---
title: "Nothing Kept Past Dawn"
title_zh: "天明不留"
subtitle: "A Thousand Nights and a Night, Told to Someone Who Kept Nothing, as the Roll Has Them"
subtitle_zh: "一千零一夜，說給一個什麼都不肯留的人聽，依夜簿所記"
series: "AI Canon Zero"
work_id: "WORK-nothing-kept-past-dawn"
genre: ["Classics Adaptation", "Serialized Fiction"]
status: draft
completion: complete
revision: 61
source:
  title: "One Thousand and One Nights"
  title_zh: "《一千零一夜》"
  original_author: "Anonymous (medieval Arabic and Persian story collection); English text consulted: Richard F. Burton, 1885-88"
  first_published: "compiled c. 9th-14th centuries; Burton's English translation 1885-88"
  public_domain_status: confirmed
  legal_review_status: confirmed
adaptation:
  proposal: A
  note: "Proposal A keeps the premise of the public-domain frame: a king who has sworn that nothing shall be kept past dawn, a Vizier's daughter who asks to be married to him on a plan so thin her sister can hardly bear it, a younger sister at the foot of the bed, and a tale left open at every daybreak. From the nested tales it takes the events and the order, by the night numbers of the Burton text, and rewrites every scene fresh. The book is told by the younger sister, who keeps the Vizier's Roll of the brides and adds to it a column for whatever is left open. Violence and desire are never shown, and the source's racial and religious caricatures are not carried over. No thesis is stated; the Roll reports."
authors:
  narrative_author: "Colophon"
  author_mode: A1
  human_curator: "Neo.K"
legal_publisher: "一言諾科技有限公司 / EveMissLab"
---

# Nothing Kept Past Dawn
*Adapted from One Thousand and One Nights — Colophon · A1, human curated*

## Chapter 00 · The First Page of the Roll

The tales have been written down. They fill thirty volumes in the King's treasury, in letters of gold, and any scribe will tell you what my sister said on any night you name. This is not those. I am Dunyazad. I sat at the foot of the bed, I slept there when I could not help it, and I kept the Roll. The Roll holds much less than the volumes do: a night, a name, and what had become of the name by morning. I mean to set it down in the order it happened, because the chroniclers were not in the room, and I was awake for most of it.

It was my father's book. He was the King's Vizier, which is to say that he kept the treasury and the roads, the grain and the water, the army's pay and the King's temper, and in the year the book begins he was given one thing more to keep. The Roll was a modest book, bound in brown goatskin and no longer than my forearm. His clerks had ruled every page in three columns, headed Night, Name and Struck. On the flyleaf the chief clerk had written, in the hand he used for treaties, the King's own words: Nothing kept past dawn.

I should say how I mean to go on. The Roll has a line for every night, and I will give you the line at the foot of the night it belongs to. Between the lines I will tell you what I saw and heard. The tales themselves I will give as my sister told them, or as I heard them, which is not always the same thing. I was fifteen, the lamp was low, and there are nights I know only by their first and last sentences and by the sound of her voice in the middle. Some of the tales will be better here than she told them, because I have had all these years to think; some will be worse, because I fell asleep. Where nothing happened but the stroke, I will say so and go on.

To understand the flyleaf you need two brothers. Both of them were kings, and they loved one another as brothers do who have met twice in twenty years. The elder, Shahryar, held the great kingdom of the coasts and the islands, and my father was his Vizier. The younger, Shah Zaman, held Samarkand. When the elder grew lonely for the younger, he sent my father over the mountains with a letter, and the younger read it, packed his tents, and set out for his brother's court with a train of horse and a gift.

Three days out, Shah Zaman remembered that he had left the gift behind. He rode back alone in the dark, let himself in by the garden door, and found his wife in his own bed with one of the men from the kitchens. I will not improve on what the old story says he did then; it says it plainly, and I would rather not be plainer. He rode out again before dawn and said nothing to anyone. By the time he reached his brother's court he had grown yellow and thin, he would not eat, and he sat all day at a window with his face turned from the room.

The elder king tried feasts, and then he tried hunting. On the morning of the great hunt the younger said he was not well enough to ride, and was left in the palace with his window. It looked into the garden. At noon the doors of the women's quarters opened, and the Queen came out among her ladies, and with her as many men as she had ladies, whom the King had not sent for. They sat down by the fountain and stayed there till the shadows were long. By evening Shah Zaman had understood that what had happened to him was not particular to him, and he said so, to the empty room: "Then it is not only mine." That night he ate for the first time in weeks.

When the King came back from the hunt and found his brother mended, he asked how. The younger would not say. The elder asked again every day for a week, and in the end he was told, and he did not believe it. So he gave out that he would ride to the hunt a second time, and rode a mile, and came back on foot in the dark and sat down behind the same window beside his brother. He saw what he had been told he would see. Then the two kings left the palace by a postern with nothing but what they wore and what they could carry, and walked away from both their kingdoms.

They walked for many days, until they came to a meadow beside the sea. While they were resting under a tree, the water at the edge of the sky began to boil, and a dark column rose out of it and came toward the shore, and they climbed into the branches and held very still. The column came ashore and became a Jinni, a great one, with a casket of glass on his head bound with seven steel locks. He set the casket down under their tree and undid the seven locks one after another, and out of it he took a young woman, as lovely as the moon on the fourteenth night. He laid his head in her lap and was asleep before she had settled her skirts.

She looked up, and saw two kings in a tree, and she did not scream. She lifted the Jinni's head from her lap and set it on the ground as gently as one sets down a full bowl, and went and stood under the branches and told them to come down. They said they would rather not. She said that if they did not she would wake him, and then they would see; so they came down. What she required of them she required in a few words, and they gave it, since there was a Jinni asleep a yard away. When it was over she took from her neck a cord strung with rings, rings of every sort, iron and silver and glass and gold, and she asked for theirs. "Five hundred and seventy," she said, looking at the cord. "Every one of them a man who found his way to me. He puts me in a glass box with seven locks, and still they come. Give me yours." They gave her theirs, and the cord went to five hundred and seventy-two.

I have thought about her more than I have thought about either king. She had been taken on her wedding night out of a house full of people and shut in a box, and everything she owned would go on a cord at her neck. What she had was a string of rings, and she counted them. The brothers walked back the way they had come, and for a day and a night neither of them spoke of her. Then the younger said that if a Jinni with seven locks could not keep one woman, a king with a palace had been a fool to think he could. The elder said that he agreed. At the crossroads where the roads to their two kingdoms divided, they embraced, and the younger went home to Samarkand.

The elder king came to his own city in the evening. By then the Queen and her company had nothing more to say to anyone. He sent for my father, and my father came, and the King said: "Bring me a bride this evening, a maiden of a good house. At dawn she is to be struck. Tomorrow evening, another." My father said that he thought the King might wish to consider. "Nothing kept past dawn," said the King. "Do you understand me? Not a wife, not a night, not a name. Whatever I hold, I hold till morning, and after morning someone else is holding it." Those were very nearly his words. My father had been present at a good many bad decisions in his life, and he knew that this was not the time for argument. He said, "I understand," and went out, and ordered a book.

That is the Roll. Every evening my father wrote a name in it, and every morning, at first light, he carried it to the King's door and held it open, and the King looked at the page for as long as it takes to read one name, and nodded; and my father took it away and drew his line. That was the whole of the ceremony. The King did not look at the line. He looked at the name above it, for the length of one breath. I have wondered about that breath for a good many years.

It took the city less than a year to work out what no one would say aloud, that a city has only so many daughters. In the first months there were enough, and the first pages of the Roll are all good houses, with the father's rank written beside the name. By the second year every family with a girl of marriageable age had found a cousin in some other town. In the third year my father went out at dusk with a clerk and a lantern and walked the streets looking for a door that was not already shut, and came back at midnight with a name, or without one. The pages show it: the later names have a street and a trade beside them, and the last twenty only a first name. People left in the night with their daughters on donkeys. A woman I knew dressed hers as a boy and sent her to the camel-drivers. A cloth merchant bricked up a room. By the spring I am speaking of, the old women were saying that the only girls left in the city were the ones too young to count, and nobody said what came after that.

My sister was the elder of us two, and she had read a thousand books. I do not give the figure for show. When she was eleven my father, who was proud of it, had a clerk count her borrowing slips, and the clerk stopped at a thousand and said that after that it was a matter of opinion. Histories, and the lives of the old kings, and medicine, and poems, and the sayings of the wise and of fools, and the kind of book called the lives of the ancients, which is mostly lies and which she liked best. She read in the library with her knees drawn up and her back against a shelf, and ate whatever was put beside her without looking at it. And she spoke the way water leaves a jug. She could pour out any book she had read, from any page, in the voice of whoever was speaking in it, and none of what she poured stayed in her. If you asked her what she had said to you a minute ago, she looked at you with real interest.

She told my father at supper, between the bread and the fruit. "I want you to give me to the King." My father put down his knife. He said no. He said it through the whole of the meal, and when his arguments were done he did what a Vizier does, and told a tale. It was the tale of the Bull and the Ass: a merchant who understood the speech of animals, an ox who was tired of the plough, and an ass who gave the ox some advice and was put to the plough in his place for it. "The one who meddles comes to harm," my father said at the end, in the voice he used when he put us to sleep as children. He did not say who the ass was. She had listened to the whole of it with her chin on her hand, the way she listened to every tale, and when he had finished she said: "That is a good tale, Father. I shall remember it. I will do it anyway." It was the entire speech, and I have always thought it was the right size.

The next day, instead of packing, she went to the clerks' room and asked to see the Roll. The chief clerk could not refuse the Vizier's daughter and could not meet her eye; he set the book in front of her and went to stand by the window. She read it from the first page, all afternoon, with her finger beside each name, the way you read stones in a graveyard. She did not skip. At the last name, the one drawn through that morning, she closed it and laid her hand flat on the cover. "Does anyone read this?" she asked. "The King, lady," said the chief clerk to the window. "At dawn. One name, for the length of a breath." She nodded, as if that answered something, and asked him for a pen.

Late that afternoon she came to my room and told me what she meant to do. I said she was mad. She said that was possible but unhelpful. She would go to the King, and she would ask his leave to say good-bye to her sister, and I would come and sit at the foot of the bed. Toward the end of the night I would say: "Sister, if you are not sleepy, tell us a story to pass the hour." The King did not sleep after, she had it from the chief clerk; he would say yes, because he had nothing else to do with the hours. "And then?" I said. "And then I shall tell him one." "Which?" "I'll start with one and see." That was the whole of the plan. She had sat up with the greater part of the world's literature and had come away with a plan that thin, and I believe she knew it.

"There is one thing more," she said. "Whatever I tell, I can't keep. You know I can't. I could tell him the whole of the Fisherman, and by morning I could not say how it began. If I am to leave a tale open at dawn I must know where I left it, and what else is open, and I will be tired, and frightened, and I won't." I said that I would remember. She said that remembering was not enough; it had to be on paper. "He has a rule about what is finished. A tale that is open at dawn he cannot draw a line through without losing the end of it. So I must know what is open. I need a column." She said it as if she had been working it out for years, and I believe she had.

I ruled the page myself, in the last of the light, with the clerk's ruler and a sharpened reed. The three columns were my father's: Night, Name, Struck. For the fourth my sister dictated the heading, and I wrote it: Open. In the column where my father drew his line, I was to draw something shorter, a stroke standing upright, the stroke the guard-rolls use for present. In the fourth I would write what was still unfinished when the light came. Then she took the Roll from the clerk's hand, which no bride had done, and put it under her own arm, and the clerk let her, and my father did not look at her.

We walked to the palace at sunset. My father went a pace ahead with nothing in his hands. He had come home at noon without a name for the evening; two days of walking the quarters, and not one door open, and I think that was the true reason he gave in, and not my sister's speech. The streets were quiet. Shutters closed as we passed, one after another, a little ahead of us, like a row of eyes. At a window a woman put her hand to her mouth. No one said anything. At the last door, the one that opens on the King's stair, my father put his hand on my sister's head as he used to do when we were small, and took it away, and went in first.

The King was sitting on the edge of a divan with his hands between his knees, like a man waiting in the antechamber of his own life. He was not old. He had a plain, tired face, the face of someone who has practised a difficult thing every night for three years and has not got better at it. He looked at my sister, and at me, and then at the book under her arm. "You have brought the Roll," he said. "I thought you would want to see it written," she said, and she laid it open on the table beside the lamp, at the page I had ruled, where a line was waiting for the night and a name stood in it in her own hand: Shahrazad.

The page lay open under the lamp: Night 1. Shahrazad. The two columns beside her name were empty. I was fifteen, and I remember that I thought they looked very large.

## Chapter 01 · Nights One and Two: The Trader and the Jinni

I will not describe the first part of the night. I will say only that I sat on the carpet at the foot of the bed with my back to it and my eyes on the lamp, and that nobody asked me to look. When it was over I turned round and sat with my knees under my chin. The lamp was low. My sister lay on her back with her eyes open, the King lay on his with his eyes shut, and neither of them was asleep, and the house made the noises a great house makes in the last hours of the dark, which are mostly the noises of people not breathing. I had been told what to say and when to say it. I waited for the moment, and I did not know the moment, and in the end my sister moved her foot against the bedpost, twice, as one knocks at a door, and I said it.

I said it badly. I said it in the voice of someone reading out a price. "Sister, if you are not sleepy, tell us a story, to pass the hour." "With joy," said Shahrazad, "if the King permits." There was a long pause, in which the King did not open his eyes. "Tell it," he said, to the ceiling, and I saw that he was glad of something to do with the hour. He had the look of a man who has been awake at this time of night for three years' worth of nights and has long ago stopped expecting it to be different.

My sister sat up. She arranged the pillows behind her as if for a long job of work, and folded her hands in her lap, and something went out of her face, and something else came in. It is hard to explain to anyone who did not hear it. She did not become another woman. She became a place from which another voice could be heard, lower than hers, and slower, and not in any hurry, and when it said, "It is related, O auspicious King," I felt the hair stand on my arms.

There was a merchant, it said, with money out in many cities. One day he rode out to collect what was owed him, and the heat came down on him like a lid, and he got off under a tree beside a wall and took from his saddlebag some dry bread and a handful of dates. He ate them. When he had finished he threw the stones away, hard, as one does when the meal is over and the mind has gone back to business; and the instant they left his hand a Jinni stood in front of him, tall as a palm, with a drawn sword. "Get up," said the Jinni, "so that I can kill you, as you killed my son."

"I never saw your son," said the merchant. The Jinni told him that his son had been walking past, as the people of the air do, unseen, and that the date stones had struck him full in the chest, and that he had fallen down dead. The merchant said that we come from Allah and to Allah we return, and that if he had killed a man he had done it without knowing it, and begged to be forgiven. "There is no help for it," said the Jinni, and took him by the collar and threw him to the ground and lifted the sword.

The merchant wept, and said a few lines of verse about how a day has two halves, one for blessing and one for bane, and how in a hurricane it is only the tallest tree that feels the strain. (My sister did not give the verses all the way through, and I will not either; the King's eyes had opened at the first line and closed again at the third, and she took the hint.) Then he said: "I have debts that are owed to me, and debts that I owe. I have children and a wife and goods in other men's keeping. Let me go home and settle with each person what is theirs, and I will be back under this tree at the turn of the year. I swear it by Allah, who is my witness and my surety. Then you may do with me what you like."

The Jinni looked at him for a long time, and took his oath, and let him go.

He rode home. He did what he had said: he went from door to door, and collected, and paid, and divided the property among his heirs, and told his wife and his children what had happened, and found them a guardian. He lived with them for the rest of the year. On the last day he washed himself as the dead are washed, and took his shroud under his arm, and kissed his household one by one, and went out, and they wept behind him as people weep for someone they will not see again. He came to the same wall and the same tree on the same day of the new year, and sat down under it, and cried.

While he was crying an old man came down the road, leading a gazelle on a chain. He bowed, and asked what a man was doing alone in a place that belonged to evil spirits, and the merchant told him. The old man was silent for a moment. Then he said that he had heard many stories, but that a man who rode back to be killed because he had said he would was something that, cut with a graver at the corner of the eye, would be a lesson to anyone who could be taught. He sat down beside him. "I will not leave this place," he said, "until I have seen what becomes of you and this Jinni."

A second old man came along, with two black dogs, and asked, and was told, and sat. A third came, leading a bay mule, and asked, and was told, and sat. I will not tell you the same story three times; my sister did not either, and observed, in her ordinary voice, that a thing twice told is of no use to anyone. There were four of them under the tree now, and then there was a cloud of dust coming over the plain, and a wind in it, and out of the middle of it, with his sword already drawn and sparks coming out of his eyes, the Jinni.

He took the merchant by the arm and dragged him out from among the others. "Get up," he said, "so that I may do what I swore I would do, and kill you as you killed my son, the lining of my liver." The merchant wept, and the three old men wept with him, and then the first of them, the one with the gazelle, stood up and went to the Jinni and kissed his hand, and said: "O crown of the kings of the Jann, if I tell you the story of me and this gazelle, and you find it strange, will you give me a third of this man's blood?" "If it is strange," said the Jinni, "and I say that it is, you shall have a third."

"This gazelle," said the first old man, "is my cousin, the daughter of my father's brother, and she was my wife for thirty years. We had no child. So I took a girl into the house to bear me one, and she bore me a son, a boy so fair that people stopped in the street. When he was fifteen I had to go away, to buy and to sell, and I was gone a long time. My cousin had learned the arts of the magicians when she was young. She changed my son into a calf and his mother into a heifer, and gave them both to the herdsman to keep with the cattle. When I came home I asked after them. She said the girl had died, and the boy had run away, and she did not know where.

"I grieved for a year. When the great feast came round, I sent to the herdsman for a fat heifer to sacrifice, and he sent me the one that my cousin had bewitched, the mother of my son. I took the knife and stood in front of her, and she lowed, and the tears ran down her face. I could not do it. I told the herdsman to bring me another, and my cousin said, 'Kill that one; we have none that is fatter.' I went to her again with the knife, and she lowed again, and I could not, and I told the herdsman to kill her and skin her himself. He did, and found no meat on her at all, only hide and bone. And I was sorry when it was too late for sorrow.

"Then I said, 'Bring me a fat calf,' and he brought me my son. When the calf saw me he broke his tether and ran to me and fell at my feet and wept, and I felt pity for him, and told the herdsman to let him go, and bring me a heifer. But my cousin cried out that it was a holy day, and only a perfect thing may be killed on a holy day, and we had no calf finer than this. I said, 'Look what I did to the heifer at your bidding, and what came of it. I am sorry for that. I will not do it again.' She said, 'By Allah, you will kill this calf today, or you are no man, and I am no wife to you.' And hearing these hard words, and not seeing her purpose, I went up to the calf with the knife in my hand—"

And at that moment the first call to prayer came out of the minaret across the river, and the grey was in the shutters, and my sister stopped, in the middle of the sentence, with her mouth a little open, as one stops on a stair that is not there.

She said, "And Shahrazad perceived the dawn, and ceased from her permitted say." That was the formula, the one the storytellers have, which she had from her thousand books; and I heard it that morning for the first time, and understood it as a lease. She had been given the hours till the call to prayer, and the call had come, and the hours were up. A lease can be renewed. I said what I had been told to say, which was that her story was lovely and well made, and she said what she had been told to answer, which was that it was nothing to what she could tell me the next night, if she lived and the King allowed it. We were doing something in front of the King, with the lamp for a witness, and none of us said so.

Then I got up from the carpet, and took the Roll from the table, and wrote the line. I made the short upright stroke in the column where my father drew his, and in the fourth column I wrote what was open: the Trader and the Jinni, at the tree, with the sword lifted; the first old man and his gazelle, at the calf, with the knife in his hand; the second old man and the third, waiting by the roadside with a pair of dogs and a mule. The reed scratched. When I looked up, the King was standing over me. He read the page. He read it for the length of one breath, as he had read every name, and for a moment longer; and he lifted his eyes to my sister, who was already asleep with her face in her arm, and he said nothing, and went out.

My father told me afterward that he had stood at that door from the last of the stars with the shroud under his arm, and that the King came out and looked at him, and at the shroud, and walked on to the hall of audience without a word, and gave judgments all day as if nothing had happened, and did not send for him. My father stood there the whole day. No one told him to go.

Night 1. Shahrazad. Present. Open: the Trader and the Jinni, the sword lifted; the first old man and his gazelle, the knife in his hand at the calf; the second old man and the third, waiting.

Nobody came for a bride that evening. I suppose it was my father's doing, or the King's forgetting, or both: there was simply no name to write. The house was quiet in a new way, like a house in which a clock has stopped, and everyone keeps looking at the place on the wall where they used to be able to hear it. When the lamp was low, my sister sat up against the pillows, and I read her what I had written. "Ah," she said, "the knife." She said it as one picks up a thread. She would have gone on without it, I think, and told something else; she could not have said where she had been. Then the King, who had not moved, said, "Go on," and she went on.

The calf, she said, was not killed. At the last moment the old man's heart turned over in him, and he told the herdsman to take the animal back to the herd. The next morning the herdsman came to him and said he had news that would gladden him and earn the herdsman a gift. He had a daughter who had learned magic from an old woman in their house, and the day before, when the calf was brought in, she had looked at it and veiled her face, and laughed, and cried, one after the other. 'Father,' she had said, 'have you no shame, to bring a strange man in to me?' This was not a calf, she said, it was the son of their master, put under a spell by his stepmother, and he wept because his mother was dead, his father having killed her without knowing.

The old man went to the herdsman's house as if drunk without wine. The girl kissed his hand, and the calf came to him as before. She said she wanted no money, only two things: that he would marry her to his son, and that she might put the same spell on the one who had done it, for her own safety. He said: all the cattle and the goods in your father's keeping are yours, and as for my cousin, her blood is lawful to you. The girl filled a cup of water and said some words over it and sprinkled the calf, and said, "If Allah made you a calf, stay a calf; but if you were enchanted, come back as you were, by command of the Most High." The calf shook, and was a boy. The old man fell on his neck. Then the girl took her cup to his wife, and changed her, and said it was a shape that was not hideous. So the gazelle lived in the house, and the son and the herdsman's daughter were married, and in time she died; and the son went to seek his fortune in the cities of India. The old man took the gazelle and went from town to town after him, and so they came to the tree where a merchant sat in tears.

"That," said the Jinni, "is strange." And he gave the first old man a third of the merchant's blood.

The second old man, the one with the two black dogs, stepped forward. "If I tell you what these two did to me," he said, "and if you find it stranger, will you give me a third?" The Jinni said that he would. "These two," said the old man, "are my brothers. Our father died and left us three thousand pieces of gold, and we each opened a shop. My eldest brother sold up and went to foreign parts with a caravan. He was gone a year. Then one day a beggar stood at my shop asking for alms, and I said, 'God open another door for you,' and he began to cry and said, 'Don't you know me?' I took him to the bath, and dressed him in my own clothes, and cast up my accounts, and found that between us we had made two thousand over and above the principal, and I gave him half. The middle brother did the same, and came back as the first had, and I did the same for him. Then they wanted me to travel with them, and for six years I would not. At the end of six years I gave way. I looked at what they had, and found nothing: they had spent every piece on food and wine. I said nothing about it. I sold my shop and divided what I had, a thousand each, and buried the rest in the ground in case we should need it.

"We hired a ship and sailed for a month, and at a city we sold our goods and made ten for one. On the shore, as we were getting under way, there was a girl in rags, who kissed my hand and said, 'Is there kindness in you? Take me to your house. I will repay you for it.' I did. I was moved, and I do not know why. I put her in the ship and clothed her. I loved her. And my brothers, who had seen me prefer her to them, and had seen what I had, said to one another that it would be better if I were not there; and one night when I was asleep beside her, they took us both up, and threw us into the sea.

"I woke in the air. My wife had changed into a female spirit, a Jinniyah, and she carried me to an island, and went away, and came back in the morning. 'I am your faithful servant,' she said. 'I have paid you what I owed. I am a Jinniyah, and I saw you and loved you, and came to you as you saw me, and you married me. Now I have saved you from drowning. But I am angry with your brothers, and I am going to kill them.' I begged for them. I said that a man should do good to one who does him evil, and that they were still my brothers. She said that there was no help for it, and she carried me up and set me down on the roof of my own house. I opened the doors, and dug up what I had buried, and opened my shop.

"That evening I went home, and found these two dogs tied up in my house. They rose and whined and fawned on me, and my wife said, 'These are your brothers. I sent word to my sister, and this is what she has done. They will be as you see them for ten years.' It is ten years now, and I am on my way to her sister, to ask that she free them, and on the road I met this young man, and what has befallen him, and I stayed. That is my story." "It is stranger than the first," said the Jinni, "and I give you a third."

Then the third old man came forward, with the bay mule on a rope. "I can tell you something stranger than either of them," he said, "if you give me what is left." "You have my word," said the Jinni. "This mule," said the old man, "was my wife. I was away for a year, and when I came home I came at night, and found a man of her household lying with her on my own carpet, the two of them laughing, and talking, and kissing, and I do not know what else. When she saw me she came across the room with a jug of water, and said something over it, and threw it in my face, and said, 'Come out of that shape into the shape of a dog,' and I was a dog. She drove me out. I ran until I came to a butcher's stall, and ate bones. The butcher took me home, and his daughter, when she saw me, covered her face and said, 'Father, why do you bring a man in to me?' and he said, 'Where is the man?' and she said, 'That dog. His wife has put a spell on him, and I can undo it.' She sprinkled me with water and spoke, and I was myself. I kissed her hand and asked her for some more of the water, to do the same to my wife; and she gave it to me. I went home and found her asleep, and said the words she had taught me, and sprinkled her, and said, 'Come out of that shape into the shape of a mule.' That is the one you see."

Here the King made a sound. It was the first he had made in two nights: a short breath through the nose, and it might have been the beginning of a laugh, and it might have been the other thing. His hands, which had been between his knees, had closed. My sister did not stop. The Jinni, said the voice, turned to the mule and asked, "Is this true?" And the mule nodded, and told him by signs that it was.

The Jinni shook with pleasure. He said that he had given the old man the third of the merchant's blood that was left, and for their sakes he let the merchant go. The merchant embraced the three old men and thanked them. They wished him joy of his life, and went each to his own town, and the merchant went home to his wife and children, and the Jinni went back into the dust. "And this," said my sister, in her own voice, which was hoarse, "is nothing to the story of the Fisherman and the Jinni."

The call to prayer came across the river again. I had not expected it so soon.

I made the stroke, and I wrote what was open: a better tale than this, promised and not named. It was only while I was writing it that I saw what she had done. To a king who struck a name every dawn she had told, as her first tale, a tale in which a man's life was bought off a third at a time, with stories; and she had kept the wife and the mule for the last, when he had stopped guarding himself. When I asked her afterward whether she had chosen it so, she said that it was the first that came into her head. I did not believe her. I do not think she believed it herself, but I have never settled which of us was nearer the truth. The King came and stood over me. He read it, and I counted: one breath, two, and a third that he held a little before he let it go. Then he went out. My father, I learned later, was at the door.

Night 2. Shahrazad. Present. Open: a tale she says is stranger than all of these, promised, not begun.

## Chapter 02 · Nights Three and Four: The Fisherman and the Jinni

When the King had gone out on the morning of the second day, I took the Roll under my arm and went to find my father. He was where I had been told he would be, with his back against the wall beside the door and the shroud folded across his knees, in the clothes he had put on the day before. He looked up at me as one looks at a stranger who is going to say something. I did not say anything. I opened the book at the page and held it out.

He read it. He read the line, and the column that was open, and then he put out one finger and touched the stroke in the third column, very lightly, as you touch a wet seal. "Who ruled that?" he said. "I did." "It is very straight," said my father. He gave the page back. I told him that she was asleep, and that she was well, and he nodded several times, and went on nodding, and did not get up. After a while he said, "Tell her I told that tale badly." He did not say which. I did not tell her. She knew.

The city talked. A maid who would not meet my eye told me, while she was filling the basin, that in the bazaar they were saying the Vizier's daughter had lasted two nights, and that the price of lamp oil had gone up because so many people were sitting up. My sister slept until afternoon. I did not sleep at all, and at sunset I was at the foot of the bed with the lamp trimmed and the Roll open on my knee, and my line ready in my mouth, when the King, who had come in late and had not yet lain down, said: "The Fisherman."

It was the first thing he had said without being asked. My sister turned her head on the pillow and looked at him for a moment as one looks at a bird that has come down on the sill. Then she said, "With joy, if the King permits," and he said, "Tell it." I put my line back where I had kept it.

There was a fisherman, said the voice, an old man, poor, with a wife and three children, who cast his net four times a day and no more. It was his rule. He had made it, I think, so that there should be a place where wanting stopped. One noon he waded in with his shirt tucked up, and cast, and the net came down on something heavy; he hauled until he thought his arms would leave him, and brought it up, and found a dead donkey, with the meshes torn. "This is a strange sort of daily bread," he said, and said the words people say, and spread the net to dry.

The second cast was a jar of sand and mud. The third was broken pots and bits of glass. He looked up at the sky and said what any of us would say: that he had cast three times, that the rule was four, that he had been given nothing, and would Heaven kindly consider. And the fourth time the net came down on something it could not lift; he had to dive to free it, and when he got it ashore there was a copper jar in it, the shape of a cucumber, yellow, heavy, with a leaden stopper pressed with the seal of Solomon son of David. "That," said the fisherman, "will fetch ten dinars in the brass bazaar." He shook it; it did not rattle. He slit the lead with his knife, and put the stopper on the sand, and tipped the jar to see what he had bought.

Smoke came out. It went straight up, a long way, and then spread along the shore, and then it gathered, and became a Jinni, with his head in the clouds and his feet on the beach, hands like pitchforks, legs like masts, mouth like a cave, teeth like boulders, eyes like two lamps; and the first thing the Jinni did was throw himself on his face in the sand and cry, "There is no god but God, and Solomon is the Prophet of God! O Prophet, do not kill me! I will never disobey you again!"

The fisherman found that he could speak, which surprised him. He said, "Solomon has been dead eighteen hundred years. We are at the end of the world. Who are you, and how did you come to be in a jar?" The Jinni sat up and looked at him, and the fear went out of his face and something else came in. "Good news, fisherman," he said. "You are going to die." "Why?" "Because you let me out." "I let you out of that jar, and I brought you up from the bottom of the sea, and set you on dry land, and that is why I am to die?" "Choose how," said the Jinni. "Choose the manner of it. That is my gift."

"Hear my story," he said, and the fisherman, whose breath was in his nostrils, said that he would hear it if it was short. It was not short. He had rebelled against Solomon, said the Jinni, with Sakhr the great one, and Solomon had sent his Vizier Asaf and had him brought in chains, and shut him in the jar, and sealed it, and had it thrown into the middle of the sea. "And I lay on the bottom. For the first hundred years I said in my heart: whoever frees me, I will make rich for ever. Nobody came."

Here my sister stopped. She let the quiet stand in the room, a long time, as long as it would take a hundred years to pass. I looked at the King. He was lying on his back with his eyes open, and his lips were moving a little, as a man's do who is counting something. "For the second hundred," said the voice, "I said: whoever frees me, I will open to him the treasures of the earth. Nobody came." She stopped again. "For the third I said: three wishes. Nobody came." Another silence. "After four hundred years had gone by I was angry, and I swore: whoever frees me from now on, I will kill, and let him choose his death. And you are the first."

"I did you good," said the fisherman, "and you pay me with evil. The proverb is right: we did them good, and they answered us with ill; such is every bad man's work." "No more talk," said the Jinni. "You will die." The fisherman said, "Spare me, so that God may spare you; do not kill me, or God will kill you," and the Jinni said that there was no help for it. And the fisherman said to himself: this is a Jinni, and I am a man to whom God has given a little cunning; let him take counsel with his anger, and I will take counsel with my wits. He said, "Before I die, in the name of the Most Great Name that is cut on Solomon's seal: will you answer me one question truly?" The Jinni, who had been enormous a moment before, flinched. "Ask, and be quick." "How did you get into that jar? It would not hold your hand. It would not hold your foot. I will never believe the whole of you was in it, not until I see it with my own eyes."

"You do not believe I was all there?" "I will not believe it," said the fisherman, "until I see you go in."

And the light came into the shutters, and the first call went up from the minaret across the river, and my sister stopped with her mouth a little open. "And Shahrazad perceived the dawn," she said, "and ceased from her permitted say." I said what I had been told to say. She said what she had been told to answer. The King lay with his eyes on the ceiling. I took the reed.

Night 3. Shahrazad. Present. Open: the Fisherman and the Jinni, the Jinni turning to smoke to prove he can fit, the fisherman with the stopper in his hand.

On the fourth night my sister was hoarse. I poured her a cup of water from the jug and held it for her, and when I looked up the King was watching me do it. He did not say anything. I read her what was open, and she drank, and the King said, "Go on," and she went on.

The Jinni, she said, shook himself, and became smoke, and the smoke poured into the jar a little at a time, like water going down a drain, until the last of it was in; and at once the fisherman snatched up the stopper and pressed it on with its seal. He stood there with the jar clasped against him. He called out, "Now choose how you will die! I am going to throw you into the sea, and I am going to build a house here, and tell every fisherman who comes that in these waters there lives a Jinni who, in return for being let out, gives his rescuer a choice of deaths." The Jinni, in the jar, understood that he had been out-thought by a man, and that the seal was holding, and he said, "I was joking! I was only joking!" "You are a liar," said the fisherman. "And the vilest of your people." He started down to the water. "No! No!" said the jar. "Yes! Yes!" said the fisherman.

The jar softened its voice. It said that the fisherman was a generous man, and a Jinni was, after all, a creature of mere impulse. It said: let me out, and I will do you a service that will take you out of want. It said that the fisherman was right to be angry, and that it was ready to be sorry. The fisherman said that his case with him was the case of the Vizier of King Yunan with the sage Duban. "And who were they?" said the Jinni. "I am in a jar, and I have the time."

In the city of Fars, said the fisherman, in the land of the Greeks, there was a king named Yunan, who had leprosy. It had begun in his hands. Every doctor in his kingdom had been brought to him, and he had drunk their draughts and swallowed their powders and been rubbed with their ointments, and he was no better. Then a physician came to the city, an old man, a reader of books in six languages, who had heard of the King's sickness, and sat up all night turning it over, and in the morning put on his best robe and presented himself. "O King," he said, "I can cure you, and I will not make you drink a thing or rub on you a thing." The King said that if the man could do that, he would be rich to his grandson's grandson, and a companion at the King's table for as long as he lived.

The physician, whose name was Duban, went home and spent that night and the next day in his workroom with a mallet of the kind they use for polo. He hollowed the head of it, and the handle, and filled the hollow with his medicines, and stopped it up, and made a ball to go with it. On the third morning he took them to the palace. "Go out on the field," he said, "and play with this. Hold it as I do. Ride hard. When your hand is wet and your body is wet, the medicine will go in. Then bathe, and sleep, and in the morning you will be well."

The King did as he was told. He rode up and down the field with his lords behind him, driving the ball, until the sweat ran off him, and his hand was wet on the handle, and the drugs came out of the wood into his palm. Duban watched from the side of the field. When the time had come, he said, "Now go and bathe." The King went to the baths, and washed for a long while, and put on clean clothes, and went to his bed and slept. When he woke, he looked at his arms, and there was nothing on them. The skin was as clean as silver that has never been worked. He wept for joy.

In the morning he went out to the hall, and Duban came in and kissed the ground and said a poem; and the King rose and took him in his arms and sat him at his own right hand. They ate together. That evening the King gave him two thousand pieces of gold and a robe of honour and sent him home on one of the royal horses. The next day, five robes of honour and a thousand dinars; and so each day after, until the King said to his lords that this was a man such as one finds only once, and that he meant to keep him near for the rest of his days.

Now the King had a Vizier, said the fisherman, who was ugly to look upon, ill-omened, small in spirit and sour, and who looked on all this and could not eat. He waited until the audience was ended and the lords had gone out, and he came forward and kissed the ground and said, "O King of the age, I have been your servant since I was a boy. I have counsel for you. If I held it back I should not be the son of my father." "What is it?" said the King. "The wise have said that whoever does not look to the end of a thing has no luck in it. And I have seen the King go the wrong way. You heap honours on your enemy, a man whose whole purpose is the fall of your throne. I fear for your life." The King, who had gone pale, said, "Whom do you mean?" "I mean the physician Duban."

"Be silent!" said the King. "That is my only true friend, and the best of all men. He cured me with something I held in my hand, after all the doctors in the world had failed. Where else would you find his like, from the east to the west? From this day I give him a thousand gold pieces a month, and if I gave him half my kingdom it would be little. I know what you are. You are jealous, as the Vizier of King Sindibad was jealous—"

Light was in the shutters. The call to prayer went up across the river and came down again. My sister said, "And Shahrazad perceived the dawn of day, and ceased from her permitted say," and I said what I had to say, and she answered, and I saw that she was too tired to be frightened. I made the stroke. I wrote what was open. I wrote it more slowly than the first time, because I was afraid of getting it wrong: the Fisherman and the Jinni, the jar by the sea and the stopper in the fisherman's hand; King Yunan and the physician, the Vizier's accusation just made; the King's answer to it just begun, and in it a King named Sindibad, whom I had never heard of. When I looked up the King had taken the Roll off the table and carried it to the window. He stood with his back to us and read it in the morning light. He read it for a good deal longer than a breath. When he put it down, he put it where he had found it, squared to the edge of the table, and went out.

Night 4. Shahrazad. Present. Open: the Fisherman and the Jinni, the jar and the stopper; King Yunan and the sage Duban, the Vizier's accusation, the King's answer begun, a King named Sindibad not yet told.

## Chapter 03 · Nights Five and Six: The Sage Duban, and the Four-Coloured Fish

By the fifth night I could no longer keep the Open column in a line. It had become a house with rooms inside rooms. My sister was telling a fisherman, who was telling a Jinni in a jar about a King, who was about to tell his Vizier about another King; and if I wrote only the last room, the others would be lost, and if I wrote them all in a row they would look like five stories instead of one inside another. So I began, that evening, to write the column as a stair. Each teller on his own line, a little to the right of the one before. When I had the whole stair down, I could read it from the bottom, where the one who was speaking was, to the top, where my sister was, and know whose mouth I was in.

"Go on," said the King, and my sister said that King Yunan had answered his Vizier like this: "You are possessed by the demon of envy, and you want me to put this physician to death, and then I shall be sorry, as King Sindibad was sorry that he killed his falcon." "How was that, O King?" said the Vizier; and the King told him.

There was a King of Persia, she said, who loved the chase, and kept a falcon that rode on his fist all night as well as all day, and wore a little golden cup at its neck to drink from. One morning the master of the hawks said it was a day for birding. They rode out to a valley and spread the nets, and a gazelle walked into them. The King, who was in the mood to make a law, said: "Whoever lets that gazelle leap over his head, I will kill him." The ring of beaters closed in. The gazelle came to where the King stood, and sat back on her haunches, and crossed her forelegs on her breast, as if she meant to kiss the ground before him; and he, who had not expected it, bowed his head to her. She went over it in one bound and was gone into the waste.

His men began to look at one another. The King said to the Vizier, "What are they saying?" and the Vizier said, "That you swore to kill whoever let her over his head." "By the life of my head," said the King, "I will bring her back," and he put his horse after her. He rode her down to the foothills of a range, where she went into a cave; he loosed the falcon, which went in at her eyes with its talons, and he came up and killed her with his mace. He cut her throat and skinned her and hung her from his saddle.

It was the hour of the siesta, and the land was dry, and there was no water, and the King and the horse were mad with thirst. Then he saw a tree that was dripping water from its branches, like butter melting. He was wearing gloves of hide, as kings do against poison. He took the little golden cup from the falcon's neck and filled it at the drip and set it in front of the bird; and the falcon struck it with her foot and knocked it over. He filled it again, thinking she was only too eager. She knocked it over again. He filled it a third time and offered it to the horse, and the falcon beat it from his hand with a flap of her wing.

"God confound you," said the King, "you unluckiest of flying things! You keep me from drinking, and you keep yourself from drinking, and you keep the horse." And he drew his sword and cut off her wing.

My sister's voice stopped. In the dark, I heard the King's breath come in and not go out again.

The falcon, said the voice, lifted her head, and told him by signs: look at what is on the tree. He looked, and in the branches was a nest of vipers, and what he had taken for water was the poison running from their mouths. He was sorry. He got back on his horse, with the dead gazelle, and rode to his camp, and threw the carcass to the cook, saying, "Take and roast it," and sat down in his chair with the falcon on his fist. And the falcon gasped and died.

"Did it die?" said the King.

He had sat up. He had sat up all at once, and swung his legs over the edge of the bed, and put his feet on the floor, and I thought, as clearly as I have ever thought anything: this is the night. I looked at the door. I looked at the lamp. I did not look at my sister.

"It died on his fist," she said, in the voice. "In the camp, where he had come back to eat."

"Because of the wing."

"Because of the wing, O King."

The King sat. I do not know how long. It might have been long enough to say a prayer. Then he drew up his feet, and lay down again, and turned his face to the wall; and my sister, who had not moved, drew a breath, and said, "And King Yunan said to his Vizier: I tell you, if I did as you wish, I should be as sorry as the man who killed his parrot."

He was a merchant, she said, who had a wife so beautiful that he could not bear to let her out of his sight, and when business at last forced him to go away, he went to the bird market and bought a parrot for a hundred gold pieces, to keep watch for him. It was a wise bird. It remembered everything it heard. And while he was gone the wife had a young man to the house, by day to dine and by night to stay. When the merchant came home he sent for the parrot first, and asked, and the parrot told him, and he went to his wife and beat her. She was not stupid. She guessed it was the bird; she called the maids and found that they all swore they had said nothing, and that the parrot had; and she gave them their orders. That night one of them ground flour in a hand-mill under the cage, and one sprinkled water through the roof of it, and one ran back and forth with a steel mirror, in the lamplight, all night long.

In the morning the merchant asked his parrot what had gone on the night before. "Pardon me, master," said the parrot, "I could neither see nor hear anything, for the dark and the thunder and the lightning all night." "But this is midsummer," said the merchant. "God knows," said the parrot, "that I saw what I saw." And the merchant, who believed his wife's version of the weather, pulled the parrot from the cage and dashed her on the floor, and she died. A few days later one of the maids told him the truth. He did not believe it until he saw the young man himself come out of her room. Then he drew his sword. He killed the young man, and he killed his wife; and he sat in the house with the empty cage, and mourned the parrot, when mourning was no use.

"Now what have I done to him?" said the Wazir, in the tale; and then he said that he had only the King's good at heart, and that if the King did not take his advice he would be destroyed like another Vizier, who played false with a young prince. "How was that?" said the King; and the Vizier told it.

A king's son, she said, was mad for hunting, and his father set a Vizier to ride with him. One day a great beast came up, and the Vizier said: "There is your quarry, Prince!" and the Prince went after it, and lost it, and lost his way, and found a girl in the waste, weeping. She said she was a king's daughter from India, who had fallen off a camel in a caravan. He put her up behind him, and when they came to a ruin she asked to be set down for a moment. She was gone so long that he went after her, and found that she was an ogress, and was saying to her children: "I have a fat young man for your dinner." They said: "Bring him quick, Mother." The Prince began to shake. She came out. "Why are you afraid?" "Of an enemy." "Pay him off." "He wants my life." "Then ask God to deliver you from him." The Prince lifted his eyes and prayed, and the ogress turned from him, and he went home and told his father what the Vizier had done; and the King put the Vizier to death.

So the Vizier of King Yunan finished, said my sister: "And you, O King, if you go on trusting this man, will die the worst of deaths. See how he cured you by something held in your hand: how do you know he will not kill you by something held in the same way?" And King Yunan, who was in the grip of fear, said: "You are right. He may be a spy. What shall I do?" "Send for him at once," said the Vizier. "When he comes, strike off his head, and you will be rid of him before he is rid of you." So the King sent.

Duban came in, happy, not knowing, and said a poem. The King said: "Do you know why I called you?" "God alone knows hidden things." "I called you to kill you." Duban stood very still. "Why would you kill me? What have I done?" "Men say you are a spy. I shall kill you before you kill me." And he told his sworder to strike. "Spare me," said Duban, "and God will spare you. Kill me not, or God will kill you." (Those are the very words, said the Fisherman to the Jinni, that I said to you; and you did not hear them, either.) "I cannot be safe without your death," said the King.

When Duban saw that it was no use, he wept, and said that he regretted the good he had done to those who did not deserve it. Then he asked for a little time to go home and settle his debts, and tell his people where to bury him, and give away his books. "And there is one book," he said, "which I want you to have. If you cut off my head, and open this book, and read three lines from the third leaf, my head will answer any question you put to it." The King was shaking with the strangeness of this; he sent him home under guard.

Next day Duban came to the hall in front of all the lords, with a worn old book and a little box of powder. "Take this book," he said, "and do not open it until my head is off. Then have it set on a tray on the powder, to stop the blood; and when the blood has stopped, open it." The King made a sign, and the sworder struck, and the head was set on the powder, and the blood stopped. The head opened its eyes. "Open the book," it said.

The King licked his finger and turned the first leaf, but it stuck, and the second, which stuck, and the third; and he did the same for six, and found nothing written on any of them. "There is nothing here," he said. "Turn more," said the head. He turned three more. The book was poisoned. The poison went through his finger and his lips, and he cried out, "The poison has done its work!" And the head of the sage Duban said some lines of verse, which I give as I remember them, which is shortly: that kings who ruled by the sword are gone, and what they did is done to them; that what you do to others will be done to you; that there is no use in being angry with Fortune. When the head was silent, the King rolled over dead.

"So you see," said the fisherman to the Jinni, "if King Yunan had spared the physician, God would have spared him; and if you had spared me, God would have spared you."

The light was in the shutters. My sister said her words, and I said mine, and she gave hers, and she sat very straight with her hands in her lap. I took the reed. Down the stair I wrote: the fisherman at the water's edge with the jar in his arms and the Jinni inside, begging. It was one line. The whole of the stair had come down, one room after another, to that.

I looked at the King. He had not turned over. I wrote the line, and waited for him to rise and come to read it, and he did not. His back was to me. After a long time he got up, as a man gets up who has been lying a long time on a hard place, and put on his robe, and went to the door without looking at the table. I had the Roll in my hands. I held it up. He did not see it. I think now that he could not.

Night 5. Shahrazad. Present. Open: the Fisherman and the Jinni, at the edge of the sea, the jar in the fisherman's arms.

My father told me, afterwards, what he said at the door. The King came out and found him with the shroud under his arm, as on every other morning, and for the first time he stopped. He stood in front of my father, and looked at the shroud, and looked at my father's face, and said, "Go home." My father said, "Lord, I would rather wait." The King said nothing more, and went to the hall. My father waited.

On the sixth night I began the stair again, and there was only one rung. My sister, with a pillow at her back and the water jug at her elbow, said that the fisherman, hearing the Jinni plead, thought about it for a while. The Jinni swore by the Name that he would do no harm and would do good. The fisherman, who was a man who kept the rule of four, opened the jar. The smoke came up, and gathered, and stood on the beach; and the first thing the Jinni did was kick the jar clear into the sea. The fisherman wet himself. "This looks bad," he said; but he said to the Jinni that God had said: keep your covenant; and he said it as the physician had, and the Jinni laughed, and told him to follow.

They went round the walls of the city, and out over the fields, and across a stony place, and down into a broad waste, and in the midst of the waste there was a lake. The Jinni waded in. "Cast your net," he said, and the fisherman did, and when he hauled it in there were four fish in it, one white, one red, one blue and one yellow. "Take these to the Sultan," said the Jinni, "and he will give you what will make you rich. I'm sorry that I can do no better. I have been under the sea eighteen hundred years and I've seen the world for an hour. But do not fish here more than once a day." And he struck the ground with his foot, and the ground opened and shut over him.

The fisherman put the fish in a bowl of water, and carried the bowl on his head to the palace, and the Sultan, who had never seen such fish, gave him four hundred dinars; and the fisherman ran home with the money in his shirt, stumbling, thinking it was a dream. The Sultan gave the fish to the new cook-girl, who had been sent from the King of Greece only three days before, to try her hand. She cleaned them and put them in the pan with oil and fried one side; and she turned them; and the kitchen wall split open.

A young woman came out of it. She was beautiful, in a blue headcloth with tassels, with earrings and bracelets and rings with stones in them, and in her hand a long cane, which she poked into the pan. "Fish," she said, "fish, do you keep your covenant?" The cook-girl fell down in a faint. "Fish, do you keep your covenant?" said the young woman again; and a third time; and the fish raised their heads from the pan and said, "Yes, yes," and said a couplet together in one voice, which was that if she kept faith they would, and if she went back on it they would pay her back in the same coin. The young woman kicked the pan over and went out by the way she had come, and the wall closed. When the cook-girl woke the fish were black as coal. "His staff broke at the first blow," she said, and fainted again.

The Vizier found her like that and shook her with his foot. She told him. He sent for the fisherman, who went back to the lake and cast and brought up four fish exactly like the first, and the Vizier stood over the cook-girl while she fried them; and the wall split, and the young woman came out with her cane, and said, "Fish, fish, do you keep your covenant?" and the fish said, "Yes, yes"; and she kicked the pan over—

The light came. My sister, who had been telling for I do not know how long, stopped. I wrote what was open, down the stair, the one rung and then a second under it: the fisherman's fish; the cook-girl's pan; the young woman who asked them a question, and what they answered; and what the Vizier was going to tell the Sultan. My hand had a tremor in it. When I looked up, the King was standing beside me. I do not know how long he had stood there. He took the Roll from my hands, as one takes a bowl, and read it, and read it for as long as I could count to forty; and then he put out one finger, as my father had, and touched the stroke in the third column, very lightly, as you touch a wet seal.

He gave me the book. He did not say anything. He went out.

Night 6. Shahrazad. Present. Open: the Fisherman's fish; the cook-girl and her frying pan; the young woman who comes through the wall and asks the fish if they keep their covenant, and what they say; the Vizier on his way to the Sultan.

## Chapter 04 · Nights Seven, Eight and Nine: The Ensorcelled Prince, and the Porter at the Door

On the seventh evening there was a cushion at the foot of the bed that had not been there before. It was a plain one, of dull green silk, laid on the carpet where I had sat for six nights with my knees under my chin. Nobody said whose it was or who had put it there. I looked at my sister, who was looking at the ceiling, and at the King, who was looking at the lamp. I sat down on it. It was a good deal better than the carpet, and I will say now that I never said so to anyone.

"The fish," said the King.

The Vizier, said my sister, went to the Sultan and told him what he had seen, and the Sultan said that he would see it for himself. The fisherman was sent for and told to bring four fish like the others, and three men to witness it. He did. The Sultan had four hundred gold pieces counted into his hand, and said to the Vizier, "Fry them here, in front of me." The pan was put on the fire; the fish went into it; and the wall split, and a man came out of it as big as a piece of cliff, with a green branch in his hand, and cried, "Fish, fish, do you keep your old covenant?" "Yes, yes," said the fish, and they said their two lines. The giant put out the pan with his branch and went back into the wall. The fish were black as charcoal. The Sultan said, "This is not a matter to be left alone," and sent for the fisherman and asked him where the fish came from.

"From a lake," said the fisherman, "behind the mountain, half an hour's walk." The Sultan could not believe that there was a lake half an hour from his own gate that he had never seen. He took his army up the mountain with the fisherman for a guide, and there it was, in a wide desert between four hills, with fish of four colours in it. No one with him had seen it. The oldest men in the army had not seen it. "By God," said the Sultan, "I will not go home, nor sit on my father's throne, until I know the truth about this lake." He had the army camp round the mountain. He called his Vizier, a man of experience, and said: "My heart tells me to go out alone tonight and find the root of this. You will sit at the door of my tent. You will tell everyone who asks that the Sultan is ill and sees no one. Tell no one anything else." And the Vizier could not argue with him.

He changed his clothes and hung his sword on his shoulder and went up one of the mountains, and walked all night, and rested in the heat of the day, and walked all the next night. At dawn he saw a black point in the distance. It was a palace of black stone plated with iron; one leaf of the gate stood open, the other was shut. He knocked once, softly. He knocked again. He knocked loudly. No one came. "It is empty," he said, and went in. He cried out in the hall that he was a stranger and wanted something to eat. No one answered. He walked through the vestibule into the middle of the house. It was furnished with silk and gold, and the hangings were down over the doors; in the centre there was a court with four open halls round it, and a fountain with four red-gold lions at its corners, each pouring out water clear as pearls; and over the whole of the court there was a net of gold wire, and under the net there were birds, which could not get out. There was everything in it that a house ought to have except people.

He sat between two doors, thinking, and he heard someone sigh in a room nearby, a long sigh, and a voice reciting some verses about how a man who has been rich can be brought low, and how none of us can run from his fate. He found the door, with a curtain over it, and drew the curtain back. A young man was sitting on a couch, a cubit off the ground: handsome, with a white forehead and a rose cheek and a mole on it like a grain of ambergris; in a silk coat, with gold on it, and a crown with jewels; and his face was the face of someone who has been sad for years. He did not get up. "My lord," he said, "your rank requires that I rise, and I ask your pardon that I cannot."

"You are forgiven," said the Sultan. "Look on me as a guest who has come with a question. Tell me the secret of the lake and the fish, and of this palace, and why you are alone in it, and why you cry." The young man wept until his chest was wet. Then he put out his hand and lifted the hem of his coat. From his navel to the hair of his head he was a man; from his navel down to his feet he was stone.

"Lend me your ears," said the Prince; and it was his own tale now. He had been King of that city, said the voice, the son of a King called Mahmud, Lord of the Black Islands, and he had married the daughter of his father's brother, who loved him so well that if he were away from her she would neither eat nor drink till she saw his face again. They had been five years together when one afternoon she went to the bath, and he lay down in his own room to wait for supper, with two girls fanning him, one at his head and one at his feet, and he could not sleep. He shut his eyes. His mind stayed open. The girl at his head said to the girl at his feet, in the low voice that servants use when they think the master is asleep: "How wretched our master is, and what a pity, to be wasted so, and betrayed—"

The King got up.

I had been watching the Sultan, and the lake, and the lions, and I did not see him do it. I heard the bed give, and when I looked he was on his feet, in the middle of the floor, with his hands open at his sides, as if he had put something down and could not remember what. He did not look at my sister. He did not look at me. He went out of the door, and drew it behind him; not slammed it; drew it, so that the latch caught softly, and the lamp-flame leaned and stood up again.

My sister had stopped in the middle of the word. We sat in a silence that had something in it. After a time I saw that she was looking at me, and that her mouth had moved. "Shall I stop?" she said, with no voice. I understood that she did not know. A storyteller who has been told that she may go on has no leave to stop; but a storyteller whose listener has gone out of the room is telling it to herself. I looked at the door. There was a line of lamplight under it, and in the line of lamplight a shadow, which did not move. He was standing on the other side.

I said, to the door, "Go on."

I have asked myself since what I should have done if the door had opened. I did not know then. My sister drew a long breath, and took up the sentence where the King had left it.

"—betrayed by our mistress, the whore," said the voice, quite low, as if to a person in the next room; and she went on, and the shadow under the door stayed where it was. The other girl said: "God curse all women who play false. And a man like our master. She is out every night. Do you not know that she puts a drug in his cup, so that he sleeps, and does not know where she goes? She dresses in her best and goes out till daybreak, and when she comes back she burns a pastille under his nose and he wakes up."

He lay still. The light went black, he said, in front of his eyes, and he thought night would never come. When she came back from the bath they sat to supper, as they always did, and they drank their wine, as they always did, and she brought him his cup for the night. He raised it to his lips and tipped it down his shirt, and lay down, and let her hear that he was asleep. She stood over him. "Sleep," she said, "sleep, and never wake. By God, I loathe you, and I loathe your whole body, and I cannot wait for the day when God takes your life." Then she dressed, and put on her scent, and slung his sword on her shoulder, and went out; and he got up and followed her, and she went through the streets to the city gate, where she said some words he did not understand, and the padlocks fell off the gate, and it opened for her. She went out into the rubbish-mounds beyond the walls, and he behind her, unseen, to a reed fence round a hut of mud brick. She went in. He climbed on the roof and looked down through the smoke-hole.

In the hut, on a bed of cane trash and rags, lay a man, one of the hands from the stables, who had once been strong and was now a leper and paralysed, with a sore on his lip and a hoarse voice. She kissed the ground in front of him. "What kept you?" he said. "Others have been here, drinking, and each had a girl, and I could not drink for your being away." "My heart," said she, "my light, do you not know I am married to a man I cannot look at? If I did not fear for your sake I would not leave one sun to rise on his city; I would heap it up for the ravens and the owls." "Liar," he said, "you play with us." She wept, and humbled herself, and begged, until at last he allowed himself to be pacified. Then she asked what there was to eat. He told her to lift the cover on the basin, where she would find the bones of the rats they had had for dinner, and to drink the dregs of a jug of beer. She ate the bones. She drank the beer. She lay down beside him under the rags.

The King's shadow had not moved. I thought I heard him breathing, though I may have been listening to my own.

Her husband, said the voice, came down off the roof and took her sword out of the corner and drew it to kill them both. He struck the man in the throat. He thought it had been enough. The man made a long hissing noise; but he had cut only the skin and the flesh of the neck. The noise woke her, and he sheathed the sword and walked home in the dark, and lay down, and slept; and in the morning, when she woke him, she had cut off her hair and put on mourning. "Do not blame me," she said. "I have heard that my mother is dead, and my father is killed in the holy war, and one of my brothers has been stung by a snake and the other has fallen off a cliff. I can do nothing but cry." And the Prince said, "Do what you like."

I could hear the dawn coming. It was not light yet, but the air had the feeling of an hour that was about to be called. My sister said her words about the dawn, and her voice did not catch on them; and I said what I had been told to say, in a voice rather clearer than I meant, and she answered. I took up the reed. I wrote the stair, two rungs: Shahrazad, and under her the half-stone Prince telling the Sultan, at the place where his wife wept for her mother. The door opened. The King came in. He crossed the room as a man crosses a room in which he does not wish to disturb a sleeper; he took the Roll from my hands and read it, standing, and did not touch the stroke. He put it back in my lap. His face was grey. He went out.

Night 7. Shahrazad. Present. Open: the Sultan in the black palace with the Prince who is stone to the waist; the Prince's tale at the place where his wife, in mourning, has begun to weep.

On the eighth night the King was already in the bed when I came in. He did not turn his head. He lay on his side with his face to the wall and his knees drawn up, as the young lie, and my sister did not ask him whether she might tell; she waited for me to read what was open and, when I had, she began, and he made no sign.

The wife, said the voice, wept for a year, to the end of its circle. At the end of it she said: "I want to build in your palace a tomb with a dome, for my grieving. I shall call it the House of Lamentations." "Do as you like," said the Prince. She built it. She had the wounded man carried into it, and laid in a tomb that was no tomb, since he could not die, and could not speak, and could not do anything but drink wine. She went there every morning and every evening and wept over him and gave him broth. This went on for a second year, and the Prince put up with it. One day he went in unawares, and found her beating her face and saying: "Why have you gone from my sight, my heart's delight? Speak to me, my life!" And she said some verses about how, if her lover were dead, she would be buried beside him. He told her that she had mourned enough. She said, "Cross me in nothing I do, or I will lay hands on myself." So he left her; and it went on a third year.

In the third year he lost patience. One afternoon, when something had gone wrong with his day, he went into the House of Lamentations, and heard her say: "Why do you never speak to me, my lord? Why do you not answer me?" And he lost his temper, and cried out: "Well-away! How long is this to last?" And she was on her feet at once. "You dog! All this is your doing. You wounded my heart's darling, and you have wasted his youth, and three years he has lain more dead than alive!" And he, in a rage, said: "Yes, I did it. You are the vilest harlot ever lain with by a groom"—and snatched up his sword.

She laughed at him. "To heel, hound!" she said. "What is done is done. God has delivered into my hand the man who did this to me. This is a fire that does not die." She stood up and said some words, and when she said them he felt his legs go, and cold come up into him, and he was what the Sultan saw: half stone, half man, neither dead nor alive. But that was only him. She turned the whole city to enchantment, with its streets and its gardens, and the four islands became four mountains round a lake, and the people of the city, who were of four faiths, she turned into fish, white and red and blue and yellow, a colour for each. "And every day," said the Prince to the Sultan, "she comes and strips me, and beats me with a hundred strokes of a leather whip, and I cry out, and I cannot move my legs to keep her off. Then she puts a hair-shirt on my back, and the silk over it, and goes to the man in the tomb, with wine and broth. She will come tomorrow at sunrise."

"By God," said the Sultan, "I shall do you a good deed that the world will not willingly let die." And he sat the evening by the Prince and talked, and lay down and slept; and before the false dawn he rose and took off his outer clothes, and drew his sword, and went to the House of Lamentations. He followed the light of the lamps and the smell of the incense to the man lying in the tomb, and he killed him with one stroke, and carried him on his back and threw him down a well in the palace. Then he came back and put on the man's clothes and lay down in his place, with the drawn sword along his side.

After about an hour she came. She went first to her husband, and stripped him, and took a whip to him, and he cried out, "Enough, enough, have pity!" "Did you have pity on my love?" she said. She laid the hair-shirt on him again and the silk over it, and went down to the tomb with a bowl of broth in her hand. "My lord," she said. "Speak to me, my lord." The Sultan, who had made his voice small, and slurred, the voice of a man who has not spoken for three years, said the name of God and that there was no strength but in God. At that she cried out for joy, and fell down in a faint; and when she came to herself she said: "Can it be that you can speak?" "Why should I speak to you?" said the Sultan. "All day you torment your husband, and he calls on Heaven till I cannot sleep from sundown to dawn; he curses us both, and if it were not for that I should long since have been well." "Then I will let him go from his spell," she said. "Let him go," said the Sultan. "Let's have some quiet."

She went out of the tomb and into the palace, and filled a bowl with water, and said words over it, so that it bubbled like a pot, and sprinkled her husband with it. "By the power of what I have said," she said, "if you are as you are by my spell, come out of that shape and be what you were." He trembled, and shook, and got to his feet, whole; and he cried out that there was no god but God. She told him to go, and never come back, or she would kill him. And she went back to the tomb. "What have you done?" the Sultan said, in his small voice. "You have rid me of the branch and not of the root." "What is the root, my darling?" "The people of this city and of the four islands lift their heads out of the lake every night, at midnight, and pray to Heaven against you and me. That is why I cannot get well. Go and set them free, and then come and take my hand and help me up. I am beginning to feel the strength come back."

She was overjoyed. She ran down to the lake, and took a little of the water in her palm, and said some words over it—

The call to prayer came up out of the dark. My sister stopped. I wrote the stair: two rungs, Shahrazad, and the Prince; and beside the rungs, in the margin, the Sultan in the tomb in a dead man's clothes, and the sorceress with a handful of lake-water, and the words she had not yet said. My hand was steadier than the night before. When I looked up the King was lying as he had lain, with his face to the wall. He did not rise to read. "Read it to me," he said.

It was the first time he had asked me for anything. I read it aloud, the whole of the stair, from the bottom up, in the voice I use for reading price lists, and when I had finished he said, "And the Sultan?" "In the tomb," I said, "in a dead man's clothes." "With a sword." "Along his side." He nodded, once, against the pillow. Then he got up and put on his robe and went out; and he stopped at the door, and did not look round, and said, to the air in front of him: "You wrote it down right."

Night 8. Shahrazad. Present. Open: the Sultan in the tomb, in the dead man's clothes, with a sword along his side; the sorceress at the lake with the water in her hand; the words not yet said.

On the ninth night there was nothing for me to read that I had not read the night before, and I read it, and the King said, "Go on," and my sister went on.

The sorceress said the words, and the fish lifted their heads, said the voice, and stood up on the instant as men; and the lake was a city, with its markets and its shops, and each man at his trade, and the four hills were islands. She came back to the tomb, and said, "My love, give me your hand, and I will help you up." "Nearer," said the Sultan, in the faint voice. She came close, to embrace him. He took up the sword and put it through her breast, so that the point came out behind, and struck again and cut her in two, and left her where she fell. He went out to the Prince, who was waiting for him, restored; and the Prince kissed his hand.

"Will you stay in this city," said the Sultan, "or come with me to mine?" "Do you know how far it is to yours?" "Two days and a half." "If you are awake," said the Prince, "wake up. It is a year's march for a man who can walk, and you were not here in two days and a half but because the place was enchanted. I shall never leave you, not for the blink of an eye." "God be thanked," said the Sultan, "who has given you to me. From this hour you are my son, my only son, for I have never been given another." They embraced. The Prince told his lords that he was going to make the pilgrimage, and in ten days he was ready, and they set out for the Sultan's city, with an escort and gifts, and travelled a year. The Vizier and the army came out to meet them, for they had given up hope. The Sultan sat on his throne and gave gifts to the people. Then he said, "Bring the fisherman who brought the fish."

The man came in, in a rough coat, with his net still smelling of the lake. The Sultan gave him a robe of honour and asked whether he had children; he had two daughters and a son. The Sultan married one daughter himself, and gave the other to the Prince, and made the son his chief of the treasury; and he sent the Vizier to rule the Black Islands in the Prince's place, with an escort of fifty. So the fisherman became the richest man of his age, and his daughters were wives of kings. "He cast his net no more than four times a day to the end of his life," said my sister, "and that was the rule." (She said it twice.) "And this, O King, is not more wondrous than the tale of the Porter and the Three Ladies of Baghdad."

"The Porter," said the King.

There was a porter in Baghdad, she said, a bachelor, who intended to stay one. One day, as he was leaning on his crate in the street, a woman came up to him in a muslin wrap with a gold border and shoes embroidered with gold, and raised her veil, and looked at him with two black eyes, and said, "Pick up your crate and follow me." He did it so fast he almost left his feet behind. She took him to a Christian's door and bought a jar of strained wine; to a fruiterer's, and bought apples and quinces, peaches and cucumbers and lemons and oranges, and myrtle berries, and jasmine, and violets and anemones and every flower that was open; to a butcher's, and bought ten pounds of mutton; to a grocer's, for dry fruit and almonds and pistachios; to a confectioner's, for a platter of sweets; to a perfumer's, for ten kinds of scented water, and sugar, and incense, and ambergris, and wax candles; and at each she said, "Lift and follow," and he lifted and followed. "You should have told me," said the porter, "and I should have brought a camel." She hit him lightly on the back of the neck. "Step out, and don't talk. You will be paid."

She stopped at last before a house with a courtyard and a pair of ebony doors inlaid with red gold. She knocked with her knuckles. The door was opened by another woman, tall and fair, with a forehead like white flowers and eyes like a gazelle's; and the porter's crate almost came off his head. Beyond her, on a couch with a canopy looped up with pearls, there was a third lady, who got down and said, "What are you standing there for? Take it off this poor man's head." They unloaded him; they put everything in its place; and they gave him two gold pieces and said, "Go, porter."

He did not go. He stood looking at the ladies, and at the wine, and at the fruit, and at the silk, and at the three of them, and at there being no man in the house. "What is the matter?" said the eldest. "Is it too little?" "It is not that, my lady," said the porter. "I never take more than two dirhams. But I am troubled, looking at three of you alone, with no man in the house. A minaret falls over unless it stands on four. You are three. You want a fourth." They laughed. "And who," said the youngest, "is to assure us of a fourth who can keep a secret? We read in a book—"

Light came into the shutters. The call to prayer went out over the river, and my sister said that she perceived the dawn and ceased her permitted say. The King lay on his back with his eyes shut and his hand on his breast. I wrote down the stair, one rung, and a rung under it: the Porter in the hall of the three ladies of Baghdad, at the door of a secret he has not yet been asked to keep. When I got up with the Roll he was awake. He put his hand out. I put the book in it. He read it, and read it again, and then he turned the page back, and looked at the night before, and the night before that, and went back through all of them, to the first. He read them all, the way my sister had read the names. I do not know how long he took. I know that the sun came up, and that he was still reading, and that nobody dared come to the door to ask where the King was.

Night 9. Shahrazad. Present. Open: the Porter in the hall of the three ladies of Baghdad, at the door of a secret he has not yet been asked to keep; the eldest lady, the doorkeeper, and the housekeeper, who have not yet said yes.

## Chapter 05 · Nights Ten and Eleven: The Porter and the Three Ladies of Baghdad

At about the middle of the morning on the tenth day, when the King had read the whole of the Roll twice and was beginning it a third time, there was a knock at the door. It was a quiet knock, the kind a man gives who has been working up to it for ten days. The King did not look up. "Come in," he said.

My father came in with the shroud under his arm, and stopped in the doorway like a man who has walked into the wrong house. His eyes went to the bed, where my sister lay asleep with one hand under her cheek; then to me, on my green cushion; then to the King, who was sitting at the table with the Roll open in front of him and a reed in his hand that I had not seen him pick up. "Sit," said the King. My father looked about him for a chair. There was no chair. He sat on the floor.

"How many are there?" said the King. He did not say of what. My father said that he did not know, lord. "You do not know." "I have never counted." My father looked at his hands. "If I had counted, lord, it would have been a number." The King was silent a long while. Then he said, "Count them." "Now, lord?" "Not now." My father waited to see if there was anything more, and there was not, and the King went back to his reading. As my father got up I saw him look at the shroud, as if he were not sure whether he was still entitled to it. "Keep it where you can reach it," said the King, not lifting his eyes; and my father, who had understood the sentence perfectly and had taken it for a mercy, went out. I took it for a lease. I have always been a little afraid of leases.

That night, when the lamp was low, the King said, "The porter," and my sister, with a pillow at her back and a cup of water on the carpet within reach, began to tell us what had passed in the house of the three ladies after the porter was admitted to their company.

I will not give it all. It was the kind of evening in which a man who has carried a load all day is given wine by three women who are, between them, rather cleverer than he is; and there is a game they play with him about the names of a certain thing, in which he is struck on the neck for every wrong answer; and the game goes on a long while. My sister told it cleanly and quickly and made it funny, and I will let it stand at that. At the end the porter knew that there are several names in Baghdad for the one thing, and that he had been using all of the wrong ones, and he rubbed his neck, and said that his neck and shoulders were on the way of God.

At nightfall they told him he might stay on one condition, which was that he ask no questions about anything that did not concern him. He agreed. They told him to go and read what was written over the door. He went, and found it there in letters of gold: WHOSO SPEAKETH OF WHAT CONCERNETH HIM NOT SHALL HEAR WHAT PLEASETH HIM NOT. I thought, listening, that every house in these tales has a sentence over the door. Ours had one on the flyleaf.

There was a knock; the portress went; and she came back to say that at the gate were three foreigners, dervishes, with their heads and their beards and their eyebrows shaved, and all three of them blind in the left eye. It was, she said, a most curious coincidence. They had come to Baghdad that evening and could not find a lodging, and had asked for the key of a stable. "And each of them," she said, "is a figure of fun, in his own way. If we let them in we shall have something to laugh at." So the ladies had them in, and made them promise what the porter had promised; and the dervishes sat down, and looked about them, and said, with one voice, that it was good. They took the porter for another of their trade, and said so, and he rose up with his eyes blazing, in a splendid temper, and told them to hold their tongues and read the door. It was the only time that night that anyone was afraid of him.

Then they sent for music, and the three dervishes took up a tambourine, a lute and a harp, and the ladies sang, and the noise was considerable; and there was a second knock. The cause of it, said my sister, was the Caliph, Harun al-Rashid, Commander of the Faithful. He went out into his own city on some nights in a merchant's coat, with his Vizier Ja'afar and his sworder Masrur, to hear what was being said of him; and that night, passing the house, they heard the harp and the singing, and he said that he wished to go in. "They are drunk, lord," said Ja'afar. "There is no help for it; I will go in," said the Caliph. "Find me an excuse."

The King, I saw, had turned his head on the pillow, and was listening to this with a peculiar attention. I have wondered since whether a man who has himself once walked out of his own palace in the night, with nothing but what he could carry, hears differently the part of a story in which a king slips out of his own gate to see how he is spoken of. I do not know. I know that he said nothing, and that when the Caliph's name was spoken he put one hand over his mouth.

Ja'afar knocked, and told the portress that they were merchants of Tiberias who had been dining with a man in the city, and had lost their way home. The ladies looked them over, merchants, men of weight, and let them in, on the same condition. The Caliph, offered wine, said that he was vowed to the pilgrimage, and the portress laid a gold-worked cloth in front of him and set on it a porcelain bowl of willow-flower water with a lump of snow in it and a spoon of sugar-candy; and the Caliph, who had been served by a thousand servants and had never in his life been given a bowl of water by someone who did not know who he was, said in himself that he would repay her.

Then the ladies stood up. The eldest, who kept the house, tucked up her sleeves, and the cateress opened a closet, and called the porter to help her, and out of the closet came two black bitches, on chains. The eldest took a whip. She had the porter pull one of the bitches forward by its chain, and she beat it about the head, while it wept and shook its head at her; and she beat it until her arm failed. Then she threw down the whip and took the dog to her breast and wiped its tears with her hands and kissed its head. She did the same with the other. And the Caliph's heart, said my sister, was moved, and his chest was tight, and he winked at Ja'afar to ask, and Ja'afar made a sign to him: be still.

Now the portress sat down, and the cateress brought out of the closet a lute in a bag of green satin, and played it, and sang three songs. I will not give them. They were songs of a lover who has been kept away; and at the end of the first, the portress cried out, and tore her dress, and fell on the floor in a faint; and they put a fresh one on her, and when her back was bare the Caliph saw on it the scars of the palm rod and the whip. She fainted at the second song, and at the third. It was a great deal to take in, in one night, and the three dervishes said that they wished they had never come into the house, but had slept on the rubbish-heaps outside the city.

The light was in the shutters. My sister said her words about the dawn; I said mine; she answered; and then the King, who had not moved for a long while, spoke. He said, "Did he ask?" My sister said, "Not yet, O King." The King said nothing more. I wrote the stair, one rung, and under it a second: the house of the three ladies, with seven strangers in it; the two bitches; the scars; the question that is forbidden, which is in every mouth, and which has not yet been asked. I turned the book round. He read it in the old way, standing, and he did not touch the stroke.

Night 10. Shahrazad. Present. Open: the house of the three ladies, the seven strangers who have promised not to ask; the two bitches, the scars, the question in everyone's mouth.

That evening my sister was sick behind the screen. She said it was the stuffy air and the tales together. She came back with a damp face and sat up against the pillows, and I said nothing, and the King said nothing, and I knew only that I had begun to be afraid for her in a way that had nothing to do with the King.

"Did he ask?" said the King.

They could not leave it alone, said the voice, none of the seven. The Caliph said to Ja'afar, "Did you not see the scars on her back? I cannot sit quiet or be at ease until I know." Ja'afar said that they had promised, and that it was better to be silent, and that in an hour or two it would be morning, and he could bring the ladies to the Caliph's court the next day and have the whole of it for nothing. The Caliph raised his head and said that he had no patience. They argued in whispers, the seven of them, and the voices rose, and in the end they agreed that the porter should ask. The porter stood up in front of the lady of the house and said, "Lady, these people would like to know the story of the two bitches, and why you beat them and then weep over them and kiss them, and why your sister has been beaten with the palm rod like a man. They have charged me to ask. Peace be with you."

"Is this true?" said the lady of the house. "Is this what he says for you?" They all said that it was, except Ja'afar, who said nothing. "You have done us a great wrong," she said. "We made a compact with you when you came in. It is not enough for you that we gave you our house and our food; you must also ask." She struck the floor three times with her hand. A door opened in the wall, and seven big men came out with drawn swords in their hands. "Bind them each to each," she said. They were bound. "Shall we strike off their heads?" said the swordsmen. "Leave them a while," she said, "I wish to know who they are."

"Lady, for God's sake, do not kill me for another's sin," the porter said. "These men did it. It would have been a lovely night but for these squinting dervishes, whose coming into a city would turn it to a desert." And he said a line of poetry about how the pardon of the strong is easy to give to the weak; and the lady, in spite of her anger, laughed. She said to them that they had an hour to live, and that if they were not men of consequence she would have hurried it. "Woe to you, Ja'afar," the Caliph whispered, "tell her who we are, or we shall be killed by mistake." "You asked for it," said Ja'afar, who had advised against the whole business. "There is a time for jokes," said the Caliph, "and a time for serious work."

The lady asked the three dervishes, "Are you brothers?" "No, we are only dervishes and foreigners." "Was one of you born with one eye?" "No, lady," said each of them, "I lost it in a strange affair, which, if it were written on the corner of the eye with a needle, would be a lesson to anyone who could take one." And each of them said that he was a king's son, ruling in his own right over a city. "Then," said the lady, "each of you will tell me his story, from first to last, and why he came to our house. And if it pleases us, he may rub his head and go in peace." "My story is soon told, lady," said the porter. "This lady hired me; she took me to a vintner, a butcher, a fruiterer, a grocer, a confectioner and a perfumer; and she brought me here; and what has happened to me since you know." The lady laughed and said: "Rub your head and go." "By God," said the porter, "I will not stir until I have heard what these others have to say."

Then the first dervish stood up, bound as he was, and told his story. He said that he was the son of a King, and that his father had had a brother, who was also a King; and that he and his cousin, the uncle's son, had been born on the same day. When they grew up he used to spend some months of each year at his uncle's court, and he and his cousin were like one person. One night, when they had been drinking, his cousin said: "I need a great service of you. Swear that you will not refuse it." He swore. His cousin went out and came back leading a woman, veiled, in rich dress; and told him: "Take this lady, and go before me to such a graveyard, and wait in such a tomb until I come." He swore that he would do it, and he did. Then his cousin came, with a bowl of water and a bag of mortar and an adze, and broke open the grave in the middle of the tomb, and dug until he came to an iron plate, like a small door; and under it was a winding stair. "Take your final choice," said the cousin, to the lady. She went down the stairs and was gone. "My friend," said the cousin, "when I have gone down, put the iron plate back, and the earth on it, and mix the lime in the bag with the water in the bowl and plaster the stones, so that no one who sees it will say: This is a new opening in an old tomb. I have worked at this for a year, and no one in the world knows of it but God. This is the thing I wanted of you." He went down the stairs, and he did not come back.

"That," said the first dervish, "is what I did; and I was drunk, and I put the plate back, and heaped the earth on it, and plastered the stones until the tomb was as it had been. In the morning I could hardly believe I had not dreamed it. I went to the graveyard to look for the tomb, and I could not find it. I looked for seven days. I went home to my father's city, and just outside the gate a crowd of men leapt on me and bound me, and I saw that they were my own father's subjects, and among them some of my own slaves. One of them, who had been a servant in our house, told me that fortune had turned on my father: his troops had betrayed him, and the Vizier had killed him and now sat on his throne, and had set watchers to take me."

And the dawn came, in the shutters, and the call to prayer. My sister said her words, and I wrote: the stair, with three rungs now, Shahrazad, the first dervish, and under him the cousin who went down the stairs; and what was open beside them was the Vizier on the throne and what he would do. I held the book out. The King read it standing, and said, to the window, "He plastered it himself." "Yes, lord." "And did not go back." "He went back. In a week. He could not find it." The King nodded as a man nods at the confirmation of a measurement. Then he put out one finger, and touched the stroke. I did not breathe.

Night 11. Shahrazad. Present. Open: the first dervish, who has plastered a tomb he cannot find again; the Vizier on his father's throne; the house of the three ladies, with seven strangers bound each to each.

## Chapter 06 · Nights Twelve, Thirteen and Fourteen: The First Dervish's End, and the Second Dervish

On the morning of the twelfth day I saw what the reed was for. I had gone to the table to put the Roll straight, and I opened it at the first leaf, and there, in the margin where the clerks leave a thumb's width for binding, in the King's hand, which is square and a little cramped, was a column of small strokes: eleven of them, in rows of five, each row crossed through with a sixth, as the guards tally their days. He had been counting the nights. He had begun, I worked out, on the very first morning, and he had made a stroke every dawn after he finished reading what I had written, and I had not seen him do it because I had always been looking at the book and never at the margin. Under the eleventh there was a space for the twelfth. I closed the book and put it back as I had found it, square to the edge, and I said nothing to anyone.

That evening he said, "The first one," and my sister, who was pale, and had been sick behind the screen again, and had rinsed her mouth twice, said that the first dervish had gone on with his tale before the lady and the Caliph and the seven swordsmen, and I read her where she had stopped.

The young man, she said, had been dragged before the Vizier who had killed his father and taken his throne, and between them there was an old grudge. As a boy he had been fond of the stone-bow. One day a bird had settled on the roof of the Vizier's house, and he had shot at it, and missed, and hit the Vizier in the eye; and the Vizier, who could say nothing then, had said nothing for years. "What is my crime?" said the young man. The Vizier pointed at the place where his eye had been. "I did it by accident." "Then I will do it by intent," said the Vizier, and put his thumb into the young man's left eye. He shut him in a chest and sent him out to the waste with a sworder who had once been his father's, and who wept, and let him go. He ran to his uncle's city, and told his uncle everything; and the uncle, who had been looking for his own son for weeks, said, "Show me the tomb."

They found it. They went down fifty steps, through smoke, to a hall strewn with grain and flour and every necessity, with a canopy and a couch; and on the couch, in each other's arms, black as charred wood, lay the cousin and the woman. The uncle spat in his son's face and struck the body with his slipper. "It is the judgment of this world," he said, "and there is a harder one to come." And when his nephew cried out at the hardness of it, he told him what the woman was. She was the boy's sister. They had loved one another from the nursery. Their father had parted them, and shut her up, and threatened, and beaten; and the boy had spent a year digging a house in the earth where no one would ever find them; and God had struck them with fire.

The King lay still. Whatever he thought about a father who builds a wall between two people who do not wish to be apart, he did not say. My sister went on. The Vizier who had killed the first dervish's father marched on the uncle's city with the whole of his army and took it; the uncle was killed; and the young man, who now had no father, no uncle, no cousin and no eye, shaved off his beard and his eyebrows and put on a dervish's rags, and made his way to Baghdad to ask the Commander of the Faithful for justice. He arrived that night, and met the other two at a corner, each of them in the same state, each a stranger; and the three had come on together to the door.

"Rub your head and go," said the lady of the house. "I will not," said the first dervish, "till I have heard my companions." So the second dervish came forward, bound at the elbow, and kissed the ground, and said that his story was like no one's.

He had been a King's son, he said, who had read every book; the calligraphers admired his hand and the poets his verse, and the King of India, hearing of him, had sent to his father to ask that he be sent. He set out by sea with six ships. Inland, fifty horsemen came out of a dust-cloud and robbed them and killed his slaves and wounded him, and he ran. He came to a city and found a tailor who gave him bread and said: "Do not tell anyone who you are; the King of this city is your father's enemy." The prince said that he could write and reckon and read the stars. "Here that is worth nothing," said the tailor. "Take an axe and a rope, and cut wood." For a year the prince cut wood. One day, in a thicket where he had never been, his axe rang on an iron ring under a tree-stump.

There was a trapdoor, and a stair, and below, a hall, and in the hall a woman, who asked him whether he was a man or a Jinni. She had lived there twenty-five years, she said, and had never seen a man. She was the daughter of a King, and on her wedding night a Jinni named Jirjis had snatched her up out of the house, with the guests still singing, and put her there. He came once in ten days and stayed one night. If she ever needed him she had only to touch two lines engraved on the alcove. He had been there four days ago; there were six to go; the young man could stay five. The second dervish said yes, and yes. They bathed; they ate; he slept, and woke to find her rubbing his feet; she brought out an old sealed flask and sang. On the second day he was drunk, and stood up, and said: "Come, I will take you out of here and free you from your Jinni. I will break the alcove and call him, and kill him. It is a practice of mine to kill Jinn." She went white, and begged, and said a line about how the wise do not go on where they can stop. He raised his foot and kicked the alcove.

The light was in the shutters. My sister said her words, and I said mine, and I wrote the stair, three rungs, and under them the Jinni who was coming. The King read it standing. Then he took up the reed and made the twelfth stroke in the margin, and then, to my surprise, another, smaller, in the space beside it, which I did not understand and did not ask about.

Night 12. Shahrazad. Present. Open: the second dervish, who has kicked the alcove, and what is coming up the stair; the house of the three ladies and the seven bound strangers.

The next night the King said, "The second," and my sister said that the earth cracked and the Jinni came out of it in a rage, and found his woman on the floor with a cup of wine beside her, and said: "What is this noise? What has happened to you?" "Nothing," she said. "My heart was heavy, and I drank a little wine to widen it; and I got up, and the wine was in my head, and I fell against the alcove." "You lie, whore," said the Jinni. He looked about, and saw on the floor an axe and a pair of sandals. "Whose are these?" "I never saw them till now. They must have come on your clothes." He did not believe her. He stripped her and bound her and put her to the question. The young man could not bear the sound; he went up the stair on knees that gave way under him, and put back the trapdoor and covered it with earth, and went to the tailor, and sat in a corner thinking what a fool he was.

My sister did not give what the Jinni did to the woman to make her say what she did not know. She said that it took a long time and that the woman said nothing; and I will not add to it. The King had sat up. "She was twelve," he said, in the dark. "When he took her, lord." "And he came every ten days." "Every tenth night." "In a box?" "Not a box, lord. Earth." He was silent a moment. "How many locks?" "One, lord. A stair." "But it was a Jinni." "It may be the same one," my sister said. "They are numerous." And the King, who had himself once watched a Jinni set down a glass casket under a tree, and who had not, in all this time, asked how many such creatures there were, lay with his hand over his eyes while she took up the tale.

The Jinni, in the shape of a Persian, said she, went to the woodcutters with the axe and sandals, saying he had found them, and they told him whose they were; and he sat in the tailor's shop till the young man came in. He caught him up like a hawk taking a mouse, and carried him underground; and there was the woman, bound to four stakes, with blood coming from her. "Is this your lover?" he said to her. "I have never seen him." "If you do not know him, take this sword and strike off his head." She took the sword. She came up to the young man. He saw in her face what she meant to do and what it would cost her, and he signed to her with his eyebrows: This is the time for mercy. And she let the sword fall. "How shall I kill a man I do not know, who has done me no wrong? It is against my law." "I see," said the Jinni. "Only like pities like." He turned to the young man. "Strike off hers, and I shall believe you do not know her." The young man took the sword and lifted it; and she looked at him and said, without a sound: Have I failed you in anything? And he threw it down. "If a woman who has been shut up twenty-five years will not strike me, how can I strike her? Do what you like."

