Chimera

1

"At this point I interrupted my sister as usual to say, 'You have a way with words, Scheherazade. This is the thousandth night I've sat at the foot of your bed while you and the King made love and you told him stories, and the one in progress holds me like a genie's gaze. I wouldn't dream of breaking in like this, just before the end, except that I hear the first rooster crowing in the east, et cetera, and the King really ought to sleep a bit before daybreak. I wish I had your talent.'

"And as usual Sherry replied, 'You're the ideal audience, Dunyazade. But this is nothing; wait till you hear the ending, tomorrow night! Always assuming this auspicious King doesn't kill me before breakfast, as he's been going to do these thirty-three and a third months.'

" 'Hmp,' said Shahryar. 'Don't take your critics for granted; I may get around to it yet. But I agree with your little sister that this is a good one you've got going, with its impostures that become authentic, its ups and downs and flights to other worlds. I don't know how in the world you dream them up.'

" 'Artists have their tricks,' Sherry replied. We three said good night then, six goodnights in all. In the morning your brother went off to court, enchanted by Sherry's story. Daddy came to the palace for the thousandth time with a shroud under his arm, expecting to be told to cut his daughter's head off; in most other respects he's as good a vizier as he ever was, but three years of suspense have driven him crackers in this one particular — and turned his hair white, I might add, and made him a widower. Sherry and I, after the first fifty nights or so, were simply relieved when Shahryar would hmp and say, 'By Allah, I won't kill her till I've heard the end of her story'; but it still took Daddy by surprise every morning. He groveled gratitude per usual; the King per usual spent the day in his durbar, bidding and forbidding between man and man, as the saying goes; I climbed in with Sherry as soon as he was gone, and per usual we spent our day sleeping in and making love. When we'd had enough of each other's tongues and fingers, we called in the eunuchs, maidservants, mamelukes, pet dogs and monkeys; then we finished off with Sherry's Bag of Tricks: little weighted balls from Baghdad, dildoes from the Ebony Isles and the City of Brass, et cetera. Not to break a certain vow of mine, I made do with a roc-down tickler from Bassorah, but Sherry touched all the bases. Her favorite story is about some pig of an ifrit who steals a girl away on her wedding night, puts her in a treasure-casket locked with seven steel padlocks, puts the casket in a crystal coffer, and puts the coffer on the bottom of the ocean, so that nobody except himself can have her. But whenever he brings the whole rig ashore, unlocks the locks with seven keys, and takes her out and rapes her, he falls asleep afterward on her lap; she slips out from under and cuckolds him with every man who passes by, taking their seal rings as proof; at the end of the story she has five hundred seventy-two seal rings, and the stupid ifrit still thinks he possesses her! In the same way, Sherry put a hundred horns a day on your brother's head: that's about a hundred thousand horns by now. And every day she saved till last the Treasure Key, which is what her story starts and ends with.

"Three and a third years ago, when King Shahryar was raping a virgin every night and killing her in the morning, and the people were praying that Allah would dump the whole dynasty, and so many parents had fled the country with their daughters that in all the Islands of India and China there was hardly a young girl fit to fuck, my sister was an undergraduate arts-and-sciences major at Banu Sasan University. Besides being Homecoming Queen, valedictorian-elect, and a four-letter varsity athlete, she had a private library of a thousand volumes and the highest average in the history of the campus. Every graduate department in the East was after her with fellowships — but she was so appalled at the state of the nation that she dropped out of school in her last semester to do full-time research on a way to stop Shahryar from killing all our sisters and wrecking the country.

"Political science, which she looked at first, got her nowhere. Shahryar's power was absolute, and by sparing the daughters of his army officers and chief ministers (like our own father) and picking his victims mainly from the families of liberal intellectuals and other minorities, he kept the military and the cabinet loyal enough to rule out a coup d'état. Revolution seemed out of the question, because his woman-hating, spectacular as it was, was reinforced more or less by all our traditions and institutions, and as long as the girls he was murdering were generally upper-caste, there was no popular base for guerrilla war. Finally, since he could count on your help from Samarkand, invasion from outside or plain assassination were bad bets too: Sherry figured your retaliation would be worse than Shahryar's virgin-a-night policy.

"So we gave up poly sci (I fetched her books and sharpened her quills and made tea and alphabetized her index cards) and tried psychology- another blind alley. Once she'd noted that your reaction to being cuckolded by your wife was homicidal rage followed by despair and abandonment of your kingdom, and that Shahryar's was the reverse; and established that that was owing to the difference in your ages and the order of revelations; and decided that whatever pathology was involved was a function of the culture and your position as absolute monarchs rather than particular hang-ups in your psyches, et cetera — what was there to say?

"She grew daily more desperate; the body-count of deflowered and decapitated Moslem girls was past nine hundred, and Daddy was just about out of candidates. Sherry didn't especially care about herself, you understand — wouldn't have even if she hadn't guessed that the King was sparing her out of respect for his vizier and her own accomplishments. But beyond the general awfulness of the situation, she was particularly concerned for my sake. From the day I was born, when Sherry was about nine, she treasured me as if I were hers; I might as well not have had parents; she and I ate from the same plate, slept in the same bed; no one could separate us; I'll bet we weren't apart for an hour in the first dozen years of my life. But I never had her good looks or her way with the world- and I was the youngest in the family besides. My breasts were growing; already I'd begun to menstruate: any day Daddy might have to sacrifice me to save Sherry.

"So when nothing else worked, as a last resort she turned to her first love, unlikely as it seemed, mythology and folklore, and studied all the riddle/puzzle/secret motifs she could dig up. 'We need a miracle, Doony,' she said (I was braiding her hair and massaging her neck as she went through her notes for the thousandth time), 'and the only genies I've ever met were in stories, not in Moormans'-rings and Jews'-lamps. It's in words that the magic is — Abracadabra, Open Sesame, and the rest — but the magic words in one story aren't magical in the next. The real magic is to understand which words work, and when, and for what; the trick is to learn the trick.'

"This last, as our frantic research went on, became her motto, even her obsession. As she neared the end of her supply of lore, and Shahryar his supply of virgins, she became more and more certain that her principle was correct, and desperate that in the whole world's stock of stories there was none that confirmed it, or showed us how to use it to solve the problem. 'I've read a thousand tales about treasures that nobody can find the key to,' she told me; 'we have the key and can't find the treasure.' I asked her to explain. 'It's all in here,' she declared — I couldn't tell whether she meant her inkstand or the quill she pointed toward it. I seldom understood her any more; as the crisis grew, she gave up reading for daydreaming, and used her pen less for noting instances of the Magic Key motif in world literature than for doodling the letters of our alphabet at random and idly tickling herself.

" 'Little Doony,' she said dreamily, and kissed me: 'pretend this whole situation is the plot of a story we're reading, and you and I and Daddy and the King are all fictional characters. In this story, Scheherazade finds a way to change the King's mind about women and turn him into a gentle, loving husband. It's not hard to imagine such a story, is it? Now, no matter what way she finds — whether it's a magic spell or a magic story with the answer in it or a magic anything- it comes down to particular words in the story we're reading, right? And those words are made from the letters of our alphabet: a couple-dozen squiggles we can draw with this pen. This is the key, Doony! And the treasure, too, if we can only get our hands on it! It's as if — as if the key to the treasure is the treasure!'

"As soon as she spoke these last words a genie appeared from nowhere right there in our library-stacks. He didn't resemble anything in Sherry's bedtime stories: for one thing, he wasn't frightening, though he was strange-looking enough: a light-skinned fellow of forty or so, smooth-shaven and bald as a roc's egg. His clothes were simple but outlandish; he was tall and healthy and pleasant enough in appearance, except for queer lenses that he wore in a frame over his eyes. He seemed as startled as we were — you should've seen Sherry drop that pen and pull her skirts together! — but he got over his alarm sooner, and looked from one to the other of us and at a stubby little magic wand he held in his fingers, and smiled a friendly smile.

" 'Are you really Scheherazade?' he asked. 'I've never had a dream so clear and lifelike! And you're little Dunyazade- just as I'd imagined both of you! Don't be frightened: I can't tell you what it means to me to see and talk to you like this; even in a dream, it's a dream come true. Can you understand English? I don't have a word of Arabic. O my, I can't believe this is really happening!'

"Sherry and I looked at each other. The Genie didn't seem dangerous; we didn't know those languages he spoke of; every word he said was in our language, and when Sherry asked him whether he'd come from her pen or from her words, he seemed to understand the question, though he didn't know the answer. He was a writer of tales, he said — anyhow a former writer of tales — in a land on the other side of the world. At one time, we gathered, people in his country had been fond of reading; currently, however, the only readers of artful fiction were critics, other writers, and unwilling students who, left to themselves, preferred music and pictures to words. His own pen (that magic wand, in fact a magic quill with a fountain of ink inside) had just about run dry: but whether he had abandoned fiction or fiction him, Sherry and I couldn't make out when we reconstructed this first conversation later that night, for either in our minds or in his a number of crises seemed confused. Like Shahryar's, the Genie's life was in disorder — but so far from harboring therefore a grudge against womankind, he was distractedly in love with a brace of new mistresses, and only recently had been able to choose between them. His career, too, had reached a hiatus which he would have been pleased to call a turning-point if he could have espied any way to turn: he wished neither to repudiate nor to repeat his past performances; he aspired to go beyond them toward a future they were not attuned to and, by some magic, at the same time go back to the original springs of narrative. But how this was to be managed was as unclear to him as the answer to the Shahryar-problem was to us — the more so since he couldn't see how much of his difficulty might be owing to his own limitations, his age and stage and personal vicissitudes; how much to the general decline of letters in his time and place; and how much to the other crises with which his country (and, so he alleged, the very species) was beset- crises as desperate and problematical, he avowed, as ours, and as inimical to the single-mindedness needed to compose great works of art or the serenity to apprehend them.

