Shadow Spinner

by Susan Fletcher

  “She said that she knew it, my lord. She was eager to please him. But she didn’t know the rest of the song. That was her deception.”

  I kept my eyes downcast and held my breath, awaiting his wrath.

  “So this mermaid with the . . . broken fin,” he said slowly. “She knew the rest of the song?”

  I glanced at the Sultan, then, but I couldn’t read his face. It was closed. A mask of stone.

  “No,” I said. “But she had heard the first part years before from a ... a singer in the bazaar. And she thought that he would know it, and that she might find him.”

  I told, then, how the queen had smuggled the girl out twice (I left Dunyazad out of it) to find the rest of the song. I ended it happily, talking fast so that no one would break in before I got to the end. “So the merman king forgave his queen. And he honored her above all other women. He told her that henceforth she needed only sing for the joy of it. He would never compel her again. And he would never, ever slay her. And then,” I said, “the compassionate landlord showed mercy on the magician’s apprentice. ’You have indeed entertained me with a tale I have never heard before,’ he said. He gave him a mule and some fruit from his garden, and he sent him on his way home.”

  When I had finished, I stood looking down at the carpet. It was done now. I had either saved Shahrazad or condemned her.

  “She lies,” the Khatun said.

  “Hmm.” The Sultans voice. At the edge of my vision I could see that he was tapping his fingers again. “And this . . . mermaid queen didn’t know that the storyteller was Abu Muslem?”

  “No! She didn’t have the least suspicion, my lord.”

  “Hmm.” He spoke softly, as if to himself. “So. If your tale has truth in it, my old vizier would not only be Abu Muslem—he would be your singer-in-the-bazaar as well. Which would make sense—now that I think on it—for it was he who told me Julnar’s tale when I was a boy. He must have written to Zaynab, whom he had known in the past, for reasons of. . . romance or conspiracy, I know not which. Then, when he heard she’d been arrested, he tried to rescue her, aided by my chief harem eunuch. And they were caught.” The Sultan turned to the storyteller. “Well?” he demanded. “Do I have it right?”

  The storyteller met his gaze. Then, “Yes, my lord,” he said.

  “So. Now that this girl has taught you what to say, you’re willing to talk. Is that it?”

  The storyteller said nothing.

  The Sultan sighed. “Well, it does fit together. But I don’t know if it’s true.” He turned to the younger man standing beside him. “You see my dilemma, brother,” he said. “What would you do in my position?”

  “Ask for proof,” the brother said. “For witnesses.”

  “Hmm,” the Sultan said again. He regarded me thoughtfully. “Can anyone verify your story? Except for these”—he looked at the storyteller and the gold-clad eunuch—“whom I no longer trust.”

  I hesitated. I would not bring Dunyazad into it. Her word would be suspect, anyway. The same with Zaynab.

  “She’s lying and I can prove it,” the Khatun said. “I don’t know about Abu Muslem—though I’m certain Shahrazad was plotting treason with him. But it was a man they smuggled in and out of the harem—not this girl. It was your precious wife’s lover. I saw them together, and I’m not the only one.”

  “There was no lover! My daughter would never do that!” It was the old man I had noticed before. He must be the vizier, Shahrazad’s father.

  “There was!” the Khatun insisted. “I saw him with my own eyes and so did Soraya. Tell him, Soraya.”

  Soraya blanched. I could almost see her weighing sides, calculating which one held the least danger. Then, “I never saw . . . a man, my lord,” she said.

  “What!” The Khatun, livid, glowered at Soraya. “She’s a liar. She’s lying to save her neck, just like the cripple!”

  “It seems to me,” the Sultan said slowly, “that they re putting their necks on the block. This one”—he looked at me—“came out of a safe hiding place to tell me why she sneaked out of my harem. That one”—he turned to Soraya—“risks your wrath, which is nearly as renowned as mine.”