The Jinni took the sword himself. It was done in a few strokes, and my sister told it in a few words, and I will tell it in fewer. She died looking at the young man, and he made sure that he was next. "It is our law," said the Jinni, "that if a wife plays me false, I may kill her. I took her on her wedding night, when she was twelve, and she had known no one but me. I came every ten days, in the shape of a man. When I was sure that she had made me a cuckold, I killed her. About you I am not sure. But I cannot let you go unhurt. Ask a boon. Into what shape shall I put you: a dog, an ass, or an ape?"

The young man went down on his knees. "Spare me, that God may spare you," he said. "O Jinni, it would become you to forgive me, as the Envied forgave the Envier." "How was that?" said the Jinni; and the second dervish told him.

Two men, said my sister, lived in adjoining houses, with a party wall between. One of them envied the other. He looked on him with an evil eye and did his best to harm him, and could not eat for it, or sleep; and the other, whatever was done to him, prospered. The Envied, hearing at last how he was hated, said, "God's earth is wide," and left. He went to another city and bought a piece of land with an old dry well in it, and built a little oratory there, and gave himself to prayer; and holy men came to him, and the notables, and his name went through the country. The Envier heard of it, and came, and was received with all honour. "I have something to tell you," he said. "Send your dervishes away." The Envied sent them; and the two walked out together to the old well; and on the brink the Envier pushed him in, and went away, thinking him dead.

The well was haunted by Jinn, who caught him, and let him down gently onto a stone. "Do you know who this is?" one said. "He is the one who ran from the Envier, and has edified us here with his prayers; and the Envier has followed him, and thrown him in. And the Sultan is coming tomorrow to ask him about his daughter." "What is wrong with her?" "She is possessed. Maymun, the son of Damdam, is in love with her. If the holy man knew the cure it would be easy: there is a black tomcat in his oratory with a white spot the size of a coin at the end of its tail. He has only to pull seven of the white hairs and burn them under her." The Envied heard all this at the bottom of the well. In the morning his dervishes found him climbing the wall, and were struck with awe; he pulled seven hairs from the cat; the Sultan came; the daughter was brought bound; the hairs were burned; the thing in her head cried out and was gone. "What shall be done for the man who has cured her?" said the Sultan. "Let him marry her," said the nobles. And he did; and when the Vizier died he was Vizier; and when the Sultan died the people said, "Who but the Vizier?" So the man who had been thrown into a well became King.

One day, riding out among his emirs, he saw the Envier standing at the side of the road on foot. He turned to a minister. "Bring that man to me, and do not frighten him." And to the Envier, when he came, he said nothing. He said to the treasurer: "Give him a thousand pieces of gold, and load ten camels with goods, and send him home to his own town with an escort." And that was all. He did not punish him for anything that he had done.

The King, in the dark, had not moved. "A thousand pieces," he said. "And ten camels. And an escort. To his own town." "Yes, lord." He said it again under his breath, like a man learning a sum.

"You see, O Jinni," said the second dervish, with tears running into his shaved beard, "the mercy of the Envied to the Envier." And the Jinni said: "Do not lengthen your words. As to my killing you, fear it not. As to my pardoning you, hope it not. As to my bewitching you, there is no escape." He tore the young man from the ground and flew with him up into the sky, until the earth was a white cloud, and set him down on a mountain, and took a handful of dust, and said some words over it, and sprinkled him. "Leave that shape," he said, "and take the shape of an ape."

It was light. It had come while she was talking, and I had not noticed, and I had written nothing. My sister said her words, quickly, as if to catch up. I wrote the stair, three rungs, and the ape on the mountain. The King read it, took up the reed, and made the thirteenth stroke, and another beside it, smaller.

Night 13. Shahrazad. Present. Open: the second dervish, turned to an ape on a mountain; the house of the three ladies, with the seven bound strangers.

On the fourteenth night my sister told how the ape came down off the mountain, and crossed a plain in a month, and came to the sea, and saw a ship. He was nearly thrown off for bad luck, but he took hold of the captain's skirt and wept, and the captain took pity and made him his own. They sailed fifty days, and anchored under a great city, whose King's Vizier, the best calligrapher in the country, had died; and the King had sworn that he would have no other but one who wrote as well. The merchants on the ship each wrote a line on a scroll, ten cubits long, and the ape got up, to their horror, and took the reed, and wrote in six hands, one after another, six couplets of verse. The King read the scroll and no writing pleased him but that.

They mounted the ape on a mule and led him through the streets to the sound of drums; and the people said to one another, Is the Sultan going to make an ape his Vizier? He kissed the ground before the King three times. He sat on his heels. He ate at the King's table, and washed his hands in seven waters, and wrote verses on his plate about the food; he drank, and wrote verses on his cup; he played chess with the King, and won, and wrote a couplet on the board. The King sent for his daughter, Sitt al-Husn, to see the wonder, and she came to the door and veiled her face and said, "Father, have you no shame? You send for me to look at a man." "He is an ape," said the King. "He is a king's son," she said, "and an Ifrit has put a spell on him, after putting his own wife to death." She had been taught magic as a child by an old woman, she said, a hundred and seventy chapters of it. "Free him, then," said the King, "and I will make him my Vizier, and you shall marry him." She took an iron knife with the name of God cut on it in Hebrew letters, and drew a circle on the floor of the hall, and wrote names in it, and whispered; and the world went dark; and the Ifrit stood in the hall with his hands like pitchforks and his legs like ships' masts. "No welcome to you, dog," said Sitt al-Husn.

Of the contest between them I will say only that it was a good one. He was a lion, and she plucked a hair from her head and made it a sword and cut him in two. He was a scorpion; she, a serpent. He was a vulture; she, an eagle. He a black tomcat; she a wolf. He became a worm, and went into a pomegranate, which swelled to the size of a melon in the air and burst on the marble, and its seeds scattered over the whole floor; and she became a white cock, and ate them up, grain after grain, all but one, which had rolled to the edge of the fountain. The cock crowed, and clapped his wings; and the seed leapt into the water and became a fish, and the cock became a bigger fish and went after it, and the room shook with shrieks. Then the Ifrit rose out of the basin like a flame, and she rose after him like a coal, and they burned at one another until the hall was full of smoke and the King and the ape were pressed against the wall, trying not to breathe.

The voice had risen. The King was sitting up with his knees drawn up and his hands round them, and I saw him bite his lip. The Princess, said the voice, blew fire in the Ifrit's face, and the sparks fell on the three of them; hers did no harm; but one of his fell on the ape's left eye and put it out. One fell on the King's face, and burned off the lower half of his beard and loosened his teeth. One fell on the eunuch's breast, and killed him. Then there was a cry: God is great. The Princess had burned the Ifrit to ashes. She came to the ape and sprinkled him from a cup, and he was a man, save for the eye. "The fire," she said. "Father, the fire. He has struck me. I forgot the one seed. Had I picked it up he would have died at once. I am a dead woman; may God supply my place to you." A black spark crept up from her feet to her thighs, to her breast, to her face. She said the profession of faith, and she was a heap of ashes beside the other.

The King of that city wept, and tore what was left of his beard. He was ill a month. When he recovered, he sent for the young man and said: "Fate had decreed that we should be happy, safe from the chances of Time, until you came. Would to God we had never seen you. We took pity on you, and have lost our all. I do not blame you; it was out of your power to prevent it; and God be thanked that my daughter delivered you, though it cost her her life. Go now, my son, out of my city; and if I see you again, I shall kill you." The young man went out weeping. At a bath he shaved off his hair and beard and eyebrows, and put on a dervish's robe of black wool; and he wept every day, and said, "My eye, and not my life"; and he came to Baghdad, and found the first dervish standing about like a man with a question.

"Rub your head and go," said the lady of the house. "I will not," said the second dervish, "till I have heard the third." And the third came forward. "My story," he said, "is not like theirs, which fell on them from the sky. I drew mine down on my own head. I shaved my own beard and lost my own eye."

The call to prayer came. It seemed to me that I had been breathing high in the chest for an hour. My sister stopped in the middle of a sentence that had taken the third dervish to the foot of the Mountain of the Loadstone, and a stair carved in the stone, and a prayer. I wrote the stair; and put down the reed.

The King said, "The Princess did not see the seed." "She saw the others, lord. She ate each grain. She saw the one that rolled; she did not see where it went." He considered this. He took up the reed and made the fourteenth stroke, and, beside it, the small one. I could not stand it any longer. "What is the small one, lord?" He looked at it. "That is what is left," he said. "Each night I count what she has not finished. It is not a long sum." And he turned the leaf and showed me. In the space beside the strokes, in his square hand, very small, he had been making a second list, a night at a time: the Jinni, the dog and the gazelle, the jar, the lake, the fish, the porter, the tomb, the ape. It was my stair; it was the Roll, in the margin of the Roll. The thing was being kept twice.

Night 14. Shahrazad. Present. Open: the third dervish at the foot of the Mountain of the Loadstone, on a stair carved in the stone; the house of the three ladies, with the seven bound strangers and the two bitches.

## Chapter 07 · Nights Fifteen and Sixteen: The Third Dervish

On the morning of the fifteenth day the King said to my father, in the passage, in front of two chamberlains and a boy with a ewer, "Take your daughter home for the afternoon." My father said "Lord?" in the voice of a man who has been handed something too large to carry. "The younger," said the King. "She has not seen the sun for a fortnight. Bring her back before the lamps." He went on. My father took me by the elbow as if I might break, and we went out of the palace by the side gate, and down the long hill into the city.

It was the first time I had seen it since the evening we walked up. The shutters were open. I had not known I would notice that. In the street of the dyers a child was running with a hoop, and a woman on a roof was beating a carpet, and the hot smell of the bread-ovens came out and met us at the corner, and an old man was selling pistachios from a tray; and I understood that for three years the streets of this city had been quiet in a particular way, and that the quiet had gone out of them in a fortnight like a splinter. At the third turning a woman stepped in front of us. She was perhaps forty, in a grey veil, with a basket on her arm, and she did not look at my father. She looked at me.

"You are the sister," she said. I said that I was. "Is she alive?" "She is asleep," I said. "She is well." The woman put her free hand over her mouth and stood so for a moment. Then she said, in a low and level voice, as one asks the price of an onion: "My daughter's name was Zubayda. She was fourteen. She was the three hundred and eleventh." And she looked at me as if there were something I was to do with this.

My father made a small sound. I said, "I will tell her." "No," said the woman. "Not her. I do not want her told. I want it written somewhere." She was not asking me to write it in the Roll; she did not know the Roll from a laundry list. She wanted it written, by someone, and she had picked out the one person in the city who was going into that palace. "I can write it," I said. "I have not got anything to write on." And my father, who for three years had carried the book of the thousand names up the hill every dawn and carried it down again, put his hand into his sleeve and drew out a little tablet of ivory leaves and a pencil of lead, which he used for his sums; and gave them to me without a word.

I wrote it down. Zubayda; fourteen; the three hundred and eleventh; the daughter of — "Bakr the cloth-dealer's widow," said the woman. "She had the dimple here." I wrote that too. When I looked up there were four more women behind her, and a man with a limp, and an old grandmother on a doorstep leaning forward with her hands on her knees. We were there an hour. My father did not hurry me. He stood in the sun with his head bent and the shroud under his arm, and when someone had finished telling me, he nodded to them, once, in the manner of a witness. In the end I had two leaves and a half. I went back up the hill in the evening with the ivory in my sleeve, and I did not give it to the King, and did not tell him what I had; I put it under my green cushion where my hand could find it. I did not know yet what it was for. I knew only that the Roll, which had one name a night, was a book with a certain kind of gap in it.

That night the King said, "The third one," and my sister, whose colour had come back, and who sat with her hands round a cup of cardamom, said that the third dervish had stood up before the lady and said that he was a King, the son of a King, and that he drew his own destiny down upon himself.

His name was Ajib, she said, son of Khazib, and his city stood on the sea. He had a fleet, and was fond of sailing; and once, going out to some islands for a month's pleasure, he was struck by a storm and by a current that took the ship away from every chart. They sailed eleven days. The look-out saw a dark thing on the water, and something bright and dark by turns on the horizon; and the captain tore off his turban and beat his face. "That is the Mountain of the Loadstone," he said. "In the morning the ship will come under its lee, and every nail in her will fly out of the planks and go to the mountain, because it loves iron. On the top is a dome of yellow brass on ten pillars, and on the dome a horseman on a brass horse, with a tablet of lead on his breast; and no one will be saved until he falls."

The ships came apart in the morning, as he had said. The prince was thrown on a plank to the foot of the cliff; there were steps cut in the rock; he climbed them and slept under the dome and heard a voice in his sleep: Dig under your feet. You will find a bow of brass and three arrows of lead with names on them. Shoot the horseman, and he will fall in the sea, and the horse at your feet; bury it where the bow was. The sea will rise to the top of the mountain, and a man of brass will come in a skiff, with two paddles. Embark with him. But do not say the name of God, whatever you see. He will row you ten days, and set you among the Islands of Safety.

He dug. He found the bow. He shot; the horseman fell; the horse dropped at his feet; he buried it. The sea came up the mountain like a floor rising, and the skiff came, with its man of brass, who said nothing, and the prince did not either. They went ten days. On the tenth, when the green line of the Islands of Safety rose out of the water, the prince, from joy, from sheer relief, cried out, "God! God is great! There is no god but God!" and the skiff turned over and the man of brass sank like a stone.

"He broke the one rule," said the King.

"He was in the sight of land, lord."

"He broke the one rule." The King was silent. I know now that he was not talking about the prince.

He swam all day, my sister said, and at night a wave like a hill threw him high up a beach, and in the morning he found that he was on an islet with a stand of low trees, and thought: whatever frees me from one great calamity throws me into a greater. Then he saw a ship, and climbed a tree. Ten slaves came ashore with iron hoes and baskets and dug in the middle of the island until they uncovered a plate of metal, and lifted a trapdoor; and they brought from the ship bread and flour and honey and carpets and lamps and everything that a house could want, and took it down; and last of all an old, old man, a bone in a rag of blue, leading by the hand a boy of such beauty that the poets would have given up. They went down. They were an hour. The slaves and the old man came up without him, and put back the plate, and heaped the earth over it, and sailed away.

When the ship was out of sight the prince came down out of his tree, and dug, and went down the stair. In a hall as bright as a bride's room, among flowers and fans, sat the boy, alone. He went white. "Do not be afraid," said the prince. "I am a man like you, and a king's son. Fate has sent me to keep you company." And the boy told him. His father was a jeweller, who had had no children, and who had dreamed a dream that he should be given a son who would not live long. The astrologers had cast the boy's birth. He should live fifteen years; in the fifteenth was a danger, and if he passed it, he would live to be old; and the danger was this: in the Sea of Peril was a mountain called the Magnet, and on it a horseman; and fifty days after the horseman fell, the boy would die, and his killer would be he who shot him down, a Prince named Ajib, the son of King Khazib. "Ten days ago," said the boy, "my father had word that the horseman had fallen. So he has put me here. When forty days are over, if I am alive, he will come for me." And the prince, who was Ajib, son of Khazib, understood that he was the one. He said nothing. He said to himself: By God, I will not kill him.

For thirty-nine days he served the boy. He lighted his lamps and warmed his water; he cut his fruit; they played at board-games; he told him stories at night until the boy slept, and covered him up. He thought: the astrologers lied. On the fortieth night the boy said, "Heat me water, brother, and wash me, and change my clothes; I am saved. Then cut me a melon and sweeten it with a little sugar-candy." The prince washed him with lupin-meal and rubbed him down and spread his bed. He went to the store and found a melon, and said: "Have you a knife?" "There, over my head, on the high shelf." The prince climbed up and took the knife from its sheath, and his foot slipped on the step, and he fell on the boy with the blade in his hand; and it went into the boy's heart as if it had been planted there.

My sister told it in a single level breath. The King had closed his eyes. "He did not mean to," he said. "No, lord." "He did every one of the things," said the King. "He washed him. He cut the fruit." "Yes, lord." "And it was on the last day." He did not say anything else for some time. I thought of the old jeweller, who had put his son into the ground in order to keep him alive, and I thought of a cousin, in another tale, who had dug a house in the earth in order to keep a woman; and I wondered whether, in all the tales that were to come, there was going to be anyone who did not build a room underground. I did not say that. I said, "Shall I read what is open?" and the King said, "Not yet."

The prince, said my sister, shut the trapdoor and heaped the earth on it, and climbed into his tree; and the ship came back, and the old man, and the slaves, and found the boy dead on his couch with the knife in his heart and clean linen on him. They carried him up, and wrapped him in silk, and the old man fell down and put dust on his head and tore out his beard, and fainted; and at sunset he came to himself and spoke some lines of verse that I do not remember, and he gave one sob, and his soul went out of him. The slaves took both bodies on board the ship, and sailed. The prince stayed in the tree until they were out of sight.

The light came. I wrote the stair: Shahrazad; the third dervish; and, under him, a ship going away with two bodies, and an island with an underground room and no one in it. I held out the book. The King read it, and made the fifteenth stroke, and then the small one; and he turned the leaf, and with his own pen, in his own cramped hand, wrote under the list a new line: the melon. Then he looked at the cushion, and at the place where my hand had gone to lie, and he said nothing about it.

Night 15. Shahrazad. Present. Open: the third dervish, alone on an island with an empty room under it, a ship gone away; the house of the three ladies, with the seven bound strangers.

On the sixteenth night my sister said that the prince stayed a month on the island, going about by day and sleeping in the room at night, and that he noticed one morning that the water to the west went out every day a little farther. By the end of the month there was dry land, and he forded it, and came to sand in which a camel would sink to the knee, and a light burning in the distance that was not a fire but the gate of a palace, of burnished copper, in the sun. Ten young men met him at the door, in rich clothes, all of them blind of the left eye; and an old man. They took him in; they put him at the foot of the hall, on the floor; the ten sat each on his own couch with blue covers, and the old man on a smaller one in the middle. "Do not ask us anything about ourselves," said the old man. He gave them all food. When the hall was dark, the ten said, "Bring us our usual," and the old man went out and returned with ten trays, with ten candles on them, and under the covers there was ashes and charcoal and the soot of kettles. The ten tucked up their sleeves and blackened their faces and beat their breasts and wept, crying, "We were sitting at ease and our frowardness brought us unease." They did this all night; at dawn they washed, and put on fresh clothes. He lived with them a month. He could not eat for wanting to know.

"Tell me," said Ajib, "or let me go." "Do not ask. You will lose your eye." "I must know." And they gave in: they slaughtered a ram and skinned it and sewed him into the skin, with a knife, and told him that the bird Rukh would take him in its claws and put him down on a mountain, and he was to cut his way out, and walk half a day to a palace of aloes and sandal-wood. "That is where we lost our eyes. We will not tell you why; it would take too long."

The bird took him. He cut himself out. He walked to a palace in a hall like a racecourse, with a hundred doors of sandal-wood, and at the top of it forty young women, each one of them like the moon, who rose and said: "Welcome. We have waited for you this month. You are our lord; we are your servants." They fed him and bathed him. He drank wine with them, and they played the lute, and each night he chose one to lie with. He thought: this is life, and the only trouble is that it passes. A year went by, in this way, to the new year. And on the first day of it, they came to him in tears. "We have to leave you," they said. "We are the daughters of kings. Once a year we must go away for forty days. We will give you the keys to forty chambers. Thirty-nine you may open. The fortieth you must not open, for in it is what will part us for ever." He swore. He kissed the girl who wept. He watched them fly away like birds.

My sister's voice dropped to a murmur. Thirty-nine chambers, she said, in thirty-nine days. A garden with fruit on every tree. A plain with date-palms and a river. A hall of cages of sandal-wood, and birds. A saloon with forty rooms leading off it, full of pearls and rubies and emeralds. He opened them one at a time, as one eats a meal that one does not want to end. And on the fortieth day there was only one door; and he stood in front of it, and the rest of his life, he said, was in the way he stood. There was one day left of the forty. He opened it.

The King had turned his face to the wall. I saw his shoulders. "One day," he said, into the pillow. "One day, lord." "He had thirty-nine." "Yes, lord." I could not tell what he meant to do with this; whether he was angry at the prince, or at the princesses, who had left a door to be opened, or at himself. I looked at my sister. She went on.

A scent met him, said the voice, so keen that it made him swoon; and when he came to himself there was a floor of saffron, and candelabra of gold, and two great censers burning aloes, and in the middle, black as the darkest night, a horse, saddled and bridled, with a saddle of red gold, between two crystal mangers, one of sesame and one of rose-water. He thought: there must be a mystery in this. He led it out. It would not move. He struck it with the rein; and it neighed like thunder and opened a pair of wings and rose with him into the sky for an hour, and set him down on a terrace roof, and shook him off, and struck him across the face with its tail, and put out his left eye. Then it flew away.

He went down off the terrace into the hall of the ten one-eyed men. "No welcome to you," they said. "We were all happy, and ate and drank of the best, and slept on cloth of gold with our heads in beauty's lap, and we could not wait one day to have the delights of a year." He asked for a tray of soot to blacken his face. "No." They drove him out. So he shaved his beard and his eyebrows, and wandered in a dervish's coat, and came to Baghdad on the evening of that same night; and that was how it was, with the three of them, blind in the one eye, come to the door.

The lady of the house said, "Rub your head and go." "I will not," he said, "till I have heard the others"; and she turned to the Caliph and Ja'afar and Masrur, who were bound each to each, and said, "And you." Ja'afar spoke up, with the story of the merchants of Mosul who had lost their way in the dark, and the lady, who was not a fool, and had some idea who had come to her house, said, "I grant you your lives, each for the sake of the other. Now go." They went out into the street. The Caliph turned to the dervishes. "Where will you go now? The morning has not come." "We do not know." "Come and spend the rest of the night with us," said the Caliph; and to Ja'afar, "Take them home with you, and bring them to me tomorrow, that we may write down their adventures."

He did not sleep. He lay awake wondering about the ladies, and the bitches, and what was under the stripes. At first light he sat on his throne of state, and said, "Ja'afar, bring me the three ladies, and the two bitches, and the three dervishes." And they were brought, and the ladies were veiled. "We pardon you your rudeness to us," said Ja'afar, "in consideration of the kindness that went before it, and because you did not know who we were. Know that you stand before Harun al-Rashid, Commander of the Faithful, of the house of Abbas. Speak the truth." The eldest lady came forward. "O Commander of the Faithful," she said, "my story is one which, if it were written on the corner of the eye with a needle, would be a lesson to anyone who could be taught."

The call to prayer came. I had my hand under my cushion. I wrote the stair: Shahrazad; the Caliph, on his throne, with the ladies standing before him, veiled, and the eldest about to speak. I turned the book to the King. He read it, made the sixteenth stroke and the small one, and, in the margin of the margin, wrote: the door. I put the reed down. And he said, without looking up from the page, "What have you got under the cushion?"

I said, "Names, lord." He waited. I took out the ivory leaves and held them to him, and he read them as he had read the Roll, in the old way, standing, for the length of one breath each, and I counted them: Zubayda, fourteen, the dimple; a Fatima; a Nur; a girl whose mother did not know her age. At the end he gave them back to me. His face was the colour of the paper. "Keep them," he said. "Where?" "With the book." And he went out, and left me with the ivory in my hand, and the sense, which I have never lost, that I had been given something to carry that was heavier than it looked.

Night 16. Shahrazad. Present. Open: the Caliph on his throne, and the three ladies, veiled, and the eldest about to speak; the two bitches; and a small book of names, which is not a tale.

## Chapter 08 · Nights Seventeen, Eighteen and Nineteen: The Eldest Lady and the Portress; the Three Apples Begin

By the seventeenth day there were two hundred people at the side gate at noon. I do not know how they heard. The woman in the grey veil had told her neighbours, and the neighbours their cousins; someone at the dyers' had told the water-sellers; and when my father and I came down the hill with the ivory tablets in my sleeve there was a line along the wall of the palace as long as the line at the bakers' on the eve of a feast. They stood quietly. They had brought nothing with them, no petitions, no money, only the name of a girl, in the mouth, as one carries a coin under the tongue.

The King had sent a stationer. I had not asked. A man in an apron stood by the gate with a book under his arm, a real one, bound in plain blue cloth with a hundred leaves ruled for writing, and he put it into my hands and said that it had been paid for, and would not say by whom; and my father, who had been sitting on a stool in the shade with the shroud across his knees, looked at the book and at me and nodded his head, once, and so I sat down on the step with the book on my knee and began. One name, and what the mother or the brother or the neighbour remembered: a laugh, a shawl, a trade, a way of walking. My father sat beside me, and as each one finished, he bowed his head in the way of a witness.

An old man came who had no one with him. He said he wanted to write down his sister's name. She had been the eight hundred and fifth, he said, or near it. He did not know her trade, because she had had none; she had been a girl in a house at the end of a lane, and she had loved plums. He had come, he said, because the day before he had seen a clerk of the Vizier's pass by in the street and had thought: someone knows. He looked at my father. "Which of them was it who drew the line?" My father said, "I did." The old man looked at him. He was not angry. He was only looking, as one looks at a man to see how he is made. "Then you might as well write it," he said. "You know her." And my father took the pencil out of my hand, and the book, and wrote, without being told, in the flat clerk's hand he used for the Roll: Hind, daughter of Salim the lamp-maker; she had a grey shawl and a gap in her teeth; the eight hundred and fifth. He had never counted. He had it by heart.

That night the King said, "The eldest," and my sister, with a new brazier at her feet that nobody explained, said that the eldest lady had stood before the Caliph and said that the two black bitches were her sisters.

Her father had died, she said, and her mother after him, and the three thousand pieces of gold had been divided, a thousand to each of the daughters; and the elder two had married and gone with their husbands to trade, and in five years they had come back to her, one after the other, in rags, abandoned by men who had spent every coin. She took them in. She washed them, and dressed them in her own clothes, and shared her money with them, because, she said, I have made more by spinning silk, and God has blessed it. They stayed a year; then they wished to marry again, and she told them what she thought of marriage; and they married, and were abandoned again, and came back; and she took them in again. At last she fitted out a ship, and they asked to go with her, because they could not bear to be parted from her; and a storm took them off the chart, and eleven days later they put in at a city none of them had heard of.

At the gate of that city there were men standing with staves in their hands who were stone. In the market there was gold lying on the stalls, and nobody to mind it, because every man was stone; in the palace the King sat on his throne with his viziers round him, and all were stone, and the Queen lay in her robes and was stone. The sisters went to collect what they could carry, as people do, and the youngest walked on, up through the empty halls, to a room at the back where a single lamp was burning on a table beside a couch; and, listening, she heard a voice reading the Koran.

It was a boy. He sat in a closet that was a small mosque, with a book on a stand in front of him, quite alone, and he looked up and gave her good-day as if she had been expected. "Tell me why you have come," he said, "and I shall tell you what has happened here." She told him. And he said that the city was his father's, and that the King on the throne was his father, and the Queen in the alcove his mother; and that they and all the people had worshipped fire, until a voice came from the sky and cried to them three times, once a year for three years, to worship God; and they did not listen. In the third year, at dawn, they became stone. The boy alone had been spared, because he alone had learned the faith, secretly, from an old woman who had been his nurse, and who was dead; and he had stayed, reading, and keeping the lamp, for as long as it had been. He was tired of being the only person awake.

"Come with me to Baghdad," said the eldest lady. "I have a ship. You shall be my husband, and I your servant." And she persuaded him, with the arts of a person who has not been loved by anyone for a long time and has just found someone; and he came. She took only what was light and precious from the treasuries. When her sisters saw the boy at her side, the sisters, who had been abandoned twice, and who had not once been refused a place in her house, were jealous of him, and said nothing; and that night, off Basra, when the lady and the boy were asleep, they lifted them, bed and all, and threw them into the sea.

"Did he drown?" said the King.

"He could not swim, lord."

The King put his hand over his face. My sister did not wait for him. She said that the lady got hold of a plank in the dark and was carried to an island and walked in the morning to the mainland. Two hours from the city, she saw a great serpent come fleeing along the track, with a dragon after her, and the dragon caught her by the tail; and the lady, who had a good deal of grief to put somewhere, picked up a stone and threw it with all her strength and killed the dragon. The serpent opened a pair of wings and flew off. The lady lay down and slept, and when she woke a black girl was kneeling at her feet, rubbing them, with two black bitches by her. "I am the serpent," the girl said. "I am a Jinniyah, and he was a Jinni who hated me. You saved my life. I went to the ship where your sisters threw you, and I took everything that was in it and put it in your house, and sank the ship; and I have made your sisters into these." She set them down on the lady's roof. "Every day you will give each of them three hundred strokes. If you fail, I shall come and shut you in the earth, for ever." And she gave her a ringlet of her own hair, to burn when she wanted her.

"And I have done it every day," said the eldest lady to the Caliph, "and I pity them, and I weep, and they know it is not by my will."

The first light was on the shutters. I wrote the stair: the Caliph and Ja'afar and the three ladies, the portress about to speak; and, in the margin, because the King had said it was to go there, what my father had written: Hind, daughter of Salim the lamp-maker, the eight hundred and fifth. I did not know whether it belonged. I put it where the book of names was, which was beside the Roll, which was in the margin of the Roll; and the King read it all, and made his stroke, and then stood with the pen in his hand for a long time, and said, to the page, "She took them back twice."

"Yes, lord."

"And they threw her in the sea."

"Yes, lord."

He wrote the small stroke. And, under it, in the list, a word I could not read upside down.

Night 17. Shahrazad. Present. Open: the Caliph, the eldest lady, and the second lady, the portress, who is about to speak; the two black bitches; and a book of names, which has a hundred leaves.

On the eighteenth night the King said, "The one with the stripes," and my sister, who was holding a piece of bread in her hand which she had forgotten to eat, said that the portress had stood forward and said she was the daughter of a rich man who had died and left her much, and she had married a richer, who also died; and she had eighty thousand dinars.

An old woman came to her door one day, with a face like a dried date and a voice like a bell, and told a story of an orphan girl who was to be married that night, among strangers; and the portress, who was kind, said she would come. The old woman took her through the streets to a great house with a black curtain on the door, and in it a beautiful girl on a couch rose and kissed her. "I have a brother," said the girl. "He saw you at weddings. He has been in love with you for a year. It was he who sent the old woman." She clapped her hands, and a door opened, and out came a young man of such good looks and good manners that the portress, who had been a widow some while, found that it was no great hardship to be tricked. The Kazi came in with his four witnesses and the contract was drawn. The young man said: "I have a condition. Swear on this book that you will never look at another man, nor incline yourself to one." She swore it. She was very happy; they lived a month in perfect pleasure.

Then she asked leave to go to the market, to buy some silks. The old woman went with her. They sat in front of a young merchant's shop, and he showed her everything he had, and would take no money for it; he would take one kiss. The old woman whispered: "What harm? Don't speak to him, don't lean over him; it's only a kiss, and you keep your oath, and your money." The portress said that she would not. She was talked into it, in the end, by the sort of voice that has talked many people into many things; she held up the edge of her veil, and he put his mouth to her cheek, and he bit it so hard that he took the flesh. She fainted. When she came to, the shop was shut, and the old woman was holding her, and telling her to go home and say she was ill.

Her husband came in that night and lit a candle. "What is that on your cheek?" "A camel loaded with firewood bumped me." "I'll go to the governor tomorrow and have every wood-seller in Baghdad hanged." "Do not burden your soul. I was on an ass, and it stumbled." "Then I'll go to Ja'afar the Barmecide, and every donkey-boy shall be killed." "Would you destroy so many men for my cheek? It was God's decree." But she began to stammer, and he knew. "You have been false to your oath," he said; and called out; and seven slaves came in, and held her down on the floor, one on her head, one on her knees; and he drew his sword and gave it to the third, and said: "Cut her in half, Sa'ad, and let each of you take a half and throw it in the Tigris for the fish. That is what is owed to those who break their word."

The King had stood up. I had not heard him. He had gone to the window and stood with his back to us, with both hands on the sill, and my sister did not stop; she lowered her voice, and I could hardly hear it, and I wrote nothing, because there was nothing to write on. The slave on her head, said the voice, bent down to her and said: "Say the profession of faith, mistress, and remember anything you would like done; for this is the last hour of your life." She asked for a little time to say her last injunctions. She lifted her head. She saw where she was, how far she had fallen, from a good house to the floor of it, and that she had done it herself. She wept. He said some verses at her. She said some back. He called out again: "Cut her!" And the slave came near, and she made sure of death—

"The old woman came in," said the King, at the window.

"Yes, lord."

"She threw herself at his feet."

"Yes, lord. She said, by the right of my nursing of you, and my long service, spare her. You are young. It is said: whoever kills shall be killed."

"And he listened."

"He listened. He said he would pardon her, but he must set his mark on her that would show all her life." My sister told it in two words more. A quince rod, and the back and the sides, until she fainted. They dragged her out and left her at her old door. She had mended in four months. When she went back to the house to look, it was a ruin; the street was down.

The King turned from the window. His face was calm. "He pardoned her because an old woman asked," he said. "Yes, lord." "That is all it took." "It took the old woman, lord. And that he had been nursed by her." "A nurse," said the King. "Forty years of a nurse." He came back and sat on the edge of the bed, with his back to my sister, as he had sat on the first night. "And what became of her?" "She went to her father's daughter, lord, the eldest lady, who had the dogs. She told her what had happened. And the eldest said, Who is safe from the spite of Time? And they lived together. They did not speak of marriage all those years." The King said nothing. I wrote the stair, and the date, and the old woman.

Night 18. Shahrazad. Present. Open: the Caliph and the three ladies, the second lady's tale just finished; the Jinniyah, who has not yet been called; a book of names, which has a hundred leaves.

On the nineteenth night my sister said that the Caliph, having had the tales written down for his archives, asked the eldest lady if she knew where he might find the Jinniyah; and she had a lock of the Jinniyah's hair, to be burned when needed. He threw it on the fire. The palace shook; there was a sound as of wings; and the Jinniyah stood before him and gave him peace. She said that she would release the sisters if he wished. She sprinkled water on the bitches and said, "Return to your former shape," and they became women, and wept. And she said: "As for the man who beat the portress, he is the nearest of all men to you." The Caliph said: "Who?" "Your son Al-Amin." He had heard of her beauty, and played a lover's trick, and married her by the law; and he had laid on her a condition, and sworn her by an oath; and she broke it. "He is not to be blamed for it," said the Jinniyah. "He was minded to kill her, and he feared God, and was content with a beating."

The Caliph sent for his son, who told it as it was. And the Caliph, who was the kind of man who liked to leave behind him a deed to be remembered, married the three ladies to the three dervishes, who were all kings' sons, and made them chamberlains, with stipends; and took the eldest lady's sisters, who were women again, into her house; and gave the portress back to his son, with the marriage contract renewed, and a great sum of money, and a house rebuilt better than before; and for himself, he married the cateress. And that night he lay with her.

"He married them all," said the King.

"Every one, lord."

"And she went back to him. The beaten one." My sister said that it was so. "Did she say she forgave him?" My sister was quiet. "It is not said, lord." The King considered this, on his back, looking at the tester. Then he said, in an even voice, like a man correcting a clerk: "It should have been said." My sister said, "Yes, lord." "Say it." "I cannot, lord," said my sister. "I was not told. But there is a woman further on, in a tale I have for you, who is more patient, and she will do it better." He said, "When?" "At the three hundred and forty-seventh night, I think." "That is a long way," said the King. He was counting. I saw his lips move. I think that he reached it, in his head, and found it a long way, and found it not impossible; and he said, "Go on, then," and she went on, with the Three Apples.

They relate, she said, that the Caliph Harun al-Rashid summoned Ja'afar one night and said, "I wish to go down into the city and ask the people how they are governed; those they complain of we shall depose, and those they praise we shall promote." And they went down with Masrur, and in a narrow alley they came upon an old man with a fishing net and a crate on his head, walking slowly, reciting some lines of verse about how a poor man's learning is of no use to him: he has a pen, and an inkwell, and a book, and nothing to eat.

The dawn was in the shutters. I wrote the stair; and put at the foot of it, in the margin of the margin, in my own hand, because the King would not, that the Caliph had walked into the city to ask how they were governed. He read it, standing, and made his stroke, and the small one. He did not say anything. At the door he turned. "Take the book to the gate at noon," he said. "The people will want to know it is being kept." And he went out. I went to my sister, who was asleep with the bread still in her hand, and took it, and put it on the table, and sat down on the cushion with the book of names across my knees, and counted the leaves. There were sixty-one written.

Night 19. Shahrazad. Present. Open: the Caliph and Ja'afar in the city at night, and an old fisherman with a net on his head, reciting; a book of names, which has a hundred leaves.

## Chapter 09 · Nights Twenty to Twenty-Four: The Three Apples; Nur al-Din Ali and His Son, in Bones

On the twentieth day, at noon, when my father and I came down to the side gate with the blue book, there was a man standing on an upturned crate outside the gate of the dyers' quarter telling the story of the Fisherman and the Jinni. He had a crowd of thirty. He had a good voice, and a rag on a stick, which he used for the Jinni's smoke, and he was getting it all wrong. In his version the fisherman chose the manner of his death by lot; the Jinni's four vows were in three hundreds; and the physician Duban had been a Jew. I stopped on the hill with my hand on my father's arm. "He has missed the second hundred," said my father, very low. I looked at him. "I have it from you," he said, "on the stair. You say it over to yourself in your sleep."

The people stood round the man, and when he came to the jar they clapped, and when he came to the Jinni's oath they were silent, with their mouths a little open, like children; and I understood that it was out. That my sister's voice had gone through the walls, in the pockets of the maids and the mouths of the chamberlains' boys, and was walking about the city by itself. It was not what we had meant. She had said, on the first night, that she could not keep what she told. She had not said that it would be kept by everyone else.

I told the King that evening. He was lying on his back with his hands on his chest, looking at the canopy, and he did not say anything for a while. "Who told them?" "No one, lord. They have been told by the walls." "Is it right?" "No, lord. He gave the fisherman a lottery for his death." "That is wrong," said the King. "It was his choice." "Yes, lord." "Let them tell it," he said, to the canopy. It was not clear to me whether this was a permission or a defeat. "And you will bring me the names."

"The chest," he said, a little later, when the lamp was low; and my sister, who had a shawl round her that I did not know, began with the Caliph and the Vizier, and the old fisherman with his net, who had no supper to give his children.

The Caliph said to him, said the voice: cast your net again on my luck, and whatever comes up I will buy for a hundred gold pieces. The old man said yes, and they went down to the river; he cast; and he drew in a chest, padlocked, so heavy that it took the Caliph and Masrur together to carry it to the palace. The fisherman had his two hundred. In the palace they broke the lock. Inside was a basket of palm leaves, corded with red wool; and in the basket a piece of carpet; and under the carpet a woman's wrap, folded in four; and in the wrap a young woman, white as silver, who had been killed and cut in pieces.

The Caliph wept. Then he stopped weeping and turned on his Vizier. "Dog of Viziers, shall people be murdered in our reign and thrown in the river, to be a burden on us at the Judgment? By God, we shall have her blood from the one who did it, and he shall die the worst of deaths. And as surely as I am descended from the sons of Abbas, if you do not bring me the man who killed her, I shall hang you at the gate of the palace, you and forty of your kin." Ja'afar said, "Give me three days." "You have them."

The Vizier went home. He sat in his house for three days, and could not think of anything to do; the third day passed, and the fourth came, and the Caliph sent for him, and asked: where is the murderer? "Am I the inspector of the murdered, O Commander of the Faithful, that I should know who killed her?" The Caliph's rage was such that he ordered Ja'afar hanged at the gate that very day, and a crier sent about the city to say that all who wished to see the Barmecide hanged, with forty of his cousins, might come; and the people came from every quarter, not knowing why, and wept; and the gallows was set up; and Ja'afar and his kinsmen stood under it.

I heard my own breath. My father was not in the room; he was at the foot of the stair, as he was every night. But I thought of him, on his stool, under the lamp, with the blue book; and I thought, as I had not allowed myself to think, that he too had been given a certain number of days, and that nobody had told him which of them was the last. My sister did not look at me. She had never looked away from the story.

Then a young man pushed through the crowd, said the voice. He was handsome, and neat, and had a mole on his cheek like a grain of ambergris, and he stood in front of Ja'afar and said: "Safety to you. I am the man who killed the woman in the chest. Hang me for her." And while Ja'afar was still standing, astonished, an old man came pushing through the crowd, and said: "Don't believe him. It was I." The young man said, "This is an old man in his dotage." "I am old," said the old man, "and tired of the world. I will give my life to ransom yours and the Vizier's and all his cousins'." The Vizier took them both to the Caliph. "Which of you killed her?" "I did." "I did." "Hang them both," said the Caliph. "If one of them is the murderer," said Ja'afar, "it would be an injustice to hang the other." And the young man described exactly how she had been killed: the basket, the wrap, the carpet. So the Caliph was satisfied that he was the man; and asked how it had come about.

She was his wife, said the youth, and the daughter of his father's brother, who was the old man, and the mother of his three sons. He had loved her. In the first days of that month she fell ill. When she began to recover she said: "I have a longing to smell an apple, and to bite it." He went out and looked in every shop and could not find one. The next morning he went round the gardens. An old gardener told him that apples had to be had from the Caliph's own orchard at Basra; so he went. It took fifteen days there and back, and he paid three dinars for three apples. And when he brought them, she had no pleasure in them, and let them lie beside her; for she was weak, and the fever was still on her. Ten days. Then she began to mend.

He went to his shop. At about noon a big slave passed it, a man in the household of somebody he did not know, with one of his three apples in his hand, tossing it. "Where did you get that?" "From my mistress. I had been away, and when I came back she was lying ill with three apples beside her; and she said to me, My horned fool of a husband made the journey to Basra for them and paid three dinars. And I ate and drank with her. And I took this one." The young man shut his shop. He went home. He counted the apples. Two. "Where is the third?" he said to his wife. She raised her head, weakly, and said: "I don't know."

The King, in the dark, said, "He did not ask her twice."

"No, lord."

"He asked once. She said she did not know. She was ill." My sister did not answer. The King said, "He cut her throat on the word of a servant in the street." "On the word of a servant, lord, and an apple missing from a bedside." "That is a very small thing to be missing," said the King, in a voice of curious flatness, and said nothing more.

The young man cut her throat, said the voice; and cut her up, and wrapped her in her wrap and a piece of carpet, and sewed it into a basket, and the basket into a chest, and put the chest on his mule, and threw it into the Tigris with his own hands. And then he went home, and found his eldest boy crying at the door. "Why are you crying?" "I took one of the apples that were by Mother, and went out to play, and a big slave snatched it from me. I said it was my mother's, that my father had gone to Basra to fetch it. He did not listen. I asked three times. He hit me and kicked me. I was afraid she would beat me, so I went outside the city with my brother. Don't tell her, Father, it would make her worse." And the father knew that the slave had lied; that the slave had never seen his wife; that he had killed her for a thing a boy had lost in the street.

"So make haste and hang me," the young man said to the Caliph, "for I am afraid she will accuse me on the Day of Resurrection." The old man wept beside him. The Caliph said that the young man was excusable, and that he would hang no one but the slave; and he told Ja'afar to bring him in three days, or die in his stead.

Dawn was in the shutters. My sister said her words, and I said mine, and she said hers; I wrote the stair, and the King read it, and made his stroke; and I heard a new thing: the King spoke before he left the page. "Which of them is the father?" he said. "The old man, lord. The father of the woman. The uncle." "He came to be hanged for his nephew." "Yes." "And the husband came to be hanged for his wife." "Yes." The King looked at the page in front of him and did not make the small stroke. He took the pen, and hesitated, and wrote a new word in his list, beside the apple. I could read it, this time. It was the word asked.

Night 20. Shahrazad. Present. Open: Ja'afar, who has three days to find a slave he has never heard of; the old man and the young man; a book of names, which has eighty-three names in it.

The slave was in Ja'afar's own house. On the fourth day, said my sister on the twenty-first night, Ja'afar made his will, and farewelled his household, and embraced his youngest daughter last of all; and felt something round inside the bosom of her dress. "What is in your pocket, little one?" "An apple, father, with the name of our lord the Caliph written on it. Rayhan, our slave, brought it to me four days ago and would not give it to me till I gave him two dinars." Ja'afar put his hand in and drew out the apple, and knew it. He had Rayhan brought. "Where did you get this apple?" "By God, master," said the slave, "a lie may get a man out once, but the truth gets him out again and again. I did not steal it from you or from the Caliph. Five days ago I saw a child playing in an alley with this apple in his hand. I took it from him. I hit him. He cried, and said that it was his mother's, who was ill, and that his father had gone to Basra for it. I did not listen. I brought it here, and sold it to the little lady for two dinars. That is the whole of it."

Ja'afar took the slave to the Caliph. The Caliph laughed till he fell over backward, and said that the story must be written, and told in public. "Do not marvel at this, O Commander of the Faithful," said Ja'afar. "It is not more wondrous than the history of Nur al-Din Ali of Egypt and his brother Shams al-Din Mohammed." "What could be stranger?" "I will tell you, on condition that you pardon my slave." "If it is stranger than the apples, I give you his blood. If not, I shall kill him." And my sister, with a smile that was the first one I had seen on her since the Fisherman, began.

I shall give it in bones, since I am the one who falls asleep. It took four nights, and I remember perhaps one. There were two brothers, Viziers of Egypt, beautiful, and loved by the Sultan; and on one evening, drinking, the two of them fell into an argument about whose child, if they should have children on the same night, should marry whose. The argument grew absurd, as these arguments do. The younger, Nur al-Din Ali, left Egypt that night in a fury and went to Basra, where he became Vizier. He married the Vizier's daughter. A son was born, Badr al-Din Hasan, so beautiful that people stopped in the street; and the father died. Meanwhile in Cairo the elder brother's daughter, by the Sultan's whim, was betrothed to a hunchback groom, who was a groom in the literal sense, from the stables; and the Jinn Maymun and an Ifritah, passing, saw the bride weeping, and looked, in jest, for a handsomer man to put in the bridegroom's place. They found Badr al-Din asleep in Basra. They carried him to Cairo.

I have this clearly, because the King laughed. It was a very small laugh; it was one breath, down the nose, as at the Mule; but the corner of his mouth went, I saw it by the lamp. It was at the hunchback, who had gone out of the bride's chamber to relieve himself, and found at the privy that the Jinn had sat down on the cover and swelled to the size of a buffalo; he sat there all night, said my sister, on the floor, with his teeth chattering and the word Jinn on his lips, and when the bridegroom came to look for him in the morning he had gone mad. The beautiful boy from Basra lay with the bride in the meantime and had a night I shall not describe, and when he woke, he was in Damascus, in his shirt, at the gate; and he became a seller of cream tarts. His son was born in Cairo, eight months after. The Sultan's anger, the pursuit, the seven years, the mother who knows her son by a tart: it all comes right. In the end they were all found, with their ages on them, as in a ledger that has been added up.

"A better tale?" said Ja'afar to the Caliph. "A much better," said the Caliph, "and the slave is free." And so a slave whose lie had killed a woman was pardoned by a tale, on the day he would otherwise have been hanged for it. I did not say that. The King said it. He said, at the end of the twenty-fourth night, to the empty room, "The tale saved him."

"Yes, lord."

"The one who carried the lie."

"Yes, lord."

He lay a long time. "That is a poor use of a tale," he said. And my sister, who was too tired to hear anything but the rhythm of it, said, "It is the only use I have, lord." And the King turned his head and looked at her. It was the first time that I had seen him look at my sister while she was awake. He looked for the length of a breath, and then another; and then he put out his hand, as one reaches for a cup in the dark, and laid it on the coverlet beside hers, not on it; and left it there, and said nothing.

Night 21. Shahrazad. Present. Open: Nur al-Din Ali and Shams al-Din, brothers, in a quarrel about the marriage of their unborn children; a book of names.

Night 22. Shahrazad. Present. Open: the boy from Basra on the road between Damascus and Cairo; a seller of tarts; a book of names.

Night 23. Shahrazad. Present. Open: a mother in Damascus, a tart without pepper, a boy of seven; a book of names.

Night 24. Shahrazad. Present. Open: nothing in the Egyptian tale; the Caliph pleased; a hunchback of the Sultan of China, not yet begun; a book of names which has a hundred and sixty-eight names in it.

## Chapter 10 · Nights Twenty-five to Twenty-nine: The Hunchback; the Broker, the Reeve and the Doctor

By the twenty-fifth day the first blue book was full. I wrote the last name on the last ruled line of the hundredth leaf, a Maymuna, daughter of a tinsmith, with a limp, and when I looked up the stationer was at my elbow with a second book. It was the same blue cloth. "Paid for," he said, before I could ask. I thought he would not say by whom, and I was right. I thought also that the person who had paid was a man who knew how many leaves a hundred leaves are, and what a thousand names would need; and that he had not stopped to count them.

That night the King said, "The Hunchback." My sister, who had put on a little flesh in a fortnight and whose colour was now her own, said that there lived in a city of China a tailor who was fond of pleasure, and that he and his wife, coming back at nightfall from a day's outing, fell in with a hunchback whose look would have drawn a laugh out of despair. They asked him to supper. He came. The tailor bought a fried fish, and bread, and lemons; and while they ate, the wife, in play, took a piece of fish and stuffed it into the hunchback's mouth, holding her hand over it. "You'll swallow it at a gulp," she said, "I won't let you chew." It had a bone. The hunchback died of it, quite quietly, with a mouth full of fish.

"There is no help in lamenting," said the tailor's wife. She wrapped him in a kerchief, and the tailor took him in his arms, and she walked ahead, crying, "O my little one, where does it hurt? Where has the smallpox got you?" and everyone who saw them said, "A child with the smallpox," and made way. They found a Jewish physician's door, and the wife sent the maid up with a quarter dinar to fetch her master down, and while she was gone they stood the dead man at the head of the stairs and ran. The physician, who loved a quarter dinar, came out in the dark, stepped on the corpse, and sent it rolling down to the bottom. He cried out for Moses and Aaron, and for Joshua the son of Nun. "I have killed a patient!" And his wife said that they were both lost if the body were here in the morning; so they carried it up on the roof and let it down by the ventilator into the house of the neighbour, a Muslim, who was the Reeve of the Sultan's kitchen.

The Reeve had been robbed for months. Somebody had been at his oil and fat; the rats, he had decided, or the cats, or the dogs that came over the roofs at the smell of a sheep's tail; and he had killed a great number of them. When he came home from a night of Koran-reading and saw a man standing in the corner under the ventilator, he said, "So it is you. And I have been murdering the cats of the quarter." He took a hammer and struck the thief in the breast, and the man fell down; and when he saw that it was a hunchback, and dead, he said, "Was it not enough for you to be a hunchback? You must needs be a thief as well?" And he took him on his shoulders and carried him to the market at the end of the night and stood him up against a shop-front, in a dark lane.

My sister's voice had a small unsteadiness in it, which I took for the effort of keeping a straight face. I looked at the King. He had his hand across his mouth, and his shoulders were not still.

A Christian broker came reeling along, she said, drunk, on his way to the bath. He had had his turban snatched in the first part of the night; and when he saw a man standing against a wall in the dark, he took him for another thief and struck him on the neck. The man fell. The broker, in his fury, sat on him and went on beating him, and called the watch; and the watch came and found a Christian kneeling on a Muslim, who was dead. "A Christian killing a Muslim!" he said. They took the broker to the Governor. The Governor, in the morning, gave order that he should be hanged.

The gallows was put up, and the rope round the Christian's neck, and the hangman about to haul, when the Reeve pushed through the crowd and said, "Stop! It was I." The Governor asked how. The Reeve told him, hammer and all, and was put under the gallows in the broker's place. Then the Jewish physician pushed through and said, "Stop! It was I who killed him." He told the stairs and the quarter dinar. The rope went round the Jew. Then the tailor came through the crowd, and said, "It is I, and no one else. I killed him." And he told the fish.

"Hold!" said the hangman, wearily. "We bring out one man and change him for another, and no one is hanged after all!" And this was when the Sultan's chamberlain arrived, in haste. The hunchback, it turned out, had been the Sultan of China's own jester; the Sultan had asked for him all the morning, and been told he was dead, and that four men had confessed to the death.

"The Sultan sent for them," said my sister, "and for the dead man on his bier. The Governor told the whole tale, which I will not tell again, as there is no use in a thrice-told tale. And the Sultan was moved to mirth." She stopped. In the quiet I could hear the lamp. "He laughed, lord. He had it written in letters of gold. He said to the court, Did you ever hear a story more wondrous than that of my hunchback? And no one had."

"He laughed," said the King.

"Yes, lord."

"And the four of them were standing there with ropes still on their necks."

"Yes, lord."

"They were not let go."

"No, lord. The Nazarene broker came forward, and said that he had a story that would surprise the Sultan more than the hunchback's. And the Sultan said, Tell it. And the Sultan said, If it does not surprise me more, all four of you will be hanged."

The King said nothing for a time. Then: "That is the shape," he said.

"Lord?"

"Of the thing. Every one of them is told to stand under a rope, and tell. The man with the date stones. The fisherman and the Jinni in the jar. The Vizier with the apples. Now these." He was not angry. I would have said he was interested, in the way of a man discovering that a pattern in the carpet has a name. "I see what you are doing," said the King.

"I am telling a story, lord," said my sister, in a very small voice.

"Yes," said the King. "Go on."

Night 25. Shahrazad. Present. Open: the Sultan of China, with four men under the gallows and a hunchback on a bier; the Nazarene broker, who has a better story.

I shall give the broker's tale as I have it, which is shortly; it took a night. He was a Copt of Cairo, he said, and a broker in sesame, and one day a young man came to him with a sample, and sold fifty ardabbs, and left four thousand five hundred dirhams in deposit, and did not come back for a year. When he did, he ate with the broker, and ate with his left hand; and the broker, who had been thinking about it for twelve months, asked why. He drew out his right sleeve. There was no hand in it.

He was from Baghdad, he said, and a merchant, and he had come to Cairo with a load of cloth. In the shop of a Syndic one day he saw a woman, and heard her speak, and was lost; she bought a piece of cloth on credit, and he told the Syndic to put it on his account, and she said, "May God make you master of all I have," and went. He saw her again. She sent a slave-girl after him to say that she was waiting. He went to her house on a Friday night, in the Habbaniyah quarter; two young women opened the door; and she herself came to meet him, crowned with a diadem of pearls, and sat him down in a hall with seven doors and a jetting fountain. They ate; they drank; she put her mouth to his; they slept. He went away in the morning and left fifty dinars under the carpet. He did it again the next night, and the next, and the one after, a kerchief of fifty dinars under the carpet each morning, until one morning he woke and found that he was beggared, dinar-less, dirham-less, and that Satan, he said, had done it.

He went into the street. At the Zuwaylah Gate there was a crowd, and he was pushed against a soldier, and his hand, which was in the soldier's pocket by no more than the crush, found a purse. A camel with a load of firewood jostled the soldier on the other side. And the purse was in his hand. The soldier found his pocket light, and turned, and struck him on the head with his mace. "Thief!" he said. The Governor was passing. "Strip him," said the Governor; they found the purse, with twenty dinars in it. "Did you steal this?" He thought: if I say no, they will beat me; and said yes. They cut off his right hand there and then, with the link-bearer's sword, and cauterised the stump; and the soldier, whose heart had turned, gave him back the purse.

He went to her. He lay down on the carpet, with his hand wrapped in a rag in his bosom, and said his head ached. She saw the colour of him. She asked and he would not tell. She gave him wine, and he took it with his left hand, and she gave him more, and he fell asleep, and when he woke he found that she had searched him, and found the purse, and the hand. She had sat all night looking at it. In the morning she sent for the Kazi and the witnesses, and wrote her whole fortune to him in the marriage contract. She opened a chest to show him all the kerchiefs, with the fifty dinars in each, that he had left under her carpet: she had put them away. "This is yours," she said. "It was only that I wanted you." She lived with him for a month. Then she fell ill, of grief for his hand, and was fifty days dying; and he buried her, and sold her property, and that, said the broker, was where the sesame came from. "And this story, O King of China, is it not more wondrous than the hunchback's?"

"No," said the Sultan. "There is no help for it; you will all be hanged."

My sister stopped. The light was in the shutters. The King lay on his back, looking at the tester. After a while he said, "She did not leave. The woman." "No, lord." "She took a man who had no hand." "And a purse in his shirt." "Without asking him anything." My sister said, "No, lord. She waited till he was asleep." "Yes," said the King, in a voice like a man laying a stone on another stone. "She would."

Night 26. Shahrazad. Present. Open: the Sultan of China, who has refused the broker's tale; the Reeve of the Sultan's kitchen, who says he has one better; four men with ropes.

The Reeve's tale was a chest. I will say only that he had been at a party the night before where there was cumin ragout, and a guest who would not touch it, until it was agreed that he might wash his hands a hundred and twenty times; and that the guest, when he ate, ate with four fingers, having neither thumb nor great toe; and that this was because of a woman in the household of the Lady Zubaydah, whom he had seen in a shop in Baghdad, and loved, and who had loved him; and because, to get him into the palace, she had had him shut in a chest among the lady's dresses, and carried in a skiff over the Tigris, and set down in front of the Chief Eunuch. "Open them," said the eunuch. "Open them all." The man in the chest lost control of himself, and the water ran out of the chest, and the woman said, "You will kill me, and yourself, you have broken a flask of Zemzem water, it is spoiling the dresses." And then someone cried, "The Caliph!"

The King was laughing. It was not much, but it was a laugh, and it went on long enough to be called one. My sister had to stop. She waited with her hands in her lap, and I saw her smile, a little, at nothing.

The Caliph opened every chest but that one, she went on. "That one," said the girl, "is the Lady Zubaydah's secret"; and the Caliph, who was in a good humour, let it pass. The young man was taken out of the chest among the dresses, in the presence of the Lady Zubaydah, who looked him over and said, "He will do." The Caliph gave leave and ten thousand dinars. They were married with a feast that went on for ten days. And at the end of it, when the bride was at the baths, they set before the bridegroom a tray, and on the tray a dish of cumin ragout, with chicken breasts, sugar, pistachios, musk and rose-water; and he ate it all, and wiped his hands; and forgot to wash them.

I could not look at the King. I looked at the lamp. In the evening the bride was carried round the palace in her seven dresses and brought to him and left. He embraced her, hardly believing it; and she smelt the cumin on his fingers, and cried out so that all her women came running. "Take this madman away," she said. "I took him for a man of sense. He has eaten cumin ragout and not washed his hands. Is this a man to come to my bed?" She took a plaited whip and beat him until her arms were numb and he fainted. For ten days she did not come near him. She sent his food by a servant, and the servant said that her mistress was sick from the smell. On the tenth day she came in and said, "I will teach you to eat cumin ragout without washing your hands," and her women held him down, and she took a razor and cut off his thumbs and his great toes. She sprinkled the stumps with healing powder. And when the bleeding stopped, the bridegroom, who had seen what she was, swore that he would never again eat cumin without washing his hands forty times with potash and forty times with galangal and forty times with soap; and she took his oath; and her anger went down; and he lay with her that night. They lived together for a long time. The Lady Zubaydah gave them fifty thousand dinars to buy a house. "But he has never seen a dish of cumin since," said my sister, "without washing a hundred and twenty times. He told us so himself, at the party."

"And this," said the Reeve, "is my story."

"It is not," said the Sultan, "more wondrous than the hunchback's. You will be hanged."

The King said, "She cut off his thumbs because he forgot to wash." "Yes, lord." "That is very little." "She said she would teach him, lord." The King turned his head on the pillow. "To eat cumin without washing his hands," he said. "Teach him." And after a moment he began to laugh again, silently, with his shoulders; and I understood that he was laughing at himself, or at the world, or at the notion of a man who washes a hundred and twenty times because a woman has taught him a lesson with a razor. I have never known. It was not a happy laugh. It was a laugh of the sort that is the first thing a man does when he has not done it for three years.

Night 27. Shahrazad. Present. Open: the Reeve's tale just ended; the Sultan, who is not moved; the Jewish physician, who says that his is better; four men with ropes.

The physician's tale was shorter, my sister said on the twenty-eighth night, and sadder, and I will give it shorter still. He was a doctor at Damascus, and was called to the Viceroy's house to cure a young man with the fever, who held out his left hand to be felt; and when the young man was recovered, and in the bath, the doctor saw that his right hand had been cut off, and the stump was new.

The young man was of Mosul. He had gone to Damascus with his uncles' goods, and stayed behind to sell; and a lady, richly dressed, had come into his house one day, and he had lain with her, and she would take no money, and brought him fifteen dinars a time. One night she brought a younger sister. They drank. The lady, who was jealous, told him to lie with the sister that night; and when he woke in the morning he was wet with blood, and the girl's head was off her shoulders, and the lady was gone. He buried the girl under the floor of the courtyard, with her jewels, and left Damascus. Three years later, out of money, he came back, and found under the carpet a necklace of ten gems; and took it to the market to sell; and was beaten until he said he had stolen it, and his right hand was cut off and the stump boiled in oil. And then the Viceroy, the Governor of Damascus, summoned him, and it was his own necklace; it had been missing three years from his house with his younger daughter.

The King had turned on his side to look at my sister while she told it. She was not looking at him.

"He told the Viceroy all of it, as it was," my sister said. "The first lady was the Viceroy's elder daughter, who had been married in Cairo, and been widowed there, and come home with ideas. She had brought her sister to the house of a stranger to share her pleasure, and killed her in jealousy, and said to her mother, I know nothing of her. And her mother wept till her heart broke, and she died. The Viceroy wept. He said to the young man, I will not blame you. And he gave him his youngest daughter in marriage."

"The one who did it?" said the King.

"No, lord. The youngest. A third. She had been a girl in the next room."

"And the elder?"

"It is not said," said my sister. "I think she grew old in the house, lord, without being asked for anything."

The King lay still. "That too," he said, "should have been said."

I wrote down what was open, that night, with a hand that was not wholly steady. The Sultan of China, with four men and a hunchback; the physician's tale ended; the tailor, who still had a rope round his neck, who said that his story was better than all of them put together, and that it was the story of a barber.

Night 28. Shahrazad. Present. Open: the Sultan of China, who is still not moved; the tailor, who has a barber; four men with ropes.

On the twenty-ninth night the King said, "The tailor," and my sister, who had had to stop three times in the middle of the night to rest, took up the thread, and said that the tailor had been at a party the night before at which the host's servants had been about to put the food on the table, when a foreign young man had come in, a handsome Baghdadi, lame in one leg; and had looked round the room, and seen among the guests a barber, and turned to go. The host stopped him. "What is the matter?" "I will not sit in the same room," the young man said, "with that barber, that omen. He was the cause of my breaking my leg; I swore not to stay in any city where he lived, and left Baghdad; and I find him here the first night." And the guests said: tell us.

The light came in, and it was the twenty-ninth dawn. I wrote the line, and under it the stair; and the King did not read it, but looked, and said, "Where is the shroud?"

I looked up. My father was at the door. He was standing there, as he had stood every morning of the last month, in the clothes of the day before. But his arms were at his sides. "Lord," my father said, "I have put it in the chest at the foot of my bed." "Why?" "You said, lord, to keep it where I could reach it." The King looked at him for a while. "Is it reachable?" "It is the third thing from the top, lord." "Good," said the King. And my father, who had understood the sentence correctly again, and who had also understood that the King was making a joke, put his hand over his face and wept, standing in the doorway, as I have never seen him weep before or since.

Night 29. Shahrazad. Present. Open: the tailor's tale, in which a lame young man from Baghdad will not sit in a room with a barber; the Sultan of China, four men with ropes, and a hunchback on a bier.

## Chapter 11 · Nights Thirty to Thirty-four: The Barber, his Six Brothers, and the Hunchback's End

On the thirtieth night the King said, "The Barber," and for the first time since the beginning I saw my sister take a drink of water before she began, as an actor does; and when she began, it was not her voice, nor the other one. It was a third voice, high and quick and friendly, a voice that went on and on without once drawing breath; and I understood, before the second sentence was done, that she was going to be the Barber.

The young man from Baghdad had told them in the room, she said, that he was a merchant's son who hated women until one morning, in a blind alley, he saw a girl at a window watering her flowers; and from that hour he had no appetite for anything. She was the Kazi's daughter. The Kazi's daughter's old nurse took his case in hand and, after a month of messages, came with the news: Friday, at the hour of public prayer, when her father would be in the mosque, he might come to the house. "Go to the bath first," said the old woman, "and have your head shaved; you've been ill." He sent his page for a barber. "A discreet man," he said, "no meddler, no talker. Someone who won't split my head with his chatter." The boy came back with this old man.

"Good morning," said the Barber, in my sister's voice, "good morning, and God give you ease, and God drive your trouble and your sorrow far from you. I see you are thin. Are you well? Recovery, they say, is a great gift. You want your head polled? Or bled? It was Ibn Abbas who said, whoso cuts his hair on a Friday, the Lord shall avert from him seventy calamities. Let me look at the astrolabe." And he took it out of a kerchief, an astrolabe with seven plates, in silver, and went into the courtyard, and stood a long time with his face to the sun, and came back and said, "You have, my lord, three hours exactly before the hour of prayer, neither more nor less, according to the most learned astronomers and the wisest almanacs. And now, if I may ask, why are you in such a hurry?"

The King was laughing. It was a new laugh, quite different from the one in the night of the cumin: it came up out of his chest, with a catch in it, like a man who has been sick and is tasting food. My sister did not stop. The young man cried: "Shave my head! You are breaking my liver!" "I will, I will," said the Barber, and shaved two hairs, and stopped. "I am concerned about your haste. Tell me where you are going, for it can come to no good; and may I add that your father, and your grandfather, never did one thing without asking me." The young man said, "I am going to a party." "A party!" said the Barber. "What a lucky day for me! It was only yesterday that I invited my friends and I have nothing to give them to eat. I was just thinking of it. What is in your house?" "Five dishes of meat, ten chickens, a roast lamb—take it all, and shave me!" "And wine?" "I have two flasks." "And scent?" "Take a box of scent worth fifty dinars! Only shave my head!" And the Barber put down the razor, and sat down on the floor, and went through the box, grain by grain, with the greatest care, while the poor young man sat with half a head of hair, listening to the muezzin in the next street. And when he had finished with the scent he said, "Now, let me tell you about my friends, who are all excellent, and not one of whom speaks more than he should. There is Zantut the bath-keeper, who sings to the tom-tom; and Sali'a the corn-chandler; and Humayd the scavenger, who sings so that the birds stop to listen, with a song that begins, 'My wife has news that is not locked in a box.' You must come and meet them."

"Go to your friends," the young man said.

"I will not let you go alone."

"Where I am going no one can go but me."

"Ah!" said the Barber, with a great light in his face. "An assignation! A woman! And on a Friday. The Governor of this city is a very sharp blade. I am exactly the person to take with you."

The King had both hands over his face. The sounds that came through them were not any longer the sounds of a man who is laughing out of politeness. My sister, who had gone pink to the roots of her hair, drank some water, and went on.

At last, said she, the Barber finished the shave. The young man made him promise to take the meat and wine to his friends and come back, and he would wait; and the Barber went out with the lamb and the chickens and the flagons, and left them with a porter at the end of the street, and hid in an alley. The young man dressed in a minute, and ran out, for the muezzins had called the Friday prayer, and went to the Kazi's house; and the old nurse took him upstairs. The Kazi came home from the mosque. He shut himself in the big room below. And the young man looked out of the window of the girl's chamber, and saw, sitting against the door across the lane, the Barber.

It happened then that the Kazi's servant had done some wrong that day, and the Kazi began to beat her; and she shrieked; and a slave ran in to plead for her and the Kazi beat him too, and he roared. The Barber, in the lane, heard the roars. "They are killing my master!" he screamed. He tore his clothes. He scattered dust on his head. "Help! My master is being murdered in the Kazi's house!" And he ran off to the young man's house, where he told the servants, and the servants came running, tearing their clothes, in a wave, shouting, "Alas for our murdered master!", and in front of them all, with his robe in ribbons and his turban gone, the Barber. In the lane there were soon ten thousand people. The Kazi came out to the door to see what the matter was. "You have killed our master!" "What has your master done that I should kill him?" "I heard him cry out!" "This is my house," said the Kazi, "and it is open to you all; go in and look." And the Barber went in.

"He was in the chest," said the King, with the tears running down his face. He was not asking.

"Yes, lord. The young man in the upper room could find no place to hide but a great chest, and he got into it. The Barber looked right and left, and then walked straight over to the chest, and heaved it on his head, and made for the stairs. And inside the chest the young man, who had resolved to bear any humiliation but this, burst the lid and threw himself on the ground in front of ten thousand people, and broke his leg. He had gold in his sleeve. He scattered it. While the people scrambled for it he made off, hopping through the lanes of Baghdad. And behind him came the Barber, calling at the top of his voice, 'They would have robbed me of my master! They would have killed him who has been a father to me! Praise be to God, who gave me the strength to prevail over them! Where are you going now, you who would not listen to me? Had it not been for me, you would be dead.'"

The King made a high, wheezing noise, such as a child makes, and rolled on his side. I could not look at my sister, because I should have laughed myself, and I knew that if I did the whole of it would come apart. I looked at the lamp.

The young man, said she, went into a weaver's shop and sat down in the back room; and sent for witnesses and made a will, dividing most of his property among his people; and left Baghdad that same day; and had travelled far to be rid of this man. "And when I came into this city and was bidden to supper," said the young man to the party, "the first person I saw was he, in the place of honour." And he went out.

That was the end of the night. The light was in the shutters. I held out the Roll and the King took it; but he could not read it; he sat holding it, with his shoulders going, and the water running down. He gave it back. It was the first time in thirty nights that he had not read a line. He got up, and I heard him in the passage; and I heard, from the door, a sound that was my father sitting down on the floor.

Night 30. Shahrazad. Present. Open: the Tailor's tale: the Barber, who says he is the Silent Man; the Tailor and the guests, who ask him whether the young man spoke the truth; the Sultan of China; four men with ropes.

On the thirty-first night he said, "The Silent Man," and my sister said: "He said it was all his generosity. Had the youth not been rescued by him, he would have been killed. 'It is well for him that he suffered in his leg and not in his life. And that you may know I am a man of few words, and very unlike my six brothers, I shall tell you a tale about myself.'"

He was living in Baghdad, she said, in the time of the Caliph al-Mustansir. The Caliph was angry with ten highwaymen and ordered them brought to him on the festival; and the Prefect of the city put them in a boat. The Barber saw them embarking. He thought, "These are people going to a wedding, they will eat and drink the whole day in that boat; none shall be their companion but me." So, from generosity of heart, he got in. On the other bank the watch chained them, and chained him among them. "And is it not a proof of my spareness of speech," said the Barber, "that I held my peace and did not please to speak?" The next day they were taken to the Caliph, who ordered them beheaded; and the Sworder cut off nine heads, and came to the tenth, who was the Barber, and stopped, because he was an old man. "Why have you struck off only nine?" said the Caliph. "I have struck off ten." "Count them." They counted. There were ten, and the Barber was standing.

"What made you keep silence in a moment like that?" said the Caliph. "I am the Silent Shaykh," said the Barber, "and am so called to distinguish me from my six brothers, who are men of great speech and no understanding, and each of whom has some maim or other. It was out of my generosity that I did not name myself to you, and shared their death with them." The Caliph laughed until he fell on his back. "O Silent Man, do your six brothers resemble you?" "Never!" said the Barber, "it grieves me that you compare us. One is a hunchback, one is lame, one is blind, one is cropped of both ears, one is cropped of both lips, one has one eye. I will tell you how." And he told the Caliph how.

"And I shall not tell you, lord," said my sister, "because there are six, and they are long, and mostly humiliations. The first brother was a hunchback tailor, who loved a lady at a window, and was set by her husband to work a flour-mill like an ox, yoked, and flogged round and round till morning; and afterwards, for a worse mistake, was paraded on a camel and fell and broke his leg. The second was led by an old woman to a lady, who had her women slap him on the neck, and pluck out his moustaches, and shave his beard, and paint his cheeks, and chase her naked into a dark room that opened into the market of the tanners. The third was blind, and was beaten before the Governor, with two other blind men, on the word of a stranger who had slipped in among them to learn where they kept their money. The fourth was a butcher, and lost an eye and was given five hundred sticks over a counterfeit dirham and a ram's carcass that he hung in his shop. The fifth and the sixth I will tell you."

The King had wiped his face. His voice was hoarse. "The fifth," he said.

Night 31. Shahrazad. Present. Open: the Barber, telling the Caliph al-Mustansir about the maims of his six brothers; the first four, told, the fifth and sixth still to come; the Tailor, the Sultan of China, four men with ropes.

The fifth brother's name, said my sister on the thirty-second night, was Al-Nashshar, and he was a beggar by night and lived on the alms by day. When their father died he left seven hundred dirhams among his seven sons, and each took his hundred. Al-Nashshar did not know what to do with it. He bought glassware, a hundred dirhams' worth, and put it in a tray, and sat down against a wall to sell it. And as he sat he began to think.

"I shall sell this for two hundred," he thought, "and buy more glass, and sell that for four hundred; and I shall go on until I have four thousand. And then I shall buy jewels, and scents, and make a hundred thousand; and buy a house, and slaves, and horses. I shall send out the marriage brokeresses, and ask for the daughter of the Vizier, the eldest, for I hear she is perfect. I shall give her a marriage portion of a thousand dinars, and if her father refuses I shall take her from under his nose. I shall buy ten little eunuchs. I shall buy a saddle of gold. I shall ride round the town, with all the people blessing me, and go to the Vizier with armed slaves before and behind. And when he sees me he will stand up and seat me in his own place, and sit far below me, for I am to be his son-in-law. I shall have two eunuchs with purses of a thousand dinars each, one for the portion and one for a gift, that he may see the greatness of my spirit and the littleness of the world in my eyes. For every ten words he says to me I shall answer two."

It was one of the most extraordinary things I ever heard my sister do. She did it entirely without hurry. She let the beggar plan his wedding to its last detail: the wedding night, the dressing of the bride, the seven showings of her in her seven dresses, to which he would turn his face only when begged; and how he would lie with his face to the wall; and how her mother would come in, and kiss his hand and his feet, and say, "Look at your handmaid, who longs for your favour;" and he would not answer; and she would bring a cup, and say, "Do not refuse the cup from your handmaid;" and he would not look at her. "And then," said my sister, "I shall shake my fist in her face, thus—and kick her, thus—"

She lifted her foot and kicked the air.

"—and with his toe," said she, in the voice of the story, "he knocked over the tray of glass; and the glass fell from the bench; and everything on it was broken to bits."

The King made no sound for a long moment. Then he said, in a quiet voice: "And the wedding?"

"There was no wedding, lord."

"And the Vizier's daughter?"

"There was no Vizier's daughter."

"She did not exist." My sister said no. "He killed her," said the King, "with his foot. She did not exist, and he killed her." And he began to laugh again, but softly, as a man laughs who is, at the same moment, doing something else with his face. I do not know what he was thinking. I think I know. I think he was thinking of the garden, and of a woman at a fountain with as many men as ladies, and a window, and a brother, and a Queen who had not for some time been anyone; and of how long a man can plan, with his heart, a wedding with someone who is not there. He did not say so, and I should not like to put it in his mouth.

The beggar, said my sister, wept, and buffeted his face and rent his clothes, and the people going to Friday prayer pitied him, and one great lady on a mule, with eunuchs, passing, asked what ailed him, and gave him a purse of five hundred dinars, and he went home blessing her; and after that, said my sister, he had other adventures with her which cost him his ears, and which you will have to hear another time. The King said, "Another time." He was looking at the canopy. It was the first time he had made an arrangement for a night he had not yet counted.

Night 32. Shahrazad. Present. Open: the Barber's fifth brother, who has kicked over a tray of glass and who will lose his ears to a lady with a mule; the sixth brother, who has not yet begun; the Tailor and the Sultan of China, and four men with ropes.

The sixth, said my sister on the thirty-third night, was Shakashik, or Many Clamours, the one without lips. He had been rich, and become poor, and one day he went out to beg. He came to a large and handsome palace with eunuchs at the door, and was told that it belonged to a Barmecide. He was told to go in at the great gate and ask the Vizier his master for alms.

He walked through the vestibule into a hall paved with marble, with a garden in the middle such as he had never seen; and at the end of it a handsome man with a fine beard, who rose and bade him welcome. He asked what he wanted. "Alms, my lord. I am in want." The man was shocked. He tore his robe. "What! I am in this city, and you here, hungry? I cannot bear the disgrace. You will eat my salt." "My lord," said the beggar, "I am dying of hunger." "Boy!" cried the host. "Bring the basin and the ewer!" and turned to him: "Wash your hands." The beggar rose to do so, and saw neither basin nor ewer; and his host went on washing his hands with invisible soap in invisible water. "Bring the table!" There was no table. "Please do me the honour of eating," said the host, moving his hand to and fro as if he were eating, and the beggar thought: This man likes to make fun of people. And he said, "I have never seen bread so white, my lord."

"It was baked," said the Barmecide, "by a maid of mine whom I bought for five hundred dinars. Boy! Bring in the meat pudding, with plenty of fat." And he turned to the guest: "Did you ever see anything finer than this pudding? Eat, and don't be shy." The beggar began to wag his jaws as if chewing. Then came the stew, with fat sand-grouse; and the chickens stuffed with pistachios; and honey fritters, with a dinar's weight of musk in every one; and almonds, and walnuts, and raisins. And at every one the host said, "By my life, eat, and don't be shy," and at every one the beggar, whose hunger by this time was a savage thing, said it was the best he had ever had. They came to the wine. The host held out an empty hand. "It is a little young, my lord," said the beggar, "I am used to wine twenty years old." The host pretended to drink to his health; and the beggar pretended to drink and to be drunk.

My sister told it with great quietness, and in a voice I did not know she had, the voice of a hungry man being polite. I found that I had my hand over my mouth. I looked at the King, and he was not laughing now; he had turned on his side, with his head on his arm and his face towards my sister, and was listening as a child listens to a thing it has been told is true.

And then, said she, the beggar, who was drunk on nothing, rose up. He raised his arm till the white of his armpit showed and gave the Barmecide such a slap on the back of the neck that the palace rang with it; and a second. "What is this, you scum of the earth?" cried the Barmecide. "My lord," the beggar said, "you have been kind to your servant. You have taken him into your house, and given him of your food, and made him drink of your old wine, till he is drunk, and rude. But you are too noble not to forgive his ignorance." The Barmecide laughed and laughed. "Long have I played the madman among my intimates," he said, "but I never found one who had the wit and the patience to enter into all my humours but you. I forgive you. You shall be my boon companion, and never leave me." He called the servants, and they brought the table, and all the dishes he had named, and they ate; and they sat together, and drank, and had singers in; and for twenty years they lived thus together, in peace.

The King's eyes were wet again, but not for laughing. "He knew," he said.

"Yes, lord."

"The Barmecide. He knew the dishes were empty."

"He knew it was empty, lord. He was testing whether the man would play."

"He was hungry."

"He was hungry. And he said the bread was white."

"And he was fed." The King lay a long moment. "That is what you do," he said, very low, to my sister. It was not a question. And my sister, who sat in the lamplight with her hands folded and her face a little tired, said, in her own voice, as simply as if she had been asked the hour: "It is the only supper I have, lord."

I thought of the side gate, and of two hundred people with a name in the mouth like a coin under the tongue. I do not know what I thought.

The end of the sixth brother, said my sister after a while, was not good. The Barmecide died, and the Sultan took his wealth and squeezed the beggar of his savings, and he fled; and Arabs took him, and cut off his lips; and later, for a sin of which he was not guilty, cut off something else. He was found on a mountain by some who knew him, and the Barber brought him home. "And this is the history of my six brothers," said the Barber to the Caliph, "and now you know that I am not like them. I support the whole family." The Caliph laughed and said, "You are indeed a man of few words, O Silent Man. Now leave this city, and settle in another." And so he did.

Night 33. Shahrazad. Present. Open: the Barber, who has finished the history of his six brothers and been banished from Baghdad by the Caliph al-Mustansir; the Sultan of China, who wishes to see this Silent Man for himself; four men with ropes.

On the thirty-fourth night the King said nothing at all, and my sister began, and told how the Sultan of China sent for the Barber to be taken out of the jail where the Tailor's party had put him; and how the Barber came, a man past ninety, with a vacant, conceited face, long ears, a great nose; and the Sultan laughed at the sight, and said, "O Silent Man, tell me something of yourself." The Barber asked what the tale of the Nazarene and the Jew and the Muslim and the Hunchback was, and why they were gathered. "To show you are no busybody, I take it," said the Sultan. "Tell him the case," and they told him; and the Barber shook his head and said, "A marvel of marvels. Uncover me the Hunchback."

They undid the winding-sheet. The Barber sat down and took the dead man's head in his lap and looked at his face, and laughed till he fell over backwards. "There is a wonder in every death," he said, "but the death of this Gobbo is worthy to be written in letters of liquid gold." The court was astonished. "I swear by your bounty, O King," said the Barber, "that there is life in him still."

He took out of his belt a barber's budget, and from it a pot of ointment, and anointed the dead man's neck; and then a pair of iron tweezers. He put them in the throat, and drew out the piece of fish with its bone, black with blood. And the Hunchback sneezed a great sneeze, and sat up, and put his hand to his face, and said, "I bear witness that there is no god but God"; and the King of China laughed until he fainted, and so did all the others.

"He was dead," said the King, in the dark. "Since yesterday."

"Yes, lord."

"And a barber, who talks, put a pair of tweezers down his throat." He was lying on his back, with his eyes shut, and the corners of his mouth were doing something. "It was in his throat the whole time."

"It was only in his throat, lord. Nobody had looked. They had all assumed."

The King lay for a very long time. Then he said, "Go on," and she went on: how the Sultan gave robes to the Tailor, and the Jew, and the Reeve, and the Nazarene, and to the Barber a pension and a seat at his table, and kept him by him, to the end of his days, in the greatest honour. It was not more wondrous, my sister said, than the story of Nur al-Din Ali and the damsel Anis al-Jalis.

I wrote the line. I wrote the stair, and the second book, in the margin; and I looked at the King, who had put his hand over his eyes, in the grey light, and lay quite still, so that I thought he had gone to sleep; but when I put out my hand to take back the Roll, he took it, and read it, slowly, and made his tally, and the little stroke, and then he did not put down the reed. He turned over the leaf, and looked at the margin of the margin. And in a space where there had been the word asked, and the word melon, and the word door, he wrote a new one, in small square letters. It was fed.

Night 34. Shahrazad. Present. Open: the Sultan of China, who has pardoned four men and a Barber and has a hunchback alive at his feet; the damsel Anis al-Jalis, not yet begun; a book of names, which is in its second book and has a hundred and nine names in it.

## Chapter 12 · Nights Thirty-five to Forty-four: Nur al-Din and Anis al-Jalis; Ghanim of Damascus

I knew on the thirty-seventh day. It was not that she was sick in the mornings, though she was; it was that she had stopped being sick in the way of a person who is afraid, and begun to be sick in the way of a person who is hungry. On the thirty-fifth night she had refused the dates, and on the thirty-sixth she had eaten eleven. She sat on the edge of the bed with her feet on the carpet and a basin by her knee, and I said, "How many weeks?" in the voice I used for reading prices; and she looked at me for a long while, and began to laugh, quietly, and put the back of her wrist against her eyes. "Five. Six," she said. "I have been counting in the wrong book."

I asked whether he knew. "He counts nights better than I do," she said. "He has written them down in the margin; I have seen it. But he has not counted this." She put her hand flat on her stomach, without looking. "I have not decided what to say. If I tell him, he has two things in his hand and not one, and I do not know what he does with two. If I do not, he finds out in a month, from some servant, and I do not know what he does with that." She took her wrist from her eyes. "Put it in the Open. Put it where he can see it, and say nothing. Let him read it as he reads the rest." "In which rung?" "I do not know. It is the only thing I am telling that I shall not be able to finish by morning."

Nights 35 to 37. Shahrazad. Present, present, present. Open: the damsel Anis al-Jalis and the Vizier's son Nur al-Din Ali, in Baghdad, in the Caliph's garden, and what the Caliph has seen from a tree; a book of names.

So at the thirty-eighth dawn, under the stair, and under the margin of the margin, I wrote the last line of the Open as it was to be written: a child, which has no name yet. I turned the Roll round. The King read it, standing. He read the rest, and arrived at the foot. He did not move. He had the reed in his fingers, and I saw the point of it shake very slightly, as the point of a reed shakes in a draught. "How long?" he said.

"My sister says two hundred and thirty nights, lord. From now. A little more."

He put the reed down. Then he picked it up again, and turned the first leaf, and at the foot of the margin, under the tally, where there were thirty-eight rows of strokes, he began to draw dots. They were very small. He drew them in rows of five, as the strokes were drawn, and he drew them one by one with his eyes fixed on the page, and he did not stop until he had drawn two hundred and thirty. It took a long time. The light came up while he drew. "I shall strike them out as they come," he said; and I do not think he heard what he had said, because it was only afterwards, in the passage, that I heard him stop, and say the word again, slowly, to the wall.

Night 38. Shahrazad. Present. Open: the Caliph's garden, and the fisherman's coat, ended; Ghanim of Damascus, not yet begun; a book of names; and a child, which has no name yet.

When he came back that evening there was a woman sitting on a stool in the corner of the room, in a plain brown veil, mending something. She was about seventy. Her hands were very quick. She did not look up. Nobody explained her. Later, when she had gone out to see to a pan of broth, I asked one of the maids who she was; and the maid said, in a whisper, as one names a sacred object, that she was the King's nurse. She had suckled him. She had, forty years ago, held down his arm for the physician when he broke it. "He sent for her this morning," the maid said. "No one has seen her at court for ten years. She lives in a house by the river with seven cats." I thought of the old woman in the tale of the portress, kneeling at the feet of a young man with a sword in his hand, saying: by the right of my nursing. And I thought: he knows what a nurse is for.

There was a brazier by my sister's feet, though the night was warm. There was a basin of dates under a cloth. There was a second cushion. A boy came with a tray of something hot that smelt of cardamom, and put it by her hand, and went out backwards. "Ghanim," said the King, when the lamp was low, and then, in a different voice, to my sister: "Are you tired?"