"So entirely was he caught up in these problems, his work and life all had come to a standstill. He had taken leave of his friends, his family, and his post (he was a doctor of letters), and withdrawn to a lonely retreat in the marshes, which only the most devoted of his mistresses deigned to visit.

" 'My project,' he told us, 'is to learn where to go by discovering where I am by reviewing where I've been — where we've all been. There's a kind of snail in the Maryland marshes — perhaps I invented him — that makes his shell as he goes along out of whatever he comes across, cementing it with his own juices, and at the same time makes his path instinctively toward the best available material for his shell; he carries his history on his back, living in it, adding new and larger spirals to it from the present as he grows. That snail's pace has become my pace — but I'm going in circles, following my own trail! I've quit reading and writing; I've lost track of who I am; my name's just a jumble of letters; so's the whole body of literature: strings of letters and empty spaces, like a code that I've lost the key to.' He pushed those odd lenses up on the bridge of his nose with his thumb — a habit that made me giggle — and grinned. 'Well, almost the whole body. Speaking of keys, I suspect that's how I got here.'

"By way of answer to Sherry's question then, whether he had sprung from her quill-pen or her words, he declared that his researches, like hers, had led him to an impasse; he felt that a treasure-house of new fiction lay vaguely under his hand, if he could find the key to it. Musing idly on this figure, he had added to the morass of notes he felt himself mired in, a sketch for a story about a man who comes somehow to realize that the key to the treasure he's searching for is the treasure. Just exactly how so (and how the story might be told despite all the problems that beset him) he had no chance to consider, for the Instant he set on paper the words The key to the treasure is the treasure, he found himself with us- for how long, or to what end, or by what means, he had no idea, unless it was that of all the storytellers in the world, his very favorite was Scheherazade.

" 'Listen how I chatter on!' he ended happily. 'Do forgive me!'

"My sister, after some thought, ventured the opinion that the astonishing coincidence of her late reveries and his, which had led them as it were simultaneously to the same cryptic formulation, must have something to do with his translation to her library. She looked forward, she said, to experimenting whether a reverse translation could be managed, If the worst came to worst, to spirit me out of harm's way; as for herself, she had no time or use for idle flights of fancy, however curious, from the gynocide that was ravaging her country: remarkable as it was, she saw no more relevance to her problems than to his in this bit of magic.

" 'But we know the answer's right here in our hands!' the Genie exclaimed. 'We're both storytellers: you must sense as strongly as I that it has something to do with the key to the treasure's being the treasure.'

"My sister's nostrils narrowed. 'Twice you've called me a storyteller,' she said; 'yet I've never told a story in my life except to Dunyazade, and her bedtime stories were the ones that everybody tells. The only tale I've ever invented myself was this key-to-the-treasure one just now, which I scarcely understand. .'

" 'Good lord!' the Genie cried. 'Do you mean to say that you haven't even started your thousand and one nights yet?'

"Sherry shook her head grimly. 'The only thousand nights I know of is the time our pig of a king has been killing the virgin daughters of the Moslems.'

"Our bespectacled visitor then grew so exhilarated that for some time he couldn't speak at all. Presently he seized my sister's hand and dumbfounded us both by declaring his lifelong adoration of her, a declaration that brought blushes to our cheeks. Years ago, he said, when he'd been a penniless student pushing book-carts through the library-stacks of his university to help pay for his education, he contracted a passion for Scheherazade upon first reading the tales she beguiled King Shahryar with, and had sustained that passion so powerfully ever since that his love affairs with other, 'real' women seemed to him by comparison unreal, his two-decade marriage but a prolonged infidelity to her, his own fictions were mimicries, pallid counterfeits of the authentic treasure of her Thousand and One Nights.

" 'Beguiled the King with!' Sherry said. 'I've thought of that! Daddy believes that Shahryar would really like to quit what he's doing before the country falls apart, but needs an excuse to break his vow without losing face with his younger brother. I'd considered letting him make love to me and then telling him exciting stories, which I'd leave unfinished from one night to the next till he'd come to know me too well to kill me. I even thought of slipping in stories about kings who'd suffered worse hardships than he and his brother without turning vindictive; or lovers who weren't unfaithful; or husbands who loved their wives more than themselves. But it's too fanciful! Who knows which stories would work? Especially in those first few nights! I can see him sparing me for a day or two, maybe, out of relief; but then he'd react against his lapse and go back to his old policy. I gave the idea up.'

"The Genie smiled; even I saw what he was thinking. 'But you say you've read the book!' Sherry exclaimed. 'Then you must remember what stories are in it, and in which order!'

" 'I don't have to remember,' said the Genie. 'In all the years I've been writing stories, your book has never been off my worktable. I've made use of it a thousand times, if only by just seeing it there.'

"Sherry asked him then whether he himself had perhaps invented the stories she allegedly told, or would tell. 'How could I?' he laughed. 'I won't be born for a dozen centuries yet! You didn't invent them either, for that matter; they're those ancient ones you spoke of, that "everybody tells": Sinbad the Sailor, Aladdin's Lamp, Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves. .'

" 'What others?' Sherry cried. 'In which order? I don't even know the Ali Baba story! Do you have the book with you? I'll give you everything I have for it!'

"The Genie replied that inasmuch as he'd been holding her book in his hand and thinking about her when he'd written the magic words, and it had not been translated to her library along with him, he inferred that he could not present her with a copy even if the magic were repeatable. He did however remember clearly what he called the frame-story: how Shahryar's young brother Shah Zaman had discovered his bride's adulteries, killed her, abandoned the kingdom of Samarkand, and come to live with Shahryar in the Islands of India and China; how, discovering that Shahryar's wife was equally unfaithful, the brothers had retreated to the wilderness, encountered the ifrit and the maiden, concluded that all women are deceivers, and returned to their respective kingdoms, vowing to deflower a virgin every night and kill her in the morning; how the Vizier's daughter Scheherazade, to end this massacre, had volunteered herself, much against her father's wishes, and with the aid of her sister Dunyazade — who at the crucial moment between sex and sleep asked for a story, and fed the King's suspense by interrupting the tale at daybreak, just before the climax — stayed Shahryar's hand long enough to win his heart, restore his senses, and save the country from ruin.

"I hugged my sister and begged her to let me help her in just that way. She shook her head: 'Only this Genie has read the stories I'm supposed to tell, and he doesn't remember them. What's more, he's fading already. If the key to the treasure is the treasure, we don't have it in our hands yet.'

"He had indeed begun fading away, almost disappeared; but as soon as Sherry repeated the magic sentence he came back clearly, smiling more eagerly than before, and declared he'd been thinking the same words at the same moment, just as we'd begun to fade and his writing-room to reappear about him. Apparently, then, he and Sherry could conjure the phenomenon at will by imagining simultaneously that the key to the treasure was the treasure: they were, presumably, the only two people in the history of the world who had imagined it. What's more, in that instant when he'd waked, as it were, to find himself back in the marshes of America, he'd been able to glance at the open table of contents of Volume One of the Thousand and One Nights book and determine that the first story after the frame-story was a compound tale called 'The Merchant and the Genie' — in which, if he remembered correctly, an outraged ifrit delays the death of an innocent merchant until certain sheiks have told their stories.

"Scheherazade thanked him, made a note of the title, and gravely put down her pen. 'You have it in your power to save my sisters and my country,' she said, 'and the King too, before his madness destroys him. All you need to do is supply me from the future with these stories of the past. But perhaps at bottom you share the King's feelings about women.'

" 'Not at all!' the Genie said warmly. 'If the key trick really works, I'll be honored to tell your stories to you. All we need to do is agree on a time of day to write the magic words together.'

"I clapped my hands — but Sherry's expression was still cool. 'You're a man,' she said; 'I imagine you expect what every man expects who has the key to any treasure a woman needs. In the nature of the case, I have to let Shahryar take me first; after that I'll cuckold him with you every day at sunset if you'll tell me the story for the night to come. Is that satisfactory?'

"I feared he'd take offense, but he only shook his head. Out of his old love for her, he gently declared, and his gratitude for the profoundest image he knew of the storyteller's situation, he would be pleased beyond words to play any role whatever in Scheherazade's story, without dreaming of further reward. His own policy, moreover, which he had lived by for many nights more than a thousand, was to share beds with no woman who did not reciprocate his feelings. Finally, his new young mistress, to whom he had been drawn by certain resemblances to Scheherazade — delighted him utterly, as he hoped he did her; he was no more tempted to infidelity than to incest or pederasty. His adoration of Scheherazade was as strong as ever — even stronger now that he'd met her in the lovely flesh — but it was not possessive; he desired her only as the old Greek poets their Muse, as a source of inspiration.