  The Sultan tapped his tented fingers, staring into the distance. Suddenly, he lunged toward me, took hold of my wrist, and pulled me roughly down to sit on the cushion beside him. “This . . . mermaid,” he said through clenched teeth, leaning in so close to me that I could smell the mint on his breath. “The one who sang to the king at night.” His voice was fierce, but quiet. I couldn’t tell if anyone but me could hear. “How . . .” he began. “How did she think of the king . . . in her heart?”

  I glanced quickly up at his face and saw there a look that took me by surprise. An oddly soft, vulnerable, hurting look. The look of a man who might cry out in his sleep at night, like a child. But then the stony mask slid back.

  “Did she despise him,” the Sultan asked, “for making her sing for her life each night? Did she only pretend affection to save her own skin? Did she . . . loathe him for what he had done before, to his other wives? For his . . . sins?”

  “No, my lord,” I said softly. “She loved him.”

  “Do you swear it?” He gripped my wrist harder, until it hurt.

  “Yes, my lord. She told me—” I stopped, corrected myself. “She told the mermaid with the broken fin. She said the king—the merman king, my lord—she said that he had a deep hurting inside him. She said that she wanted to soothe him. And when the mermaid with the broken fin . . . questioned how the queen could love him—because of the things you just said, my lord—the queen said, ’I’m not ashamed of loving him. There’s nothing wrong with loving someone. Its hating—that’s what’s wrong.’”

  I glanced at him again. Pain was flooding his eyes. A spasm shuddered across his countenance, and the stone facade broke. Crumbled. The muscles in his face were working, struggling for control. He bowed his head, covered his face with his hands, and I heard a sharp intake of breath that might have been a sob.

  It was quiet in the room. No one looked at the Sultan, and we all avoided one another’s eyes.

  All but the Khatun. She was staring at her son, alarmed.

  At last, he pulled his hands away from his face. He had composed it again into the mask.

  “You still have no certain proof, either way,” his brother reminded him.

  The Sultan nodded.

  “Proof?” The Khatun said. “You don’t believe your own mother? Who gave birth to you? Who nursed you? Who protected you from assassins all your life? Who—”

  “Gracious mother,” the Sultan said. “You have done all of those things. For that, I will honor you forever. But now . . .” He looked about the room. “I need to hear one more story. From Shahrazad. Just the two of us, alone. So leave me now—all of you.”

  “But what will you do about them?” the Khatun demanded, pointing at me, then the storyteller, then the eunuch.

  The Sultan looked at us as if he had forgotten us completely. “Oh,” he said. “Well, they’ve all conspired to deceive me. Guards, take them to the dungeon. Lock them up.”

  Chapter 23

  The Green Hills

  LESSONS FOR LIFE AND SORYTELLING

  Every storyteller has a special way she likes to end her tales. My mother used to say, And now my story has come to an end, but the sparrow never got home—even if there wasn’t any sparrow in her story. Other tellers like to end with a rhyme. For instance:

  Mulberry, Mulberry

  Here ends my story.

  The storytellers in the bazaar are known for dropping hints about something they’d like you to give them:

  And now my story I have told

  And though I would not ask for gold. . .

  Silver dihrams, copper fils

  Would happily reward my skills.

  When you hear those words—those ending words—you know that’s all there is.

  But real life isn’t like that. Its endings are squirmier than the ones in
stories. You try to tuck them in neatly and they kick the blankets off.

  The thing about life is, no matter what happens to you, it goes on. What seems like an ending is really a beginning in disguise.

  The guards herded us down a long, narrow flight of stairs to a hallway lined with wooden doors. About halfway down the hall, they unlocked one and shoved me into a dark cell. I heard the key grate in the lock, then footfalls, then the clunk of another door. At first I thought I was alone.

  In the shaft of dusty sunlight that streamed in through a high, small window, I could see iron rings mounted on the stone walls. The floors were also of stone—rough and uneven, full of sand and dirt. It stank.

  In a corner of the cell, the shadows clotted into a solid form: a woman rising slowly to her feet.

  “Marjan? I thought you got away. Oh, my dear!”

  Zaynab!

  I ran to her; she held me in her arms. She smelled of feathers, a dusty, comfortable smell. “Did they hurt you?” I asked.

  “Oh, it did hurt. But it’s stopped hurting now.”