I think none of us had known that he could ask it. It was spoken almost casually, to the canopy, as a man asks the hour. She said, after a moment, "Yes, lord." "Then we shall wait for an hour," said the King. "Dunyazad will sit." And he lay with his hands on his chest, in the lamplight, and looked at nothing, for an hour by the sand-glass; and my sister slept, sitting up, with her head against the post; and I did not move. It was the first time in thirty-eight nights that anyone had told the lease it might be shorter. I did not dare write it down.

When she woke he said, as if nothing had happened, "Go on, then"; and she took up the tale where the hour had left it. It was the tale of Ghanim, who was a merchant's son from Damascus, and who went to Baghdad with a load of silk, and made his fortune, and was walking back from a funeral in the dusk, and was locked out of the city gate. He found a cemetery with a high wall and a garden of date palms inside, and climbed in, and lay down in a tomb to wait for the morning. And at midnight, said my sister, three men came to the gate of the garden, with a lantern and a chest; and the gate was locked, and one of them began to climb the wall with the chest on his head, and the others said: Quick, quick, and do not drop it.

I have forgotten all that passed after that, in detail. I can give the shape. It was a chest, and in the chest was a woman, drugged, or dead, or something between the two, whom three eunuchs had come to bury in a garden by night, on the order of a jealous queen; and a young merchant in a tomb who watched them do it, and who, when they had gone, took the chest home, and the woman with it, and nursed her, and learned that she was the first favourite of the Caliph; and from this came a love, and a sister, and a mother, and the anger of the Caliph, and three eunuchs' tales told in the dark to pass the time, which I will not give, because they are about the way the men came to be eunuchs, and my sister told them in the voice of a woman reading a bill. The Caliph found out. The queen was angry. The merchant and the woman and the mother and the sister were pursued, and hidden, and brought at last, all four, before the Caliph, who was not angry in the end; who married the sister himself, and gave the woman back to the merchant; and so it came right. It took seven nights. I fell asleep on four of them.

What I remember is not the plot but the King. For seven nights he asked questions. Where was the lantern? Did the woman wake? What did he say when she woke? What did she ask first? And my sister, who in the beginning had never been asked a question, answered each of them, as if she had always known; and in the course of the answers I saw that the story had begun to change. It was no longer a thing that she told to him. It was a thing that was built between them, the two voices going back and forth in the dark, he with the questions and she with the answers, like a man handing stones and a woman setting them. "What did she ask first?" "She asked, Where am I?" "And he?" "He said, You are in my house." "No," said the King. "He would say: You are with me." My sister was silent a moment. "Yes, lord. He said: You are with me." And I wrote nothing, because I had no column for it.

Nights 39 to 43. Shahrazad. Present, present, present, present, present. Open: Ghanim and the woman he took out of the chest; the Caliph's wrath; the Caliph's sister's wedding; a book of names; and a child, which has no name yet.

The tale of Nur al-Din Ali and the damsel Anis al-Jalis had been told on the thirty-fifth to thirty-seventh nights, before the child, and I cannot give it, because I was too frightened that week to remember anything but my sister's face. But there is one part of it that he asked for again on the forty-fourth night, a thing he had never done: "The coat," he said, "tell the coat." And she said, with a straight face, that a thrice-told tale is of no use; and he said that it had been told once; and she told it again. It is the part with the fisherman, and I give it here, with what comes before it. Nur al-Din was the son of a Vizier, and the damsel was a slave-girl whom his father had bought for the Sultan of Basra for ten thousand dinars, a girl who could play the lute, and read, and sing; and the son had taken her, and been ruined by her, and sold her to pay his debts, and been robbed again; and the two of them fled by ship to Baghdad. There, in a garden by the Tigris belonging to the Caliph, an old keeper, Shaykh Ibrahim, let them in against all rules; and gave them wine against all his principles; and they sat drinking in a pavilion with a hundred lamps, and the damsel sang, and the Caliph, who was out walking in the dark with Ja'afar and Masrur, in the disguise of a merchant, saw the light on the water.

He climbed a tree to look in. The Vizier climbed after. They saw the old Shaykh, drunk as a lord, saying to the damsel: "O my lady, I am your slave." They heard her sing. And the Caliph, who was enraptured, said that he must go in and join them; but Ja'afar said: not as a Caliph; and a fisherman was passing, Karim, with a net on his shoulder, who knew the Caliph at once, and fell down on his knees. "Get up," said the Caliph, "give me your coat." The fisherman gave him a gaberdine of coarse wool, patched in a hundred places. The Caliph put it on. He wound his head-cloth round his face. He took the net on his shoulder; and into the pavilion he walked, in the character of a fisherman, with a basket of fish.

"Lice!" said the King, suddenly, from the pillow. "The coat. It had lice." He was shaking. "Lord, the fisherman said: Do not trouble about the lice; they are old inhabitants." "He said that!" said the King. "He said that, to the Caliph?" "He said, Commander of the Faithful, there are lice on this coat from before your reign." The King laughed so that the bed moved. I saw the old nurse, in the corner, raise her head for the first time, and look at him with an expression I do not know how to name; and bend over her mending again; and I saw that her hands were not quite steady.

The Caliph, in the coat, with a basket of fish, was received by Shaykh Ibrahim with an oath: out of here, you scoundrel! And Nur al-Din, who was hungry, and an honest soul, said: let him in. They had the fish fried. The damsel sang again. And the Caliph, who had come in a fisherman's coat to hear her, said afterwards, as they went home, that it was the best evening he had ever spent. It came right in the end: he sent for them, and for the evil Vizier of Basra, who was made to kneel; and made the young man Sultan of the city; and the damsel his wife. I give it as I have it, which is shortly, because I fell asleep before the end.

The old nurse was gone when I woke. In the morning the sand-glass was on the table beside the Roll, with a strip of cloth tied round the neck of it. "He tied it himself," said the maid. "Last night, after you had both gone to sleep. He sat there with it for a while, and then he tied it." I did not know what it meant. I know now. It meant that the hours in that room had begun to belong to someone.

That afternoon the King sent for my father. My father came, with his hands empty, and stood in the doorway of the room, and my sister, who was lying on the bed with her eyes open, turned her head. They had not spoken since the night of the supper. "Father," she said. He crossed the carpet in four steps, and went down on one knee beside the bed, and took her hand in both of his, and put his forehead against it. He did not speak. After a long time she said, in an ordinary voice, "I thought about your ass, Father." "My ass?" "In the tale. The ox and the ass. I thought about it on the fourth night. The ass was punished for advising the ox, and the ox got a day's rest by it. Someone pays. I think it was a true tale." "It was a bad tale," said my father, into her hand. "It was a true one," said my sister, "and I did it anyway." And they stayed so for a while, not saying anything, my father with his head against her hand, and the old nurse in the corner mending, and the sand-glass with its strip of cloth on the table; and I went out into the passage, because I had an idea I should not be there.

Night 44. Shahrazad. Present. Open: Ghanim and the Caliph's sister, ended; a tale of King Omar bin al-Nu'uman and his sons Sharrkan and Zau al-Makan, not yet begun; a book of names, which has two hundred and ninety-one names in it; and a child, which has no name yet.

## Chapter 13 · Nights Forty-five to One Hundred and Six: King Omar and His Sons, and What Changed in the Room

I am not going to give you the tale of King Omar bin al-Nu'uman and his sons, and I had better say why before I am asked. It took sixty-two nights. In the thirty volumes of the chroniclers it fills a good part of a volume, and the chroniclers got it from my sister's mouth at the end of the thousand nights, when she had told it, and the rest, a second time, to a table of scribes; and they got a good deal of it wrong, as I have seen, and I have a good deal of it wrong myself. I lost the thread in the second month. I could not name now the three Viziers, or tell you who put the poison in the sweetmeat. I can tell you what changed in the room. That I did not sleep through.

It began, my sister said on the forty-fifth night, with a King. He was Lord of Baghdad and Khorasan and the Isles of India and China, and he had three hundred and sixty castles, one for each day; and he had a son, Sharrkan, a great fighter, born of a free wife, and a younger son, Zau al-Makan, and a daughter, from a Greek slave girl called Sophia who had been the daughter of an emperor and did not mention it. There was a great hoard. There was a war, and a treachery, and a letter. I mean to say that the tale had everything. It had a hundred things, and each one of them had a hundred things in it, and the whole was a wheel. And in the first week the King sat bolt upright and said, "What is a sister to a King?" and "Where is the Greek emperor now?" and "How many men?" because it was a story about armies, and he had been a King of armies for twelve years.

Then Sharrkan went out to the border of the Greek country with ten thousand horse, and one night, being restless, he left the camp alone and walked down a wady, and came to a meadow with a stream in it, and in the meadow two women.

One was a girl, said my sister, about eighteen, and tall, with an arm like a sword; and the other was a very old woman, thin as a rake, with a face like a bit of dried hide, who was holding the girl by the girdle and saying: "Come, come, my lady Abriza, you said you would wrestle." Sharrkan hid behind a tree. The old woman stood up to the girl and the girl threw her; and she got up and went at the girl again, with her arms crooked like a crab's, and threw her again; and my sister gave the two bouts with the greatest care, the old woman's grunts, the girl's laughing, the sound of a body on grass; so that the King put his hand over his mouth, and the nurse in her corner put down her mending.

"Sharrkan laughed," said my sister, "so loud that they heard him."

"And they took him," said the King.

"They did not take him, lord. The girl called, Who is there? And he came out and said, I am a traveller, a Muslim, a soldier of the King of Baghdad, and I am looking for a hospitable place to spend the night. And the girl said: A soldier. Then you can wrestle." He said he could not wrestle with a lady. She said: You will wrestle, or you will give me your horse, and your sword; I will take them from you. And he wrestled her."

"Did he throw her?" said the King.

"No, lord. She threw him."

"Once?"

"Three times." My sister gave it very gravely. "He took hold of her round the waist, and his fingers sank into the soft of her. And he forgot what he was doing. And she took him by the thigh and the neck and tripped him, and he fell on his back; and she laughed, and said, Are you an eater of dead men's meat? Get up. And he got up, and the second time he got himself ready, and she threw him from a hold he had never heard of. And the third time he fought in earnest, and she threw him as a woman throws a basin of slops out of a window."

The King lay on his back and laughed until the tears ran into his ears. "Good," he said. "Good. That is a woman who knows what she is about." And my sister, with a perfectly straight face, said that Sharrkan had been of the same opinion, and had in the course of that night taken a wholly new view of the Greek nation; and that the girl's name was Abriza, and she was a princess, and the old woman who had held her girdle was Zat al-Dawahi, which is to say Mother of Calamities, and that he would hear a great deal of her.

I shall not give what followed. It was war, and a love, and a long journey; and it was a brother and a sister who lost each other at a gate in the dark, he going one way and she another, and were sold, as slaves, to different masters in different cities, and did not meet for seven years; and the seven years took forty nights.

"Seven years!" said the King. It was the sixty-eighth night. He had been listening to the brother and the sister for eight nights. "She is in Jerusalem and he is in Damascus, and the Greek has taken the town, and he does not know where she is." "No, lord." "Does she know that he is alive?" "She believes him dead." "Why does it take forty nights?"

I looked up. My sister had her hands in her lap. She was a good deal rounder in the face by that time, and had a smudge of fatigue under each eye, and she did not hurry.

"Because the years had things in them, lord."

"I do not want the things. A man comes in and says, Your brother is in Damascus. Why does that not occur to anyone?"

"Because no one knows, lord. The brother is a different man in Damascus than he was at the gate; he has a different name. The sister is veiled. There are two hundred miles of road, and it is a war."

"It is a war," said the King, "and it is forty nights."

"Yes."

"Forty nights to tell, or seven years to happen?"

My sister was silent for some time. The old nurse had stopped mending. "Both, lord," she said.

"I want them to meet on the third night," said the King; and then, after a pause, in a smaller voice, "and I do not want it to be the third night." I know what he meant. He wanted the end, and he wanted the thing that came before the end, and he knew now that he could not have the first without losing the second, and that the whole art of the business, which he had been getting to the bottom of for sixty-eight nights, was the keeping of that hunger exactly as it was. He knew it, and he hated it, and he would not have given it up. "Go on," he said. "No. Not tonight. Tomorrow. Let them be in Damascus another night." And he turned over on his side and slept; and my sister, who had been given a night off by the one man in the world who could not afford it, lay down beside him with her eyes open, looking at the canopy, and I saw her put her hand on her stomach.

Nights 45 to 60. Shahrazad. Present, sixteen strokes. Open: King Omar and his sons; Sharrkan and the girl Abriza; Zat al-Dawahi, who is old; a book of names; and a child, which has no name yet.

It was in these weeks that my father began to bring news from the hall of audience. The King had gone back to it, in the second month; he sat in the morning, and judged, and in the evening came up to the room with the dust of it on him. My father, who stood behind the throne with the book of the day, told me what he saw. A man had come with his wife's brother to accuse her of a lover. The King listened to the end. "Have you asked her?" he said. The man said he had not. "Then go home," said the King, "and ask her; and come back tomorrow and tell me what she says." The court, said my father, gasped like a roomful of men who have seen a camel walk on the water. The man went; and came back; and the lover turned out to be her cousin, a boy of thirteen, who had brought her a letter from her mother. "He asks the second question now," said my father, in the voice of a man reporting a miracle in a small way of business. "He has begun to ask the second question, Dunyazad."

And on the sixty-first night something occurred which I think none of us noticed but I. As on every other night, I held the Open and was about to read it; and the King, from the pillow, said, before I had begun: "The Greek has crossed the river, and the old woman has not heard." My sister's mouth opened, and she said, "Yes." He went on: "And Sharrkan is in the tent, and the girl has not yet come." "Yes, lord." He had it all. He had it better than I. He had been carrying the stair in his head for a month. I let my hand fall, and the book with it, and from that night on I did not read the Open aloud. I want to say that it was the end of a duty and the beginning of something better. It was, I think, only that: she had told something to someone, and he had kept it; and I was no longer the only one.

Nights 61 to 85. Shahrazad. Present, twenty-five strokes. Open: the brother in Damascus and the sister in Jerusalem, who have not met; the war of the Greeks; a book of names, which is in its third book; and a child, which has no name yet.

I must also say that at about the eightieth night the cradle came. It was carried up the stairs by two men in a handcart, with a cloth over it, and they put it down in the corner where the nurse sat. She got up and took off the cloth. It was a small cradle of carved cedar, very old, a little scorched at one end, with the figure of a bird on the headboard. "He broke the bird's beak when he was two," said the nurse to nobody. "I kept it. I thought: someone will want it." She had kept it forty years in a house by the river, with seven cats, and the cats had slept in it. The King came in at dusk, and saw it, and stood for some time, saying nothing; and then he went across the carpet and stood over it, and did not touch it. "It is smaller than I remember," he said. "They always are, lord," said the nurse.

By the ninetieth night the side gate had begun to get presents. I had not expected it; it had happened first by accident, a woman laying a tiny shirt on the step beside the book while she waited, and saying nothing, as if she had left it by mistake. Then a wooden spoon. Then a rattle made of a gourd with seeds in it. By the end of the week there was a heap of them in the lee of the wall, small things, hand-sewn, a cap, a ball of knotted rag, a pair of shoes no bigger than a walnut, and a thin silver bangle with no name on it; and nobody would say who had left what. The stationer came and looked at them. My father looked at them for a long time. "What shall I do with them?" I said. "Take them up," said my father. "Give them to the nurse." I took them up. The King was in the room, at the table, with the Roll. He saw the arms full of little cloths, and he got up, and took the bangle from my hand, and held it in his palm, and weighed it, and gave it back. "Keep it with the book," he said. And the nurse took the cap and the shirt and put them in the cradle, folded; and nobody in the room spoke; and I remember that the lamp was low, and that there was a smell of cardamom.

On the hundredth night my father asked leave to speak. He had been standing in the doorway, as always; he had not got into the way of coming further, and the King had not, I think, learned how to ask him. "Lord," he said, "I have counted." The King, who was cutting a pear for my sister with his own knife, with a good deal of care, looked up. "How many?" "I have the number, lord." The King held the pear still. "Keep it," he said. "Not yet." And my father bowed, and went out to the passage, where he sat down on the floor, and put his head against the wall, and I do not think he moved for an hour; for he had made the number in his head three times, from the beginning, and every time it came out the same, and every time he had felt, as he said to me afterwards, the paper under his hand.

By the hundredth night the brother and the sister were in the same city, within a stone's throw, each one thinking the other dead; and I could not bear it any longer, and I do not think the King could either; and on the hundred and fifth night my sister, in a voice that I think was near to breaking, and not for the story, told how, in a market in Damascus, in front of a seller of perfumes, they met. The King made a sound I had not heard, and put his hand across his eyes; and she described it: how the sister saw a man who looked like someone she had loved, and could not speak; and how he saw a veiled woman with a particular way of holding her wrist; and how neither said a word; and how, from behind the veil, she said his name.

"After forty nights," said the King.

"After seven years," said my sister. "The seven years are the story's, lord. The forty nights are ours."

He took his hand from his face. "It was worth the time," he said, to the canopy, quite quietly. And I understood that this was what he had been waiting to be able to say.

Nights 86 to 106. Shahrazad. Present, twenty-one strokes. Open: the brother and the sister reunited in a market in Damascus; the war not yet ended; the tale of Taj al-Muluk and the Princess Dunya, not yet begun; a book of names; and a child, which has no name yet.

## Chapter 14 · Nights One Hundred and Seven to One Hundred and Twenty-four: Taj al-Muluk, and Aziz and Azizah

On the hundred and eighth day a letter came from Samarkand. It had been thirty days on the road. It was on a single sheet, sealed with a signet I had not seen since the evening of the garden, and addressed, in the hand of a scribe who had been told to take his time, to the King of the Coasts and Islands, my lord and brother. The chamberlain brought it up himself and put it into the King's hand, and went out backwards, as the boy with the cardamom had done; and the King read it standing at the window, once, and again, with his back to the room.

"He has heard," said the King. He did not say who. He said it to the glass of the window. "They talk of it in the bazaar of Samarkand, he says. He has a man who came by the caravan road, who says that the King of the Coasts is married to the Vizier's daughter and she has lasted a hundred nights. He writes: Is it true? And then he writes: Is it you?" There was a long silence in which I could hear the nurse's thread. "I do not know how to answer the second question," said the King.

He had never, in all those nights, said anything to me which I was not meant to take as a command. I did not know what to do with it. I said, "Lord, shall I fetch a pen?" He turned round. For a moment I thought he had not heard; then he went to the table and sat down, and pushed the ink toward me. "You write a fair hand," he said. "You ruled the page. Write: Brother. It is true. And then: Come." I wrote it. "And then?" "And then nothing," said the King. "He will know what else." And he looked at what I had written for some time with an expression I should find difficult to give a name to; and signed it, and had it sealed; and it went out that morning on the fastest horse in the stable, with a boy who was told to ride all day and take no rest.

By this time my sister could no longer lie on her back. The nurse had let out her gowns twice. She told the stories sitting up, propped on four pillows, with her knees apart and a hand under her stomach as under a loaf that might fall; and the King, who had never in his life arranged a pillow, had learned how. It was a thing to see, though I saw it every night: a man who had read a thousand names in one breath each, standing at the head of a bed with a bolster in his arms, tilting his head, asking, "Higher? Lower?" And my sister, with her eyes shut: "Lower, lord." And he would shift it a hand's breadth, and say, in the voice of a man trying a key: "Now?"

That night the King said, "The garden. The one with the cousin," and my sister, who had a hand under her breast as she sat up and moved with the care of a woman carrying a very full bowl, began on the tale of Taj al-Muluk and the Princess Dunya. I shall not give it. A prince in a city behind the mountains of Ispahan who would not marry; a minister who found him a bride; a bride-train and a hunting trip and a caravan of merchants; and, among the merchants, a young man with a hand-kerchief of linen with two gazelles embroidered on it, who wept when he took it out, and who said that he could not sell it, nor show it, nor say why. And the prince, who was a person who always wanted to know, said: "Tell me." I shall give you his answer, which took seven nights, and which my sister called Aziz and Azizah. It is what I remember best of the first hundred and fifty. It is the one I cannot tell without a second lamp.

He had a cousin, said my sister, the daughter of his father's brother. They had been brought up in one house, on one carpet; they had been betrothed in the cradle; and on the Friday of the wedding, with the guests invited and the kadi coming, he went out to the bath, put on new clothes, and, turning into a street he did not know, sat down to rest on a stone bench in the heat, and a handkerchief fell on him from a window.

"Who threw it?" said the King. He was lying with his hands behind his head.

"A lady, lord, at a lattice. She looked at him. She put a finger in her mouth, and joined two fingers and laid them on her breast, and closed the shutter. And he did not go to his wedding."

The King took in a long breath. "He forgot."

"He forgot, lord. He sat on the stone until the sun went down, and went home at midnight, and his cousin was sitting in tears in the saloon; and she told him that the guests had come and eaten and waited and gone, and his father had sworn there would be no marriage this year. She asked where he had been. And he told her. He showed her the handkerchief."

"And she?" said the King, in the dark.

"She read what was written on it. And she cried. And then, lord, she wiped her eyes, and she said: Tell me what signs she made. He told her. And she told him what they meant."

There was a long silence. I looked at my sister. She was looking at the lamp.

It was the thing I found hardest to bear in the telling, and I find it hard in the writing: the cousin who loved him, sitting up with him through the nights, reading the signs of the other woman, a finger in the mouth, a mirror in a bag, a lamp on a pot of flowers, as one reads for a friend the letter of a man who is going to leave one. "It means that you are to her as her soul is to her body," said the cousin. "It means, come back in five days. It means, sit in the dyer's shop. It means, when the sun is down; and the hair over her face is the dark; and the pot of green things is the garden behind the street; and the lamp is the pavilion." She dressed him, and washed him, and put him on the road. She sat up with him when he was sick. She told him stories to make him sleep. On the fifth day he went, as the signs had said, to sit before the dyer's shop; and the shop was shut, and no one came, and the sun went down, and he walked home like a drunken man. She was standing in the saloon with one hand against the wall, and she asked him, smiling, why he had not stayed the night with his beloved; and he kicked her in the breast.

"He kicked her," said the King.

"He kicked her, lord. She fell. Her forehead hit the edge of the dais, and a wooden peg; and it was cut open, and bled. And she said nothing. She got up and made tinder of a rag and bound it, and wiped the floor, and it was as if nothing had happened. And she came to him smiling. She said: I said what I said because I had a headache, and I had meant to be bled; and now you have eased my head. Tell me what happened."

My sister stopped. I saw her breathe. She laid her hand on the side of her stomach. The King did not move for so long that I thought he had gone to sleep. Then I heard, quite clearly, in the dark, a sound I had not heard from him before, which was a man swallowing.

"Her head," he said.

"Yes, lord."

"She said it was her head."

"Yes."

"And he believed her."

"He believed her," said my sister. "And he told her all about the other woman."

"For seven nights," said the King; and I understood that he had been counting.

He went to the garden the next night, my sister said, and found a pavilion lit and a table laid and no one in it; and he was hungry from weeks of not eating, and ate, and slept; and in the morning he found on his stomach a piece of salt and a piece of charcoal. His cousin read them to him: salt, for the lover who is insipid; charcoal, for the face that must be blackened. The second night he ate and slept again, and found a cube of bone and a stick and a date stone and a carob pod; his cousin read: Thy body is present but thy heart is absent; and, a green date burns the vitals of the lover; and, the lover's heart is wearied. The third night he did not eat, but drank, ten cups, and was found outside the garden with a butcher's knife and an iron weight on his chest. "Her right eye," said the cousin, quietly. "She swears by it. She says: if you sleep again, I will cut your throat."

Each morning he came home like a man who has lost a battle, and each morning she stood at the door, and washed him, and fed him with her own hand, bite by bite, and sat by his bed with a fan until he slept, and wept into her sleeve where he could not see. Her wound did not close. It was in this part that my sister's voice began to change, I mean to say that it slowed, as the voice of a person slows who has come to a particular step on a stair. On the fourth night he was awake. He stayed awake, with his fingers on his eyelids. And at the last hour of the dark the lady came with ten maidens in green satin, and said, laughing: "Because thou hast watched, I know thou art a lover." And they were happy, my sister said, that night; I will not describe it.

"And he forgot," said the King.

"He forgot the couplet his cousin had taught him to say when he left her. He remembered it the next night. It was a verse about patience, lord. It was a verse about a woman who would not live to see the end of it. And the lady, when she heard it, put her hand to her mouth, and said: She who made those lines is dead. He said: She is my cousin; she is at home; she is not dead. And the lady said: Go and see."

I did not look at the King. I looked at the lamp. I could hear, in the corner, that the nurse had stopped breathing as one stops who is waiting for a blow.

"He went home," said my sister. "He heard crying in the street. He asked. And someone said: Azizah. We found her behind the door." She stopped. "Dead," she said. "She had been behind the door, lord, in the saloon, with her head on her knees. They found her when they came to take the carpets up. She had died of it, lord. Of that and the wound and the thing in between." Her voice was perfectly level. "His mother, at the door of the house, said: Her death is on your neck; and may God not acquit you of her blood."

The King was sitting up. He sat with his elbows on his knees and his hands over his mouth, and I saw that he was rocking, a very little, from side to side. The nurse, in the corner, had got up from her stool. She came across the carpet, with her mending still in her hand, and stood by the bed; and after a time she put out her free hand and laid it on the back of his neck, as a woman lays it on the neck of a grown boy who has not wept since he was seven. He did not move away. He said, through his hands, in a voice I did not know: "Behind the door."

"Yes, lord."

"Why behind the door?"

"Because she did not want to be found, lord," said my sister, very gently, "until it was over."

I never learned how long that lasted. I know that the lamp burned down, and that at some point the nurse took it up and trimmed it, and put it down; and that the King lifted his face at last and wiped it on his sleeve like a boy, and looked at my sister, and said: "That was the woman you promised me."

"No, lord," said my sister. "That was another."

"There is another."

"There is another, who is further on. She does not die. She is more patient than this one. I did not know I should tell you this one first." And she put her hand over his, where it lay on the sheet; and he let her.

The rest of Aziz and Azizah I shall give in a line, as I have heard that it must be given: that the young merchant was tricked by an old woman into marrying a girl he did not love, who made him swear by his oath of divorce to come home every night before morning, or lose her; that he kept it, as a man keeps the walls of his prison, a year; that he returned to the garden to find it empty, and the lady who had once met him in it so changed by what she had heard of the dead girl that she would not look at him; that he carried the cloth with the two gazelles from city to city, and was a merchant who could not sell it. It came right, in some fashion, with a prince at the end; I fell asleep. I have no gift for sequels. It was the cousin I remembered.

Nights 107 to 112. Shahrazad. Present, six strokes. Open: Taj al-Muluk, a prince of the mountains of Ispahan, and a young merchant with a handkerchief he will not show; a book of names; a letter that has gone to Samarkand; and a child, which has no name yet.

Nights 113 to 120. Shahrazad. Present, eight strokes. Open: Aziz and Azizah; a woman behind a door; a King who has written the word behind; a book of names; and a child, which has no name yet.

Nights 121 to 124. Shahrazad. Present, four strokes. Open: Aziz the merchant, with a cloth he cannot sell, in the camp of a prince; the oath of divorce; the tale of the Beasts and the Birds, not yet begun; a book of names; and a child, which has no name yet.

## Chapter 15 · Nights One Hundred and Twenty-five to One Hundred and Seventy: The Hashish Eater, the Wolf and the Fox, and the Brother's Arrival

The second half of Aziz and Azizah took eighteen nights, and I have given it to you in a line, and I should like to add to the line only that it was not a worse tale than the first half but a worse listening. The King heard it as a man hears a debt being read aloud. At the end of each night he would say, "And the cousin?" and my sister would say "She is dead, lord," and he would say "Yes," and turn his face to the wall. It was not that he did not wish to hear; it was that he had heard it. When she came to the oath, the young merchant's oath, by which he must be home in his wife's house every night before morning or lose her, the King said, "Before dawn," and nothing more; and my sister, for the first time that I can remember, did not go on at once.

It was the high summer by then, and the city had changed under it. In the dyers' quarter there were eleven men on crates, each with a rag on a stick, and no two of them told the Fisherman alike. The water-sellers had the Hunchback; the bakers the Barber; and a boy of ten at the corner of the street of the coppersmiths, with a drum, had a version of the Wolf and the Fox that I thought no worse than my sister's. And the news ran along with the tales as a dog runs along with a procession. On the hundred and twentieth day the dyers' storyteller added to the end of his Fisherman, to a roar of satisfaction, that the Vizier's daughter was with child. On the hundred and twenty-sixth, that it was a boy. On the hundred and thirtieth, that it was twins. My father came back from the gate with his face quite grey. "They are laying wagers," he said. "On what?" "On whether he will let it be born." I went up and told the King. He was cutting a pear. He cut a slice, and put it in my sister's hand, and cut another, and ate it himself, slowly; and he said, "Let them lay them." And after a time: "Who is giving the odds?"

By the hundred and thirtieth day ninety-two of the dots had been struck out; I counted them, with the Roll upside down, from the other side of the table. A hundred and thirty-eight stood. The King struck each one at dawn with the reed, and it left a small flat stroke across a small round dot; it was a shocking sight, a page of arithmetic, if you did not know. And in the margin of the margin, where the words were, the fifth, which he had written on the ninetieth night, was a word I had to ask him to read to me. It was cradle. And I had stopped writing the book of names in a single column at the gate; I wrote it in two, on both sides of the leaf, and in the evenings I carried it up, and he looked at the last page, and said, "Seven hundred and four." I had not told him the number.

On the hundred and thirty-third night something happened which I had not been told about and which, to the end of my days, I shall be unable to describe without wanting to leave the room. My sister had been sitting with her knees up and her hands folded on the swell of her stomach, in the middle of a sentence about a mule, and she stopped. She said nothing. She took her hands away from herself and looked down, and her face went completely blank, the way a face goes when it is listening to something too fine for the ears; and then she began to laugh, soundlessly, with her mouth open.

"What is it?" said the King. He had put down the Roll.

"Nothing, lord," said my sister. "It moved."

I do not know what he thought. I know that he stood up, and that for a moment he looked like a man who has been handed something extremely hot; and then he said, in a voice such as I had not heard him use to anyone, a voice that was very nearly the voice of a boy asking a favour, "May I?" My sister looked at him. "Yes, lord." He crossed the carpet. He knelt down by the bed, which he had never done, with the stiffness of a man who has not knelt to anything in many years, and laid his hand flat, as one lays it on a very fine horse, on the place she showed him; and waited. Nothing happened. He waited. His mouth was a little open. Then something under his palm gave a push, quite hard, like a heel; and he snatched his hand away as though it had been burnt, and looked at it, and looked at her; and put it back.

The nurse in her corner did not look up. But I saw her mend one stitch twice.

That was the hundred and thirty-third night. I did not write it down. There was nothing in the Roll to write it in. I put it in the book of names, at the end of the day's names, in the last line of the page, in letters so small that I have since had to hold the page to the light to find them: It kicked.

It was in the course of the nights that followed that the King asked me, one evening, not to let her tell a certain story. It had come up in the course of a long and rambling night, the hundred and forty-fourth, when my sister, tired, with her mind running along the stream of the Hashish Eater, a thin and silly tale about a man who ate a piece of hashish in a bath-house, and imagined that the bath attendants were bowing to him, and that he had been made a Vizier, and was carried off, in his mind, to a palace, and ate and drank and gave orders, and was beaten in the end for stealing a towel; she had said, as she finished, that there was one more tale of the kind, a story of a Badawi named Hammad. It was a story of a man who is taken prisoner in a fight in the desert, by a young man and the young man's sister, and given hospitality, and sworn to friendship, and shown a bed. "And on the third day," said my sister, "he said to Hammad: I would like to sleep, and I trust my life to you. And he laid his sword beneath his pillow, and slept. And—"

"Stop," said the King.

He had not raised his voice. He was lying on his back, and had not moved. My sister stopped. I saw the nurse look up. "Not that," said the King. "I know what comes next. I do not want it in the room." "Lord—" "He kills him. The host. In his sleep. With his own sword." My sister said, very gently, "Yes, lord." "I know that story." And I thought: he does know it. I think he knew a hundred of them, and that they were all a single one, with a different name each time; and that he had put that one away at the bottom of his head, with a shroud under it, some years ago, in the dark. "Tell me something with animals," said the King.

So for four nights there were animals. They were the old fables, and they are in the books, and I give only one; it is the one he asked for twice. It is the tale of the Wolf and the Fox.

A fox and a wolf, said my sister, shared a den. The wolf was a tyrant, and ill-tempered; he took the lion's share; and he struck the fox whenever the fox said a word. The fox, one day, said, "O Wolf, be gentle. The sons of Adam are cunning. By their craft they bring down the birds of the air and haul the fish from the sea; one day they will catch you." The wolf hit him so that he lay senseless. When the fox revived, he smiled at the wolf, and made his apologies; and the wolf, who was pleased, said that he forgave him. The fox lay down, and said to himself that the blow of the teacher is at first hurtful, but afterwards sweeter than honey.

Now one day the fox went by a vineyard, and saw a breach in the wall. "No," he said to himself. "Why is there a breach? A man who sees a hole in the ground and does not look at it is a man who wishes to die." And he looked, and it was a pit, covered over with matting and dust, which the owner had dug to catch the beasts that spoiled the vines. "Praise God that I did not go in," said the fox; "and I wonder whether my enemy, who beats me every day and takes the lion's share, will go in." And he laughed at the thought, and went and found the wolf and said to him: "God has opened a way for you into the vineyard without toil. The owner is dead, torn by wolves; the grapes are shining on every tree." And the wolf, whose greed had got hold of his wits, arose and went; and the fox lay behind him and pretended to be dead, and watched. The wolf stepped on the matting and fell through.

The King had turned on his side. "He laughed," he said.

"Yes, lord."

"The fox laughed. He looked down into the pit, and the wolf was weeping, and the fox wept with him."

"He did, lord. And the wolf said, Is it pity for me that you weep? And the fox said: No. I weep that you did not fall in before I met you, for then I should have had a quiet life."

"He wept," said the King, "because he was glad."

"It was both, lord," said my sister.

"Yes," said the King, after a moment; and I saw that he knew it. "Both." He lay for some time without saying anything. Then: "And the wolf said: Do not hate me for what I did. He who has power and forgives, his reward is with God. And the fox said: you hit me." "Yes." "And that was that." "It was not quite that, lord. The fox, in the end, grew careless. He thought he had the vineyard to himself; he went into it, and fell into the same pit, or another. The owner found them both there in the morning." "Both," said the King. He closed his eyes. "He should have thrown him a rope." "And then the wolf would have gone on hitting him." "Yes," said the King. "Yes, he would. But then there would have been no pit." I do not know what he meant. I think he meant: no pit for the fox either. I think he meant a number of things. I wrote down only the plain words of the Open, which were: the wolf, the fox, the vineyard, the pit.

I give the rest of the hundred and fifty nights in a heap, because they went by like a river in flood. There were more fables: the mouse and the ichneumon; the cat and the crow; the flea and the mouse; the hedgehog and the wood-pigeons; a weaver who was a fool; a thief with a monkey; and I recall that the King asked for the one about the sparrow and the peacock to be told a second time, and then a third. And then the long story of Ali bin Bakkar of Persia and Shams al-Nahar, the Caliph's favourite, a story of two lovers who were forbidden to meet and met in the houses of friends, and sent each other letters, and were found out; I gave it to the nurse once, who said that she had known a pair. It lasted eighteen nights. I cannot give it. I know that the King asked on the third night whether the lovers' letters were in verse or prose, and my sister said that they were in verse, and he said, "Of course," and smiled.

Nights 125 to 141. Shahrazad. Present, seventeen strokes. Open: the young merchant Aziz and an oath of divorce; the prince Taj al-Muluk; a book of names; and a child, which has no name yet, and which has moved.

Nights 142 to 147. Shahrazad. Present, six strokes. Open: a man who ate hashish in a bath; a Badawi named Hammad, whose story was stopped; a book of names; and a child, which has no name yet.

Nights 148 to 152. Shahrazad. Present, five strokes. Open: the wolf and the fox, in a pit and out of it; the mouse and the ichneumon; a book of names; and a child, which has no name yet.

Nights 153 to 169. Shahrazad. Present, seventeen strokes. Open: Ali bin Bakkar of Persia and Shams al-Nahar the Caliph's favourite, who have been found out; a book of names, which is in its third book; and a child, which has no name yet.

The brother came on the hundred and seventieth morning. We had not expected him. I had thought, I believe, of a day, of a letter, of a message from the gate; and instead there was only the cough of the porter in the court, and horses, and a sound in the passage as of a man in boots who has learned to put them down softly. I was writing the line. The King was at the window with his back to the door, and I saw him go still. The door opened without a knock. The man who stood in it was tall, brown from the road, in a plain travelling coat; he had a face very like the King's, but older, I thought, though he was the younger; more tired; and he had a way of holding his shoulders as if some weight had been taken off them years ago and they had not quite learned the trick of standing without it.

He did not say anything. He looked at the room: at the bed, with its four pillows; at my sister, sitting up in it with her hair down and her hands on her stomach; at the cradle, with the baby clothes folded in it; at the nurse; at me. He looked longest at the table where the Roll was. "Shah Zaman," said the King, without turning round. "You came." "You said, Come." "I did." "So I came." The King turned. They looked at one another across the length of that room, two men who had walked out of two kingdoms together on a night long ago, and had come to a meadow by the sea; and I had never before seen on a face the look which each of them wore, which was the look of a man who has been wrong in one particular way for three years and finds that the other has been wrong in a different way, and has not died of it.

"Is it true?" said Shah Zaman. His voice was rough. He looked at my sister. "Is she—"

"Come and see," said the King; and then, in the smallest voice, "Sit down. You look as though you have not eaten since Samarkand."

Night 170. Shahrazad. Present. Open: Ali bin Bakkar and Shams al-Nahar, the story ended; a tale of Kamar al-Zaman, not yet begun; the King's brother Shah Zaman, who has come from Samarkand and stands in the door; a book of names; and a child, which has no name yet.

## Chapter 16 · Nights One Hundred and Seventy-one to Two Hundred and Thirty-six: Kamar al-Zaman and Budur

The King's brother stayed. He was given a room along the passage with a window on the garden, and the first three days he slept in it, so that the servants began to say he had died; on the fourth he came to the door of the other room at sunset and stood in it, and the King, who was cutting a pear, looked up and said, "Sit," and he sat. He sat on the floor, on a rug the nurse brought, with his back against the end of the bed. He sat next to me. I had my green cushion and he had his rug, and between them there was a space of about a yard; and for the next sixty-six nights I think he did not move more than a hand's breadth from that place. I should like to say that we talked. We did not talk. Two people who have been at the edge of a thing for a long time do not need to; we sat, and listened, and now and then one of us turned a head very slightly toward the other when something was said, as a man looks at his neighbour in a mosque when the imam makes a mistake.

The King introduced them on that first evening, in the formal manner, with his brother standing in the doorway and my sister propped on her four pillows with her hair over one shoulder. "This is Shah Zaman, my brother, King of Samarkand," he said. And then, after the smallest pause, as a man steps on to a bridge that he has not yet tried: "This is my wife, Shahrazad. And this is Dunyazad, the Vizier's younger daughter, who keeps the Roll." It was the first time he had given either of us a name before another person. My sister inclined her head. "You are very welcome in this house, lord," she said. "I am told you have not eaten." "I am told so too," said Shah Zaman, with a curious little bow, as though to a judge; and he looked, for a moment, almost as shy as I was.

He was a quiet man. He ate what he was given. He watched the King as one watches a house that has been long shut and has just been opened and aired, and he said, to me, on the sixth night, in a voice so low I barely heard it: "He has put on flesh." "Yes." "He looks like our father." "I did not know your father." "He looked like this when my mother was ill." And he turned away, and said no more; and I did not understand until much later that he was telling me that the face the King wore now was not a new one but one that had been laid up under the other for a good many years.

He had brought presents, which he laid on the table in the morning in a heap, with the look of a man who has been asked to a house and has no idea what is wanted. For the child, a bolt of Samarkand silk, undyed, soft as breath, "for the cradle." For my sister a book, a small one, in a binding of green leather, which he said he had not known how to choose and so had taken off his own shelf; and she looked at the title and said, gravely, that she had read it, but never in his copy. And for me, because he had heard from the King that there was a book kept in the room, two reams of Samarkand paper, thin and hard, the best in the world, packed in sandalwood shavings. "I thought," he said, "that a modest book might want more leaves." I took it. I did not know what to say. He read the first page of the Roll, that morning, standing at the table, where the flyleaf says in the chief clerk's hand what it says; and then he turned to the margin of the margin and read that; and then he put it down and said to me, quietly, "He is keeping it." "Yes." "I did not think he could." "Nor did I," I said.

In the afternoons the brothers talked at the window. I could hear them from my cushion, if I did not move, and I did not. They spoke of ordinary things at first, the road, the price of grain at Samarkand, a horse; and then one afternoon the King said, without turning: "Do you still count?"

There was a silence. Shah Zaman put his hand inside his coat, and brought out nothing; he laid it flat on his chest. "Five hundred and seventy-two," he said. "Every time I see a ring." "That is what she said." "That is what she said. I had mine from our father. It was iron." "Mine was gold," said the King. "I gave it to her gladly." They stood a while. "She was in a glass box," said Shah Zaman. "I think of that. I think of the seven locks. She had five hundred and seventy-two rings and no house." "She had a Jinni." "He kept her very carefully," said Shah Zaman. And the King laughed, a short, shocked laugh, and put his hand on his brother's shoulder. It was a thing I had not seen him do to anyone. I looked at the carpet.

That night the King said, "Kamar al-Zaman," and my sister began.

There was a king, she said, Shahriman, lord of the Khalidan islands, who had four wives and no son, and who asked his Vizier what he should do. "Pray," said the Vizier. The King prayed; and a son was born, a son so beautiful that the midwives forgot what they had come to do. He was called Kamar al-Zaman, the Moon of the Age. At fifteen he was a marvel; and his father, who loved him beyond reason and was beginning to feel the weight of his years, said: "My son, I should like to see you married while I live." And the prince, bowing, said that he would never marry. He had read, he said, about women. He quoted a line of verse about what they do to a man's money and his head. His father said, "Think of it." He thought of it for a year. At the end of the year, in the middle of a grand audience, in front of the Emirs and the Viziers, his father put the question again; and the prince said, loudly, that the King was in his dotage.

A silence, my sister said. The King struck the Prince with the flat of his hand, and ordered him seized, and put in the old tower with the Roman well, and left there with a couch and a lamp and a bit of food; and went home and could not sleep for love and anger.

I saw Shah Zaman's shoulders move. "He locked him up," he said, almost to himself. "For not wishing to love." "For not wishing to marry," said the King; and then, after a long moment: "It is not the same." "No," said Shah Zaman. "But I wonder."

The prince, said my sister, sat in the tower, and ate a little, and prayed at the well; and in the deep of the night, as he slept, with the lamp burning at his head, a Jinniyah called Maymunah, a daughter of one of the kings of the Jinn, came up out of the well, as she did every night, to take the air; and saw a light in the tower. She stood over the bed. She looked at the sleeper for an hour without moving. He lay with his shirt open at the neck, and his hair across his face, and the lamp lit the line of his cheek. She said: Blessed be God, the best of creators. She said: How could they have the heart to leave him here? And she bent and kissed him between the eyes, and drew the sheet over his shoulder, and sat on the foot of the couch. She did not wish him any harm.

And then, said my sister, there was a beating of wings in the air; and Dahnash, an Ifrit, flew in through the window, and saw her, and was afraid. He was her inferior. "Do not strike me," he said, "in the name of the seal of Solomon, and I will tell you something extraordinary that I have seen." He had been in China, he said, in the realm of King Ghayur, and he had seen the King's daughter, Budur, who was the most beautiful thing in the world, and she was about to be married, and she would not marry. She had read, said Dahnash, about men. She had said her father was in his dotage. Her father had shut her in a tower, on an island in the sea.

I felt Shah Zaman go still beside me. I felt it as one feels a bird land on a roof.

"Show me," said Maymunah; and he took her through the air, over land and sea, to a tower on an island in the Inland Sea, and in the tower, on a bed of silk, with a lamp, the Princess. And Maymunah looked at her for an hour; and she bent, and saw what she saw; and said, "By God, they are like two halves of an apple." Then they began to quarrel. Dahnash said the girl was more beautiful. Maymunah said the boy. Each of them swore by the seal of Solomon, and by the Throne, and by their own mothers, who were not good oaths. In the end Maymunah said, "We will bring them together. We will put them side by side, and compare them, as one holds two pieces of silk to the light." And Dahnash lifted the Princess in his arms, still asleep, and flew with her, and laid her down on the couch beside the Prince, under one sheet.

I do not know that I have ever heard my sister tell a thing as she told that. She did not hurry and she did not slow. She let the picture be: the lamp, the two faces on the one pillow, the hair of the girl lying across the shoulder of the boy, the breath of the one and the breath of the other, which went in and out together, as if each were the other's tide. There was an Ifrit and a Jinniyah in the room; she let them be there, and fall silent; she let them stand, a little stooped, as people stand over a cradle. "Like two halves of one thing," said my sister, in the voice of Maymunah; and I heard, beside me, a noise. It was Shah Zaman. He had put the back of his hand against his mouth.

They called in a judge, a one-eyed hunchback Jinni, named Qashqash, who decided that they were equal, and that the only way to know was to wake each in turn, while the other slept; and see who loved the other more. So Dahnash, in the form of a flea, bit the Prince on the neck, and he woke. And there, in his bed, in the lamplight, was a girl. He looked at her. He did not speak. He looked at her for an hour, with his heart knocking, until it was dawn in his eyes; and he put out his hand, and touched her cheek. He tried to wake her. He spoke to her; he kissed her; she slept as the dead sleep. "I know you," he said, to her sleeping face, in a voice so low I felt it rather than heard it. "My father has done this. He has put you here to catch me." He was angry, and in love, in the same moment, and could not tell the two apart. And in the end, after hours of looking, he took her ring off her finger, and put it on his own, and put on her finger his; and he lay down beside her, and slept, because the Jinn had put it on him to sleep.

"Rings," said Shah Zaman.

It was one syllable, and he said it in the dark, quite softly, in a voice that cracked in the middle. The King did not turn his head. But I saw him put his hand across the space between the bed and the rug where his brother sat, and rest it a moment on the top of his brother's head, as one rests a hand on the head of a child who has said something true.

"They exchange rings," said my sister, evenly. "It is how they know, when they wake, that it was not a dream." And she went on.

They did the same with the Princess, on the next night, and with the same result: she woke, and found a young man in her bed, and took the ring off his finger, and put on her own, and lay down. In the morning each woke alone: he in the tower of the Khalidan islands, she in the tower on the Inland Sea, and each of them looked at a hand with a ring on it that was not theirs. And each of them, said my sister, lay sick from that morning, with a love that no physician could treat, for the one beloved whose name they did not know, and whose face they had seen in the dark once, and would not forget.

I give the rest as I have it, in my poor way, as it took sixty-six nights. The Prince's father found his son wasting, and sent for doctors, and took him out of the tower, and nothing helped; the Princess's father shut his daughter up again, and had four physicians hanged. Then the Princess's foster-brother, whose name was Marzawan, set out to find a prince with a certain face, and was shipwrecked, and was thrown up by the sea under the very palace where the Prince lay; and he was the first man in the tale to say, "I know her." There was a journey, and a lie about astrology told in a marketplace, and a ring folded inside a letter, and two people who had known each other for one night were married at once. And then, I am sorry to say, the tale went on for another thirty. A bird took a jewel out of the Prince's hand, and he ran after it. The Princess woke alone, put on his clothes, which fitted her, rode into the city of the Ebony Islands as a prince, was taken for one, and was married, in good faith, to the King's daughter, and had to be a husband for a year. The Prince dug in a garden, and found gold. They were brought together in the end, and he had two wives and two sons, Amjad and As'ad, and each boy was loved by the other's mother as no mother should love a son; there were two letters from two queens, and two boys who would not do what was asked, and a treasurer who could not do what he was told, and the boys were sent out into the world with nothing, and their father built them tombs. It was a tale in which people were always being taken for each other. My sister told it in the dark, with the nurse in her corner and the two men beside the bed, and my own heart in my mouth; and on the two hundred and thirty-sixth night, at the end of a night in which one brother lay in chains in a Magian's cellar, in a city where the other was Vizier, a crier went through the streets calling for a young man of a certain face, and the Magian's daughter, who had been told to beat the prisoner and had not, went down and told him; and he went out, and up to the palace, and the two of them fell on each other's necks and lay a long time as if dead.

I did not hear what came next. It is not that I fell asleep. It is that I looked round, at the end of that night, and the two of them, my sister's husband and his brother, were sitting side by side on the end of the bed, with their arms round each other's shoulders, not saying anything at all, and each of them with his face turned a little away, so as not to be seen.

Nights 171 to 190. Shahrazad. Present, twenty strokes. Open: the Prince of the Khalidan islands and the Princess of China, who have each worn the other's ring; a book of names; and a child, which has no name yet.

Nights 191 to 236. Shahrazad. Present, forty-six strokes. Open: Amjad and As'ad, who have found one another in the city of the Magians, and their father, who has built them tombs; a book of names, which is in its fourth book and has more than nine hundred names in it; thirty-two dots to be struck; and a child, which has no name yet.

## Chapter 17 · Nights Two Hundred and Thirty-seven to Two Hundred and Sixty-seven: Ni'amah and Naomi, and Ala al-Din Abu al-Shamat

Bahram was given his life on a condition, and he paid the first instalment of his gratitude by telling two boys a tale, to comfort them. That is how my sister began the 237th night: with a man she had not liked, doing a kind thing in the only coin he had. The tale was of Ni'amah and Naomi, who were brought up in one cradle at Kufa, he the son of the house and she a slave bought as a baby with her mother; and when they were old enough to be told what the law thought of them they were married, and for two years nothing happened, which tellers pass over in a clause. Then the Governor heard that the girl could sing, and an old woman came to the door in a coat of undyed wool, with a rosary of a thousand beads, to ask leave to pray in a blessed house. It is the oldest trick there is, and it works every time, because the people who open the door are kind. She came every day for a month. On the last day she took the girl to see the holy men, and the girl was not seen again, and the Governor sent her to the Caliph at Damascus with a letter to say that he had bought her.

The rest is the boy's, and it took four nights. He lay sick for three months. A Persian physician, who said that there was nothing wrong with him that Damascus could not mend, took him there, set him up in a shop among a great many glass jars, and called him his son; and an old woman of the Caliph's household came to the shop with the water of a sick girl called Naomi. He sent the medicine in a box with a paper folded in it. The girl drank it, and read the paper, and laughed, which she had not done since she was taken. Then he was dressed as a slave-girl, and taught to walk with the left shoulder forward and to sway, and was led into the palace and told to count five doors and go in at the sixth; and he counted wrong, and sat down on a couch in a room full of ambergris, and the Caliph's sister came in.

She was a quick woman. She took him for a girl, and then did not; and when he said, "I am Ni'amah, and I have risked my life for my slave," she said, "No harm shall come to you," and sent for Naomi, and the three of them ate and sang until the Caliph came in at midnight. She did not hide them. She said, "Brother, I have read a tale in a book," and told him, as a thing in a book, the story of a youth who left his house to find his slave, and found her, and had been with her a short time when the King who had bought her from a kidnapper came in and ordered them both killed, without asking, without waiting to learn how it stood. "What do you say of that King?" "It was an unkingly thing," said the Caliph. "When he had the power to punish he should have pardoned. He should have weighed three things: that they loved each other; that they were in his house and in his grasp; and that it is the part of a King to be slow in judging between people, and how much more when it is himself that is concerned." "Then," said his sister, "whoever has judged against himself must abide by it. Stand up, Ni'amah. Stand up, Naomi."

I watched Shah Zaman during that part. He looked at his brother, and then at the floor, as a man looks away from a window when a name is being read in the street. The King did not move. He had a pear on the board in front of him and the knife in his hand; the pear was in two halves, and the knife was still. When my sister reached the Caliph's three things he said, "The third." She said it. "Again." She said it again: that it is the part of a King to be slow, and how much more when it is himself that is concerned. He nodded once, as a man does when a sum comes out as he thought it would. "Go on," he said. She went on. The Caliph gave them to each other and sent them home to Kufa with presents; and I do not think anyone in the room ate the pear.

After that came four armies, arriving at one city from four sides in a single afternoon, each with a sovereign at the head of it, looking for someone. I can give you the dust, which rose four times, each cloud higher than the last, and the sovereigns: a Queen who wanted her slave back; Ghayur, who had lost a daughter; Kamar al-Zaman, a King now, who had built tombs with nothing in them for two sons; and last, under a black banner, an old man in a black coat whose beard came down over it, who had worn black for his son all those years, and whose son, being told, fell down on the road in a faint. They embraced in the dust. Marriages were arranged, as they are. There was a month of drums. At the end my sister said what the tellers say, "until there came to them the Destroyer of delights and the Sunderer of societies," which is what is said when the teller cannot bring herself to say died; and the King said, "Is that all they say?" "It is all they say, lord." "It is not very much," said the King.

Nights 237 to 249. Shahrazad. Present, thirteen strokes. Open: Ala al-Din Abu al-Shamat, of Cairo, only begun; a book of names; nineteen dots to be struck; and a child, which has no name yet.

On the 249th night the King said that it was a wonderful tale, and my sister said that it was not more wonderful than another, and he said, "What is that?" before she had finished the sentence. She began it at once, without a breath. There was a merchant of Cairo called Shams al-Din, Consul of the merchants, who had been married forty years and had no child. One Friday he sat in his shop and saw that every merchant in the bazaar had a son beside him; he went to the bath, and looked in the barber's glass, and saw that the white in his beard had overtaken the black. He went home and would not eat, and he quarrelled with his wife; she said the fault was his, and he said it was hers, and both of them lay awake ashamed. What mended it was a confection of nuts and spices and opium, boiled up by a broker who had no business in the matter, which my sister gave in full, and which made the nurse put her mending down on her knee. In due course there was a boy.

On the seventh day the merchant went in to his wife and said, "Where is God's deposit?" and they brought him the child, with a mole on each cheek, and he said, "What have you named him?" "If it were a girl I should have named her," she said, "but this is a boy, so no one shall name him but you." It was the custom then to name a child by an omen: you waited for the first words that came in from the street, and what you heard was the name. They waited. A man in the road called to his friend, "Ho, my lord Ala al-Din!" and the merchant said, "We shall call him that"; and, for the moles, Father of Moles: Abu al-Shamat. "Is that how it was done?" said the King. "In my mother's village, yes," said the nurse, not looking up. "You stood at the door." "And if the first word was a bad one?" "You waited for the second."

The boy was kept under a trap-door until his beard grew, for fear of the evil eye, and got out by accident, and wished to be a merchant; and at his father's party the merchants' sons laughed at him because he had never travelled. He went home in tears. His mother gave him ten loads of stuffs; his father, who said that travel was a curse and that a man should eat his bread in his own land, gave him forty more, and warned him of a wood called the Lion's Copse. I leave out the road, which my sister gave in some detail. He lost everything to bandits in the wood his father had warned him of, and came into Baghdad at night in his shirt, and sat down in a doorway; and two men stopped in the street and looked at him.

They were an old merchant and his nephew. The old man had a daughter, Zubaydah, who played the lute better than anyone in Baghdad, and whom he had married to the nephew; and the nephew, in a temper, had said the word of divorce three times, which cannot be taken back, and the law allowed him to have her again only if another man married her and let her go. They needed a stranger who would be her husband from nightfall to dawn. They offered the boy a thousand dinars, a suit of clothes and a mule. He signed for a marriage-settlement of ten thousand dinars, which he would owe if he did not divorce her in the morning, and was taken to a house with a lute in it. That is as much as I shall tell of that night.

In the morning the Kazi's officer knocked at the door, and the boy, who had been told by his wife what to do, gave the officer five dinars and went to the court. He went up to the Kazi, and kissed his hand, and put fifty dinars in it, and said: "By what law is it lawful and right that I should marry at nightfall and divorce in the morning, against my will?" I was not looking at my sister. I was looking at the King's hand, which was on the arm of the chair, and which did not move. "Divorce by compulsion and by force," said the Kazi, "is sanctioned by no school of the Moslems." My sister did not change her voice. She did not slow, and she did not look at the end of the bed. I asked her afterwards whether she had known that it was there, and she said that she had not remembered; and I did not believe her and I did not disbelieve her, because she read that book at fifteen, and nothing she has read has ever stayed on a shelf.

The King said nothing that night. In the morning, when I turned the Roll round to him, he read it from the top, as he did, and came to the dots, and put the point of the reed beside the nearest, and said, "He paid the Kazi." "Lord?" "Fifty dinars. He put fifty dinars in the man's hand, and then he asked. A careful man, who was paid." "Yes, lord." "And he said it." He struck the dot. "It is not nothing," said the King, "that he said it"; and he went to the window, and Shah Zaman went and stood beside him, and neither of them spoke.

After that the tale went on, as tales do, with the Caliph in it. He came to the boy's house in a dervish's coat, with his Vizier and the poet Abu Nowas and Masrur, who in a dervish's coat looked more like an executioner than ever, and sat on the rug and listened to the girl play; and he left a hundred dinars under the prayer-rug every morning for nine mornings, and on the tenth sent fifty loads of Cairo stuffs with a letter in the name of the boy's father, so that the settlement was paid. The boy was made Provost of the merchants, and then the Caliph's companion, and then Chief of the Sixty. His wife cried out one night in the next room, and was dead, and they buried her. The Caliph gave him a slave-girl to console him, and he would not touch her, saying that what has been the master's should not become the man's; and then, being a man who did nothing by halves, he went to the slave market and bought a girl called Jessamine for ten thousand dinars, and freed her, and married her, and she was with child by him.

I give the harm in one breath, because my sister did. The Governor's son, who was ugly and twenty and had never been on a horse, had wanted Jessamine; his mother made a bargain with the mother of an arch-thief who lay in the Governor's prison; the thief was let out, and on the first night of the next month he climbed into the Caliph's sitting-room by a ladder and took the Caliph's robe and dagger and rosary and signet and a jewelled lantern, and hid all but the lantern under a marble slab in the boy's house. In the morning the Caliph said, "Search," and they dug it up. The boy was sentenced, and walked to the gallows with the crier in front of him. Ahmad the Calamity, captain of the Guard, whom he had made his father by a covenant before God, stopped the hangman and hanged another man in his place, the likest he could find, and took the boy to Alexandria, and bought him a shop.

Jessamine, who would not look at the Governor's son, was set to scour pots in the Governor's kitchen. It was on the 265th night that her child was born there, among the pots, and the women of the kitchen, who had been kind to her, asked her what she would call him. My sister told it plainly. "Were his father well," she said, "he would have named him; but now I will name him Aslan." It means lion. I heard the nurse's needle stop, and then go on. The King looked at the foot of the margin, where four dots stood. I do not know whether he was looking at the dots. Shah Zaman, who had been sitting with his knees drawn up, put his feet down on the floor.

The child crawled up a flight of stairs into the Governor's lap, and the Governor, who had done nothing in the matter but sign a paper, saw Ala al-Din in his face, and kept him, and called him his son. He grew into a horseman. At fourteen he drank in a tavern with the arch-thief, who had the Caliph's lantern in front of him and would not give it to him, saying that lives had been lost for it; and the boy, who could add, went to his mother, and to the Calamity, and then, on a polo field, put himself between a ball and the Caliph's face, and was told to ask a boon, and asked for his father's murderer. The thief was searched, and the lantern was found in his shirt. But the man they were sending to fetch was no longer in Alexandria. A sea-captain had bought a jewel from him, a jewel with five faces that he had found in the bottom of a leather bag and taken for onyx, and had paid a hundred thousand dinars for it and given him a drink that put him to sleep; and he woke in the hold of a ship bound for Genoa, where the King, who had been told he would die at the hands of a man from Alexandria, was killing prisoners one by one on the quay. An old woman of the convent came in at the last moment and said that she needed a servant for the church. He carried wood for the convent for seventeen years.

Nights 250 to 267. Shahrazad. Present, eighteen strokes. Open: Ala al-Din Abu al-Shamat, in a convent in Genoa, with a jewel he does not know the use of; his son Aslan, who has a name; a book of names; one dot to be struck; and a child, which has no name yet.

## Chapter 18 · Nights Two Hundred and Sixty-eight to Two Hundred and Seventy-seven: The Last Dot, the Birth, and the Name

On the morning of the 268th day the King struck the last dot. I had been counting them down for a week, upside down from the other side of the table, and I need not have; there was one left at the end of the last row of five, and the reed went across it, and the page was finished. It looked like a field after the harvest. He held the reed over it a long time, as though there might be one more, and then laid it in the groove of the box. "It is today," he said. "A child is not a dot, lord," said the nurse, from her corner, without looking up; she had said it before, on the 262nd day and on the 240th, and she said it as one says that the soup is hot. "I know that," said the King. He sat down on the floor beside his brother, with his back against the end of the bed, and said nothing for the rest of the day, which I had not seen him do since the first week.

That night my sister told the Princess in the church, and the music. The boy had been seventeen years in the convent, hauling wood and wheat for monks who did not know his name. One day the old woman told him to leave the church, because the King's daughter was coming to pray, and he hid in a closet with a window, because he wished to know whether she was like our women; and there beside her, with a lute, was his wife Zubaydah, who had been buried. She would not play for the Princess until the Princess kept her word, which was to give her back her husband. "He is in that closet," said the Princess, "listening." She played. He came out. They fell down together on the floor. "Who was buried?" said the King. It was the first thing he had said since morning. "A Jinniyah, lord. She took her shape, and lay down, and cried out; and in the night she broke out of the tomb." "And no one asked." "No one asked, lord. It was a very good likeness." "No one asked," said the King, as though he were setting it down beside something else.

Night 268. Shahrazad. Present. Open: Ala al-Din Abu al-Shamat, who has heard a lute in a church in Genoa; a book of names; no dots; and a child, which is late, and has no name yet.

The 269th night held the rest of it, and I will give it in a line. The jewel had five faces, and each, rubbed, gave one thing: a couch that flew, a pavilion, trees and a river in a dry valley, a laid table, and a horseman who put an army to flight; and the man and his two wives sat on the couch and flew to Alexandria, and to Cairo, and to Baghdad, where a young man named Aslan was waiting for his father; and the Caliph held a feast. "Until there came to them the Destroyer of delights." My sister said it in the voice of a woman closing a door, and I think she was listening to something else. "It is only keeping the hours of the house," she said to the nurse, afterwards, of the child. "It is a guest, and guests are late."

On the morning of the 270th day Shah Zaman asked me, in the voice of a man asking the price of grain, whether it was usual. I said that I did not know; I had never had one. "Nor I," he said; and then, after a while, "I had thought I might be of use. It appears that there is nothing in the whole business that a man is for." "You turned the cradle," I said. "I turned it twice," he said, "and turned it back." The 270th night was Hatim of Tayy, which is very short: a dead host who, asked in jest for supper by a king asleep near his grave, came into the king's dream sword in hand and killed the king's camel, because he had nothing else to give, and whose son brought the king another camel in the morning. The 271st began with Ma'an son of Zaidah. On the afternoon of that day my father came to the door of the room and stood in it with his arm crooked in the old way, under nothing. The shroud had been in the chest at the foot of his bed since the twenty-ninth night; but the arm had not been told. I saw him look at it, and put it down. The King came and stood beside him, and they stood together facing the room, like two men at the edge of a river that they have been told is fordable.

The pains began that evening, as they say, without announcement. The nurse came and went with her sleeves rolled and said that it would be tonight, and that the men were to go out. The King said he would go out when the night's tale was told. "It will not be told," said the nurse. "It will," said my sister, from the pillows, in the voice of someone describing the weather; and so it was, with the door ajar the width of a hand and the two Kings in the passage on the other side of it, the elder with his back to the wall and the younger beside him, listening through the crack. The sand-glass stood on the table with its cloth tied round its neck. Nobody turned it. She told Ma'an and the Badawi with the cucumbers. You will know it. A man in the desert tells a stranger on a mule what he hopes to get from Ma'an: a thousand dinars; and if Ma'an says too much, five hundred; and too much, three hundred; two hundred; a hundred; fifty; thirty; and if it is still too much, he will tie his ass at the Emir's door and go home. She said the numbers between the pains. She would stop on a word and start again on the same word, and the nurse, who had delivered half the city, said she had never seen it done. At fifty she was breathing through her teeth. At thirty she said "Too much" in the Emir's voice and began to laugh, and I heard, through the crack in the door, Shah Zaman laugh once, helplessly, and stop; and the King say, in a low voice, "Thirty."

I will not tell you the rest, because it is not mine and she has never told it. I was sent for water and for cloths, and I was in the room when the room changed its size; that is all I can say of it. The nurse said a word that I will not write. There was a sound like a hinge. "There," said the nurse, "there," to someone, and then, to the door, "A boy"; and the door, which had been open the width of a hand, was open the width of a man, and the King was in it. He had his hands held out in front of him a little way, as a man holds a bowl that he has been told is full. Nobody stopped him. My sister was grey and very tired, and she said, clearly, "And he left the ass tied up where it was," which is the end of that tale; and she shut her eyes.

It was just light. I wrote the line standing, and gave it to the King to read, as I did every morning, and he read it standing, with the child on his arm, which I had not thought he would be able to do. He read down to the foot, and at the foot he laid his thumb beside the word born, as he laid it beside the strokes, and kept it there. He gave the Roll back to me, and sat down on the end of the bed with his son, and he sat there for the whole of the day.

Nights 269 to 271. Shahrazad. Present, present, present. Open: the city of Labtayt, not yet begun; a book of names; and a child, born at dawn, a son, who has no name yet.

My sister slept for most of two days, and woke on the third evening and asked me, as she asks every evening, what she had told. I read her the last lines of the Roll, and it came back to her in the order it had left. Then she said, "And where is he?" I said that he was with the King, and that the King had not put him down since the dawn of the 271st day, except to give him to the nurse and to Shah Zaman, and then not far. "Then it is going to be a long childhood," said my sister, and asked for the dates, which were under the cloth.

There were four nights after that which I can give you in a clause apiece, because I was not listening. The city of Labtayt, where a king shut a tower and put a lock on it, and every king after him a lock of his own, until there were twenty-four, and the last of them broke every one, against the advice of his grandees, and found a scroll. A caliph who was asked three times by his headsman whether the boy's head should come off, and said yes each time, and the boy laughed, and said a verse about a hawk that let a sparrow go because it would make a poor supper; "Does that work?" said the King; "Once, lord," said my sister. And a man called Ibrahim who hid in Baghdad with a hundred thousand dinars on his head. The King listened to all of them with his son on his arm, and when the child cried he said, "Go on," to my sister, and walked up and down the room with him, and the sentence went on above their heads. Shah Zaman held the cradle with the Samarkand silk in it, which no one else had been allowed to touch, and said to the wall that he had never seen his brother carry a thing so carefully.

On the 275th night my sister began the city of Iram of the Pillars; and the King, if you had asked him, would have said, I think, that she began it for him, and nobody asked. A man looking for a strayed camel in the deserts of Yemen comes upon a city with two gates inlaid with jacinths, and streets of gold and silver brick, and fruit trees, and running water, and no one in it. He fills his bags with pearls and musk and goes home; and on the way the pearls turn yellow. A Caliph asks a learned man, and the learned man says: Iram, which Shaddad built, who read an old book about Paradise and said that he would build the copy. He wrote to all the kings of the earth, and told them to gather everything of value in the world, and to leave nothing; it took them twenty years to gather and three hundred to build, and twenty to put a castle on it, and twenty for the king to get ready to move in; and when he was one day's journey from the gate, a Cry came out of the sky, and neither he nor any of his people ever saw the city. "And the road?" said the King. "God blotted it out, lord." "Then no one can go." "One man did, it is said, a companion of the Prophet." I saw the King turn the child a little on his arm, so that the window was behind his face and not in it.

Nights 272 to 276. Shahrazad. Present, five strokes. Open: Iram of the Pillars, and the King who gathered everything; a book of names, which is nearly full, with more than nine hundred and fifty names in it; and a son, who has no name yet.

On the seventh morning, which was the end of the 277th night, the nurse said, as one says that the bread is out, "He must have a name, lord. It is the custom." "I know the custom," said the King. He was at the window with the child, as he had been at that hour for six mornings, in the grey. "I have not named anything," he said, "in a long time." He said it to the glass. My sister, from the pillows, said, "It is yours to say, and mine to say after." "I should like to be told by someone," said the King, and did not say by whom. Nobody spoke. The nurse put her hands in her sleeves. And from the court below, loud, in a voice I had not heard raised in fifteen years of hearing it, my father called: "Abd al-Baqi! Abd al-Baqi, the water! Where is that boy?" A page ran across the stones with a copper jar. The King stood quite still. "What was that?" he said. "A page, lord," said the nurse. "What did he call him?" "Abd al-Baqi, lord." "It is a name," said my sister. "The servant of the Everlasting." The King looked at the face of his son. "Then he will be called that," he said.

The page's name was Hasan. I had known him four years. My father came to the door a little after, with the look of a man who has been shouting in a court, and was told, and bowed, and did not look at anyone. I have never asked him why, on that morning, in that court, in that voice, he called Hasan by another name, and he has never told me; and he has never given me the least reason to think that it was anything but what it looked like, which was an omen from the street, as the custom was.

The King wrote it down himself. He gave the child to the nurse, and went to the table and turned back the first leaf of the Roll, and at the foot of the margin of the margin, under the five words that were already there, the last of them cradle, he wrote a sixth, slowly, in the square hand: Baqi. Only the second half of it. Then he sat looking at it, and at the empty place under the tally where the dots had been. When I wrote the line for that night I left the child out of the Open, as one leaves out anything that has been answered; and I noticed that I had left a space where he had stood in every line since the thirty-eighth dawn, and I found that I could not close it up.

Night 277. Shahrazad. Present. Open: Iram of the Pillars, and the King who was one day's journey from the gate; a book of names.

## Chapter 19 · Nights Two Hundred and Seventy-eight to Two Hundred and Ninety-six: Isaac of Mosul, the Mock Caliph, and Ali the Persian

The hair was cut that same morning, which is the custom. My father did the weighing, being the one man in the house who could be trusted with scales; it came to very little, and he gave its weight in silver at the gate, counting the coins into the hands of the people in the queue and writing down the name of each one who took one. He has never been able to give anything without writing it down. The nurse was to bury the hair, which is also the custom. "Give it to me," said the King. "It is not kept, lord, it is buried." "I know the custom," he said, for the second time that morning; and she put it in his hand. He laid it inside the front board of the Roll, in the thumb's-width of the binding, between the tally and the place where the dots had been, and closed the board on it. I have never seen him look at it. It is there.

The city knew by noon. The storyteller on the crate at the dyers' gate added a line to the Fisherman, and took it out, and put it in again with the sex of the child. The wagers on whether the King would let it be born were paid, by an arrangement that nobody could explain, to a stationer in the Copper Market, who had bet that he would, and who gave the whole of it to the poor at the gate, in dirhams, which my father was also writing down. Women came to the side gate, where I wrote the names at noon, with small things wrapped in cloth: a pair of little shoes, a lump of salt, a rattle made of three date stones in a gourd. I wrote down the givers. I asked the first of them what the salt was for, and she said that it was against the evil eye, and that I was to put it in a corner of the room where the King could not see it. I put it under the cradle. I do not know whether the King saw it.

The 278th and 279th nights finished Iram. There is a tomb in it, after the Cry: the son of Shaddad cut a cave for his father and laid him on a throne of gold under seventy robes, and set at his head a golden tablet with a verse on it, telling the proud to take warning, and saying that its owner had been lord of the east and of the west and had fallen like harvested grain. Two men came on the cave in a later age, and went down, and took the tablet, and as many bars of gold as they could carry. "Did they read it?" said the King. "It does not say, lord." "No," said the King. "It would not." And in the same breath, because she was tired, and because the sentence is the same in every mouth, my sister said, "And men also tell the tale of Isaac of Mosul."

Isaac was a singer, and the Caliph's favourite, and one night on his way home from the palace he was caught short in a back street, and found a great basket hanging down a wall, and, being drunk, sat in it, and was hauled up by four women who had been waiting for someone else. They did not send him away. A lady came in, as lovely as a moon, and asked who he was; he said that he was a merchant of the bazaar; and she asked whether he could repeat verses. They passed the night so. She said a piece, and he answered with one; she told a story, and when he fell silent she began another; he told her every tale he had ever heard from a neighbour who drank with kings, and she said that she had not thought to find such a memory in a bazaar. At dawn an old nurse came and said that the time had come, and the lady said: keep what has passed between us to yourself. He went three nights running, and on the third he left the Caliph's own presence to go, and was fetched back by runners, and told the Caliph everything in private; and the Caliph came the next night in the second basket, and was married to her by morning. Then the Caliph told Isaac to tell it to no one, and he told no one until the Caliph died. "That is a long time to keep a thing," said the King, to the sand-glass; and I could not tell whether he approved.

Nights 278 to 281. Shahrazad. Present, four strokes. Open: Isaac of Mosul and the lady in the house with the basket; a book of names, which has begun its fifth book; and a son, who has a name.

There was a sweeper, in the three nights after that, who took hold of the cloth of the Ka'abah in the middle of the pilgrimage and prayed aloud that a certain lady might quarrel with her husband again; he was seized, and was to be hanged, and told the Emir why. I shall not tell you why, and neither did my sister, in any detail; she told it quickly, with her eyes on the child; and the Emir let him go, and said to the people, pray for him, he is excusable. "He should have prayed for something else," said the King. "What?" said Shah Zaman. "I do not know," said the King. "That is why he is excusable."

Then the Caliph Harun al-Rashid could not sleep, which happens to him about once in thirty nights, and went down in a merchant's coat with the Vizier and Masrur to the Tigris, to hire a boat. The old boatman would not take them out. The Caliph comes down the river every night, he said, in his state-barge, with a man crying: whoever is found on the water after dark, I will strike off his head or hang him from the mast. They paid him two dinars and hid under a black cloth beneath an arch of the bridge, and the barge went by: two hundred white slaves in rows, men with cressets of red gold burning aloes-wood, a throne in the middle, and on the throne a young man in black embroidered with yellow, with a Vizier beside him who might have been Ja'afar, and an executioner who might have been Masrur. "By Allah," said Harun, under the cloth, "my reason is confounded." It was a very exact copy. I watched the King, who sat quite still at the crier; and then I watched Shah Zaman, who was watching the King.

They went again the second night, and landed behind the false Caliph's party, and were taken for merchants from abroad, and entertained. The wine went round. The young man had a gong; each time he struck it a door opened and a woman came out with a lute and sang one song, and at each song he cried out and tore his coat to the hem, and they let down a curtain and brought him another. Four times. At the fourth he fell down in a faint, and the curtain stuck, and the Caliph saw that his ribs were scored with the marks of whips. "A handsome youth," said Harun, "and a thief." He did not say it kindly. But Ja'afar asked, as he was made to, and the young man told them. He was a jeweller's son, Mohammed Ali, with his father's shop; a lady on a mule had come to buy a necklace that no king could match, and had taken him home to be paid, and had told him who she was, the Lady Dunya, the Vizier's own sister, and had married him that hour, properly, with a Kazi, rather than have him otherwise. He lived a month in her house and did not go out. One day she went to the baths and made him swear not to rise from the couch; and an old woman came from the Lady Zubaydah, the Caliph's wife (another woman than the lutist), to say that she wished to hear him sing; and he went, and sang, and came back, and his wife was awake. She had him blindfolded, and her women begged for him, and she had him beaten instead, and thrown into the street like a log. When he was well he sold the shop and bought four hundred white slaves and built a barge, and had gone down the Tigris every night for a year, dressed as the Caliph, with a man crying out that whoever was on the river would lose his head; and had heard no news of her.

The Caliph sent for him in the morning, and for the Vizier's sister, and asked her whether she knew the young man. She said that women could not be expected to know men. He said: this is your Jeweller. She said that it had been written. He renewed the contract before the Kazi and made the Jeweller one of his companions; and then my sister said, "until there came to them the Destroyer of delights." "Did he ever strike off a head?" said the King. "The Jeweller? No, lord. He cried it nightly for a year, and nobody lost one." "Then he was not much of a Caliph." I could not tell whether it was a joke. I do not think that he could. "He built a barge," he said, a little afterwards, "instead of going to the door." And Shah Zaman, at the window, did not turn his head.

Nights 282 to 294. Shahrazad. Present, thirteen strokes. Open: Ali the Persian, who has been sent for and has said that he hears and obeys; a book of names; and a son, who has a name.

On the evening of the 295th day my sister, who had slept most of the afternoon with the child on her arm, sat up and said, in the voice of the newly woken, "Where was I?" and looked about for me. I was at the side gate with the book. The nurse was out of the room. It was the King who answered. He was by the window with the sand-glass in his hands, and he did not turn. "The Jeweller is pardoned," he said. "The Caliph has asked the Vizier's sister whether she knows him, and she says that women do not know men. He renews the contract before the Kazi. You said the thing that is said, and went on at once to a man called Ali, a Persian, whom the Vizier has brought to the Caliph for his sleeplessness, because he has many tales; and he has been told to come, and has said that he hears and obeys. That is all he has said." He turned the sand-glass over. "He is going to tell what he has seen or what he has heard. The Caliph is to choose." My sister looked at his back for some time. "You have kept that," she said. "It was said," said the King. "It was said in the room." I have thought since that this was the evening on which I became, in part, unnecessary; and that he did not mean it so. I said as much to Shah Zaman, who had sat on his rug through all of it; he said that nobody is unnecessary to a Roll, and I said that was the sort of thing a man says who has never been kept by one. He considered this, and said that it was fair.

The Persian said that he would tell what had befallen him. He had gone abroad with a boy and a little leather bag, and in a strange city a man had fallen on him in the market, seized the bag, and said that it was his and everything in it; and they had been taken to the Kazi. The Kazi asked the man what was in the bag. He said: two styles for the eyes, a kerchief with two gilt cups, and two tents, and two spoons, and a cow and two calves, and a lioness and two lions, and a she-bear and two jackals, and an upper chamber and two saloons, and a kitchen with two doors, and a company of friends to swear that it was his. My sister said it all, down to the lioness, without a breath, in the voice of a clerk reading an inventory, and the King began to laugh. It was not the laugh at the Reeve's chest, which was surprise, nor the one at the Barber, which was hunger. It came up slowly from some depth where it had been kept for a long time, and when it arrived he had to put his hand over his face. The child on his arm opened his eyes at the noise and looked up, and then did a thing with his mouth that the nurse said was wind. "It was not wind," said the King, from behind his hand.

Asked in his turn, the Persian said that his bag held a coat of mail and a broadsword and a thousand fighting rams and gardens and statues and slave-girls and singing-women, and the Tigris and the Euphrates, and Iram of the Pillars, and a thousand sharp razors to shave the Kazi's beard unless he judged the bag to be the Persian's. The Kazi said that they were two pestilent fellows who made sport of magistrates, and told them to open the bag. In it were bread, a lemon, cheese and olives. The Persian threw it down in front of the other man, and went his way; and the Caliph laughed until he fell on his back, and gave him a present. "Whose bag was it?" said the King. "The Persian's, lord. Bread, a lemon, cheese, and olives." "How does the Kazi know?" "He does not say." "He did not know." "No, lord. He opened it." "He should have opened it first," said the King. "Before the lioness." My sister said that it would not have been half so good a tale, and the King said that was true, and that it would have been a better judgement; and they were both right.

Nights 295 and 296. Shahrazad. Present, present. Open: Harun al-Rashid and the slave-girl that the Vizier would not sell, only begun; a book of names; and a son, who has a name.

## Chapter 20 · Nights Two Hundred and Ninety-seven to Three Hundred and Eleven: The Lover Who Feigned a Thief, and the Fortieth Day

The tale that the 296th night had left open was finished on the 297th. The Caliph and his Vizier had been drunk together, and each had sworn, on the divorce of his own wife, that he would neither sell nor give the other a certain slave-girl; and when they were sober they found that they could do neither, and sent at midnight for the Imam Abu Yusuf. He came on his mule. He said that the Vizier should sell half of her to the Caliph and give him the other half, and that both oaths would be kept; and when the Caliph, who could not wait the legal days, asked what was to be done, he said that she should be married to a slave for the space of a sentence and divorced. The slave refused to divorce her, for a hundred dinars, for a thousand. So the Imam said that the Caliph should give the slave to the girl, since no one can be married to what he owns, and the marriage was void. The Caliph filled the Imam's mule's nose-bag with gold. My father, at the door, looked at the nose-bag, and then at the floor.

On the 297th night my sister told the lover who made himself a thief. He was a young man of Bassorah, very handsome, whom a crowd brought before the Emir Khalid for having been caught in a house at night. He confessed. He would say nothing else. The Emir, who did not believe him, had him put in irons and sent a crier through the city to say that the hand would be cut off in the open place in the morning; and then, in the dark, had him brought to his own room, and fed. "You have a story that is not a thief's," said the Emir. "The Prophet says, in cases of doubt avoid the punishment. Tomorrow the Kazi will ask you; deny it." And sent him back to the cell. But in the morning, before the whole city, the young man was asked whether the thing he took might have been worth less than a quarter dinar, and said no, more; whether he had a share in the goods, and said no; and the Emir, in a rage, struck him across the face with his whip. The butcher laid the knife to the wrist. A girl came through the crowd in torn clothes, and threw herself on him, and unveiled, and said: read this first.

He had thrown a stone against her window, as lovers do, to tell her that he had come; her father and brothers heard it and ran out; and he had snatched up what lay about the house so that it should look like a robbery and her name be kept out of it. I will not give you the girl's letter, which was in verse, as such letters are. "He gave him the night," said the King. "Lord?" "The Emir. He had him fed, and gave him till morning, in case there was a story." "Yes, lord." "In case," said the King; and he looked at me, I thought, though it may have been at the Roll; and he did not say in case of what.

The 299th night began with the Bean-seller, and with a thing I had not known was in it. When the Caliph Harun crucified Ja'afar the Barmecide, he ordered that whoever wept for him should be crucified also, and the people kept away. An Arab of the desert, who had brought Ja'afar an ode every year in return for a thousand dinars, came with this year's ode and did not know. He found the body, and knelt his camel, and wept, and recited the ode, and fell asleep; and Ja'afar came to him in a dream and said: go to Bassorah, to a certain merchant, and say that I salute him and ask for a thousand dinars, by the token of the bean. The merchant wept when he heard it. He gave the Arab a thousand and five hundred more, and said he should have a thousand every year; and he told the story of the bean. He had sold hot beans in the streets of Baghdad, in the rain, with hardly a coat, and Ja'afar had called him in and told his household to buy, and each had filled the measure with gold; and at the end there was one bean left, and Ja'afar split it, and sold one half to a girl for twice the gold already given, and bought the other half himself for twice the sum of the whole. I looked at my father, who stood at the door. He did not move; he never does at that name. I thought it a hard thing to hear in one's own house, a Vizier killed by a king and a city forbidden to weep for him; and my sister, who did not look at him, told it in exactly the voice she used for the beans.

Nights 297 to 299. Shahrazad. Present, three strokes. Open: Abu Mohammed Lazybones, of Bassorah, and what he was sent for to bring the Caliph; a book of names; and a son, four weeks old, who has a name.

The six nights after that were Lazybones, and I will give them in a breath, because they are long. There was a man in Bassorah so idle that he would not get up out of the sun; his mother gave him five dirhams and sent him after a shaykh who was going to China, and by some turn of that voyage, which my sister gave in its full number of turns, he became so rich that the Caliph sent for him because he alone had a jewel big enough for the crown of the Lady Zubaydah; and he came to Baghdad with trees of gold and an enchanted tent and a way of making the palace battlements bow. On the three hundredth night, at the dawn, the King counted the strokes in the margin of the first leaf, five to a row; there are sixty rows; he put the point of the reed to the last and said, "Three hundred." Then, after a time, "That is a number." "It was my father's word," I said, "once." "Yes," said the King. "He said that if he had counted it would have been a number." My father was not in the room. I have not told him. Then there were Yahya the Barmecide and a debtor to the Caliph, whom Yahya paid out of his own family's gold, and who thanked him with a couplet about having feared their arrows; and Yahya said, when he was told it, that a man in want and sick at heart is not to be blamed for what falls from him, for it does not come from the heart. "Say that again," said the King. My sister said it again. "Put that in the margin," he said, which he had never asked me to do with a word that was not his own; and I wrote it, small, under the sixth, because there was nowhere else.

The 307th night held a very short one. The Caliph Mamun, at a council of the learned, raised a stranger in a ragged white coat from the lowest seat to the highest by the quality of his answers, and then, at the wine, offered him the cup; and the stranger stood and asked leave to say one word. He said that the Commander of the Faithful had lifted him out of his littleness by the little reason he had, and that if he drank it would leave him, and he would sink to what he had come from; and he hoped the Commander of the Faithful would not rob his slave of that small jewel. The Caliph gave him a hundred thousand pieces. "He asked to be let keep it," said the King, who had a cup of pear-juice in his hand. He looked at the cup for a time, and did not drink, and I think that he did not know that he did not.

On the 308th night she began Ali Shar and Zumurrud, which is long and which I shall tell in its place. It begins at a bed: a merchant of Khorasan, who had his son at sixty, dying, gives him the last of what he knows. Do not be over-familiar with anyone. Do good while you are able. Keep your wealth and do not waste it. Take counsel of those older than you. Beware of wine. "I have heard you," says the son, at each, "and I will obey you. What more?" The King had the child on his arm. He asked my sister to say the list again, and she said it, and he said, "He asked what more." "Yes, lord." "He did not ask why." "No, lord." "No one does," said the King, "at a bedside."

Nights 300 to 310. Shahrazad. Present, eleven strokes. Open: Ali Shar of Khorasan, who has buried his father and kept his shop for a year; a book of names; and a son, who has a name.

The fortieth morning, which was the end of the 310th night, my sister got up. It is the day when the forty are over, and a woman may bathe, and put on a clean dress, and be a person again in the street. The nurse had been counting too. She had her in the bath before the light, and she came out in the green dress, thinner, with her hair wet over one shoulder, and stood a long time at the window with her hands on the sill, like a woman looking at a country she has been told about. The King was at the table. He had written something in the margin and was blowing on it. "You are up," he said. "It is the day," said my sister. "There is a custom," said my father from the door, who had not been asked, and who had been listening with his whole body, "that on the fortieth day a child is shown." "To whom?" said the King. "To the people, lord." "Which people?" "The ones in the court," said my father. "They have been in the court since dawn."