"Sherry tapped and riddled with her quill. 'I don't know these poets you speak of,' she said sharply. 'Here in our country, love isn't so exclusive as all that. When I think of Shahryar's harem-full of concubines on the one hand, and the way his wife got even with him on the other, and the plots of most of the stories I know — especially the ones about older men with young mistresses — I can't help wondering whether you're not being a bit naïve, to put it kindly. Especially as I gather you've suffered your share of deceit in the past, and no doubt done your share of deceiving. Even so, it's a refreshing surprise, if a bit of a put-down, that you're not interested in taking sexual advantage of your position. Are you a eunuch?'

"I blushed again, but the Genie assured us, still unoffended, that he was normally equipped, and that his surpassing love for his young lady, while perhaps invincibly innocent, was not naïve. His experience of love gone sour only made him treasure more highly the notion of a love that time would season and improve; no sight on earth more pleased his heart, annealed as it was by his own passions and defeats, than that rare one of two white-haired spouses who still cherished each other and their life together. If love died, it died; while it lived, let it live forever, et cetera. Some fictions, he asserted, were so much more valuable than fact that in rare instances their beauty made them real. The only Baghdad was the Baghdad of the Nights, where carpets flew and genies sprang from magic words; he was ours to command as one of those, and without price. Should one appear to him and offer him three wishes, he'd be unable to summon more than two, inasmuch as his first — to have live converse with the storyteller he'd loved best and longest — had already been granted.

"Sherry smiled now and asked him what would be the other two wishes. The second, he replied, would be that he might die before his young friend and he ceased to treasure each other as they did currently in their saltmarsh retreat. The third (what presently stood alone between him and entire contentment) would be that he would not die without adding some artful trinket or two, however small, to the general treasury of civilized delights, to which no keys were needed beyond goodwill, attention, and a moderately cultivated sensibility: he meant the treasure of art, which if it could not redeem the barbarities of history or spare us the horrors of living and dying, at least sustained, refreshed, expanded, ennobled, and enriched our spirits along the painful way. Such of his scribblings as were already in print he did not presume to have that grace; should he die before he woke from his present sweet dream of Scheherazade, this third wish would go unfulfilled. But even if neither of these last was ever granted (and surely such boons were rare as treasure keys), he would die happier to have had the first.

"Hearing this, Sherry at last put by her reserve, took the stranger's writing-hand in her own, apologized for her discourtesy, and repeated her invitation, this time warmly: if he would supply her with enough of her stories to reach her goal, she was his in secret whenever he wished after her maiden night with Shahryar. Or (if deception truly had no more savor for him), when the slaughter of her sisters had ceased, let him spirit her somehow to his place and time, and she'd be his slave and concubine forever — assuming, as one was after all realistically obliged to assume, that he and his current love would by then have wearied of each other.

"The Genie laughed and kissed her hand. 'No slaves; no concubines. And my friend and I intend to love each other forever.'

" 'That will be a greater wonder than all of Sinbad's together,' Sherry said.

'I pray it may happen, Genie, and your third wish be granted too. For all one knows, you may already have done what you hope to do: time will tell. But if Dunyazade and I can find any way at all to help you with your tales-to-come in return for the ones you've pledged to us — and you may be sure we'll search for such a way as steadfastly as we've searched for a way to save our sex — we'll do it though we die for it.'

"She made him promise then to embrace his mistress for her, whom she vowed to love thenceforth as she loved me, and by way of a gift to her — which she prayed might translate as the precious book had not — she took from her earlobe a gold ring worked in the form of a spiral shell, of which his earlier image had reminded her. He accepted it joyfully, vowing to spin from it, if he could, as from a catherine-wheel or whirling galaxy, a golden shower of fiction. Then he kissed us both (the first male lips I'd felt except Father's, and the only such till yours) and vanished, whether by his will or another's we couldn't tell.

"Sherry and I hugged each other excitedly all that night, rehearsing every word that had passed between the Genie and ourselves. I begged her to test the magic for a week before offering herself to the King, to make sure that it — and her colleague from the future — could be relied upon. But even as we laughed and whispered, another of our sisters was being raped and murdered in the palace; Sherry offered herself to Shahryar first thing in the morning, to our father's distress; let the King lead her at nightfall into his fatal bed and fall to toying with her, then pretended to weep for being separated from me for the first time in our lives. Shahryar bid her fetch me in to sit at the foot of the bed; almost in a faint I watched him help her off with the pretty nightie I'd crocheted for her myself, place a white silk cushion under her bottom, and gently open her legs; as I'd never seen a man erect before, I groaned despite myself when he opened his robe and I saw what he meant to stick her with: the hair done up in pearls, the shaft like a minaret decorated with arabesques, the head like a cobra's spread to strike. He chuckled at my alarm and climbed atop her; not to see him, Sherry fixed her welling eyes on me, closing them only to cry the cry that must be cried when there befell the mystery concerning which there is no inquiry. A moment later, as the cushion attested her late virginity and tears ran from her eye-corners to her ears, she seized the King's hair, wrapped about his waist her lovely legs, and to insure the success of her fiction, pretended a grand transport of rapture. I could neither bear to watch nor turn away. When the beast was spent and tossing fitfully (from shame and guilt, I hoped, or unease at Sherry's willingness to die), I gathered my senses as best I could and asked her to tell me a story.

" 'With pleasure,' she said, in a tone still so full of shock it broke my heart, 'if this pious and auspicious King will allow it.' Your brother grunted, and Sherry began, shakily, the tale of the Merchant and the Genie, framing in it for good measure the First Sheik's Story as her voice grew stronger. At the right moment I interrupted to praise the story and say I thought I'd heard a rooster crowing in the east; as though I'd been kept in ignorance of the King's policy, I asked whether we mightn't sleep awhile before sunrise and hear the end of the story tomorrow night- along with the one about the Three Apples, which I liked even more. 'O Doony!' Sherry pretended to scold. 'I know a dozen better than that: how about the Ebony Horse, or Julnar the Sea-Born, or the Ensorcelled Prince? But just as there's no young woman in the country worth having that the King hasn't had his fill of already, so I'm sure there's no story he hasn't heard till he's weary of it. I could no more expect to tell him a new story than show him a new way to make love.'

" 'I'll be the judje of that,' said Shahryar. So we sweated out the day in each other's arms and at sunset tried the magic key; you can imagine our relief when the Genie appeared, pushed up his eyeglasses with a grin, and recited to us the Second and Third Sheiks' Stories, which he guessed were both to be completed on that crucial second night in order, on the one hand, to demonstrate a kind of narrative inexhaustibility or profligacy (at least a generosity commensurate to that of the sheiks themselves), while, on the other hand, not compounding the suspense of unfinished tales-within-tales at a time when the King's reprieve was still highly tentative. Moreover, that the ifrit will grant the merchant's life on account of the stories ought to be evident enough by daybreak to make, without belaboring, its admonitory point. The spiral earring, he added happily, had come through intact, if anything more beautiful for the translation; his mistress was delighted with it, and would return Sherry's embrace with pleasure, he was confident, as soon as the memory of her more contemporary rivals was removed enough, and she secure enough in his love, for him to tell her the remarkable story of the magic key. Tenderly then he voiced his hope that Scheherazade had not found the loss of her maidenhood wholly repugnant to experience, or myself to witness; if the King was truly to be wooed away from his misogyny, many ardent nights lay ahead, and for the sake of Scheherazade's spirit as well as her strategy it would be well if she could take some pleasure in them.

" 'Never!' my sister declared. 'The only pleasure I'll take in that bed is the pleasure of saving my sisters and cuckolding their killer.'

"The Genie shrugged and faded; Shahryar came in, bid us good evening, kissed Sherry many times before caressing her more intimately, then laid her on the bed and worked her over playfully in as many positions as there are tales in the Trickery-of-Women series, till I couldn't tell whether her outcries were of pain, surprise, or — mad as the notion seemed — a kind of pleasure despite herself. As for me, though I was innocent of men, I had read in secret all the manuals of love and erotic stories in Sherry's library, but had thought them the wild imaginings of lonely writers in their dens, a kind of self-tickling with the quill such as Sherry herself had fallen into; for all it was my own sister I saw doing such incredible things in such odd positions, it would be many nights before I fully realized that what I witnessed were not conjured illustrations from those texts, but things truly taking place.

" 'On with the story,' Shahryar commanded when they were done. Unsteadily at first, but then in even better voice than the night before, Sherry continued the Merchant-and-Genie story, and I, mortified to find myself still moistening from what I'd seen, almost forgot to interrupt at the appropriate time. Next day, as we embraced each other, Sherry admitted that while she found the King himself as loathsome as ever, the things he did to her were no longer painful, and might even be pleasurable, as would be the things she did to him, were he a bedpartner she could treasure as our Genie treasured his. More exactly, once the alarm of her defloration and her fear of being killed in the morning began to pass, she found abhorrent not Shahryar himself — undeniably a vigorous and handsome man for his forty years, and a skillful lover — but his murderous record with our sex, which no amount of charm and tender caressing could expunge.

" 'No amount at all?' our Genie asked when he appeared again, on cue, at sunset. 'Suppose a man had been a kind and gentle fellow until some witch put a spell on him that deranged his mind and made him do atrocious things; then suppose a certain young lady has the power to cure him by loving him despite his madness. She can lift the spell because she recognizes that it is a spell, and not his real nature. .'

" 'I hope that's not my tale for tonight,' Sherry said dryly, pointing out that while Shahryar may once upon a time have been a loving husband, even in those days he gave out virgin slave-girls to his friends, kept a houseful of concubines for himself, and cut his wife in half for taking a lover after twenty years of one-sided fidelity. 'And no magic can bring a thousand dead girls back to life, or unrape them. On with the story.'