  “Well, you can tell them anything they want to know. Just tell them, so they won’t hurt you. I told the Sultan everything this morning. Except about Dunyazad. We can’t tell about her.” I related what had happened since I had left the palace—how I found the storyteller and discovered that he was both the old vizier and Abu Muslem. How Farah had told me about my mother. How I’d left her and couldn’t find the storyteller, so I’d come back and told my story to the Sultan.

  “Did he believe you?” Zaynab asked. “Is he going to pardon Shahrazad?”

  “I don’t know. I thought so, for a moment. He said he’s going to talk to her alone. But then he sent me and the storyteller and the chief harem eunuch down here. Because we deceived him.”

  “He said that? Deceived?”

  I nodded.

  Zaynab closed her eyes, shaking her head.

  “I hope I haven’t. . . Oh, if I’ve sent her to her death—”

  “Don’t think that, my dear! You haven’t! Of course you haven’t.”

  “When do you think we’ll know?” I said. “About what will happen . . . after he talks to Shahrazad?”

  Zaynab sighed. “I don’t know. Maybe not till morning. That’s when they used to announce a new wife. We’ll hear the bells.”

  “And if we hear nothing—”

  “That will be good news.”

  The day crawled past. We waited. Listened. A eunuch came, bringing food and sharbat, but he refused to answer our questions. Still, “Sharbat!” Zaynab said wonderingly. “This is the first I’ve had sharbat in this cell.”

  I asked her some things I had been wondering about the storyteller. She told me that they had worked together when she was the governor of the messenger pigeons and he was vizier. They had not been friends, exactly, but there had been respect between them. After he had been banished, the vizier and Zaynab had corresponded several times by carrier pigeon until the Sultan replaced Zaynab for a short time with a man. “It ended there,” she said. “I never heard from him again. I never knew that he was Abu Muslem, until he told me in his messages after you delivered him the birds.”

  “But he must have liked you,” I said, remembering what the Sultan had said about romance. “Or he wouldn’t have risked his life trying to rescue you.”

  “Rescue?” She blinked at me, puzzled.

  “You didn’t know? He was in the room when I told the story. Bound and gagged, with the gold-clad eunuch.” Who must have been the inside helper, I thought. Not the soft-faced one. “They’re down here, too, locked up.”

  Zaynab looked sad and thoughtful. “Maybe he thought that if you and I were gone, there would be no one to tell what Shahrazad had done. Maybe he trusted that she would be clever enough to get herself out of trouble, as long as there were no witnesses.”

  Or maybe he liked you, I thought.

  Late in the afternoon came the sounds we had been dreading. Bells.

  I sat stricken, numb with dread.

  “Wait,” Zaynab said. “Listen.”

  In the distance, I heard the faint call of a crier. There was news.

  “They don’t usually have a crier for a new wife,” Zaynab said. “It might be something else.”

  The crier’s voice drew nearer, until—finally!—I could understand:

  “His Royal Magnificence, Shahryar, wishes to invite all of his subjects to the celebration of his marriage to his beloved queen, Shahrazad.”

  * * *

  Later, Zaynab and I wished that we had listened to the rest of the message. It had gone on, but we were so full of joy and dancing that we hadn’t heard a word.

  Celebration of his marriage. They had never celebrated their marriage. Back then, nearly three years ago, the Sultan had been marrying a new wife every night and there hadn’t been time for celebration. But now . . . a belated celebration. That was good. It sounded . . . permanent.

  I pictured in my mind what would happen when Shahrazad came to get us. We would kneel before her, but she would raise us up, embracing us, thanking us profusely. She would lead us in a jubilant procession to the Sultan, who would thank us gravely and present us with gold and jewels and robes of honor. Then we would be borne up on a litter and paraded through the streets, where people would smile and wave and pelt us with rose petals.