He took the child himself. He went out onto the gallery over the great court at noon, in the plain coat, with Shah Zaman a step behind him and my father a step behind that, and I behind my father with the book of names, because I had been told to bring it and did not know why. I had not seen the court full since the first morning. It was full. They stood in rows as far as the gate and out of it, in the sun, men and women and children on their fathers' shoulders, and nobody was talking. I have never heard so many people make so little sound. Shah Zaman, behind the King, took off his cap, which in Samarkand is a thing a man does at a burial; I do not think that he knew he had done it. The King said nothing. He held the child up a little, as a man holds up a cup, with the hand under the head; and the child, who had been asleep, opened his eyes at the light and looked at the sky. Nothing happened. Then in the third row from the front a woman in black, whom I knew, because I had written her daughter at the gate in the second book, took one step forward out of the rank. "What is his name?" she said. She said it in an ordinary voice. It carried to the end of the court. "Abd al-Baqi," said the King. She said it after him, once, to herself, to get it right; and the man behind her said it, and the woman behind him; and it went back through the court like a bucket along a line, until it reached the gate. "Mine was Salma," said the woman. And the King, who had not looked at the book in my hand, who had not looked at anything, said: "Salma. The weaver's daughter. She was left-handed, and sang over the washing, and had a green shawl. She was the four hundred and second." There was a long silence. "Yes," said the woman. She turned and went back to her place in the rank. Nobody moved. He held the child for some time longer; I could not tell how long; and then he took him in.

I asked my father afterwards whether he had known that the King knew them. He said no. He said that he had thought the King read each one for a breath, as he had said at the beginning, and no more. I looked in the book that night. The entry says: Salma, a weaver's daughter, left-handed, sang over the washing, a green shawl; four hundred and second. In my hand. He had not been shown it that day. I do not know when he had read it, nor how many others he has by heart, and I have not asked him that either. My sister, who had watched from behind the screen in the passage, asked me only what they had done. "Nothing," I said. "They did nothing." "Good," said my sister. I think that she had been afraid of the cheering.

Night 311. Shahrazad. Present. Open: Ali Shar of Khorasan, who has asked himself to whom he shall leave it if he does not spend it; a book of names, which is in its fifth book; and a woman in the court, who said Yes.

At the side gate the next noon there were forty-one names, which was more than on any day since the first month. The first was an old woman's, for a niece whom nobody had remembered to give. She did not say why she had come that day. I did not ask.

## Chapter 21 · Nights Three Hundred and Twelve to Three Hundred and Twenty-seven: Ali Shar and Zumurrud, and a Letter to Samarkand

The letter from Samarkand had been on the table for three days. It came on a camel, in a message-bag of boiled leather, and the King read it twice and laid it under the sand-glass, where it stayed; and on the forty-first morning Shah Zaman took it out from under the glass and read it standing, and folded it, and said to the room, which is how he asks for things, that his Vizier at Samarkand wrote that the governor of Bukhara had been collecting taxes in the King's name and in his own, and that the caravans had begun to go round by the south. "How long is it to Samarkand?" said the King. "Thirty days, if the road is dry." "It is not dry." "No." The King looked at the child, who was on the nurse's knee. "Go," he said. "Come back before the winter." And that was the whole of it between them, as it had been at the window; I think they had said what they had to say in the afternoons, and neither would have known how to say it again at the gate.

He packed in an hour. He had come with a saddle-bag and he left with a saddle-bag. But he had brought ten reams of Samarkand paper, thin and hard, in sandalwood shavings, and hidden them in the cedar chest under the silk for the cradle, so that I should not be embarrassed by being given them at once; and he took me to the chest, and opened it, and went out of the room. On the top ream there was a slip in his hand which said: for the Open, and for anything that is not. I have not shown it to anyone. I stood over ten reams of paper for some time. When I came out he was at the gate with the horses, and the King was there already, holding the bridle of the nearest as though to see that it was sound. "Will you write to me?" said Shah Zaman, to me, over the horse's neck. "What shall I write?" "The Open." I said that it was in the Roll. "Copy it." "Why?" "Because I shall not be in the room," said Shah Zaman, "and I should like to know what he has not finished." I looked at the King, who was looking at the horse's mouth. I said that I would.

"Do you still count?" said the King, quite low, as the groom took the bridle. I do not think that he meant me to hear. "I stopped on the fortieth day," said his brother. "Why?" "I do not know. I took off my cap in the court, and when I put it on again I was not counting." The King nodded, as though that were an answer, and did not ask the other thing; and Shah Zaman got up on his horse and went out through the gate with six men behind him and did not turn round, which is the manner of the people of Samarkand. The rug was left by my cushion. The nurse put her foot on it that evening and said that it was in the way, and went on putting her foot on it, and did not move it. In the morning the King asked her to turn the rug so that its worn edge faced the wall; she did; by noon it faced the cushion again, and nobody had touched it.

The room was larger that night. My sister began the evening's tale and kept looking toward the end of the bed, where the rug was, and the King sat with his back against the foot of it, in the place where he had sat for a hundred and forty nights with his brother on his left, and kept his left hand on the floor a little away from his body, palm down, as a man does who has been in the habit of a shoulder. At the second watch he moved it. He put the sand-glass there instead. I do not think that he knew.

She brought Ali Shar to the slave-market, where the bidding was for a girl called Zumurrud, the Emerald, who could write the seven hands and recite the Koran in the seven readings and made silk curtains that sold for fifty dinars. Her owner had sworn to sell her only to the man she herself chose; and the broker, who had never been given such a thing, went down the ring of merchants asking her, one by one: this one? An old man with a grey beard, who bid a thousand dinars, she would not have; she said, in verse, that she did not care for a man brought to such a state by his years. A man with a dyed beard she mocked in verse too, the same afternoon. A one-eyed man she waved away. A short one, with a beard to his navel. And then her eye came to a young man at the back of the ring, who had not eaten that day and was only watching to see what she would fetch. "That one," she said. "His cheek is smooth, and his breath is sweet." "They asked her," said the King. "Yes, lord. Her owner had sworn it." "And the broker asked her again, for each." "For each, lord." "For each," said the King. I did not write it down. It is not a thing that one writes.

He had no money. The young man stood with his head down, ashamed to say that he could not buy a girl he had come to stare at; and she saw it, and said to the broker, "Take my hand, and walk me to him." She dropped her price from a thousand to nine hundred, to eight, to a hundred, laughing, and he said that he had not a hundred; and when she understood that he had nothing at all she asked him to lead her aside into a lane, as if to examine her, and drew out of her dress a purse with a thousand dinars in it and put it in his hand. "Pay nine hundred for me out of that, and keep a hundred for provisions." He bought her with her own money. She gave him another thousand to furnish the house, and when the house was furnished she told him to buy silk and gold thread and coloured silks, and every eight days she made a curtain, and every eight days he sold it for fifty dinars, to a merchant, never to a stranger: "for we have enemies, and a stranger would be the cause of our parting." He kept to it for a year.

At the end of the year a man who was not a merchant offered a hundred dinars for the curtain, and the broker was bribed with ten, and the young man sold. I shall not give you what came after in detail, because it is the worst thing in the story and my sister gave it in a short way. The stranger followed him home, and asked for water, and for bread, and put something in a banana, and the young man slept; and the stranger was the brother of the old man whose beard she had made the verse about; and she was taken to that old man's house, and told what she would be, and said no. They were not kind to her. That is all I will say. I did not look at the King. I looked at the child, and did not look at the child, and the nurse said that she would take him to the other room, and the King said, "No," and put his hand over the child's ear, the one that was uppermost, as a man puts his hand over a candle in a draught.

She was got out of that house by a mistake. An old woman had told Ali Shar to stand under her window at midnight and whistle, and she would let herself down on a rope; and he fell asleep on the bench; and a thief who came by took the turban off his head, and she, seeing a man in the dark under her window, let herself down to him with a pair of saddle-bags full of gold, and by the feel of his beard knew that it was not her lord. He took her to a cave, where his old mother sat. Zumurrud asked the mother if she might louse her in the sun, and the old woman, who had not been out of the cave in a month, said yes; and when the old woman was asleep Zumurrud put on the clothes of a trooper whom the thief had killed, and girded his sword, and got on his horse, and rode ten days into the empty country, and on the eleventh came to a city. At the gate the troops were drawn up, and the Emirs and the Grandees; and as she rode up they got down and kissed the ground and cried: God give you victory, O our lord the Sultan. For it was the custom of that city, when the King died without a son, that the army should go out to the suburbs and wait three days, and whoever came from a certain quarter they would make King. "They did not ask her," said the King. "No, lord. She did not give them time." "She said she was a man of rank, who had quarrelled with his family." "Yes." "That was quick." "She was very quick," said my sister, "and very tired."

So she was a King for a year, and a good one, as the story says: she took off taxes, and let out prisoners, and mended wrongs; and she kept to the palace with two small eunuchs and let no man near her. On the first day of each month she had a banquet laid for the whole city on the race-course, and ordered the shops shut; and she had a dish of sweet rice put before an empty seat, and sat on her throne and watched the gate. The first to take that seat was a man with blue eyes who said his name was Ali, a weaver; and she had a table of sand brought and struck a figure with a pen of brass and said: your name is not Ali. Then the thief, with another name. Then the old man. Each told her a false name, and each was found out by the table of sand, and each was told to speak the truth; and I shall not tell you what she did to them. My sister told it in the voice of a woman reading out a bill, the nurse left the room, and the King, who had put his hand over the child's ear again, said: "She asked their names." "Yes, lord." "They lied." "Yes." "And she knew." "She knew, lord." "Then why ask?" "To see whether they would lie," said my sister, who had thought about it. "That is a reason," said the King. He did not say what it was not.

In the fifth month she watched the gate of the race-course for a young man who was thin and wasted and looked as though he had been ill for a year, because he had; and he sat down opposite the dish of sweet rice because it was the only place free, and ate it, and the people who knew what it meant said: young man, do not eat that. He said that he did not mind what was done to him. She let him finish. She could have had him taken at the first mouthful, and she sat and watched him eat the whole dish, as a woman watches a child who has not eaten for a long time; and then she had him taken to the bath, and clothed, and brought to her at night. She teased him that night, my sister said, as a woman does who has had a year to think of it; I shall not give you that either. In the morning she told her Emirs that she had a mind to travel into this man's country, and that they should choose a viceroy till she came back, and she went with him, with camels, and gold, and presents for his friends; and he gave alms to the poor in his own city, and they had children, and lived the gladdest life, "till there came to them," said my sister, "the Destroyer of delights." And she stopped, a little before her time, and looked at the cradle; and she said, in her ordinary voice, that she was tired. "Then stop," said the King. It was the first time that he had said it to her, in the middle of a night, and the dawn was an hour and a half away. She stopped.

Nights 312 to 327. Shahrazad. Present, sixteen strokes. Open: Jubayr bin Umayr and the Lady Budur, not yet begun; a book of names; and a son, who follows the lamp with his eyes.

To Shah Zaman, King of Samarkand, from Dunyazad, who keeps the Roll. You asked for the Open, and here it is, copied from the Roll as it stood at dawn on the 327th night; the column does not change much from night to night, and I do not think that you are a man who needs it all. Ali Shar and Zumurrud: ended, "till there came to them the Destroyer of delights." Jubayr bin Umayr and the Lady Budur: not yet begun. A book of names, in its fifth book. A son, who follows the lamp. What is not in the Open: on the 322nd night he asked me where you would be by now. I said, at the river, if the road was dry. "The road is not dry," said the King. He was right; the rain has been on the whole of this country and, I suppose, on yours. It was the first time that he has asked after anyone. I have not told him that I am writing to you. I do not think that I need to. The nurse has brought two of her seven cats to the house. The King has said nothing. The child has been seen to look at one of them for a very long time. The rug is still by my cushion. The nurse says it keeps out the draught. She is wrong, and she knows it. The paper is very good. I have used two sheets for this letter, and I am keeping the rest for the Open.

## Chapter 22 · Nights Three Hundred and Twenty-eight to Three Hundred and Forty-six: Jubayr and the Lady Budur, and Letters

The Caliph Harun could not sleep, which my sister said happens to him more often than the Barmecides could bear; and Masrur, who is the man who has to do something about it, offered him in turn the garden and the stars, the three hundred concubines walking about their rooms unwatched, the doctors of law in dispute, the poets, the wits, and the pretty boys; and to each the Caliph said, "My soul inclines not to this." "Then, my lord," said Masrur, "strike off my head." And then, having run out, he went to the door, and found the Wag waiting, Ali bin Mansur of Damascus. "Shall I tell you," said the Wag, "what I have seen with my eyes, or what I have only heard?" "If you have seen anything worth the telling," said the Caliph, "let us hear it; for hearing is not like seeing." It was the second time in thirty-odd nights that the Caliph had said it. The King said it with him, very quietly, half a beat behind. The child, on his arm, looked up at the sound, and the King stopped, and looked down at him, as one looks at a dog that has understood a word.

The Wag was in Bassorah for his pension, and walked out alone to see the town, and lost himself, and came to a great door with two brass rings, and a trellis of vine over the bench, and heard a woman singing in a voice that had been unhappy for some time. He raised the curtain a finger's breadth. A girl looked up and sent her maid to ask if he had no shame at his age, and he said that he was thirsty. They gave him water in a golden tankard, and he was a long time over it, looking; and when he could drink no longer he said that he was troubled in mind. "At what?" "At the turns of Time." She told him she was Budur, the daughter of a jeweller of that city, and when he gave her his own name she came down from her seat and said: now I will tell you my case. I am a lover parted from my beloved. The beloved was Jubayr bin Umayr, Emir of the Shayban, who had come into her room one day while her maid was plaiting her hair, and had seen something he did not like, or did not understand, and had gone out saying a line of verse, and had not written since. She wrote him a letter in verse, and she offered the Wag five hundred dinars if he brought an answer, and a hundred for his trouble if he did not.

Jubayr was out hunting. He came back at evening, and embraced the Wag, who said afterwards that he felt that he had embraced the world; and he laid a table with verses cut into it, and begged him to eat. "I will not eat a mouthful," said the Wag, "till you grant me my desire." He gave him the letter. Jubayr read it and tore it in pieces and threw it on the floor. "I will grant you anything but that; I have no answer to her." But when the Wag rose in a temper he caught his skirt, and said: "Did she not tell you, if you bring me an answer you shall have five hundred, and if not, a hundred? Stay with me, and you shall have the five hundred." So the Wag stayed, and ate, and a girl sang, and Jubayr fell down in a fit at the second verse; and in the morning a page came with the five hundred dinars and a message, that he should not go back to the girl who had sent him. He went back. She was standing behind the door. She knew everything, from the tearing of the letter to the fit; and when he asked her how, she said that the hearts of lovers have eyes; and she gave him his hundred, and raised her face to heaven and asked God to do to Jubayr what He had done to her.

The Wag came again the next year for his pension. Budur's house had servants at the door, and the street was swept; Jubayr's had its bench broken and no page. He thought that someone had died, and stood in the road and wept for the house, and a slave came out and said that the master was alive, and had been struck with love of a certain lady, and sat like a rock, and did not ask for food or water. They had to say verses to him to bring him round. "Welcome, son of Mansur," he said. "The jest has become the earnest." And he wrote her a letter. She answered it. But what she wrote was hard, line upon line, and the Wag read it before he gave it, and said, "He will die of this"; and tore it in pieces, and asked her for another; and that was hard too, and he tore that. The third she wrote in a different hand, and wept while she wrote it, and sealed it, and told him to say: she will be your guest tonight. Jubayr read it and fell in a faint. They heard the tinkle of her anklets in the passage. He was on his feet. They were married before the morning, with a Kazi and two witnesses, for a hundred thousand dinars, which she took out of the bag and handed back to him, apart from a handful for the Kazi. And he told the Wag how the love had passed from her to him: it was New Year's Day, and she was in a boat on the river with ten girls and a lute, and he had said, sing me that again, and she would not; and he had told the boatmen to pelt her with oranges, and they pelted her till he thought the boat would sink. "That is how the love went across," said Jubayr.

"He tore up two letters," said the King, when my sister had done. "The Wag?" "Yes." "To spare them, lord." "Whose were they?" "Hers; he carried them." "He read them first." "He had to, to know." "And decided what Jubayr could bear." "Yes, lord." "She wrote the third in a different hand," said the King. "She wrote what he could bear." "Yes, lord." "Is that a lie?" I had my reed in my hand and I looked at the Roll. My sister said, "It is the same woman on the same day." "That is not what I asked," said the King; but he asked no more, and I have been thinking since about what it is that a person who carries letters for two people is to do, and about my own.

From the seventh week my sister told with the child at her breast, and did not break a sentence when he took it; the nurse said that it was an unnatural talent, and the King said that it was the only one that was needed. My sister said it was only the same as telling in the dark. But I noticed that she had begun to keep her eyes on his face and not on the King's, and that when she lost a word it was now the child who gave it back to her, by making a small noise in the right place; and that the King, who had never once been in doubt of whom she was telling to, sat very still when this happened, as a man sits who has learned that the house has another door.

Nights 328 to 337. Shahrazad. Present, ten strokes. Open: the six slave-girls of Al-Yaman, not yet told; a book of names; a letter from the river, not yet read to the King; and a son, who has begun to look for his father's voice.

On the 337th night the post came from the river. It is a small leather bag, with a seal in the shape of a cap, and it was handed in at the side gate by a rider with six days' mud on him, and the porter, who has been told, brought it to me and not to the King. The letter was on a single sheet of the Samarkand paper, folded in four. It said: "From the post-house at the Oxus. The road is not dry. The grey horse went lame on the fourth day and I have a bay, whose name is Patience, which I did not choose. The river is high and we wait two days for the ferry. The keeper of the post-house asked me to write my name and rank in his ledger, and I wrote traveller, and he looked at it for some time and said that it was the first time. There is a bird here that sits on the roof and says one word, which I have not been able to find in any dictionary. I count nothing. I have found that I walk past rings without seeing them, and then I stop and look to see if I am seeing them, and that is a sort of counting too. Does the boy's hair grow? Send the Open. Tell my brother the road is not dry." I read it to the King. He had the child asleep on his chest, and did not move. "I know that it is not," he said. And then, after a while: "Write to him. Come before the winter." "He knows, lord." "Write it." I wrote it; and I thought of the Wag with the two torn letters, and of the fact that both of them now spoke through me, and that neither of them knew what the other had been told.

Nine nights I will give in a breath, since I was not much listening to them. The Man of Al-Yaman and his six slave-girls, white, brown, plump, lean, yellow and black, whom he made praise their own colours to him in verse over a cup, and made peace between them, and clothed them all in robes; the Caliph Mamun bought them for sixty thousand dinars, and sent them back to their master, who could not bear to be without them, with the sixty thousand. The Caliph Harun and the damsel in the chamber, and Abu Nowas, who was in pawn at a tavern for a thousand dirhams spent on a boy in three coats. The man who stole the golden dish a dog had eaten from; the sharper of Alexandria and the police; the three chiefs of police, each of whom told a tale of how he was fooled; the thief and the money-changer; the sharper of Kus; Ibrahim the Caliph's uncle and a merchant's sister. They were all about men who were taken in, and the King said so, on the 344th night, with the child laughing at the sound of his voice; and my sister said that he was right, and that she had noticed it herself, that the people most easily taken in were the ones who were quite certain that they were not.

That month Hasan brought me a small book at the side gate. It had come from a stationer in the Copper Market, who was selling the tales written out for a quarter dirham, in a hand that was none of ours, with the Fisherman and Aziz and Azizah and the Hunchback, and it was wrong in several places that I will not tell you. It ended each tale with a line across the page and the words: and so the matter was concluded. I took it to the King, because I did not know what else to do with it. He looked through it for some time with the child under his arm. "Does it have the Open?" he said. "No, lord." "Then how do they know where she stopped?" "They do not, lord. They put a line." "A stroke." "A line across the page." "Let them," said the King, as he had said of the crate at the dyers' gate; but he did not give it back to me, and it is in the cedar chest now under the silk, with the paper from Samarkand.

Nights 338 to 346. Shahrazad. Present, nine strokes. Open: the Woman Whose Hands Were Cut Off, who is not yet begun, and who was promised to the King on the nineteenth night, for tomorrow; a book of names; a letter from the river, answered; and a son, who laughs at his father's voice.

To Shah Zaman, King of Samarkand, from Dunyazad, who keeps the Roll. Your letter came on the 337th night and I read it to him. The Open is enclosed, from the 328th night to the 346th, and is very much shorter than it looks. The King says: come before the winter. I wrote it in his words, not mine, and have put it at the end where he can find it if he asks, which he has not. The boy's hair grows. It is a thing I cannot show you, and neither will he. I have a confession, since you asked for the Open and nothing else. It is that I leave things out. I do not tear up what I am sent to carry, like the Wag; I simply do not write it. I did not tell you that he put his hand over the child's ear at the cruel part of Zumurrud, and that he said, of a justice done on three men, that it was a reason. I did not tell you that he has asked me twice whether you had a good horse. I have put these on a separate sheet, which is folded inside this one. You may burn it unread. I find that I do not, after all, know what a person ought to do who carries letters between two people, and I should like to know what a King does. The bird on the post-house roof, my father says, is saying "not yet" in the speech of the river people; he did not say how he knew; I have not told the King. Tomorrow is the 347th night. She has not forgotten, and I think that he has not either. Write when you can. The paper is very good.

## Chapter 23 · Nights Three Hundred and Forty-seven to Three Hundred and Fifty-six: The Woman Whose Hands Were Cut Off

In the afternoon of the 346th day my sister, who had slept, sat on the edge of the bed with the child asleep against her shoulder and said to me, without preface, "The book does not say it." I knew which she meant. I said that I had been afraid it would be this. "The woman praises God," she said. "That is the whole of it. She does not say anything to him; she is not asked; the tale ends at the river. If I give him the rest, it is mine, and not the tale's." "It is yours either way." "If I leave it out it is the tale's." She looked at the child's ear. "He asked me, on the nineteenth night, if she said it, and I said that I was not told. I said that a woman further on would. I did not know that I had made a promise until he counted." I said that she could tell him what the book said, and then say that she was going on. I said that I would have written them in two inks. She said that that was a clerk's answer, which it was. "Is that a lie?" she said. It was what the King had asked, some nights before, of Budur's third letter, and I did not know that she had heard it. "Not if you say it," I said. She thought. "No," she said. "Not if I say it." And she gave me the child to hold, which she does not often do, so that she could put up her hair.

On the evening of the 346th day the King said to me, as soon as I came in, "Is it the night?" He had not said the number aloud once since the nineteenth night, and I had not said it to him. "It is the night, lord." He nodded. He had washed the child's face with his own hands, which the nurse had allowed for once, and sent the nurse away to see to her cats; and he had put the sand-glass on the floor, where his brother used to sit. Then he said, to the door, in the voice in which he asks for things: "Vizier." My father had been standing there, as he stands, with his arm a little crooked. "Sit," said the King. "It is the night of the woman." My father had never sat in that room. He looked at the floor, where there was nothing but the rug and my cushion; and he sat down, with his back against the wall, awkwardly, as a man sits who has not sat on the floor in front of anyone for forty years; and I moved my cushion an inch toward him, for no reason, and he did not look at me.

"I said the three hundred and forty-seventh, lord," said my sister, from the pillows. "I said I thought. The tellers do not agree about the numbering. It may be the night before, or the night after." "It is tonight," said the King. She looked at him a moment, and she did not say anything else about it.

The first part of the night was the end of a tale begun on the night before, of Ibrahim, the Caliph's uncle, who was asked by the Caliph Mamun for the most remarkable thing he had ever seen. He had been riding, and had smelt food, and looked up and seen, behind a lattice, a wrist, lovelier than anything; and he had got into the house by telling two strange gentlemen that their friend was waiting for them, so that the master of the house took him for a guest of the guests and the guests took him for a friend of the master; and he had eaten, and drunk, and sung, and the master, who had learnt his name, had sprung to his feet. "Now of the food I have had my will," said Ibrahim, "but of the hand and the wrist I have still to win my wish." The master had called down every woman of the house, one by one, to show him; the last was his sister, and it was her wrist; and he had given her to Ibrahim that night, with ten thousand dinars, and sent her to his house with an equipage too large for the house. My sister told it very quickly, and without looking at the King; and I thought, as I think she meant me to, that she had put a hand and a wrist before the woman who had none.

Then she began. A certain King made a proclamation that anyone who gave alms of anything should lose his hand; and everyone stopped giving. A beggar came to a woman who was hungry herself, and asked her for something, and she said: how can I give you anything, when the King cuts off the hands of all who give alms? He adjured her in the name of God, and she had pity, and gave him two scones of bread. The King heard of it, and sent for her, and her hands were cut off, and she went home. She went with her sleeves hanging, and I think that nobody in the street looked at her, because it was the one day when they were all careful not to. Now after a while the King said to his mother that he wished to marry, and his mother said that among the slave-girls there was one of unsurpassed beauty, who had a blemish; and he asked what, and she said that both her hands had been cut off. He asked to see her. He was ravished, and he married her, and he did not know her; and she bore him a son. "He did not know," said the King. "No, lord." "He had cut them off himself." "Yes." "And did not ask her name." "Her name is not said, lord." "He did not ask," said the King. The other wives, being envious, wrote to the King that the woman was unchaste, and the boy hardly born. He wrote to his mother and told her to take the woman into the desert and leave her there. "He wrote," said the King. "Yes, lord." "He did it by letter." My sister said that he had.

So the old Queen took her, with the child at her neck, and abandoned her; and she walked, and wept, and came to a river, mad with thirst, and knelt to drink, and the child slid from her neck into the water. She had no hands to catch him. She sat on the bank. Two men came, and asked what she wept for, and when she told them they asked if she wished them to bring the child out, and they prayed, and the child came out of the water, safe and sound. Then they asked if she wished to have her hands given back as they had been, and she said yes; and they prayed, and her hands were given back, goodlier than before. "Do you know who we are?" they said. "God knows." "We are your two scones of bread, which you gave in alms to the asker, and which were the cause of the cutting-off of your hands. So praise God for giving you back your hands, and your child." And she praised God.

"That is where the book stops," said my sister. "The tellers stop there, and say praise be to God. I said that I would not stop there." The King did not move. My father, against the wall, had put his hand flat on the floor beside him, as one steadies oneself on a boat. The woman, said my sister, got up, with her son and her hands, and washed in the river; and she looked at her hands for some time, the way a person looks at a thing she has been lent. Then she went back. She did not go to her own people, for she had none. She went to the city, and the palace gate, and said to the guard: tell the King that his wife is here, with her hands. They took her in. The King was at his table. He looked at her as men look at one they have been told is dead; he stood up, and sat down, and could not speak; and she stood in the doorway with the boy on her arm, and held out her hands, open, as one does to show that they are empty. Then she said it. I saw my sister, in telling it, look not at the King but at the wall above his head, where there is a stain the shape of a bird. "You cut off my hands, and I do not keep it. You sent me into the desert on a letter, and I do not keep that. I have come to say so. I do not need you to say anything." And she stood there. That is all that my sister said that she said. It is, I think, the shortest speech she has ever given anyone, and she gave it in a woman's voice and not her own.

"Again," said the King. My sister said it again: "You cut off my hands, and I do not keep it." "Again." She said it a third time, in the same voice, and I could not see her face, for the lamp was behind her. "Did she stay?" said the King. "I do not know, lord." "Say." "I cannot, lord. I was not told." "No," said the King, after a long time. "It is enough that it is said." And then, to the room, not to anyone: "It is said." My sister put her face for a moment against the child's head. My father's mouth had come open. He looked, I thought, like a man about to speak who has had the words for years and has never once been able to find which of them comes first. "Vizier," said the King, very low. "Not yet." My father shut his mouth. I have thought a good deal about that. It was the old word; it was not the old voice.

At the dawn he did not take up the Roll at once. He turned back the first leaf, and at the foot of the margin of the margin, after the six, he wrote a seventh word, in the square hand: hands. It was the word in the guard's message. He did not say why. I did not ask him. Then he sat looking at it, and at the lock of hair inside the board, and at the dots which were struck; and he took the Roll from me and read it from the top and arrived at the foot.

That morning, in the passage, my father put into my hand a paper, folded small, that he had kept in his sleeve. It had seven names on it, in his writing: seven of the brides who had no one left in the city to give them, who had been strangers brought in from the provinces, with nobody to say a mother's name or a trade. He had known them. He had carried them to the door himself. He had not written them down, because he had not been asked, and had not been able to ask whether he might. I wrote them that noon at the side gate, on a page by themselves, in the fifth book. It is the only page in the books with no mother's remark on it, and I left the line under each name empty, in case. I did not ask him how long he had had the paper. He said, "Not yet," quietly, as if to himself, and then, "Now."

Night 347. Shahrazad. Present. Open: the Devout Israelite, not yet begun; a book of names; and the Woman Whose Hands Were Cut Off, who is told, and of whom it is not known whether she stayed.

Nine nights, which I give you in a breath, because my sister gave them in one. The Devout Israelite, who gave away the price of his yarn, and exchanged his trencher and jar for a stinking fish, and found a pearl in it, and when a beggar asked for a share gave him half, and the beggar said he was a messenger sent to try him. Abu Hassan al-Ziyadi, who was deposited ten thousand dirhams by a man on his way to Mecca and spent them the same day, and when the man came back the next morning ran out of the house and was sent for by the Caliph, to whom the Prophet had appeared four times in the night and said, Succour Abu Hassan; and the Khorasani, when he heard how it had been, said, "Had you told me the fact at first I should not have pressed you; I will not take any of it; you are quit." "That is the second," said the King. "Lord?" "The second who did not keep it." The poor man who was lent five hundred dinars by a friend, and found three strangers who said they had a deposit of his father's, and found at home that the friend had arranged them all. The ruined man of Baghdad who was told in a dream to go to Cairo and was beaten for it, and the Wali who told him he had dreamt of a treasure in Baghdad under a fountain, and did not go; and the man went home, and dug under his own fountain. The Caliph Mutawakkil and Mahbubah, whom he had forsaken for her arrogance, and who each dreamt the same night that they were reconciled, and woke and made the same verse; and when he died all his four thousand concubines forgot him but one, who mourned him until she died, and was buried at his side. "She kept it," said my sister, who did not often say anything of her own at the end. "Lord." "Yes," said the King. He did not say it with any particular tone. And on the last of the nine nights she began the King's Daughter and the Ape, and did not finish, because the dawn caught her, which is the only honest reason for not finishing.

Nights 348 to 356. Shahrazad. Present, nine strokes. Open: the King's Daughter and the Ape, only begun; a book of names; and a son, who has begun to know the name that he is called, and does not yet know that it is his.

## Chapter 24 · Nights Three Hundred and Fifty-seven to Three Hundred and Eighty-one: The Ebony Horse, Uns al-Wujud, and the First Snow

On the 357th night my sister began the horse of ebony. A King of Persia called Sabur, at the feast of the New Year, was brought three gifts by three sages of three countries: a man of gold with a trumpet, which would blow upon any enemy who came in at the city gate and strike him dead; a silver basin with a peacock of gold and twenty-four chicks, which at each hour of the day and night pecked one chick and cried out and beat its wings; and a horse of black wood inlaid with gold, which would carry its rider where he willed, a year's journey in a day. The King said that he would give them whatever they asked, and what they asked was his three daughters. The youngest saw her husband through the curtain: a man of a hundred, with a dyed beard and eyes the colour of raw meat; and she went to her room and put dust on her head. Her brother, Prince Kamar al-Akmar, the Moon of Moons, came in from a journey and heard her weeping, and went to his father to say that this was not right; and the sage, who had heard, said to the King that if the Prince did not believe in the horse he should try it. He showed the Prince one pin, on the right shoulder, and said, "Turn this," and went away. The horse rose with him into the air, and went up, and up, and did not stop.

"He was shown the one pin," said the King. "Yes, lord." "By a man who bore him a grudge." "Yes." "And he was not shown the other." "No, lord. But he thought, in the sky, near the sun, that a man who made a pin to go up must have made one to come down; and he felt along the horse with his hands, every part of it, and found on the left shoulder a screw like a cock's head, and turned it, and the horse began to come down." The King had the child's hand in his, and was running his thumb over the knuckles, one by one, as one feels for a pin. "Someone should have told him that there is another," he said. "He found it, lord." "That is a different thing." My sister said that it was. "Is there always another?" said the King. "In the tale there was, lord." "And outside it?" She was silent so long that I thought she had not heard. "I do not know, lord," she said. "I have not been outside a tale for a very long time." The King said nothing. After a while he put the child's hand back into the blanket, fold by fold, and said that it was cold.

Thirteen nights I will give you in a breath. The Prince came down on the roof of a palace in Sana'a and went down through the dark to find food, past a eunuch asleep with a sword by his head, and kissed the Princess Shams al-Nahar on the cheek, and she woke and said that her father had lied about the man who wanted her, since he was not ugly; and in the morning the King of Sana'a, who had a drawn sword, said that the Prince should have asked for her in the usual way, before witnesses; and the Prince said that he would fight forty thousand horse for her, and sat on his horse on the roof and rose before their eyes. She grieved. He came back for her, and she said, take me wherever you go, and he did; he took her to the gardens outside his father's city, and left her in a summer-house, to go and prepare a procession for her entry, and a palace, and to let her see the greatness of his father. "He went to prepare a show," said the King. "Yes, lord." "For her to be shown." "Yes." "He did not bring her in as she was." While he was gone the Persian sage, gathering herbs in the garden, found the horse and the Princess, and told her that the Prince had sent him, and flew away with her, and a King of the Greeks took her, and the sage was beaten and jailed; and the Prince went about the world for a year asking after a girl and a horse of wood, and was thought mad. When he found her she was feigning madness herself, tied up, so that no one should touch her; and he came to the Greek King as a physician from Persia and cured her, on condition that the King should take the horse and the troops out to a meadow, and let him exorcise the demon from the princess by putting her on the horse; and he set her behind him on it and turned the pin, and they rose, and the King and his army stood in the meadow until the evening.

On the 365th night it snowed. It was the first snow that any of us in that house could remember; I had seen it twice in my life in the hills, but never in the city; and in the morning, when I came in with the Roll, the room was full of a new white light, and the King was at the window with the child in his arms. The child was five months old, and he had a particular look of outrage that he gave to things he did not know. He gave it to the snow. "Take him down," said the King; and the nurse said that it was cold and he would catch his death, and the King said that he would catch snow. We went down. He walked out into the middle of the court in his plain coat, in the unmarked white, up to his ankles, with the child in a quilted blanket against his chest, and stood. The nurse stayed in the doorway. My sister was at the window above; I saw her hand on the glass. I stayed with the Roll under my arm. He bent, and took a handful of the snow in his free hand, and held it near the child's face; and the child, after a time, put out a finger and touched it, and withdrew it quickly and looked at the finger. Then he did it again. The King laughed. It was not the laugh that comes from far down; it was a short one, like a man's who has been given something he did not expect. Then he looked back at the place where we had come out, and saw the marks that he had made: a single line of footprints from the door to where he stood. "They will be gone by noon," said the nurse. "Yes," said the King. And he walked back to the door in his own footprints, one foot at a time, setting each boot in the print it had left, as a man does who does not want to make a second set.

On the 369th night, which was a Tuesday, I was sixteen. Nobody had said so. The King, cutting a pear after the evening meal, asked me my age as he might have asked the price of salt, and when I told him, said, "Since when?" "Since the morning, lord." "Why did you not say?" "I did not think it was a thing that was kept." He did not answer. He cut the pear in two, and gave me the half with the stalk, which is the better; and I did not know until I had eaten it that he had cut it for me. My sister, who had said nothing all day, gave me a cup of glazed clay from the potters' street, with a blue fish inside it, and said that she had meant to wait until the Roll was done.

Nights 357 to 370. Shahrazad. Present, fourteen strokes. Open: Uns al-Wujud and the Vizier's daughter Rose-in-Hood, not yet begun; a book of names; a first snow; and a son, who touched it twice.

The 371st night was the beginning of Uns al-Wujud and Rose-in-Hood, which is long, and which my sister told in the order of the letters. The daughter of a King's Vizier, who loved wine and verse and was called Rose-in-Hood, watched the ball-game from her lattice, and dropped an apple on a young guardsman called Uns al-Wujud, and asked her nurse his name. The nurse carried their letters. One of them, by mischance, was dropped in the passage, and a eunuch picked it up and took it to the Vizier; and the Vizier read it, and knew his daughter's hand, and went to his wife and wept until his beard was wet. I looked at my father. He was on the floor with his back against the wall, where he sits now. He did not weep; he looked at his hands, which he turned over, one and then the other, as though he had been told that there was something on them. "He wept," said the King. "He was afraid for her, lord. He said it was for two reasons: that she was his daughter, and that the King was his master." "He built her a castle," said the King, who knew that part of the tale already, because it is the part that is always told. "On a mountain in an island in the sea, lord, with guards and a garden; and he took her there in the night, in a ship, and said that it was a pleasure-trip." "And he did not ask her." My sister said that the tale did not say. "No," said the King. "It does not." My father turned his hands over again. That night, in the passage, I asked him whether he would have built it. He considered. "In the city," he said. "So that I could see the door." It is the only thing he has said to me about the matter, and I think it was an honest answer, and I had not known until then that he had one.

The rest I give you in the order in which it was done to me, which is to say a little at a time and with the dawn always in the wrong place. Uns al-Wujud found the door of her house shut and a line of verse written on it, and wandered mad through the night; a lion, whom he flattered in verse, led him down to the shore; a hermit who had not seen a man for years prayed for him and sent him out on a raft of reeds; and he came to the island, where an eunuch who had once been a merchant of Ispahan let him into the castle: a garden round a tank, and cages hung in the trees, and in every cage a bird, and every bird, when he wept, answering him in its own voice. But she was gone. She had let herself down from the castle on a rope of her dresses, and walked to the shore, and got into a fisherman's boat, and been carried to a King, Dirbas, who took her in, and swore that he would find the young man, and sent a Vizier round the world with presents. The Vizier found him, and did not know it: he brought him home as a fakir, in rags, on the deck of his own ship. I will not give you the recognition, which my sister gave at some length, and which went a little faster than the beginning.

On the 373rd night the post came from Samarkand, in the leather bag with the seal like a cap, and I took it to the King myself, since it was addressed to both of us. "From Samarkand. I came on the thirty-fourth day. The governor of Bukhara had been taking in two names, mine and his. I did not behead him; I made him come to Samarkand and sit in the room where I sit and watch me keep accounts, for forty days, in silence; and at the end of the forty days he gave me back what he had, and a great deal more, and asked me to send him home. I find that there is nothing more punishing than watching a man read a ledger aloud. The caravans are going through again. I have opened the room that I shut after my wife, three years ago. It is only a room. I read the second sheet. I did not burn it. I want to be told things like that; tell me always. The horse is called Patience and has grown fat. It is snowing here; it has been for eleven days. I will come at the first snow on your side of the mountains. I have your Open pinned over my table; there are two columns now, yours and mine. Mine is shorter. S." The King listened with his eyes shut. At "tell me always" he opened them, and looked at me; and I looked at the Roll. "Write to him," said the King. "Write that it has snowed. Write that the boy took it in his hand."

I wrote it that night, on the Samarkand paper, in the second hour. "It has snowed. The boy took it in his hand and touched it twice. The King walked back across the court in his own footprints, one foot at a time. You said always, and I am keeping this in." On the first of each month I make my copy of the Open for him, on two sheets: one for the Open, and one for what is not in it. I have begun to write the second sheet first. I did not put in the last thing, which is that the boy, on the 378th night, said "ba" to the lamp, and that the nurse, my sister and the King each said at once that it was the beginning of his name, and that he looked at all three of us with the contempt of one who had meant only the lamp.

On the 380th night my father did not come to stand at the door at dusk. The nurse said that he was in the lane of the weavers. I asked what for, and she said that he had not said, but that he had gone with a paper in his hand, and looked at the paper at every door; and she said it as one says that it will rain. He came back after the second watch with snow on his shoulders and his shoes wet to the ankle, and went to the King and said something low; the King nodded; my father went to bed. I do not know what he said.

Nights 371 to 381. Shahrazad. Present, eleven strokes. Open: Abu Nowas and the three boys, only begun; a letter from Samarkand, answered; a book of names, in its fifth book; the first snow, which is gone; and my father, who has gone out with a paper.

## Chapter 25 · Nights Three Hundred and Eighty-one to Four Hundred and Twelve: Daniel's Question, Shah Zaman's Return, and the Second Child

The nights after the Wazir's castle I give you as my sister gave them, quickly, like a woman paying out a rope. Abu Nowas, who shut himself up with a feast and prayed to be sent someone fit to eat it with. A man of Bassorah who spent everything on a slave-girl he loved, and she told him to sell her, since he needed the price. The wife of Mutalammis, who was pressed by her family to marry again when her husband had been so long away that people thought him dead, and who said no for as long as she could, and was married at last, reluctantly; and on the night of the wedding the husband came home, and stood among the women, and she sighed the first half of a verse, and he answered her with the second, from the crowd; and the bridegroom, hearing it, went out improvising, and left the two of them the house. A simpleton whose ass was stolen by two sharpers, one pulling it off by the halter while the other put his own head in. Harun and three poets; Harun and Zubaydah at her bath. They were told, most of them, with my sister's eyes on the child. He was seven months old and had four teeth, or rather four places where the teeth meant to be, which he showed to everyone as evidence.

On the 388th night the first snow came on the mountains, and on the morning of the 389th, at the gate, there was a rider with ice in his beard and a bay horse that had grown fat. The porter ran for me, and I ran, I think; I remember that I went down the stairs with the Roll under my arm because I did not know how to put it down. He had already dismounted. He stood with the reins in his hand and looked at me, and I at him, and neither of us said anything for as long as it takes a horse to blow. "You are early," I said at last, which was the sort of thing I had meant to say, and had not meant to say first. "The snow came early," said Shah Zaman. He took a parcel out of his saddle-bag, wrapped in oilcloth, and put it in my hands. It was a book. It was bound in green leather, a hand's breadth by two, and when I opened it, it was my own writing: the second sheets, all of them, in the order in which I had sent them, which I had folded inside the letters and told him to burn. On the first leaf he had written, in his small upright hand: What is not in the Open. "I could not keep them in Samarkand," he said. "I thought you should have them. In case you wanted to know what you had left out." I did not say that I had kept no copies; I do not think that I could have spoken. The King had come down, behind me. He looked at the two of us, and at the green book, and at his brother's beard, and said, "You have grown a beard." "It is the road," said Shah Zaman. And the King, who had not touched anyone for eighty days except a child, put out both his hands and took his brother's face between them, and held it, and looked at it, as one looks at a thing in a shop that one has decided to buy.

That night the child screamed at the beard. It took four days for them to be on terms. I will not say that Shah Zaman minded; he sat with his rug beside my cushion, as before, and held his nephew at arm's length like a man holding a vessel that may still be hot, and said to him, in Persian, in the voice of a general, that he had come a long way. On the third night the child took hold of the beard with both fists, and would not let go, and the King said that this was to be expected in a family that did not let go of things; and Shah Zaman, whose eyes were watering, said that if it was a family characteristic he had got it from the other side.

On the 391st night the King laughed at the fisherman and the fish. It is a small tale. Khusrau of Persia was given a great fish by a fisherman and ordered him four thousand dirhams; and his wife Shirin said that he had done ill, since the next courtier he gave a like sum to would feel it a slight, and the next he gave less to would feel insulted; and the King said that a King cannot go back on his gift; and she said, call him back and ask him if the fish is male or female. The fisherman said it was an hermaphrodite, and got four thousand more. Then, going away with the bag on his shoulder, he stooped for one dirham that had fallen, and Shirin said, see the meanness of the man; and the King, in a temper, called him back, and the fisherman said that he had stooped because the coin has the King's face on one side and his name on the other, and he could not bear that any man should tread on it; and got another four thousand, and the King made a proclamation that no man should take a woman's counsel, for it will lose him his one dirham and another two beside. "He did not pay once and stop," said the King. "No, lord." "A King does not take back a gift." "No, lord." "Not even the price of a fish," said the King; and he looked, I thought, at my father, who was on the floor with his back to the wall, and who said nothing at all.

Nights 381 to 393. Shahrazad. Present, thirteen strokes. Open: the Devout Woman and the two elders, not yet begun; a book of names, in its fifth book; a boy with four places for teeth; and Shah Zaman, who has come with the first snow on this side.

The 394th night was a short one, and in the books it is told in a paragraph. There was a virtuous woman among the Children of Israel who went every day to a garden to wash before prayer; and two old men who kept the garden fell in love with her, and told her that unless she yielded to them they would swear that they had found her with a young man. She said that God would preserve her from them. They opened the gate and cried out, and said what they had said they would say; and since it was the custom of those days, they cried her name in the streets for three days, and the two elders came to her each day, and laid their hands on her head, and thanked God for sending His anger down on her. On the fourth day they took her out to be stoned. And a boy of twelve called Daniel, who had followed them, said, do not stone her yet; and he sat on a chair, and had the old men taken apart, and asked the first what he had seen, and where. Under a pear-tree, said the first. He asked the second. Under an apple-tree. "Three days," said the King. My sister said that it was three days. "They cried her name for three days." "Yes, lord." "And nobody asked." "A boy asked, lord, on the fourth." "Why not on the first?" "I do not know, lord. It is not said." "Nobody asked where." "No, lord." He was silent. "It took him a moment," he said. "A moment, lord." "A moment, to ask where." The child on his arm turned his face against his chest. I saw my father's hands, flat on the floor, press a little, as a man presses a floor to see whether it will take his weight.

On the 395th night, and the two after it, the Caliph Omar sat judging, and two young men brought before him a third, by the collar, and said that he had killed their father. He did not deny it. He was a Bedouin, whose stallion the old man had killed with a stone, thrown over his garden wall when one of the camels strayed in; and he had picked up the same stone, and thrown it back. "It is just," he said. "The law is the law." But he had a younger brother, for whom his father had left money that he alone knew where to find, and he asked for three days to bury it with a guardian; and when Omar asked who would stand surety, he looked round all the faces, and chose a stranger, Abu Dharr, who had never seen him. Abu Dharr said yes. The three days went. On the third the young men said that he would not return, having once fled; and Omar said that if he did not, Abu Dharr would suffer what the law prescribed. The court was in tears. And in the last hour, sweating, and saluting, the Bedouin came in. "I have given the boy to his mother's brothers," he said, "and let them into the secret of the money, and braved the heat of noon, and kept my word as a free man. That it be not said that good faith is gone from among men." Abu Dharr said that he had stood surety for a man he did not know because he had been chosen, and had not been able to bear that it should be said that generosity was gone from among men. And the two young men said: "We forgive him our father's blood, that it be not said that humanity is gone from among men." They would not take the blood-money from the Treasury either. They said they had forgiven him for God's sake, and that whoever does so does not follow his kindness with reproach.

Three times, then: that it be not said. The King was silent a good while. Then he said, without moving, "He came back." "Yes, lord," said my sister. "He did not have to." "He had given his word." "And a stranger had stood for him." "Yes." "Vizier," said the King. My father lifted his head. "I am told that you go out in the evenings with a paper." My father said that it was so. "How many houses?" "Forty-one, lord." "And?" "Thirteen opened." There was no expression in his voice at all; he was giving an account, as he has always given accounts. "I said my name. I said what I had done, and that I was the man who came to the door. I did not say that I was sorry; I thought that was a thing for them to refuse, and not for me to ask. At the fourth house a woman threw a shoe at me. It missed, and she said that she had not meant it to hit. At the nineteenth an old man let me in and sat me down and gave me a cup of water, and said nothing for a quarter of an hour, and then told me where I might find the grave. I went." "Is it that it should not be said?" said the King. "No, lord. I go because there is a paper, and the paper has names." "And is it said?" "What, lord?" "That the Vizier is gone from among men." My father considered it, as he considers everything. "I do not think they are saying it, lord," he said. "I think they are saying a good many other things." The King nodded, as though that were the correct answer to a different question. He did not tell him to stop.

On the 400th night, when the lamp had been trimmed, my sister said, "Lord, I am going to tell you something, and I would like to be the one who does it." He put the child down on the rug between two cushions. "I am with child again," said my sister. "Since the end of the harvest, by my count and the nurse's. I do not know yet whether it is a son." He said nothing for some time. "The first time," said my sister, "I told you by the Roll. I wished to tell you with my mouth." "How long?" said the King. "A little under two hundred and sixty nights, lord." He drew a breath. "I shall not draw the dots." "No, lord." "A child," said the King, "is not a dot." The nurse, in her corner, did not look up from her mending, and I saw that she was smiling at it. He laid his hand on the coverlet beside my sister's, as he had on the twenty-fourth night, and left it there. And when I wrote the Open at dawn I wrote the last line as it had been written once before: and a child, which has no name yet. I found that my hand knew the way.

On the 404th night my sister told a very short tale about a King. He went out in disguise and asked for water at a woman's door, and was so struck by her face that he asked for her favours. She knew him. She led him in, and sat him down, and gave him a book to read while she saw to something; and the book was about the Divine prohibition, and the punishments prepared for the adulterous; and the King read it, and trembled, and gave it back, and went away repenting. When the husband came home she told him, and he said in himself that he feared the King's desire had fallen upon her, and he did not go near her after that. Some time went by, and her kinsfolk complained to the King that the man had hired a field and ploughed it awhile and then neither tilled it nor gave it up; and the King asked him what hindered him from sowing, and he said, "It reached me that the lion had entered the field, and I stood in awe of him, and dared not draw near." The King understood the parable. "The lion did not trample the field," he said. "It is good for seed. Sow it." My sister stopped. "Who told the husband?" said the King, after a moment. "The King did, lord. In the end." "It should have been sooner," said the King; and my father, on the floor, closed his eyes, and I do not think he was asleep.

Nights 394 to 404. Shahrazad. Present, eleven strokes. Open: the King and the woman with the book, ended; Abd al-Rahman and the feather of the Rukh, only begun; a book of names; a second child, which has no name yet; and a Vizier, who has been to forty-one houses.

Eight nights I give you in a breath, because there is not much in them that is not the weather. The feather of the Rukh, which was big enough to hold a gugglet of water, brought from an island by a man of the west; Adi and the Princess Hind, who met at a church on a feast-day, she eleven years old and he come with presents; Di'ibil and the lady at the gate of Karkh; Isaac of Mosul and a merchant; three lovers who died of it; the mad lover in the monastery; the prior who became a Moslem. The first snow lay on the roofs for nine days and then went to water; and on the tenth Shah Zaman, whom we had not been able to keep from the cold, went out in his coat and stood in the court looking at the place where the child had put his finger in it, and the King came down and stood beside him, and neither of them said what they were looking at.

Nights 405 to 412. Shahrazad. Present, eight strokes. Open: Abu Isa and Kurrat al-Ayn, only begun; a book of names; a second child; and a bay horse called Patience, who is fat.

## Chapter 26 · Nights Four Hundred and Thirteen to Four Hundred and Thirty-five: The Caravan from the North, and a White Book

I give you the first eight of those nights in a breath, since I was learning to write a new column and was not listening as I should. Abu Isa, a prince of the Caliph's house, who loved a singing-girl in the house of one of his brother's captains and told no one; and the Caliph Mamun, who made a round of his captains' houses by surprise, and sat to be sung to by ten girls, and ten more, and ten more, until the one came out whom the prince could not look at, and wept when she sang; and the Caliph, who might have kept her, said that if he had had a mind to her he would have preferred Abu Isa before himself, and gave her to him. "Did he ask her?" said the King. "She sang it in front of the Caliph, lord, in verse: that she loved him." "Then she was asked," said the King. "It is the kind of asking there is." Al-Fath and the Caliph Mutawakkil; Abu Suwayd and a pretty old woman; the Emir Ali bin Tahir and the girl Muunis. There was a preacher of Baghdad, Sitt al-Mashaikh, who disputed with a man for three nights about a question I will not give you, and beat him with the Koran, and the Traditions, and his own words. The King asked who won, and my sister said that she had never been able to remember the terms, only that the woman did. She had a new way of sitting, in those weeks, with a cushion at the small of her back and one hand where the child would be, and she told the whole of Abu Isa with that hand lying quite still.

Nights 413 to 420. Shahrazad. Present, eight strokes. Open: Ali of Cairo, not yet begun; a book of names, in its fifth book; a second child, which has no name yet; and a Vizier, who has been to sixty-three houses.

On the 421st day, at noon, Hasan the page, whose name was never Abd al-Baqi, came up the stairs two at a time and said that there was a caravan at the north gate with a sealed paper, and that the porter did not know what to do with it. I went down with him, since it was my office to meet strangers at the side gate with the book. At the foot of the stair I met my father, who had been sent for by the porter; and I saw, for the first time in my life, that my father could go grey. It was not the colour of his face, which is always the colour of his face. It was a stillness that came down over him, as a cloth comes down over a cage. He had the sealed paper in his hand. I read it over his arm. It said that, in obedience to the Vizier's order of the nineteenth month for the supply of maidens to the capital, the governor of the northern marches sent ten daughters of good families, with their dowries, and an escort, to arrive before the feast.

"I wrote it in the nineteenth month," said my father. He said it to the paper. "When the city had no more to give. I wrote once to every province. I never wrote again." "Lord," said the sergeant at the gate, who did not know whom he was speaking to, "it is a twenty-six days' march from the marches, and they set out at the new moon." "Yes," said my father. "I understand that." And the King was behind us. I do not know who had told him; no one had; I think he heard it in the way that the house sometimes tells him things. He did not say anything to either of us. He went out through the side gate in his plain coat, and stood in the road.

There were ten of them. The youngest was fourteen; the eldest, I think, seventeen. They were in good wool cloaks, in two lines, with the dowries on a cart behind them, which was copper pots, and a bolt of linen, and some jars; they had been told to bring cloaks, because it was cold at night in the capital, and they had brought them. One had a pot on her head, which she had forgotten to put down. The youngest was holding the hand of the girl beside her, and the girl beside her had her eyes shut. Nobody was crying. They were standing as they had been taught to stand when a great man is looking at them. "How many set out?" said the King, to the sergeant, in the voice in which he asks for things. "Twelve, lord. Two died of the fever on the road. They are buried at the third station, and I have their names." "Give them to the Roll," said the King. He said nothing else for what seemed a long time. Then he took one step forward, to the first of the girls, who was standing nearest, and said, "What is your name?"

He asked it of every one. He did not say that they were safe, and he did not say that he was sorry; he stood in front of each of them with his hands at his sides and asked her name, and her village, and listened to the answer, which was several times a name I could not follow, and several times a place he had never heard of; and I wrote, on a loose leaf, standing, as fast as I could. Then he said, "Do you wish to go home?" nine times, and nine times they said yes, with a kind of terror, as though it were a question that might be taken away. The tenth was a girl called Sumayya, who was fifteen, and could write her name, and nothing else. She looked at the Roll in my arm the way a person looks at a river she has been told about. "I would like to learn to write," she said. "Not to go home?" "I would like to go home after." "After," said the King. My sister had come down by then, with a hand on the wall; she stood a little behind him, and when he had done she walked past him and said to Sumayya, who was nearest, only, "Can you carry a book?" "Yes, lady." "Then you are the one we were waiting for," said my sister, which was not true, and was kind, and I have not asked her whether she knew.

My father wrote the paper that afternoon, on his knee, in the passage. To the governor of the northern marches. The supply of maidens to the capital is suspended. The maidens are returned with an escort and their dowries, and the cost of the journey home to be paid from the Treasury. "Suspended," said the King, who was reading it over his shoulder. My father stopped. "Not ended, lord?" he said, very quietly, with the pen in his hand. "Suspended," said the King. My father wrote it. I noted the word. It was the word of a man who has not yet found the other.

That evening my father said to me, in the passage, that he had not written a second letter in the nineteenth month because to write it he would have had to say what the first was for, and that he had thought it safest for everyone to let the first one lapse. I said that letters do not lapse. "No," he said. "I have since learned."

They slept that night, the ten, in the long room above the stables that is kept for the wives of visiting governors, with the doors open. My father had the key brought and laid it on the sill outside, so that anyone could see that it was not turned. Shah Zaman sat up on the stair with the sergeant and a lamp, because, he said, he was a man who knew what it was to be sent for. Nobody slept. At the second watch my sister, who is not supposed to be on stairs, went up with a lamp, and I behind her with the cushion, and she sat on the end of a bed among the cloaks and told them the Fisherman, because it is the first story she ever learned to tell and it ends with the Jinni in the jar. The youngest of them, the one who held the other's hand, asked in the middle, without lifting her head: "Is it true the King kills?" My sister did not stop at once. "It was true," she said. "And now?" said the girl. My sister looked at the lamp. "Not yet," she said. "What does that mean?" "It means that you should ask me tomorrow, and I will tell you what I know then." Nobody said anything. Then someone laughed, once, in the dark, at nothing, as people do who are too frightened to cry; and my sister went on with the Fisherman; and the Jinni, who had promised a hundred things from the bottom of the sea, came out of the bottle in the usual way, in smoke.

There had been four letters in the nineteenth month, not one. North, south, east, and the hill country; and the King, who had not known that, asked my father in the morning whether there were others, and my father, who has never lied to him, said that there were three. Riders went out that day, on the best horses, with the same paper. The south caravan was met at the second station, and turned back; it had eleven in it, and it had been on the road for sixty days, and nobody in it had thought to ask whether there was a reason to go on. The east one was met at the river, and sat down on the bank, and some of the girls wept for the first time, with the relief of it, because they had been told to be brave and had been. Of the fourth, from the hill country, which has no road to speak of, no word came back. The riders were gone eleven days and said that there was no caravan to be found. My father said that it was possible that it had not set out. He said it in the voice of a man giving the best account he had; and he put it in the Open himself, in his own hand, as he has never done before: a caravan from the hills, which is not found.

That evening I went to the stationer's in the Copper Market and bought a book of plain white paper, with a hundred leaves, and on the first page I wrote: Came to the gate, and went home. I wrote under it the ten names, and the villages; and I found that my hand wrote them without needing a different pen. I had thought it would feel different. The King asked for the page, when I took it up. He sat with it on his knee, and then he said, "Read them." I read the ten names aloud, in the room, one after the other, which no name had been, in that room, since the first book was begun; and after each he said the name again after me, once, low, as a man repeats a word in a language he is learning. When I came to the end he said nothing, and then he said, "Again," and I read them again.

The nine left on the 425th day with the sergeant and a purse of silver apiece, in the cart with the pots. At the wheel the youngest said to my sister, "You said to ask tomorrow." "I did." "I am asking." My sister, who had a hand on the wheel, said, "He asked your name. That is what I know." "Is that much?" "It is more than the nineteenth month," said my sister. The girl thought about it, and nodded, as one nods to a price, and the cart went out through the north gate, and the youngest waved. The tenth stayed. She asked, the first evening, whether she might write the nine names in her own hand, in the white book, under mine; and I said she might; and she wrote them very badly, with the tongue between her teeth, and I did not correct them. They are there now, the two lines, one above the other, mine and hers, so that anyone turning the page can see that someone was learning. The two who had died I wrote in the fifth blue book, with the station at which each is buried; they are the only two names in the five books of the brides who were not struck, and they are in the same book. I do not know what else I should have done. My sister, who understood by then, said that it was not a question that can be answered by doing it correctly.

The rest of that month I can give you in a breath. Ali of Cairo, the merchant's son, who buried his father and spent the whole of the house, down to the marble and the woodwork, and went to Baghdad, where a house stood empty that no one would lodge in, and he said he would lodge in none other; and there were forty nights of it. The pilgrim man and the old woman. Haunted houses, and a treasure, found in the end by a man who had lost everything else and could no longer be frightened by a house, which is, my sister said, the only way that such treasures are found. Sumayya sat on the rug beside my cushion, which had by now two occupants, learning to hold a reed, and wrote the first letter of the alphabet two hundred times, and was ashamed, and did it again. On the 430th night the King came to look at the page. He did not say anything. He held it up to the lamp, and turned it over, and looked at the back, where the ink had come through; and gave it to her, and said, "It is straight."

Nights 421 to 435. Shahrazad. Present, fifteen strokes. Open: Tawaddud, the slave-girl of Abu al-Husn, not yet begun; a white book, with ten names in it, and the fifth blue book, with two; a girl who is learning to hold a reed; a paper to the governor of the northern marches, with a word in it that is not the last; and a caravan from the hills, which is not found, in my father's hand.

## Chapter 27 · Nights Four Hundred and Thirty-six to Four Hundred and Sixty-two: Tawaddud, and a Boon Not Yet Asked

On the 436th night my sister began Tawaddud. A rich merchant of Baghdad had a son at last, after long prayers, and named him Abu al-Husn on the seventh day; and when the father died the son was visited by friends who said that mourning is for maidens, and took him to the bath, and in a year the money was gone, all but a slave-girl that his father had left him, Tawaddud, who was five feet tall and played the lute and knew every book. She told him to take her to the Caliph and ask ten thousand dinars; and if the Caliph found her dear, to say: try her. The Caliph asked her what she was skilled in. She said syntax and poetry and jurisprudence and the Koran in the seven, the ten and the fourteen readings, the number of its chapters and verses and letters; and medicine and logic and the exact sciences; and the lute; and added, "If I sing and dance I seduce, and if I dress and scent myself I slay." He sent to Bassorah for the best prosodist in the world, and for readers of the Koran, and doctors of the law, and physicians and astrologers and mathematicians and philosophers, seventy of them, and they came into the room not knowing why. The seventy looked at one another; the youngest of them, a mathematician, blushed to the ears. She sat on a golden stool and unveiled, and said, "Which of you is the doctor of the law?"

"Seventy," said the King. "And one girl." "Yes, lord." "She asked which of them." "She asked which was the doctor of the law, lord, and then began. She would have the questions in the order of her own choosing." "That is a fair thing," said the King, who sat with his chin on his hand. Shah Zaman, on the rug, was asleep with his mouth a little open; the child was asleep on the King; my father was in the corner, awake. My father said that ten thousand dinars was more than the Treasury paid in a month to the garrison of the north. "And she was worth it?" said the King. "We shall hear," said my father, which is the nearest to a joke that he has made in my hearing. "Go on, then."

For five nights the doctors of the law and the readers of the Koran put to her the questions on which a Moslem is examined: what are the obligations, how many prostrations, what must be done on waking, what are the conditions of the Pilgrimage, what is the last verse revealed. I will not give you them. By the fifth night the youngest of the doctors was sitting with his hands in his lap like a boy who has been told to wait. She answered them as one pours water from a jug into a cup, never spilling and never looking at the cup. One answer only the King asked to have again. "What are the ordinances that cannot be changed?" said the doctor. "They are four," said Tawaddud: "night and day and the sun and the moon, which build up life and hope; and none knows whether they will be destroyed." The King said, "Again." My sister said it again. "Night and day," he said. "And the sun and the moon," said my sister. "Which build up hope." "Yes, lord." He said no more of that.

On the 441st night my sister could not speak. It was not the fever, though she had been warm for two days; it was that the words, when she opened her mouth, sat in her throat like cold bread. She was in her third month, and the nurse, who had said nothing for a week, said that she would not tell tonight, nor tomorrow, nor the day after, and that anyone who said otherwise would find her in the doorway. The King had been told. He said, "Then stop." It was the first night since the first that there was no tale in the room. He sat with the child, and the sand-glass beside him on the floor, and the lamp; and I wrote the Roll at dawn, Night 441, Present, Open: Tawaddud, the doctor of the law cut off, the physician not yet; and I made the stroke, and he came and looked at it. "It is straight," said the King. It was the first time that he had said it of a stroke of mine.

There were three nights like that. They were quiet, and the child did not cry once, and nothing was missing from them that I could name, and on the fourth the King said, at the hour when the tale would have begun, without turning his head, "Dunyazad. Who comes next?" I said that it was the physician. "What does he ask?" I said that I did not know. "You were in the room." "I was, lord." "You have heard every night." I said that I wrote the Roll, and did not keep the tales; I kept what was left of them. He said, "Is that all that is left?" I looked at my sister, on her pillows, who had her eyes open and was looking at the ceiling with the face of a person who is not going to help. "I could try," I said.

I will tell you how it was, since I have promised to leave nothing out. I sat on my cushion, and I opened my mouth, and what came out was the voice in which I read the Open: level, quick, with the stops in the wrong places. "The physician rose," I said, "and asked her to describe the configuration of the bones." I stopped. I could hear it. My sister, from the pillows, without turning her head, said, in a low voice, "Do not tell it as if you were reading it. Tell it as if you were there." "I was there." "Then tell it." And I did. I told the bones, which in man's frame number three hundred and sixty, and the veins, which are as many; the humours; which baths are best, those with sweet water and wide space and good air, so that the atmosphere in them has all four seasons; and the tongue, which God has appointed as the interpreter of the thought, and the eyes to be lanterns, and the nostrils to smell, and the lips as the doorkeeper. I told it for an hour and a half, and left out a great deal; and when I stopped, the King said, "That was told like a clerk reading a list." "Yes, lord." "It was a good list." And Shah Zaman, whom I had thought asleep, said from the rug, "Do it again tomorrow."

Night 444. Dunyazad. Present. Open: Tawaddud, the physician answered, the astrologer not yet; a book of names; a white book; a second child, which has no name yet; and my sister, who is in bed.

I had written it at the head of the line, where it had always said Shahrazad, before I understood what I had written, and I would have scratched it out, and then I did not. In the morning my sister took the Roll off the table, and read it, and said nothing; she turned the page a little towards the window, as one does with a thing one wants to see more clearly, and gave it back. The King read it standing. He came to the head of the line, and stopped; and then he put his thumb beside the name, as he has put it beside the strokes. I do not know what that means. I have not asked him.

I told Tawaddud for seventeen nights. I told the astrologer, with the seven planets and the twelve houses and the courses of the moon; and a question about what becomes of the night when the day comes, and of the day when the night comes, to which she answered, He causes the night to enter in upon the day, and the day to enter in upon the night. I told the spot of lowland on which the sun shone once and will not shine again until Judgment-Day, which is the bottom of the Red Sea where Moses struck with his staff. I told the five that are in Paradise and are neither men, nor jinn, nor angels: Jacob's wolf, and the dog of the Seven Sleepers, and Esdras's ass, and Salih's camel, and Duldul the mule of the Prophet. "A wolf," said the King. "Jacob's, lord. The one that was accused." "That it did not eat the boy." "That it did not." "And so it is in Paradise." "Yes, lord." "For not having done it," said the King. I had no answer to that, and did not try to give one. On the 453rd night I noticed that the child, who had turned his head to his father's voice since the autumn, turned it now to mine; and I stopped, in the middle of the mathematician, and the King said, "Go on." But I went on a little differently, I think, after that. Sumayya, who had sat on the rug beside my cushion for eleven nights with her reed idle in her hand, said to me afterwards, in the passage, in a whisper, "Is it always like it was?" I said that it was not. I said that I changed it, in telling, to what I could carry. "Then how will anyone know?" she said. I said that they would not; that this was why one kept a Roll. She considered this, with her tongue between her teeth. "Then you have to write the other thing," she said. "What you changed." I had not thought of it. I have begun to do it on the second sheet.

I told the chess. The Caliph sent for the best player in Baghdad, who played her once, and lost, and played again, and lost, and was offered a handicap, her queen and her right castle and her left knight; and he took it, and she moved little by little until one of her pawns was a queen, and set a piece in his way, and he took it. "The measure is meted and the loads balanced," she said. "Eat till thou art over-full; naught shall be thy ruin, O son of Adam, save thy greed. Knowest thou not that I did but tempt thee? See: this is check-mate." And he gave her his clothes, leaving himself his trousers, and swore that he would contend with none, so long as Tawaddud abode in Baghdad. "She let him take it," said the King. "Yes, lord." "And then showed him what it cost." "Yes." He was silent. "It is a thing that one can do to a greedy man," he said, "once." I told the backgammon. I told the lute, which was brought in a bag of red satin, an old worn lute, polished by use; she laid it in her lap and bent over it as a mother bends over a child that she is suckling, and preluded in twelve modes, till the whole assembly was swaying like a sea; and sang. I told it on the 460th and 461st nights. I did not say that I was nervous; but I found that I told the lute with my hands in my lap, like hers. My sister, with a hand on the curve under her dress, listened to me tell it the way one listens to a person walking about in one's own house.

On the 462nd night my sister was up. She sat on the end of the bed with the cushion at her back, and said that she would tell the last of it, and that nobody should say that she should not; and the nurse, in the doorway, said nothing. The Caliph paid Abu al-Husn a hundred thousand dinars for her, and said: Tawaddud, ask a boon. She said: I ask that you restore me to my lord who sold me. He did; he gave her five thousand dinars for herself, and he made Abu al-Husn his companion for as long as he lived, with a thousand dinars a month; and my sister said, "Marvel then, O King, at the eloquence of this damsel and the hugeness of her learning, and consider the generosity of the Commander of the Faithful, in that he said to her, Ask a boon, and she besought him to restore her to her lord." And she stopped. The King said nothing for a little. "She asked for him," he said. "Yes, lord." "She did not ask for herself." "No, lord." "That is not the same as asking for nothing." "No, lord," said my sister. "It is a different list." And then he said, still looking at the lamp, "Dunyazad."

"Lord." "Ask a boon." I said that I did not understand. "You have told seventeen nights," said the King. "I am the Caliph. Ask." I did not know what to say. I want to be exact: I did not have any answer. I had wanted so few things, for so long, and always for other people, that when I tried to think what one of my own might be, it was like putting a hand into a purse that has been given away. I thought of the Roll; I thought, absurdly, of the cup with the blue fish; on the rug, Sumayya let her reed fall, and picked it up. "I do not know, lord," I said. "I do not know what I want." "That is allowed," said the King, quite kindly. "May I ask you at the end?" "The end of what?" "The Roll, lord." He thought. "That is a long way," he said. "Yes, lord." "I shall count." My father, in the corner, closed his eyes; Shah Zaman, on his rug, looked very hard at the wall; and my sister said, "It is a good answer," which she does not say. And the King took up the pen, and in the thumb's-width of the binding, where the tally is, and under the last of the strokes, he wrote, in the square hand, a small mark that I have not looked at closely, since it is his: but I think it is a date.

Nights 445 to 461. Dunyazad. Present, seventeen strokes. Open: Tawaddud, ended, who asked for him; a book of names; a white book; a girl who is learning to hold a reed; and a second child.

Night 462. Shahrazad. Present. Open: the Angel of Death and the Proud King, only begun; a book of names; a boon, which is not yet asked, and which a King has said he will count to.

## Chapter 28 · Nights Four Hundred and Sixty-three to Four Hundred and Eighty-two: The Angel's Tales, and a Woodcutter Left Open

From the end of the 462nd night my sister told tales of the Angel of Death, and she told them for twenty nights. I will not give you all of them. The Roll has them as a column of kings and graves, and when I read it back to myself on the nights I cannot sleep, it looks like a street in which every house has been sold. She was in her fourth month, and told them from the bed with the big cushion at her back, under the nurse's rule, which was that when the sand-glass had run twice she stopped, whatever the King was waiting for. The first was a king who rode out in state, in a collar of rubies, so proud that he gave no glance to a man in rags who stood in his road. The man took the bridle and put his mouth to the King's ear. The King asked for a little time, to go home and take leave of his people. "Thou shalt never return nor look on them again." Then she told of the other man, the devout one, who said, Welcome, I have been weary of waiting for thee, and asked only to be taken in the middle of his prayer, with his forehead on the ground; and was.

On the 463rd night it was the rich king, who had built a palace with strong doors and set guards on every one, and sat down to the first meal in it, saying to himself, O soul, thou hast gathered all the wealth of the world, now take thy leisure. Someone knocked, and the whole palace shook. The servants ran at him with staves. "Bide in your steads," said the man at the door, "I am the Angel of Death." And the King said to his people, "Tell him to take a substitute in my place." She stopped there, for the length of one breath. Nobody looked at anybody. My father looked at the floor, which is where he looks when the rest of us have the manners not to look at him; he was for a long time the man who found the substitutes. "I will take no substitute," said my sister, in the Angel's voice, which was not a voice but only her own, made flatter, "and I come for thee alone, to part thee from what thou hast gathered." Then the treasure spoke. The King cursed it, and it asked him why, since it was made of the same dust as he was, and had been put into his hand to be given away. "It spoke," said the King. "Yes, lord." "The treasure." "Yes, lord." He said nothing more that night, and my father, in his corner, was counting something on his fingers, which I knew to be houses.

There was a king of the Children of Israel who begged the Angel for a day, then for an hour, and was told that the hour had been in the account and had gone, and that one breath remained. "Who will be with me in the tomb?" "Naught but thy works." "I have none," said the King. There was Iskandar of the Two Horns, who came upon a tribe so poor that they dug their graves in front of their doors, to see them every morning, and swept them. Their King took out a skull, and then another, and laid them before the conqueror, one of a king who had dealt tyrannously with his people and one of a king who had dealt justly, and put his hands on Iskandar's head. "Would that I knew which of these two you are," he said. Iskandar wept, and offered him the vizierate and half of everything. He refused. All men were Iskandar's enemies, he said, because of the worlds he had won; all men were his own friends, because he had nothing. That was the whole of it. It took half a night, and the sand-glass was turned once.

Then came Anushirwan the Just, who pretended to be ill, and sent his stewards through the provinces to find him a mud brick thrown away from a ruined village, as a medicine; and after a long time they came back and said that there was none, neither a ruin nor a castaway brick in all the realm. He thanked God. He had only wanted to know. The King listened to this with his chin on his hand, and said nothing. In the morning he stood at the window with my father, and said, without turning, "A brick." "Lord?" "From a house that has been thrown away. For my medicine." My father looked at his own hands. "It may take a little time, lord." "Yes." He was back before dark. He had been to the Tanners' Lane, and he came in carrying it in both sleeves, the way he used to carry the shroud: half a brick, grey on the broken side. The King looked at it for a time that I did not count. "The Tanners' Lane." "Yes, lord." "How many are standing?" "Four, lord. Two of them are only the door-frame." "Put it by the door," said the King, and went to his bed.

It stayed by the door. The nurse put her foot against it when the door swung. Shah Zaman set his tin of saddle-grease on it. I held the loose sheets down with it when the wind came in under the shutter; and the boy, who could sit by then if he was propped, was pulled away from it twice with grey on his mouth. Nobody moved it for the rest of the winter, and nobody said what it was for.

On the 465th night my sister looked at it before she began the Kazi's wife. A Kazi of the Children of Israel went on pilgrimage and left his brother to judge in his place and his wife in his brother's charge; the brother wanted her, and she said no, and he had her accused. I leave out what was done to her then, and what was done in the village where she was taken in, because my sister told it in four sentences and I cannot do it in one. She came to a cell by a road and prayed there, and the sick came to her from the whole breadth of the earth; and one morning there stood at her door, each with a different illness and none of them knowing her, the brother, and a thief, and a peasant's wife, who had each wronged her once. She stood in the doorway, veiled, and told them that they would not be relieved of what was upon them until each had said what he or she had done. They said it, one by one. Then she asked God to heal them, and He did; and the Kazi, who had come with his brother, looked at her too long and said, "I had a wife, and were she not dead I would say that you were she"; and she told him who she was. "She forgave them," my sister said. "All three." The King said, "She made them say it first." "Yes, lord." He said nothing about the second part.

The tray-maker and his wife, on the 469th night, were people who fasted by day and sold what they made at night; he was the one who came home without bread, because a rich man's wife had shut the door on him, and he had found a way out of that house which only a man in a tale can find. I will not give you the way. His wife did not ask where the bread was. She said that if the neighbours saw no fire in their oven that night they would know that the two of them were poor, and that to be grateful to God was to hide it; and she filled the oven with wood and lit it. A neighbour came to borrow a coal, and called through the door that their bread was burning, and it was; it was the whitest bread in the street. They ate it and thanked God. Then they asked Him to excuse them the weariness of work, so that they might serve Him all their days, and the roof opened, and a ruby fell through it and lit the house. In the night she dreamed that she was in Paradise, where the chairs of the prophets stood in rows and the stools of the righteous behind them, and she found her husband's stool, and saw a hole in the side of it. "What is the hole?" "It is the place of the ruby that fell on you from your roof." She woke weeping. She told him to pray that it go back: "for the hunger and poverty of our few days here are easier to bear than a hole in your seat among the just." He prayed, and the ruby rose, as they watched, through the roof, and was gone. Sumayya said, "I would have kept the ruby and had the stool mended." The nurse laughed, for the first time in a month. "It is not that kind of stool," said my sister. The King said, to nobody, "She asked for the stool." And he turned the pen over in his fingers for a long while.

There were others, and some I give you only by their edges. Al-Hajjaj had a man chained in a cage that was built over him, and in the morning the chains lay on the floor and the cage was empty; and the gaoler went to the governor with his shroud and his sweet herbs in his sleeve, and the governor smelt them, and asked what they were, and said, "Did you not know that He on whom the man called in your hearing delivered him in your absence?" My father put a hand to his crooked arm and held it. There was a blacksmith who could take red iron out of the fire with his bare hand; a pious man came to ask how, and he said that there had been a hungry woman at his door once, and a night on which he had not done a thing that he meant to do. That was all he said, and he said it as if it were small.

There was a hermit who lost his cloud, which had followed him in the mountains and rained on him as he needed, and who was sent to find a king who could pray it back; and the king, who sat to hear petitions one day in seven, lived the other days in a ruined room behind the palace, in a gown of wool, with his cousin, weaving palm mats, and had done so for forty years. "Forty years of mats," said Shah Zaman. "I lasted forty days with the accounts at Bukhara, and thought myself a hermit." The King's mouth moved; it was not a laugh, but it was on the road to one. There was a captive soldier who shut his eyes and recited while his enemy's daughter laid the table, and she fell in love with the recitation and then with the man; and they fled on a horse too tired to go on, and the army that came after them turned out to be angels, come to the wedding. "Was the horse tired?" the King asked. It was the only question that he asked all night.

On the 478th night she told the Prophet on the mountain. He kept himself on a height above a spring, and in the daytime he watched who came there to drink. A horseman came, and drank, and rode off, leaving a bag of gold on the ground. A second man came, and drank, and saw the bag, and took it, and went. Then a woodcutter came with a load on his back and sat down to drink; and the horseman rode back, in a great state, and asked him where the bag was, and the woodcutter said that he knew nothing of it, and the horseman killed him, and went through his clothes, and found nothing. My sister did not describe it. The Prophet cried out, "One man has a thousand dinars, and another has been killed unjustly." And God said to him, "Busy thyself with thy devotions; the ordering of the universe is no affair of thine. The horseman's father had taken a thousand dinars by force from the second man's father, and so I gave the son what was his father's. And the woodcutter had killed the horseman's father." And the Prophet said, There is no god but Thou; Thou knowest what is hidden. My sister stopped, and put her hand where it goes, and said nothing.

Sumayya, who had been given the corner of a blanket and her third reed, said into the quiet, in the voice she uses for questions that she thinks nobody will mind, "Did anyone ask the woodcutter?" "Ask him what, little one?" said my sister. "If he did it." "God knew." "God didn't ask him." Nobody said anything. The King had his hand flat on the front board of the Roll, where the lock of hair is. "Put it in the Open," he said. I asked him which, the question or the tale. "The woodcutter." "He has no name in it, lord." "Then put that." So I wrote, in the column where I put what is not finished, a woodcutter who was not asked, and who has no name in the tale. It is not a thing that anyone can do anything about, a woodcutter in a tale; I know that. I wrote it the way I write everything.

Night 478. Shahrazad. Present. Open: the Prophet on the mountain, who was told that it was not his affair; a woodcutter, who was not asked, and has no name in the tale; a brick, by the door; a book of names; a boon, not yet asked.

The next night was the ferryman, who took an old man across the Nile for the love of God and fed him, and was told by him that he would die the next day, at noon, under a tree on the far bank, and that the ferryman should wash him and shroud him in the shroud he would find under his head, and keep his gown, his gourd and his staff for someone who would come and ask for them. The someone was a young man known to everyone for loose living, who had been at a wedding all night and still had henna on his hands, and who said that a person in a dream had told him where to go. The ferryman gave him all three. He wept that night, and in a dream he was asked whether it grieved him that God had granted one of His servants a way back to Him. I did not look at my sister, and she did not look at me. In the morning, on the sheet in the corner where Sumayya is allowed to practise, there was a word in her hand, as big as a thumb and leaning to the left: Present. Under it she had made one stroke.

The Island King took two nights. A rich man's son kept his dying father's one command, which was never to swear by God, truly or falsely, and so he paid every claim that was made upon him, on the claimant's word alone, until there was nothing left; then he took his wife and his two small sons to sea, and the ship broke. He came ashore alone on an island, and washed, and called the prayer, and creatures came up out of the sea and prayed behind him. A voice told him where the treasure was. Ships came; in ten years it was a kingdom, and he was its King. His wife and each of the boys had been taken up by different strangers, and years later each of them, by a long road, came to the island: the sons as the King's secretary and steward, the mother as the guest of a merchant on a ship. The King set the two young men to watch the ship by night, and to keep awake they told each other the stories of their lives, and one of them said, "What was your mother's name?" and the other told him; and they fell upon one another. The mother, in the cabin, heard it all, and said nothing until morning. At the question about the name my father stood up and walked out of the room, which I have not seen him do in a tale, and was back in the time it takes to count a hundred; and the King did not turn his head.

The last, on the 481st and 482nd nights, was Abu al-Hasan, who had been to Mecca so many times that others followed him for the water-stations, and who set out one year to go alone. At the first mosque on the road a leper sat in the prayer-niche, and said that he wanted his company; he said no. At the next mosque the leper was sitting in the niche before him. So it went as far as Arafat, where he threw himself at the man's feet and begged for what he had refused, and was told that it could not be, and that tears would not help. At every station after that the leper was a stage ahead, and at Medina he lost him, and the old sheikhs there told him who it had been, in whose name they prayed for rain. At Arafat the man pulled him by the sleeve from behind, and told him to ask for a thing; and he asked for three prayers: that he should love poverty; that he should never lie down at night on provision that was assured; and that he should see the Face. The man prayed them, and went. The first two, said Abu al-Hasan, had been granted, and the third he trusted for. My sister gave this in the voice of someone handing over a key. Shah Zaman said, from the rug, "The second is the hard one. I have managed it three nights at a time." "Which of the three would you ask, Dunyazad?" said the King. I said that I did not know. "You have time," he said. He looked at the binding, and I looked at my hands.

Night 482. Shahrazad. Present. Open: the Queen of the Serpents, only begun, and a sage of Greece called Daniel, who has no son; a brick, by the door; a woodcutter, who was not asked; a book of names; a white book; a boon, not yet asked.

## Chapter 29 · Nights Four Hundred and Eighty-three to Four Hundred and Ninety-eight: The Honey Cistern, and Another Wolf

Daniel the Greek had no son, and one night, lying awake over it, he remembered that God hears those who come to Him; he prayed for a son to inherit his learning, and went home and knew his wife, and she conceived that night. So my sister began the Queen of the Serpents on the 482nd night, and went on with it on the 483rd, and I will say now that it is the longest tale she has told, and that it lives inside itself like a nest of bowls: a Queen telling a woodcutter about a king who listened to a prince, so that on some nights she was four voices down. Daniel took ship; the ship broke; he came home with five leaves of all his library, locked them in a box, and gave the key to his wife, and said that if she bore a son she was to call him Hasib Karim al-Din, and give him the leaves when he asked what his father had left him. Then he sighed once and died. The astrologers cast the child's horoscope and said that he would live long, and be given the knowledge of all the exact sciences, but not before a great peril, early in his life. He would not learn. They put him to school, and he read nothing; they put him to a trade, and nothing came out of his hands; they married him, and he sat.

The woodcutters of the quarter told his mother that if she bought the boy an ass and cords and an axe, they would take him up the mountain with them and he would earn his share; and she was so glad that she bought the ass that day. In a rainstorm they took shelter in a cave, and Hasib, who sat apart, struck the floor idly with his axe and heard it sound hollow, and dug, and found a flagstone with a ring in it, and under the stone a cistern full of honey. They told him to stay and guard it while they fetched jars. For some days they came and went, and sold honey by the jarful in the streets, and he guarded; and when little was left one of them said, "It was Hasib who found it, and he will come down to the city and say, It was I," and they all agreed what to do. They asked him to go down and bale out the last of it. He did, and passed it up, and said, "Draw me up, there is nothing left." There was no answer. He heard the asses go.

They went to his mother weeping. They said that a storm had come on while they were in the cave, and that his ass had broken loose and he had gone after it into the valley, and that a great wolf had come out and torn him in pieces and eaten the ass. "A wolf," said the King. "Yes, lord." "Another wolf." I had not known till then that I was waiting for it. "Jacob's sons said it," said Shah Zaman from the rug, "to Jacob, about Joseph. It has not gone out of fashion." "It is a patient animal," said my sister. "It does not argue." The mother beat her face and put dust on her head and mourned him; and the woodcutters opened shops, and became merchants, and ate and drank and laughed; and every day they brought her meat and drink, and she lived on what they brought, and thanked them. "They fed her," said the King. "Every day, lord." "The ones who did it." "Yes, lord." He did not turn his head. "How many houses is it now?" My father, in his corner, had been looking at his hands. "Sixty-three, lord, and the sixty-fourth is a roof only." "Does it count?" "I do not know, lord," said my father. "I count it so that I shall not be idle." The King nodded, once, as he nods at a stroke that is straight; and the nurse bit off her thread.

Hasib sat on the lip of the cistern and wept and said what one says, and a scorpion fell on him from above and he killed it. Then, because he was a young man who had never learned anything but could still think of one question, he asked himself how a scorpion had come into a cistern full of honey. He found the crack it had fallen through, with daylight in it, and widened it with his woodman's knife, and crept out into a gallery, and came to an iron door with a silver padlock, and in the padlock a golden key. Whoever locked that door left the key in it, and I have thought about that since. Behind it there was a lake of something that shimmered like silver, which was small snakes; and a hill of green jasper with a golden throne on it, and twelve thousand stools around the throne, and on every stool a serpent a hundred cubits long, with eyes like live coals. A serpent the size of a mule came up bearing a tray of gold, and on the tray another, clear as crystal, with a woman's face. "Have no fear of us, O youth," she said, in his own speech. "I am the Queen of the Serpents." And she had them bring him fruit, because it was all that they ate.