" 'You're a harder critic than your lover,' the Genie complained, and recited the opening frame of the Fisherman and the Genie, the simplicity of which he felt to be a strategic change of pace for the third night- especially since it would lead, on the fourth and fifth, to a series of tales-within-tales-within-tales, a narrative complexity he described admiringly as 'Oriental.'

"So it went, month after month, year after year; at the foot of Shahryar's bed by night and in Scheherazade's by day, I learned more about the arts of making love and telling stories than I had imagined there was to know. It pleased our Genie, for example, that the tale of the Ensorcelled Prince had been framed by that of the Fisherman and the Genie, since the prince himself had been encased (in the black stone palace); also, that the resolution of the story thus enframed resolved as well the tale that framed it. This metaphorical construction he judged more artful than the 'mere plot-function' (that is, preserving our lives and restoring the King's sanity!) which Sherry's Fisherman-tale and the rest had in the story of her own life; but that 'mere plot-function,' in turn, was superior to the artless and arbitrary relation between most framed and framing tales. This relation (which to me seemed less important than what the stories were about) interested the two of them no end, just as Sherry and Shahryar were fascinated by the pacing of their nightly pleasures or the refinement of their various positions, instead of the degree and quality of their love.

"Sherry kissed me. 'That other either goes without saying,' she said, 'or it doesn't go at all. Making love and telling stories both take more than good technique — but it's only the technique that we can talk about.'

"The Genie agreed: 'Heartfelt ineptitude has its appeal, Dunyazade; so does heartless skill. But what you want is passionate virtuosity.' They speculated endlessly on such questions as whether a story might imaginably be framed from inside, as it were, so that the usual relation between container and contained would be reversed and paradoxically reversible — and (for my benefit, I suppose) what human state of affairs such an odd construction might usefully figure. Or whether one might go beyond the usual tale-within-a-tale, beyond even the tales-within-tales-within-tales-within-tales which our Genie had found a few instances of in that literary treasure-house he hoped one day to add to, and conceive a series of, say, seven concentric stories-within-stories, so arranged that the climax of the innermost would precipitate that of the next tale out, and that of the next, et cetera, like a string of firecrackers or the chains of orgasms that Shahryar could sometimes set my sister catenating.

"This last comparison — a favorite of theirs — would lead them to a dozen others between narrative and sexual art, whether in spirited disagreement or equally spirited concord. The Genie declared that in his time and place there were scientists of the passions who maintained that language itself, on the one hand, originated in 'infantile pregenital erotic exuberance, polymorphously perverse,' and that conscious attention, on the other, was a 'libidinal hypercathexis' — by which magic phrases they seemed to mean that writing and reading, or telling and listening, were literally ways of making love. Whether this was in fact the case, neither he nor Sherry cared at all; yet they liked to speak as if it were (their favorite words), and accounted thereby for the similarity between conventional dramatic structure — its exposition, rising action, climax, and dénouement — and the rhythm of sexual intercourse from foreplay through coitus to orgasm and release. Therefore also, they believed, the popularity of love (and combat, the darker side of the same rupee) as a theme for narrative, the lovers' embrace as its culmination, and post-coital lassitude as its natural ground: what better time for tales than at day's end, in bed after making love (or around the campfire after battle or adventure, or in the chimney corner after work), to express and heighten the community between the lovers, comrades, co-workers?

" 'The longest story in the world — ' Sherry observed, 'The Ocean of Story, seven hundred thousand distichs — was told by the god Siva to his consort Parvati as a gift for the way she made love to him one night. It would take a minstrel five hundred evenings to recite it all, but she sat in his lap and listened contentedly till he was done.'

"To this example, which delighted him, the Genie added several unfamiliar to us: a great epic called Odyssey, for instance, whose hero returns home after twenty years of war and wandering, makes love to his faithful wife, and recounts all his adventures to her in bed while the gods prolong the night in his behalf; another work called Decameron, in which ten courtly lords and ladies, taking refuge in their country houses from an urban pestilence, amuse one another at the end of each day with stories (some borrowed from Sherry herself) as a kind of substitute for making love — an artifice in keeping with the artificial nature of their little society. And, of course, that book about Sherry herself which he claimed to be reading from, in his opinion the best illustration of all that the very relation between teller and told was by nature erotic. The teller's role, he felt, regardless of his actual gender, was essentially masculine, the listener's or reader's feminine, and the tale was the medium of their intercourse.

" 'That makes me unnatural,' Sherry objected. 'Are you one of those vulgar men who think that women writers are homosexuals?'

" 'Not at all,' the Genie assured her. 'You and Shahryar usually make love in Position One before you tell your story, and lovers like to switch positions the second time.' More seriously, he had not meant to suggest that the 'femininity' of readership was a docile or inferior condition: a lighthouse, for example, passively sent out signals that mariners labored actively to receive and interpret; an ardent woman like his mistress was as least as energetic in his embrace as he in embracing her; a good reader of cunning tales worked in her way as busily as their author; et cetera. Narrative, in short — and here they were again in full agreement — was a love-relation, not a rape: its success depended upon the reader's consent and cooperation, which she could withhold or at any moment withdraw; also upon her own combination of experience and talent for enterprise, and the author's ability to arouse, sustain, and satisfy her interest — an ability on which his figurative life hung as surely as Scheherazade's literal.

" 'And like all love-relations,' he added one afternoon, 'it's potentially fertile for both partners, in a way you should approve, for it goes beyond male and female. The reader is likely to find herself pregnant with new images, as you hope Shahryar will become with respect to women; but the storyteller may find himself pregnant too. .'

"Much of their talk was over my head, but on hearing this last I hugged Sherry tight and prayed to Allah it was not another of their as if's. Sure enough, on the three hundred eighth night her tale was interrupted not by me but by the birth of Ali Shar, whom despite his resemblance to Shahryar I clasped to my bosom from that hour as if I had borne instead of merely helping to deliver him. Likewise on the six hundred twenty-fourth night, when little Gharíb came lustily into the world, and the nine hundred fifty-ninth, birthday of beautiful Jamilah-Melissa. Her second name, which means 'honey-sweet' in the exotic tongues of Genieland, we chose in honor of our friend's still-beloved mistress, whom he had announced his intention to marry despite Sherry's opinion that while women and men might in some instances come together as human beings, wives and husbands could never. The Genie argued, for his part, that no matter how total, exclusive, and permanent the commitment between two lovers might turn out to be, it lacked the dimensions of spiritual seriousness and public responsibility which only marriage, with its ancient vows and symbols, rites and risks, provided.

" 'It can't last,' Sherry said crossly. The Genie put on her finger a gift from his fiancée to her namesake's mother — a gold ring patterned with rams'-horns and conches, replicas of which she and the Genie meant to exchange on their wedding day — and replied, 'Neither did Athens. Neither did Rome. Neither did all of Jamshid's glories. But we must live as if it can and will.'

" 'Hmp,' said Sherry, who over the years had picked up a number of your brother's ways, as he had hers. But she gave them her blessing — to which I added mine without reservations or as if's — and turned the ring much in the lamplight when he was gone, trying its look on different hands and fingers and musing as if upon its design.

"Thus we came to the thousandth night, the thousandth morning and afternoon, the thousandth dipping of Sherry's quill and invocation of the magic key. And for the thousand and first time, still smiling, our Genie appeared to us, his own ring on his finger as it had been for some forty evenings now — an altogether brighter-looking spirit than had materialized in the book-stacks so long past. We three embraced as always; he asked after the children's health and the King's, and my sister, as always, after his progress toward that treasury from which he claimed her stories were drawn. Less reticent on this subject than he had been since our first meeting, he declared with pleasure that thanks to the inspiration of Scheherazade and to the thousand comforts of his loving wife, he believed he had found his way out of that slough of the imagination in which he'd felt himself bogged: whatever the merits of the new work, like an ox-cart driver in monsoon season or the skipper of a grounded ship, he had gone forward by going back, to the very roots and springs of story. Using, like Scheherazade herself, for entirely present ends, materials received from narrative antiquity and methods older than the alphabet, in the time since Sherry's defloration he had set down two-thirds of a projected series of three novellas, longish tales which would take their sense from one another in several of the ways he and Sherry had discussed, and, if they were successful (here he smiled at me), manage to be seriously, even passionately, about some things as well.

" 'The two I've finished have to do with mythic heroes, true and false,' he concluded. 'The third I'm just in the middle of. How good or bad they are I can't say yet, but I'm sure they're right. You know what I mean, Scheherazade.'

"She did; I felt as if I did also, and we happily re-embraced. Then Sherry remarked, apropos of middles, that she'd be winding up the story of Ma'aruf the Cobbler that night and needed at least the beginning of whatever tale was to follow it.

"The Genie shook his head. 'My dear, there are no more. You've told them all.' He seemed cruelly undisturbed by a prospect that made the harem spin before my eyes and brought me near to swooning.

" 'No more!' I cried. 'What will she do?'

" 'If she doesn't want to risk Shahryar's killing her and turning on you,' he said calmly, 'I guess she'll have to invent something that's not in the book.'

" 'I don't invent,' Sherry reminded him. Her voice was no less steady than his, but her expression — when I got hold of my senses enough to see it — was grave. 'I only recount.'