  But Zaynab took a more sober view. She tried to comfort me, patting my hand and calling me my dear and telling me everything would be all right. But I could see that she was worried. Finally, I got her to tell me what she was thinking. “I’m afraid,” she said, “that the Sultan may not know what to do with us. You left the harem, and I helped. And we both had dealings with Abu Muslem. Shahrazad will try to help us—help you, anyway. But the Sultan is . . . stern. He may feel he has to make an example of us and your storyteller. To show that people can’t get away with defying him.”

  Over the following days and nights, many sounds drifted down to us in our cell: strains of flutes and drums and cymbals, joyful singing, bell ringings, and, more and more as time went by, the dull roar of many voices.

  Zaynab told me that in all her days at the palace she had never heard of a celebration as grand as this one seemed to be. “There are so many voices,” she said. “And the music never stops.”

  I began to think she was right about the Sultan. I tried to move my thoughts from the fear of what would become of us and put them on Shahrazad. I imagined her at the celebration. I pictured the Sultan . . . cherishing her. My visions of her appearing at our cell door began to fade.

  I fought off the sneaky, disloyal thought that she might have . . . forgotten us.

  And so on the seventh day, when I woke from a nap and saw . . . an apparition standing at the door, I thought at first that I must be dreaming. This creature was garbed in a dazzling robe of scarlet brocade embroidered with gold, and shrouded in a gauzy silky veil. In the light that slanted in through the high window, I could see that her hands were dyed with intricate henna patterns, like a bride.

  “Put on your veils,” she was saying, “and come with me!

  I stared at her openmouthed, then turned to find Zaynab staring as shamelessly as I.

  “Don’t sit around gaping, Marjan. Hurry!” the apparition said.

  And then I knew who she was.

  Dunyazad.

  “What—” I began.

  “We’ve got to get you out of here. It’s all planned. It’s not safe for you here anymore, after what happened to Soraya. So—”

  “Soraya?” My mind was moving slowly. I had waited so long for this moment that I hardly believed in it anymore. “What happened to Soraya?” I asked.

  “Oh—You don’t know anything, do you?”

  “We heard the crier say that the Sultan was going to celebrate his marriage to Shahrazad. But. . . but you . . . all dressed up to marry . . .” A sudden, horrible thought occurred to me. “She’s not,” I said. “He didn’t—”

  “My sister’s fine
,” Dunyazad said. “Put on your veils! I’ll tell you all about it on the way.”

  Zaynab and I threw on our veils and followed Dunyazad out the door and into the narrow hallway. At the end of the hall, near the stairs, I saw the storyteller and the eunuch, waiting.

  Dunyazad spoke to us as we hurried toward them. “The Sultan is celebrating his marriage to my sister, as you heard. He begged her forgiveness and said he’ll never stop blaming himself for the past as long as he lives. He promised to honor her above all other women, and she doesn’t have to tell stories anymore unless she wants to. And . . .” She paused. “And his brother is marrying me.”

  I stopped, stared. The Sultan’s brother . . . who had been killing his wives every night, too . . . Dunyazad was going to marry him?

  “Come along, Marjan!” Dunyazad took my hand, pulled me beside her. The storyteller and the eunuch started up the stairs; Dunyazad followed, with me and Zaynab close behind.

  “Soraya was found drowned in the baths,” Dunyazad said. “The Khatun says it must have been an accident, but everyone else thinks the Khatun had someone kill her. That’s why Shahrazad didn’t want you released from the dungeon. To protect you from . . . accidents, until we could get you safely away.”

  Soraya . . . drowned? It hit me in the pit of my stomach. And . . . away. Where was away? I couldn’t take in everything she had told me. There was too much of it. It had come too fast.

  When we came out at the top of the stairs, Dunyazad led us down a deserted hallway The music and voices swelled louder.

  “The Sultan has invited all his subjects—high and low—to partake in the feasting, as a sign of reconciliation between him and them,” Dunyazad went on. “For the grief he’s caused them. For their daughters. And to celebrate his vow never to do what he did again. People are arriving from all parts of the kingdom.”

  “So . . . you are getting married today?” I asked.

  Dunyazad nodded. “Its a celebration for Shahrazad and the Sultan, and the formal marriage for his brother and me.”

  “But . . . how did you get away? You’re the bride. They’ll miss you.”