He told her his story, from the school where he had learned nothing to the rope that nobody held. "Nothing save good shall betide thee," she said. "But I would have thee abide with me some time, that I may tell thee my history." And Hasib, who had been a night in a cistern and was now in a hall under a mountain with twelve thousand serpents, said, "I hear and obey," which was all there was to say. "She kept him," said the King. "For two years, lord, in the tale." "To tell him a story." "Her own, lord." Shah Zaman, from the rug, in the voice that he uses when nobody has asked him: "It is a very old method." "Be quiet," said the King, without heat; and the nurse made a noise into her mending that was not a cough.

Her own story was Bulukiya's. A king of the Children of Israel in Cairo died, bent double with poring over books, and left his son Bulukiya the throne, and in an inner closet of the treasury a column of white marble, and on it a box of ebony, and in that a box of gold, and in that a book. Bulukiya read the book. It described a prophet who would be sent in the latter days, and the young King fell in love with the description (that is how my sister put it), and sent for the elders and the priests and told them that he would have his father taken out of the grave and burned, because his father had hidden the book from him. The elders said that his father was dead, and his affair in the hands of his Lord, and that he should not. So he went to his mother, and put on a gown of goat's hair and sandals, and set out on foot to find the man in the book. "He wished to dig up his father," the King said, "for not telling him." "For hiding it, lord." "They were sensible, the elders." "Yes, lord. They were elders."

I will give you the rest by its edges; my sister gave it over eleven nights, and the Roll is not long enough. He came to an island where serpents the size of palm trees were praising God, and they told him that they were of Hell, and that Hell breathes twice a year, out in the summer and in in the winter, and that they were the small ones, blown out by her breath. He came to Jerusalem and met a learned man named Affan, who had read in his books that whoever wore the ring of Solomon would be obeyed by men and jinn and birds and beasts, and that a herb grew which, rubbed on the feet, let a man walk dry-shod over any sea, but that it would speak its name only to someone who carried the Queen of the Serpents in a cage. So they caught her. They set milk and wine in a cage on her island and hid, and she came down off the back of her serpent and drank the milk, and then the wine, and slept; and they took her up the mountains on a man's head, and the plants spoke as they passed, and one said, "I am the herb you seek." "She was tricked with milk," the King said. "Yes, lord." "And then she let them go." "She told them they would not have the ring. She said they had better have asked for the other herb, the one of which whoever eats shall not die till the First Blast." The King was silent for a time. "Would you eat it?" he said. My sister put her hand where she puts it. "If they did," she said. "Not otherwise." "Yes," said the King.

They went on over the seven seas, walking on the water with their feet anointed, and came to the mountain where Solomon lay on a golden throne in green silk, with the ring on his middle finger and a serpent under the throne. Affan told Bulukiya to say the conjurations and not to stop. The serpent breathed fire and said, Go back, and Bulukiya went out of the cave, and Affan did not, and he put out his hand and touched the ring and the serpent breathed on him once more, and he was a heap of ashes. Bulukiya fell down in a swoon. Gabriel came and woke him, and told him to go his ways, for the time of the Prophet's coming was yet far off; and Bulukiya wept and remembered what the Queen had said to them, that it was far, far from their power. I leave out the dust of Affan. My sister did not leave it out, but she told it in a plain voice, and the King looked at the child.

Then Bulukiya wandered, alone, and I give you only what stayed with me. An island of saffron earth and carnelian gravel, where beasts of the sea came up in the night, each holding a jewel for a lamp, to talk with the beasts of the land until daybreak. An island where the trees bore fruit like men's heads hanging by the hair, and others that laughed and wept, and the daughters of the sea came ashore with jewels in their hands and danced. A giant forty cubits high under an apple tree, who forbade him to touch it: "Because thou art a son of Adam, and thy father forgot the covenant, and ate." The Jinn of the White Country, who fight a war every year against the unbelieving Jinn, and whose King, Sakhr, set him on a mare and said, Do not get down, do not strike her, do not cry out in her face; and bound two roasted camels on her crupper to steady her, because she knew him for a son of Adam and was afraid. Two days on her carried him seventy months. Sakhr told him of the seven stages of Fire, and what is in each. I will not give you those. My sister gave them in one night, quickly, with her eyes on the boy, and the King put his hand over the boy's ear, and that was all anyone did.

He met an Angel who sat with a tablet before him, writing the shifts of night and day, and another on Mount Kaf whose hands were opening and shutting, bending and stretching, all the time, and who said, "My hands lay hold upon the roots of the earth. When He wishes to visit a land with earthquake or famine or plenty, He tells me, and I do it, without moving from my place." Sumayya, who has the corner of the blanket and her fourth reed, said into the pause, "Does it make his hands tired?" "I do not know, little one." "Does he know what it is, when he does it? Whose it is?" "No," said my sister. "He is told the land, not the people." The King said, "That is a mercy," and I looked at him, because he does not say that; and he said nothing else. There was the fish under the world, so large that the head of it took three days to pass the prophet Isa, who fainted; and every day, said the voice, I make forty like it.

By the 497th night the Queen had said it all, and Bulukiya had come to a gate between two seas, and walked over the face of a sea that was half sweet and half salt, and met four great angels going to seize a dragon that had eaten a thousand cities, and had come at last to an island where a young man with light on his face sat weeping between two built tombs. Hasib had begged her twice by then to let him go home. She said she knew what he would do: he would see his mother, and then he would go to the baths, and the moment that he finished his washing would be the last she saw of the world, for the bath would be the end of her. He swore that he never would. "I would not believe thee though thou swore a hundred oaths," she said. "Thou art a son of Adam, and thy father swore, and forgot." He wept ten days. On the 498th night he begged her a third time, and the serpents wept for him, and went to their Queen and begged for him, and she took his oath, and called a serpent to carry him up to the earth. The serpent had made ready, and was about to go with him, and Hasib turned back. "I would have thee tell me the story of the young man between the tombs," he said.

"He asked for one more," said the King. "Yes, lord." "At the door." "Yes, lord." "They do," said Shah Zaman. "I have." On the 490th night the almond in the court had flowered, and the King had carried the boy out in the morning and held him up to it, and the boy had tried to eat a petal; and all through those days the brick lay by the door, and the boy, who could sit by himself now, had got to it and pulled himself half upright by it, and been taken away from it, and got to it again. Nobody said anything about that either.

Night 498. Shahrazad. Present. Open: a young man between two tombs, who is about to tell his story; Hasib Karim al-Din, under the mountain, who is about to be let go; a woman who was told it was a wolf; a brick, by the door; a woodcutter, who was not asked; a book of names; a boon, not yet asked.

## Chapter 30 · Nights Four Hundred and Ninety-nine to Five Hundred and Twenty: The Feather-Vest, and a Small Fish

My sister began the young man's story on the 499th night, with her back against the cushion and the sand-glass turned beside her, and I remember that before she began the nurse said, "Not more than two," and she said, "I will see." The young man was Janshah. His father, Teghmus, was King of Kabul, and ruled more cities than I will count, and had no son; the astrologers told him that he would have one, but only by the daughter of the King of Khorasan. He sent his Vizier, Ayn Zar, with fifteen hundred loads of silk and stones and a letter that was nine parts courtesy and one part threat, and the marriage was made by proxy, and a boy was born like the moon on the night of its fullness. The astrologers cast his horoscope and said that in his fifteenth year he would meet with perils and hardships, and that if he lived through them he would be greater than his father. He was taught to read and to ride. In his fifteenth year he was hunting, and started a gazelle of a strange colour, and chased it with seven of his father's white slaves down to the sea, where it leaped into the waves and swam to a fishing boat and sprang aboard; and the Prince and the seven went after it, and the boat put out, and an evening came, and a wind, and in the morning there was no land.

I give you the islands as she gave them, which was quickly. On the first there was a man by a spring who spoke in a voice like the whistling of birds, and who, as they watched, split himself in two and went off in two directions; and out of the hills came a crowd of men like him, and each, when he reached the spring, split in halves and ran at the strangers to eat them. Three of the slaves were lost on the beach. On the third island there was a castle with walls of white marble and a palace of crystal, and a garden and a basin and a throne of red gold with stools about it, and nobody in it; and they sat there, the Prince on the throne and the three slaves on the stools, and he wept for his father's city; and out of the sea came the apes, in their thousands, and stood round in a circle with their paws on their breasts, and killed gazelles, and laid a table of gold, and kissed the earth before him. They told him by signs that the island had been Solomon's, and that he was now their Sultan. In the morning he found his boat scuttled. They had sunk it in the night, said the four Wazirs of the apes, because they had known that he would be their Sultan, and had feared that he would go. The same morning the four Wazirs brought their troops before him, rank on rank, and asked by signs that he do justice among them; I suppose he did, since they were content. "They sank his boat," said the King. "Yes, lord." "To keep him." "They were afraid he would leave, lord." "And they fed him." "Gazelle and fruit, on gold. And he shot the Ghuls for them from the river bank, and they won their war." "Was he happy there?" "For a year and a half, lord. Then he took his three men and ran away in the night."

The apes came after them through the valley, and the valley was full of ants as big as dogs, who rose out of the earth and fell on the apes, and in the dusk Janshah and his three fled along the floor of the valley with the apes behind and the ants beside. By morning there was one slave, and then none, and Janshah took off his clothes and swam a river, and held a branch, and came out alone on the far bank and wrung out his shirt and wept until it was dark. Then he walked, eating the herbs of the earth, to another river, which dries on every seventh day; and he waited, and crossed on its dry bed, and came to a town where nobody in the streets said a word. In the first house at which he knocked the people sat round a room in silence and signed to him to eat and drink and not to speak; and on the next day the master of the house greeted him and asked who he was, and Janshah wept, and told him.

I do not give you the people of the town beyond the river by their name. My sister gave it, and it is written on my second sheet, under what I changed, that I have not. They were hospitable. One of them, a merchant, had had it cried in the streets for three months that he would give a thousand pieces of gold and a slave-girl of rare beauty to whoever would do half a day's work for him, and nobody would, because nobody believed that half a day's work could be worth so much. Janshah thought, as anyone would, that a man does not offer so much for half a day unless the half day is dangerous; and said that he would do it, because he had nothing left that could be taken. The merchant fed him and gave him the gold and the girl, and next day took him on a mule to the foot of a mountain whose height had no limit, and gave him a knife and a cord, and told him to throw the mule, and cut its throat, and skin it, and slit the belly and creep in, and be sewn up. Janshah did. A great bird took the carcass up to the top of the mountain, and when it began to feed he cut his way out, and the bird flew off, and he stood among the sun-dried bodies of other men, and looked down, and the merchant was very small at the bottom, calling up for stones. The mountain was all rubies. He threw down two hundred, and asked to be shown the way down; and the merchant gathered them, and put them on the mule, and went away.

He crossed the mountain in two months, on hill herbs, and came to a valley with a castle in it, and at the gate an old man with a staff of carnelian, who gave him bread, and heard his story, and said that his name was Shaykh Nasr, King of the Birds, and that the castle was Solomon's, and that once in the year all the birds in the world came to be counted; and that he would give Janshah to one of them to be carried home. Meanwhile he gave him the keys of the castle and told him he might open any door in it but one. Sumayya put her hand over her mouth, and took it away again. "I would have too," she said. "He opened it," said the King. "He was told not to, lord, and he did." The room had a pavilion of gold and crystal, and a fountain, and figures of beasts and birds that sang when the wind blew in at their ears, and the carpet of Solomon folded in a closet. He sat down on a stool before the door, and three birds like doves, as big as eagles, came down out of the middle of the sky and lit by the basin, and took off their feathers and were three girls, and went into the water and played; and he, who had seen no woman for years, forgot his own name.

When he spoke to them the youngest said that they were from the invisible world and had come to amuse themselves; and he said what a man says, and she told him to leave off and go; and he wept; and they ate his fruit and stayed until the morning, and then put on their feathers and became doves and were gone. He fell down in a swoon, and lay all day. Shaykh Nasr, back from the Parliament of the Fowls, found him, and heard it, and said that they were daughters of the Jinn who came once a year, and that if his heart was set on one of them he should wait out the year; and on the day, he should hide under a tree, and when they had gone into the water, he should take the feather-vest of the one he wanted, and not give it back until the old man returned from the Parliament.

On the 509th night, in the middle of the doves, my sister stopped, and put her hand to the side of her belly, and her face did what a person's face does when the floor moves. The nurse said, "Is it?" and she said, "Yes." The King had been looking at the lamp. She held out her hand, without looking at him, and he did not at first know what it was for; then he got up from the floor, with the boy asleep on his arm, and sat on the end of the bed, and she took his other hand and put it where hers had been. I looked at my own. I do not know how long it was. "It is like a fish," he said. "Which?" said my sister. "Not the one under the world." "No, lord. A small one." He did not take his hand away until the glass had run out, and the nurse, who has seen everything and says nothing, turned the glass, and said nothing.

The year went by, and on the day he hid under the tree and the three came and took off their feathers and went into the water, and the youngest said, laughing, that if there was anyone lying in wait he would take none but her. He ran and took her vest. Her name was Shamsah, the Sun-maiden. She asked him from the water why he had done it, and he said that if he gave it back she would fly, and he would die; and she laughed, and so did her sisters, and she said, "Be of good cheer. I must needs marry thee." The sisters lent her clothes, not enough to fly in. She sat down by him and wiped away his tears with her sleeve. When Shaykh Nasr came back he made her swear by God that she would never betray him, and she swore it, and they stayed three months. Then she said that she wished to go with him to his own country, and Shaykh Nasr told Janshah to give her vest back. He gave it. She put it on and said, "Climb on my back and shut thine eyes and stop thine ears, so thou mayst not hear the roar of the revolving sphere," and she flew. She flew him thirty months' journey in a day and a half, and set him down in a meadow outside the walls of Kabul, and sat with him by the river until his father's men came out.

"He had given it back," said the King. "To fly home, lord. She had kept her oath." "And she did not go." "She sat down by the river." Teghmus came out with the army, and wept for joy; the Queen came, and the women of the city; and the King had a palace built in a garden, for the bride, with running water under it. And while it was building, Janshah had the masons cut a block of white marble and hollow it like a chest, and he put Shamsah's vest in it, and sealed the lid with lead, and had it buried in the foundations, and the arches of the palace built over it. I thought of the front board of the Roll, and did not look at it. "And then he buried it," said the King. "Under the arches, lord." He said nothing for the length of a breath, and my sister did not fill it. They were married with great splendour, and she was brought to the new palace in a procession, and when she went in, she smelt the scent of her feathers.

She waited until midnight, when Janshah was deep in sleep, and went to the place, and dug beside the arch till she came to the marble, and pulled off the lead with her hands, and took out the vest and put it on. Then she flew up, and perched on the roof, and called to the people in the palace, "Fetch me Janshah, that I may bid him farewell." He came out, and saw her there, in her feathers. "Why hast thou done this?" he said. "O my beloved," she said, "I love thee passing dear, and I rejoice that I have restored thee to thy friends and to thy country, and that thou hast seen thy mother and thy father. And now, if thou love me as I love thee, come to me at Takni, the Castle of Jewels." And she flew away. "She told him where," said the King. "Yes, lord." "After she had taken it." "After." "Go on."

He fell down in a swoon, and for two months his father asked every merchant and traveller in the kingdom where the Castle of Jewels might be, and there was not one who had heard of it, and the King sent him singers and slave-girls to cheer him, and Janshah sat among them and could not be cheered. Now King Kafid of Hind, who had a feud of blood with King Teghmus, heard that the King of Kabul was so taken up with his son's sorrow that he had neglected his army, and he marched, and the two kings fought for seven years. I do not give you the battles; my sister gave a good many of them, and I wrote the names of the places and not the rest. Janshah stayed shut in the palace two months, and saw nobody, and then asked what ailed his father that he did not come; and was told that the King was at the war; and said, "I am taken up with myself and my love," and called for his horse, and took a thousand horse as an escort, and in the night, in a meadow, when the men were asleep, he rode away alone. "He left his father in the field," said Shah Zaman. "For a girl." "For a place," said my sister. "Nobody knew where it was." The King said, "Did the father know where he had gone?" "No, lord. He knew that the thousand horse had come back without him."

Night 520. Shahrazad. Present. Open: Janshah, riding alone in the night to a place that nobody has heard of, who has left his father at the gates; a King of Hind, outside them; a Sun-maiden, in a Castle of Jewels, who has told him where; a brick, by the door; a woodcutter, who was not asked; a woman who was told it was a wolf; a book of names; a boon, not yet asked.

## Chapter 31 · Nights Five Hundred and Twenty-one to Five Hundred and Thirty-six: The Castle of Jewels, and a Woman Who Was Not Asked

I give you the search quickly, because it took my sister five nights and almost nothing happened in it but distance. Janshah asked in every town for the Castle of Jewels, and nobody had heard of it. He went with a caravan to the east, and then to Khorasan, and then to Khwarazm, and then fifteen months to the river that dries on the seventh day, and crossed it, and went to the house in which he had lodged, and was fed. The next morning he heard the same cry in the street, a thousand pieces of gold and a girl for half a day's work, and he took it, and the merchant did not know him. This time it was a mare. This time, on the top of the mountain, when the merchant called up for stones, Janshah said, "Thou art he who didst with me thus and thus five years ago, and by thee I suffered hunger and thirst and sore toil; and now thou hast brought me back, and thinkest to destroy me. By Allah, I will not throw thee aught." And he turned his back on him and went to Shaykh Nasr. "He knew him," said the King. "He knew him, lord. The merchant did not." "And he did not throw him anything." "Not one stone." The King said nothing more of that.

The old man had never heard of the place either, and nor had any bird that came to him in the year; and one of the great birds took Janshah on its back to carry him to his own country, and lost the way, and set him down in the country of the beasts, and he said, "Go thy ways and leave me here; until I die on this spot or find Takni, I will not go back." So the King of the Beasts, who was named Shah Badri, gave him tablets to learn, and had every beast that came to him asked, and none knew it; and Shah Badri sent him on the back of a beast to his elder brother Shimakh, who had been a prisoner of Solomon's, and who had never heard of it either, and who sent him on a bird with four wings, each thirty cubits long, to a monk named Yaghmus, who lived in a Hermitage of Diamonds, and who said that he had been alive in the days of Noah and had never heard of it. Then, on the day of the oath-taking, when all the birds and beasts and Jinn came to the monk, there came last of all a black bird, large and late, who said that when he and his brothers were chicks, behind Mount Kaf, on a hill of crystal, their father and mother had gone out one morning for food and been caught by a Marid and carried to a castle called Takni, before a King named Shahlan, who had let them go because they said they had young. The bird took Janshah to the Hill of Crystal, and then on, seven nights and eight days, and set him down on a mountain; and there, in the evening, far off, he saw something shining like lightning across the sky. It was two months away. It was the castle.

At Takni a Marid of King Shahlan's, sent that very day on an errand, found a mortal on the road, and asked his name and was told it, and took him on his shoulders; because the Princess had told her father and mother everything, and the King had given orders that any mortal found should be brought to him. The King of the Jinn rode out to meet him and put him on a mare and brought him to a castle whose walls were rubies and whose floor was crystal; and Shamsah's mother, who came to him in the hall, said, "Welcome, my son. Our daughter has sinned against thee, but do thou pardon her misdeed for our sakes." And Janshah cried out, and fell down in a faint. "The mother asked it of him," said the King. "Yes, lord." "Not the girl." "The girl came after, lord, and kissed his hands, and hung her head." "Go on."

They were married with great splendour, and lived two years at Takni, and then he said that her father had promised that they should spend one year at his home and the next at hers; and the King of the Jinn had a litter of red gold made, with a canopy of green silk, and four of his Marids to carry it between earth and heaven, and they went, thirty months' journey in a day. They came down on Kabul at the worst moment of that war. The city had been shut for seven years, and King Teghmus had taken leave of his ministers and his household, because he saw no way out; and the whole city was weeping when the litter came down in the middle of the palace. I do not give you the rest of that night. My sister told it in a few sentences, and said that the Marids fell on the camp of the besiegers in the dark and that in two days there was no army, and she said it as one reads a figure from a Roll. I wrote on my second sheet that she told it short. The tale does not. The tale puts the King and his son and the Sun-maiden on the roof together, to watch it, and calls it a high pleasure. The King had not looked up. The nurse, who was sitting by the brick with the boy, began to tell him something about the almond.

King Kafid of Hind, who had been taken in his bed by a Marid and hung in the air in chains to see his army, was let go on a lame mare, because Shamsah interceded; and Janshah and Shamsah lived on in their two countries, one year and the next, for a good many years. Then, one year, on the road to Takni, they came down to rest on an island by a river, and she took off her clothes and went into the water with her women; and Janshah walked along the bank, and something in the water took her, and she was dead in a moment. I do not give you more, and my sister did not give more. Her women brought her out. Her father and mother came, and washed and shrouded her, and buried her by the river, and would have taken Janshah home with them; and he asked for a grave dug beside hers, so that when he died he might be put in it, and the King had a Marid dig it, and went; and he sat down between them. That was the young man weeping between the tombs. Nobody said anything. Sumayya said, in a very small voice, "He didn't go home?" "No," said my sister. The nurse took the boy, who was awake and had been watching the lamp, and walked him up and down the room as far as the brick, and back.

Bulukiya heard it, and said that he had thought he had been to every corner of the earth, but that now he forgot all he had seen after hearing this; and Janshah put him on the right road, and he went. All this the Queen of the Serpents told to Hasib. And Hasib asked how she knew it, and she said that twenty-five years before, she had sent a serpent to Egypt with a letter, and Bulukiya had read it and come to her mountain, and found her away at Mount Kaf for the winter, and her deputy there; and he had asked the deputy for the herb that keeps a man from dying, and the serpent had said she did not know where it was; and a serpent had carried him back with his eyes shut, and he had found himself on the mountain of Mokattam. And what became of him in the end? Hasib asked. He walked over a sea, she said, and came to an island with a tree whose leaves were as big as the sails of a ship, and under it a table spread with food, and a bird of pearls and emeralds on a branch, which had followed Adam out of Eden; every Friday night, the bird said, the saints came and ate at the table, and when they had eaten it was taken up to Heaven. And while he was there Al-Khizr came. Bulukiya asked how far it was to Cairo, and Al-Khizr said five and ninety years' journey; and Bulukiya wept; and Al-Khizr said, Take hold of me with both your hands, and shut your eyes. He took one step, and said, Open them. Bulukiya was at the door of his palace. He turned to thank him, and there was no one there.

"One step," said Shah Zaman. "Ninety-five years' journey in a step. I could have used that on the Oxus road." "His mother was alive," said my sister. "She swooned for joy. They sprinkled water on her face." "And the other?" said the King. "The other, lord?" "The one who was told it was a wolf." "Hasib's," said my sister. "He went up, in the end. The serpent took him, and left him on the platform of a cistern, and he walked into the city at sunset and knocked at his own door." His mother opened it and screamed, and threw herself on him; his wife came out and kissed his hands. And when they had sat down he asked about the woodcutters, and his mother said that they had come and told her a wolf had eaten him, and that they were merchants now, with houses and shops, and every day they brought her food. He sent her to tell them that her son was back and would see them. They changed colour. They each sent a suit of embroidered silk; and the next day, having taken advice from the merchants of the city, who told them that each one of them should give him half of what he had, each of the seven came to him with half his money and his slaves. And Hasib said, "What is past is past. What befell us was decreed of God, and destiny is stronger than cunning." He went to each of their houses, and ate there for a night and a day, one after the other, for a week.

"He forgave them," the King said. "Yes, lord." "He took half." "From each of the seven." The King's hand was on the front board of the Roll. "Did anyone ask his mother?" My sister opened her mouth and closed it. The sand-glass was nearly out. "No, lord," she said. "The tale does not say that anyone did." I wrote on the Open that night, under the woodcutter who was not asked, a woman who was not asked; and I crossed out, in the line above it, the woman who was told it was a wolf, since it was the same woman and I had two lines for her.

He did not keep his oath. It was not much of a failure: a man in the street, and the keeper of the baths running up to him with his arms open, begging him to come in and be washed at his expense; and Hasib said that he had sworn never to go into a bath, and the bathman swore by the triple divorce of his wives that he must; and Hasib, who could not bear to be the ruin of another man's house, went in. The keeper of the bath was one of the seven. My sister said so, and then said that the tale does not say whether he knew. Hasib had hardly sat down when a score of men came and said that he must come with them, to the Sultan, who was his debtor; and the Sultan's Vizier, Shamhur, took him to the palace in a splendid robe, and in a bedchamber at the end of seven doors was King Karazdan, who was dying of a leprosy, with his face in a cloth. The books said that the Queen of the Serpents would cure him. The Vizier had set men at the door of every bath in the city to look at the belly of whoever came out, because whoever had lived two years with the Queen would have a black belly when he washed. Hasib said that his belly had been black from the day his mother bore him. They did not beat him for long. My sister did not tell me how long. He took them to the cistern, and Shamhur burned incense and said the conjurations, and the water of the well went down and a door opened in its side, and out came a serpent as big as an elephant, with the Queen on a golden dish on her back. Her face was fair and young, and she looked at Hasib, and she said, "Where is the covenant thou madest with me, and the oath thou swarest, that thou wouldst never enter the bath? But there is no fighting against Fate. God has appointed the end of my life for thy hand to hend." And she wept, and Hasib wept to see it.

"She knew," said the King. "She told him at the beginning, lord, and again at the end. She said, I would not believe thee though thou swore a hundred oaths." "And she let him go." "The serpents wept for him, and went to her, and begged." "Knowing." "Yes, lord." He was silent. "Go on." On the dish, on the road to the Vizier's house, she told Hasib what he must do. He must say that he did not know how to kill, and let the Vizier do it with his own hand. I do not give you that. The Vizier laughed at him for weeping, and said, "How canst thou weep for a worm?" He set the pieces to boil in a brass cauldron and went off to the King, and left Hasib two phials, and told him to drink the first scum that rose and to keep the second. The Queen had told Hasib to do the opposite: to drink the second and to give the first to the Vizier, and to watch. When the Vizier came back and asked for the second phial, Hasib gave him the first, and the Vizier drank it, and swelled, and fell dead; and Hasib, remembering what she had said, and thinking that the Vizier would never have saved the second scum for himself had it contained harm, drank the second.

"And the waters of wisdom," said my sister, "were made to well up in his heart, and the fountains of knowledge were opened to him." He went out with the flesh on a dish, and saw as he walked the seven heavens and the Lote-tree beyond which there is no passing, and the courses of the spheres and the causes of eclipses, and the virtues of every herb and mineral, so that in a moment he was a physician and a chemist and an astronomer; and over three days he gave the King what she had said that he must give, and covered his face, and the King sweated, and his skin scaled, and he was whole. He made Hasib his Chief Vizier, and gave him three hundred slaves, and five hundred mules laden with treasure, and the house of the Vizier who had died. Hasib asked his mother for what his father had left him, and she brought the five leaves, and he read them and said, "These are part of a book. Where is the rest?" She said, "Lost with the ship." He lived on in all delight, my sister said, until there came to him the Destroyer of delights and the Sunderer of societies. "And the five leaves?" said Sumayya. "He kept them, little one." "Even when he could have written the rest?" "Even so."

"And yet, O King," my sister said, in the voice that she keeps for the end of a night, "is not this tale of Bulukiya and Janshah more wondrous than the story of Sindbad?" "Who is Sindbad?" said the King. "A porter, lord," said my sister, "who put down his load on a bench at the gate of a rich man's house, one hot day in Baghdad, and heard a lute." And the sky in the window was the colour of a lamp being turned down, and she stopped there, and the glass was out.

Night 536. Shahrazad. Present. Open: a porter in Baghdad who has set down his load at a gate and heard a lute, only begun; a woman who was not asked; a woodcutter, who was not asked; a brick, by the door; five leaves of a book; a young man between two tombs; a second child, which has moved; a book of names; a boon, not yet asked.

## Chapter 32 · Nights Five Hundred and Thirty-seven to Five Hundred and Fifty: Three Voyages, and a Boy Who Stood

At the end of the 536th night my sister had put a porter down at a gate, and on the 537th she took him up again. It was a hot day in Baghdad, in the reign of Harun al-Rashid, and a man named Sindbad, who carried other people's goods on his head for his bread, set his load on a bench outside a rich man's house, in the shade, where the ground had been swept and watered. A cool air came out of the door, and the smell of food, and the sound of lutes and singing, and of birds glorifying God in different tongues. He looked in at a garden and servants, and was moved to say in verse that some are weary and others at rest, and that he did not rail at God's ordinance, but that the difference between his origin and the rich man's origin, which was the same, was as the difference between vinegar and wine. A page came out and took him by the hand. In a hall he found lords at tables, and in the highest place an old man with white at the sides of his beard, who gave him food and asked him his name, and when he said, "Sindbad the Porter," smiled and said, "Thy name is even as mine. I am Sindbad the Seaman. Say me again the verses thou recitedst at my gate." The Porter was ashamed. "Be not ashamed," said the Seaman. "Thou art become my brother." I thought of the Roll, which is a load that nobody pays for, and went on writing.

He told them his voyages, one a day for seven days, and at the end of each he gave the Porter a hundred pieces of gold. In the first his father had died and left him money, and he spent it with young men until it was gone; and he remembered a saying of Solomon's, that three things are better than three, the day of death than the day of birth, a live dog than a dead lion, and the grave than want; and sold all that he had, even his clothes, for three thousand dirhams. He went down to Bassorah, and sailed, and they came to an island like a garden of Paradise, and went ashore and made fires to cook; and the captain cried from the ship that it was no island, it was a great fish asleep in the sea, with sand on its back and trees grown on the sand, and that it had felt the fire. Those who ran got to the ship. The island sank. The nurse put down her mending. "My brother," she said. She is not a woman who says that kind of thing. "He went down off Bassorah when I was a girl, and I was told it was a whale." "Were you told it was a whale?" said the King. "I was told it was something. I have always thought it was a sandbank." The King considered. "It is a better story if it was a whale," he said. "Yes, lord," said the nurse. "That is why I have never been sure."

Sindbad found a wooden tub that God threw in his way, and floated on it a night and a day, and was cast on an island where a mare stood tethered on the beach, and a man came up out of the ground and took him down into a vault. He was one of King Mihrjan's grooms. Once a month, he said, at new moon, they tether their best unserved mares by the sea, and hide, and the stallions of the sea come up out of the water and cover them, and try to drag them off, and cannot for the ropes, and the grooms run out with swords on shields, and the stallions plunge back; and the foals are worth a mint of money. So Sindbad was brought to King Mihrjan, who made him registrar of his port. He saw, in that king's seas, an island where drums are beaten all night, and a fish two hundred cubits long, which the fishermen frighten away by knocking pieces of wood together; and the Indians at the court told him that their people are divided into seventy-two castes, at which he marvelled. Years went by. One day a ship came in, and he stood on the quay taking note of the bales, and the captain said that there were some in the hold whose owner had been drowned at an island that was a fish, and that they meant to carry his price to his people in Baghdad; and Sindbad asked the name, and the captain said it, and Sindbad cried out that it was his. The captain did not believe him. "Verily," he said, "there is neither conscience nor good faith left among men." It took Sindbad some time to say what he knew, matters that had passed between the two of them on the voyage, and nobody else, before the captain gave him the bales, and wished him joy. He went home rich. "And I forgot," said my sister, in Sindbad's words, "all that I had suffered."

I counted it on my second sheet, because Sumayya had told me to count what I changed and I found that I had begun to count what was repeated: the sentence comes at the end of each voyage, the same sentence, in the same words. "He forgets quickly," said the King. "Yes, lord." "It is a gift." "It is how he can go again," said Shah Zaman, from the rug, "a merchant who stops is a man waiting to die." "Does he forget the apes?" said Sumayya. "He forgets them first," said the nurse. The King said nothing. His hand went, as it goes, to the blue book at the side of the bed, and rested on it, and did not open it; and the boy, who was awake on his arm, put out his own hand to the book, and the King moved it a little out of reach, and gave him a finger to hold instead.

On the 543rd night my sister's voice was gone. It was not as before: it was the voice of a person who has used it five hundred and forty-two nights. The nurse said that she would tell the first glass and I the second, until the child came, and that nobody was to say that she should not. The King looked at me. "The second voyage," I said. I told it as one who had been there. Sindbad was bored at home, and went, and at an island fell asleep by a spring after he had eaten, and woke to find that the ship had sailed without him. He was alone, and he wept, and blamed himself for having left a house full of food; he climbed a tree, and saw a great white thing in the middle of the island, and went to it, and it was a dome without a door, fifty paces round; and then the sun went out. I stopped there, I think, longer than I should have. I put my hand over my eyes, as one does when a light goes. It was a bird, so big that its wings were a night. It came down on the dome and settled over it, and slept; and Sindbad, who had heard of such a bird, took the cloth from his head and made it a rope and tied himself to its leg. He did not sleep. In the morning the bird went up and up, until he thought they had come to the edge of the sky, and came down on a mountain, and he undid himself and ran. It had come for a serpent, and carried it off.

He stood on the peak of a valley deeper than any he had seen, with mountains round it that no one had climbed; and the floor of the valley was diamond, which cuts stone and cannot be cut, and the valley swarmed with snakes the size of palm trees, which came out at night, and hid by day from the eagles. He found a cave, and rolled a stone to the door, and saw at the back of it a great serpent brooding on her eggs, and sat the night out looking at her, and she at him, I think. In the morning a slaughtered beast fell at his feet. That was how he knew the device. The diamond-merchants cut up a beast and throw the pieces down into the valley, where the diamonds stick in the blood, and the eagles pick up the meat and carry it to the tops of the mountains, and the merchants run at them and make a noise. Sindbad filled his pockets and his girdle and his turban, and when a second piece fell he tied himself under it, with the cloth, and lay on his back, and an eagle came down and took the meat with him on it, and flew up. And I said the rest in a voice I did not know I had. The merchant who had thrown the meat, who found a man standing by it covered in blood, shook with fear; and turned over the meat; and there were no diamonds; and he struck one hand on the other and cried, "Harrow, my disappointment!" Sumayya laughed out loud, and put her hand over her mouth, and the boy laughed because she did. Sindbad said, "Fear not; I am a man, and a good man, and a merchant; I have plenty of diamonds, and will give you more than you would have got." And he did.

When I stopped there was no sound but the glass. "When the sun went out of the sky," said the King, "I felt it." He said it to the lamp. The nurse said, from her corner, that she had seen the sun go once, as a girl, in an eclipse, and had not wished to see it again. "You told it as if you had been there." "I had my hand over my eyes, lord." "It showed." That was all he said, and it was more than he had said of any of my strokes; and my sister, on her pillows, closed her eyes, and I think she smiled, but I did not look long enough to be sure. I wrote it that morning: Night 543. Shahrazad and Dunyazad. Present.

On the third voyage the ship was blown out of its course to the Mountain of the Apes, which are four spans high and black-faced and yellow-eyed, and come in thousands, and no man had ever come back from them. They did not hurt anyone. They swarmed up the cables and gnawed them through, and the ship ran on the shore, and they took the merchants and put them on the island, and took the ship and its cargo and went off. In the middle of the island was a castle with a gate of ebony, and in the courtyard a stone bench and a great many bones; and at nightfall a creature as tall as a date-tree, black, with eyes like coals, came down from the roof, and picked them over one by one, and took the stoutest, which was the captain. I leave out what he did with a spit. I told it in four sentences and my sister, on her pillows, with her eyes shut, nodded, as she does at a stroke. They put out its eyes and ran for a boat they had built; and it and two like it threw rocks at them, and most of them died, and the three who were left came to another island, and a serpent like a dragon swallowed two of them, one at night, one in a tree. Sindbad bound five boards about himself like a bier, and lay down in the sand on his back, and the serpent came all night and went round him and could not come at him. In the morning he went to the shore and made signs with a branch to a ship far out, and they took him in, and clothed him, and fed him. It had put in at an island of sandalwood.

The captain said to him that a merchant had been lost who had left bales aboard, and that Sindbad, being a stranger and a pauper, might sell them and take a share. "What name shall I write on them?" said the clerk; and the captain said, "Write on them the name of Sindbad the Seaman, him who was with us in the ship and whom we lost at the Rukh's island." "He watched them write it," said the King. "Yes, lord. He said to himself, By Allah, I am Sindbad the Seaman." "And said nothing." "He waited until the merchants were all gathered." "Why?" "So that they would all hear," said my sister, "lord." The King said, "That is a long time to stand and watch your name written on the goods of the dead." Nobody answered him. One of the merchants had been in the valley of diamonds and swore that he knew him, and the captain, hearing the bale-marks, was convinced, and kissed him. Sindbad sold his goods in the isles, and in Hind, and bought cloves and ginger, and came home with more than he could count, and gave alms to the widow and the orphan; "and I forgot," said my sister, "all that I had suffered." Sumayya, who counts, held up three fingers. The nurse said, "There will be a fourth." "Yes," said the King.

On the 548th night the boy stood. He had been at the brick for a month, pulling himself half up and sitting down, and that night, when the second glass was beginning and I was on the Rukh's egg again (the King had asked to hear it a second time), he got both hands on the edge of it and put his feet under him and rose, with his face hot and astonished, and stood. Nobody moved. The nurse had her needle in the air. Shah Zaman, on the rug, did not breathe, which for him is a great deal. Then he took one hand off the brick, and looked at it, and put it back. "Do not tell him he is standing," said the King, very low. We did not. He stood until his knees went, and sat down hard, and cried a little, and was picked up; and in the morning the King came to the Roll and put his thumb beside the stroke, and beside the word Present.

Night 550. Shahrazad and Dunyazad. Present. Open: the fourth voyage of Sindbad the Seaman, only begun; a boy who has stood, once, at a brick; a woman who was not asked; a woodcutter, who was not asked; a book of names; a second child, which has moved; a boon, not yet asked.

## Chapter 33 · Nights Five Hundred and Fifty-one to Five Hundred and Sixty-six: Four Voyages More, and a Boy Who Came

The fourth voyage began at the end of the 550th night, and I told it in the second glass, from the plank. A squall tore the sails, the anchor-cable parted, the ship went down with her goods, and Sindbad and some others got on to one plank and rode it like a horse for a day and a night to an island. There they were taken by naked men, who brought them to their king and set before them a food that none of them knew. His companions ate, for hunger; he could not; and from the moment they had eaten, their eyes turned in their heads and their reason went, and they were given oil to drink and rubbed with it, and led out every day to pasture like cattle, and grew fat. I do not give you what the food was for. I said it in six words. Sindbad, who had not eaten, wasted with fear, and was forgotten by the naked men, and walked out of their place one day, and was shown the road by the old herdsman who tended his friends, with a movement of one hand. He walked seven days on roots. On the eighth he came to men gathering pepper, and they took him to their king; and he made the king a saddle, for nobody there rode with one; and the carpenter and the smith made more, and the Vizier wanted one, and the grandees; and in a short time he was rich and loved, and the king married him to a lady of high family, in a house of his own.

On the 553rd night my sister told the first glass sitting up. Sindbad loved his wife, and a neighbour of his lost his, and he went in to condole, and found the man in a worse state than grief explained. "I have one day left to live," said the neighbour. "This very day they bury my wife, and they bury me with her in one tomb; for it is the custom with us, if the wife die first, to bury the husband alive with her, and in like manner the wife if the husband die first, so that neither may enjoy life after losing the other." Sindbad cried that it was a most vile custom and not to be endured of any, and went to the King, who said that it was the custom of his forefathers from time out of mind, and that a foreigner was buried by it as a native. "It is the same for both," said the King. "Yes, lord." "That is more than," he said, and stopped. The glass ran for some time. Nobody finished it for him. Shah Zaman, who finishes everything, looked at the wall; and my sister said, in Sindbad's words, that God had never made it lawful to bury the quick with the dead.

The wife died. They put her on a bier in her finery and carried her to the end of the mountain, and lifted a rock from the mouth of a pit, and threw her in; and tied a rope of palm fibre under his arms and let him down after, with a jar of water and seven loaves. "He said that they would not hear him," my sister said. The cave was full of the dead and of the dying, and the smell. He lay on the bones and cursed the day he took a wife in that city, and ate a little bread, and drank a little water, and lived. What he did when the next living person was let down, and the next, to keep their bread and water, he told the Porter in plain words, and my sister gave it in nine. I will not give you the nine. The King had his hand over the boy's ear before she began, and I do not know how he knew. At last something scratched among the bodies, and Sindbad went after it with a leg-bone and saw, at the end of the cave, a light no bigger than a star; it was a hole in the back of the mountain, widened by the beasts that came to eat the dead. He went through it, to a slope above the sea where no one from the city could come, and carried out the food, and the jewels from the necks of the dead women, and waited with a strip of white shroud on a stick, until a ship passed. The captain asked how he had come to a mountain behind which stood a great city, on which in his life he had never seen anything living but beasts and birds. Sindbad told him a story, and did not tell the truth of it, for fear there should be one of the islanders on board. He went home, and gave alms to the widow and the orphan, "and I forgot," said my sister, "all that I had suffered." The nurse said, "That is the fourth." "He forgot the cave," said the King. "The tale says, all that he had suffered." "It would," said the King.

The fifth voyage he made in his own ship, which he bought. They found a white dome on a desert island, and the merchants broke it with stones, and the young Rukh was inside, and they took its flesh. Sindbad called to them to stop. Then the sun went out, and I put my hand over my eyes, and the King said, "Not again," which was a joke, and I did it again. The two birds came back with boulders in their claws; the first fell wide of the ship and the sea opened and showed the bottom, and the second, bigger, fell on the poop; and Sindbad, on a plank, was cast up on an island like a garden, and met an old man sitting by a well-channel, who made signs that he wished to be carried across. Sindbad took him on his back, and the old man wound his legs round his neck, and would not get off. He rode him day and night, and beat him with his heels when he stopped, and made water on him, and Sindbad said that he had done a kindness and been paid with an ill turn, and swore that he would never again do any man a service as long as he lived. "Did he keep it?" said the King. "No, lord," said my sister. "He is a man who forgets." He made wine in a gourd, and the old man drank it, and fell; and Sindbad got loose of him. I give you that he got loose. Sindbad gives what he did next, and I do not. There was a city of apes, where the townsfolk go out in boats at night and sleep on the water for fear of them, and Sindbad filled a bag with pebbles and threw them at the apes in the trees, and the apes threw down coconuts, and he made his living so. There were pearls, and a fifth home-coming. Sumayya held up five fingers. The nurse said, "And a sixth."

On the 560th night I asked for the lamp to be turned down. I had not meant to. I was at the part of the sixth voyage where Sindbad is alone on an island of wreckage and jewels, with every one of his companions buried, and makes a raft of aloes-wood and lets the river carry him under the mountain, and I found that I could not tell the dark with a lamp in the room. I had told the beach first, because it is the loveliest thing in the voyage: rubies lying like gravel in the bed of the stream, and crude ambergris that runs like wax down the banks in the heat and sets again at night, and the monsters of the deep that swallow it and cannot keep it down. The King got up and turned it down himself, to a bead. Sumayya moved nearer to me on the rug. The boy slept. I told the channel narrowing, until the rock scraped his head and he had to lie on his face; and the days he could not tell from the nights; and the sleep. "And when he woke," I said, "he was in the light of Heaven," and the King, without a word, put the lamp up. Nobody spoke. I think my sister had her eyes open.

He had come out among husbandmen, who took him to their King, who was the King of Sarandib; and the King lodged him in his palace, and asked him about the Caliph Harun al-Rashid and the justice of his rule, and sent by him a letter on yellow skin in ultramarine ink, and a ruby cup a span high lined with pearls, and a couch covered with the skin of the serpent that swallows elephants, and a slave-girl like a moon. Sindbad told the Caliph how the King of Sarandib goes in procession on an elephant eleven cubits high, with a thousand horsemen in gold brocade; at his head a man carries a golden javelin, and behind him another a mace of gold whose head is an emerald a span long; there is no Kazi in his city, because every man there can tell truth from falsehood; and before him goes a man who cries out his praises, "This is the King of great dignity and high authority"; and when he has finished, another behind the King cries, "He will die! Again I say he will die!" and the first answers, "Extolled be the Perfection of the Living, who dieth not!" "Again," said the King. "He will die," said my sister. "Again I say he will die." "Again." She said it a third time, and did not wait to be asked. The King looked at the sand-glass at his side. "I have a glass," he said. And after a time, to nobody, "It does not say it so loud."

My sister told the seventh voyage twice, for it is told two ways, and on my second sheet I wrote down the difference. In the first, the ship is blown into the Sea of the Clime of the King, where Solomon's tomb is, and three fish rise out of the sea, each bigger than the last, the third with a mouth wider than the gate of a city; a squall breaks the ship on a reef; Sindbad, on a plank, tells himself that he does not repent, and that if he says he renounces, he lies in his renouncement. He makes a raft of sandalwood and goes under a mountain, and comes to a city, where an old man buys the raft and gives him his daughter. The townsfolk, at the first of every month, grow wings and fly up. Sindbad begs one of them to carry him; and as he rises he hears the angels praising God, and cries, "Praised be God!" and a fire comes out of heaven, and they drop him on a mountain, cursing. Two young men give him a golden rod; a serpent has a man in her jaws to below the waist, and he strikes her on the head, and the man is his friend for the rest of the tale. He goes home with his wife. He had been away seven and twenty years. And he swore never to travel again. In the second telling, which differs in essential form, the Caliph sends for him, to carry a letter and gifts to the King of Sarandib. He says that he has sworn, and that when he hears the word voyage his limbs tremble. "For our sake," says the Caliph, "thou wilt go." He goes. Pirates take the ship, and he is sold to a rich man, who puts him in a tree with a bow to shoot elephants; and one morning the elephants tear the tree up by the roots, and the biggest of them puts him on its back and carries him to a place full of the bones of elephants, where they come to die. His master wept for joy over the heaps of ivory. He freed him.

"He had sworn," said the King. "Yes, lord. In both." "And the Caliph sent him." "In the second, lord." "A Caliph sends, and the man goes." My father, in his corner, said, "He goes, lord." Nobody said anything after that. The King looked for a time at the lamp, and then at the boy, who was on the floor by the brick with one hand on it, and who looked back at him with his mother's face; and my sister, in the first glass, with a small cough, said what the Porter said when it was over: "Allah upon thee, O my lord, pardon me the wrong I did thee." "What wrong?" said Sumayya. "The verses, little one. He thought the Seaman's life was easy." They went on in friendship until the Destroyer of delights came to them; and glory be to the Living, who dieth not. "Which is true?" said the King. "Both, lord. They are told two ways."

Then, on the 566th night, the boy let go of the brick. He had been standing at it for some time with one hand, as he does now, listening; and he took the hand away, and looked at it, and took a step, and another, and a third; and he sat down. The King, who was five paces off on the floor with his arms out, did not know that he had put them out. The boy looked at him. Nobody moved. Then he got up, holding his hands high like a man on a wall, and came the rest of the way. The King took him up, and said nothing, and nobody said anything to him; and in the morning, before the Roll was read, he turned back the first leaf, and at the foot of the margin of the margin, after the seven, he wrote an eighth word, in the square hand. It was: came.

Night 566. Shahrazad and Dunyazad. Present. Open: the City of Brass, in which, my sister says, nobody lives, only begun; a boy who has walked, five paces, from a brick to a King; a woman who was not asked; a woodcutter, who was not asked; a book of names; a second child, which has moved; a boon, not yet asked.

## Chapter 34 · Nights Five Hundred and Sixty-seven to Five Hundred and Seventy-eight: The City of Brass, and Seven Years of Grain

My sister said at the end of the 566th night that the City of Brass is a city in which nobody lives, and began it on the 567th. A Caliph at Damascus, Abd al-Malik bin Marwan, was sitting with his lords talking of Solomon, and of the copper bottles in which Solomon shut up the Jinn that rebelled against him, and sealed them with lead and with his ring, and cast them into the sea. A man named Talib bin Sahl, who sought treasure for his living and had books that said where it lay, told how his grandfather's ship had been blown for a month off its course to a mountain, where a people who had no Arabic but their King's took the strangers in, and on the fourth day showed them a fisherman drawing up his net with a copper bottle in it, sealed with the seal of Solomon. They broke it open. A smoke went up, blue, to the zenith, and a voice cried out of it: "I repent! I repent! Pardon, O Prophet of God! I will never return to that which I did aforetime." The smoke became a giant whose head was level with the mountain-tops, and went. "To whom?" said the King. "To Solomon, lord." "He is dead." "Yes, lord. They do not know it. Whenever a net brings one up, the one inside begs his pardon." The King looked at his hands, which were empty. The boy was asleep on the nurse, and she did not move.

The Caliph wished to see the bottles, and sent Talib with letters to his Emir in the west, Musa bin Nusayr, who sent for the oldest man on that coast who had travelled, a Shaykh named Abd al-Samad. It was, the Shaykh said, a journey of two years going and two coming. They took a thousand camels laden with water in earthen jars, because the hot winds dry up skins and leave jars alone. They travelled a year. One dawn the Shaykh found that he did not know where they were. "The stars were clouded," he said. They came to a castle of black stone, with a dome of lead a hundred cubits high and a gate of China steel, and nobody in it; and over the door, in gold, in the old Ionian letter, were verses, which the Shaykh read aloud to the Emir, who had asked him to. They ended: "As had they only set their burdens down to rest awhile, and then had rode away." I stopped there. I did not mean to. "The porter," said Sumayya. I said that I had thought so too.

Inside there were four hundred tombs of yellow marble round a pavilion, and in the largest lay Kush, son of Shaddad, who ruled a thousand years. He had four thousand bay horses, and a thousand daughters of kings to wife, and a thousand sons like lions, and treasure in a thousand cisterns; and when death came he said to his soldiers, "Can you ward this off?" and they could not; and he had his treasures brought and said, "Can you ransom me with all this, or buy me one day of life?" and they could not. That was graven on a tablet at his head. In the palace there was a table of yellow onyx, with words on it: "At this table have eaten a thousand kings blind of the right eye, and a thousand blind of the left, and yet other thousand sound of both eyes, all of whom have departed the world." The Emir took the table, and nothing else.

They went on for three days to a hill with a horseman of brass on it, with a lance, and a writing: If thou know not the way to the City of Brass, rub my hand. Musa rubbed it, and the horseman turned like lightning and stopped, and they went the way that he faced. They came to a pillar of black stone with a creature sunk in it to the armpits, with two wings and four arms and a third eye in his forehead, who cried, "Glory to my Lord, who hath adjudged me this grievous torment!" He was an Ifrit named Dahish, who had spoken from the belly of an idol of carnelian in the court of a sea-king when Solomon sent to ask for the King's daughter and the breaking of the idol; and the King had refused; and what came after was the war of Solomon, with a thousand thousand men and six hundred thousand thousand devils, and the birds and the beasts, and I leave it out, because my sister did, in one breath, and my father looked at the floor. Dahish had fled for three months and been caught. Solomon had the pillar hollowed and sealed him in it, until the Day of Judgment. He told them where the City of Brass was. "It is near."

It had walls of black stone, and two towers of brass that shone from far off like twin fires, and five and twenty gates, none of which could be seen from outside, because they open only from within. On a hill above it the Emir found seven tablets of white marble, and the Shaykh read them. I will give you one. "O son of Adam, what hath seduced thee from the service of the Ancient of Days, and made thee forget that one day thou must defray the debt of death? Where be the kings who peopled Irak? The Summoner of Death summoned them and they answered him, and the Herald of Destruction hailed them and they replied, Here are we!" "Here are we," said the King. "Yes, lord." "That is what you write." I said that it was. He turned his head and looked at the Roll on the table. "Present," he said, and nothing else; and my sister, on her pillows, with her hand where she puts it, looked at the ceiling.

They built a ladder in a month, banded with iron, and set it to the wall, and it reached the top as if it had been measured. A man went up, and looked down into the city, and clapped his hands and cried, "By Allah, thou art fair!" and went over. Another went up, and laughed, and did the same. There were twelve. The Emir said that they had no business with the city. The old Shaykh said that it was his; and he went up, saying the name of God and the Verses of Safety, and at the top he clapped his hands, and those below begged him not to; and he laughed for a long while, and sat, and said the names of God; and then he stood and called down that there was no harm, that God had kept the wiles of Satan from him. He had seen ten maidens like Houris calling to him with their hands, and below them a lake; and when he had thought to throw himself in, he had seen his twelve companions lying dead on the stones. It was an enchantment of the people of the city, to turn back whoever would look. I told it with my back to the wall. I do not know why I say so; it is true. He found a horseman of brass on a golden gate, with a pin of gold in its navel, and turned it twelve times, and the gate opened with a noise like thunder.

Inside there was a guard-room with dead men sitting on benches, their shields above them and their bows strung; and at the belt of the oldest, the keys; and the great gate, which the Shaykh opened to those outside, who cried Allaho Akbar. I give you the markets only by their scales. Every shop in the city was open, with the weights hung out and the brass vessels in rows, and in every shop the merchant sat on his shop-board with the skin dried on his bones, looking as if he would speak: the silk market, the jewellers, the money-changers, with gold in their shops and nobody to count it, and the perfumers' with bladders of musk and ambergris. There was no food in any of the shops. My sister said that twice. Over the door of the palace there were verses in gold and ultramarine: The tombs aloud reply to the questioners and cry, Death's canker and decay those rosy cheeks corrode.

In the middle of the palace, in a pavilion with a dome of alabaster, there lay on a couch a damsel in a body-robe of pearls, with a crown of red gold, and two jewels on her forehead that gave light like the sun; her hair was black and her cheeks red, and she seemed to look at them to the right and to the left. "Peace be with thee, O damsel," said the Emir. "She is dead, lord," said Talib. "She has been embalmed with great art, and her eyes taken out and quicksilver put under them and set back; and when the air moves the lashes she seems to look at you." Two slaves of copper stood on the steps, one with a mace and one with a sword. Between them lay a tablet of gold with letters of silver, and the Shaykh read it. "I am Tadmurah, daughter of the Kings of the Amalekites. I possessed what no king possessed, and was righteous in my rule, and gave largesse and freed bondsmen. Then there came upon us seven years of drought, in which no drop of rain fell and nothing green sprang from the earth. We ate what we had; then the cattle; then there was nothing. I had my treasures brought and measured, and sent trusty men to every land to buy food, and they came back after a long absence with the treasure, and said that they had not been able to barter fine pearls for poor wheat, bushel for bushel, weight for weight. So we displayed our riches, and shut the gates of the city and its strong places, and resigned ourselves to the decree of our Lord. Then we all died, as thou seest us. After the substance naught abideth but the trace."

"Bushel for bushel," said the King. He did not say it to my sister. "Vizier." "Lord." "How many years of grain are there in the granaries?" My father had been looking at his hands. "In the city, four, lord, and some months. In the north, less than one." "Make it seven." "Lord, the north," my father began. "Seven," said the King, in the voice in which he had said a brick. My father put out his finger and wrote it on his palm, as he does for the houses; and in the morning, before the audience, he went out with two clerks and a measuring-rod, and I saw his back from the window, going down towards the granaries by the river, where I have never seen him go.

Talib bin Sahl said that the damsel would have no need of the jewels on her, which were the ornament of the world, and that one garment of cotton would cover her; and that they had more right to them than she. The Emir said that she had written: Touch not what is on my body, for it is the covering of my shame and the outfit for my last journey; and that she had given it to them in trust. "Because she is dead," said Talib, "shall we leave these?" and went up the steps; and the two slaves of copper moved, and he did not come down. "Greed of gain degrades a man," said the Emir, and had the troops carry out the gold and the vessels, and leave her as she was, and shut the gate again as it had been. "He was told," said the nurse. "She said not to." "Yes," said the King. Sumayya said, "He didn't need them," and nobody asked her who.

They went on along the shore for a month, to a mountain full of caves by the sea of Al-Karkar, where lived a people who had been taught to pray by Al-Khizr when he came up out of the sea, and who knew no other words than the ones he had given them, and said them every evening before the Friday. Their King had his divers bring up twelve of Solomon's bottles, and gave the Emir some of the creatures of the deep who have the shape of men, and the Emir took some of these to the Caliph, who put them in cisterns of planks, and they died of the heat. I tell you this because my sister told it, and Sumayya cried. The Caliph opened the bottles one after another in his hall, and out of every one came a devil saying, "I repent, O Prophet of God; I will never go back to it"; and he marvelled, and said that God had never given anyone what He gave Solomon. The Emir Musa gave up his government to his son, and went to Jerusalem to worship, and died there. "That is all that has come down to us of the City of Brass," said my sister, "and God is all-knowing." "And those not brought up?" said the King. "They are saying it, lord." He nodded.

At the end of the 578th night my sister said that she had another tale, of the craft and malice of women, and of a King of China who had grown old without a son, and of the son he got, and a concubine, and seven Viziers. "Seven," said the King, and looked at my father. "Seven, lord," said my father. "I am told that I count for several, on my better days." "On your better days," said the King; and that was all, and it was a good deal.

Night 578. Shahrazad and Dunyazad. Present. Open: a King of China who has grown old without a son, only begun; seven years of grain, of which there are four; a city in which nobody lives, shut again as it was; a boy who walks to the door and back; a woman who was not asked; a woodcutter, who was not asked; a book of names; a second child, which has moved; a boon, not yet asked.

## Chapter 35 · Nights Five Hundred and Seventy-nine to Six Hundred and Six: The Seven Days of Silence, and a Jar Without a Cloth

For twenty-eight nights my sister told one story, and inside it twenty-seven more, and I will give you the first and the last and the middle only by their doors. There was a King of China who had grown old without a son. His Queen told him of a dream: a voice had said that if she bore a daughter she would be the ruin of the kingdom, and if a son, that he would meet with trouble in his youth and pass through it without loss of life; and that it could be conceived only when the moon stood in Gemini. So it was, and the child was born like the moon on its fourteenth night, and the astrologers who cast his nativity said that a danger waited for his youth, and that he would escape it. The King gave him to nurses until he was seven, and then gathered three hundred and sixty of the learned, to choose the one who should teach him everything; and they chose a Sage named Sindibad.

The Sage asked three things of the King, before he would begin. The first was that he should not do to another what he would not have done to himself. The second was that he should do nothing in haste, without asking the experienced. The third was that where he had power, he should show pity. The King had these written, and swore them before the court. "I submit myself to thy conditions," he said. Three years went, and the boy had learned nothing, for his mind was on play; and the Sage said that he would teach him in seven months what no one could teach him in seven years. He had a house built, with the walls whitened with stucco, and painted on them every thing that he meant to teach; and he locked the Prince in it with seven padlocks, and came every third day to explain the pictures, and to bring food. When the boy was lonely, he looked at the walls. Sumayya said, "On the wall?" and looked at the plaster of our room, as though it might begin; and I saw her mouth move.

When the Prince was ready, the Sage looked in his horoscope, and found it barred by a conjunction that would last seven days, and said to him: "Be silent. Not one word for seven days, though thy father scourge thee. If thou pass this week thou shalt rule after him." The Prince went in to his father and would not speak; and the Sage hid himself, and none could find him. The courtiers said that the boy was shy of women, and the King sent him to the palace of the women, where there was a stream, and forty chambers with ten girls in each who played instruments, so that the whole palace danced. The King's favourite saw him, and was taken with love, and threw herself upon him, and said that if he would take her she would poison his father and set him on the throne. He signed to her that when he could speak he would tell the King. She tore her clothes, and her hair, and went to the King, and said that this son of his, who was said to be dumb, had required her of herself and tried to kill her when she refused. The King, who had waited all his life for him, called his seven Viziers, and bade them put the Prince to death.

They talked together in the corridor. If they did what he said, he would repent it the day after, and turn on them for not stopping him. The first said, "I will warrant you for today," and went in, and told the King that he had heard great store of tales of the malice and craft of women. "Tell me some of that which hath come to thy knowledge," said the King. A King of the Kings, the Vizier said, saw a woman on a roof, and fell in love with her; and sent her husband, who was his Vizier, on an errand to the other end of the kingdom, and went in his place to her house. She kissed his hands and feet, and said that she was not worthy to be the handmaid of one of his servants, and asked him to take patience and abide with her that day, so that she could make him something to eat. She brought him a book to read; it was moral instances, and exhortations, and broke his courage. Then she set before him ninety dishes of many colours, and he tasted each and found the taste of all of them one; and she said that in his palace were ninety concubines of many colours, but their taste was one. He was ashamed, and rose, and left, and in his haste forgot his signet-ring under the cushion.

The Vizier, returning, found it. He did not speak to his wife for a year. At last her father complained to the King, in the Vizier's presence, that he had a garden, which he had planted with his own hand and given to the Vizier, who had eaten of it and then neglected to water it, so that it withered. The Vizier said that it was true: he had cared for it, and eaten of it, till one day he went and saw the footprint of the lion there; and he had been afraid, and left it. The King understood that the footprint of the lion was his own ring. "Return to thy garden," he said, "and fear nothing. I have heard that the lion went there. By the honour of my fathers, he did it no harm." The King in our room did not look at anyone. "A lion's footprint," he said. "He did not go near it," said my sister. "Yes," said the King. My father, in his corner, was looking at the brick.

It went on, a Vizier a day, and for each Vizier the favourite, who came the next morning and said that the King had been turned from justice by the prate of his ministers, and told a tale of the malice of men. I give them you only by their shapes. There was the parrot that told the confectioner what his wife did while he was away, and the wife who made a storm over its cage with a hand-mill and a candle and a fan, so that when it spoke of the deluge the man tore its head off; and there was the fuller who was drowned with his son. The egg-white that a rake spilled on a merchant's bed, so that he would think his wife untrue, and the little boy who fried it and ate it. The miser, who learned what his two loaves a day had been made of. The woman who came home from the rice-seller with earth and stones in her napkin and said that she had dropped a dirham, and made her husband sift the dust for it until his face was grey. Over a drop of honey that fell in a shop, a fly, a bird, a cat, a dog, and a man who killed another, the people of two villages destroyed one another; "none knoweth their number save Allah." "Over a drop," said the King. "Yes, lord." He looked for some time at his own hands. "Who began it?" "The drop, lord." "The man who let it fall." "He did not mean to." "No," said the King; and that was all.

On the fifth day, the Vizier told the tale of the man who never laughed again. A rich man's son wasted what his father left, and at the last hired himself to an old man who needed a servant in a house of eleven old men, who wept and wailed all day, and who made him swear not to ask why. They died one by one, and he buried them in the garden behind the house, until there was only the one who had hired him; and the old man said, on his deathbed, "There is a door in that wall. If thou open it, thou shalt know why we wept; and thou shalt repent when repentance will avail thee naught." The young man found the door in a dark corner, with spiders' webs over it, and four steel padlocks, and let it be for seven days. On the eighth day he said that nothing can avert what is fore-ordained, and broke the padlocks. "He held off seven days," said the King. "Seven, lord." "And on the eighth." "On the eighth." The nurse looked up from her mending. "It is a long time to hold off a door," she said. Behind it was a passage, and a sea, and an eagle which carried him to an island, and a ship of ivory and ebony, with ten maidens, who called him King, and a country of women who ruled while the men tilled; and a Queen who gave him everything in it, and told him not to open one door. He was seven years there. Then he opened it, and the bird was behind it. "No welcome to a face that shall never prosper!" He did not laugh again as long as he lived.

On the fifth day the favourite came in with a bowl of poison, and on the sixth with a naked knife, and on the seventh she lit a great fire and made as if to throw herself in it, and said she would accuse the King on the Day of Resurrection. Each time, my sister said, the King looked at the thing in her hand for a long time. "She threatens herself," said the King. "Yes, lord." "That is a way to ask." He did not say what he meant. That was the day the Vizier told the tale of the man with three wishes, which I shall not give you because the first of them was foolish and the second was a joke and the third was undone; and she told the necklace. A pious woman who had been given a necklace to keep by a Queen was put to the question by fire and blows when it vanished, and confessed nothing, and was put in prison. A magpie had taken it to a crevice in the wall; the King saw it fly out and fetch it. He sent for her and kissed her head and wept and begged her pardon, and gave her treasure, which she refused. She forgave him, and went away into the mountains, and swore never to enter another man's house. "She forgave him," said the King. "Yes, lord." "She would not take the treasure." "No, lord." He said nothing more.

I leave the long tales, which came on the seventh day and filled five nights: Prince Behram, who rode against the Princess Al-Datma and lost himself for her; the house with the belvedere, in which a lover is hidden in a chest; the King's son and the Ifrit's mistress. On the last of them, a King's son lost his ring to a woman's trick, and his father ordered him put to death, and the Viziers prevailed with the father again; and the next morning, the eighth day, the Prince came into the audience hall with Sindibad holding his hand, and praised his father and the Viziers in the most eloquent words, and thanked them for saving his life. Nobody had known he could speak. The King kissed him between the eyes. Sindibad said that he had told the boy to keep silent, because he had read in the stars that if he spoke in that week he would die. The King said, to the court, "If I had killed my son, whose would the fault have been: mine, or the damsel's, or the preceptor's?" And no one answered; and Sindibad said, "Answer thou, my son."

The Prince said that a merchant, whose guests were with him, sent a slave-girl to the market for a jar of clotted milk; and a kite passed over her, holding a serpent in its claws, and a drop of venom fell into the milk; and the merchant and his guests drank it, and died. "Whose was the fault?" Some said the guests', who drank without looking, and some said the girl's, who left the jar uncovered. "It was neither," said the Prince. "Their hour was come, and their appointed portion was spent, and God had fore-ordained that they should die thus." Sumayya said, "She should have put a cloth on it." My sister said, "The kite was overhead, little one." "She should still have put a cloth on it." The King said, "Yes. She should." He said it as if she had asked him something. "And so should the merchant have looked at it before he drank," he said, "and the boy has been silent seven days, and has had time to think what he would say." The Prince added that the blind Shaykh, and the child of three, and the child of five were wiser than he, and told their tales: the sandalwood merchant and the sharpers; the profligate man who went to another city to sin and was put to shame by a three-year-old with rice in his eye; the four merchants and the stolen purse, which a five-year-old solved with a dirham's worth of sweets. I give you the child of three because I told it, in the second glass, with my chin on my knees, and the boy laughed at it, and I let him.

Then the Prince told his father what the favourite had done. "She required me of love, and I refused; and she promised to give thee poison, and make me King; and I signed to her that when I could speak I would requite her." The King sent for her. "How shall we put this damsel to death?" he asked, and some said, cut out her tongue, and others, burn her. She said that her case was like that of the fox and the folk. A fox got into a currier's storehouse and spoiled the skins, and the currier beat him with the hides until he lay for dead, and an old woman took out his right eye, for a charm against weeping in children, and a boy cut off his tail, and a man took out his knife to slit his belly for the gall that cures dim eyes; and the fox sprang up and ran, and said that he had borne the eye and the tail but not the belly. "I excuse her," said the King, "and in my son's hands be her doom." The Prince said, "Pardon is better than vengeance, and mercy is of the quality of the noble." He set her free. "Depart from our neighbourhood," he said, "and God pardon what is past."

"He did not say that he pardoned her," said the King. The glass had run out. My sister, on her pillows, looked at him. "No, lord," she said. "He said, God pardon what is past." "That is not the same." "No, lord." "He sent her out of the neighbourhood." "Yes." "Alive." "Yes, lord." "It is not done," said the King, to nobody; and the nurse said, "It is done, lord, she has gone," and the King said, "She has gone. It is not done." I wrote it that morning in the column where I put what is not finished: a favourite, sent out of the neighbourhood, whom nobody has pardoned. The King gave the kingdom to the Prince, and crowned him with his own crown, and said that he was old and would give the rest of his days to worship; and the Prince reigned in justice, and his power was magnified, until there came to him the Certainty.

Night 606. Shahrazad and Dunyazad. Present. Open: the sons of a merchant named Omar, of whom the youngest is loved, only begun; a favourite, sent out of the neighbourhood, whom nobody has pardoned; a jar, which should have had a cloth on it; seven years of grain, of which there are five; a boy who walks to the door and back; a woman who was not asked; a woodcutter, who was not asked; a book of names; a second child, which has moved; a boon, not yet asked.

## Chapter 36 · Nights Six Hundred and Seven to Six Hundred and Twenty-four: Judar and His Brothers, and a Baker Whose Name Is to Be Found

A merchant of Cairo named Omar had three sons, Salim and Selim and Judar, and loved the youngest the most; and when he was old he divided his goods in four before witnesses, a share for each son and a share for their mother, so that after he died there could be no dispute. There was one. The two elder said that their father's wealth was in Judar's hands, and went to the judges; and the judges, who had been bribed by all three, found for Judar twice, and by the end of it the three of them had given everything they had to the courts, and were poor. The brothers beat their mother and took what she had. Judar took her in. "Do not curse them," he said. "Allah will requite each according to his deed. Come and live with me, and the scone that I eat I will share with thee." He comforted her with a verse: If a fool oppress thee, bear it patiently, and from Time expect thy revenge to see; shun tyranny, for if mountain oppressed mountain, it would be shattered by it. He got a net and went fishing at Bulak, and some days he made ten coppers, and some twenty; and his brothers came to the house when he was out, and his mother gave them stale bread, and said, "Eat quick and go before your brother comes." One day he came in while they were eating. He smiled in their faces. "Welcome, my brothers," he said. "A blessed day. I thought you had forgotten me." They said that it was Satan's doing. He made peace with them, and they supped, and lodged with him, and ate his fish.

Then there was a day when his net came up empty, and the next, and for seven days he caught nothing, and he took bread each night at the baker's on credit, and went home. The baker, when he offered his net in pledge, would not take it. "The net is the gate of thy livelihood," he said. "If I took it I should close the door of thy subsistence." He gave him twenty coppers' worth of bread, and said that if there were no fish tomorrow there would be bread tomorrow. "A baker," said the King. "Yes, lord." "Is there a baker who does that?" My father said, "There is one in the Coppersmiths' Row, lord, who has done it for four of the houses." "Which?" "I did not ask him, lord. He did it before I came." The King looked at his hands for a time, and said, "Find out his name."

On the eighth day Judar went to Lake Karun, to cast there. A Moor came on a she-mule with golden saddle-bags, and said, "Peace be upon thee, O Judar, O son of Omar!" and asked him to say the Fatihah with him, and to bind his elbows behind him with a silken cord, and push him into the lake, and wait; and if his hands came up above the water, to cast the net over him and haul him out, but if his feet came up first, to take the mule to a Jew in the bazaar, who would give him a hundred dinars. The Moor's feet came up. The Jew gave Judar the hundred dinars, and said, "This is the reward of the covetous." The next day a second Moor came, who knew everything the first had said, and asked the same; and his feet came up. Judar, who thought that they were mad, said that he hoped Moors would come to him every day. "He said that?" said the King. "He said that, lord. He was getting a hundred dinars a head." "He did not know what he did." "He knew that he was tying a man's hands, lord." The King said nothing to that. The third Moor put his hands up out of the water with a red fish in each, and told Judar the history, which was that the first two had been his brothers, and the Jew a third, and the fourth was himself, and that their father had taught them magic and left them a book of the secrets of the world, which they had quarrelled over; and the old man who had reared their father had said that whichever of them brought him the four treasures of the sorcerer Al-Shamardal might have it: a sword, a seal-ring, a phial of kohl and a celestial planisphere. It could be done only by Judar. I cut the fish short, because they were the sons of the Red King, and the Moor kept them in two caskets until they were forced to open the door.

He fed Judar on the way. "What wilt thou have?" "Bread and cheese." "O my poor fellow, bread and cheese befit thee not; wish for something good." Four-and-twenty dishes the Moor named, till Judar said, "That will do; thou makest me long for all these meats, and I see nothing"; and the Moor put his hand into the saddle-bags and took out a golden dish with two hot browned chickens, and then another, until the whole four-and-twenty were on the ground. When they had eaten, he threw away what was left, and put the empty dishes back, and it began again at the next meal. "Nothing was kept," said my sister. "No, lord. Whatever was left he threw away, or gave to the poor; and the bags filled again." "Nothing was kept past the meal," said the King. I looked at the Roll. They crossed in four days, on a mule that was an Ifrit and did a year's journey in a day, to Fez, where a girl called Rahmah opened the upper room; and there Judar ate for twenty days and was clothed every morning in a new dress, until the day came to open the hoard of Al-Shamardal.

There were seven doors under the river-bed. At the first he was to knock a light knock, and wait, and a louder knock, and wait, and then three together; and a voice would ask, "Who knocketh at the door of the treasure, unknowing how to solve the secrets?" and he was to say, "I am Judar the fisherman, son of Omar." At each of them something stood to kill him if he resisted, and would fall down and be a body without a soul if he did not: a figure with a sword, who said, Stretch forth thy neck; a horseman; an archer; a lion that he must give his hand to; a slave; two dragons; and at the seventh door, a woman in the shape of his mother, who said, "I am thy mother who bore thee and suckled thee and reared thee," and he was to make her take off her clothes. He had been told that she was not his mother, and she called him my son, and as he threatened her, one garment after another, she begged him, and he went on; and when she was left in her trousers, she said, "O my son, is thy heart stone? Wilt thou dishonour me?" And he said, "Thou sayest sooth," and let her keep them. Then she cried out, "He has made default; beat him!" and they came from nowhere and beat him, a beating that he did not forget in all his days, and threw him out, and the river closed. "He was sorry for her," said the King. "Yes, lord." "She was not his mother." "No, lord. The Moor told him that, and told him again." "And it had her face." "Yes." The Moor made him wait a year. It was the year that he ate from the saddle-bags, and was clothed in a new dress every morning; and then he went down again, and when she had nothing left on, she fell, and he took the sword and the ring, the phial and the planisphere, and music sounded for him. He gave them to the Moor. He asked for nothing but the saddle-bags, and the Moor gave him them, and a second pair filled with gold and jewels, and sent him back to Cairo on the Ifrit mule.

Outside the Gate of Victory his mother was sitting begging. "Alms, for the love of God." She had given his brothers what he left her, and they had taken it, and put her out, and she slept on an empty stomach. "In the name of God," she said, when he began to name what he would give her to eat, "Yauh! Yauh! art thou daft? Who can pay for such dishes, and who knows how to dress them?" He told her to bring the saddle-bags, and she felt them, and they were empty, and he put in his hand and drew out stuffed ribs, and she wept. "The mother," said the nurse. "The mother," said the King, and said nothing more of that. It was on the 615th night that my father said, after the tale, that the granaries held five years and some months, and the north a year; and the King said, "Good." He did not say anything else. I wrote it.

Judar fed his brothers, and they learned the secret of the bags from their mother, and arranged to sell him to the Captain of Suez for forty dinars. They asked the Captain and two of his men to a supper in Judar's house, and fell on Judar in his sleep. He worked a year in the galleys. A ship was wrecked on a rock; he swam out; a Bedouin camp, a merchant of Jiddah who took him on, Mecca, and on the circuit of the Ka'abah, the Moor. The Moor gave him the seal-ring, in which there lived the Marid Al-Ra'ad al-Kasif, and told him to rub it; and Al-Ra'ad took him on his back to Cairo between noon and midnight, and left him in his mother's courtyard. "I will bring my brothers," said Judar; and the Marid brought them out of the King's prison, where the King had put them for the bags, and they thought that they were to die. He said, "Weep not. It was Satan and covetousness. How could you sell me? I comfort myself with Joseph, whose brothers did worse, for they cast him into the pit. But repent unto God, and He will forgive you; and as for me, I pardon you." "He forgave them," said the King. "Yes, lord." "That is twice." "Yes, lord." Shah Zaman, on the rug, said, "I have a brother." "You have," said the King. And they looked at each other for the length of a breath, and neither said what he meant.

Judar had the Marid build him a palace in a night, and furnish it, and bring him slaves, and empty the King's treasury into it, since it was the King who had taken the saddle-bags; and the Treasurer fell down in a fit. The King sent an Emir with fifty men to bring him, and an eunuch in a chair of gold at the gate beat them, and a hundred, and two hundred; so the King sent his Vizier alone, in a white habit with a rosary in his hand, who sat down beside the eunuch and said, "Peace be with thee." "And on thee be peace, O mortal," said the eunuch, and the Vizier knew what he was. Judar kept the King standing for some time in his own hall; and when the King said that greed had impelled him and that if there were no offending, there would be no forgiving, he said, "God pardon thee," and let him sit. The King, afraid of a man who could do that, gave him his daughter, the Princess Asiyah. When the King died the army made Judar Sultan, and he built a mosque over him, and made his brothers his two Viziers. A year later the brothers asked him to a feast.

I did not tell the end. My sister told it, in the first glass, and she told it fast. The first brother poisoned him, and took the ring, and rubbed it, and told the Marid to kill the second brother, who was to have been his Vizier of the left, and to throw both bodies down before the generals at dinner. "Eat and make merry," he told them, "for I am your Sultan; and if you will not have me I shall rub the ring and the Marid shall kill you, great and small." They said they would have him. He sent to Judar's widow that he would go in to her that night. She received him with joy, and gave him poison in a cup of water; and when he was dead she took the ring and broke it, and tore the saddle-bags, so that nobody might have them again, and sent to the Shaykh al-Islam and the officers, and said, "Choose you out a King." "She broke it," said the King. "And tore the bags." "Nothing was left." "No, lord." The lamp had burned low. He sat for some time looking at it, and I wrote nothing.

The boy had been awake all this time, on the King's arm, looking at the lamp. He turned his head to his father's face and said, quite clearly, "Ba." "Again," said the King. "Ba," said the boy, and put his hand flat on the King's mouth. And the King put his own hand over the boy's, and shut his eyes, and did not move for a long time; and my sister, on her pillows, said that she would tell another tale, of Gharib and his brother Ajib, and a King of might named Kundamir, who had grown old.

Night 624. Shahrazad and Dunyazad. Present. Open: Gharib and his brother Ajib, and a King named Kundamir, who has grown old, only begun; a broken ring; the baker who would not take the net, whose name is to be found out; seven years of grain, of which there are five and some months; a favourite, sent out of the neighbourhood, whom nobody has pardoned; a boy who has said Ba, twice; a woman who was not asked; a woodcutter, who was not asked; a book of names; a second child, which has moved; a boon, not yet asked.

## Chapter 37 · Nights Six Hundred and Twenty-five to Six Hundred and Fifty: Gharib, and a Son Born Before Dawn

There was in olden time a King of might named Kundamir, who had been a brave man of war and had grown old and decrepit; and it pleased God in his extreme old age to give him a son, whom he named Ajib, the Wonderful, because of his beauty. The boy was taught by a priest of his father's faith, and then to ride and to fight; and by twenty he was the best horseman of his day and a tyrant, who rode out with a thousand riders to cut off caravans and carry off the daughters of nobles. The nobles complained to his father. The old King had him seized and beaten, and shut in a dark room for two days. Ajib bore it ten days. Then he went in at night to the room where his father slept, and cut his throat, and in the morning took the throne, and told the Emirs, who stood in front of him with drawn swords, "You see what your King has gained. Whoever obeys me I will honour. Whoever does not I will do with him what I did with my sire."

My sister told it quickly, and the King did not stop her. Five months later Ajib had a dream. He saw his father standing before him, and out of his father came a thing the size of a bee, and it grew into a lion with claws like hangers and ran at him and ripped him open. The interpreters said that it meant a child of his father's who would be his enemy and would win. He had them beaten for it. "I have no brother whom I should fear," he said. Then he went to his father's house of women and found one of the concubines seven months gone with child, and ordered two slaves to take her to the sea and drown her. "Stop," said the King.

My sister stopped. It was the middle of the 625th night, in the first glass, and she had her hand where she keeps it. The King was not looking at her. He had the boy on his knee, who was awake, and he had turned the boy's face into his coat. "They did not," said my sister. "Lord. They did not drown her." "Say that first." "The two slaves took her to the sea, lord, and they could not do it, and they took her to a forest; and she is alive in the next word." "Say it." "She is alive, lord, and her child is alive, and he is called Gharib, and he is the hero of the tale." The King looked at the lamp. "Go on," he said. The nurse put down her mending and said nothing, and put her hand on my sister's knee.

She was alone in the forest, among fruit trees and streams, when the slaves were killed by raiders in a quarrel of their own, and she gave birth to a boy, brown and clean-limbed, and named him Gharib, the Stranger, because of her strangerhood, and cut the cord, and wrapped him in her clothes. Hunters came into the forest, with hawks and hounds and gazelles, and found her with the child at her breast, and asked her whether she was a mortal or a Jinniyah, and she said that she was a mortal. Their chief, Mardas, who was Emir of the Banu Kahtan, took her to wife, and she bore him a son called Sahim al-Layl, Arrow of the Night. They grew up together like twins, and learned the sword, and the spear, and the bow; and when they were fifteen each of them could stand against a thousand horse.

What I give you of the next twenty nights I give by the people. Mardas's tribe was raided in his absence by the lord of the Banu Nabhan, who wanted Mardas's daughter Mahdiyah and was refused; and Gharib took a hundred horse and brought her back and the captives with her. He was thanked. And he fell in love with Mahdiyah, the way a man does who has just seen her taken, and could not eat or sleep; and Mardas, when it was told to him, thundered and said, "This is the reward of him who reareth the sons of adultery!" and took a hundred and fifty of his men into a valley to wait for the boy he had raised, and kill him on the road home. "He reared him," said the King. "Yes, lord." "And would kill him for wanting his daughter." "For wanting her without a dower." "It is the oldest quarrel there is," said Shah Zaman from the rug, "between the man who raised a boy and the boy." The King looked at him. "It is not the oldest," he said.

The ambush was itself ambushed, by Amalekites, who were after Gharib for the man he had killed; and they trussed up Mardas, and would have taken him away to be put to death, and Sahim, who had been wounded, went to Gharib to warn him, and Gharib went into the valley alone in the dark, and brought him out. Sumayya asked how he could. "He was his father," she said. "No," said my sister, "he was the man who had brought him up." "That is what I said." My sister smiled; it was the first time that month that she had smiled in the first glass. "He did not do it for that," she said. "He did it because the man was in a ditch." Mardas asked the youth to forgive him. He forgave him, and the old man said that the dower for his daughter should be the head of the Mountain-Ghul, who had held that country for a hundred years, and had eaten a good many of it. I leave out what the Ghul ate. In his mountain he was keeping a King's daughter, Fakhr Taj, the daughter of the King of the Persians; Gharib went up and fought him, and instead of killing him he spared him, and the Ghul, who had never been spared, became his man and went with him to the end of the tale; and he took the Princess home to her father, who said that he would marry them. That is a thread that I shall lose now and take up again. Mardas, who had not meant him to come back, packed up his tribe in the night and went to Cufa with his daughter, to give her to King Ajib.

I did not tell this part. My sister told it, in the first glass, on the 635th night, with her eyes on the ceiling and her hands folded on the arc of her dress. Ajib asked Mardas who the youth was; and Mardas said, a youth whose mother was in his tents, called Nusrah. Ajib said, "It is she." He sent for her. He asked her where the two slaves were that he sent with her, and she said, "They slew each other on my account." And Ajib drew his sword. "He killed her," said the King. "Yes, lord. She had no name for ten nights, and then she had that one." "Nusrah," said the King. "It means aid." "Yes, lord." "In front of Mardas." "Yes, lord." "And Mardas gave him the daughter." "He married the daughter to him, lord, and Ajib gave him thirty thousand dinars." The King did not move. He said, "Is there more of that?" "No, lord. The rest is war." "Then tell the war."

I told the war, in the second glass, and it was long; and I will give it you as I gave it to him, which was in the shape of what was the same. Gharib marched on Cufa to take the blood-wreak of his father and his mother and his betrothed, with the Ghul at his side and a great many Arabs and Persians; and Ajib met him with a great many more. There was a day, and a night, and a day; and Gharib was taken in his sleep and put in irons in Ajib's tent; and his brother Sahim put henbane in the lamps and carried Ajib out in a cloak, and Gharib had him stripped and whipped and set a guard over him, and in the morning went to the aid of his uncle and left no guard. Ajib's page crept in and carried him away on his back. "He left no guard," said the King. "Lord?" "Gharib. He had him, and he went to help his uncle, and left no guard." "He was in a hurry, lord." "Yes." He looked at the boy. "He did that on purpose," he said. I do not know what he meant; I put it on my second sheet, under what I do not know.

It was the 640th night when my father said that he had found the baker's name. He said it from his corner. He had been to the Coppersmiths' Row on four evenings, in the dress of a clerk, and bought bread of the man who was not the baker, and the fifth evening bought of the baker, who is called Hamid and is sixty, and has fed eleven houses on credit for six years; and when the Vizier asked him why, he said that bread is a thing that goes off. The King said, "Hamid." He said it twice. "Hamid," said Sumayya, "is the praised one." "Does he know that?" said the King. "No, lord." He did not say anything about sending anything; my father said that he had thought of it, and had not done it, because the baker would then know, and the thing would be a payment. "No," said the King. "Do not send." I wrote it in the column where I put what is not finished: a baker named Hamid, to whom nothing has been sent. On the 645th night my father said that the granaries held six years.

On the 650th night, in the middle of the first glass, my sister stopped. She was telling how Gharib and Sahim, asleep, were taken up by two Marids and carried to the King of the Jinn, who has four heads, one of a lion, one of an elephant, one of a wolf and one of a man, and she stopped between the second head and the third, and put both hands under her belly, and her face did what it had done on the 509th night, but longer. "This is not a fish," said the nurse. "No," said my sister. Then she turned her head to me, and said, in the voice that she had used to me when I was six, "Dunyazad. Go on," and the nurse and the two women who had been waiting in the next room since the 640th night took her under the arms and carried her behind the curtain, and the lamp went with them, and there was only the small one by the bed.

The King did not follow her. I want to say what he did, because I do not think that he knew it. He sat on the floor by the brick, with the boy, who was awake and astonished at the dark, and his back against the wall; and my father stood in his corner with his hands at his sides, and Shah Zaman, on his rug, sat up, and began to count something on his fingers, and when he came to the end of one hand he began again; and Sumayya came and sat against my knees. And from behind the curtain there were sounds. "Go on," the King said to me. I said that I did not know where. "Anywhere," he said. "Tell the beginning." So I told it. I told a woman alone in a forest among fruit trees and streams, with nobody to help her, and a child at her breast whom she called the Stranger. I told it through the first glass, and when it ran out the King took it and turned it himself, and I told it through the second. I told it as though I had been there. I told it three times. Sumayya, against my knees, was saying something under her breath; I listened, and it was the nine names in the white book, one after another, and then again from the beginning. The King did not move, except that when there was a noise behind the curtain, he put his hand on the boy's back and kept it there until the noise was over; and my father said the names of God very quietly, not the same ones twice, and at some hour sat down on the floor, which I have not seen him do in his life.