" 'Borrow something from the treasury!' I implored him. 'What will the children do without their mother?' The harem began to spin again; I gathered all my courage and said: 'Don't desert us, friend; give Sherry the story you're working on now, and you may do anything you like with me. I'll raise your children if you have any; I'll wash your Melissa's feet. Anything.'

"The Genie smiled and said to Sherry, 'Our little Dunyazade is a woman.' Thanking me then for my offer as courteously as he had once Scheherazade, he declined it, not only for the same reasons that had moved him before, but also because he was confident that the only tales left in the treasury of the sort King Shahryar was likely to be entertained by were the hundred mimicries and retellings of Sherry's own.

" 'Then my thousand nights and a night are ended,' Sherry said. 'Don't be ungrateful to our friend, Doony; everything ends.'

"I agreed, but tearfully wished myself — and Ali Shar, Gharíb, and little Melissa, whom all I loved as dearly as I loved my sister — out of a world where the only happy endings were in stories.

"The Genie touched my shoulder. 'Let's not forget,' he said, 'that from my point of view — a tiresome technical one, I'll admit — it is a story that we're coming to the end of. All these tales your sister has told the King are simply the middle of her own story — hers and yours, I mean, and Shahryar's, and his young brother Shah Zaman's.'

"I didn't understand — but Sherry did, and squeezing my other shoulder, asked him quietly whether, that being the tiresome technical case, it followed that a happy ending might be invented for the framing-story.

" 'The author of The Thousand and One Nights doesn't invent,' the Genie reminded her; 'he only recounts how, after she finished the tale of Ma'aruf the Cobbler, Scheherazade rose from the King's bed, kissed ground before him, and made bold to ask a favor in return for the thousand and one nights' entertainment. "Ask, Scheherazade," the King answers in the story — whereupon you send Dunyazade to fetch the children in, and plead for your life on their behalf, so that they won't grow up motherless.'

"My heart sprang up; Sherry sat silent. 'I notice you don't ask on behalf of the stories themselves,' the Genie remarked, 'or on behalf of your love for Shahryar and his for you. That's a pretty touch: it leaves him free to grant your wish, if he chooses to, on those other grounds. I also admire your tact in asking only for your life; that gives him the moral initiative to repent his policy and marry you. I don't think I'd have thought of that.'

" 'Hmp,' said Sherry.

" 'Then there's the nice formal symmetry — '

" 'Never mind the symmetry!' I cried. 'Does it work or not?' I saw in his expression then that it did, and in Sherry's that this plan was not news to her. I hugged them both, weeping enough for joy to make our ink run, so the Genie said, and begged Sherry to promise me that I could stay with her and the children after their wedding as I had before, and sit at the foot of her bed forever.

" 'Not so fast, Doony,' she said. 'I haven't decided yet whether or not I care to end the story that way.'

" 'Not care to?' I looked with fresh terror to the Genie. 'Doesn't she have to, if it's in the book?'

"He too appeared troubled now, and searched Sherry's face, and admitted that not everything he'd seen of our situation in these visions or dreams of his corresponded exactly to the story as it came to him through the centuries, lands, and languages that separated us in waking hours. In his translation, for example, all three children were male and nameless; and while there was no mention of Scheherazade's loving Shahryar by the end of the book, there was surely none of her despising him, or cuckolding him, more or less, with me and the rest. Most significantly, it went without saying that he himself was altogether absent from the plot — which, however, he prayed my sister to end as it ended in his version: with the double marriage of herself to your brother and me to you, and our living happily together until overtaken by the Destroyer of Delights and Severer of Societies, et cetera.

"While I tried to assimilate this astonishing news about myself, Sherry asked with a smile whether by 'his version' the Genie meant that copy of the Nights from which he'd been assisting us or the story he himself was in midst of inventing; for she liked to imagine, and profoundly hoped it so, that our connection had not been to her advantage only: that one way or another, she and I and our situation were among those 'ancient narrative materials' which he had found useful for his present purposes. How did his version end?

"The Genie closed his eyes for a moment, pushed back his glasses with his thumb, and repeated that he was still in the middle of that third novella in the series, and so far from drafting the climax and dénouement, had yet even to plot them in outline. Turning then to me, to my great surprise he announced that the title of the story was Dunyazadiad; that its central character was not my sister but myself, the image of whose circumstances, on my 'wedding-night-to-come,' he found as arresting for taletellers of his particular place and time as was my sister's for the estate of narrative artists in general.

" 'All those nights at the foot of the bed, Dunyazade!' he exclaimed.

'You've had the whole literary tradition transmitted to you — and the whole erotic tradition, too! There's no story you haven't heard; there's no way of making love that you haven't seen again and again. I think of you, little sister, a virgin in both respects: All that innocence! All that sophistication! And now it's your turn: Shahryar has told young Shah Zaman about his wonderful mistress, how he loves her as much for herself as for her stories — which he also passes on; the two brothers marry the two sisters; it's your wedding night, Dunyazade. . But wait! Look here! Shahryar deflowered and killed a virgin a night for a thousand and one nights before he met Scheherazade; Shah Zaman has been doing the same thing, but it's only now, a thousand nights and a night later, that he learns about Scheherazade — that means he's had two thousand and two young women at the least since he killed his wife, and not one has pleased him enough to move him to spend a second night with her, much less spare her life! What are you going to do to entertain him, little sister? Make love in exciting new ways? There are none! Tell him stories, like Scheherazade? He's heard them all! Dunyazade, Dunyazade! Who can tell your story?'

"More dead than alive with fright, I clung to my sister, who begged the Genie please to stop alarming me. All apologies, he assured us that what he was describing was not The Thousand and One Nights frame-story (which ended happily without mention of these terrors), but his own novella, a pure fiction — to which also he would endeavor with all his heart to find some conclusion in keeping with his affection for me. Sherry further eased my anxiety by adding that she too had given long thought to my position as the Genie described it, and was not without certain plans with respect to our wedding night; these, as a final favor to our friend, she had made written note of in the hope that whether or not they succeeded, he might find them useful for his story; but she would prefer to withhold them from me for the present.

" 'You sense as I do, then,' the Genie said thoughtfully, 'that we won't be seeing each other again.'

"Sherry nodded. 'You have other stories to tell. I've told mine.'

"Already he'd begun to fade. 'My best,' he said, 'will be less than your least. And I'll always love you, Scheherazade! Dunyazade, I'm your brother! Good night, sisters! Fare well!'

"We kissed; he disappeared with Sherry's letter; Shahryar sent for us; still shaken, I sat at the bed-foot while he and Sherry did a combination from the latter pages of Ananga Ranga and Kama Sutra and she finished the tale of Ma'aruf the Cobbler. Then she rose as the Genie had instructed her, kissed ground, begged boon; I fetched in Ali Shar, walking by himself now, Gharib crawling, Jamilah-Melissa suckling at my milkless breast as if it were her mother's. Sherry made her plea; Shahryar wept, hugged the children, told her he'd pardoned her long since, having found in her the refutation of all his disenchantment, and praised Allah for having appointed her the savior of her sex. Then he sent for Daddy to draft the marriage contract and for you to hear the news of Scheherazade and her stories; when you proposed to marry me, Sherry countered with Part Two of our plan (of whose Part Three I was still ignorant): that in order for her and me never to be parted, you must abandon Samarkand and live with us, sharing your brother's throne and passing yours to our father in reparation for his three-years' anguish. I found you handsomer than Shahryar and more terrifying, and begged my sister to say what lay ahead for me.

"'Why, a fine wedding-feast, silly Doony!' she teased. 'The eunuchs will perfume our Hammam-bath with rose-and willow-flower water, musk-pods, eagle-wood, ambergris; we'll wash and clip our hair; they'll dress me like the sun and you the moon, and we'll dance in seven different dresses to excite our bridegrooms. By the end of the wine and music they'll scarcely be able to contain their desire; each of us will kiss the other three good night, twelve good-nights in all, and our husbands will hurry us off toward our separate bridal-chambers — '

" 'O Sherry!'

" 'Then,' she went on, no tease in her voice now, 'on the very threshold of their pleasures I'll stop, kiss ground, and say to my lord and master: "O King of the Sun and the Moon and the Rising Tide, et cetera, thanks for marrying me at last after sleeping with me for a thousand and one nights and begetting three children on me and listening while I amused you with proverbs and parables, chronicles and pleasantries, quips and jests and admonitory instances, stories and anecdotes, dialogues and histories and elegies and satires and Allah alone knows what else! Thanks too for giving my precious little sister to your brute of a brother, and the kingdom of Samarkand to our father, whose own gratitude we'll hope may partially restore his sanity! And thanks above all for kindly ceasing to rape and murder a virgin every night, and for persuading Shah Zaman to cease also! I have no right to ask anything further of you at all, but should be overjoyed to serve your sexual and other interests humbly until the day you tire of me and either have me killed or put me by for other, younger women — and indeed I am prepared to do just that, as Dunyazade surely is also for Shah Zaman. Yet in view of your boundless magnanimity Q.E.D., I make bold to ask a final favor." If we're lucky, Shahryar will be so mad to get me into bed that he'll say "Name it" — whereupon I point out to him that a happy occasion is about to bring to pass what a thousand ill ones didn't, your separation from me till morning. Knowing my husband, I expect he'll propose a little something à quatre, at which I'll blush appropriately and declare that I'm resigned after all to the notion of losing you for a few hours, and wish merely thirty minutes or so of private conversation with you before you and your bridegroom retire, to tell you a few things that every virgin bride should know. "What on earth is there in that line that she hasn't seen us do a hundred times?" your delicate brother-in-law will inquire. "Seeing isn't doing," I'll reply: "I myself have pretty intensive sexual experience, for example, but of one man only, and would be shy as any virgin with another than yourself; Shah Zaman has the widest carnal acquaintance in the world, I suppose, but no long and deep knowledge of any one woman; among the four of us, only you, King of the Age, et cetera, can boast both sorts of experience, having humped your way through twenty years of marriage, a thousand and one one-nighters, and thirty-three and a third months with me, not to mention odd hours with all the concubines in your stable. But little Dunyazade has no experience at all, except vicariously." That master of the quick retort will say "Hmp" and turn the matter over to Shah Zaman, who after bringing to it the full weight of his perspicacity will say, in effect, "Okay. But make it short." They'll withdraw, with the grandest erections you and I have ever shuddered at — and then I'll tell you what to do in Part Three. After which we'll kiss good night, go in to our husbands, and do it. Got that?'