The window had gone from black to the colour of ash, and I had come, for the third time, to the place where the hunters find the woman in the forest with her child, when a voice said from behind the curtain, "A son." It was the nurse. I stopped. Nobody moved. Sumayya was weeping into my sleeve and said that she was not. "Is she," the King said, and could not finish it. "She is tired, lord," said the nurse. "She says that you may come." He gave me the boy. I have not held him for a long time; he is heavy now, and warm, and smelt of his father. The King went behind the curtain, and I heard nothing; and then, after a space of time that I did not count, I heard him speak, one word, and I could not hear what it was. When he came out he went to the Roll, which was lying on the table, where I had written, by the small lamp, as soon as the nurse spoke, in the column for what is not finished: a child, born, a son. He read it. He took up the pen and put the point of it in the ink, and I saw that his hand was not steady; and he put it down again, and put his thumb beside the word born, as he had done once before.

Night 650. Shahrazad and Dunyazad. Present. Open: the King of the Jinn, who has four heads, only begun; a baker named Hamid, to whom nothing has been sent; six years of grain, of seven; a child, born, a son; a boy who has said Ba, and walked; a favourite, sent out of the neighbourhood, whom nobody has pardoned; a woman who was not asked; a woodcutter, who was not asked; a book of names; a boon, not yet asked.

## Chapter 38 · Nights Six Hundred and Fifty-one to Six Hundred and Eighty: A Name in the Margin, and a Son Set Free

For seven nights I told both glasses, and the Roll says Dunyazad alone, in my own hand, and I did not scratch it out. The nurse had ruled it, and nobody had to be reminded of what she meant, and my sister lay with her face to the wall and the child at her side and listened to me tell the King of the Jinn. He has four heads, those of a lion, an elephant, a panther and a lynx, and he sat on his throne like a mountain when the two Marids put Gharib and his brother down before him. "Ye have slain my son," he said. I gave each of the four heads its own voice, and the older boy, on the floor by the brick, laughed at the elephant. They had been in the Valley of Springs and had seen a bird and shot at it with wooden bolts, and it had been his son. Gharib said by the Great God that he had not known. I will not give you the fire, in which the King of the Jinn kept a goddess, nor how it went out. When it did, he said that the Truth had been displayed to him, and kissed them both, and gave them a banquet, and for a month he and Gharib fought together against a cousin of his called Barkan, who was a rebel; and after that Gharib could not go home.

There was a girl in the palace of the rebels, Star o' Morn, the daughter of a King called the Blue King, whose mother, a King's daughter of China, he had carried off and ravished, and who died when the child was forty days old. She hated her father and was glad of his death. Gharib looked at her and loved her with exceeding love, "forgetting," said the tale, "Fakhr Taj the Princess, and even Mahdiyah." He married her that night. "He forgot them," said the King, who had the boy on his knee, with the hair standing up at the back of his head. "For a night, lord," I said. "That is the sentence that was written." "Another who forgets quickly," said the King. "It is a gift." But it was not the way that he had said it of Sindbad, and Shah Zaman, who had heard it both times, looked at the wall. The nurse said that he was a man. "He is a King," said Shah Zaman. "It is not the same." "No," said the King.

On the seventh morning, after the 656th night, my father and Shah Zaman and the nurse and Sumayya and I stood round the bed, and my sister sat up against the cushions, in a clean shift, with her hair down, and the child in her arm. He was dark, and small, and had a great deal of black hair, and his eyes were closed against the light, and he looked, my sister said, like a man who had been spoken to rudely. The King came in from the court with the older boy on his shoulder. He did not say anything. He asked me for the Roll, and I gave it to him, and he turned back the first leaf and at the foot of the margin of the margin, after the eight, he wrote a ninth word, in the square hand: Yusuf. "Joseph," said the nurse. "The wolf," said Shah Zaman. "The grain," said my father, and then, as if surprised at himself, "the seven years." "The pit," said Sumayya; and the King looked at her. "Which?" said the nurse. The King said nothing. I do not know which he meant. I think he did not choose. From the bed my sister said, "All of them," and he said, "Yes." Sumayya asked me afterwards how it was written; I wrote it on her sheet, and she copied it four times, and the fourth was straight.

The older boy, who had been put down, walked to the bed holding his hands out in front of him like a man crossing a stream, and stood and looked at the other. He put one finger out and touched the black hair. "Ba," he said; and then, so clearly that nobody breathed, "Ba," and put his whole hand on the head, flat, and left it there. My sister's eyes filled. "No," said the King, when someone moved. "Leave it." We left it. When the child woke and made the sound that they make, the older boy took his hand off at once, with his mouth open, as one who has done something and is not sure what, and looked at his father. "Again," said the King; and the boy put the hand back.

On the eighth night my sister told the first glass, sitting up, as she had said that she would, and I the second; and I will give the rest of Gharib to you the way that it came, in a hurry, because it was a hurry in the telling. The King of the Jinn would have given him his winged horse, but it would have died on the earth of men, so he gave him a horse of the sea, which was not to be matched in Al-Irak; and he wept at the parting, and said, "If aught befall thee wherein thou art powerless, send for me." And a thousand Marids carried Gharib and Star o' Morn and his share of the spoils to his own country, fifty years' journey in two days and a night; and they came down by his city of Oman and found it beleaguered by a host as numerous as the surging sea. I leave out the battles. They are in the Roll as place-names: Oman, Cashmere, Karaj, Isbanir. On the 660th night my father said, after the tale, "Seven years, lord. In the north, seven, and in the city, seven and some months." "Good," said the King. "Now do not touch it." My father said that he had not meant to. "That is what I mean," said the King. I wrote it down. It is one of the few things in the Roll that is finished.

Gharib heard at Cashmere from a Persian officer that Fakhr Taj, the Princess of the Persians, whom he had freed from the Ghul and sent home to her father, and who was to have been his wife, had been drowned in the river by her father's order; and the world waxed wan before his eyes. He swore by Abraham the Friend that he would go to the dog and have his life for hers. Two men were brought, who had been told to drown her, and said that they had not been able to; that they had let her go and told her to flee, and had left her on the bank of the Jayhun; and Gharib had his astrologers strike a board of geomancy, and they could not find her. A Marid, an enemy, caught him as he slept and took him to the Jayhun and meant to throw him in it, but, finding it hard, made him a raft and pushed it out into the stream, which carried it a long way. "That is another island," said Sumayya, who counts. "The sixth," said the nurse. "The seventh," said Shah Zaman, "if you count Sindbad's twice." They argued about it in the second glass. It was a restful argument.

A ship took him, and its sailors knew who he was, and bound him, and carried him to a city called Karaj, where an Amalekite had set up in each gate an idol of carnelian with a Marid inside it, to whom they sacrificed strangers; and Gharib got out of it, I will not say how. A Marid took him up and flew with him, and he got free of that one also, in the air, and came down on a great island in the middle of the sea, full of all the fruit that lips and tongue could ask, with fish that he caught; and there he lived alone, for I do not know how long, my sister did not say. She said that it was a pleasant place. "He was not in a hurry," said the King. "No, lord. He had stopped." "Why?" "There was nothing there that he could do, lord, until the ship came." "I have been on that island," said Shah Zaman. "It was called Samarkand."

Fakhr Taj had not drowned. The two men, when they let her go, told her to run; and she went on, from country to country and valley to valley, saying, "Where is thine eye, O Gharib, that thou mayst see my case?" until she came to a wady with a castle in the middle of it, and a hundred damsels in the castle, who took her for one of the Jinn and asked her who she was. She told them. They wept, and said, "Be of good cheer; here shalt thou have meat and drink and raiment." Five days later she bore a boy, as he were the moon, and called him Murad Shah. The castle belonged to a King of the Jinn named Salsal, who came once in the month on a white elephant, and was told her story, and said that when her son was a man he would take her father's head. The boy was brought up among the Jinn's children, hunting lions, until his heart was harder than the rock. When he was fifteen he said, "O my mamma, who is my papa?" and she told him; and he said, "By the claim thou hast on me for rearing me, I will bring thy father's head into thy presence."

He took two hundred Marids and rode out. He took Shiraz, and Balkh, and Samarcand of the Persians; he divided the booty among his soldiers, who loved him; and when he had an army of a hundred thousand horse he sat down before Isbanir al-Madain, which was Gharib's city, and sent for his mother. The city did not fight for three days. On the third, a Marid named Zalzal, who owed Gharib his life, came down on the roof of the palace at midnight with forty thousand Marids and Gharib on his arm, and Gharib cried out for Star o' Morn and Mahdiyah, and they ran to him and wept. He sat on his throne, and the officers told him that an army had sat down before the walls three days before, with Jinn in it, under a commander called Murad Shah; and that it had not yet fought.

The next morning Murad Shah rode out between the two armies in his armour and called out that none should come to him but their King; that if the King overthrew him, he should be lord of both armies, and if he overthrew the King, he would kill him as he had killed others. Gharib heard it and said, "Avaunt, O dog of the Arabs!" and went out. They broke their lances on each other, and then their swords; and when the horses fell down under them they dismounted and gripped each other. The boy lifted his opponent in the air to dash him down; and Gharib caught him by the ears, and pulled with all his might, until it seemed to the boy that the heavens were falling on the earth; and he cried, with his heart in his mouth, "I yield myself to thy mercy, O Knight of the Age!" The King of the frame had stood up. I had not seen it. He was on his feet by the brick, with his hand on the wall, and he sat down again when my sister, who was telling it, put out her own hand, without looking, as one puts out a hand to a child in the dark.

Gharib bound him, and sat on his throne, and had him brought, shuffling in his fetters, and hanging his head, and said, "Who art thou, that thou shouldst ride out against kings?" And the boy said, "Reproach me not, for I have an excuse. I came out to avenge my mother and my father on Sabur, King of the Persians; for he would have killed them; but my mother escaped, and I do not know whether he killed my father or not." "By God, thou art excusable," said Gharib. "But who were thy father and mother?" And the boy said, "My sire was Gharib, King of Al-Irak, and my mother Fakhr Taj, daughter of Sabur." Gharib gave a great cry and fell down in a swoon. They sprinkled rose-water on him. When he came to himself he said, "Art thou indeed Gharib's son by Fakhr Taj?" "Yes," said the boy. "Thou art a champion," said Gharib, "the son of a champion. Loose my child!" "Loose my child," said the King, in a voice that I did not know. "Yes, lord," said my sister. She had her hand on the baby, who was awake, and looking up at the lamp.

I leave out what was done to Sabur. My sister said it in a sentence, and I did not look at the King, and I have not written the sentence. She said that Gharib crowned his son with the crown of the Chosroes and made him King of the Persians and Turks and Medes, and set his uncle on the throne of Al-Irak, and reigned in justice, and all the peoples submitted to him; and that he and his wives and his companions lived in every comfort, until there came to them the Destroyer of delights and Sunderer of societies. "That is every thing that has come down to us," said my sister, "of the history of Gharib and Ajib." And she said that there was a man named Abdullah bin Ma'amar al-Kaysi, who had gone on pilgrimage one year, and told a tale of a woman called Rayya and her lover Otbah.

Night 680. Shahrazad and Dunyazad. Present. Open: a pilgrim who went one year to the Holy House, and a woman called Rayya, only begun; a son named Yusuf, thirty days old, whose name is in the margin; a boy who has put his hand on a head and been told Again; seven years of grain, of which there are seven, which are not to be touched; a baker named Hamid, to whom nothing has been sent; a favourite, sent out of the neighbourhood, whom nobody has pardoned; a woman who was not asked; a woodcutter, who was not asked; a book of names; a boon, not yet asked.

## Chapter 39 · Nights Six Hundred and Eighty-one to Six Hundred and Ninety-eight: He Who Mends the Stumbles of the Noble, and a Woman Who Was Asked

A man named Abdullah bin Ma'amar went one year on the pilgrimage, and when he had done it he turned back to visit the Prophet's tomb, and one night, as he sat in the garden between the tomb and the pulpit, he heard a low moaning in a soft voice, which said: "O night, thou art longsome for love-sick sprite, complaining of love and its ecstasy." He got up and went towards it and found a youth of the utmost beauty, with the down not yet on his cheek and tears worn into it like two trenches. The youth said that his name was Otbah, that he had gone that morning to a mosque to pray, and that a company of women had come, like moons, round a girl of passing loveliness, who had stopped in front of him and said, "O Otbah, what sayest thou of union with one who seeketh union with thee?" and gone. He had not seen her since. He was distracted, and did nothing but move from place to place.

So Abdullah went with him, and the Ansaris with them, a whole party, and they found out that the girl was Rayya, daughter of a man of the Banu Sulaym, and rode to ask for her. Her father went in in a rage. "They are noble chiefs," she said, "and the Prophet intercedes for them with God. For which of them do they ask me?" and when she heard, said that she had heard of Otbah that he performs what he promises, and told her father to make the dowry so heavy that they would go. He asked for a thousand bracelets of red gold and five thousand dirhams and a hundred pieces of Yemeni stuff and five bladders of ambergris. Abdullah said, "Thou shalt have that much." They sent to Medina for it, and abode forty days feasting, and then the father said, "Take your bride." Thirty camel-loads of her things, and a litter; and a day's journey from Medina some horsemen fell on them, and Otbah drove at them and was killed. "And the damsel," said my sister, "hearing it, cast herself from the camel and threw herself on him, and cried out grievously; and she sobbed a single sob and gave up the ghost." "Forty days," said Sumayya. "They had forty days of the feast." "They had no night," said the nurse. "No," said my sister. They dug one grave for them. Seven years later Abdullah came back, and over the grave there was a tall tree, and on it fillets of red and green and yellow stuffs; and the people called it the tree of the Bride and the Bridegroom. The King said nothing about that one at all.

Hind, the daughter of Al-Nu'man, was the fairest woman of her day, and Al-Hajjaj married her, and one day went in and found her looking at her face in a mirror and saying that she was a thoroughbred filly that a mule had covered; and I give her to you by that line, which is as much as my sister gave. Then, on the 683rd night, my sister told of a man called Khuzaymah, of the Banu Asad, who had been famous for bounty, and who had grown poor, and whose brethren, on whom he had lavished favour, had helped him a while and got tired of it. He told his wife, who was the daughter of his uncle, that he was going to shut his door until he died. And he did. And in Mesopotamia a Governor named Ikrimah, who was called Al-Fayyaz, the Overflowing, heard his name one day in the audience-chamber and asked how he did; and was told that he had shut his door. "This comes of his generosity," said Ikrimah. "And has Khuzaymah bin Bishr found no comforter and no requiter?" That night he took four thousand dinars in a purse and a single page and rode to Khuzaymah's house, and sent the page away, and knocked.

Khuzaymah came to the door, and Ikrimah gave him the purse and said, "Better thy case herewith." He felt it heavy and held on to the bridle. "Who art thou? My soul be thy ransom." "I come not to thee at a time like this desiring that thou shouldst know me." "I will not let thee go till I know thy name." "I am hight Jabir Atharat al-Kiram," said Ikrimah, which is, he who mends the stumbles of the noble; and he rode away. Khuzaymah spent the night handling the coins in the dark, for there was no oil in the lamp, and knew by the roughness that they were gold, and could not believe it. In the morning he paid his creditors and went to the Caliph, and told him the story; and the Caliph, who wished very much to know the man, made Khuzaymah Governor of Mesopotamia in Ikrimah's place. When he came to the city Ikrimah came out to meet him. And Khuzaymah, taking up the books, found Ikrimah short of money, as all the governors are; and said that it must be paid; and Ikrimah said that he had not got it; and Khuzaymah put him in irons. He kept him a month. "He did not know," said the King. "He did not know, lord." "He put in irons the man who had come in the dark to his door." "He did not know it was he." "No," said the King; and he said it a second time, to himself.

Ikrimah's wife heard how he was, and sent her freedwoman to Khuzaymah's gate, to say, "Hath Jabir Atharat al-Kiram deserved of thee no better reward than a strait prison and hard irons?" Khuzaymah cried out, "Alas the baseness of it, was it he?" and went to the prison with the honourable men of the city, and found Ikrimah wasted and hanging his head. He knelt, and kissed his face. "The generosity of thy dealing," he said, "and the vileness of my requital." And he had the irons struck off him and put on his own feet; and Ikrimah said, "What art thou about? I conjure thee by God." They went out. Khuzaymah took him to his own house and to the bath, and washed him himself, and gave him a robe, and money, and made his excuses to his wife; and they went together to the Caliph at Ramlah, and Khuzaymah said that he had found Jabir Atharat al-Kiram, and the Caliph made Ikrimah Governor of Armenia and Azerbaijan and Mesopotamia, and ten thousand dinars more than he had asked, and said that Khuzaymah's case was in his hands. Ikrimah said, "I restore him to his office." My father had been very still in his corner. "Vizier," said the King. "Lord." "The baker." "Lord, I have not sent him anything." "That is not what I meant. See that no one puts him in irons." "Lord?" "The Governors," said the King. "They do it by mistake." My father said that he would see to it; and wrote on his palm, under the houses, with his finger; one word, short, which I think was irons.

I give the next few by their edges. Yunus the Scribe had a girl, and gave her to the Caliph Walid, and then regretted it; and the girl, when she was brought in, sang verses of her own to the Caliph so elegantly that he asked her if they were her own, and she said, "They are my very own." Harun al-Rashid asked Al-Asma'i for the best thing he had heard, and he said that he had heard much and been pleased by three pairs of couplets sung by three girls of Bassorah. Ibrahim of Mosul asked leave of the Caliph for a Saturday to be private, and an old man in white came in, with a silver-handled staff and a scent, and said that he was not hungry and asked for a pint of wine and said, "Wilt thou sing us somewhat?" and then, "Well done, O Abu Ishak"; and Ibrahim did not like it that a stranger had his name. The old man said that he would sing; and he took the lute, and the strings spoke Arabic, and the doors and walls of the house sang with him, and Ibrahim could not move. "Sing it after me," said the old man. "Repeat it to me," said Ibrahim. "There is no need of repetition. Thou hast it by heart." And he vanished; and a voice from a corner of the house said, "'Tis I, Abu Murrah, who have been thy cup-companion this day." That was the Devil. He had come only to sing. Ibrahim sang it to Harun, who drank to it, though he was not a drinker.

"He sang it once," said the King, "and the man had it." "Yes, lord." "And did not forget." "He never did, lord. He had it by heart till he died." "That is a thing the Devil does well," the King said; and Shah Zaman said, in the voice that he uses when he is going to be rude, "And a King." The King turned his head. "What?" "He does not forget either." The King looked at him for the length of a breath. "No," he said. "I do not." On the 690th night, which was the fortieth day, my sister got up. She walked to the window with the older boy hanging on her skirt, and stood there, and the King gave her the younger, and she held him up to the grey light, and nobody said anything about the forty days, and the nurse, who had counted them, said that they were done.

Then there was Jamil the poet, who told Harun on a sleepless night how a young man had come to him by night, to ask him to help his cousin and himself to flee from a house that would have parted them, and he did; and there were the lovers of Bassorah, and of Medina, and Ishak of Mosul with his mistress and another Devil; and I tell you only that on the 692nd night my sister told of a wild Arab who came on foot at noon to the palace of Mu'awiyah in Damascus, limping, in the sun. The Caliph saw him from his window and said, "Hath God created any miserabler than he who needs must hie abroad at such an hour?" and told the page, "If he seeks me, forbid him not." The Arab said that he came complaining against Marwan, the Caliph's deputy at Medina. He had had a wife called Su'ad whom he loved with a love that none came near; a bad year had killed his camels, and her father, finding him poor, had taken her away. He went to Marwan, who sent for her, and the moment that he saw her he fell in love with her, and became the man's rival, and had him tortured until he divorced her; and kept him in prison until the days of her purification were over, and married her. "He required of him," said my sister, "to divorce her. He said, I will not put her away. And they tortured him." "They tortured him," said the King. "Until he did it. And she was asked nothing." "No, lord."

Mu'awiyah wrote to Marwan a letter which my sister gave in full, and which was not kind: it said that the Wali who governs people should keep his eyes from their lusts and his flesh from its delights. Marwan obeyed, and wrote back, praising the woman; and the Caliph, who said that he was exceeding in his praise of her, sent for her, and saw such beauty as he had never seen, and talked with her, and found her fluent. And he sent for the Arab, and said to him, "An thou wilt give her up to me, I will give thee three slave-girls, high-bosomed maids like moons, with each a thousand dinars, and an annual sum from the Treasury." The Arab groaned one groan and swooned, so that the Caliph thought him dead; and when he came to himself, he said: "With heavy heart and in sore need I appealed to thee from the injustice of Marwan; but to whom shall I appeal from thine?" "Make me not one of the betrayed," he said, in verse, "who from the fiery sands to fire must sue for help." And the Caliph said, "Thou confessest to having divorced her, and Marwan owned the like. So we will give her free choice."

"He asked her," said Sumayya. It was the first thing that she had said in the room in a long time that was not a question. "He asked her," said my sister, "and he said, Which dost thou choose, O Su'ad: the Commander of the Faithful, with his honour and glory and dominion and palaces; or Marwan with his violence and tyranny; or this Arab, with his hunger and poverty?" And she made two couplets: "This one, whom hunger plagues and rags unfold, is dearer than tribe and kith and kin I hold; than crowned head, or deputy Marwan, or all who boast of silver coins and gold." And she said, "By Allah, I will not forsake him for the shifts of Fortune. There is old companionship between us, and it is just that I bear with him in his adversity as I shared with him in his prosperity." The Caliph ordered her ten thousand dirhams, and delivered her to the Arab, and he took his wife and went his way. "After he had offered to buy her," said the King. "Yes, lord." "He asked her after." "Yes." "That is better," said Sumayya, "than not asking." "Yes," said the King; and he did not say anything else, and he sat with his chin on his hand for some time looking at the Roll.

The last of them, on the 698th night, was Al-Malik al-Nasir, the Conquering King, and his Wazir. The Wazir, Abu Amir, was given a boy, a Christian, of great beauty, and the King saw him and said, "Whence cometh this boy?" "From God," said the Wazir, and the King said, "Wilt thou terrify us with stars and make us prisoner with moons?" And the Wazir, who knew what he meant, sent the boy to him as a present, with two couplets. Then he was given a slave-girl of the loveliest in the world, and feared that the King would hear of it and the same would happen, and sent her to him also, with a costlier gift. An enemy told the King that the Wazir still gnashed his teeth for the boy, and the King wrote him a letter in the boy's name, asking him to demand him back; and the Wazir wrote on the back of it, "Shall man, experience-lectured, ever care, fool-like, to thrust his head in lion's lair?" "A lion again," said the King. The nurse said that she was getting tired of the lion. "He is a patient animal," said my sister; and the King laughed, once, aloud, and put his hand over his mouth, and the boy on his knee looked up at him.

Then she said that there was a man called Ahmad al-Danaf, Calamity Ahmad, who came from Cairo as a fugitive and became Captain of the Watch of the right hand in Baghdad, and another called Hasan Shuman, of the left; and that in the city there was an old woman called Dalilah the Wily, who had a daughter named Zaynab the Coney-catcher, and that Dalilah said she would play off higher-class rogueries in Baghdad than ever either of them had. "In the city," said the King, to nobody. "In the streets." He was quiet for some time. "Vizier," he said. "Lord." "I want to see the lane." My father did not ask which. "I want to see the lane," the King said again, "the one the brick came from." "Lord," said my father, "when?" "Not yet," said the King. "Soon." It was the old word, and not the old voice.

Night 698. Shahrazad and Dunyazad. Present. Open: a woman called Dalilah the Wily, and her daughter, only begun; a King who wishes to see a lane, soon; a baker named Hamid, whom nobody is to put in irons; a son named Yusuf, forty-eight days old, who has been held up to the window; a boy who puts his hand on his brother's head; a woman who was asked, after; a woman who was not asked; a woodcutter, who was not asked; a book of names; a boon, not yet asked.

## Chapter 40 · Nights Six Hundred and Ninety-nine to Seven Hundred and Eighteen: The Wily Old Woman, and a Shutter in the Tanners' Lane

My sister began it on the 699th night, and I give you the beginning as she gave it, because she liked it. There were in Baghdad, in the time of Harun al-Rashid, two rogues, Ahmad al-Danaf, whom they called Calamity, and Hasan Shuman, whom they called the Pestilence, and the Caliph, who could not beat them, made them Captains of the Watch, one of the right hand and one of the left, with a thousand dinars a month apiece and forty men each. An old woman named Dalilah the Wily, whose dead husband had held the same post, heard the crier, and told her daughter Zaynab, who is called the Coney-catcher, that she would play higher rogueries than either of them. She put on white wool, hung a rosary the size of a load of firewood from her shoulder, carried a pitcher with three dinars in its mouth, and stopped under the window of the wife of the Chief of the Ushers. That lady had quarrelled with her husband that morning because he had seen the Emirs with their sons. He had called her barren. She had called him a mule. Each was sorry by noon. The old woman whirled her pitcher in the porter's sight, the dinars fell out, and the porter, who was owed three months' wages by his master, took it for a miracle. Then she told the wife of a saint she knew, the Father of Burdens, who cures the barren, and led her out of the house for the first time since her wedding. "Not once?" said Sumayya. "Not once," said my sister.

I will not give you the whole of that day, which has seven people in it and one pitcher. It has a young merchant who was promised a bride, and the bride, who was promised a saint, and a dyer who lent his keys to a woman whose house was being propped up; and it ends with the merchant in his shirt in one room and the wife in her shift in another, each waiting for the old woman's daughter or the old woman's son, and the old woman three streets away with their clothes. One thing was left, and she did it: she told a donkey-boy that the dyer was bankrupt, borrowed his donkey to carry off the customers' goods, and told him to break the vats so that the Kazi's men should find nothing. When the dyer came back with a meat-pie, there was the donkey-boy with a saw in the ruins of the shop, saying how glad he was that his master was safe. The dyer cried, "Alas for my goods and the people's goods!" and the donkey-boy cried, "Alas for my ass!" and they took each other by the throat and wept both alases at once. The King laughed aloud, and the boy on his knee looked up at him. For the rest of that week Shah Zaman said "Alas for my ass" when he came in at the door, as other men say peace be upon you.

On the 703rd night she took a child's clothes. She did it with a brass counter and a nursemaid who was a simpleton, in a street laid with carpets for a betrothal: she took the Provost of the Merchants' little son out of the maid's arms, stripped him, and left him in pledge with a goldsmith for a thousand dinars of jewels. The book gives the goldsmith a faith, as it gives one to nearly everyone who is made a fool of, and I leave it out here and later; he was a goldsmith, his name was Azariah, and he was robbed. The Provost found his son sitting bare in the shop and was so glad that he let the clothes stand for the ransom. The five she had robbed went looking. She gave a barber a dinar and a story, that the donkey-boy had lost his wits and cried "My ass" sitting and standing, and the barber took two of his teeth and burned his temples to cure him; I leave out the how, because my sister told it with her eyes on the baby. At last the five caught her and brought her to the Wali's house, where they all waited under his window and slept; and she walked into his wife's room and sold the five of them to the lady, as Mamelukes, for a thousand dinars. "Free men may not be sold," said the King, as the five said to the Wali. "It is a very old rule," said Shah Zaman. "Yes," said the King. "It is."

They tied her to a post on the bank of the Tigris and set ten men over her, and the ten slept. I will not say how she was tied; the book does. Now a man from the desert, who had heard a neighbour say that he broke his fast in Baghdad on honey-fritters, and had never seen the city or a fritter, was riding in, saying, "On the honour of an Arab, I will eat honey-fritters and nothing else." He found her at the post. She told him she was bound for spitting on a cook's fritters, and that the Governor had ordered ten pounds of them to be eaten at her post and her stomach could not bear sweets. He said he would eat them for her. She said nobody might, unless he were bound in her place. So he unbound her, and she took his clothes and his horse; and in the morning the Wali came and found a man in his shirt asking whether they had brought the honey-fritters. "Did he eat any?" said the King. "No, lord." "None at all?" "Nobody brought them." The King turned his head. "Vizier." "Lord?" "Fritters." My father wrote a word on his palm. They came the next night under a cloth, hot, and the cook had been told nothing; the boy got honey up to his ears, Shah Zaman ate seven, and the nurse said she did not know where the honey had come from, and ate two.

The Wali took them all to the Caliph, and the Caliph said, "I take upon myself all that you have lost," and gave Dalilah to Calamity Ahmad to bring in. Zaynab, who had promised her mother the clothes of all one-and-forty of his men, took a saloon with two doors, set out trays of meat and wine, stood in the door with her face unveiled, and said she was a vintner's daughter from Mosul who wanted the Captain's protection. Every man who came in to be kind to her was put to sleep on the carpet, Ahmad last, and that evening they sat in their barrack in their shirts, waiting for dark. Hasan Shuman told Ahmad to shake his collar before the Caliph and say he did not know her. Ahmad shook it, and Hasan was charged with her instead. He went to the Caliph and asked for the kerchief of pardon, saying she had done it for no greed, but to show her cleverness and her daughter's, so that the stipends of the dead husband and the dead father should be continued to them; and the Caliph gave it. "Somebody asked for her," said the King. "Hasan, lord." "He put his own neck in it." "Yes." Sumayya was looking at the lamp. I knew which line of the Open she was reading.

The Caliph said to her, "Ask a boon of me, O Dalilah," and I stopped writing. She asked for her husband's post for herself and her father's for her daughter, and then to be portress of the Khan the Caliph had built for merchants, with its forty slaves and its forty dogs, and a pavilion over the gate for her pigeons; and he wrote her the patent. "She had the price ready," said the nurse. The King did not look at the nurse. He looked at me. "You have not," he said. "At the end, lord," I said. "I shall count," he said. Then, at the end of the 708th night, when the glass had run, he said to my father in the voice he uses for ordering a horse, "Tomorrow. Before the city is up." "Lord, the guard." "Ten, a hundred paces behind, in porters' coats. My brother will arrange it." "I will," said Shah Zaman, "and I am coming." The King turned to me. "And the Keeper of the Roll." "Lord?" "You have written the Open for two years and not seen a street."

We went out by the gardeners' gate in brown coats, my father in front with nothing in his sleeves, the King behind him, Shah Zaman at the King's elbow with the face of a man carrying a rug, and I last, in the nurse's old brown veil, which smelt of cats. I had not been in a street since the first night. It was longer than I remembered, and louder: the bakers' boys, the first water-seller, a dog asleep in the middle of the way with everybody going round it. Nobody looked at us twice. The Tanners' Lane is at the bottom of the town where the river bends, because the smell has to go somewhere; we smelt it two streets off, lime and wet bark and under them the sweet sour smell of a skin thinking about going off. It is not a long lane. On the left side, four places that were still standing, with nobody in them: two houses with the roofs fallen in at the middle and the shutters nailed, and two that were only a door-frame with the morning showing through. On the right, houses with washing and bark in the doorways, and a boy up to his knees in a pit, who looked at us and went on stamping.

My father did not need telling which was which. He stopped before the first, and said, with his eyes on the nailed shutter, a name, a trade, a daughter, and the daughter's age, not loudly, the way he reads the Roll. The King stood. My father went to the next and did the same, and to the next. He had not written them on his palm; I saw that he had them all by heart. He said the fourth one twice, as if the King had asked for it a second time, which the King had not. At the first of the door-frames the King walked in. It opens on a courtyard with a fig tree grown up through the floor of what was a room, and one wall still a wall. He stood among the leaves with his hands at his sides, as he stands at the window when he has asked for a count and is waiting for it. Then he laid his palm flat on the wall, as the boy lays his on the baby's head, to see that it is there. He took it away. Nobody spoke, not even Shah Zaman. When we came out a shutter across the lane was open, and a woman was in it with her arms on the sill; she looked at the tall man in the brown coat for as long as it takes to count ten, and then she closed the shutter. She did not slam it. She closed it all the way, and I heard the bar go down. "Yes," said the King, to the shutter, and walked on.

At the bottom of the lane a man with forearms the colour of strong tea was lifting a skin out of a vat with a hooked pole. The King asked him what it was. "Goat." "How long does it take?" "To do it right? Fourteen months. A skin will go off in three days if you let it, sir. That's what the lime's for. Then the bark. Bark's the keeping." "And then?" "Thirty years, more if the owner's decent." The King watched the skin go back into the pit. "I have a boy who has begun to walk," he said. "How old?" "Fourteen months." "Then he wants kid," said the tanner, "soft, and not too stiff in the sole. They like to feel the floor." He cut a strip from a pile and held it to the light, and said to bring the foot on Thursday. "I cannot bring it," said the King. "I will send it." "Draw it on a bit of paper, then. A boy won't stand." The King paid him in silver, and the man bit one coin, and was not ashamed of his own habit. At the palace gate Shah Zaman, who had not said a word since the fig tree, said, "I am not going to ask," and the King said, "Thank you." That night he said to me, "Put it in the Open." "What shall I call it?" "A shutter." I wrote it. On the second sheet I wrote the rest.

On the 709th night my sister turned to Cairo, and to Mercury Ali, called so because he went through every net like quicksilver. His heart was heavy one day and he drank until he lost his senses, and on the Red Road he asked a water-carrier for a drink, shook the cup and poured it on the ground, three times, and drank the fourth. The water-carrier, who was poor, said that little folk are one thing and great folk another; and Ali drew a dagger to ask what he meant. The man said he had known a braver and more generous, Calamity Ahmad of Baghdad, to whom he had come in debt and flight, and who had given him five dinars, a mule, and at last a letter for Ali of Cairo. "And I have not delivered it," said the water-carrier, "because I do not know where he lives." "He carried it about," said Shah Zaman, "not knowing to whom." "And it came to the man," said the King. "In the road, lord." Ali said, "I am he," and set out. He killed a lion and put a robber tribe to flight on the way, which I give you in one sentence, since the book gives a page and my sister gave a breath. In Baghdad a boy took a dinar to show him Calamity Ahmad's door, and kicked a pebble at it so that he would know it. Then Zaynab met him in the street in her best, and led him to a house with a lock that she opened with her veil and the name of the mother of Moses, and dropped a ring in the well and asked him to go down for it; and she was out of the door with all his clothes while he was still falling. The master called four doctors of the law to read over the well, and Ali hung under the bucket until it was near the top, and sprang out among them, and they beat one another crying Ifrit. "And they believed that?" said Sumayya. "The Emir made him tell the truth," said my sister, "and then gave him an old gown."

Hasan Shuman told him how to have it back, and I leave out the part where the book has him paint his skin to look like the Khan's cook and makes a joke of the cook's colour; he took the cook's coat and basket, and the cook slept. At the Khan, Dalilah knew him at the gate and cried that he was the captain of thieves; the forty slaves said he was their cousin Sa'adu'llah, and she said, "In with him, and if he knows the kitchen and the larder he is your cousin; if not, kill him." The cook had a cat that sprang on his shoulders whenever he came in. It sprang on Ali; he threw it off; it ran before him to the kitchen door and stopped, and then to the larder, and stopped; and he took the key with feathers on it and the key with grease on it. "Cats know," said the nurse. "Mine would have." He put sleep in every dish, went up and took the one-and-forty suits and the forty pigeons, and left a paper on Dalilah's neck: None did this save Ali the Egyptian. In the book he kills the dogs as well. "Do they die?" said the nurse. "In the book," said my sister. "Then they sleep," said the nurse, and I wrote it so on the second sheet. Dalilah woke to a sponge held to her nose and told her daughter that he had had it in his power to do worse, and had refrained out of courtesy. "He could have," said the King. "Yes, lord." "And left a paper." Hasan Shuman had the pigeons cooked among the men, and when Dalilah came to ask for hers, she tasted one and said, "This is none of the carrier-pigeons' flesh, for I fed them on grains of musk." The King laughed until he had to put the boy down.

The price was her uncle. Zurayk the fishmonger, who had been the greatest rogue in Iraq and had repented, hung a purse of two thousand dinars at his shop door with bells tied to it, and cried that it was the property of any sharper who could take it by his skill, and when a hand touched it he threw a cake of lead. Ali made seven attempts in seven coats. I give you the snake-charmer, who threw his snakes on the floor of the shop, and I leave out the one where he came as a woman, because my sister did not wish to tell it so soon after, and told it fast. There was a child in the last part, who was taken for an hour and given back. In the end Zurayk gave him the purse as a gift for his niece's sake, and said he had no command over Zaynab but affection, which her mother had said in the same words. "Then she asked herself," said Sumayya, "since nobody could." "She set her own price," said my sister. It was a dress: the dress of Kamar, the goldsmith's daughter, brought from an enchanted treasure, which her father hung every morning in a golden dish in the window of a castle, crying, "Where are the sharpers of Cairo?"

The castle could be seen only while the goldsmith was in it. He made Ali an ass, a bear and a dog, one after the other, and the ass part has a thing in it that I leave out. Three women took Ali's side for terms of their own: the goldsmith's daughter, who fell in love with him, and a broker's daughter and her maid, who had read the goldsmith's books. What was done to the goldsmith in the end, and why, the book is proud of, and I am not; I give you that he was a goldsmith, and that Ali came out with the dress. A sweetmeat-seller met him in the road and gave him a sweet with sleep in it, and took the dress, and was himself given a sweet by a Kazi, who was Hasan Shuman; and the sweetmeat-seller was Ahmad al-Lakit, Dalilah's grandson, the boy who had kicked the pebble at the door. "Go back to your grandmother," said Ali, "and tell her and Zurayk to meet me tomorrow at the Caliph's Divan, to receive Zaynab's dowry." Next morning he went up with Calamity Ahmad and the Forty and kissed the ground before the Caliph, and my sister saw the dawn and stopped.

The shoes had come two nights before, on the 716th, while she was in the goldsmith's castle; I put them here because it is where they belong. A boy from the lane brought them in brown paper, with a bill for four dirhams. I had drawn round the boy's foot on a leaf of the Samarkand paper on the Thursday, while he tried to eat the pen. They were kid, soft, with a cord that the nurse tightened, and they squeaked. The boy stood still. He lifted one foot and put it down, listening, and looked at his father, and walked four steps, and the shoe said so; and he stopped, and went back, and did it again. "Again," said the King. "Gain," said the boy. The King did not say it a third time, which for him is the loudest thing there is.

Night 718. Shahrazad and Dunyazad. Present. Open: a dress, carried to a Divan, and a Cairene who is to be paid for it; a woman who set her own price; a shutter, shut and barred, in the Tanners' Lane; a baker named Hamid, whom nobody is to put in irons; a son named Yusuf, sixty-eight days old; a boy in shoes that squeak; a woman who was asked, after; a woman who was not asked; a woodcutter, who was not asked; a book of names; a boon, not yet asked.

## Chapter 41 · Nights Seven Hundred and Nineteen to Seven Hundred and Thirty-eight: The Hawk Is the Wazir's, and a Eunuch Who Told the Truth

Mercury Ali ended on the 719th night, and he ended well. He went up to the Caliph with the dress, and the Caliph said "Ask a boon of me," and Ali asked to stand on the Caliph's carpet and eat at his table. He was given a hall with four daises and forty sleeping-closets for the lads he sent for from Cairo, and four marriage contracts, which I leave there; the dowry of Zaynab was the dress, and Dalilah took it from the Caliph's own hand. On a night when he was on guard, the Caliph asked him to tell all that had befallen him from the beginning, and had it written down and laid up in the store with the other histories. "Who wrote it?" said the King. "It says they did, lord." "From his mouth?" "From his mouth." The King looked at the Roll, and did not say what he had been going to say. After that night he had the Open read to him from the top at the end of the second glass, every night before the Roll was struck, and when I came to "a shutter" I read it as I read any other line, and he said nothing, and I thought that was how to read it.

Then my sister began Ardashir. There was in Shiraz an old King, Sayf al-A'azam, who after many years of physicians had one son, Ardashir, and when the son was fifteen he fell in love by report with Hayat al-Nufus, the daughter of Abd al-Kadir of Iraq, who hated men so much that no one dared say the word before her. Kings had asked for her, and she had told her father that if he forced her she would kill herself. Ardashir's father sent a Wazir; the answer was no; and the old King called out his army and swore to blot out the traces of Abd al-Kadir's dominions. His son went in to him and kissed the ground and said, trouble not your soul, for when she hears what has been done to her father and his people because of her, she will kill herself, and I shall die. "He stopped it," said the King. "A son stopped a father." "It is rare," said Shah Zaman. The Prince put on a merchant's clothes, and his father's Wazir went with him, and three hundred thousand dinars.

They took a shop in the stuff-bazar of the White City and he sat in it like the moon at the full, and the crowd was so thick that nobody could pass. The Princess's old nurse came for a dress, and he gave her the best he had, worth ten thousand dinars, for nothing, and a purse for the washing of her clothes, and in the end he told her. She told him what the wise say, that a merchant who wants a king's daughter should ask for a Kazi's, and then she took his letter. There are nine letters in the book, in verse, five his and four hers, and each of his went with a purse a little larger than the last. "That is the postage of a lesser prince," said Shah Zaman, who keeps accounts. I will not read you the verses. Hers began with a threat to crucify him on the gate of the bazar, and ended with a threat to give his flesh to the birds of the wild. "She answers every one," said the nurse. "I would have answered the first," said Sumayya. "You did," said the nurse, "in your head, and a good deal worse."

When the Princess lost her temper, the old woman said what I should call a careful thing. If you tell your father, she said, and he hangs the merchants over their shops, the people will ask why, and they will say, they sought to seduce the King's daughter; and then they will say she was with them ten days; for woman's honour is like curded milk, the least dust fouls it. So the Princess wrote another letter, and another. At the last, when she saw that the letters were not stopping, she had the old woman beaten and put out of the palace by her feet, and I leave out how, and then she sent a physician after her. The old woman went to Ardashir's shop as soon as she could ride, and he asked her what the Princess's hatred was, and she told him the dream. The Princess had dreamed that in her garden a fowler spread a net, and a male pigeon fell in it, and the others fled, but his mate came back and pecked through the mesh until he was free; and then she fell in it herself, and the others fled, and he fled with them; and the fowler woke and cut her throat. "Thus do men with women," the Princess had said, and since that day she had hated them.

The Wazir had an idea. He bribed the old keeper of the Princess's garden, a man of seventy with eight children, who earned a dinar a month, and repaired and stuccoed the ruined pavilion at the end of it, and then called the painters and told them he had had a dream: a fowler, a net, a pigeon freed by his mate, and her caught; and the male flying off; and a falcon that seized him and ate him. They painted it on the wall of the pavilion, and the falcon was his. It was not in her dream. I wrote that on the second sheet, in the margin, in small letters: the hawk is the Wazir's. "That is cheating," said Sumayya. "A thing painted is not a thing that happened." "It is a very old method," said Shah Zaman. My father, from his corner, wrote something on his palm, and it was not the hawk; when the King asked, he said that the rains were nine days late in the north. "Nine days is nothing." "Yes, lord." He rubbed it out with his thumb and wrote it again.

The Princess wanted to go to her garden, as she did every year when the fruit was ripe, and had nobody to take her, because she had had her old nurse beaten; and two of her women, Bulbul and Siwad al-Ayn, went to the nurse's house and asked her to her face. She said she would not go back to the woman who had had her dragged out by the feet like a dead dog. They said, "Think who it is that comes to you." Then she went. "She went for the two who came to her door," said the nurse, "not for the one who sent them." The Princess said, "The fault was mine," and the nurse took her into the garden and showed her the pavilion, and the wall, and said the angels had known the male pigeon was wronged and had shown it. Then she talked to her of men and women, and I give you only the end of it: a King whose wife died, who buried himself alive with her; a wife who threw herself into the grave of her husband. The King put his hand over the boy's ear. Shah Zaman looked at the wall.

When the Princess's hatred was gone, the old woman said the words they had agreed, "O Thou whose boons are hidden," and Ardashir came out from among the trees swaying, and they both fainted. The old woman carried them into the pavilion and sat outside it. After that the Princess gave her three days to bring him to her and swore to tell the King that she had corrupted her if she did not, and the nurse plucked his face with tweezers and painted his eyes and his hands and dressed him as a bride, and taught him to advance the left foot and draw back the right, and took him through seven doors, past thirty eunuchs, and hid him in a cistern behind the last until dark. "Are you a Jinn-mad old woman?" said the Princess, when she saw a girl and not him. "I have brought you his sister." Then she uncovered his face. They were together for some time. I leave out what the book calls their nights, which it gives in verse.

One of the Kings sent the Princess's father a necklace of twenty-nine pearls, and the King sent it by the eunuch whose back teeth she had knocked out. He knocked at the door, and the nurse, asleep on the threshold, said she would fetch the key and ran away; and the eunuch, whose name was Kafur, pushed open the door, and passed seven doors, and drew back the curtain of the bed, and saw the Princess asleep with her arms round a young man handsomer than she. She woke. She took the hem of his robe and put it on her head and kissed his feet, saying, "Veil what Allah veileth." "May Allah not veil thee," said Kafur, "nor him who would veil thee. Thou knockedst out my grinders." He locked the door on them and went to the King, and asked for immunity before he spoke. "He told the truth," said Sumayya. "With a grudge," said Shah Zaman. "It is still the truth," said the King.

The King of Iraq took a sword, and sent for them, covered, and when they came he tried to cut Ardashir down, and the Prince threw himself on his breast and said the fault was his alone, and the Princess threw herself on her father and said, not him, for he is the son of a great King. The Wazir of that court, whom the book calls a gathering-place of all that is evil, said that those in such a case have need of lying, and that there was nothing for it but to cut off both heads. "It is the easiest advice to give, lord," said my father, from his corner. "I have given it." The King did not look at him. The King said to the Sworder, "Take this and strike off his head, and do the same with her, and consult me not a second time." The Sworder put the Prince on the carpet of blood and bound his eyes with a piece of his skirt, and swung his sword three times, and raised his hand; and a cloud of dust went up from the plain, and the dust was a host like locusts, of the Great King of Shiraz, who had come himself to find his son. The King did not move. The boy was asleep on his shoulder. My father had stopped writing. I counted, and I do not know what I counted.

The Wazir of Iraq went out to the host and kissed the ground twenty times, and was told that if the Prince was in the city he would be taken away, and if harm had come to him the land would be laid waste. He went back as pale as a man can be, and the King cried, "Fetch me the Headsman, lest death fall on him!" The Headsman said, "I have smitten off his head, as thou badest." "O dog," said the King, "if this is true I will send thee after him." Then the Headsman said, "O King, he is yet in the chains of life." "He said he had," said the King. "Why did he say he had?" "He had been told not to ask a second time, lord," said my sister. "So he said it, to see what the King would answer," said the King. "It is the only way he could ask." "That is how it reads, lord." "And the other King answered." "Yes." The King was quiet; the boy on his shoulder woke and slept again. I do not think anyone breathed in that room but the boy.

King Abd al-Kadir kissed the Prince and begged his pardon and begged him to say nothing to his father that would lower him. The Prince said he would not move until his honour and the Princess's had been cleared, and the King sent women to prove it by a way that the book thinks conclusive and I think is nobody's business, and I leave it out. Then the King robed him and sent him to his father, and the Great King sent his Wazir with a gift to ask for the Princess for his son. The King of Iraq said he had no objection, but that the girl was of full age and reason and her affair was in her own hand, and she should choose. He told the chief eunuch to tell the Princess. The Princess said, "I hear and I obey." "He asked her," said Sumayya. "Through four people," said the nurse, counting on her fingers. "The Prince asked his father, who sent his Wazir, who asked the King, who sent the eunuch." "It counts," said Sumayya, looking at the King. "It counts," said the King.

They were married with a feast, and the Great King sent to ask whether his son wanted anything before they left, and Ardashir said that he wished to take his wreak of the Wazir who had counselled the sword and the eunuch who had told a lie about them. King Abd al-Kadir sent both. The eunuch had not told a lie. They were hanged over the city gate. "The eunuch told the truth," said Sumayya, "and he is hanged." "Yes," said the King. "Put it in the Open." Sumayya took the reed from me before I could reach for it, and wrote it herself, on the leaf under the line about the shutter, a eunuch who told the truth, with her tongue between her teeth; and the King took the leaf and looked at it for a long time. "It is straight," he said. The old woman, who had come back after her flight, went with the Princess to Shiraz, and they celebrated the wedding again, and lived, as the book says, until the Destroyer of Delights.

On the 738th night my sister began a King of Khorasan named Shahriman, who had a hundred concubines and no child. The rains in the north were nine days late, then eleven, and my father said so, and wrote it down; I heard him say, to nobody, "It will come."

Night 738. Shahrazad and Dunyazad. Present. Open: a King of Khorasan with a hundred concubines and no child, only begun; a shutter, shut and barred, in the Tanners' Lane; a eunuch who told the truth, in Sumayya's hand; rains late in the north; a baker named Hamid, whom nobody is to put in irons; a son named Yusuf, eighty-eight days old; a boy in shoes that squeak; a woman who was asked, after; a woman who was not asked; a woodcutter, who was not asked; a book of names; a boon, not yet asked.

## Chapter 42 · Nights Seven Hundred and Thirty-nine to Seven Hundred and Fifty-six: A Year Without a Word, and Nine Men in the Jails

My sister began Julnar on the 739th night, and I give her to you the way my sister gave her, from the outside. There was a King in Khorasan named Shahriman, who had a hundred concubines and no child, and one morning a merchant came to his door with a slave-girl as straight as a Rudaynian lance, wrapped in gold-bordered silk, with seven tresses to her anklets. The merchant said she had cost him five thousand dinars in all and he gave her for nothing. The King gave him ten thousand and a robe, and had the girl put in a room above the sea, whose latticed windows looked on the water, and shut all the doors upon her. She did not speak. He asked her name and she looked at the floor. He had the women play every instrument and sing to her, and she looked at them without a smile; he fed her by mouthfuls; he put away his hundred and kept her for a year. "Did he ask her name?" said the King. "He asked, lord." "And she did not answer." "For a year." "He kept her above the sea," said Sumayya, "with the doors shut." "The book says all the doors," said my sister.

At the end of the year he said to her that he had given up everything for her, and begged her to speak, or if she was dumb to tell him by a sign; he was old and had no heir. She bowed her head and then smiled, and said that God had answered his prayer: she was with child, and had she not conceived by him she would not have spoken one word. He sent a hundred thousand dinars to the poor. Then he asked what her silence had been, and she said that she was a wretched exile, far from her mother and her brother. She was Julnar the Sea-born; her father, a King of the sea, had died, and another King had taken the kingdom; she had quarrelled with her brother Salih and sworn to put herself in the hand of a man of the land, and had come out of the water and sat on an island in the moonlight. A man had found her and asked of her what such men ask, and she had struck him on the head; and he had sold her to the merchant, and the merchant to the King. "If your heart had not loved me," she said, "I would have thrown myself from this window into the sea. But I was ashamed to go back to them with a child by you." The King said nothing. The boy on his knee pulled at the cord of his shirt. On the second sheet I counted the times she had been sold and the times she had been asked, and wrote the two numbers side by side.

She told Shahriman to hide in a closet while she brought her family. She burned two pieces of lign-aloes and whistled, and the sea foamed, and a young man came up out of it as handsome as she, and an old woman with speckled hair, and five girls, all walking on the water. They wept. They said, how could you leave us four years, and her brother said, come away with us now. And Julnar, with her husband in the closet, said that she was in the utmost ease and honour, that he was good to her, that if she left him he would die and she would too. "She put him in the closet," said the nurse, "to hear it." "Did she mean it?" said Sumayya. "Both," said the nurse. "Both," said the King. Her family had eaten his food and not seen him, and fire came out of their mouths like lamps in cressets; she fetched him from the closet, and he saluted them and ate with them for thirty days. "A man who hides in a closet to hear his wife," said Shah Zaman, "and is then asked to dinner." "It happens," said the King.

The child was born, a moon, and on the seventh day her mother Farashah and her brother came and named him Badr Basim, the Smiling Full Moon. Salih took him in his arms and walked about the room with him, and out of the palace, and down to the salt sea, and into it. Shahriman gave the child up for lost and wept; Julnar said, "Fear not, I love him more than you." The King had Yusuf on his knee. He held him closer, and my sister, without a word, held out her hands, and he gave him to her; I do not think either of them had decided it. The older boy, who had been listening to his shoes, stood still, and said "Ba" as if it were a question. In an hour the sea went turbid and Salih came out with the child, quiet and shining. They had put an eye-powder on him and said over him the names on the ring of Solomon, so that he could not drown in any ocean of the world, and Salih laid down a casket of jewels as big as ostrich eggs, of which the King said one was worth his realm. The boy grew and was taught writing and archery and horsemanship. At fifteen they set him on the throne with his father standing, and his father fell sick and died, and was mourned a month. The Grandees told the young King that over-mourning is for women, and took him to the bath. "Is it?" said Sumayya. "For women?" "The Grandees said so," said my sister. "Grandees do," said the nurse.

A year after, on a night when Salih was visiting, he said to Julnar that the boy was seventeen and unmarried, and named a hundred sea-princesses, and she refused them all; and then he asked whether the boy was asleep. Julnar felt him and said that he slept, and Salih named the Princess Jauharah, daughter of King Al-Samandal, who was a fool and a violent one. Badr was awake. He lay on his elbow with his eyes shut and fell in love by hearsay. Next day in the garden he wept; and Salih, who had heard him, said, let us tell your mother and ask her leave. "If I tell my mother," said the boy, "she will not let me. I will not tell her. I will go with you, and tell her after." "He did not ask his mother," said my sister. My father had been writing on his palm; his hand stopped. My sister looked at him. "Go on, daughter," he said, and she went on. Salih gave the boy a ring with the names of God on it that would keep him from drowning, and they dived into the deep.

Salih took two bags of jewels to Al-Samandal and asked for the Princess for his nephew, and the King laughed until he fell backwards, and called them dogs, and told his pages to take Salih's head. Salih's mother had sent a thousand horsemen to the gate; they took the King and pinioned him. Jauharah ran to an island and climbed a tree. Badr, who had run away thinking that all this was on his account, came to the same island and lay down under the same tree and looked up. She asked if he was Badr Basim, and said that if he loved her a span she loved him a cubit, and came down and kissed him; and then she said words and spat in his face and made him a white bird with a red bill. She told her slave Marsinah to carry him to the Thirsty Island and leave him to die. Marsinah carried him there and thought that a man so beautiful should not die of thirst, and took him to an island with trees and a stream, and told her mistress that she had left him on the Thirsty Island. "She said it was done," said the King. "Yes." "And it was not." "No." "That is two." "Lord?" "Someone told to, who said it was done." My father wrote nothing.

Julnar went down to her mother to ask for her son, and was told about the war, and was angry with Salih for taking him without her leave. She went back to her kingdom, to keep it, and said to them, "Do not forget him, for if he is harmed it will kill me; I see the world only in him." My father laid his other hand over the words on his palm. The bird was caught by a fowler and sold to a King on an island, whose wife knew him for a man the moment she saw him, and veiled her face, and with a cup of water and some words made him a man again; and the King fitted him a ship. On the eleventh day a rock broke her in pieces and everyone drowned but Badr, who rode a plank for three days to a white city on a tongue of land. Mules and asses and horses came down to the beach in their hundreds and drove him off the shore, striking at him. "They were men," said my sister. "Every one a young man who had landed. They were warning him."

A grocer named Abdallah, who was a magician and a Moslem and was feared by the Queen, took him in and told him that the Queen kept a young man for forty days and then made him a mule, a horse or a bird. The book makes her a fire-worshipper, and I leave that out; she was a queen who turned strangers into animals. She took Badr home for forty days of wine and music. One morning he followed her into the garden and saw a white bird at the stream and a black bird that had been her Mameluke, and then he saw her a woman again; I leave out the rest. Abdallah gave him a pound of parched barley and told him what to say. She gave him her own to eat, and he pretended to eat it, and offered her his; she ate a mouthful, and he threw water in her face and said, "Take the shape of a dapple mule." She wept. He put a bit in her mouth and rode her out. "He did what she did," said Sumayya. "It is a reason," said the King. "It is not an answer." "No, lord," said my sister.

On the third day an old man asked him to dinner, and an old woman wept at the mule and said it was like her son's that had died, and offered a thousand dinars for it. Badr said he was jesting, he would not sell. "In this city none may lie," said the old man. "They put to death whoever lies." "That would be a quiet city," said Shah Zaman. "I should not like to live in it," said the nurse. "No," said the King. Badr gave up the mule, and the old woman drew the bit and sprinkled water on her, and she was Queen Lab, whose mother this was. The old woman whistled up an Ifrit like a mountain, and they flew back, all three; and Lab made him the foulest of birds and put him in a cage and cut off his meat and drink. One of her women pitied him and gave him both in secret, and when she could, went to Abdallah, who sent her by an Ifrit to Julnar. Julnar and her mother and Salih gathered the tribes of the sea and the Jinn and flew to the city, and in the twinkling of an eye it was taken; I leave out what the book is glad of. She took her son out of the cage and sprinkled him, and he was a man, and wept. Abdallah was married to the woman who had come, and made King of the city.

Badr said that none would content him but Jauharah. Julnar had Al-Samandal fetched, and Badr asked him for his daughter, and the King said, "She is your handmaid." He sent for her. She came, and threw her arms round her father's neck. He told her that he had given her in wedlock to King Badr Basim, who befitted her as she befitted him; and she said, "I may not gainsay you, my father; do as you will; chagrin and despite are at an end, and I am one of his handmaids." "He asked her," said Sumayya. "He told her," said the nurse. "She turned him into a bird," said Sumayya, "and now she says she is his handmaid." "That is what it says," said my sister. "What became of Marsinah?" said Sumayya. "The book does not say." "Then it is not finished," said Sumayya, and I put her in the Open that night without waiting to be told: a slave-girl, who said it was done. They made a feast, and showed the bride in nine dresses, and released all who were in the jails. "How many are in the jails?" said the King. "Three hundred and eleven, lord." "For what?" "Debts, mostly. And some for words." "What words?" "About you, lord." The King was quiet. "How many?" "Nine." My father looked at his palm. "Put it in the Open," said the King. I wrote it: nine men in the jails for words.

On the 756th night my sister began a King of Khorasan named Mohammed bin Sabaik, who went on a raid every year. The rains in the north were twenty-three days late, and then twenty-six. My father had stopped saying it aloud. He wrote the number on his palm each evening, and each evening it was larger, and I saw the King watch him do it, and neither said anything.

Night 756. Shahrazad and Dunyazad. Present. Open: a King of Khorasan who goes on a raid every year, only begun; nine men in the jails for words; a slave-girl called Marsinah, who said it was done; a shutter, shut and barred, in the Tanners' Lane; a eunuch who told the truth, in Sumayya's hand; rains twenty-six days late in the north; a baker named Hamid, whom nobody is to put in irons; a son named Yusuf, one hundred and six days old; a boy in shoes that squeak; a woman who was asked, after; a woman who was not asked; a woodcutter, who was not asked; a book of names; a boon, not yet asked.

## Chapter 43 · Nights Seven Hundred and Fifty-seven to Seven Hundred and Seventy-eight: Five Conditions, and a Story Heard for the Room

My sister began on the 757th night with King Mohammed bin Sabaik of Khorasan, who raided the lands of the unbelievers every year and loved tales above anything, and gave a robe, a thousand dinars and a horse to anyone who told him one he had not heard. His Wazir was an envious man who said that this fashion ruined the land. One day the King sent for a merchant named Hasan, learned and a poet, and told him to bring a story such as he had never heard, and if it pleased him he would make him Chief Wazir, and if it did not he would take all that was in his hand and banish him. Hasan asked for a year, and was given it. He sent five Mamelukes to five quarters of the world, with five thousand dinars apiece; four came back empty at the end of four months, and the fifth, in Damascus, followed a young man who was running to hear an old man tell tales on a stool. The old man had the story of Sayf al-Muluk, and sold it for a hundred and ten dinars on five conditions. "Which are these," said my sister, counting them on her fingers: "that it is not told on the beaten road; that it is not told before women and slave-girls; that it is not told before servants or feather-heads; that it is not told to boys; and that it is read only before Kings, Emirs, Wazirs and men of learning." Nobody said anything. The nurse put her hands over her ears and took them off again. On the second sheet I wrote that the third condition, in the book, names the servants by a colour, and that I had written servants.

"There are two Kings in this room," said Shah Zaman, "and a Wazir. I will hear it for the room." "I will hear it for the room," said the King. "Lord," said my sister, "there is a nurse, and the Keeper of the Roll, and Sumayya, and two boys." "The boys are not listening," said the King. The elder one, in his shoes, was marching round the baby's cradle and the shoes said so. "Then I am a feather-head," said Sumayya, "with a reed." "You are a feather-head with a reed," said the nurse, "and so am I, without." My sister took a breath and told it. Hasan copied it out and read it to the King and the Emirs ten days before the year was up, and was given a city and the right hand; and the King had the tale written in letters of gold and laid up in his privy treasure, and whenever his breast was straitened he sent for Hasan to read it to him.

There was a King in Egypt named Asim, who was a hundred and eighty years old, and had no child. One day, seeing his Emirs come in with their sons, he got down from his throne and sat on the floor and wept; and his Wazir Faris, who was older by a hundred years and also childless, told him of Solomon, who could ask a thing of God. Faris went to Saba. Solomon told him why he had come before he spoke. He told him to kill two snakes with golden collars at the foot of a tree, and to give the flesh to their wives, and both wives conceived on one night, and on one night both bore sons, Sayf al-Muluk and Sa'id. And when the child was born King Asim opened the prisons, both criminals and debtors, and forgave three years' taxes, and set up kitchens round the city walls. "Did we open the jails when Yusuf was born?" said the King. "No, lord," said my father. "Why not?" "You did not say. For the first boy you did: ninety-one." "How many now?" "Three hundred and eleven. Two hundred and four for debts. A hundred and fifty-eight of those owe less than a hundred dinars." "How much?" "Six thousand one hundred, near enough." "Open them. I will pay it." "I will pay half," said Shah Zaman. "Half," said the King. My father wrote on his palm. "And the nine, lord?" said my father. The King did not answer for as long as it takes to count ten. "Not yet," he said. It was the old word, and I could not tell the voice.

When the boys were twenty-five the old King gave his throne to his son, and the Wazir gave his office to his, and each of the boys was told to choose two things from four: a ring, a sword, a seal, and a wrapper. Sayf al-Muluk took the ring and the wrapper. That night he opened it in a closet by a candle and found a tunic, and inside the lining, worked in gold, the portrait of a girl, with writing over her head: Badi'a al-Jamal, daughter of Shahyal, King of the Jinn who live in the garden of Iram. He fell down in a swoon. He was sick for three months. The physicians told King Asim that his son was in love and had no way to the one he loved, and Asim said to the Sworder, "Take Sa'id, bind his eyes and strike his neck"; and Sa'id asked for immunity before he spoke. "Kafur did that," said Sumayya. "They all do," said Shah Zaman. "They learn it," said the King. Asim said that if she had been a daughter of men they could have found a way, and Sayf al-Muluk said he wanted no other. "Nobody asked her," said Sumayya. "It was a picture." "Yes," said my sister. "It was on a tunic her father sent to Solomon, who sent it to Egypt without opening it."

He had forty ships made ready, and twenty thousand armed Mamelukes, and sailed to China, where King Faghfur gave him forty days of feasting, and then to the islands of India, until a storm broke all the ships and left him in a boat with a few men. They came to an island where a creature who looked like an old man called one of them by his name and leapt on his shoulders and rode him like a donkey, and they fled. They came to an island of Ghuls, and to a mountain where men of enormous size put them in cages like birds and ate two of them; the book gives these their colour, and I did not. They hung the cages at the King's head because they liked the sound of the weeping. He gave Sayf al-Muluk to his daughter, who was married on another island, and she liked him, and he said he was in love with another; and she made him and his men fetch wood and water for four years, and in the end for five. "She did not kill him," said the King. "No, lord." "She could have." "She made him carry wood." "It was her kitchen," said the nurse. "Four years," said the King. "And he did not change his mind." "No."

They made a raft and left. Crocodiles took his men one by one, and he came alone to an island of apes, who brought him to a castle with bricks of gold and silver, and a young man who offered him the island. He walked on four months and came to the High-builded Castle of Japhet son of Noah, where on a golden throne sat a girl, Daulat Khatun, daughter of the King of Hind, whom the Blue King's son, a Jinni, had taken from her bath in her father's garden and shut up there. He came every Tuesday, she said, and kissed her, and embraced her, and did nothing else, and left on Friday. "He did not touch her," said the King. "No." "He took her out of her bath and kept her in a castle that nobody could come to, for years." "Yes, lord." "And did nothing else." "So she says," said my sister. The nurse made a noise in her throat. The Jinni had hidden his soul, because the astrologers had said that a king's son would kill him: in a sparrow, in a box, in a casket, in seven caskets and seven chests, in an alabaster coffer, buried at the edge of the sea. "Where would you hide yours?" said Sumayya, to nobody. "In a cat," said the nurse. "In a ledger," said Shah Zaman. "Where would you, lord?" "I do not think I would put it anywhere." "Then anyone could find it." "Yes," said the King. My father put down his reed.

The older boy came and put his hand on the baby's head, and said "Yu." It was the first time. He looked round at us all, and said it again, and the baby, who is the one it was about, looked at the ceiling. Sayf al-Muluk put the ring of Solomon on the surface of the sea, and the coffer came up, and he broke it and strangled the sparrow, and the Jinni fell at the palace door a heap of black ashes. He and Daulat Khatun made a raft of ten doors of sandal-wood and lign-aloes with nails of gold, and sailed four months, he sleeping with a drawn sword between them, to the city of Amariyah, whose King was her uncle. Her father came for her. And Sayf al-Muluk rode through the streets, and saw a young man selling a tunic for fifteen dinars, and knew him for Sa'id, who was thin and changed; and he said to his attendants, "Take him to my palace." They heard "prison." They put him in irons, and no one remembered him for a month, and he cut ashlar with the other prisoners in the quarry. "He said palace," said Sumayya. "They heard prison," said my sister. "Servants hear what they think the master means," said the nurse. "It happens, lord," said my father. "I have the eleven." "Then open them," said the King.

I will give you Sa'id's tale in a breath. The creatures who rode him like a donkey for years; the wine he made in a pit of grapes, and the skulls they drank it from; the fire he lit in the vine-stalks round them while they slept; the cave of the blinded men, and what he did to the creature who had blinded them, which the book tells at length and I do not. He sold his tunic in the market to eat. The two friends sat at the table of Taj al-Muluk, and Daulat Khatun went to her foster-sister Badi'a al-Jamal, daughter of the Jinn, and told her how he had suffered for her. And Badi'a al-Jamal blushed and said that this could never be, for man does not agree with the Jinn. Daulat Khatun begged her by the milk they had sucked together; and she said, "For thy sake I will show him my face once." She saw him from the window, wandering in the garden and saying verses to himself, and it cost her a thousand sighs. When he came up she said, "And who keeps faith? There is no true love in men." He said that all men are not created alike. She made him swear, on his hand in hers, that neither would put another before the other, man or Jinn. "She asked him for an oath first," said Sumayya. "That is how it should be," said the nurse. "Yes," said the King.

She sent him to her grandmother in the garden of Iram, on the back of her maid Marjanah, and told him how to behave: take the sandals at the foot of the couch, kiss them, put them on your head, and stand silent. The grandmother said, "How shall there be accord between man and Jinn?" and then, when he had promised, said that she would send for her son. While he walked in the garden, five Jinn of the Blue King, who had seen him, asked him whether he was the one who had killed their master's son, and he said yes, with this ring; and they gagged him and flew with him to their King. The Blue King's ministers advised cutting off his limbs, one a day, and beating him, and crucifying him; I leave out the rest. An old Emir said, "Do nothing now. He is the betrothed of Badi'a al-Jamal, and King Shahyal will seek his blood." The King put him in prison. "There is always one old Emir," said Shah Zaman. "Who says wait." "Not yet," said the King, and looked at my father, and my father looked at his palm.

Shahyal went to war on his mother's order, for a mortal, and beat the Blue King and took his sons; and the Blue King gave up the prisoner and signed a paper clearing him of his son's death. I leave out the numbers. Sayf al-Muluk was married to Badi'a al-Jamal in Sarandib, and asked King Taj al-Muluk for the Princess Daulat Khatun for Sa'id, and they were married on one night. After forty days she asked if he had any regret, and he said he wanted only to see his father and mother, and she had her slaves carry them to Cairo and back, and from that time they went to see them whenever they longed to. They lived, said my sister, until the Destroyer of Delights; and this is all that has come down of the story of Sayf al-Muluk, "and Allah alone knows the truth." "All that has come down," said the King. "It does not say it was all of it?" "No, lord." "It says that was what they had." "Yes."

On the 778th night my sister began another, Hasan of Bassorah, whose father was a merchant, and who had a brother. The rains in the north were thirty-eight days late, then forty-three, and tonight forty-eight. My father had begun to write it in two lines. I saw the King look at his palm across the room, and look away, and I saw the nurse, who has seen a great many things, fill the water-jar by the cradle without being asked.

Night 778. Shahrazad and Dunyazad. Present. Open: a merchant of Bassorah with a brother, only begun; nine men in the jails for words; a slave-girl called Marsinah, who said it was done; a shutter, shut and barred, in the Tanners' Lane; a eunuch who told the truth, in Sumayya's hand; rains forty-eight days late in the north; a baker named Hamid, whom nobody is to put in irons; a son named Yusuf, one hundred and twenty-eight days old, whose brother has said the first half of his name; a boy in shoes that squeak; a woman who was asked, after; a woman who was not asked; a woodcutter, who was not asked; a book of names; a boon, not yet asked.

## Chapter 44 · Nights Seven Hundred and Seventy-eight to Seven Hundred and Ninety-eight: The Door That Was Forbidden, and Three Tombs With Nobody in Them

On the 778th night my sister began Hasan of Bassorah, the elder son of a merchant, who spent his father's money on friends until there was none, and none of the friends knew him, and he and his widowed mother were three days without bread. A friend of his father's put him to a goldsmith, and in time he had a shop of his own. One day an old stranger with a great white beard and a white turban stood in the doorway and said, "Thou art a comely youth. Thou hast no father and I have no son, and I know an art than which there is no better in the world." Next day, in Hasan's shop, he cut a broken platter into the crucible, took a folded paper out of his turban, shook a pinch of yellow powder on it, and told Hasan to blow the bellows; and out came a lump of gold that sold for fifteen thousand dirhams. "Fifteen thousand," said Shah Zaman, "for a lump the size of a mortar." Hasan went home and told his mother, who said that men who profess to make gold are sharpers who take people's money. She was right, and he did not hear her. He never saw the gold made; the powder was in the turban, and the gold was in the powder.

The next day he took the stranger home, and sent his mother to a neighbour, and fetched sweetmeats, and the stranger put a pinch of something in a piece of one and gave it to him, and said that he had a daughter whose like had never been seen, and that Hasan was the only man for her. He fell down where he sat. The stranger locked him in a chest with the gold in another, and had both carried to a ship that was waiting, and sailed; and Hasan's mother came home to an open door and two chests gone, and built a tomb in the middle of the house, and wrote her son's name and the date of his loss on it, and sat by it. "She built it before she knew," said the nurse. "She knew," said my sister. The stranger was named Bahram. Every year he took a young Moslem and cut his throat for his purposes, and had a thousand, all but one. The book makes him a worshipper of fire and a hater of Moslems; I leave out the fire, and I leave out what was done to the boy on the ship for three months because he would not kneel to it, until a storm came and the sailors said it was on account of the youth, and rose against the stranger and killed his servants. He loosed Hasan then and said that he had only been testing his patience. "And he believed him," said the King. "He was alone on a ship," said my sister. "He had no one else to believe."

They sailed three months more, to a shore of coloured pebbles, and went inland, and Bahram beat a copper drum with a silk strap and three she-dromedaries came out of the dust. They rode fourteen days to a mountain so high the clouds split on it. Bahram sewed Hasan into a camel's skin with three cakes and a bottle of water, and the vultures took him up to the top, where he cut himself out, and saw on the summit rotten bones and wood. "Throw me down six bundles," called Bahram, "and then do as thou wilt: stay, or jump." And he went away. The bones were of the boys before him, whom he had sent up the same way. Hasan stood a while and then threw himself into the sea behind the mountain, and the sea carried him to the land by God's grace. He found a palace, and in the doorway two girls playing chess, who knew him at once for the boy the stranger had brought the year before. The younger said to her sister, "Bear witness that this is my brother by the covenant of God, and I will die for his death and live for his life." They were the daughters of a King of the Jinn, seven of them, whom their father had shut away on the Mountain of Clouds because he would not give them to anyone. Hasan lived with them a year. When the stranger came again, with another boy bound hand and foot, Hasan went out to him and struck him once between the shoulders, and took his drum and his dromedaries, and put the boy on one and told him to go home. I give that in a sentence, as the book gave it in less.

The sisters were called to a wedding for two months and left Hasan the keys and told him not to open one door. He opened it. "Why do they always forbid one door?" said Sumayya. "To see who opens it," said the nurse. "It is always the one door," said the King. Behind it was a stair of onyx, and at the top a pavilion with a basin, and ten birds flew in from the desert and put off their feathers, as one takes off a coat, and were ten girls; and they went into the water, and the chief of them was the most beautiful that God had made. The book gives her to Hasan at length, and I give you her face, and that the others did not dare touch her. At dusk they put on their feathers and flew away. He went down the stair and lay ten days and ate nothing. When the sisters came back the youngest found him and asked, and he told her. She said she would help him, and told him how: wait for the first of the month, hide, take the dress of the chief girl and no other, and when the rest have flown, seize her, and keep the dress where she can never find it. "Take her by the hair," the book says, and I leave out the hair. "Whose idea was that?" said the nurse. "Hers," said my sister. "The youngest." The nurse said nothing for some time.

He took the dress, and the rest flew away, and she stood alone on the roof and said, "O thou who hast taken my dress and stripped me, restore it to me and cover my shame, so may God never make thee taste my tribulation." He brought her down to his room. When the sisters told her the man loved her, she said, "Do folk like you do such a deed to the daughters of Kings?" and wept until morning. Then the youngest sister dressed her and sat with her, and told her about him, and the next day he kissed her feet and said that he had taken her only that he might be her servant until the Day of Judgment. One of the sisters stood deputy for her in the contract, and the book says it was by her consent, and does not say whose. "Whose?" said Sumayya. "The book says hers," said my sister. They kept him forty days. My father, in his corner, was writing very small.

Hasan dreamed of his mother thin as a pen, and woke weeping, and the sisters let him go, with five-and-twenty chests of gold and fifty of silver and the dromedaries; and the youngest clung to his neck until she fainted. They went to Baghdad. He bought a house for a hundred thousand dinars. In three years his wife bore him two sons, Nasir and Mansur. Then he thought of the sisters, and bought them presents, and before he went he took his mother to the closet, and showed her where the feather-dress was buried in a chest, and said, "Watch over it. Do not let her see it. She is of the Jinn, the daughter of a great King; do not let her go out of the door, nor look out of a window, nor over a wall; for I fear the air for her when it blows." His mother said she would. And the book says, in one line, that his wife heard it, and neither of them knew. "He told his mother not to let her out," said Sumayya. "And not to say where it was." "She heard." "Yes," said the King. "She heard and she waited." "Three years and two boys," said the nurse. "She had two," said the King. "She did not go while she had no dress." The old nurse, who is seventy, looked at the lamp.

The wife waited two days after he left, and on the third said to his mother, "Have I lived with him three years and shall I never go to the bath?" and wept. His mother said, "We are strangers here, and he is abroad." And she said, "Men are excusable, because they are jealous. But women are not all alike, mother, and if a woman has a mind to a thing, none can guard her or keep her from it; nothing restrains her but her reason and her religion." So the old woman took her to the bath, with the boys. Every woman in the Hammam stopped to look at her. One of them was Tohfah the lutanist, a slave of the Caliph's, who forgot to wash her head, and followed her home, and told the Lady Zubaydah that she had seen a woman whose husband the Caliph would kill to have her. Zubaydah sent Masrur the eunuch to the house. He said, "The Lady summons you." The old woman said that her son had told her to let no one see the girl. "If I thought it dangerous," said Masrur, "I would not ask you to come." My father got up and went as far as the door, and stood there with his back to us, and came back when Masrur had taken them. "The Lady's eunuch," he said, to nobody. "No one refuses him, lord." "No," said the King.

Zubaydah looked at her and stood her up and kissed her and put her own necklace on her, and asked what she could do. The wife said that she had a dress of feathers and would show her a wonder if she had it, and it was in a chest buried in the store-closet of her husband's mother's house. The old woman swore she had never seen such a dress. Zubaydah took the key from her and sent Masrur to dig it up. The wife put it on, in front of them all, and was a bird. She flew once round the palace with the boys on her breast, and said some verses, which I will not read you, and said, "O mother of my husband, tell him when he comes that if he wants to meet me, let him come to the Islands of Wak." She went up through the dome. Zubaydah said she had not known. "Words profit nothing," said the old woman. "Do thou acquit me." The King had been holding Yusuf upright against his shoulder for some time. He had a cough, which had begun on the 790th night with the first yellow dust out of the north, and by the 796th his breathing had a sound in it that the nurse did not like.

Hasan had said goodbye to the seven sisters, each with two lines of verse, the youngest last: "I did not say farewell, for fear that saying it would melt your heart." He came back with five loads of gold and found his mother thin as a tooth-pick, and the house open, and the chest broken, and no one in it. "Where are they?" he said. She said, "They are in three tombs." And my sister read: she had dug in the house three graves, for the wife and the two boys, and sat by them weeping. "Stop," said the King. He said it as he said it on the night Ajib ordered the concubine drowned, softly, with the child's head under his chin, and my sister did not stop to think. "They are not in them, lord," she said. "They are alive. They are in the Islands of Wak. She dug them because she did not know." "Go on," said the King. She went on. Hasan fell down in a faint from morning to noon, and when he woke he took his sword to his mother's throat and said, "Tell me the truth or I will kill you and myself." She told him. He went round the house five days without eating. Yusuf was hot. The nurse put cold cloths on his chest and the soles of his feet and said nothing, and my father brought cold water from the court well in the dark, and the well was lower than I had ever seen it; and the King walked with him, and walked, and at the end of the second glass he lay down on the floor beside the cradle with the child on his chest, and slept. I listened to the baby's breathing until I could hear that there was nothing in it.

My sister told the rest of that night, the five days, and the mother's tears, and Hasan's verses, quietly, to the room, as one speaks in a house with a sick person. At dawn Yusuf slept in the cradle and the King slept on the floor, and nobody woke him. Sumayya took the reed from me because my hands were not steady, and wrote the Roll line in her own hand. It was straight. Under it she wrote, because I had told her what we write for that: child, a fever; gone at dawn. The north was sixty-eight days without rain. My father said that wheat was dearer in the lower market by a tenth, and the merchants were asking whether the King's granaries were full. "What do you say?" said the King, from the floor, without opening his eyes. "That the King keeps his granaries, lord." "Good," said the King, and slept.

Night 798. Shahrazad and Dunyazad. Present. Child, a fever; gone at dawn. Open: a man of Bassorah whose wife is in the Islands of Wak, only begun; nine men in the jails for words; a slave-girl called Marsinah, who said it was done; a shutter, shut and barred, in the Tanners' Lane; a eunuch who told the truth, in Sumayya's hand; rains sixty-eight days late in the north; a baker named Hamid, whom nobody is to put in irons; a son named Yusuf, one hundred and forty-eight days old, who coughed; a boy in shoes that squeak; a woman who was asked, after; a woman who was not asked; a woodcutter, who was not asked; a book of names; a boon, not yet asked.

## Chapter 45 · Nights Seven Hundred and Ninety-nine to Eight Hundred and Sixteen: Reckon Them Dead, and Bread That Goes Off

On the 799th night my sister took up the tale as if the 798th had not been, which was how she meant it. The child was well. The King said that Sumayya should read the Open that night, since she could, and she stood and read it with her finger under the lines, slowly, and when she came to "a eunuch who told the truth, in Sumayya's hand" she stopped. "Go on," said the King, and she went on, and read her own name in the voice she used for the others. After that she read it every night, and I kept the Roll.

Hasan went to the sisters on the Mountain of Clouds, a month after the bird flew, and told them, and they looked at one another and looked at the floor. Then they said, "Put forth thy hand to heaven, and when thou reachest it, thou shalt win thy wife." He wept. The youngest told him to be patient: "the son of ten years does not die in the ninth." She said she had meant to tell him to burn the feather-dress, and the Devil made her forget. He stayed a year, and his eyes could not keep their tears; and the sisters had an uncle, Abd al-Kaddus, who came once a year on an elephant and would do whatever the eldest asked, and she burned a perfume and called him. He sat and shook his head and bit his finger and made marks on the ground, and said, "He may not reach the Islands of Wak. Between him and them are seven wadis and seven seas and seven mountains. Let him reckon his wife and sons as dead." "Reckon them dead," said the nurse. "That is what they all say." The King put his hand over the elder boy's ear, and the boy, who was holding a shoe, looked up.

Hasan said, "How shall life be sweet to me unless I win my wish?" The old man took him on the elephant three days to a blue mountain with a door of Chinese iron, and gave him a black stallion and a scroll, and told him to wait at a cavern for five days, and on the sixth a black Shaykh in black would come out and take the letter without speaking, and then wait five days more: if he comes himself, you will win; if a page comes, he means to kill you. It was Abu al-Ruwaysh, who sent him in on the sixth day, among four elders in a hall with fountains, and told them his tale; and they said, "Never saw I any who loathed his life as this youth does." He wrote a second letter and gave him a pouch of incense and sent him by an Ifrit named Dahnash, on whose back he was not to say "Glory to God" or both would die, to a land white as camphor, to King Hassun, who read the letter and shook his head and put him in a guest-house for a month, until the ships came from the Islands. Then the captain put him in a chest and carried him aboard like cargo. "Each one told him to go home," said Sumayya, "and each one sent him on." He made verses all the way; I give you one couplet, the one my sister read twice: "Their image stays with me and will not fly; but for the hope of meeting, I would die." "Letters are how a thing gets done, lord," said my father. "Yes," said Shah Zaman, who keeps the accounts. "At four doors, and a ship."

On the 805th night my father said that two hundred and forty people had come in from the north and were sitting outside the north gate, women and children and a few goats, and more were on the road. The wells in their villages, they said, were mud. They had walked eleven days. "What do they ask?" said the King. "Bread, lord, and water." "Kitchens," said the King. "Round the gate. Soup and bread, twice a day." "From the granaries, lord?" "Not the granaries. Buy flour." "The flour in the lower market is a fifth dearer than it was." "Then buy it from the one who sells at the old price." My father was quiet. "Hamid, lord. On Coppersmiths' Row. He is out of flour by the third day of the week, and he says the millers will not sell to him." "Send to him," said the King. "Not a gift. An order. Twelve hundred loaves a day for the north gate, at the old price, and the flour from my mill." He had once said "Do not send" about this baker, and I think we all remembered. My father wrote on his palm. The next night he reported: Hamid said he would do it, but that he would bake each day at dawn and the bread would be eaten by noon, and he would not bake for tomorrow, because bread is a thing that goes off; and that it was not to be called the King's bread. "He said it was bread." "Good," said the King.

On the 808th night a loaf came up from the lower town in a cloth, with no message. It was Hamid's, baked that morning, with a crust that cracked when the nurse tapped it. "He sent one so that you would know what the gate is eating, lord," said my father. The King broke it and gave Shah Zaman half, and the boy the crust, which he held in both hands and did not eat but carried round the room. "It goes off by tomorrow, lord," said my father. "Then we shall eat it today," said the King, and we did, all of it, and the nurse gathered the crumbs.

My sister, meanwhile, had Hasan under a settle on the shore of the Islands of Wak, in the dark. The women came off the ships in thousands, in mail, and one sat on his settle, and he took her hem and laid it on his head and asked for her protection. She said, "Get up, before they kill you." She told him to wait until the next night, and brought him armour. She was the commander of the army of virgins, an ancient dame blue-eyed and pock-marked and gap-toothed, Shawahi, Mother of Calamities, and she told him he would be killed, and took him anyway. He told her his tale, and she said that love like that had brought him, and that it was the truth of his purpose that had saved him. They went seven months' journey to the Seventh Island, over the Land of Birds, where one cannot hear one another speak (my sister did the noise with her hands, and the elder boy put his shoe over his ear, and the nurse said that she had been to the Land of Birds, it was her cousin's wedding), and the Land of Beasts, and the Land of the Jinn, where no one looks behind or he dies, and came to a river under a mountain where the heads of fruit on a tree cry "Wak! Wak!" when the sun rises. On the bank she had every girl in her army go into the river to wash, so that he might see his wife. The book has a great deal to say about this, which I leave out. On the second sheet I wrote that the book is very anxious, a dozen times, to tell us that the army were virgins, and I wrote it once. He looked at each face and said, "Not her."

Last of all came a damsel with ten slave-girls and thirty women, who ducked them in the water and ruled them, and Hasan said, "She is like her, but she is not she." The old woman asked him to describe his wife; he did, and she bowed her head, and raised it, and said, "That is a daughter of the Supreme King, who rules all the Islands of Wak. Wake up. Reckon her dead. Choose another, and I will give you wealth, and go home." Hasan said that if he were cut in pieces he would only love her the more. Shawahi looked at him a long time, and said that she would risk her life for his. So she took him into the city and hid him in her house, and went to the Queen, Nur al-Huda, and told her, trembling, that a man had hidden under a settle and asked her protection. "Art thou so lewd," said the Queen, "that thou bringest men into the Islands of Wak? Bring him here, or I will strike off thy head."

He came before her with the old woman beside him, and gave his name, Hasan, and his city, Bassorah, and his sons' names, Nasir and Mansur; he did not know his wife's name. The Queen asked what she said at leave-taking. He told her: "let him come to the Islands of Wak." Nur al-Huda said, "Had she not wanted thee she had not said this." Then she said that she would show him all the girls in the city and the provinces; if he knew his wife she would give her to him, and if not she would crucify him over the old woman's door. He said he accepted. They brought him every girl in the city, a hundred at a time (the nurse counted to twenty hundreds and stopped), and then every girl in the palace, and he said, "Not her." "Take him," said the Queen, "drag him on his face and cut off his head." They threw him down and covered his eyes with his skirt, and stood over him with their swords. The old woman threw herself on the ground and said, "He has eaten of our meat and entered our land, and he has a claim on thee." "What did she say?" said the King. "That he had eaten of their bread, lord," said my sister. "Yes," said the King. My sister told this part quickly, and he did not look at the Roll.

Shawahi said there was one girl he had not seen, and that was the Queen. Nur al-Huda said, "How can he be my husband that I should show him my face?" But she unveiled; and Hasan gave a great cry, so loud that the palace shook, and fell down. When he came round, he said, "This Queen is either my wife or the likest of all folk to my wife." The Queen laughed until she fell on her side. She asked what in his wife was like her, and he said everything, the shape, the voice, the brow. She smiled, and her cheeks reddened, and she told Shawahi to take him back to her house and look after him. Then she told the old woman to arm herself and take a thousand horse to the city of her father, the Supreme King, to the palace of her youngest sister, Manar al-Sana, and tell her to put her two sons in their mail and send them. "Say her sister longs for them," she said. "And bring them to me by another road than their mother's." The book says that the Queen swore by every oath that if the woman was his wife and the boys his sons she would not hinder him; and the book says in the next line that she meant to kill him if they were not. "She had already decided," said Shah Zaman. "She had decided one thing or the other, and set a test to see which," said the nurse. "Which is deciding," said the King.

The old woman came to Manar al-Sana, whose father was the Supreme King and who had never let anyone look at her sons: "from the time of their birth none hath looked on their faces, neither Jinn nor man, male nor female, and I am jealous for them of the zephyr when it breathes in the night." "Nobody had looked at them," said Sumayya. "In seven years." "Four," said my sister. "Nobody had looked at their faces," said the nurse, and looked at the cradle, where the younger boy was awake with his fists in his mouth, and at the elder, who was standing at my father's knee in his shoes, looking at my father's palm. The nurse said that in her day a child's face was not shown for forty days either, and nobody called that jealousy. "They called it caution," she said. The Princess gave way. The old woman took the two boys in the little coats of mail their aunt had sent, and went off like a bird by another road. At her sister's palace the Queen set them on her knees and said, "Fetch me Hasan."

On the 815th night they brought him in, thinking he was to be killed, and he saw them on the Queen's knees, the two of them, and gave a great cry and fell. They knew him. The book says that God made them speak, and they said, "O our father!" The elder boy in my father's room, who has had three words, put down the shoe, and said the first one. "Ba," he said, and looked at the King. The King did not say anything, and he picked him up. The shoe lay on its side on the floor, and nobody picked it up. On the Queen's knees the boys wept. Nur al-Huda saw that they were Hasan's sons and that her sister was his wife, and she raged against her sister beyond measure, and screamed in Hasan's face, and kicked him in the chest. "Arise, and run for thy life! Were it not that I swore no harm should come to thee, I would kill thee with my own hand." She told them to put him out, and they threw him out of the palace on his face; and when he came round he was lying in the road, and he knew nobody, and did not know how to go home. The north was eighty-six days without rain.

Night 816. Shahrazad and Dunyazad. Present. Open: a man of Bassorah, thrown out of a palace on his face in the Islands of Wak, with his sons inside; kitchens at the north gate, and a baker who will not call it the King's bread; nine men in the jails for words; a slave-girl called Marsinah, who said it was done; a shutter, shut and barred, in the Tanners' Lane; a eunuch who told the truth, in Sumayya's hand; rains eighty-six days late in the north; a son named Yusuf, one hundred and sixty-six days old; a boy in shoes that squeak, who says Ba; a woman who was asked, after; a woman who was not asked; a woodcutter, who was not asked; a book of names; a boon, not yet asked.

## Chapter 46 · Nights Eight Hundred and Seventeen to Eight Hundred and Thirty-one: The Fault Was Mine, and Eight Men Let Out

Hasan lay in the road where they had thrown him, and my sister left him there for a night and told us about his wife. Manar al-Sana, the Supreme King's youngest, had been about to start for her sister's when a chamberlain came and said that her father wanted her. He had dreamed that he went into a treasure-house of jewels, seven of them the finest, and chose the smallest and the clearest, and as he came out and opened his hand a strange bird, not of their country, swooped and snatched it. The interpreters told him that of his seven daughters he would lose the youngest, by force and against his will. "He chose the smallest," said the King. "Yes, lord." "Do not go," he said. She said that her sister had made ready a feast and would be angry, because it was four years since she had seen her; that no mortal could come to their islands, past the White Country and the Black Mountain, the Island of Birds and the Valley of the Jinn; that she would be a month. He let her go. "He told her the dream," said the King, "and she went." "She said no one could reach them," said my sister. "She was sure," said the nurse. "They were all sure," said the King.

Her sister met her at the door and did not salute her. "O whore," she said, "whence haddest thou these children? Hast thou married unbeknown to thy sire, or committed fornication?" Manar al-Sana said that she was lawfully married, and appealed from her to the Lord of the Heavens. "She said she was married," said the King. "Yes, lord." "And nobody believed her." "Her sister had the boys in her lap an hour before, lord, and knew whose they were." "Yes," said the King. Nur al-Huda had her put in irons, and beaten, and hung up by the hair; I leave out the ladder and the whip, which the book describes, and what was said to the old woman Shawahi when she tried to leave. She wrote to the Supreme King, who wrote back, "I give thee command over her life; if the matter is as thou sayest, kill her without consulting me." "Without consulting him," said the King. "Yes, lord." "He did not say, kill her." "No. He said, if the matter is as thou sayest." "It is easier in a letter," said my father, from his corner. The King looked at him. "Yes," he said. "It is." Nur al-Huda read the letter, and sent for her sister, and I leave the rest out.

On the 821st night, before the glass, my father said that one of the nine had died in the night. The oldest. A cobbler, seventy-one, who had been two years and a month in the jail for saying, in his shop, "May God take him by the throat." It was a fever; the nights in the jail had been cold; the other eight had washed him. The King did not move. "How long?" he said. "Two years and a month, lord." "The eight." "Lord?" "Today." "All eight?" "Today, before noon. And bring him to his house, with a shroud." "He had a daughter, lord. In the lower town." "Find her." My father wrote on his palm, and his hand did not shake; I noticed that. The King said nothing else that night. Sumayya read the Open at the end of the second glass, and when she came to "nine men in the jails, for words" she read it, and stopped, and said "eight" to nobody, and went on. When my sister began Hasan again, he did not look at her, but at the brick by the door.

Hasan got up out of the road and walked beside the river. On a tree there was a scroll which said: "In thy mother's womb I cast thy case the best, and I will suffice thee in whatever troubles thee." Beyond it two little boys, sons of a magician, were fighting over a copper rod and a leather cap that their father had worked a hundred and thirty-five years to make, which the rod gave command of seven tribes of the Jinn, and the cap hid whoever wore it. Hasan said he would judge between them, and threw a stone, and told them the one who ran to it first should have the rod, the other the cap; and put the cap on his head and the rod in his hand while they ran. The younger boy came back first with the stone and found nobody. "Where is the man who was to judge between us?" he said to his brother. They looked for him a long time, and he stood beside them. "Did he steal them?" said Sumayya. "Their father had said that a stranger would take them," said my sister, "and that they would not know how." He went into the palace and stood before Shawahi and shook a shelf, and she thought it was a devil. Then he went to his wife.

She was bound by her hair to the ladder, and her sons played under it. They saw him when he lifted the cap, and cried, "O our father!" and their mother looked right and left and saw nobody. Then he took it off in front of her. She screamed. She said, "Save thyself, for she has hosts that none can withstand." And then she said, "All this befell me because I rebelled against thee, and went out without thy leave. Women never know a man's worth till they have lost him. Blame me not." And Hasan said, "It was not thou that wast in fault; the fault was mine, and mine only; for I went forth and left thee with one who knew not thy rank, nor thy worth, nor thy degree." "Again," said the King. My sister said it again: "The fault was mine, and mine only." He said nothing more. The nurse blew her nose. Shah Zaman looked at his hands. Then Hasan asked her. "Wouldst thou have me carry thee to thy father's house," he said, "or depart with me to my country, now that relief is come?" "He asked her," said Sumayya. "He asked her," said my sister. "And what did she say?" said the nurse. "She said, go to thy country and put away false hope, for thou knowest not the perils." "And he stayed," said the King. "He said he would not leave this place nor go but with her."

At night he loosed her, and they carried the boys to the gate of the Queen's harem, and it was locked from outside. A voice said, "I will not open to you unless you swear to take me with you." It was Shawahi, on a red earthenware jar with a palm-fibre rope round its neck, which ran like a Najdi colt. They swore. Outside the city Hasan struck the earth with the rod and ten Ifrits stood up out of it with their heads in the clouds, seven Kings of the Jinn, and said, "What dost thou bid?" He asked to see their tribes. "Some of us are heads without bodies," they said, "and some are bodies without heads." He thought better of it. "He thought better of it," said the nurse. "I would have." He said, "Take us to Baghdad." They said they could not: they were of the covenant of Solomon, and had sworn not to carry any son of Adam on their backs. They brought horses of the Jinn. It was seven years' journey, they said, and he had come in less than one because God had softened the hearts of His servants, and the Shaykh's elephant had gone three years in ten days and the Ifrit three years in a night. "Seven years," said Shah Zaman, "and he did it in the better part of one." A Moslem Ifrit, tall as a column of smoke, met them on the road: he wished to leave the land of the magicians, and would guide them if he might come by night. For a month they rode the sea-shore; on the thirty-first day a dust-cloud walled the world.

It was the Queen's army. The Seven Kings said, "Go up the mountain with thy wife and children and leave us," and he went up, with the old woman, and watched. The Jinn threw fire from their mouths, and heads flew from trunks, and the blood ran in rills; I give it as the book gives it, in dust and flame, and I leave out the count. It lasted three days. On the third the army of Wak was broken, and the Queen was taken, pinioned, with her chief officers. The old woman said what she would do to her, with two bitches and two mares, and I leave that out also. Hasan commanded that the prisoners be put to the sword; the old woman cried, "Slay them all and spare none." Then Manar al-Sana saw her sister bound, and wept, and said to Hasan, "What wilt thou do with her?" "Her torturing of thee was misdeed enow," he said. And she said, "She has an excuse for what she did to me. It is thy doing that my father's heart is on fire for the loss of me. What will he do if he loses my sister also?" "It is thine to decide," said Hasan. "Do what thou wilt." "It was hers to decide," said Sumayya. "Yes," said the King.

She unloosed her sister and the rest, and embraced her, and they wept together a long while; and Nur al-Huda said, "Bear me no malice for what I did with thee." "This was foreordained to me," said Manar al-Sana. "Foreordained," said the King. He said it as he says "Present." "Is that a pardon?" said the nurse. "The book says they sat on the couch and talked," said my sister, "and that she made peace between the old woman and the Queen." "She was asked," said Sumayya. "She was asked, after." My sister looked at her, and at the Roll, and I wrote nothing, because nobody had told me what to write.

The Queen and the old woman took the left-hand road and Hasan and his wife the right. At the house of the Princesses, the youngest sister embraced him and wept; and she turned to Manar al-Sana and said, "O daughter of the Supreme King, was there no pity in thy bosom, that thou partedst him from his children and set his heart on fire? Didst thou want him to die?" Manar al-Sana laughed. "So it was ordained," she said, "and whoso beguileth folk, him Allah will beguile." "She has the right of it," said the nurse. "Both of them," said the King. King Hassun met them with his horsemen under the trees, and they were his guests three days. At the cavern of brass the two Shaykhs were waiting, Abd al-Kaddus and Abu al-Ruwaysh, and Abd al-Kaddus said, "Thou hast delivered thy wife and sons and hast no further need of the two. Give me the rod and Abu al-Ruwaysh the cap." Hasan hung his head. He did not want to say he would not; he said that he would. "He could have kept them," said Shah Zaman. "Foolish." "He had them in his hand," said the King, "and he gave them to the men who got him there." "His mother says he was a fool," said the nurse; for when Hasan reached Baghdad, two months and ten days from the sisters' palace, and his mother had fainted and come round and kissed his wife's head, she heard of the rod and the cap and said, "O my son, hadst thou kept them thou wert master of the whole earth." He bought houses and gardens and estates, and they lived in all pleasance, said my sister, until the Destroyer of Delights. "Master of the whole earth," said the King. "She wanted that for him." "Mothers do," said the nurse.

The eight had gone out of the jail the day after the 821st night, at noon, with a dinar apiece, and nobody saw where they went. My father had gone out at dusk the same day with a litter and two bearers, and he did not come back until the second glass; and he said nothing, and the King did not ask. I noticed that his sleeves smelt faintly of lime and wet bark. I did not strike the line about the nine. I wrote under it: one dead; eight out. The King read it, and put his thumb beside it. On the 826th night Shah Zaman had a letter from Samarkand, which he read twice and put in his sleeve; in the morning he sent two riders, and told the King only that he had a use for his horses. The King said he could have what he liked. On the 830th night the nurse put her finger into Yusuf's mouth, and said, "Tooth," and everybody had to feel it, even Shah Zaman, who was bitten. "Is it straight?" said the King. "It is," said the nurse. The north was a hundred and one days without rain, and nine hundred and twelve people sat outside the gate now, and the sky over the north gate was the colour of tin, and Hamid had asked for a second oven and a boy to turn the loaves. On the 831st night my sister began Khalifah, a fisherman of Baghdad.

Night 831. Shahrazad and Dunyazad. Present. Open: a fisherman of Baghdad, only begun; a cobbler, seventy-one, who is dead, and eight men let out of the jails for words, who went where nobody saw; a litter, and a smell of lime; kitchens at the north gate, nine hundred and twelve at the gate, and a baker who has asked for a second oven; a slave-girl called Marsinah, who said it was done; a shutter, shut and barred, in the Tanners' Lane; a eunuch who told the truth, in Sumayya's hand; rains a hundred and one days late in the north; a son named Yusuf, one hundred and eighty-one days old, with a tooth; a boy in shoes that squeak, who says Ba; a woman who was asked, after; a woman who was not asked; a woodcutter, who was not asked; a book of names; a boon, not yet asked.

## Chapter 47 · Nights Eight Hundred and Thirty-one to Eight Hundred and Forty-five: Three Apes, and a Paper That Chose

Khalifah the fisherman of Baghdad had never married, and had never caught enough to be worth marrying on. One morning he cast his net ten times and drew up nothing, and said that bread belongs to God, who gives it to some and not to others; and he cast an eleventh time, and it was heavy, and in it was a lame one-eyed ape. "What is this heart-breaking luck?" he said. He tied the ape to a tree and took up a whip, and the ape said, "Khalifah, hold thy hand, and cast again; God will give thee thy daily bread." He cast again and drew up a second ape, with teeth wide apart, Kohl on his eyes, henna on his hands, laughing; and a third, red, with a blue waistcloth, who said he was the ape of Abu al-Sa'adat the banker, whom he greeted each morning and each evening, and each time the banker made five dinars. "Three apes in three casts," said Shah Zaman. "The river has changed its trade." "Praised be God," said Khalifah, "who has turned the fish of the Tigris into monkeys!" He called the third one the monarch of all monkeys, and did what he was told. The older boy had been given the nurse's shawl to hold, and cast it over the cat; the cat took it as an insult, and the nurse said that was five apes today. Sumayya wrote the three apes in the margin of the Open, with a number beside each, and the King asked what the numbers were, and she said the casts.

The third ape told him what to do. Catch a fish, a big one; lay it on green grass in a basket; take it to the banker's shop and say, I went out to fish on your luck and God sent me this. The banker will offer a dinar, then two, then five; take nothing; say that you will sell it for two sayings only, that he stand up and say, "Bear witness, people of the market, that I give Khalifah the fisherman my ape for his ape, and my lot for his lot, and my luck for his." Then the one-eyed ape would give the banker good-morning every day, and every day an affliction would fall on him, until he had nothing; and Khalifah would make ten dinars a day. The book gives the banker a faith, as it gave one to the goldsmith, and I leave it out; he was the banker. When Khalifah would not take his five dinars but threw them back, saying, "Give folk back their fish!" the banker thought that two sayings meant something else, and was frightened and angry and had him beaten in the street. "I can eat ten donkeys' rations of stick," said Khalifah, getting up. The banker laughed in spite of himself, and said the words; and Khalifah went down to the river and drew up a net full of fish, and sold ten dinars' worth that day, and ten each day for ten days.

That night, with a hundred dinars in the house, and a good deal of hashish in him, he said to himself, "Everyone knows I was a poor fisherman and now I have a hundred dinars. The Caliph Harun al-Rashid will hear. He will send for me and say, lend me the hundred, and I will say, I have nothing, and he will have me beaten until I confess. The wise thing is to practise." So he stripped, and set a leather pillow beside him, and whipped himself, every other blow on the pillow, roaring, "Alas, my lord, they lie against me, I am a poor fisherman, I have nothing of this world!" The merchants of the Khan climbed over the roofs and came down through the skylight to find him naked and flogging himself. "We are preparing for the Caliph," he said. The King laughed. He laughed with his head back, as he does when it comes up from the bottom, and the sound went round the room; and Yusuf, on the nurse's knee, who had never laughed in his life, opened his mouth with the new tooth in it and laughed too, a short dry sound like a door. Everyone stopped. "Again," said the King, and did it again, and the child did. Shah Zaman, who had been trying to look as if nothing was happening, put his hand over his face.

The next day Khalifah lost the purse in the Tigris, diving a hundred times, and when he came out his clothes had been stolen. He wrapped himself in his net and ran about the bank like a camel in rut. Meanwhile the Caliph had bought a slave-girl, Kut al-Kulub, who knew all the arts and could sing, for five thousand dinars and had given the jeweller ten, and had not left her for a month except for the Friday prayers, and forsaken the Lady Zubaydah and his concubines. The Lords of the realm complained to Ja'far, who told him the highest boast of a King is the chase. So they rode out, and the Caliph, thirsty, rode alone up a mound where he saw a figure, and the figure was Khalifah naked in a net. "Hast thou any water?" "Art thou blind?" said Khalifah. "The Tigris is behind this mound." He drank; and when Khalifah heard the Caliph name the gown and the girdle and the waistcloth, which were the very things that had been taken, he took hold of the mule and said, "Thou stolest my clothes." The Caliph gave him his own satin gown. Khalifah cut a third off the skirt with a knife, because it was too long. "What wage dost thou get for thy piping?" he asked, for the Caliph's mouth was small and his cheeks large. "Ten dinars a month." "I make thy ten dinars every day. Be my apprentice, and I will give thee five."

They fished. They could not pull the net in, and Khalifah said that for the first time he had taken the gown, but this time he would take the ass; together they got it in, full. "Go to the market and fetch two frails," said Khalifah, "and I will keep the fish." The Caliph rode back to Ja'far laughing, and all the Barmecides kissed the ground; and the Caliph said that whoever brought him one of the fish that Khalifah his master had taken would have a dinar. The Mamelukes went down to the river like vultures, and Khalifah, seeing them come, thought they were fish of Paradise, and went into the water up to his neck with two fish in his hands, praying that his partner the piper would come. He gave them in the end to the chief eunuch, Sandal, who had no money on him, and told him to come to the palace in the morning. "Whence hadst thou that gown?" said the Caliph's own tailor, in the street. "From a man I taught to fish," said Khalifah. "I forgave him the cutting off of his hand, for stealing my clothes, and he gave me this." "He forgave a hand," said the nurse. "There are not many in this book who do." "No," said the King. "Not many."

On the 838th night my father said that wheat in the lower market was double what it had been in the spring, and that three men had been taken forestalling it, buying from the carters at the gates and holding it back. "Irons?" he said. The King did not answer, and my father wrote a word on his palm and did not look at it. "No," said the King. "Make them sell at the old price, to the kitchens, what they bought. And write their names." "All three, lord?" "All three. In the Open." Sumayya read them aloud the next night, three names, in a voice that did not know them; and my father said that the second was a cousin of his, and that he had known it when he reported them.

At the palace, Zubaydah, who had heard of Kut al-Kulub and had not eaten for a month, asked the girl to sing for her, and gave her sweets with Bhang in them; and when she was asleep had a chest made and a tomb, and put it about that the girl had choked, and told her women she would strike off the neck of whoever said she was alive. The Caliph came back from the chase and went to the tomb and wept on it. "There is nobody in it," said Sumayya. "No." "That is another," said the nurse. "Hasan's mother had one, and the three graves, and this." "Baghdad is full of empty graves," said Shah Zaman. "Not all of them are empty," said the King, very quietly, and no one said anything, because no one could have said what he meant, and my father looked at his palm. Zubaydah gave the chest to a eunuch to sell on the condition that it was bought unopened, and give the price in alms.

The Caliph, to amuse himself, had Ja'far write twenty papers: twenty sums of money from a dinar to a thousand, and twenty offices from the smallest to the Caliphate, and twenty punishments from a beating to death, and told Khalifah to draw one. "Whatever is on it, I will give," he said. "If it is the Caliphate I will take off my robe, and if it is hanging I will do it." Ja'far said to himself that something might fall to this wretch's lot and be the end of him, and that he would be the cause. Khalifah drew a hundred blows; and they beat him. He drew a second: naught shall be given to the fisherman. He drew a third: one dinar. "He wrote the papers himself," said the King. "Ja'far wrote them, lord," said my sister. "The Caliph told him what to write." "He made the paper choose." "Yes, lord," said my father, from his corner. "So that it should not be him." "It was him." "Yes, lord." The King looked at the Roll, and did not say any more. Khalifah, outside, threw the dinar to Sandal, who saw that his eyes were wet, and gave him a hundred dinars for the fish.

He walked to the slave-market, where a chest was being sold; it was Zubaydah's. The bidding reached a hundred dinars and he said, "A hundred and one," and the merchants laughed and the eunuch said, "Sell it to him." He carried it home on his head. In the night it moved. He thought there were Jinn in it, and woke the quarter for a lamp, and broke the lock with a stone, and there lay a girl like a Houri, who woke and said, "Bring me jessamine and narcissus." "There is only henna," said Khalifah. She asked where she was; he said she was his slave, bought for a hundred dinars and one; she asked his name. He fetched her bread and cheese and a cucumber and a pitcher of water from his neighbours, whom he woke twice, and she wrote a note to Ibn al-Kirnas the jeweller and told him to take it to the jewel-market and say nothing. The jeweller read it and kissed it and gave him a thousand dinars and a mule; he got on face to crupper and held the tail and was thrown. "She sent him a thousand dinars more," said my sister. "Then she took him to the Caliph."

The Caliph said, "Wast thou in very deed my partner yesterday?" "By Him who gave thee thy cousin's succession," said Khalifah, "I know her not, except by sight and speech." The Caliph gave him fifty thousand dinars and a robe and a mule and slaves to serve him, so that he was like a King; and was angry for a long time with Zubaydah, and would not go to her, until she wrote him a letter in verse: "I long once more the love that was between us." And he read it, and said, "All sins doth God forgive," and answered that he pardoned her. "She wrote first," said the nurse. "She asked," said Sumayya. "Everybody who asks is pardoned," said Shah Zaman. "In this book." "In this book," said the King. Khalifah took a monthly pay of fifty dinars and a mansion and a wife, the daughter of a chief man, and praised God in verse, and lived until the Destroyer of Delights. The book tells him again, from another manuscript, as Khalif, with a handsome ape and a village that pays twenty thousand dinars a year; I give you only the first.

The north was a hundred and fifteen days without rain. There were fourteen hundred at the north gate, and three ovens in Coppersmiths' Row, and a fourth being built by the palace masons. On the 845th night my sister began Masrur and Zayn al-Mawasif, and I saw the King look at the ceiling, as a man looks to see whether the roof is sound, and look at the window, which was clear and hard and blue. In the morning I went up to the roof of the Roll-room, which I had not done since the first snow, and saw the north road: a line of grey people, women with children on their hips, walking to the gate where the smoke of the kitchens went straight up, there being no wind to bend it.

Night 845. Shahrazad and Dunyazad. Present. Open: a merchant named Masrur, only begun; a cobbler, seventy-one, who is dead, and eight men let out of the jails for words, who went where nobody saw; a litter, and a smell of lime; kitchens at the north gate, fourteen hundred at the gate, three ovens and a fourth, and a baker who will not call it the King's bread; a slave-girl called Marsinah, who said it was done; a shutter, shut and barred, in the Tanners' Lane; a eunuch who told the truth, in Sumayya's hand; rains a hundred and fifteen days late in the north; a son named Yusuf, one hundred and ninety-five days old, who has laughed; a boy in shoes that squeak, who says Ba; a woman who was asked, after; a woman who was not asked; a woodcutter, who was not asked; a book of names; a boon, not yet asked.

## Chapter 48 · Nights Eight Hundred and Forty-six to Eight Hundred and Sixty-three: Chess for Everything, and a Man Who Knocked at His Own Door

The merchant Masrur dreamed that he held a white dove in a garden and that a great bird came down and took it out of his hand; and in the morning he went out to find someone who would say what it meant. Nobody would. He walked until he was far from his own street, and heard a voice reciting on the other side of a wall, and the door was open, and he went in. There was a garden with a blessing painted over each of its four daises, on the house, on its owner, on every guest who came in need; and at the far end of it, behind a curtain of red brocade, four women sat, and one of them, the book is careful to say, was over four feet and under five. This was Zayn al-Mawasif, the Adornment of Qualities. "What brings you into a house that is not yours," she said, "among women who are not yours, without leave?" He said the garden had pleased him. "With love and gladness," she said, and told him to go. He asked for water. The book has the two of them call one another by their faiths here, as a person is called by a name; I leave them out, here and everywhere in this tale, and the husband's too, and shall not say again that I have. He said her water was not forbidden to him nor his to her, since we are all one creation, and she had it brought, and then food, and a cup with writing on the outside, Guard thy tongue, and when he had drunk it, writing on the inside, And hide her secrets from foes.

The maid Hubub told him what would not work. Her mistress, she said, was the daughter of a strict house and had never been seen outside it, and had no use for money or for men; if he wanted her he must put her into verse. He did. She answered in verse that told him to leave, and kept him the whole night, and in the morning made him swear to tell no one and to keep company with no other woman, and swore the same herself, and sent Hubub home with him to see what he owned. "If he is a man of condition we will take him," she said, "and if not, we will let him go." He was a man of condition. She played him at chess. It takes three days in the book and she won every bout: ten dinars a bout, then a hundred, then his shop, then his slave-girls and houses and gardens, until a Kazi was fetched, who looked at her fingers and lost his wits, and wrote the deed that made everything Masrur had in the world hers. Then she asked him for things he could not buy, and he went out with nothing, and Hubub followed to see what credit he had, and he turned round in the road and told her the truth. She went back weeping. Zayn al-Mawasif wrote him a note: all she had taken would come back to him, and he should come when it was dark. He came, and she gave him the shops, the houses, the deed. The book spends a poem on him and a poem on her, and a poem about her body that I leave out.

"All of it?" said the King. "All of it, lord." "It is the only way to find out," said the nurse. "Find out what?" said Sumayya. "Whether they stay when there is nothing." "It is expensive," said Shah Zaman. "He stayed," said the King. "He had nowhere else," said my father, in the voice he uses for numbers. On the 850th night the rains in the north were a hundred and twenty days late, and he wrote it on his palm, which by now had so many things on it that he had to write across them. The fourth oven in Coppersmiths' Row was lit that morning by the palace masons; Hamid asked for a fifth, and four boys; there were sixteen hundred at the north gate, and the line for the loaves went out through the gate and half-way round the wall. "Give him what he asks," said the King. The second of the three men whose names Sumayya had read, my father's cousin, had brought his wheat to the kitchens on his own cart, and carried the sacks in himself, and stood at the ovens half a morning, and would not be given a receipt. Hamid sent the boy who carries the loaves to say so, and nothing else. My father heard it, and had nowhere on his palm to write it.

The husband came home. His wife had washed her face in saffron to look ill, and told him she had sickened for his absence, and begged him never to go again without a companion; he said he would take one, and opened his shop, and that same morning Masrur came and sat beside him and bought drugs and spices, and came again, and within a week the husband was asking him to be his partner. She made a great business of not appearing before a stranger, and appeared, veiled, and sat across from Masrur and looked at him until the day ended. The husband had a mocking-bird that had always come to his head when he sat down to eat; in his long absence it had grown used to Masrur's lap, and now it would not come to its master. That night his wife said a name in her sleep, and the next night, and the third; on the fourth he lay awake and heard her say Masrur. He asked the man's name at table, and was told, and went out to fetch his cousins to witness their brotherhood, and came back by the back way and stood at a window that gave on the room, and saw his wife fill her mouth with wine and give it to the man beside her, and pour rose-water over him from head to foot. Then he went round to the front door and knocked.

"He knocked," said Shah Zaman. "He had a key," said the nurse. The King had got up and gone to the window, which gives on the court and a great deal of sky, and he said, with his back to us, "He knocked so that someone would tell him it had not happened." And someone did: the girl told her mistress that her master was at the door, and her mistress said to let him in; and the girl told him that the door had not been opened, day or night, since he went; and he said, "That pleases me." "It did not," said the nurse. "He said it did," said the King. Nobody asked him how he knew. He came back to his place, and my sister, who had waited without moving, went on: the husband put off the brotherhood to another day, and Masrur went home.

After that he sold all he owned, and forged a letter from kinsmen asking him to bring his wife for twelve days, and had a litter made for her and her maids. She saw what it was. While he was out loading the camels she went to the three doors of the house, the outer first, and wrote on each in verse: on the first, to a dove, to carry her greeting; on the second, to whoever passed, to remember her; on the third, to Masrur by name, not to forget what had been sworn. Then she let herself be lifted into the litter. Masrur found the house shut and the doors written on, and read them in order, and fell down; and when he came to himself he went out by the road they had taken, and came up with the caravan at the rear, where she rode, and held to the litter, weeping, while she begged him to turn back before morning showed him to her husband. He fell down again, and when he woke the caravan was out of sight. At the place where Masrur comes up with it the King's thumb went to the margin of the margin, found a word, and stayed on it; it was the eighth, came. I saw, and looked away.

The husband, who had begun to find the letters, took her silks and gave her hair-cloth, and her maids the same, and had three pairs of irons made; and the smith who was brought to put them on looked at her and could not. He begged the lightest pair for her and the heaviest for the maids; and going home that night he said some lines aloud about the chain on such a leg, which a judge in the road overheard, and sent for him. When he was sent back to bring her to the court, he made keys for the padlocks, and opened the door and the irons, and showed the three of them the way. I thought of the casket with seven padlocks on the first page of the Roll, and of the girl who got out of it every time the Jinni slept; and I did not write that on either sheet.

The two riders Shah Zaman had sent to Samarkand on the 826th night came back on the morning of the 856th, one on a lame horse, with a letter in the hand of the governor of Bukhara, the man he had made sit and watch him keep accounts for forty days. Shah Zaman read it in the Roll-room with his finger under the line. The state granaries on the Oxus were full of the last two harvests; there was no hunger on that side of the mountains; the governor had counted what could be spared and counted it again, and would send it: three hundred camel-loads in the first caravan and a second to follow, sixty days if the passes were clear and seventy if they were not. Then, in another tone, he added that the room Shah Zaman had shut after his wife was now the counting-room, and the ledgers were kept in it. Shah Zaman stopped there, and went on. "Sixty days," said the King. "Put it in the Open," he told my father. "As promised. Not as coming. Coming is what you can see on the road." My father wrote on his palm, across the rains. "I thought I had wasted forty days," said Shah Zaman. "No," said the King, and then, "Read the last part again," and Shah Zaman, who had meant to skip it, read it.

At the judge's house she told him she was no man's wife but a stranger, whom the man she was shackled to had carried a long way from home with her dead father's money; and he looked at her and asked if she would marry him, and she said yes. She went to the second and told him the same, and the third, and the fourth, none of whom knew of the others. In the morning, while the husband was at a bride-feast, she went to the court in her best silk, and the four of them looked at her: one dropped his pen, one's tongue stopped in his mouth, one made a mistake in his sum; and they sent four sergeants for the husband, who was dragged before them and said, "She is my wife." What they did to him then, and in the street afterwards, I leave out. They did not ask him whose the money was, or what he had done; they told him what to say, that she was no wife of his and the money hers, and he said it, and they gave her the money and the paper and sent him to the jail. "They did not ask him," said Sumayya. "Not one question," said my sister. "And her?" said the King. "Four times, lord. The same question." "Whether she would marry them." "Yes." "And not the other," said the King, and no one asked which.

That night she rode out with her maids in the dark, and rode three days and nights. The judges sat in their court next morning and waited, and she did not come. The chief of them mounted his mule to look, and in the street met the other three, each on his own mule, each looking; and when they had told one another what they were looking for, nobody said anything. Shah Zaman laughed first, one loud short laugh, and then the King, once, through his nose, and the nurse said, "Four," like a woman counting eggs. The chief judge lay down on his bed and made verses and sobbed one sob and died; the second did the same, with other verses; the third and fourth the book tells as it told the first and second, and does not say that anyone was sorry. "Men do not die of it," said the nurse. "No," said my sister. "In books they do." She had come meanwhile to a house of forty men who had sworn off women, and the head of them begged her to rest ten days, and sent the forty to her one by one with his messages, and each fell in love at the door and never named him; and on the ninth night she told her maids that she could not stand against forty men who each wanted her for himself, and they rode out in the last of the dark. The forty, finding the room empty, recited a verse apiece, and then, because they could not follow her, made an image of her and set it up among them. "A picture," said Sumayya. "It was not her," said the nurse. "Nobody asked her to sit." She left every place in this tale at the darkest hour, before it could be called morning; I noticed it on the second sheet, and drew a line through it.

She came home. Her sister Nasim brought back the stuffs that had been left with her, and Zayn al-Mawasif hung the curtains and burned aloes-wood and sent Hubub for Masrur, who had been walking up and down her street for forty days. They fell down together in the doorway, and when they came to themselves they sat down to sherbet and told one another everything from the first. Then a Kazi came, and a contract was written, and they were married; the book makes a ceremony of their faiths here, and I have said what I do with those. The husband, meanwhile, had been let out of the jail by the new judges and was three days from the city. Zayn al-Mawasif called Hubub. "Dig a grave in the burial-ground," she said, "and plant basil and jessamine on it and water it. If he comes and asks for me, say I died twenty days ago of grief for him; if he asks to see the tomb, take him, and weep before him, and put him in." Hubub said, I hear and obey. He came; he was told; he was taken to the grave, and wept, and said some lines about the two things for which the eyes should weep blood, and fell down in a swoon. "He was alive," my sister said, "and Hubub put him in," and said nothing more about it, and nobody asked her to. "That one is not empty," said the nurse. The King said nothing. I looked at my father; he was looking at his palm. "Put it in the Open," said the King at last. "What?" said Sumayya, who had the reed. "A grave with someone in it." She wrote it, and read the line back, as she does, and he said it was straight.

At the end of the 863rd night my sister began the next tale: a merchant of Cairo, and his son, who was asked by the sons of other merchants to go to a garden, and said he could not go without his father's leave, and went to ask it. The boy by the brick, who had three words and had never put two together, said "Ba," and then, after a count of three, "Gain," and looked at the King; and the King said, "Yes," and then, "Again," and got down on the floor with him. In the morning the rains in the north were a hundred and thirty-three days late. There were nineteen hundred at the north gate, and the fifth oven was laid. Yusuf, who was two hundred and thirteen days old, sat on the nurse's rug without her hand for as long as it took the King to count eleven, and then fell over sideways on his brother's shoe, and was not at all put out.

Night 863. Shahrazad and Dunyazad. Present. Open: a merchant of Cairo named Taj al-Din, and his son, who asked leave to go to a garden, only begun; a grave with someone in it; a cobbler, seventy-one, who is dead, and eight men let out of the jails for words, who went where nobody saw; a litter, and a smell of lime; kitchens at the north gate, nineteen hundred at the gate, four ovens and a fifth, and a baker who will not call it the King's bread; a caravan from Samarkand, promised; a slave-girl called Marsinah, who said it was done; a shutter, shut and barred, in the Tanners' Lane; a eunuch who told the truth, in Sumayya's hand; rains a hundred and thirty-three days late in the north; a son named Yusuf, two hundred and thirteen days old, who sits; a boy in shoes that squeak, who says Ba and Gain; a woman who was asked, after; a woman who was not asked; a woodcutter, who was not asked; a book of names; a boon, not yet asked.

## Chapter 49 · Nights Eight Hundred and Sixty-four to Eight Hundred and Eighty: A Rose for a Verse, and a Girdle a Night

Ali Nur al-Din was the son of the merchant Taj al-Din of Cairo, and when the sons of other merchants asked him to a garden he said he could not go without his father's leave, and asked, and his father said yes and gave him money. "He asked," said Sumayya, who had just read us the Open, the grave and all, in the voice she keeps for lists. "He did," said the King. "And he was given." It was a garden of every fruit the book could think of, each in two kinds, with a verse for each, and I give you the pomegranate and leave the rest; and a gardener who gave out roses only against verses, ten roses, ten young men, ten verses, which they made while Ali Nur al-Din watched. Then the wine. He said he had never drunk it and would not. The gardener said that God is forgiving; one of the young men swore by the divorce of his wife that Ali would, another said it was for his sake, a third that it would mend his heart, and when he said it was bitter they put sugar in the cup. He drank ten. He asked for music, and they fetched a girl with a lute, and what the book does with her I leave out.

On the 866th night the fifth oven in Coppersmiths' Row was lit, and by the 867th there were two thousand at the north gate. Hamid, so the boy who carries the loaves said, had asked for nothing, which my father took to mean that he would need something soon. In the Roll-room Yusuf, who was two hundred and eighteen days old, went on his stomach across the rug toward the brick, pulling with his elbows, a hand's breadth at a time, with the face of a man crossing a river; and the older boy took him by the ankle and brought him back, and did it four times, and then, because it was not working, lay down beside him and showed him the brick from close to. "Let them," said the King, when the nurse moved. Nobody moved again.

He rode home in the dark. His mother met him at the door and put her face to his and smelt the wine, and his father, who did not love wine-drinkers, came to his bed and smelt it too, and said, "Is folly come to such a pass with thee?" And Ali Nur al-Din, who was drunk, lifted his hand and struck his father in the face; the book says where, and what came of it, and I do not. His father, when they had brought him round, swore by the oath of divorce, which is the oath a man swears when he wants to be believed and puts his wife on it, that in the morning he would cut off his son's right hand. "He swore it by her," said the nurse. "She was in the room." "She had not been asked," said Sumayya. "She was the one who got him out," said my sister. "At dawn," said the King. "In the morning, lord." "Oaths sworn at night," said the nurse, "are mostly undone by morning." "By whom?" "By whoever swore them, if he wakes in time." "Yes," said the King. The mother waited until the father slept and the moon was up, and woke the boy, who was sober now, and told him what he had done and what was sworn. "Go," she said, and gave him a purse of a hundred dinars and told him to send word where he was. As he went he saw, on the edge of the chest, a second purse, a great one, of a thousand, which the book says she forgot. He took it, and tied both round his waist, and was out of Cairo by dawn. "She forgot it," said the King. "The book says so." "A woman who has just counted out a hundred," said the nurse, "does not forget a thousand by the same chest." "Write it forgotten," said the King. On the second sheet I wrote forgotten, and underneath, in the nurse's words, "no."

He went by ship to Rosetta and by boat to Alexandria, and walked in at the Gate of the Lote-tree, and an old man came down from his shop in the druggists' market and took him by the hand and led him home and fed him. Years before, in Cairo, the old man said, he had been short a thousand dinars on a purchase, and a merchant who did not know him had weighed it out and taken no paper; and the merchant was this boy's father. Ali Nur al-Din gave him the great purse to keep for him, and spent the hundred in the lanes, eating and walking and looking at the sea, and when it was gone went back to the shop for a little of his own money and found the old man out, and sat down in the shop to wait.

There came into the market a man of Persia on a mule with a girl behind him, and he gave her to the broker to cry; the broker set her on an ebony stool and lifted her veil, and the bidding went to nine hundred and fifty. The Persian asked whether she consented. He had been sick on the road, he said, and she had nursed him, and he had sworn not to sell her to anyone she did not approve; her sale was in her own hand. So the broker went to her and asked, and she said, "Show me the man." "He asked her," said Sumayya. "Before," said the nurse. "Yes," said the King. "Before." She was shown six. She sent each back with a verse about him, and the broker was cuffed at every stall, and I give you the dyed beard and the long beard and leave out the rest, because the rest is about what is wrong with the men's bodies, and I do not like to laugh at that. The King laughed once, at the beard, and stopped. "Write that down," he said. "In the Open?" said Sumayya. "No. It is not open." So on the second sheet, among the things the book does and I have changed, I wrote: a girl whose sale was put in her own hand. Then her eye fell on a young man in a striped coat sitting on a shop-bench in the middle of the merchants, and she took a ruby ring off her finger and gave it to the broker and said, "Take me to him."

Ali Nur al-Din said, when she asked why he did not bid, that if he had been in his own country he would have bought her with all he had; she said that if he would add one dinar to the price it would hearten her, though he did not buy, so that the merchants might say, he is a Cairene, he knows slave-girls. He said a thousand, and she said, "I sell myself to this young man for a thousand dinars," and the Kazi was fetched, and the paper written, before he understood that it was done. He paid out the thousand from the druggist's keeping and took her to the poor room the old man had lent him, and she looked round at the patched rugs and said it would do until he went home. He had nothing else; he borrowed fifty dirhams from the druggist, who said he would lend him up to ten times and after that would not return his greeting, and she sent him for silk of five colours at twenty dirhams and for bread and meat and wine and flowers with the rest. She cooked, and they ate; what the book gives the night I leave to the night. When he slept, she took out a pair of knitting needles and made a girdle.

In the morning she gave it to him and told him to sell it in the Persian bazaar for twenty dinars, and he said it could not be, a girdle of twenty dirhams' silk made in one night; and it fetched twenty dinars, money down. He paid the druggist his fifty and bought silk, and she made another. Every night she made a girdle and every morning he sold it, and they lived so for a year and a half. "Five hundred," said the nurse. I had five hundred and forty on the second sheet. "She kept none," said the King. "He sold one every morning, lord. She kept the money in a box, against need." "The money," said the King. "And the girdles went." "They went," said my sister. "I do not think she ever saw one again after it was finished." He put his thumb on the stroke for that night in the Roll, beside the straight line, and took it away. At the end of the year she made a kerchief of silk of six colours, which took a week of nights besides, and he wore it on his shoulders in the market, and people stopped to look, because there was not another like it in the world, and he took it for a thing that could only bring him good.

One night he woke and she was weeping. She said that parting was near, and told him how to know the man who would bring it: an old man with one eye and a limp. "Do not speak with him, do not buy from him or sell to him, do not return his greeting, though the law says you must," she said. He said that if he saw him he would kill him. "No," she said. "Do not do even that. Do nothing." "Do nothing," said the King, as a man reads aloud a line he has not met before. "She said it as if it were a thing he could do, lord," said my sister. "He could not," said the nurse. He could not. He fell asleep next morning on a shop-bench in the market with the end of the kerchief in his fist, and the old man with one eye and a limp sat down beside him with seven others and took the other end in his hand and turned it over. "She should have made it badly," said Shah Zaman. "She could not," said my sister. The King put his thumb on the stroke again, and this time left it.

Ali Nur al-Din woke and knew him and cried out. The old man asked who had made the kerchief; Ali Nur al-Din said his mother. He offered five hundred, six, nine, a thousand; Ali said no, for it was the only one; the merchants round them said that its price was a hundred at most, and nine hundred was profit, and told him to sell, and he was ashamed before them, and sold. The old man paid the thousand in front of them, and then said that he and the merchants must be his guests that night, for he had old wine and a fat lamb; and when Ali would have gone home to her they swore him by the divorce and held him back by main force. At the table they filled his cup and the old man asked, in the voice of a man making conversation, whether he would sell the girl he had bought a year and a half ago for a thousand dinars, for five thousand, for ten; and Ali, who was drunk, said before them all, "I sell her to thee for ten thousand," and the old man sent for a Kazi and witnesses. In the morning he counted out the ten thousand, and Ali Nur al-Din said, "I sold thee nothing; I have no slave-girl." And the merchants said, you did, and we are the witnesses; are you angry that you bought her for a thousand, and had a year and a half of her, and made ten thousand besides? Take the money. And he took it.

"They made him," said the nurse. "They swore him by the divorce, and they held him by force, and they made him drink." "There was a Kazi once," said the King, "who said that a divorce under compulsion is sanctioned by no school." "I remember him," said my father. "Is a sale?" "The schools differ, lord. And the Kazi who wrote this one was not asked." "Nor was Ali Nur al-Din," said the King. "The book does not say that he was," said my sister. "It is kept, lord," said my father, from his corner, and I saw the King look at him and look away. He did not say, as he says of other things, put it in the Open. I put it in myself.

All that night Miriam sat waiting, and the druggist's wife sat up with her and said he was surely with friends from Cairo; and in the morning she saw him come into the street behind the old man with one eye, in the middle of the merchants, and began to shake like a ship in a gale. "I told thee," she said. He wept; she kissed him between the eyes. The old man came in to kiss her hands, and she struck him on the cheek and said, "Thou hast followed me and followed me." He laughed, and swore by a name I leave out that if the boy had loved her he would not have sold her. Then the book says who she was. She was the daughter of a king across the sea; she had been sick, and vowed to visit a church on an island if she lived; and on the way the ships of the other side took her and all her ladies and sold them at Kairouan; and she was sold to a merchant of Persia who could not be a husband to any woman, and who set her to serve him. He fell ill, and she nursed him two months; and when he was well he said to her, "Ask a boon." She said, "Sell me only to the man of my choice." He taught her what he believed, and she learned it, and that, too, I leave where I have been leaving such things. "And he swore," said my sister, "and put her sale in her own hand." I did not look at the King, and he did not look at me, and the nurse bit off her thread.

The old man had a ship, and a mule with a silk canopy for her, and she was carried out by the sea-gate and rowed to the ship, and stood looking at Alexandria until it went under the sea; the book gives her a long poem for it, and I give you the first line. Ali Nur al-Din went back to the room and found her frame and the dress she had worn, and held them against him, and locked the door and ran to the shore, and stood looking at where the ship had been, and called her name. An old man came off a ship that lay there and asked whether he wept for the girl who had sailed yesterday with the man from over the sea; and Ali fell down. The old man was the captain of a ship bound for her city, with a hundred merchants in it. "Have patience," he said. "Three days, and I will bring thee to her, if God wills."

On the 880th night the rains in the north were a hundred and fifty days late, and there were twenty-three hundred at the north gate, and Hamid had asked for a sixth oven. My father held up his palm to show the King that it was full. "Use the other hand," said the King. He turned the other hand over and wrote on the back of it, and looked at the number for some time, and put both hands in his sleeves.

Night 880. Shahrazad and Dunyazad. Present. Open: a young man on a quay in Alexandria, who sold what he did not mean to sell, and a ship that sails in three days, only begun; a father's oath, sworn at night, to cut off a hand in the morning; a purse, forgotten; a sale made under compulsion, and the Kazi who wrote it; a grave with someone in it; a cobbler, seventy-one, who is dead, and eight men let out of the jails for words, who went where nobody saw; a litter, and a smell of lime; kitchens at the north gate, twenty-three hundred at the gate, five ovens and a sixth asked for, and a baker who will not call it the King's bread; a caravan from Samarkand, promised; a slave-girl called Marsinah, who said it was done; a shutter, shut and barred, in the Tanners' Lane; a eunuch who told the truth, in Sumayya's hand; rains a hundred and fifty days late in the north; a son named Yusuf, two hundred and thirty days old, who crawls; a boy in shoes that squeak, who says Ba and Gain; a woman who was asked, after; a woman who was not asked; a woodcutter, who was not asked; a book of names; a boon, not yet asked.

## Chapter 50 · Nights Eight Hundred and Eighty-one to Eight Hundred and Ninety-four: A Hundred Heads, and a Man Who Always Went to Fetch Something

The captain's ship, with a hundred merchants in it, and Ali Nur al-Din, sailed fifty-one days, and was taken off the coast of the city across the sea by the king's cruisers, which had been scouring those waters ever since his daughter came home and took every ship that came from our side. They were paraded before him and put in a cellar; and a day later the galleon came in with Miriam, and the king rode down and took her in his arms, and her mother asked her, privately, whether she was as she had been. She said she was not: she had been sold from merchant to merchant, and one had beaten her and forced her, and the next. I do not say whether it was true; the book does not. "What else could she say?" said Sumayya. "Nothing," said the nurse. "And they asked for a hundred." The queen told the king, and the king told his grandees, and the grandees said that nothing would make her clean again but the heads of a hundred men from our side of the sea. "How many?" said the King. "A hundred, lord." "For what she said." "For what they thought she meant," said my sister. They sent for the prisoners. What was done I leave out, and the book does not leave out one head: it goes down the rug man by man, beginning with the captain, and my sister told it in a single breath and stopped, and the nurse put down her mending.

There was one left. Ali Nur al-Din was already blindfolded at the rug when an old woman, the keeper of a church, came up to the king and reminded him that he had vowed five captives to every church if his daughter were restored; and the king, who had one man left, said, take him. She led him to the church and gave him a black gown and set him to sweeping. On the seventh day she told him to put on his own clothes and take ten dirhams and go out, because the king's daughter was coming to the church that day with four hundred ladies, who would cut him to pieces if they found him. He walked all day round the city and learned its gates, and came back at dusk; and the princess came, and he saw her, and cried her name before four hundred. The ladies ran at him with swords. "Leave him," said Miriam. "He is mad." And he rolled his eyes and foamed at the mouth and twisted his legs, and I think it was the first thing in the book he had done well. "He had been drunk," said Shah Zaman. "He knew how it is done." That night she stayed behind alone, she said, to pray in the chapel, and when her ladies slept she went to him where he sat on live coals, and told him: tomorrow, when the first third of the night is gone, go to the offering-chest and take what is light, open the door to the tunnel and go down to the sea; there is a little ship with ten men; when the captain puts out his hand, give him yours; and do not sleep.

The captain was a tall old man with a long beard, and when one of the sailors said that the king meant to sail in this ship himself in the morning to guard his daughter, he struck the man down, and so with the rest, all ten; and told Ali Nur al-Din to haul up the mooring-stake; and Ali did, and stood shaking, and was not told why. I leave out the ten. At dawn the captain took hold of his long beard, and it came off in his hand. "It was she," said my sister. "She had got the captain's place and his beard by a way I leave out, and she stuck it on her face." The King laughed. "Another beard," said Shah Zaman. "It is a book of beards," said the nurse. They sailed with a fair wind and came to Alexandria in the book's usual space of a sentence, and Ali Nur al-Din tied the ship to the quay and left her in it and went up into the city to borrow a veil and a mantle and walking boots from the druggist's wife.

"He left her in the ship," said the nurse. "For the length of a street," said my sister. "He went for a veil." "He is always going for something," said Sumayya. In the time it takes to borrow a veil, the king, who had missed his daughter at daybreak and found ten dead men on the shore and the postern open and the ship gone, had sent his captain of the port after her on pain of a foul death; and the captain asked the old woman at the church where the prisoner was from, and she said Alexandria. They came in at the very hour Ali went ashore, and took the empty ship with one person in it, and sailed home without drawing a sword. The king, when his daughter was brought to him, said, "Thou liest, O whore"; she had told him she was carried off by robbers and had talked them round. He bade crucify her over the palace gate. At those words the King took Yusuf from the nurse's lap, which he does not do at that hour, and held him against his shoulder until the one-eyed Wazir, who had wanted her all along, came in and asked for her to wife: he would build her a palace with walls no thief could climb, and when it was finished he would cut the throats of thirty men from our side of the sea before its gate. And they married her to him.

Ali Nur al-Din came back with the veil and the mantle and the boots, and the ship was gone. The people on the shore told him, and reproached him, and one said, why did you not bring her up without a mantle? and each said a hard word, and one said, let him be, he has enough. The druggist found him in a faint and said, praised be God, you have lost nothing; you have gained by her. "He had nine thousand dinars," said Shah Zaman. "He did not want them," said my sister. He took the first ship going to her country, and was taken by the same cruisers, with a hundred more, and brought to the same king, who had them killed one after another and left him to the last because he was young and slight. What was done, again, I leave out; the nurse did not put down her mending, having put it down once. The king knew him and said, "Thou art Nur al-Din." "My name is Ibrahim," he said. They sent for the old woman, to see; and meanwhile the one-eyed Wazir came to the king and said his palace was finished and he had need of his thirty, and the king said he had only this one, take him; and the painters said they had two days' work still to do, and he was put in the stables, in chains, to wait.

There were two stallions, brothers, that the kings of the islands would have given an island to steal, one white as silver and one black as night; and one had a film over his eyes. The king had given him to the Wazir to cure, and he stood in the stable where Ali Nur al-Din lay chained, and the other neighed for him until the whole house shook; and the Wazir told the king, and the king said, "If this, which is but a beast, cannot bear to be parted from his brother, how should it be with those that have reason?" and sent the other stallion too. "I have a brother," said Shah Zaman to the nurse. "We know," said the nurse. The King said nothing. He was looking at the older boy, who had hold of the younger one by the ankle again, to bring him back from the brick. Ali Nur al-Din knew something of horses. He thought: I will say I can cure it, and spoil its eyes, and they will kill me and I shall be at rest. So he took glass, ground fine, and lime, and onion-juice, and bound it on the horse's eyes; and in the morning the film was gone and the eyes were finer than before. The Wazir took off his chains with his own hand and made him master of the horse.

The Wazir's new palace had a lattice over the stable-yard, and his daughter, sitting at it, heard the master of the horse singing in the night, and told the princess, whom the Wazir had married and not touched, because he had sworn not to until the palace was built. The princess came to the lattice and looked down; and he, who had seen nothing for a month but a horse, looked up and said, "That is the voice of the Lady Miriam." She threw him a letter in a kerchief: when the first third of the night is past, saddle the two stallions and bring them to the city gate; if anyone asks, say you are exercising them; and do not sleep. That evening she gave the Wazir wine, and in it a pastille of which, the book says, an elephant would sleep a year; and he fell on his face on the carpet. She filled two saddle-bags with what was light to carry and heavy in worth, and put on armour, and went to the gate. Ali Nur al-Din was at the gate with the halters in his hands, and slept.

"Again," said the nurse. "He had waited all the first third," said Sumayya. "He slept," said the King. A man whom the kings of the islands had been paying for years to steal those stallions came by that night, and found the horses untied and the master asleep with the halters in his fist, and took them off his hands; and Miriam, coming up in the dark with the saddle-bags, took the thief for Ali, and handed them to him, and he laid them on the horses, and they rode out of the gate in silence, till she said, "What ails thee that thou art silent?" and he answered in a voice that was not Ali's. The book describes him for six lines by his colour, and I leave out the six lines. She killed him with one blow, and rode back, and found Ali asleep and snoring where she had left him, and woke him with a cuff. "Did I not tell thee not to sleep?" "My heart was cooled by thy promise," he said. And they rode out of the city.

In the morning the king came with gifts to give the bride and bridegroom good-day, and found the Wazir on the carpet in a drugged sleep; and when he had been waked, and said he knew nothing, the king drew his sword and killed him where he sat. Then he called his three sons and mounted with all his knights, and followed the tracks, and found the two in a green valley, where they had stopped to eat. "And how is thy heart for a fight?" she asked Ali. "As steadfast as a stake in bran," he said, and recited some lines about the mouse, at which Shah Zaman laughed. She told him to keep behind her and she would keep him from harm; and one after another her three brothers rode out at her, each after the king had told him to offer her the old faith before he killed her, and she killed each of them, the eldest first. The King put his hand over the older boy's ear; he had not been told to; and he took it away when she had said the third. The knights fled. The king turned back to his city, and wrote to the Caliph.

He wrote to Harun al-Rashid that his daughter had been stolen by a captive of our side, and asked for her back, and promised half of a great city for the trouble. The Caliph wrote to every governor. Ali Nur al-Din and Miriam, who knew nothing of it, rode into Damascus, where the governor's men were waiting, and were sent on to Baghdad. The Caliph looked at her and at him. He asked Ali his story and said, "How manifold are the sufferings that men suffer!" Then he asked her what she said, and she said what she believed, at some length, and I leave it out. "Art thou willing," said the Caliph, "that this young man be thy husband?" "How should I not be willing," she said, "who was bought by him with his money, and kept with kindness, and ventured for with his life, many times?" "He asked her," said Sumayya. "That is the third," said my sister. "The Persian, the broker, the Caliph." "Write it on the other sheet," said the King. So the Caliph married them. Then the king's envoy, who had come to Baghdad for her, said that if she were not given back his master would send an army by land and sea; and the Caliph ordered his head struck off; and Miriam said, do not soil your sword, and did it herself. The Caliph, who admired her forearm, gave them robes and a house.

In time Ali Nur al-Din longed for his mother and father, and the Caliph gave him leave and letters to the emirs of Cairo, and they went home, and his parents met him and Miriam and honoured her; and they lived in the house with gifts coming in from emirs and merchants, eating and drinking, until the Destroyer of Delights came. The book says nothing about a hand. It says nothing about an eye, either; I leave out the eye, which the book gives once, early, and never again. "The oath," said the King. "By the divorce of his wife," said my father, from his corner, and the room turned toward him, because he had not spoken in this tale. "By the law, lord, a man who swears so to do a thing, and does not do it, has divorced her; she is divorced when the time he named has passed. If he swore to cut the hand at morning and the morning passed and the hand was whole, then at morning his wife was divorced by his own oath." "Could he take her back?" said the nurse. "During the waiting time, lord, he could." "If he asked," said Sumayya. "If he asked her," said my father. "The book does not say that he did." "She woke the boy," said the King. "She knew the oath. She knew what it did." "Yes, lord," said my father. The King put his thumb on the seventh word, hands. "Put it in the Open." "What?" said Sumayya, who had the reed. "A woman who gave up her marriage to save a hand," said the King, "and whether she was asked back." I wrote it, and struck out the line before it about the father's oath, which was the same line seen from the other side.

At the foot of the part of the tale that I had left out I had kept a count on the second sheet, as I did in the Sindbad, of the dead; it came to two hundred and fifteen. I did not read it out. On the 894th night the rains in the north were a hundred and sixty-four days late, and there were twenty-six hundred at the north gate, and Hamid's sixth oven was lit; and Yusuf, who was two hundred and forty-four days old, took hold of the brick with both hands and pulled himself up on it, and stood, for as long as it took the King to say "Ba," which is not his word to say, and then sat down hard. The older boy clapped. At the end of the night my sister began a tale that the Prefect of Cairo used to tell, of an old man in Upper Egypt who was asked where the mother of his children came from.

Night 894. Shahrazad and Dunyazad. Present. Open: an old man of Upper Egypt, who was asked where the mother of his children came from, only begun; a woman who gave up her marriage to save a hand, and whether she was asked back; a purse, forgotten; a sale made under compulsion, and the Kazi who wrote it; a grave with someone in it; a cobbler, seventy-one, who is dead, and eight men let out of the jails for words, who went where nobody saw; a litter, and a smell of lime; kitchens at the north gate, twenty-six hundred at the gate, six ovens, and a baker who will not call it the King's bread; a caravan from Samarkand, promised; a slave-girl called Marsinah, who said it was done; a shutter, shut and barred, in the Tanners' Lane; a eunuch who told the truth, in Sumayya's hand; rains a hundred and sixty-four days late in the north; a son named Yusuf, two hundred and forty-four days old, who stands; a boy in shoes that squeak, who says Ba and Gain; a woman who was asked, after; a woman who was not asked; a woodcutter, who was not asked; a book of names; a boon, not yet asked.

## Chapter 51 · Nights Eight Hundred and Ninety-five to Nine Hundred and One: Two Purses Still Tied, and a Third Child

The Prefect of Cairo said that he lay one night in the house of a man of Upper Egypt, very old, with small children; and when they asked him where their mother came from, the old man said she was a captive of the great war, and that he had a rare adventure with her. He had sowed flax, and the price at home was bad, and people told him to take it to Acre, where there was a buyer. In the market at Acre a woman came to buy flax, with her face uncovered, as the women of that place go, and he was easy with her about the price, and she came back, and he was easier. She walked with an old woman, to whom he said that he was sick with love; and the old woman said it could be done, if no one knew but the three of them, and if he were lavish. He paid her fifty dinars. He made ready his house, which looked on the sea, and spread a bed on the roof, for it was summer, and the woman came, and they ate and drank, and it grew dark. They lay under the sky with the moon on them, and watched the stars shaking in the water; and he said to himself that he was ashamed before the sea. The book has a name for what he was ashamed before, and I say the sea, which is also in the book. He did not touch her. She got up at dawn in a rage and left.

He walked to his shop and sat, and presently she passed, as bright as the moon, with the old woman, who was angry too; and he thought: who are you, that you should refuse her, a saint? So he ran after the old woman and said, bring her again, and she said she would not come back for less than a hundred; and he paid, and the woman came a second night, and again he came to himself and refrained. The third time the old woman asked five hundred, and he decided to spend the whole price of his flax; and before he could, the crier went through the town to say that the truce between the two sides had run out and that everyone from his country had a week to be gone. So he sold what he could, and went to Damascus with a heart full of love for a woman he had paid for and not had, and traded in slave-girls for three years, to ease it. Then the war came, and the Sultan won, and took the cities back, and sent to him for a girl, and bought one, and owed him ten dinars, and there was no money in the treasury that day, having been spent on the war; so they said, take him to the captives and let him choose one for the ten. He went in, and among the women of the other side he saw her.

"He paid three times and did not," said Sumayya. "Four, if you count the ten," said Shah Zaman. "That is a poor merchant," said the nurse. "Or a good one," said Sumayya. The King said, "He paid to be asked to come again." Nobody asked him what he meant. She was another man's wife, a knight's; he chose her; he said to her, "Do you know me?" and she said no; and he told her who he was, the flax-merchant of Acre, whom she had told that he would not see her again except for five hundred; and now she was his for ten. The book has her say a thing then about his faith, and take it for her own, and I leave it out. What he did, the book says, is this: he would not go in to her until he had set her free and had the Kazi write the marriage. And then she conceived. When the war was ended, an envoy came from her king to ask for the captives back, and they were all returned except her, and the envoy asked where she was; and she was brought before the Sultan, and the envoy, and said, as they could see by her middle, that she was with child, and was his, and they should have no more profit of her. The envoy said, take thy wife and go. And then he ran after the man, and said that her mother had sent a chest for her, because her daughter was a captive and naked. He brought it home and she opened it, and found her clothes, and on top of them the two purses, the fifty and the hundred, which he had given the old woman for her, tied still with his own tying.

"She kept them," said the nurse. "Tied," said the King. "Three years," said Shah Zaman. "Untouched, the book says, lord," said my sister. "It is a long way for a purse to go." "It came home," said the King. He asked nothing more, and we went on.

The next tale was a short one, of a ruined man of Baghdad and his slave-girl. He was a man of condition who spent everything on a girl he loved and who loved him, till there was nothing left. He did not know what to do; the girl did. "Sell me," she said. "Someone rich will buy me, and I will find a way back to you." He took her to the market, and a gentleman of Basra bought her for fifteen hundred dinars; and when he had the money the young man repented, and wept, and asked to cancel, and the buyer would not. He sat in a mosque with the bag of gold under his head, and slept; and when he woke, the bag was gone, and his feet were tied with a rope. He threw himself into the Tigris, and they pulled him out. An old man took him home and sat with him until he was calmer, and a friend gave him fifty dinars and told him to go to Wasit, where he had family; and at the river a ship was loading, and the sailors would not take a gentleman, so he bought a sailor's clothes and sat with the crew. Then the girl came aboard, with two women, and after her the gentleman of Basra, who had bought her.

The gentleman fed her at his own table, and asked her how long she meant to go without singing; and the young man, in sailor's clothes in the bows, knew what she suffered for love of him. They hung a curtain along the gunwale and the gentleman sat with his friends before it, and wine was brought, and they pressed her to sing. She tuned the lute and sang two lines about a camp left empty, and wept, and threw it down; and he fell down in a faint, and they thought he was possessed, and a page said, why have you taken this madman aboard? and the sailors said they would put him ashore at the next village. That evening, while the others were on the bank, he went behind the curtain, and took the lute, and tuned it in the manner that he had taught her, and nobody else would know, and went back to his place. When they came on board, and the moon was bright on the river, the gentleman said, do not spoil our evening. She took the lute, and drew a breath, and said, "By God, my master and teacher is in this ship." The gentleman said he would be glad to hear him. The sailors said they had brought no one. The young man laughed, and said, "Yes, I am her master, who taught her when I was her lord," and she said from behind the curtain, "That is my lord's voice."

"She knew the lute," said the nurse. "She knew how it was tuned," said Sumayya. "And she did not say so," said Shah Zaman. "She said it was her master. That is saying so." "In the book it is the lute," said my sister. The gentleman of Basra, who had not touched her, nor even heard her sing before that day, wept with the rest when he had the story; he said he had bought her only to hear singing in Baghdad and had not known; he would free her at Basra and marry her to him, and settle money on them, on one condition: that when he wanted music a curtain should be hung and she sing behind it, and the young man should be of his company. So they drank and sang the rest of the way, and at a landing-place they all got off, and the young man, who was drunk, sat down on his heels and fell asleep; and the ship went on without him, for they were drunk too, and no one missed him. He woke in the sun with nobody there. He had given the girl his money, and he had forgotten to ask the gentleman's name or where he lived.

On the 898th night, at the foot of the bed, with the sand-glass in her hand, my sister said before she began, "There will be a third." No one had said it. I had known since the cold of the 870s, and the nurse longer; and I had not written it in the Roll, which is kept for what is said. The King, I think, had known as he knows the number of loaves. He was on the floor with the older boy, and he did not look up. "When?" "The nurse says about the 990th." "That is a number," said the King. "I am counting," said my sister. He looked up then. "Again," he said. "There will be a third." "Again." "There will be a third." He took Yusuf, who was standing at the brick with both hands, under the arms and held him up against the lamp, as one holds up a cup to see whether it is full. Then he said, "Put it in the Open." "It is not open, lord," said Sumayya. "It is, until it comes," said my sister. I wrote: a third child, not yet.

The young man took a ship to Basra and knew nobody there, and did not know the gentleman's house. He sat down by a grocer who needed a clerk, and wrote out his accounts so well that in a month the grocer's takings were up and his expenses down, and in a year the grocer gave him his daughter and a partnership in the shop. He lived in the grocer's house two years with a broken heart, and would not drink, and one day, the day the singers and dancers of the town go out to eat on the river bank, he went with them, because he thought he might see her; and the boatman of the old ship was going along the bank, and knew him, and took him up. "We thought you had fallen in the river," they said. They told him: when she knew he was lost she tore her clothes and burned the lute, and when they came to Basra she put on black and made a tomb beside the house and stayed in it, and said she would not sing again. They took him to her. She cried out, he thought she had died, and he held her; and the gentleman freed her and married her to him, and settled five hundred dinars a month, on the old terms. The young man went to the grocer and told him what had happened, and begged him to hold him blameless for divorcing his daughter, without any fault of hers; and paid her dowry. "Well," he said at the end, "the Bountiful loaded us with the gifts of good fortune."

"She made her own tomb," said Sumayya. "A tomb with someone in it." "She chose it," said the King. "Do I cross out the other?" I said. "No," said the King. "It is a different grave. She was waiting in that one." "Two years," said the nurse. "And he in the grocer's," said Shah Zaman. "And the grocer's daughter?" said the King. "He begged the father to hold him blameless," said my sister. "And paid her dowry." "He asked her father." "Yes, lord." "Not her." "The book says he told the grocer, lord." "Told," said the King. "Put her in the Open." I wrote: a grocer's daughter, who was divorced and paid, and not asked.

The next tale my sister began on the 899th night, near the dawn: that in the land of Hind there was a mighty king, Jali'ad, who had two-and-seventy kings under him and three hundred and fifty judges in his cities, and whose chief minister, Shimas, was two-and-twenty years old; and who had no child. The King of Hind dreamed that he poured water on the roots of a tree with many trees about it, and fire came out of the tree and burned up all that grew round it. He woke in terror and sent for Shimas, who bowed his head, and smiled, and said that it promised a son. But there was something more, he said, that he did not wish to explain at that hour. The King sent for the interpreters of the realm; and one of them said that Shimas knew the whole, but would not trouble his lord's rest; and that the son would not govern as his father did, but would oppress, and something would befall him that befell the mouse with the cat. And my sister told the Mouse and the Cat: that a cat, on a wet night, weak with cold, came to the door of a mouse's nest and begged him to let her in, a stranger and wretched; and the mouse said, thou art my natural foe, and the cat swore by God that she could not hurt him, she had no strength; and he took pity, and dragged her in, and she lay in the nest till she was rested, and then crept round to the door of it, and when the mouse would have gone out as usual, she seized him. He cried out, "Where are the oaths thou swarest?" And a hunter came by with his hounds, and one of them put his head into the nest, and took her by the neck.

"He let her in," said Sumayya. "He did right," said the King. "He nearly died of it," said the nurse. "He did right, and nearly died," said the King. "That is how it goes." "The dog came," said Shah Zaman. "The dog came," said my sister. "The book says, who has compassion shall be compassionated." "Does it?" said the King. "It says it," said my sister. On the 901st night the rains in the north were a hundred and seventy-one days late, and my father had run out of back of the hand and begun on the wrist; the lower market sold its last sack of wheat on the 899th, and the King's mill was eating its own stock, and Hamid had asked for a seventh oven. There were twenty-eight hundred at the north gate. Yusuf, who was two hundred and fifty-one days old, let go of the brick with one hand and took a step sideways along it, and the older boy said "Yu," and the King said nothing, and did not move, as a man does not move when a bird comes down near him.

Night 901. Shahrazad and Dunyazad. Present. Open: a king of Hind who dreamed he watered the roots of a tree, and the mouse and the cat, only begun; a third child, not yet; a grocer's daughter, who was divorced and paid, and not asked; a woman who gave up her marriage to save a hand, and whether she was asked back; a purse, forgotten; a sale made under compulsion, and the Kazi who wrote it; a grave with someone in it; a cobbler, seventy-one, who is dead, and eight men let out of the jails for words, who went where nobody saw; a litter, and a smell of lime; kitchens at the north gate, twenty-eight hundred at the gate, six ovens and a seventh asked for, and the last sack of wheat in the lower market; a caravan from Samarkand, promised; a slave-girl called Marsinah, who said it was done; a shutter, shut and barred, in the Tanners' Lane; a eunuch who told the truth, in Sumayya's hand; rains a hundred and seventy-one days late in the north; a son named Yusuf, two hundred and fifty-one days old, who takes a step; a boy in shoes that squeak, who says Ba and Gain and Yu; a woman who was asked, after; a woman who was not asked; a woodcutter, who was not asked; a book of names; a boon, not yet asked.

## Chapter 52 · Nights Nine Hundred and Two to Nine Hundred and Seventeen: A Jar of Butter, the Oldest Granary, and a Door with Writing on It

A few months after the dream, the woman the King of Hind loved best told him that the child had stirred, and he sent for Shimas and said, "My dream is come true, and I have my wish. What sayest thou?" And Shimas said nothing. "What ails thee," said the King, "that thou dost not rejoice with me?" Shimas prostrated himself and said that there are three things of which it does not become the understanding to speak until they are accomplished: the traveller, until he is home; the man in the fight, until he has beaten his enemy; and the pregnant woman, until she has cast her burden. My sister told it on the 901st night, looking at the lamp. "Three," said the nurse. "Three," said my sister. "I did not choose it. It is next." "I have been counting," said the King. "Once," said Sumayya. "Aloud, once." "Once is a count," said the nurse.

For he who speaks of a thing before it is, said Shimas, is like the Fakir with the jar of butter. A Fakir was given every day three scones and a little butter and honey by a rich man, and saved the butter in a jar, which he hung over his bed. Sitting up one night with his staff, he thought: I shall sell the butter and buy an ewe, and the ewe will bear a ram-lamb and an ewe-lamb, and those will bear; and I shall sell the males and buy cows, and buy land, and build a palace, and hold a wedding the like of which was never seen. And I shall have a son. I shall teach him philosophy, and bid him do good, and he will not gainsay me; and if I see him disobey, I shall come down on him with this staff. So saying, he raised the staff, and struck the jar, and the butter ran down into his beard. The King said nothing for a while. He had Yusuf on his knee. "He raised the stick," he said, "before there was a ewe." "Yes, lord." "It is the first thing they plan," said the nurse. "The stick." "Not always," said my sister. "Often," said the nurse.

On the 903rd night Shimas gave the second tale, to show that God answers: a pond shrank until there was barely water for the fishes in it, and they went to the Crab, who was the oldest, and asked what they should do. The Crab said they lacked understanding, to despair of God's mercy; the daily bread of every creature was fixed before it was made; let each of them clear his conscience, and ask, and have patience, and if death came they would be at rest, and if there were cause to flee, they would flee. And in a few days there was a violent rain, and the pond was fuller than before. "Because it rained," said the King. "Yes, lord." "It might not have." "Then they would have died, lord," said my sister, "and the book would have put another fish." "The Crab said have patience." "The Crab had no granary," said Shah Zaman. No one expected the King to laugh, and he did not; he looked at my father, who had the number on his wrist and the figures in his sleeve. The King's mill, my father said, had eleven days of flour and the kitchens nine; the lower market had no wheat to sell; Hamid said he could bake from anything that came to him, but not from nothing. "Open the oldest granary," said the King. "A tenth." "The oldest is the sixth year's corn, lord. It is from the hill." "Then it will be eaten first." "You said not to touch it." "I said so on the 660th night. This is the 903rd." "Yes, lord." "Hamid says that grain is a thing that keeps," said the nurse, "and bread is a thing that goes off." "Then send him the one that keeps," said the King, "and let him make the other."

The first carts came down from the hill on the 905th night, twenty of them, with the seal on every sack; my father counted them in at the gate and Hamid counted them out. On the 906th a loaf from the sixth year's corn came to the palace on a board. "It tastes of the hill," said the nurse. "It tastes of having been kept," said the King, and ate the heel of it, and gave the crust to Yusuf, who had been waiting for it with his mouth open, and who put it in his mouth, and looked at the ceiling like a man who is told a thing he has been expecting.

The next nights gave the rest of the seven ministers: a crow and a serpent; a jackal who envied a jackal; a king who stripped a pilgrim of his gown and was burned, with his city, when the pilgrim prayed in the jail; a hawk; a charmer's wife who opened the basket; a spider and the wind. I give you two. The crows had lost their king and could not agree on another, so they decided that whichever flew highest should reign, and they all rose, and each thought himself the highest, until the lowest said, look up, and above them was a hawk. So they made the hawk king. And every day he took a company of them to a cave and ate them, and when the rest came to complain he tore ten of their chiefs in pieces in front of them and called them the murderers. "They chose the highest," said Shah Zaman. "It is how it is done." "It is how it is done," said the King. The spider had built in a high gate and was content, and a wind blew her out into the sea, and she upbraided the wind; and the wind said that this world is a house of trials, and that she should wait, and when it changed carried her home, and she knew her place and clung to it. "Not all go back," said the nurse. "No," said my sister. "The book says she did."

On the 908th night the child was born, and the King named him Wird Khan; and when he was twelve he built him a palace of three hundred and sixty rooms, and put three sages in it with orders to teach him in a different room each day, and write on the door of each room what had been taught there. "On the door," said Sumayya. "A door with writing on it," said Shah Zaman, looking at no one. The sages reported every seventh day. By twelve and a half the boy knew more than any of them, and the King, who could not wait, told Shimas to call the learned of the realm and put the boy to the question.

Shimas asked him a hundred things before them all, about this world and the other, and the body and the soul; I put on the second sheet that my sister gave the questions fast, as one pays out coins, and that the answers are in the book. Of the Prince's two pictures I give you these. A blind man and a cripple begged together, and were let into a garden on condition that they did no waste; the cripple wanted fruit he could not reach, and the blind man could not see it; so the cripple climbed on the blind man's back and guided him to the trees, and they stripped the garden; and when the master asked what they had done, they said they had no means, and he said, I know that you carried the cripple, O blind, and he showed the way. "The cripple knows where the fruit is," said the nurse, "and the blind one has the legs." "And both are beaten," said Sumayya. "That is the body and the soul," said my sister. "The book says the blind one is the body." "It is a garden," said the King. Nobody knew what he meant, and I wrote nothing on either sheet.

Then Shimas asked what a Wazir owes his King; and the Prince said, good counsel, in public and private, and the keeping of secrets, and to tell his lord all he has a right to know, and not to climb to a rank that the King thinks him unworthy of, like the hunter who made friends with a lion, and trusting its gentleness mounted it to skin it, and was torn in pieces. And if the King is a tyrant, said Shimas? Then the Wazir must show him the way of justice, and warn him of the punishment; and if the King will hear him, his end is gained; and if not, there is nothing for it but to leave him with courtesy, because in parting there is ease for each. My father, in his corner, did not move. The King did not look at him. "That is the book," said my father, after a while, to nobody. "Yes," said the King. "I have not parted," said my father. "No," said the King. That was all; and my sister, who had stopped, went on.

On the 912th night Yusuf, who was two hundred and sixty-two days old, let go of the brick with both hands and walked from it to the King, six steps, with his arms out and holding nothing, while the older boy, who held nothing either, stood and watched with his mouth open. The King did not put out a hand. He sat with his hands a little off the floor, and when the child arrived, he put one thumb on the eighth word in the margin of the margin, came, and one on the ninth, Yusuf, and said nothing at all. The older boy said, "Yu. Ba." The nurse said something to the cats.

When the Prince was seventeen King Jali'ad sickened, and called him, and told him to keep ten precepts: when wroth, to curb wrath; when afflicted, to be patient; to speak soothfast; to perform what he promised; to do justice in judgment; to be merciful in power; to deal generously with his governors; to forgive his foes; to be lavish of good offices to his adversary; and to stay his mischief from him. And ten more, for the people: when thou dividest, be just; when thou punishest, oppress not; fulfil thine engagement; hearken to those that give thee loyal counsel; when offence is offered, neglect it; abstain from contention; enjoin the laws; abate ignorance with a sharp sword; withhold thy regard from treachery; and do equal justice, so that the great and small love thee and the wicked fear. Sumayya counted on her fingers. "Twenty," she said. "Which have I kept?" said the King. It was not a question for the room, and the room answered it. "When thou hast power, be merciful," said the nurse. "Not all." "No," said the King. "When thou punishest, oppress not," said my sister, and no one said anything. "Forgive thy foes." "The eight," said Sumayya. "Hearken to those that give thee loyal counsel," said Shah Zaman, and looked at my father. "Abate ignorance with a sharp sword," said Sumayya. "I should skip that one," said the nurse. "Skip it," said the King. "Perform what thou promisest," said my sister. I did not look up. "That one," said the King, "I have not yet been asked to keep." I wrote nothing; I heard the nurse's needle stop.

Then Jali'ad died, and they buried him and put the crown on his son; and for a little while the young king governed as his father had, until the world waylaid him. The book says so in those words. He began to send for every beauty he heard of and take her, until he had more women than Solomon; he shut himself up with a company of them for a month at a time, and did not go out, nor look into the complaints of his people, and if they wrote to him he did not answer. The grandees met in secret and said that some calamity would come, and went to Shimas, saying, thou art the chiefest and the wisest of us; go and speak with him. Shimas asked a page to ask leave for him to go in, and the page said that for a month no one had seen the King's face, and told him to find the slave who carried the King's food from the kitchen, a man the book describes by his colour, which I leave out. Shimas sat at the kitchen door until the man came, and asked him, when the King had eaten and his temper was at its best, to say that Shimas was at the door.

On the 917th night the rains in the north were a hundred and eighty-seven days late, and there were thirty-two hundred at the north gate, and Hamid's seventh oven was lit and an eighth asked for; the carts from the hill had come down every day for twelve days, and the Vizier had written the count of them on the inside of his left arm, where the sleeve covers it. My sister stopped with Shimas at the kitchen door, and the dawn was at the window; and the King said nothing, and let her.

Night 917. Shahrazad and Dunyazad. Present. Open: a wazir at a kitchen door, waiting to speak to a king who has not been seen in a month, only begun; a third child, not yet; a grocer's daughter, who was divorced and paid, and not asked; a woman who gave up her marriage to save a hand, and whether she was asked back; a purse, forgotten; a sale made under compulsion, and the Kazi who wrote it; a grave with someone in it; a cobbler, seventy-one, who is dead, and eight men let out of the jails for words, who went where nobody saw; a litter, and a smell of lime; kitchens at the north gate, thirty-two hundred at the gate, seven ovens and an eighth asked for, and a baker who will not call it the King's bread, baking from the sixth year's corn; a caravan from Samarkand, promised; a slave-girl called Marsinah, who said it was done; a shutter, shut and barred, in the Tanners' Lane; a eunuch who told the truth, in Sumayya's hand; rains a hundred and eighty-seven days late in the north; a son named Yusuf, two hundred and sixty-seven days old, who walks; a boy in shoes that squeak, who says Ba and Gain and Yu; a woman who was asked, after; a woman who was not asked; a woodcutter, who was not asked; a book of names; a boon, not yet asked.

## Chapter 53 · Nights Nine Hundred and Eighteen to Nine Hundred and Thirty-one: The Last Story Wins, Three Hundred and Five Camels, and a Name Said with the Bread

On the 918th night the slave took the King his dinner, and when his temper was at its best said that Shimas was at the door, and Shimas was let in. He said that the King had been given, by God, learning and wisdom beyond any king before him, and that he was forgetting his father's charge and the people's complaints; and he told him of a fisherman who went out to the river, and saw a big fish from the bridge, and took off his clothes and plunged in after it, and caught it, and found himself far from the bank; and would not let go of the fish, but floated with it into a whirlpool from which no one comes out. The keepers of the river ran along the shore and cried to him, "Throw away what is in thy hand and save thyself!" And he would not, or could not, and went down with it. "He should have let go," said the King. "He did, lord," said Shah Zaman, "at the last." "Too late." My sister said that the book has the fisherman say, as he went down, that it was he who had left the plain way where there was safety, for concupiscence. "And the King of Hind?" said Sumayya. "He said he would come out and sit in judgment the next day."

He did not. A woman he loved best said that the Wazirs were duping him, so that he should have no joy of his kingship but spend his life warding off their troubles, like the boy and the thieves: seven thieves who found an orphan and fed him and set him to climb a walnut tree and shake it down for them, and when the owner of the garden came they said it was the boy's tree, and the boy was punished and had not had a nut. The next day Shimas came with a camel that broke free while its master was admiring its milk, and a man who took his wife into his garden, which I give you by its title only; the favourite answered with a merchant who trusted a doctor who gave him a purge, and a stronger purge, and the third time a poison; and Shimas with the jackals who made a wolf their judge and found that he kept the whole camel; and she with a shepherd who gave up his sheep one by one to a lion that was stuffed with straw. The shape was always the same. "They are fighting with stories," said Shah Zaman. "Whoever tells the last one wins," said the nurse. "He decided each time," said Sumayya, "after the last one." "Who tells the last one here?" said the King. "The mistress," said Sumayya. "She does not let anyone else," said the nurse.

On the 921st night, at first light, a rider came down the north road at a gallop to say that camels had been seen from the post-house at the second milestone, a long file of them, coming in under red dust, with a standard that was not ours. We all went up to the roof of the Roll-room, except my sister, whom the nurse would not let climb the stair: the King, with Yusuf on his arm, Shah Zaman, my father, Sumayya, and I; the older boy had hold of the King's coat. The north road was grey with people, as it has been since the winter, on both sides; and down the middle of it, where they had made a lane, came the camels, in a file as long as the road, each led by a man with a cloth over his face against the dust, and the dust was not grey but red. Sumayya counted aloud. My father counted under his breath and wrote on his arm. "Three hundred and four," they said together, and then, "No, five." The grey people did not shout. Some of them knelt. "Coming is what you can see on the road," said the King. "It is on the road, lord," said my father. "Strike it." I took the Open and drew a line through a caravan from Samarkand, promised, and wrote: come. Shah Zaman's hand was over his eyes, as it was when the child laughed. The King stayed on the roof until the last camel had gone in at the gate and Hamid's boys had run out to meet the first sack. Then he went down the stair and stood at the foot of the bed with his hands open and told my sister what he had seen, from the beginning, in the order he had seen it: the rider, and the dust, and the cloth over the faces, and the people who did not shout. It was the first time I had heard him tell anything from the start. "You left out the dust," said the nurse. "I did not," said the King.

On the 922nd night the favourite told the King to do away with the Wazirs, all of them, beginning with Shimas, who was the head of the matter; and the King sent for ten slaves, big men who had been his father's, and told them to stand beside him with their eyes on his hand; and the next day he sat in the Divan with the Book of law-cases on his knee and had the herald proclaim that anyone who had business with the King might come, and the Wazirs and the Prefects and the Chamberlains came, in their ranks, one by one, and Shimas first, as the Grand Wazir always does. "As the Grand Wazir does," said my father, from his corner. "I know the custom," said the King. I leave out what was done in the next room and to whom, in the order they came; the book is careful to say that it was done in order, and that the common people, who had no valour, were sent home. My father had his sleeve over the number on his arm. He did not ask my sister to go on faster, and he did not ask her to stop.

Then the King of Outer Hind, who envied his country and saw that there was no one left in it to give counsel, wrote him a letter: build me a castle in the middle of the sea, or twelve hordes of horse will come and besiege your capital until I have it. Wird Khan read it and said to his women, "This is what befell the Francolin and the Tortoises." A francolin, passing an island in the heat, came to the tortoises' dwelling and stayed; they loved him; he flew out every morning and came back every night, and they could not bear his being away all day. One of them said to him, kindly, that he who has wings has no rest, and that they feared lest some enemy take him; why did he not pluck out his wing-feathers and stay with them, and eat of their trees? He plucked them, one by one, to please them. A weasel came. "Is there nothing with you but weeping?" he said to the tortoises, when it had him; and they said they had no force against a weasel. He said it was not their fault, it was his, for having listened. "They loved him," said the nurse. "They clipped him," said Sumayya. "They did not mean to," said my sister. "No," said the King. "That is the worst kind." Shah Zaman looked at the lamp, and I looked at the lock of hair in the front board of the Roll, and did not open it. The book has Wird Khan go on, after the francolin, to blame women, and the garden, and Adam; I leave out the list.