" 'Do what?' I cried- but she'd say no more till all had fallen out as she described: our wedding-feast and dance; the retirement toward our chambers; her interruption and request; your permission and stipulation that the conference be brief, inasmuch as you were more excited by me than you'd been by any of the two thousand unfortunates whose maidenheads and lives you'd done away with in the five and a half years past. You two withdrew, your robes thrust out before; the moment your bedroom doors closed, Sherry spat in your tracks, took my head between her hands, and said: 'If ever you've listened carefully, little sister, listen now. For all his good intentions, our Genie of the Key is either a liar or a fool when he says that any man and woman can treasure each other until death — unless their lifetimes are as brief as our murdered sisters'! Three thousand and three, Doony — dead! What have you and I and all that fiction accomplished, except to spare another thousand from a quick end to their misery? What are they saved for, if not a more protracted violation, at the hands of fathers, husbands, lovers? For the present, it's our masters' pleasure to soften their policy; the patriarchy isn't changed: I believe it will persist even to our Genie's time and place. Suppose his relation to his precious Melissa were truly as he describes it, and not merely as he wishes and imagines it: it would only be the exception that proves the wretched rule. So here we stand, and there you're about to lie, and spread your legs and take it like the rest of us! Thanks be to Allah you can't be snared as I was in the trap of novelty, and think to win some victory for our sex by diverting our persecutors with naughty stunts and stories! There is no victory, Doony, only unequal retaliation; it's time we turned from tricks to trickery, tales to lies. Go in to your lusty husband now, as I shall to mine; let him kiss and fondle and undress you, paw and pinch and slaver, lay you on the bed; but when he makes to stick you, slip out from under and whisper in his ear that for all his vast experience of sex, there remains one way of making love, most delicious of all, that both he and Shahryar are innocent of, inasmuch as a Genie revealed it to us only last night when we prayed Allah for a way to please such extraordinary husbands. So marvelous is this Position of the Genie, as we'll call it, that even a man who's gone through virgins like breakfast-eggs will think himself newly laid, et cetera. What's more, it's a position in which the woman does everything, her master nothing- except submit himself to a more excruciating pleasure than he's ever known or dreamed of. No more is required of him than that he spread-eagle himself on the bed and suffer his wrists and ankles to be bound to its posts with silken cords, lest by a spasm of early joy he abort its heavenly culmination, et cetera. Then, little sister, then, when you have him stripped and bound supine and salivating, take from the left pocket of your seventh gown the razor I've hid there, as I shall mine from mine — and geld the monster! Cut his bloody engine off and choke him on it, as I'll do to Shahryar! Then we'll lay our own throats open, to spare ourselves their sex's worse revenge. Adieu, my Doony! May we wake together in a world that knows nothing of he and she! Good night.'

"I moved my mouth to answer; couldn't; came to you as if entranced; and while you kissed me, found the cold blade in my pocket. I let you undress me as in a dream, touch my body where no man has before, lay me down and mount to take me; as in a dream I heard me bid you stay for a rarer pleasure, coax you into the Position of the Genie, and with this edge in hand and voice, rehearse the history of your present bondage. Your brother's docked; my sister's dead; it's time we joined them."

2

"That's the end of your story?"

Dunyazade nodded.

Shah Zaman looked narrowly at his bride, standing naked beside the bed with her trembling razor, and cleared his throat. "If you really mean to use that, kindly kill me with it first. A good hard slice across the Adam's apple should do the trick."

The girl shuddered, shook her head. As best he could, so bound, the young man shrugged.

"At least answer one question: Why in the world did you tell me this extraordinary tale?"

Her eyes still averted, Dunyazade explained in a dull voice that one aspect of her sister's revenge was this reversal not only of the genders of teller and told (as conceived by the Genie), but of their circumstances, the latter now being at the former's mercy.

"Then have some!" urged the King. "For yourself!" Dunyazade looked up. Despite his position Shah Zaman smiled like the Genie through his pearly beard and declared that Scheherazade was right to think love ephemeral. But life itself was scarcely less so, and both were sweet for just that reason — sweeter yet when enjoyed as if they might endure. For all the inequity of woman's lot, he went on, thousands of women found love as precious as did their lovers: one needed look no farther than Scheherazade's stories for proof of that. If a condemned man — which is what he counted himself, since once emasculate he'd end his life as soon as he could lay hands on his sword — might be granted a last request, such as even he used to grant his nightly victims in the morning, his would be to teach his fair executioner the joys of sex before she unsexed him.

"Nonsense," Dunyazade said crossly. "I've seen all that."

"Seeing's not feeling."

She glared at him. "I'll learn when I choose, then, from a less bloody teacher: someone I love, no matter how foolishly." She turned her head. "If I ever meet such a man. Which I won't." Vexed, she slipped into her gown, holding the razor awkwardly in her left hand while she fastened the hooks.

"What a lucky fellow! You don't love me then, little wife?"

"Of course not! I'll admit you're not the monster I'd imagined — in appearance, I mean. But you're a total stranger to me, and the thought of what you did to all those girls makes me retch. Don't waste your last words in silly flirting; you won't change my mind. You'd do better to prepare yourself to die."

"I'm quite prepared, Dunyazade," Shah Zaman replied calmly. "I have been from the beginning. Why else do you suppose I haven't called my guards in to kill you? I'm sure my brother's long since done for Scheherazade, if she really tried to do what she put you up to doing. Shahryar and I would have been great fools not to anticipate this sort of thing from the very first night, six years ago."

"I don't believe you."

The King shrugged his eyebrows and whistled through his teeth; two husky mamelukes stepped at once from behind a tapestry depicting Jamshid's seven-ringed cup, seized Dunyazade by the wrists, covered her mouth, and took the open razor from her hand.

"Fair or not," Shah Zaman said conversationally as she struggled, "your only power at present is what I choose to give you. And fair or not, I choose to give it." He smiled. "Let her have the razor, my friends, and take the rest of the night off. If you don't believe that I deliberately put myself in your hands from the first, Dunyazade, you can't deny I'm doing so now. All I ask is leave to tell you a story, in exchange for the one you've told me; when I'm finished you may do as you please."

The mamelukes reluctantly let her go, but left the room only when Shah Zaman, still stripped and bound, repeated his order. Dunyazade sat exhausted on a hassock, rubbed her wrists, pinned up her fallen hair, drew the gown more closely about her.

"I'm not impressed," she said. "If I pick up the razor, they'll put an arrow through me."

"That hadn't occurred to me," Shah Zaman admitted. "You'll have to trust me a little, then, as I'm trusting you. Do pick it up. I insist."

"You insist!" Dunyazade said bitterly. She took up the razor, let her hand fall passively beside the hassock, began to weep.

"Let's see, now," mused the King. "How can we give you the absolute advantage? They're very fast, those guards, and loyal; if they really are standing by, what I fear is that they'll misconstrue some innocent movement of yours and shoot."

"What difference does it make?" Dunyazade said miserably. "Poor Sherry!"

"I have it! Come sit here beside me. Please, do as I say! Now lay that razor's edge exactly where you were going to put it before; then you can make your move before any marksman can draw and release. You'll have to hold me in your other hand; I've gone limp with alarm."

Dunyazade wept.

"Come," the King insisted: "it's the only way you'll be convinced I'm serious. No, I mean right up against it, so that you could do your trick in half a second. Whew, that gooseflesh isn't faked! What a situation! Now look here: even this advantage gripes you, I suppose, since it was given instead of taken: the male still leading the female, et cetera. No help for that just now. Besides, between any two people, you know — what I mean, it's not the patriarchy that makes you take the passive role with your sister, for example. Never mind that. See me sweat! Now, then: I agree with that Genie of yours in the matter of priorities, and I entreat you not only to permit me to tell you a story, but to make love with me first."

Dunyazade shut her eyes and whipped her head from side to side.

"As you wish," said the King. "I'd never force you, as you'll understand if you'll hear my story. Shall I tell it?"

Dunyazade moved her head indifferently.

"More tightly. Careful with that razor!"

"Can't you make it go down?" the girl asked thickly. "It's obscene. And distracting. I think I'm going to be sick."

"Not more distracting than your little breasts, or your little fingers. . No, please, I insist you keep hold of your advantage! My story's short, I promise, and I'm at your mercy. So:

"Six years ago I thought myself the happiest man alive. I'd had a royal childhood; my college years were a joy; my career had gone brilliantly; at twenty-five I ruled a kingdom almost as prosperous as Shahryar's at forty. I was popular with my subjects; I kept the government reasonably honest, the various power groups reasonably in hand, et cetera. Like every king I kept a harem of concubines for the sake of my public image, but as a rule they were reserved for state visitors. For myself I wanted nobody except my bride, never mind her name, whom after a whole year of marriage I still loved more than any woman I'd ever known. After a day's work in the durbar, bidding and forbidding et cetera, I'd rush in to dinner, and we'd play all night like two kittens in a basket. No trick of love we didn't turn together; no myth of gods and nymphs we didn't mimic. The harem girls, when I used them, only reminded me of how much I preferred my wife; often as not I'd dismiss them in mid-clip and call her in for the finish.

"When my brother summoned me here to visit that first time, much as I longed to see him it was all I could do to leave my bride behind; we made our first goodbyes; then I was as overjoyed as I imagined she'd be when I discovered that I'd forgotten a diamond necklace I'd meant to present to Shahryar's queen. I rushed back to the palace myself instead of sending after it, so that we could make love once again before I left — and I found her in our bed, riding astride the chief cook! Her last words were 'Next time invite me'; I cut them both in two, four halves in all, not to seem a wittol; came here and found my sister-in-law cuckolding my brother with the blackamoor Sa'ad al-Din Saood, who swung from trees, slavered and gibbered, and sported a yard that made mine look like your little finger. Kings no more, Shahryar and I left together by the postern gate, resolved to kill ourselves as the most wretched fools on earth if our misery was particular. One day as we were wandering in the marshes, far from the paths of men, devouring our own souls, we saw what we thought was a waterspout coming up the bay, and climbed a loblolly pine for safety. It turned out to be that famous ifrit of your sister's story: he took the steel coffer out of his casket, unlocked the seven locks with seven keys, fetched out and futtered the girl he'd stolen on her wedding night, and fell asleep in her lap; she signaled us to come down and ordered us both to cuckold the ifrit with her then and there. Who says a man can't be forced? We did our best, and she added our seal rings to the five hundred seventy she'd already collected. We understood then that no woman on earth who wants a rogering will go unrogered, though she be sealed up in a tower of brass.

"So. When I'd first told my brother of my own cuckolding, he'd vowed that in my position he'd not have rested till he'd killed a thousand women: now we went back to his palace; he put to death his queen and all his concubines and their lovers, and we took a solemn oath to rape and kill a virgin a night, so as never again to be deceived. I came home to Samarkand, wondering at the turns of our despair: how a private apocalypse can infect the state and bring about one more general, et cetera. With this latter motive, more than for revenge on womankind, I resolved to hold to our dreadful policy until my kingdom fell to ruin or an outraged populace rose up and slew me.

"But unlike Shahryar, I said nothing at first to my vizier, only told him to fetch me a beautiful virgin for the night. Not knowing that I meant to kill her in the morning, he brought me his own daughter, a girl I knew well and had long admired, Samarkand's equivalent of Scheherazade. I assumed he was pandering to his own advancement, and smiled at the thought of putting them to death together; I soon learned, however, from the woman herself, that it was her own idea to come to me — and her motive, unlike your sister's, was simple love. I undressed and fell to toying with her; she wept; I asked what ailed her: it was not being separated from her sister, but being alone at last with me, the fulfillment of her lifelong dream. I found myself much touched by this and, to my surprise, impotent. Stalling for time, I remarked that such dreams could turn out to be nightmares. She embraced me timidly and replied that she deplored my murdering my wife and her paramour, both of whom she'd known and rather liked, for though in a general way she sympathized with my disenchanted outrage, she believed she understood as well my wife's motives for cuckolding me, which in her view were not all that different, essentially, from the ifrit's maiden's in the story. Despite my anger, she went on bravely to declare that she herself took what she called the Tragic View of Sex and Temperament: to wit, that while perfect equality between men and women was the only defensible value in that line, she was not at all certain it was attainable; even to pursue it ardently, against the grain of things as they were, was in all likelihood to spoil one's chances for happiness in love; not to pursue it, on the other hand, once one had seen it clearly to be the ideal, no doubt had the same effect. For herself, though she deplored injustice whether in individuals or in institutions, and gently affirmed equality as the goal that lovers lovingly should strive for, however short of it their histories and temperaments made them fall, yet she knew herself personally to be unsuited for independence, formed by her nature and upbringing to be happy only in the shadow of a man whom she admired and respected more than herself. She was anything but blind to my faults and my own blindness to them, she declared, but so adored me withal that if I could love her even for a night she'd think her life complete, and wish nothing further unless maybe a little Shah Zaman to devote the rest of her years to raising. Or if my disillusionment with women were so extreme (as she seemed uncannily to guess from my expression) that I had brought her to my bed not to marry her or even add her to my harem, but merely to take her virginity and her life, I was welcome to both; she only prayed I might be gentle in their taking.

"This last remark dismayed me the more because it echoed something my late wife had said on our wedding night: that even death at my hands would be sweeter to her than life at another's. How I despised, resented, missed her! As if it were I who was cut in two, I longed to hold her as in nights gone by, yet would have halved her bloody halves if she'd been restored to me. There lay my new woman on the bed, naked and still now; I stood on my knees between hers, weeping so for her predecessor's beauty and deceit, my own blindness and cruelty — and the wretched state of affairs between man and womankind that made love a will-o'-the-wisp, jealousy and boredom and resentment the rule — that I could neither function nor dissemble. I told her of all that had taken place between my departure from Samarkand and my return, the oath I'd sworn with my brother, and my resolve to keep it lest I seem chicken-hearted and a fool.

" 'Lest you seem!' the girl cried out. 'Harems, homicides — everything for the sake of seeming!' She commanded me then, full of irony for all her fears, to keep my vow if I meant to keep it, or else cut out her tongue before I cut off her head; for if I sent her to the block without deflowering her first, she would declare to any present, even if only her executioner, that I was a man in seeming merely, not in fact, and offer her maidenhood as proof. Her courage astonished me as much as her words. 'By Allah,' I vowed to her, 'I won't kill you if I can't get it up for you first.' But that miserable fellow in your left hand, which had never once failed me before, and which stands up now like an idiot soldier in enemy country, as if eager to be cut down, deserted me utterly. I tried every trick I knew, in vain, though my victim willingly complied with my instructions. I could of course have killed her myself, then and there, but I had no wish to seem a hypocrite even for a moment in her eyes; nor, for that matter, to let her die a virgin — nor, I admitted finally to myself, to let her die at all before she was overtaken like the rest of us by the Destroyer of Delights et cetera. For seven nights we tossed and tumbled, fondled and kissed and played, she reaching such heats of unaccustomed joy as to cry out, no longer sarcastically, that if only I would stick her first with my carnal sword, she'd bare her neck without complaint to my steel. On the seventh night, as we lay panting in a sweat of frustration, I gave her my dagger and invited her to do me and Samarkand the kindness of killing me at once, for I'd rather die than seem unable to keep my vow.

" 'You are unable to keep it,' she told me softly: 'not because you're naturally impotent, but because you're not naturally cruel. If you'd tell your brother that after thinking it over you've simply come to a conclusion different from his, you'd be cured as if by magic.' And in fact, as if by magic indeed, what she said was so true that at her very words the weight was lifted from heart and tool together; they rose as one. Gratefully, tenderly, I went into her at last; we cried for joy, came at once, fell asleep in each other's arms.

"No question after that of following Shahryar's lead; on the other hand, I found myself in the morning not yet man enough after all to send word to him of my change of heart and urge him to change his. Neither was I, after all, in love enough with the Vizier's daughter to risk again the estate of marriage, which she herself considered problematical at best.

" 'I never expected you to marry me,' she told me when I told her these things, 'though I'd be dishonest if I didn't say I dreamed and prayed you might. All I ever really hoped for was a love affair with you, and a baby to remember it by. Even if I don't have the baby, I've had the affair: you truly loved me last night.'

"I did, and for many nights after — but not enough to make the final step. What your Genie said concerning marriage could have come from my own mouth if I had the gift of words: to anyone of moral imagination who's known it, no other relation between men and women has true seriousness; yet that same imagination kept me from it. And I dreaded the day my brother would get word of my weakness. I grew glum and cross; my mistress, intuitive as ever, guessed the reason at once. 'You can neither keep your vow nor break it,' she told me: 'Perhaps you'd better do both for a while, till you find your way.' I asked her how such a contradiction was possible. 'By the magic words as if,' she replied, 'which, to a person satisfied with seeming, are more potent than all the genii in the tales.'

"She then set forth a remarkable proposal: legend had it that far to the west of Samarkand was a country peopled entirely with women, adjoining another wholly male: for two months every spring they mated freely with each other on neutral ground, the women returning home as they found themselves pregnant, giving their male children to the neighboring tribe and raising the girls as members of their own. Whether or not such a community in fact existed, she thought it a desirable alternative to the present state of affairs, and unquestionably preferable to death; since I couldn't treasure her as she treasured me (and not for a moment did she blame me for that incapacity), she proposed to establish such an alternative society herself, with my assistance. I was to proclaim my brother's policy as my own, take to bed a virgin every night and declare her executed in the morning; but instead of actually raping and killing them I would tell them of her alternative society and send them secretly from Samarkand, in groups of a hundred or so, to organize and populate it. If, knowing their destiny, they chose to spend their last night in Samarkand making love with me, that was their affair; none, she imagined, would choose death over emigration, and any who found their new way of life not to their liking could return to Samarkand if and when I changed my policy, or migrate elsewhere in the meanwhile. In any case they'd be alive and free; or, if the pioneers were captured and made slaves of by barbarians before the new society was established, they'd be no worse off than the millions of their sisters already in that condition. On the other hand, separate societies of men and women, mingling freely at their own wills as equals on neutral ground, might just make possible a true society of the future in which the separation was no longer necessary. And in the meantime, of course, for better or worse, it would be as if I'd kept my dreadful vow.

"At first hearing, the plan struck me as absurd; after a few nights it seemed less so, perhaps even feasible; by the end of a week of examining passionately with her all the alternatives, it seemed no less unreasonable than they. My angel herself, in keeping with her Tragic View, didn't expect the new society to work in the naïve sense: what human institutions ever did? It would have the vices of its virtues; if not nipped in the bud by marauding rapists, it would grow and change and rigidify in forms and values quite different from its founders' — codifying, institutionalizing, and perverting its original spirit. No help for that.

"Was there ever such a woman? I kissed her respectfully, then ardently a final time. After one last love-making in the morning, while my hand lingered on her left breast, she declared calmly her intention, upon arriving at her virgin kingdom, to amputate that same breast for symbolic reasons and urge her companions to do the same, as a kind of initiation rite. 'We'll make up a practical excuse for it,' she said: ' "The better to draw our bows," et cetera. But the real point will be that in one aspect we're all woman, in another all warrior. Maybe we'll call ourselves The Breastless Ones.'

" 'That seems extreme,' I remarked. She replied that a certain extremism was necessary to the survival of anything radically innovative. Later generations, she assumed, established and effete, would find the ancestral custom barbaric and honor its symbolism, if at all, with a correspondingly symbolic mammectomy- a decorative scar, perhaps, or cosmetic mark. No matter; everything passed.

"So did our connection: with a thousand thanks to her for opening my eyes, a thousand good wishes for the success of her daring enterprise, and many thousands of dinars to support it (which for portability and security she converted into a phial of diamonds and carried intravaginally), I declared her dead, let her father the Vizier in on our secret, and sent her off secretly to one of my country castles on a distant lake, where she prepared for the expedition westward while her companions, the ostensible victims of my new policy, accumulated about her. Perhaps a third, apprised of their fate, chose to remain virginal, whether indignantly, ruefully, or gratefully; on the other two-thirds who in whatever spirit elected to go hymenless to the new society, I bestowed similar phials of jewels. Somewhat less than fifty percent of this number found themselves impregnated by our night together, and so when the first detachment of two hundred pioneers set out across the western wastes, their actual number was about two hundred sixty. Since I pursued this policy for nearly two thousand nights, the number of pilgrims and unborn children sent west from Samarkand must have totaled about twenty-six hundred; corrected for a normal male birth rate of somewhat over fifty per cent, a rather higher than normal rate of spontaneous abortion, and infant as well as maternal mortality owing to the rigors of traveling and of settling a new territory, and ignoring — as one must to retain one's reason — the possibility of mass enslavement, rape, massacre, or natural catastrophe, the number of pioneers to the Country of the Breastless must be at least equal to the number of nights until Shahryar's message concerning your sister arrived from the Islands of India and China.

"Of the success or failure of those founding mothers I know nothing; kept myself ignorant deliberately, lest I learn that I was sending them after all to the Destroyer of Delights and Severer of Societies. The folk of Samarkand never rose against me; nor did my vizier, like Shahryar's, have difficulty enlisting sacrificial virgins; even at the end, though my official toll was twice my brother's, about half the girls were volunteers- from all which, I infer that their actual fate was an open secret. For all I know, my original mistress never truly intended to found her gynocracy; the whole proposal was perhaps a ruse; perhaps they all slipped back into the country with their phials of gems for dowry, married and lived openly under my nose. No matter: night after night I brought them to bed, set forth their options, then either glumly stripped and pronged them or spent the night in chaste sleep and conversation. Tall and short, dark and fair, lean and plump, cold and ardent, bold and timid, clever and stupid, comely and plain- I bedded them all, spoke with them all, possessed them all, but was myself possessed by nothing but despair. Though I took many, with their consent, I wanted none of them. Novelty lost its charm, then even its novelty. Unfamiliarity I came to loathe: the foreign body in the dark, the alien touch and voice, the endless exposition. All I craved was someone with whom to get on with the story of my life, which was to say, of our life together: a loving friend; a loving wife; a treasurable wife; a wife, a wife.

"My brother's second message, when it came, seemed a miraculous reprise of that fatal first, six years before: I turned the kingdom over to my vizier and set out at once, resolved to meet this Scheherazade who had so wooed and yarned him back to the ways of life that he meant to wed her. 'Perhaps she has a younger sister,' I said to myself; if she does, I'll make no inquiries, demand no stories, set no conditions, but humbly put my life in her hands, tell her the whole tale of the two thousand and two nights that led me to her, and bid her end that story as she will — whether with the last goodnight of all or (what I can just dimly envision, like dawn in another world) some clear and fine and fresh good morning."

Dunyazade yawned and shivered. "I can't imagine what you're talking about. Am I expected to believe that preposterous business of Breastless Pilgrims and Tragic Views?"

"Yes!" cried Shah Zaman, then let his head fall back to the pillow.

"They're too important to be lies. Fictions, maybe — but truer than fact."

Dunyazade covered her eyes with her razor-hand. "What do you expect me to do? Forgive you? Love you?"

"Yes!" the King cried again, his eyes flashing. "Let's end the dark night!

All that passion and hate between men and women; all that confusion of inequality and difference! Let's take the truly tragic view of love! Maybe it is a fiction, but it's the profoundest and best of all! Treasure me, Dunyazade, as I'll treasure you!"

"For pity's sake stop!"

But Shah Zaman urged ardently: "Let's embrace; let's forbear; let's love as long as we can, Dunyazade — then embrace again, forebear and love again!"

"It won't work."

"Nothing works! But the enterprise is noble; it's full of joy and life, and the other ways are deathy. Let's make love like passionate equals!"

"You mean as if we were equals," Dunyazade said. "You know we're not. What you want is impossible."

"Despite your heart's feelings?" pressed the King. "Let it be as if! Let's make a philosophy of that as if!"

Dunyazade wailed: "I want my sister!"

"She may be alive; my brother, too." More quietly, Shah Zaman explained that Shahryar had been made acquainted with his brother's recent history and opinions, and had vowed that should Scheherazade ever attempt his life, he'd manage himself somewhat similarly: that is (as he was twenty years older, and more conservative), not exactly granting his wife the power to kill him, but disarming and declining to kill her, and within the bounds of good public relations, permitting her a freedom comparable to his own. The harem was a royal tradition, necessarily public; Scheherazade could take what lovers she would, but of necessity in private. Et cetera.

"Did you really imagine your sister fooled Shahryar for a thousand nights with her mamelukes and dildoes?" Shah Zaman laughed. "A man couldn't stay king very long if he didn't even know what was going on in the harem! And why do you suppose he permitted it, if not that he loved her too much, and was too sick of his other policy, to kill her? She changed his mind, all right, but she never fooled him: he used to believe that all women were unfaithful, and that the only way to spare himself the pain of infidelity was to deflower and kill them; now he believes that all people are unfaithful, and that the way to spare oneself the pain of infidelity is to love and not to care. He chooses equal promiscuity; I choose equal fidelity. Let's treasure each other, Dunyazade!"

She shook her head angrily, or desperately. "It's absurd. You're only trying to talk your way out of a bad spot."

"Of course I am! And of course it's absurd! Treasure me!"

"I'm exhausted. I should use the razor on both of us, and be done with it."

"Treasure me, Dunyazade!"

"We've talked all night; I hear the cocks; it's getting light."

"Good morning, then! Good morning!"

3

Alf Laylah Wa Laylah, The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, is not the story of Scheherazade, but the story of the story of her stories, which in effect begins: "There is a book called The Thousand and One Nights, in which it is said that once upon a time a king had two sons, Shahryar and Shah Zaman," et cetera; it ends when a king long after Shahryar discovers in his treasury the thirty volumes of The Stories of the Thousand Nights and a Night, at the end of the last of which the royal couples — Shahryar and Scheherazade, Shah Zaman and Dunyazade — emerge from their bridal chambers after the wedding night, greet one another with warm good mornings (eight in all), bestow Samarkand on the brides' long-suffering father, and set down for all posterity The Thousand Nights and a Night.

If I could invent a story as beautiful, it should be about little Dunyazade and her bridegroom, who pass a thousand nights in one dark night and in the morning embrace each other; they make love side by side, their faces close, and go out to greet sister and brother in the forenoon of a new life. Dunyazade's story begins in the middle; in the middle of my own, I can't conclude it — but it must end in the night that all good mornings come to. The Arab storytellers understood this; they ended their stories not "happily ever after," but specifically "until there took them the Destroyer of Delights and Desolator of Dwelling-places, and they were translated to the ruth of Almighty Allah, and their houses fell waste and their palaces lay in ruins, and the Kings inherited their riches." And no man knows it better than Shah Zaman, to whom therefore the second half of his life will be sweeter than the first.

To be joyous in the full acceptance of this dénouement is surely to possess a treasure, the key to which is the understanding that Key and Treasure are the same. There (with a kiss, little sister) is the sense of our story, Dunyazade: The key to the treasure is the treasure.