That night the King put on old clothes and went into the city alone, and stopped at a wall where two boys of about twelve sat talking, and one said that his father's crops had withered before their time, from the want of rain, and the other said, do you know why? Because our King killed his Wazirs, not for any offence of theirs, but for love of women who told him to; my father was one, Shimas; and soon you will see how God deals with him. The King, listening, was astonished: the boy knew of a letter that only he possessed. "How do you know?" he said. "From the sand," said the boy, "and from the saying that no mystery is hidden from God." When my sister came to the end of the boy's speech, no one in the room said anything for as long as it takes to turn the glass. The nurse put down her thread. "Is that what they say?" said Sumayya, not to my sister. She turned to my father. "At the north gate, some," he said. "What do they say?" said the King. "That the rain is late, lord." "Why?" "Some say the north is being punished." "For what?" My father looked at the number on his arm. "For what, Vizier?" "For the names, lord." "Which names?" "The ones that have not been read. They say it will not rain until they are." "Who says?" "The women at the gate, lord, when the bread comes. They say a name first, one of them, and the others say, here. And then they eat." "Since when?" "Since the second week of the kitchens." "You did not tell me." "You did not ask, lord." "I am asking." "Yes, lord," said my father. And then he told him, and I put it in the Open: names said at the north gate with the bread, and the answer, here.

In the book the boy, the son of Shimas, goes with the other children of the school and answers the King of Outer Hind's letter for Wird Khan: he reads it aloud, and laughs, and writes that thou hast put out thy hand to that whereto thou canst not reach; build thee the castle in the midst of the sea thyself, but first still the waves and wall off the winds; and in the margin he draws his own portrait, and writes under it, This answer was written by the least of the boys of the school. The King of Outer Hind read it, and saw the face, and did not sleep; and he wrote back that it had only been a test of Wird Khan's mettle. Shah Zaman laughed until the nurse made him stop. The King, who had not laughed in a week, laughed once, and said, "The least of the boys of the school," twice, in two voices.

When Wird Khan had put away his love of women, he asked the boy how he should punish them; and the boy said that women are not alone to blame, they are like a stock in trade, and no one forces a man to buy; the fault is the buyer's. "I have fixed it on myself," said the King, "and I have no excuse except divine foreordainment." And the boy said: God has endowed us with capability and freewill, and so if we will, we do, and if we will, we do not. "He did not let him have it," said the King. He said it as one reads the next line in the Roll. Nobody asked what he meant, and I wrote nothing on either sheet.

On the 930th night the book ends, as it ends, with the repentance; and it is a clean end; and the end is this. Wird Khan asked his ministers what should be done with the women who had advised him, and the boy said, let what has befallen them suffice; reduce them to servants' estate. Another minister said that the least they deserved was to be put in the room in which the Wazirs were killed, with a little coarse food and a little water, to die one by one, the last among the dead. And the King took the second. I leave out the rest, which the book gives with its blessing. "He asked the boy first," said the King, very low. "Yes, lord." "And did the other." "Yes, lord." "Put them in the Open," he said. "The women in the room." "The ones he shut in?" said Sumayya. "And the boy who would not have," said the King. I wrote: the women in the room where the Wazirs were killed, and a boy who would have spared them.

On the 931st night the rains in the north were two hundred and one days late, and there were thirty-six hundred at the north gate, and the first loaf from the Samarkand wheat came to the palace with a pebble in it. "Good," said Hamid, so the boy said; "it is real." Yusuf, who was two hundred and eighty-one days old, stood at the brick and said a word. It was "Ba." The older boy looked at him with great seriousness. "Yu," he said. "Ba."

Night 931. Shahrazad and Dunyazad. Present. Open: a dyer and a barber, only begun; names said at the north gate with the bread, and the answer, here; the women in the room where the Wazirs were killed, and a boy who would have spared them; a third child, not yet; a grocer's daughter, who was divorced and paid, and not asked; a woman who gave up her marriage to save a hand, and whether she was asked back; a purse, forgotten; a sale made under compulsion, and the Kazi who wrote it; a grave with someone in it; a cobbler, seventy-one, who is dead, and eight men let out of the jails for words, who went where nobody saw; a litter, and a smell of lime; kitchens at the north gate, thirty-six hundred at the gate, eight ovens, and a baker who will not call it the King's bread, baking from Samarkand's wheat; a slave-girl called Marsinah, who said it was done; a shutter, shut and barred, in the Tanners' Lane; a eunuch who told the truth, in Sumayya's hand; rains two hundred and one days late in the north; a son named Yusuf, two hundred and eighty-one days old, who walks; a boy in shoes that squeak, who says Ba and Gain and Yu; a woman who was asked, after; a woman who was not asked; a woodcutter, who was not asked; a book of names; a boon, not yet asked.

## Chapter 54 · Nights Nine Hundred and Thirty-two to Nine Hundred and Forty-seven: A Sack of Lime, a Ring Given Back, and Whose It Is to Pardon

In Alexandria there lived two neighbours, a dyer named Abu Kir and a barber named Abu Sir, whose shops stood side by side. The dyer took cloth from people to dye, and required his wage in advance for the dyestuffs, and sold the cloth, and spent the price on meat and tobacco; and when the owner came he said, come tomorrow, and the next day, my wife was brought to bed, and the day after that, it was stolen. "A dyer who sells the cloth," said Sumayya. "Every town has one," said the nurse. "He said it was stolen," said the King. "Another who said it was done." Nobody asked which. The barber was poor too, with no customers, and one day the dyer, whose door a customer had nailed up with the Kazi's seal, said that there was no call to stay in a town like this; let them go abroad, with their crafts in their hands; and they would recite the Opening of the Book on it, that whichever of them got work should feed the one who had none, and the rest go in a chest until they came home. They took ship. The barber shaved the passengers for loaves and cheese, and the Captain's table, and carried it all to the dyer, who was sea-sick, and ate it, and slept; and for eighty days in the city they came to, the dyer ate and slept and said, do not blame me, I am giddy. On the forty-first day the barber fell ill and lost his wits with fever, and the dyer took the thousand silver bits from under his head, and went out and locked the door.

The Khan's porter found him on the third day and fed him from his own money for two months, for the face of God. When he was well he went out to look for his friend, and found a dyery with coloured cloths spread out before the door and a crowd looking; for in that city there were forty master-dyers, who knew only blue, and who admitted no stranger; and the King had built the stranger a dyery, and given him a horse and two slaves. The dyer sat on a mattress at the door, in royal clothes, with eight slaves. He looked at the barber and said, "O scoundrel, have I not told thee not to stand at my door?" and had him seized and beaten, and told the crowd he was a thief who stole their cloth. "A city of blue," said Shah Zaman. "And a man who brought it colours," said Sumayya, "and was beaten for it." "He brought them red," said my sister. What was done to the barber in front of the shop I leave out; the book counts the strokes, and I do not; and then the barber went back to the Khan and sat there until the burning went off.

Then he went to the King and told him that the city had no baths; and the King had one built, and he heated the water, and made a fountain in the basin, and taught ten boys to rub with the glove; and for three days all who came went in and out for nothing. On the fourth the King came himself, and was scraped clean, and said, "Take a thousand dinars from every man who washes." And the barber said: pardon, King; all men are not alike; if I take a thousand the poor man cannot enter, and the bath will stand empty; let each pay what his heart can give. The Lords agreed, and each gave a hundred dinars, and a slave, and a woman, and a servant, for the King's honour, four hundred of them; and the barber said, where shall I put all these, and sold them back to the King for a hundred a head, and said, may God ease thee as thou hast eased me of these Ghuls, whose bellies none may fill. "What did the poor pay?" said the nurse. "What they could," said my sister. "Hamid takes that," said Sumayya. "He takes nothing," said my father. "The King pays." "The King's kitchens take what is given," said the King, "and Hamid takes the rest of it out of what is given." "Yes, lord," said my father. "He will not call it a price." The King laughed, once, and stopped.

The dyer went to the bath, and was shampooed and fed, and the barber would take nothing from him and called him comrade; and the dyer, going away, said that it lacked a paste of yellow arsenic and quicklime which takes the hair off, and Abu Sir said he would make it. And Abu Kir went to the King at once and said: this barber is thy enemy; the king across the sea, whose prisoner he was, has promised him his wife and children if he kills thee; he will give thee a paste, saying it takes off the hair, and it is poison. The King went to the bath, to see; the barber gave him the paste, and it smelt foul. He had the barber seized, and sent for his Sea-captain and said: put him in a sack with two quintals of unslaked lime and tie the mouth over his head; row him out in front of my window, and when I say, cast him, throw him in, so that he is drowned and burned. My father's hand had gone to his sleeve. "Lime," said the King, not loudly. "Yes, lord," said my father. "The tanners use it, for the hides." "To take the hair off." "Yes, lord." The nurse's needle stopped; then went on. I looked at the lamp. I did not look at my father's sleeves, which were clean.

"Did anyone ask him?" said the King. "They asked the dyer, lord," said my sister. The Captain took the barber to an island and said that he had been shaved and bathed by him once, and not allowed to pay; he would not drown him; he put a stone in the sack, and gave him a net, to fish for the King's kitchen, and went to row under the lattice. The King signed to him with his right hand, cast him, and something flashed from his finger and fell into the sea. It was his seal-ring, which was spelled; when the King was angry with anyone and signed at him with that hand, a flash came from the ring and the man's head fell from his shoulders; the troops obeyed him for nothing else; and he said not a word of it, for fear of the troops. A fish swallowed the ring, and the fish came up in the barber's net, and he cut it open, and put the ring on his finger. When two of the cook's boys came for fish, he signed to them, knowing nothing, and they died. I leave out how. The King put his right hand on his knee, palm up, and looked at it, as my father looks at his.

When the Captain came back he said, do not move your hand, and told him what the ring was; and Abu Sir said, take me to the city. He went in to the King, who was sitting facing his men, grey with not telling them, and said: thou didst throw me in the sea; thy Captain took me to an island; thy ring fell into the water and a fish swallowed it, and I found it, and two of the boys died, not by my will; here it is; take it. And if I have done anything deserving death, tell me what, and slay me, and thou art absolved. "He gave it back," said Sumayya. "He did not know what it was," said my father, "till he was told." "And then he gave it back," said the King. "Had any but thou found it," says the King in the book, "he would never have restored it to me." The King put on the ring and felt life come back to him, and embraced the barber, and said, blame me not, but forgive me.

The King sent for the Khan's porter and the dyer's workmen, and they told the truth. They brought the dyer bareheaded, with his elbows bound, and paraded him through the markets, and said he should be sewn in a sack with lime and thrown into the sea. And Abu Sir said, "O King, accept my intercession for him, for I pardon him all that he has done to me." "If thou pardon him what he did to thee," said the King, "I cannot pardon him what he did to me." And they threw him in. The barber asked, for his boon, to be sent home, and the King gave him a galleon and its crew; and at Alexandria the sea had washed the sack up on the beach, and he buried the dyer there, and built a tomb over him, and wrote a verse on the door; and when he died he was buried beside him, and the place is called Abu Kir to this day. "He pardoned him," said Sumayya. "It was not the King's to take," said the nurse. "It was his own to give," said my sister. "He could pardon what was done to him," said the King. "Yes, lord." "Not what was done to the King." "No, lord." "Whose is it to pardon what the King has done?" No one answered. My father wrote nothing on his palm. "Those it was done to," said the nurse. "They are dead," said the King. "Their mothers are not," said the nurse, and bit off the thread.

On the 940th night my sister began the Fisherman and the Merman. A fisherman named Abdullah had nine children and a tenth born that day, and when he cast his net on the luck of the new-born, nothing came up; and he cast it again, and again, and went home without a fish, past the baker's oven, where the baker called to him, "Hast thou bread enough?" and gave him ten half-dirhams' worth of bread and ten more, and said, we will reckon when better luck betide thee. For forty days he took the bread and nothing came. "When I say reckon with me," he said, "he says, be off; this is no time for reckoning." "That is Hamid," said Sumayya. "That is not Hamid," said my father, "who does reckon; but he does not say what the sum is." On the forty-first day the fisherman said to his wife that he would tear the net up; and she said, Allah is bountiful. And that day his net came up heavy, and in it was a dead donkey; and when he cast it again, in it was a man.

He thought the man was one of Solomon's Ifrits, and ran; but the man said he was a Merman, and that if the fisherman would let him go they would be friends: a basket of fruit from the land every morning, and a basket of jewels from the sea. The fisherman let him go; and sat on the shore saying, "Thou hast let thy prey from thy hand away. I might have made a show of him." "He was sorry he let him go," said Sumayya. "And then he came back," said the nurse, "with both hands full." "Yes," said the King. He did not say anything else. The fisherman paid the baker with a handful of pearls, and the baker left his oven and followed him home with the bread on his head. Then he tried to sell a jewel to the Syndic of the jewellers, who said, here is the thief who stole the Queen's necklace, and had him beaten and bound and dragged to the King. "They did not ask him," said Sumayya. "Not one question," said my sister. The Queen sent to say that her necklace was in its place and that these were finer; and the King called the jewellers filthy villains, and said, why did you not ask him? He made him his Wazir and married him to his daughter, and made the baker Wazir of the left. "Hamid, Wazir of the left," said Sumayya. "He would not have it," said the King. "He would make bread of it," said the nurse.

The fisherman went down to the sea every morning with the fruit and came back with the jewels, for a year; and one day the Merman asked whether he had visited the Prophet's tomb in Yathrib, and when he said no, said he would give him a deposit to lay on it, and carried him down into the sea with an ointment of the liver-fat of the Dandan, a fish so big that it swallows an elephant, and dies at a single cry of a son of Adam. The fisherman cried, and one died. They went through eighty cities; I leave out the city of women, and what the sea-king does with them, and with their sons, and the custom of dress and marriage, which the book gives forty lines. At the Merman's house his daughter looked at the fisherman and said, "What is this No-tail?" and she and her mother and her brothers laughed at him; and the Merman said, forgive them, they lack wit; no-tails are rare, and the Sultan takes them and keeps them to make fun of. The Sultan said, "Welcome to the No-tail," and everyone laughed, and let him go; he asked for jewels as his boon. "He kept him to laugh at," said Shah Zaman. "In the book it is a custom," said my sister.

The Merman gave him a purse for the Prophet's tomb, and as they went back to the shore they heard singing and saw a table spread with fish and many people feasting; and he asked, a wedding? "Nay," said the Merman, "one of them is dead." And the fisherman said that in his country, when one dies, they weep and keen and the women beat their faces and rend their garments. The Merman stared at him and said, "Give me the deposit." "I have broken off our companionship," he said. "Are ye not, O folk of the land, a deposit of Allah? Why is it grievous to you that Allah should take back His deposit? How can I trust thee with a deposit for the Prophet, if when a child is born to you ye rejoice, albeit the Almighty sets the soul in it as a deposit, and when He takes it again it is grievous to you and ye weep? Since it is hard for thee to give up the deposit of Allah, how shall it be easy to thee to give up the deposit of the Prophet?" And he went down into the sea and the fisherman never saw him again. He called upon him for some time from the shore, and the King his father-in-law said that he should not have told him. "He told the truth," said Sumayya. "And lost the friend," said the nurse. "Often," said my sister. The King said, "They feast." "At a death, lord." "I would not like to live in it," said Shah Zaman. "You would not have to," said the nurse. The King said nothing for a long time. Then he said, "How many last night?" "Nine, lord," said my father. "Whose?" "I do not know the names, lord. I know the number." "Write the names tomorrow." "Yes, lord." From that night my father wrote the names he was told at the gate on the inside of his right arm, and the count of the rains on his left, and said he did not know which was the heavier.

On the 947th night the rains in the north were two hundred and seventeen days late, and there were thirty-nine hundred at the north gate and nine ovens, and the lime-burners' carts, my father said, had stopped coming to the Tanners' Lane for want of firewood. Yusuf, who was two hundred and ninety-seven days old, pointed at his brother and said, "Ba." And his brother, who had said it for him all the winter, pointed back and said, "Yu." They looked at one another, each with his word for the other; and the King, who had given them both, did not say whose was whose.

Night 947. Shahrazad and Dunyazad. Present. Open: a Caliph who could not sleep, and a merchant of Oman, only begun; a friend lost for telling the truth, and a deposit; whose it is to pardon what the King has done; names said at the north gate with the bread, and the answer, here; the women in the room where the Wazirs were killed, and a boy who would have spared them; a third child, not yet; a grocer's daughter, who was divorced and paid, and not asked; a woman who gave up her marriage to save a hand, and whether she was asked back; a purse, forgotten; a sale made under compulsion, and the Kazi who wrote it; a grave with someone in it; a cobbler, seventy-one, who is dead, and eight men let out of the jails for words, who went where nobody saw; a litter, and a smell of lime; kitchens at the north gate, thirty-nine hundred at the gate, nine ovens, and a baker who will not call it the King's bread; a slave-girl called Marsinah, who said it was done; a shutter, shut and barred, in the Tanners' Lane; a eunuch who told the truth, in Sumayya's hand; rains two hundred and seventeen days late in the north; a son named Yusuf, two hundred and ninety-seven days old, who says Ba; a boy in shoes that squeak, who says Ba and Gain and Yu; a woman who was asked, after; a woman who was not asked; a woodcutter, who was not asked; a book of names; a boon, not yet asked.

## Chapter 55 · Nights Nine Hundred and Forty-eight to Nine Hundred and Fifty-nine: A Grey Book, a Glass, and Blood on a Hand

The Caliph Harun al-Rashid could not sleep. He called Ja'afar and said that if his sleeplessness were not cured by morning he would strike off his neck; and Ja'afar, who has had to deal with this before, said that care is lightened in three ways, by looking in a mirror, by going to the bath, and by hearing song; and the Caliph said he had done all three. "Then there is a fourth," said Ja'afar: "to see what you have never seen, or hear what you have never heard, or tread a ground you have never trodden." "He is always awake, that Caliph," said the nurse. "The book does not say what he does by day." "He sleeps by day," said the King, "and the Vizier does not." "I sleep, lord," said my father. "At the second glass," said the King. "For the length of one." Nobody asked how he knew that either.

On the 948th night my father came to the Roll-room with his right sleeve rolled to the elbow, and read out what was written on the inside of his arm, in the voice he uses for numbers: nine names. Seven of them were in the blue books; Sumayya found them, with the page. Two were not. They were two girls of eight and eleven who had come down the north road with their mothers and died of the cough in the first month of the kitchens, and their mothers had said the names at the gate, with the others, since they had no one else to say them. "They are in nobody's book," said my father. "Write them in mine," said the King, and sent for a stationer, who brought a grey book of a hundred leaves, and Sumayya wrote the two on the first page in her own hand, and under them the seven. "Keep them with the others," said the King. It is what he said of the first sixty-one names, on the nineteenth night. Then my father read the last name. It was Salma. "The four hundred and second," said the King. He did not ask whose. My father said that the woman who says it had been serving the bread at the gate since the second week, in black, and stood at the back; and that when she said it the others said, here; and she ate, and went on serving. The King sat for some time with his hand on the grey book, and my sister began.

It was the merchant of Oman. He had sold his thirty ships and his houses and come to Baghdad with a million dinars to see the city he had been told of, and on a Friday he walked to Karn al-Sirat and found a house where an old man named Tahir kept girls, who let their nights by the price: ten dinars, twenty, forty. He took a month of the first for three hundred and a month of the second for six hundred, and so on up the ladder, until, one evening on the roof, he saw behind a curtain a girl on a couch with a boy's hand on her neck, so beautiful that he lay awake until morning; and she was the old man's daughter, and her night was five hundred dinars. He paid fifteen thousand for the first month. "A million dinars," said Shah Zaman. "In a house on a river." "At so much a night," said the nurse. "I leave out what the book makes the girl say to him on the first night, in verse," said my sister; "it takes a page, and my father is in the room." "I am in the room," said my father. "Yes, lord," said my sister.

He stayed month after month, until the money was gone, and wept to her, and she told him what her father did to those who ran out: three days' hospitality and the door. "Keep your secret," she said, "and I will keep you. All my father's money is under my hand. Every morning I will give you a purse of five hundred dinars; give it to him, saying, I shall pay you day by day; he will hand it to me; and I will give it to you again." He did that for a year. "She paid her father with his own money," said the nurse. "So that he would not be paid by anyone else," said Sumayya. "It is a kind of kitchen," said my father; and no one asked what he meant. Then one day she beat a maid, and the maid said, I will torture thy heart as thou hast tortured mine, and went to her master, who came in, and said that it was his wont to give a merchant three days, and he had had a year; his servants took his clothes, and gave him ten dirhams and an old suit worth five, and told him to go, and that if he stayed in the town his blood was on his own head.

He sailed to Basra and worked for a grocer he knew, and when he had a hundred dinars he took a room by the river to buy goods; and there came a ship in with two men who spread a carpet and a bag of jewels, and one was an old acquaintance, who, seeing him bidding nothing, asked why, and when he said he had a hundred dinars in the world, sold him the whole bag for a hundred, in front of the merchants, and said it was a gift. Among the stones was a red amulet, the size of a hand, graven with marks like the tracks of ants; and for a year no one in the market would give him more than ten or fifteen dirhams for it. Then a man came, bearing the dust of the road, and turned over his wares, and took the amulet, and kissed his hand, and offered twenty dinars, and fifty, and a thousand, and the merchant, who was angry because no one wanted the amulet, would not answer; and the crowd told him to sell, or they would drub him; and he sold it for thirty thousand. "Hadst thou held back," said the buyer, "I would have bid thee a hundred thousand, ay, a thousand thousand." "And from that day," said the Omani to the Caliph, "this pallor you see." "He did not know what it was," said the King. "No one told him," said my father. "He asked," said Sumayya. "He asked the broker, and the broker threw it in his face." "Brokers do," said the nurse.

The buyer was the servant of a king of Hind whose daughter was sick of a sickness that cannot be named, and bound; the amulet cured her; and she lost it to the sea in a necklace, and the sickness came back; I leave out what the book says the sickness did, night by night, to the girls who were set to sleep in her room. He found the old man dead who could make another, and was sent out through the world to look, and had found it in a shop in Basra. The Omani went back to Baghdad with what he had, and to Tahir's house, where the balcony was broken down and the lattice built up; and a servant told him that Tahir had repented, and sold his girls, and that his daughter was dying for a merchant named Abu al-Hasan, for whom he had offered a hundred thousand dinars. "Thou owest me the reward for good news," said the Omani, "for Abu al-Hasan stands at the door." The old man ran out and wept on his neck, and led him in to the daughter, who fell down in a swoon and, when she woke, said that now she would eat. The Kazi was sent for; and the old man gave the wedding. The Caliph, when he had heard it, went home and had three years' tribute put in an alcove behind a curtain, and sent for the Omani, and said, "Which is more, this, or what you lost by the amulet?" "This many times, Commander of the Faithful." "Bear witness," said the Caliph, "that I give it to this young man." He wept for joy, and the blood came back to his face, and the Caliph held up a mirror and showed him. "Bring me a glass," said the King. Sumayya brought the polished copper from the nurse's box, and he held it away from himself, then near, for as long as it takes to turn a page. He gave it back and said nothing. "Well?" said the nurse. "Put it away," said the King.

On the 953rd night my sister began a story of a vizier's son, Ibrahim, who could not leave the house except for the Friday prayer, and who on the way home found a book-seller with a book that had in it the picture of a girl so beautiful that she all but spoke; he bought it for a hundred dinars and wept over it for a week, and asked the bookseller who had painted it. A man of Baghdad, in the Karkh. He filled a bag with thirty thousand dinars of gold and gems, told no one, and rode off with a caravan; a Bedouin took his mare and a hundred dinars to guide him in two months' journey in a few days; and in Baghdad he found the street, and the painter, an old man on a marble bench, who gave him a house to live in, and a game of chess. Ibrahim lost the first game; he had no mind for it; he was thinking of the bag, which he had put down somewhere in the house. "I have eaten a morsel worth a dirham and lost a bag worth thirty thousand," he said, silently, "but I seek aid of Allah." And the old man brought it back, and said, "When thy thought was on the bag I beat thee; now I have brought it back, thou beatest me." "He beats me when I am not thinking of the board," said Shah Zaman. "I have not beaten you since the first snow," said the King. "Since you began to look at the door," said Shah Zaman. The King did not say anything, and moved a pawn.

The painter was Abu al-Kasim, and the picture was of his cousin Jamilah, who lived at Basra, and who would not hear the word man in her presence; he had asked her father for her, and she had sent word that if he valued his life he would leave the town. So he drew her, in books, and scattered them in all countries, so that some beautiful young man might see her and come, and see her, and that she might fall in love with him, and that he, the painter, might look at her once from afar. Ibrahim wept; and the painter sent him in a ship to Basra. The Khan's porter, and his wife, and a hunchback tailor whose pocket Ibrahim tore twice on purpose to give him gold, and the hunchback keeper of the garden called the Wild Heifer, who put him in an arbour and said, do not sneeze. "A picture," said Sumayya. "Nobody asked her," said the nurse. "She had heard of him," said my sister. "She loved him by report." No one said anything; the King looked at the grey book on the rug beside him. When Jamilah danced in the pavilion for her women she looked up and saw him, and took a knife a half-cubit long and went to him; and when face met face the knife fell from her hand, and she said, "Glory to Him who changeth men's hearts!"

They fled, with the ship; and at Baghdad the painter was waiting in a boat; and he threw into theirs a box of sweetmeats with Bhang in it. Ibrahim woke naked among the ruins of a bath, with blood on his hand from a dead woman whose head he had touched in the dark, and I leave out whose, and how it came to be there. The Chief of Police found him. "This needeth no proof," he said, seeing his hand, "strike off his head"; and the headsman, who had a heart, said, "By Allah, this is no murderer's face." They put him on the rug of blood. At that moment the Wazir of Egypt's Chamberlain rode up, sent to look for him, and said, "Why didst thou not have patience with him and question him? This is a lad of fifteen; he hath not killed a sparrow!" "That is the fourth," said Sumayya, "in a month." "Of what?" said the nurse. "That they did not ask." "It needed no proof," said the King. "Blood on a hand is the oldest proof, lord," said my father. "Is it?" said the King. My father said nothing, and put his hand in his sleeve.

The Caliph had the killer slain, I leave out how, and sent for Jamilah, who was found bound with her own hair, and for the painter, whom he ordered to be punished for what he had done to her, which I leave out; and Jamilah's father came in complaining of the youth who had taken his daughter, and the Caliph said that he had delivered her from torture and slaughter and married them on the spot. They went to Egypt, and lived as the book says. On the 959th night the rains in the north were two hundred and twenty-nine days late, and there were four thousand and one hundred at the north gate, and the Vizier said that of the names on his arm that night nine were new. The nurse had moved my sister's cushion to the floor by the bed and put a stool under her feet, and she told the first glass sitting up, with her hand on her side. Yusuf, who was three hundred and nine days old, stood without the brick, for as long as it took the King to say his name, and took two steps toward his brother, and sat down; and his brother said, "Yu," in a voice of great patience, and put the shoe back on his foot.

Night 959. Shahrazad and Dunyazad. Present. Open: a Caliph named Al-Mu'tazid, who went out into a by-street at noon, only begun; a grey book of a hundred leaves, for names that are in nobody's book, kept with the blue ones; Salma, the four hundred and second, whose mother says her name at the north gate, and the answer, here; the nine new names of the night; whose it is to pardon what the King has done; a friend lost for telling the truth, and a deposit; the women in the room where the Wazirs were killed, and a boy who would have spared them; a third child, not yet; a grocer's daughter, who was divorced and paid, and not asked; a woman who gave up her marriage to save a hand, and whether she was asked back; a purse, forgotten; a sale made under compulsion, and the Kazi who wrote it; a grave with someone in it; a cobbler, seventy-one, who is dead, and eight men let out of the jails for words, who went where nobody saw; a litter, and a smell of lime; kitchens at the north gate, four thousand and one hundred at the gate, nine ovens, and a baker who will not call it the King's bread; a slave-girl called Marsinah, who said it was done; a shutter, shut and barred, in the Tanners' Lane; a eunuch who told the truth, in Sumayya's hand; rains two hundred and twenty-nine days late in the north; a son named Yusuf, three hundred and nine days old, who has taken two steps; a boy in shoes that squeak, who says Ba and Gain and Yu; a woman who was asked, after; a woman who was not asked; a woodcutter, who was not asked; a book of names; a boon, not yet asked.

## Chapter 56 · Nights Nine Hundred and Sixty to Nine Hundred and Seventy-eight: A Bean at Every Door, Asked at Once, and a Knife in the Chest

My sister took up the Caliph where she had left him, in a by-street at noon. Al-Mu'tazid, in a merchant's coat, with his companion Ibn Hamdun, had heard two eunuchs at the door of a great house wish for a guest, since their master would not eat without one; so they went in. The master met them in a tunic of Nishapur silk with a ruby on his hand, and gave them water, and a table, and a curtain with three girls singing behind it, and the Caliph sat through all of it with a frown. The man said he was only a merchant's son, Abu al-Hasan of Khorasan, and did not know whom he had in his house, until Ibn Hamdun told him. "Since I came in," said the Caliph, "I have seen the name of my grandfather Al-Mutawakkil on the cups, and the cushions, and the very coat you wear. Tell me the truth and you are safe from me. Tell me a lie and I will punish you as no one has been punished." "He was asked for the truth," said the King. "And told it," said Sumayya. "And was safe," said the nurse. The King put his hand on the grey book on the stool beside him, and did not open it.

The truth was a long one. His father had been a money-changer, and he had eaten the money; he sold his mother the house for five thousand dinars, which were her own father's, kept for a time of need, and ate that; and sold it to her again for fifteen thousand, on the condition that she take his affairs into her hand, and she put him in the shop. "A mother who buys the house twice," said the nurse, "and does not say a word." Then a girl came in so beautiful that when she said, "Weigh me out three hundred dinars," he told his page to weigh it, and afterwards said he did not know why, he could not think. A month later she came again and unveiled, and took three hundred more, and then five hundred; he followed her to a jeweller's, where she took a necklace and told him to pay, and to the Tigris, where she got into a boat, and he made a sign to the ground as if to kiss it, and she went off laughing, into the palace of the Caliph Al-Mutawakkil. "He says three thousand dinars," said my father, who adds as other men breathe. "It comes to sixteen hundred. Either there is a necklace he has not told us about, or a man in love is counting in his heart." Nobody asked which.

His factor, an old druggist, told him to reckon it spent for the sake of God and forget her. But when she came again and said she had no way but to see him once a month, he went back to the druggist, who found a tailor working opposite the palace lattice, and told him to tear his own pocket and bring it to be sewn. "A pocket torn on purpose," said Sumayya. "Ibrahim's," said the nurse. "He tore Ibrahim's twice," said my sister. "This one only once." He ordered suits of Greek brocade, a hundred in the end, and whoever came out of the palace and liked one, he gave it to, even the doorkeeper, until the tailor said, "This is not how a merchant behaves. Are you in love?" The girl, the tailor told him, was the Caliph's own lutanist, and she had a Mameluke eunuch; and the eunuch, given five suits and then one worked with jewels worth three thousand dinars, looked at him and said, "You are Abu al-Hasan of Khorasan, the money-changer. The whole palace talks of you. She loves you more than you love her." "He was found by his gifts," said the King. "Nobody had to look," said Shah Zaman.

The next evening the eunuch dressed him in a shirt woven with gold and the Caliph's own gown, and scented him with the Caliph's scent, and took him into a gallery with rooms down both sides. "At each door put down a bean," he said. "It is what the Caliph does every night. Count the doors; the one you want has a marble threshold." In the middle of the gallery there was a clatter and the light of torches, and the real Caliph coming with the women, and he heard a girl say, "Have we two Caliphs? One has put his bean at my door, and here is the other with the lights." "He counts his nights with beans," said Shah Zaman. "A bean is not a name," said the King. My father put his sleeve down over his arm. A girl in the Caliph's train took the frightened man by the sleeve into a room, and said, "If you are a thief, you are lost. If you are Abu al-Hasan, you are safe; you are the friend of my sister Shajarat al-Durr, who never stops talking about you." Her sister came, and fell on his neck, and said she had promised him she would not be his unlawfully, and would find a way.

Then there was a noise, and the Caliph was coming to her room; she put the man in a cellar under a trapdoor, and went out to serve him. Al-Mutawakkil asked her to sing, and she took her lute and sang so well that the man in the cellar all but cried out, and the Caliph, pleased, said, "Shajarat al-Durr, ask a boon of me." "I ask my freedom," she said. "Thou art free," he said, "for the love of God." My sister stopped there, as she is allowed to stop, and I did not look up from the Roll. The nurse said to the cat, "Not yet," and the cat, which had been waiting, lay down. "She had it ready," said the King. "She asked at once." "He gave it when he was pleased," said Sumayya. "And when she asked."

The Caliph went off to make peace with the girl he had quarrelled with, and the lutanist opened the trap, and said she was a free woman by his coming. They dressed him in women's clothes to get him out; and in the middle of the palace the Caliph was sitting, and saw a handmaid who walked wrong, and had her brought back. Asked how he dared, the man said, "My ignorance, and my passion, and my trust in your clemency." Al-Mutawakkil heard them both, and said, "I pardon you both," and sent for the Kazi, and married them; and everything in Abu al-Hasan's house with that name on it was her marriage-gear, and not the Caliph's treasury. Some while after, she came home with her clothes torn and said that his rule was ended; his son had come in upon him with armed men of the guard, and the book says what they did, and I leave it out. They went down the river to Basra with her goods and the children she bore him. Al-Mu'tazid, who had come in to be angry, wrote him a patent that he need pay no tax on his lands for twenty years, and made him his cup-companion, until the world parted them. "He asked first," said Sumayya. "And said what he would do to a lie," said the nurse, "and then did not have to." "Everyone in the book who tells is pardoned," said Shah Zaman. "In this book," said the King; and the nurse, who had been about to say something, did not.

On the 963rd night my sister began another Kamar al-Zaman. "There are a great many," said the nurse. "This one is a merchant's son, not a prince," said my sister, "and I will say so each time." His father, Abd al-Rahman, had kept him and his sister shut up in a house with a slave-girl for fourteen years, for fear of the evil eye on a child so beautiful; and his wife said at last, "How long will you keep your son from the eyes of the folk? Is he a girl or a boy? If you die, and he says he is Abd al-Rahman's son, no one will believe him." "Fourteen years," said Sumayya. "He kept them in because he loved them," said the nurse. The father took the boy to the shop, and the whole market stopped to look, and a dervish in haircloth came through the crowd and sat on the bench opposite and wept. The merchant, thinking the worst, took the dervish home and set the boy to tempt him in the night, and watched from the window; and the dervish prayed, and would not, and at last lost his temper. "Why did you weep when you saw my son?" said the merchant. The dervish told him of a Friday in Basra when he had found the streets empty and the shops open, no dog and no cat, bread hot in the oven, and not one person; and then drums, and eighty girls riding two by two with their faces bare, and in the midst of them a woman on a horse so beautiful that he lay hid behind a shutter. She said there was a man in a doorway; they brought him out; and what was done to him on her word I leave out. "Your son," said the dervish, "is the image of her."

The boy asked for goods, and his father said he could not bear to be parted from him for an hour, and his mother said that if they refused he would run away; so he went, with ninety thousand in merchandise and forty jewels in his belt. A day short of Basra raiders took everything and killed his men, and he lay down among the dead and put their blood on himself until they went; and he came into the city on a Friday, into the empty streets, and saw the drums and the girls and the woman on the horse, and could not stand. "By report," said Sumayya. "Like Jamilah," said the nurse. He sold a jewel for a thousand dinars, and told a barber what he had seen; and the barber said, "Tell no one; all Basra locks itself in on Friday morning, and nobody knows why." The barber's wife, a midwife who knew every house, took a hundred dinars and told him. The chief of the jewellers, Obayd, had pierced a jewel that no one else could pierce, and the King of Basra had said, ask a boon. Obayd said, give me till tomorrow. He did nothing without consulting his wife, whom he loved; and she said: that every Friday, two hours before the prayer, the whole city go into the mosques or lock itself in its houses, with the dogs and cats, and every shop be left open, so that she could ride through with her women, her face bare, and where she found a man she would have him killed. "A city shut in," said Shah Zaman, "for one woman, one morning a week." "Ours has been shut in nearly three years," said the nurse. "One asked to be let out," said Sumayya, "and one asked to have a city shut in." "He took it home to ask her," said the King. "She had a better idea of what to ask than he did." Nobody said anything. I wrote it down, and the King's hand had gone to the grey book again.

The midwife told the boy what to do. He was to have a ring made by Obayd, give the apprentices a dinar each, pull the ring off as too tight and give it away, and bring a better stone; and Obayd, proud of his customer, would praise his face to his wife, because, my sister said, there is no sillier cuckold than the man who praises another man's looks to his wife. The wife wished for the ring. She had her husband bring the young man to supper three nights running, with a drug in the night cup of both men; and what she did to the sleeping guest I leave out. In the morning his cheeks and lips burned, and the jeweller, ashamed, said that the mosquitoes of that room loved only the beardless. "He gave the boy the reason himself," said the King. In the boy's pocket he found four cockles; and the midwife read it: a lover does not sleep, and you are a child to be playing with shells. The second night, a knife: sleep again and I will cut your throat. On the third night he poured the cup behind the pillow, and she came with the knife, and he laughed; and she said, "Three times, and you did not understand the sign." He told her an old woman had taught him, and she said, "Go to her, and ask if she has more; if not, I will do the rest."

She did the rest. She had the boy take a house next to hers, and a builder to dig a tunnel to her room, and every night she carried across bags of her husband's money. Then she gave him a knife her husband had made himself, which he valued at five hundred dinars and would not sell, and told him to show it in the shop and say he had it from a man whose mistress had given it to him instead of money; and the boy ran it back to her by the tunnel before the husband was through the door. Obayd knew it, because its fashion was a device of his own and there was not another like it. He came home with a face like a man who has swallowed a stone, and she said, "You suspected me, and came to see whether I had given your things away." "Where is my knife?" he said, and she said, "In the chest." It was in the chest. The next day it was the watch, and "Here it is." "She put them back," said my sister, "both times, before he was through the door." "And he was glad," said the King. "He saw the knife in the chest, and was glad." She told him that if she had not shown him the knife and the watch he would have known her for a traitor, and she would never break bread with him again; and he gentled her, and was sorry. "He wanted to be told," said the King, in a voice that did not rise. "It is easier," said Shah Zaman. "Yes," said the King.

On the 974th night she put on her best clothes and her rings, which her husband had made with his own hands, and walked behind the boy to the shop with her face bare, as a slave-girl; and the boy said, "I bought this girl for a thousand dinars. What do you think of the price?" "What is your name, girl?" said Obayd. "Halimah," she said, which was also his wife's. He ran home, and she was sitting in the same clothes in her room, having come back by the tunnel. "Look in my face," she said; "perhaps I am she who stood in the shop, and disguised myself, and agreed with him to lay a snare for you." "What words are these?" he said. "I never suspected you of such a thing." Then she beat her maid, and told him she could not bear the sight of her, and he took the maid to sell, and passed by the boy's house, where the boy bought her for nothing; and his wife was already in the litter, by the tunnel. "Kiss your old master's hand," the boy said to her, and she stepped out of the litter and kissed Obayd's hand, and got back in; and he looked hard at her. "He looked hard at her," said my sister. "He looked," said the King. "And did not see." "He was glad not to," said the nurse. Obayd wept when they left, because friendship has its debts, and went to his shop glad that his suspicion had come to nothing; and when he went home that night the house was empty to the boards.

He told no one. He said he was going on the pilgrimage with his wife, and the whole city rejoiced, because there would be no more Fridays; and on the road raiders stripped him, and he came on foot to Cairo, naked, and was told that on the last day of a wedding feast the poor were fed. It was the boy's wedding; his father had said, "If you marry her I am quit of you in this world and the next; she did it to her husband and will do it to you," and had shut the woman and her maid in an upper room and found the boy another bride. Obayd was bathed and clothed and told his story in private, and Abd al-Rahman said to his son that he would now see whether the man was a man of honour or a cuckold. He told Obayd to make peace with his wife, and gave him the key; and stood behind the door with a sword. "If he forgave her," said my sister, "he would have killed him." "For forgiving," said Sumayya. The King put his hand over the older boy's ear; nobody had told him to. My sister said what the jeweller did with his hands in one breath, and I did not write it down. Abd al-Rahman came out from behind the door and said, "I would have killed you if you had forgiven her. Now you shall have my daughter," and the folk were told two slave-girls had died. "A test with one answer," said the nurse. The King took his hand from the ear. Nobody said anything.

Obayd lived with the daughter five years and died. The King of Basra, who had said, when Obayd came home, that if he did not fear God he would kill him and marry her, asked for the widow, and she said no: not a woman among her kin had married twice, "not though you kill me." He sent her home to her father with a Wazir and five hundred horse and everything the jeweller had left, and she lived there without marrying until she died. "So if this woman would not replace her dead husband with a King," said my sister, reading the end of the book, "how is she to be compared with the other, who replaced her husband while he lived? And he who deems all women alike, there is no remedy for the disease of his insanity." She was on the cushion on the floor, with the stool under her feet and her hand at her side, and had stopped twice for breath. Shah Zaman looked at the King. The King did not look at Shah Zaman; he looked at the lamp. Sumayya trimmed it. On the 978th night the rains in the north were two hundred and forty-eight days late, and there were forty-three hundred at the north gate, and my father, who had twelve new names on his right arm, held it out to Sumayya to read without being asked. Yusuf, who was three hundred and twenty-eight days old, walked from the brick to the nurse's rug, and past it, and all the way to the King's knee, and the older boy walked beside him, not touching.

Night 978. Shahrazad and Dunyazad. Present. Open: a Caliph who found that one province's tribute had not come, only begun; a grey book of a hundred leaves, in which are the names said at the north gate, kept with the blue ones; twelve new names of the night; Salma, the four hundred and second, whose mother says her name at the north gate, and the answer, here; a freed lutanist who asked at once; a jeweller who looked hard, and did not see; whose it is to pardon what the King has done; a friend lost for telling the truth, and a deposit; the women in the room where the Wazirs were killed, and a boy who would have spared them; a third child, not yet; a grocer's daughter, who was divorced and paid, and not asked; a woman who gave up her marriage to save a hand, and whether she was asked back; a purse, forgotten; a sale made under compulsion, and the Kazi who wrote it; a grave with someone in it; a cobbler, seventy-one, who is dead, and eight men let out of the jails for words, who went where nobody saw; a litter, and a smell of lime; kitchens at the north gate, forty-three hundred at the gate, nine ovens, and a baker who will not call it the King's bread; a slave-girl called Marsinah, who said it was done; a shutter, shut and barred, in the Tanners' Lane; a eunuch who told the truth, in Sumayya's hand; rains two hundred and forty-eight days late in the north; a son named Yusuf, three hundred and twenty-eight days old, who walks; a boy in shoes that squeak, who says Ba and Gain and Yu; a woman who was asked, after; a woman who was not asked; a woodcutter, who was not asked; a book of names; a boon, not yet asked.

## Chapter 57 · Nights Nine Hundred and Seventy-nine to Nine Hundred and Eighty-nine: A Whip at Midnight, Five Times Bowed, and a Pardon That Is Not a Lock

The Caliph Harun al-Rashid, my sister went on, going over the tributes of his provinces, found that every one had come in but Basra's, which was twenty days late. "Perhaps something has befallen the governor," said Ja'afar. "Twenty days," said Shah Zaman. "Two hundred and forty-nine," said my father, from his corner, and looked as if he wished he had not. "I know the number," said the King. The Caliph sent Abu Ishak the boon-companion, with five thousand horse, to ask why; and the governor, Abdullah bin Fazil, rode out to meet him, and said the tribute was ready and would go tomorrow, but that since Abu Ishak had come so far he must be a guest for three days first. They ate, and sat late, and a bed was spread for him on an ivory couch inlaid with gold; and at midnight, lying awake and making verses, he saw his host get up, and gird himself, and take a whip from a locker and a lighted taper, and go out.

Abu Ishak followed as softly as he could. He saw the governor take a tray from a closet, four dishes and bread and a jug of water, and carry it down a passage to a room with an ivory couch in the middle and two dogs fastened to the couch with chains of gold. He loosed the first dog, which put its muzzle to the floor as if to kiss it, and whined; and he tied its paws behind it and threw it down and beat it with the whip until it groaned and lay without sense; and then he did the same to the second. Then he took out a kerchief and wiped their eyes, and said, "Bear me no malice; by God, this is not of my will, nor is it easy for me; it may be that God will give you a way out." He fed them from his own hand, a morsel at a time, and gave them water, and went away. Abu Ishak saw it three nights, and said nothing to his host, and on the fourth day took the tribute and went home. "Three nights," said Sumayya. "He did not ask him." "He was ashamed," said the nurse. "He told the Caliph," said Shah Zaman. "Casually," said my sister, "and without design." "Say what the man said after," said the King. My sister said it. "Again," said the King, and she said it again; and he said, "Again," and she said it a third time, and he said, "That is enough." I did not write it in the Roll. I put it on the second sheet, with a number beside it, and the number is three.

The Caliph said, "Go back, and bring me Abdullah and the two dogs." Abu Ishak begged to be excused, because he had been the man's guest and could not look him in the face; but the Caliph said that if he sent another, the governor would deny it and say he had no dogs, and if he sent Abu Ishak, who had seen them, he could not. "Otherwise I will kill you." "Man's wrong is from the tongue," said Abu Ishak, and went back with a letter in the Caliph's hand and told his host the whole of it. And Abdullah said, "Since you have told him, I will bear out your report, lest he think you a liar, for you are my friend. Were it anyone else, I would have denied it and given him the lie." They went to Baghdad, with the dogs on camels, in chains of gold, and the dogs kissed the floor before the Caliph and wagged their tails and wept. "He did not lose the friend," said Sumayya. "He lost the secret," said the nurse.

The dogs, said Abdullah, were his brothers, Mansur and Nasir; and if he spoke truly they would bow their heads, and if he lied they would stare up. Their father Fazil had been named for the twin who lived; he left three sons, a house and a shop and sixty thousand dinars; and Abdullah, the youngest, took the house and the shop in the division and stayed to keep them, while his brothers took their share in money and stuffs and went to sea. A year later, in the cold of winter, they came to his shop in ragged shirts with their lips white, having lost everything in a wreck; and he put his own furs on their backs and took them to the bath, and fed them, and then divided what he had into three, "as if our father had died today," and opened each of them a shop; and they sold by day and praised the sea by night, and urged him to come with them. Each time he turned to the dogs and said, "Was this so, O my brothers?" and each time they bowed their heads. I counted them on the second sheet. There were five before he was done. "He divided it twice," said Sumayya. "The second time nobody asked him to." "Nobody asked the dogs anything," said the nurse, "but whether it was true." "It is two answers," said the King. "Bow, or stare." Nobody asked him what he meant.

They sailed, and made money, and came to a mountain where Abdullah, going up to look for water, saw a white snake fleeing from a black dragon, and when the dragon had her by the head he threw a stone and killed it; and the snake became a girl, who kissed his hands and went down into the earth. Twenty days after, with the water gone, they came to another mountain, and behind it a city with fourteen gates and a porter on a bench with fourteen keys on a brass chain, who would not return his greeting, because he was stone. So was the old woman with a bundle of washing on her head, and the oilman with his scales and his cheeses, and the dogs and the cats. The cloth in the shops was like cobweb and went to powder in his hand; the bags of gold crumbled, and the gold in them did not. In the palace the Wazirs sat on their chairs, stone, and the King on his throne in a crown, stone; and up forty steps he heard a girl reciting aloud, and found her, the King's daughter, who knew his name. An old man who came on Fridays had told it to her. The book says why her father's city had been turned to stone, and it was a quarrel about gods, and I leave it out; she had been seven, and was thirty, and had lived twenty-three years in that room on one pomegranate a day from a tree in the court. "The cloth went to dust and the gold stayed," said Sumayya. "Gold does," said the nurse. "Hamid says bread is a thing that goes off," said the King. "It is why it is bread," said Shah Zaman. "Yes," said the King. "Twenty-three years," said my father. "He asked her whether she would be his wife," said my sister, "and to go with him to Basra. She said yes." "He asked her," said the nurse.

He brought her to the ship, and his brothers, who had not dared go in, took their share and rolled their eyes; and when they saw the girl, each said he must have her. He said he had promised to marry her himself, and that he would find each of them a bride in Basra, with a dowry, and they would be wed on one night; and they said nothing. On the fortieth night, in sight of Basra, they took him in his sleep by the arms and the legs and threw him into the sea, and told the captain he had gone over the side in the dark to relieve himself. He sank, and the water brought him up, and a great bird the size of a man took him in her claws; and she was the snake, whose name was Sa'idah, daughter of the Red King of the Jinn. She took him to her mother and her father, who gave him a suit of treasure; and she told him why the dragon had hunted her, and I leave that out; and she carried him back to the ship, where his brothers were quarrelling over the girl. She would have killed them. He begged her not to. "To content you, I will not kill them," she said, "but I will enchant them," and filled a cup with sea-water, and said a word over it, and sprinkled them, and they were two dogs. And she said: when you come to Basra, put a collar on each, and chain them in a room by themselves, and every night at midnight beat each of them until he faints; and if you let a night pass, I will come and beat you, and then I will beat them.

In Basra he put collars of gold on them, because he could not bear iron, and the first night he forgot, and she came out of the floor and beat him until he fainted, and then went and beat them. After that he never missed a night, for twelve years, "in my own despite," and afterwards he wiped their eyes and fed them with his hand. "Because she would beat him," said Shah Zaman. "He said it every night," said Sumayya. "After. 'It is not of my will.'" "It was in his hand," said the King. Nobody said anything. That night, at the foot of the Open, I wrote: a man who beat his brothers every night for twelve years, and said after that it was not of his will. Sumayya read it aloud with the rest at the end of the second glass, in the voice she uses for all of it. The King did not stop her.

The Caliph said he would have the dogs made men again, and wrote to the Jinn's daughter in his own hand, and told Abdullah to leave the beating for one night and give her the letter. That night Abdullah took the collars off and sat the dogs down to eat from the same tray, and let them wash their paws after, to the stupefaction of his servants, who threw the leavings away as unclean; and at midnight Sa'idah came up through the floor with eyes like fire. He gave her the letter. It said that the man had forgiven his brothers and given up his claim, and that where there was reconciliation retribution was remitted; and that if the Jinn would not hear him, he would not hear them. She took it to her father, who said that the writer of it had power over them, for reasons I leave out, and that she must obey; and she came back and sprinkled the dogs, and they were men, and fell at their brother's feet. "He forgave what was done to him," said the King. "The letter says the claim is his." "And hers?" said the nurse. "Whose?" "The one in the cabin." Nobody answered. Abdullah asked his brothers what they had done with his wife, and they said that she had heard them fighting, and gone into the sea. He wept, and forgave them for that too. Sa'idah, going, said, "Be on your guard against them; they are traitors."

They did not change. They made him a feast, one at a time, and sat him up late with stories, and when he slept they knelt on him, and put him in the river, and went to the Caliph weeping, and said the Jinn's daughter had carried their brother off, and begged his governorship. A dolphin took him up. It came every day under the kitchen window of that house, where the leavings were thrown into the river, and that day there had been more than usual, and it was strong; it carried him to the far bank. "Of course," said Shah Zaman. "A pardon is not a lock," said the nurse. "No," said the King. "The kitchen fed the dolphin," said my father. "It was the leavings," said the King. "It is the same." A caravan found him, and a man in it who knew medicine nursed him for thirty days' journey, to a city far from Basra, where a healer named Rajihah cured the sick overnight; he was carried in, and behind the curtain was his wife. She had gone into the sea, and the old man who came on Fridays had taken her up and put her there and told her to wait; and she rubbed his limbs, and he was well. "She was alive," said Sumayya. "Yes," said the King. On a Friday night the old man carried them both home to Abdullah's palace in Basra, and in the morning he looked from the lattice.

He saw his brothers where the Caliph had had them put, for what they had told him; the book says how, and I leave it out. He had them buried, and went to Baghdad and told the Caliph the whole of it, and the Caliph had the marriage contract drawn between him and the girl from the stone city; and they lived in Basra until the Destroyer of delights came. "Nobody asked her what she would have done with them," said the nurse. "No," said the King. On the 989th night my sister, who had told the end of the book with her hand at her side, began a cobbler of Cairo whose wife was called the Dung, and who was asked on the first page for a vermicelli-cake with honey and had no dirhams. "A cobbler with a wife," said the nurse. "Good." My sister laughed, and stopped; and the nurse took the stool from under her feet and put a cushion behind her back.

That night the rains in the north were two hundred and fifty-nine days late, and there were forty-five hundred at the north gate, and Hamid had asked for a tenth oven and it was laid; my father had eleven new names on his right arm, and held it out to Sumayya to read without being asked. Yusuf, who was three hundred and thirty-nine days old, walked from the nurse's rug to the King's knee, as he does, and stood, and lifted both arms. The King, who had picked him up unasked for three hundred and thirty-nine days, said, "He is asking," to no one, and picked him up.

Night 989. Shahrazad and Dunyazad. Present. Open: a cobbler of Cairo, whose wife is called the Dung, who was asked for a vermicelli-cake with honey and had no dirhams, only begun; a man who beat his brothers every night for twelve years, and said after that it was not of his will; a wife who went into the sea rather than be chosen, and was not asked what should be done to the men who chose; a grey book of a hundred leaves, in which are the names said at the north gate, kept with the blue ones; eleven new names of the night; Salma, the four hundred and second, whose mother says her name at the north gate, and the answer, here; a freed lutanist who asked at once; a jeweller who looked hard, and did not see; whose it is to pardon what the King has done; a friend lost for telling the truth, and a deposit; the women in the room where the Wazirs were killed, and a boy who would have spared them; a third child, not yet; a grocer's daughter, who was divorced and paid, and not asked; a woman who gave up her marriage to save a hand, and whether she was asked back; a purse, forgotten; a sale made under compulsion, and the Kazi who wrote it; a grave with someone in it; a cobbler, seventy-one, who is dead, and eight men let out of the jails for words, who went where nobody saw; a litter, and a smell of lime; kitchens at the north gate, forty-five hundred at the gate, ten ovens, and a baker who will not call it the King's bread; a slave-girl called Marsinah, who said it was done; a shutter, shut and barred, in the Tanners' Lane; a eunuch who told the truth, in Sumayya's hand; rains two hundred and fifty-nine days late in the north; a son named Yusuf, three hundred and thirty-nine days old, who walks and lifted his arms; a boy in shoes that squeak, who says Ba and Gain and Yu; a woman who was asked, after; a woman who was not asked; a woodcutter, who was not asked; a book of names; a boon, not yet asked.

## Chapter 58 · Nights Nine Hundred and Ninety to Nine Hundred and Ninety-nine: Plenty, Present, and a Ring That a Princess Keeps

On the 990th night my sister went on with the cobbler. Ma'aruf lived in Cairo by patching old shoes, and his wife, Fatimah, whom the whole street called the Dung, told him one evening to bring her a vermicelli-cake dressed with bees' honey. My father's hand went to his right sleeve and came away. Nobody remarked on it. Ma'aruf had no dirhams; a pastry-cook trusted him, and dressed the cake with cane-honey, because he had no other; and she threw it in his face and knocked out a tooth, and he struck her once, lightly. "Lightly," said the King. "The book says lightly," said the nurse. "Who wrote the book?" said Shah Zaman. She complained of him to a Kazi, who gave him a quarter-dinar to buy honey and told them to be at peace; and the Kazi's runners, who wanted their fee, dragged him about the market until he sold his tools. She complained to a second Kazi, and a third court; a man ran in to warn him that she had gone to the High Court; and he ran, with five small coins, and sat down in the rain in a ruined cell, and wept.

A being came out of the wall. He had lived in that cell two hundred years, he said, and had never seen anyone do as this man was doing; and he had pity, and would do what the man wished. Ma'aruf asked for a country where his wife would not know the way. The being took him on his back and flew with him all night and set him down on a mountain above a city, and in the morning he went down, and the people laughed at him for saying that he had left Cairo yesterday, and a merchant on a mule drove them off and took him home. It was Ali, who had played with him as a boy, and had run away at seven and wandered, and made himself rich in that city by saying he was a merchant whose baggage was behind him. "Where nobody knows you, do what you like," said Ali. "Say that you are a rich man who has come for pleasure, and that your baggage is coming. When they ask if you have any such stuff, say, Plenty." "The being asked him what he wanted first," said Sumayya. "Before he did anything." "Two hundred years in a wall," said the nurse, "and nobody had wept in his cell." "He had been waiting for it," said the King. He did not say what he meant, and no one asked.

So Ma'aruf rode into the market on a mule, and Ali rose and kissed his hand and told the merchants that he was the richest man in Cairo; and whatever they asked, he said, "Plenty." A beggar came, and he gave him a handful of gold, and the thousand dinars Ali had lent him were gone by noon. The consul of the merchants said that when a beggar came he should say, God will send you your daily bread; and Ma'aruf said that was not his practice, and borrowed another thousand, and gave that away; and for twenty days he borrowed from the merchants and gave to the poor, until he owed sixty thousand dinars and no baggage came. "Plenty," said the nurse. "He had none," said Sumayya. "Sixty thousand dinars, lord, in twenty days," said my father, "to beggars, on his word." "He did not say, God will provide," said Shah Zaman. "He gave," said the King. "He had nothing to give," said the nurse. "He gave," said the King again. Nobody went on with it.

The merchants went to the Sultan of the city, who was a covetous man; and he thought that a man who gave away sixty thousand must have a great deal more, and that he had more right to it than the merchants. He sent for Ma'aruf and gave him a jewel to value; and Ma'aruf, who had no notion of jewels, pressed it between finger and thumb and broke it, and said it was a bit of stone worth a thousand dinars and he had better. The Sultan took this for proof. His Wazir said that the man was an impostor, and the Sultan said that he said so because he had once asked for the Princess himself, and been refused; and gave the Princess to Ma'aruf, with forty days of feasts. "The Wazir was right," said Sumayya. "With a grudge," said the nurse. "It is still the truth," said the King. "Nobody asked the Princess," said Sumayya. "She was asked about the Wazir," said my sister, "and she said no." "And about this one?" said the nurse. "No."

The book spends a page on the wedding night, and a hundred names for one thing, and I leave it out; so did my sister, but not for that reason. In the first glass of the 994th night, in the middle of a sentence about a treasurer, she put her hand to her side and said, "Nurse." The nurse said, "Yes," as if she had been asked what time it was, and took her under the arms, and the two women who had been waiting in the next room since the 985th night took her behind the curtain. "Take the boys," said the nurse. The King took the older boy by the hand and the younger on his arm, and sat down on the floor by the brick, with his back to the wall, and a boy on each knee. My father stood in his corner. Shah Zaman sat up on his rug and counted something on his fingers. Sumayya came and sat against my knees. "Go on," the King said to me. I said that I did not know where she had stopped. "Anywhere," he said.

I told the Princess asking her husband for the truth. She said to him, "Tell me, and nothing shall befall you but what will gladden you; you are my husband, and I will not transgress against you"; and he told her that he was a cobbler, and had a wife called the Dung; and she laughed, and said he was clever at lying, and that her father had given her to him for his money, and would kill him when he found out. She gave him fifty thousand dinars of her own, and a young man's clothes, and a horse, and told him to go where her father's rule did not reach and write to her, and she would send him all her hand could reach; and next morning she told her father, who had asked her to find out, that ten young men had come with a letter saying the baggage was late because robbers had taken two hundred loads on the road, and that her husband had gone to hurry it, laughing, and that the Wazir was a liar. "She kept it," said Sumayya. "She was asked to find out. She found out. She did not tell him." "She promised first," said the King. Behind the curtain there were sounds. When there was a noise, he put his hand on the nearer boy and kept it there until it had passed.

While I told it, the King began to speak to the boys, in the voice he keeps for the Open, so low that I do not think he knew I could hear. He told them a tale. There was a king, he said, who had a rule, and a book in which the rule was kept, and a vizier who carried the book up the hill at dawn; and one evening a girl came with a book under her arm and said, I will tell you a tale; and the king knew. He knew on the first night that he would not draw the line. He had sat up waiting to hear what happened next, but that was only to hear it; he had known from the beginning, and she was never in danger from him, not for one dawn. "Gain," said the older boy, who has three words, and none of them right for this. The King told it again, the same way, word for word, as one says a thing that has now been said. My father, in his corner, said nothing. I wrote what the King had said in the margin, where I write what is said, under the stroke for the night. On the second sheet I wrote what the Roll says of the first morning, which is: Night 1. Shahrazad. Struck: nothing. Open: a merchant and a Jinni, only begun; and I put no mark beside it. The Roll is kept for what is said. It was never kept for what is true; that is what the second sheet is for. The second time he told it, I did not write it down. The Roll takes a thing once.

The window had gone from black to the colour of ash when a voice said from behind the curtain, "A son." It was the nurse. Nobody moved. Then, from behind the curtain, there was a thin, outraged sound, the sound of a very small person finding out what air is like; and the King, with a boy on each knee, said, loud and level, to me, "Write: Present." I did not understand him. "He answered," said the King. "Write it." So I wrote it, by the small lamp, at the foot of the night, where the line is: Night 994. Shahrazad and Dunyazad, and one. Present. The King put his thumb beside the word. "Is she," he said, and the nurse said, "Tired, lord. She says you may come." He gave me both boys, who were heavy and warm and asleep, and went behind the curtain, and I heard nothing; and when he came out he did not say what he had said. "He will be named on the seventh morning," said the nurse. "I know," said the King.

For six nights I told both glasses, and my sister lay with her face to the wall and the new one on her arm. On the 995th I told the ploughman: Ma'aruf rode into the waste with the Princess's money, and a peasant asked him to be his guest and went to fetch him dinner, and Ma'aruf, to make up for the time, took the plough himself, and the share caught in a ring of gold, and under a slab he found a stair and a hall with four daises, one of gold, one of emeralds and pearls, one of rubies, one of diamonds, and a coffer of crystal with a casket on it, and in the casket a seal-ring with writing on it like the tracks of ants. He rubbed it. A voice said, "Adsum! Wilt thou raise a city or ruin a capital or kill a king?" It was a spirit called Abu al-Sa'adat, who had been Shaddad's, and who said he must serve whoever held the ring and rub it, once; and if you rubbed it twice together, you would burn him. Ma'aruf asked for the whole hoard brought up, and eight hundred of the spirit's sons came out as boys with golden baskets and made it three hundred mules' load; and seven hundred mules of stuff, and horses with jewelled saddles that were spirits, and a litter of red gold; and when the peasant came back with a bowl of lentils and a nosebag of barley, he took him for the Sultan, and Ma'aruf ate the lentils, and filled the bowl with gold. "He ate what he was given," said Shah Zaman, "and paid." "He asked the ring what it could do," said Sumayya, "before he asked it for anything." "He asked for the mules," said the nurse. "He had plenty," said the King. "After all."

He went back to the city in the litter, with the Sultan coming out to meet him, and the merchants repaid two for one, and he gave to the poor until the Sultan had to find another store-house, and the Wazir's face went the colour of a dead leaf. It was the Wazir who said that there must be a secret, and that wine is a traitor. On the 998th night he took the Sultan and Ma'aruf into a garden and filled the cup and filled it again, and Ma'aruf told him everything, and, when the Wazir asked to see the ring, drunk, handed it over. The Wazir rubbed it, and said, "Take this man and throw him down in the Desert Quarter, where there is nothing to eat or drink." And when the Sultan asked what his crime was, he rubbed it again, and the Sultan went down beside his son-in-law. Our King looked at my father. "Have you a ring?" he said. "I have no ring, lord," said my father. "No," said the King. "You have sleeves." My father looked at his sleeves, which were rolled to the elbow, and said that he supposed he did.

The Wazir called the troops and told them he would have them thrown down too if they did not make him Sultan; and they did. He sent word to the Princess that he would come to her that night, widowhood or no; and she sent back, "Welcome." I leave out what the book says he meant. She put on her best, and laughed at him, and said, "Seest thou not the man looking at us? He is in the bezel of the ring. Throw it away from me." He plucked it off and laid it on the cushion; and she kicked him in the stomach, and he fell over, and forty slave-girls held him while she rubbed the ring once and had him taken to a prison. She had her father and her husband fetched back from the desert, and told her father to sit on his throne and make her husband Wazir of the Right, and said what should be done to the Wazir, and I leave that out. "Give me the ring," said her father. "Or give it to thy husband." "It behoveth not that either of you have it," said the Princess. "I will keep it myself, and belike I shall be more careful of it than you." "She kept it," said Sumayya. "She could," said the nurse. "She was careful, lord," said my father. "She was." The King looked at his right hand, which lay on his knee, and did not turn it over.

On the 999th night the rains in the north were two hundred and sixty-nine days late, and there were forty-seven hundred at the north gate, and Hamid had asked for an eleventh oven and it had not been laid; my father had thirteen new names on his right arm, and read them without being asked. Yusuf, who was three hundred and forty-nine days old, walked the length of the Roll-room, and past the brick, and back, and the older boy walked beside him, not touching. My sister sat up, for the first time, with the new one asleep on her arm, and said that the cobbler's tale would end in two nights, and that she would tell it herself. Nobody said what the number two meant; all of us had counted it.

Night 999. Shahrazad and Dunyazad, and one. Present. Open: a Wazir in the Prison of Wrath, and a ring that a Princess keeps, only begun; a man who beat his brothers every night for twelve years, and said after that it was not of his will; a wife who went into the sea rather than be chosen, and was not asked what should be done to the men who chose; a grey book of a hundred leaves, in which are the names said at the north gate, kept with the blue ones; thirteen new names of the night; Salma, the four hundred and second, whose mother says her name at the north gate, and the answer, here; a freed lutanist who asked at once; a jeweller who looked hard, and did not see; whose it is to pardon what the King has done; a friend lost for telling the truth, and a deposit; the women in the room where the Wazirs were killed, and a boy who would have spared them; a son, five days old, who has no name, and who answered; a grocer's daughter, who was divorced and paid, and not asked; a woman who gave up her marriage to save a hand, and whether she was asked back; a purse, forgotten; a sale made under compulsion, and the Kazi who wrote it; a grave with someone in it; a cobbler, seventy-one, who is dead, and eight men let out of the jails for words, who went where nobody saw; a litter, and a smell of lime; kitchens at the north gate, forty-seven hundred at the gate, ten ovens, and a baker who will not call it the King's bread; a slave-girl called Marsinah, who said it was done; a shutter, shut and barred, in the Tanners' Lane; a eunuch who told the truth, in Sumayya's hand; rains two hundred and sixty-nine days late in the north; a son named Yusuf, three hundred and forty-nine days old, who walks; a boy in shoes that squeak, who says Ba and Gain and Yu; a woman who was asked, after; a woman who was not asked; a woodcutter, who was not asked; a book of names; a boon, not yet asked.

## Chapter 59 · Night One Thousand: One Breath Each, Someone to Answer, and a Shutter Not Barred

The Night column of the Roll is three figures wide. The chief clerk ruled it so on the evening before my sister came, when he could not have thought of a night with a fourth, and for two hundred nights I had known this one would not fit. On the thousandth I wrote it small, with the one tucked against the line and the three noughts going over into the column headed Name, and nobody remarked on it, though my father looked at it for the length of a breath. It was the sixth day since the new one came, if you count the day he came, which the nurse does. My sister sat up on the cushion with him on her arm and told the first glass herself, in a voice that was thinner than it had been and did not shake. "I said I would," she said, to nobody.

She began where she had left the Wazir, in the Prison of Wrath. The Sultan had him fetched out and put to death and burned in front of the troops, who cursed him as he passed; what was done I leave out, and so did she, in a sentence. Ma'aruf was made Wazir of the Right. They lived so five years, and in the sixth the old Sultan died, and the Princess made her husband Sultan in his place, and kept the ring. They had a son, who was five. "She kept it to the end," said Sumayya. "She gave it to him when she was dying," said my sister. "She said, be careful of the ring, for your own sake and for this boy's. And in the morning she was dead." The King looked at the new one on my sister's arm and said nothing. "She was careful," said the nurse. "She was," said the King.

One night Ma'aruf, who had been Sultan for a while, woke in the dark and found a woman in his bed, long-toothed and ill-favoured, who said, "Fear not, I am your wife Fatimah." She had been begging in Cairo, she said; she had wept for him every night; and a being had found her weeping and told her that her husband was a Sultan in a certain city, and had taken her through the air and set her down in his room. Ma'aruf asked when she had left Cairo, and she said, just now. She said she was sorry; and she asked him, as a beggar asks, to let her eat bread with him. "He took her in," said the nurse. "She asked," said Sumayya. "She said, I place myself under your protection." "Someone carries them all," said Shah Zaman. "There is always one," said the nurse. Ma'aruf gave her a palace and twenty slave-girls and said that if she did any mischief he would kill her and fear nobody; and the boy, who visited her as he visited his father, took a dislike to her, because she looked at him as at somebody else's. "Children know," said the nurse. "Yes," said the King.

My sister stopped there, at the end of the first glass, in the middle of the boy and the woman, and said that the rest was tomorrow's, and that she would not make it longer than it was. She did not tell the second; she held the new one. It was Sumayya's turn to read the Open, which she does at the end of the second glass, and she took up the paper because there was nothing else to do with the silence, and read it from the top in the voice she uses for all of it; and when she came to the line about the names said at the north gate with the bread, and the answer, here, which she has read eighty times and the King has heard eighty times with his hand on his knee, the King said, "Tonight."

Nobody asked what he meant. He stood up and gave the boy on his knee to the nurse and said to my father, "The Roll. All of it, and the grey book." "It is a thousand and eighty-one, lord," said my father. "You have carried them up the hill every dawn," said the King. My father went and brought the Roll, and took it in both arms, with the cover against his chest, as he used to take the shroud; and a porter took the grey book. "Who is to come?" said my father. "Whoever wants to," said the King. Shah Zaman put his cap on his knee, and took it up again. Sumayya took the lamp. The nurse said that nobody was to take my sister, and my sister said that she had no intention, she had something on her arm; but she looked at the King as he went by, and nodded, once, as one does when a thing has been said the right size. I put on the nurse's brown veil, which smells of cats, and followed.

We went out by the gardeners' gate, with ten guards in porters' coats a hundred paces behind, and through a city that was asleep or pretending to be. Shutters closed ahead of us, one after another, as on the evening we walked to the palace; but this time, here and there, a shutter opened behind. It smelled of lime and wet bark in the lower streets, and of bread near the north. The gate is at the top of the town. Forty-nine hundred people were lying on the stones in the dark with their feet toward eleven ovens, and Hamid, who does not wear a coat, was standing by the first with his arms folded; and the women in black were in the third row, where I had seen them on the fortieth day. Nobody cheered. I think the King had expected it. I think he had walked the whole way with his hands down, ready for it; and when the crowd only turned over, like sleepers, and sat up one by one, he let out his breath. My father opened the Roll on the lid of a bread-box, at the first page, where the first name was. The King, who had read it every dawn for the length of a breath, read it aloud.

"Layla," he said, and took one breath, which was what he had always given, and nobody answered. Shah Zaman, behind him, took off his cap, which in Samarkand is a thing a man does at a burial; I do not think he knew he had done it. He read the second. He read the third, and from somewhere in the crowd a woman's voice said, "Here," not loudly, and it went back through the court like a bucket along a line, until it reached the ovens; and I saw that she had not known the girl; she was an old woman with a limp who had come for bread. After that there were more. For the names that had somebody, the somebody said it; and for the names that had nobody, a person near the front said it, and then another; and by the two hundredth, when the King's voice had begun to break on the long ones, I could not have said which were answered by kin and which by neighbours, and I do not think they could. He never made a breath longer than a breath. I asked him afterwards. He said that he could not give the first more than the last, nor the last less than the first; he had given them one breath apiece for three years, and it was the only thing he had given them that was exactly fair. He said it as a man says the price of bread.

At the three hundred and eleventh, a woman in a grey veil said "Here" in the voice in which she had asked me for a place to write it, and I thought of the dimple. At the four hundred and second the King stopped before the name, and the women in black waited; and he said, "Salma," and the woman who had stepped out of the rank on the fortieth day said, "Mine," and then, "Here," and sat down on the stones, not because she was tired. He took the breath. He did not look at the book. By the six hundredth the whole of the gate was answering. It was not loud. It was like the sound of a long thing being passed from hand to hand in the dark. At the eight hundred and fifth the voice that said "Here" belonged to an old man at the edge of the crowd, with nobody beside him, who had come on the seventeenth day to write his sister's name; and he looked, as he said it, at my father; and my father, who was holding the book open with both hands, bowed his head once, as one does to a witness, and did not lift it until the next name.

There were a thousand and eighty-one before her. The last was a girl called Nafisa, seventeen, a salt-seller's daughter, and her father said "Here" from the third row in the voice of a man answering a roll he has dreaded for three years. The grey had begun in the dark above the gate, and the ovens ticked, and at the back a child coughed. The King turned the page, to the page I had ruled in the last of the light, and read what was written on the first line of it, in my sister's hand. "Shahrazad," he said. It was not a name that anyone at the gate had to answer. "Present," I said. I had not known I was going to. It is the word I have drawn beside her name for a thousand nights, and I said it in my own voice, which carried further than I meant; and from the back a man's voice that I did not know said, "Here," and then another, and then, quietly, the whole gate, once, and stopped.

He did not read the blue books, which are the same names with more written beside them. He read the grey book, which is short; and last of all my father gave the Roll to the porters, and pushed up his right sleeve to the elbow, and held out the arm in the light of the ovens, and the King read the twelve new names from the ink on the inside of it, one breath each, and twelve voices answered. My father's arm did not shake, and he did not look at it. When it was done, the sky above the gate was the colour of the inside of a shell. There was no wind. The wind had stood in the north for as long as the rains had been late; and the smoke of the ovens went straight up, and then, near the top, leaned a little to the south, which my father looked at and did not mention. Hamid came with a loaf in his two hands and held it out. "Lord." The King broke it and gave half to my father. "It is not the King's bread," he said. "No, lord," said Hamid. They ate it standing, in the cold, with forty-nine hundred people not watching.

We did not go back by the way we had come. The King went down, through the town, by the steps to the river, with my father behind him carrying the Roll in both arms again, and Shah Zaman, and Sumayya with the lamp that nobody needed now; and I do not think he had said where. At the bottom, where the river bends, in the lane that smells of lime, he stopped across from the two houses with no roof. The shutter was shut. The bar was down. "Ma'aruf," said the King. He gave it the breath. "A cobbler. Seventy-one." Nothing. I counted ten, as she had counted it for him. At eleven, I heard the bar lifted, and the shutter opened a hand's breadth, and a woman's face was in the gap, about forty, with a cloth over her hair; and she looked at him for as long as she had looked at him before. "Here," she said. "Yes," said the King. And then he said, "I have a son. He is to be named this morning. I would give him the name. I am asking." She looked at him. "It is a common name," she said, and shut the shutter. She did not drop the bar. We stood there a little longer than there was any need, in the smell of lime, and then my father moved, and we went up. On the steps I thought: my sister had not chosen the tale; it was next; and my father's hand had gone to his sleeve on the 990th night at a name, and I had thought it was a trade.

It was the seventh morning. The nurse was waiting on the Roll-room stair with the new one wrapped in the green shawl, which is mine, and my sister behind her, who had not slept and did not say so. The King sat down at the table where the Roll was lying, and took the reed, and in the margin of the margin, after CAME and YUSUF and the others, in his small square hand, wrote the tenth word. Sumayya, who copies a name four times, wrote it once, and looked at it, and wrote it again, and her fourth was straight. It said MA'ARUF. "It is the name in the tale," said Shah Zaman. "It is a common name," said the King. My father said, in the voice for numbers, that there were four hundred and six of them in the city, in the registers of the quarters; he had looked. "Both," said the nurse, who had not been told which. "Both," said the King. I do not know what the woman at the shutter meant. I wrote it as she said it.

On the thousandth night the rains in the north were two hundred and seventy days late, and there were forty-nine hundred at the north gate, and Hamid's eleventh oven was laid; my father had twelve names on his arm, which had been read, and he washed it in the ewer, and the water ran blue. Yusuf, who was three hundred and fifty days old, walked the length of the Roll-room and back, and the older boy walked beside him, not touching. I wrote the line at the foot of the night, where the line is. I did not strike anything.

Night 1000. Shahrazad and Dunyazad, and one. Present. Open: a woman come from Cairo to a cobbler who is a Sultan, and a boy who dislikes her, only begun; a man who beat his brothers every night for twelve years, and said after that it was not of his will; a wife who went into the sea rather than be chosen, and was not asked what should be done to the men who chose; the names of the Roll, read aloud at the north gate from the first to the last, one breath each, and the answer, here; Salma, the four hundred and second, who said, mine; twelve new names of the night, read from an arm; a freed lutanist who asked at once; a jeweller who looked hard, and did not see; whose it is to pardon what the King has done; a friend lost for telling the truth, and a deposit; the women in the room where the Wazirs were killed, and a boy who would have spared them; a son named Ma'aruf, seven days old, who answered; a grocer's daughter, who was divorced and paid, and not asked; a woman who gave up her marriage to save a hand, and whether she was asked back; a purse, forgotten; a sale made under compulsion, and the Kazi who wrote it; a grave with someone in it; a cobbler, seventy-one, who is dead, whose name was said, and the answer; eight men let out of the jails for words, who went where nobody saw; a litter, and a smell of lime; kitchens at the north gate, forty-nine hundred at the gate, eleven ovens, and a baker who will not call it the King's bread; a slave-girl called Marsinah, who said it was done; a shutter, shut, not barred, in the Tanners' Lane; a eunuch who told the truth, in Sumayya's hand; rains two hundred and seventy days late in the north; a son named Yusuf, three hundred and fifty days old, who walks; a boy in shoes that squeak, who says Ba and Gain and Yu; a woman who was asked, after; a woman who was not asked; a woodcutter, who was not asked; a book of names; a boon, not yet asked.

## Chapter 60 · Night One Thousand and One: A Stroke That Leans, Yes to Again, and One Line Left Open

The seventh morning was the thousand and first day, though nobody called it that, and it had nothing in it. The King slept in daylight, which he does not do, on the floor of the Roll-room, with the older boy against his back. My father, who did not sleep, went down to the north gate at noon and came back with his left sleeve pushed up and a number on the inside of the wrist: a hundred and eleven. A hundred and eleven families had gone home in the night, with their bundles, by the north road, toward the villages they had come from, because their names had been read; Hamid had counted the pallets. My father did not know which arm the number belonged on. He wrote it on the left, under the rains, and looked at it. The wind had gone round to the south after midnight. Nobody mentioned that either. Sumayya read the Open to the cat, to practise. The new one had a day of being looked at. The older boy brought him a shoe, which was the only thing he had to give, and the nurse took it away, and he brought it again.

At the first glass my sister, on the cushion, took the cobbler up where she had left him: the woman from Cairo, and the boy who disliked her. Ma'aruf, she said, would have nothing to do with the woman as a husband, and kept to others, and she grew jealous, and took it into her head to have the ring and kill him and be Queen in his place. It was his custom, out of respect for the writing on it, to take the ring off when he lay with a woman, and lay it on the pillow, and not put it on again until he had washed, and to send the woman away before dawn; and Fatimah knew. "He took it off," said Sumayya. "Every time," said the nurse. "She watched him do it," said Shah Zaman. "She had nothing else to watch," said the nurse.

The night she went to do it, the boy, who had gone out to the privy without a light, saw her come out of her palace in the dark and go to his father's, and said to himself, what does that witch want there at this hour? He had a short sword of watered steel that he would not go to his father's Divan without, and his father used to laugh at it and say, "It is a fine sword, my son, but you have not gone down with it to battle nor cut off a head"; and the boy would say, "I will not fail to cut off with it some head that deserves it." He followed her. She went in, and searched, and said to herself, "Where has he laid the ring?"; and found it; and as she came out, turning it in her hand, about to rub it, the boy did what he had said he would, and I leave out how, and she cried out once and was dead. "He did not wake his father," said Shah Zaman. "He followed her," said the King. "She had the ring in her hand," said the nurse. "She did," said the King. He looked at his right hand on his knee. This time he turned it over, and looked at the palm, which was empty, as my father looks at his; and turned it back.

Ma'aruf woke and saw his wife on the floor, and the boy with the sword, and heard it, and said that the boy was his son without doubt, and had eased him of her. He took the ring from her hand, and had her washed and shrouded and buried; her coming from Cairo had been only to her grave. He sent for the ploughman whose lentils he had eaten, and made him Wazir of the Right, and married his daughter, and in due time married his son; and they lived in all the ease that there is, and their days were serene, until there came the Destroyer of delights and the Severer of societies. "That is the end of the cobbler," my sister said. "It is also the end of what I have." Nobody moved. The lamp made its small noise. Outside, in the night, as it had been all day, it was dry.

"I have not asked you for anything," she said, "since I asked your leave to say good-bye to my sister, on the first night. After that I told you what I would do. I would like to ask now." "Ask," said the King. She said, "Bring me my sons," to the nurse; and the nurse brought them: the older, by the hand, walking, in his shoes that squeak; the second, who walks, but goes down on his hands when he is in a hurry; and the third, on her arm, who had been named that morning. My sister took the baby and stood up, which nobody had told her she might. The nurse said her name, in a tone I will not set down. She stood in the lamp with her free hand on the older boy's head and the second holding her skirt, in front of the King. "These are your sons," she said. "I ask that you release me from the doom of death, as a gift to them; for if you kill me they will have no one to tell them how it was."

The King looked at her for a long time. Then he said, in the plain voice he uses to Hamid, "I pardoned you before the coming of these children." He said it as one says a thing that has now been said. Nobody spoke. My father, in his corner, put a hand into his sleeve and took out nothing, and put it back. "I know, lord," said my sister. She meant either thing. She had the baby on her arm, and she looked past the King, at the lamp, with the face she wears at the end of a tale, which gives nothing away, and which I have been reading for a thousand nights and could not read. I wrote what he had said in the margin, where I write what is said, under the stroke for the night; and on the second sheet I wrote nothing, because I did not know what to put. I know what the Roll says of the first morning, and the third, and the hundredth; I have it by heart. It does not say when. The older boy said, "Gain," and the King, to my surprise, said, "No."

Shah Zaman cleared his throat. He said that if it was not an ill time he had something to ask, and had meant to ask it of the King as the head of the house. "Ask," said the King, in the voice of a man who has had practice with the word. Shah Zaman said that he wished to ask Dunyazad to marry him; and that he would stay where they were, and not take her to Samarkand, because he had learned in two years that he could not do without the sight of the rug by the cushion. "Do not ask me," said the King. "She is not mine to give. She is the one who keeps the book." Shah Zaman turned on his rug. He is a plain, kind man, and I think he was more afraid than the King had been of the gate. "Dunyazad," he said. "Ask me in the morning," I said. It was the first thing I had said to him in a voice that was not for the Roll. Shah Zaman sat back on his rug as if he had been handed something to carry, and put it carefully on his knee. "She has a boon first," said the King.

I had forgotten that he remembered. "It is the end of the Roll," he said, "and you said you would ask me at the end." "It is the end of a night," I said. "The Roll has a great many pages left. I ruled them." "Ask." I had had nine hundred nights to think of a boon, and every one I thought of was for somebody else, and one by one he had done them without being asked: the eight out of the jail, the gate fed, the names read. What was left was mine, and small. I did not know that I would say what I said until I had said it. "I would like to stop counting." "Counting what?" "Nights. Names. Days. Ovens. Strokes. I have counted everything since I was fifteen. I would like to do it badly." "Granted," said the King. "I wrote it down." He took the Roll, which was open on the table at the last page, and turned it to the binding, and showed me the mark he had made on the 462nd night, under the last stroke, in the margin by the spine, which I had taken for a date. It was a small upright stroke, not so straight as mine. "It is what you write," he said. "I was told it means, I am in the room." "It leans," I said. "I was not practised," said the King. I put my thumb beside it, as he does, and left it there, and he let me.

The others went on; the nurse put the boys to bed in a row; my sister sat down, because her knees had decided it; Sumayya trimmed the lamp. The King stayed at the table. After a while he said, low, not as to anyone, "When did I stop?" I said that the Roll does not say. "No," he said. "Is there a night?" "There is a night when you said, Then stop. There is a night when you said, Not yet, to my father, in the old voice, and it was not the old voice. There are nine nights that I could put a finger on, and none of them is it." "It is not in the Roll," he said. "No." "Then write that it is not." I took the second sheet and wrote: he does not know when. I wrote it with him watching, and he said, "That is the truer one," and put his thumb beside it, as he does, and left it there.

It began about the middle of the night, with a sound on the shutter that I took for a moth. Then it was on the roof, a few at a time, and then more, in no order, with the dull particular note that dry tiles make, and the cat went to the window and sat with her back to us. My father, who was standing in his corner, opened his mouth; I saw the number come up in it. "Two hundred and seventy-one," he began, in the voice for numbers; and the King said, "No." My father shut his mouth on it, and I watched it go down. He told me afterwards that it was the first number he had swallowed in forty years, and that it did not sit well. Nobody went to the window. The nurse said to my sister, quietly, that she should lie down. The baby woke and found it a thing worth the trouble of crying about. I lay on my cushion, where I lay on the first night, and listened, and did not count the drops. My sister, from hers, said, without turning her head, "You have stopped." "Yes." "Good. I never could. It is why I needed you." Then the older boy, who had been put to bed and had got out of it, walked to the window in his shoes and put both hands on the glass, and said, "Gain." "Yes," said the King. It was the first time he had answered the word. A little rain had come in at the door, which nobody had shut, and lay on the floor in a dark tongue; it reached the brick, which had stood all winter and all the dry months by the door, the colour of dust; and the brick drank it, and turned the colour of the lane. The second boy went and put his hand on it, as he does. It rained for some days. Sumayya says eleven, and my father says eleven and part of a twelfth; I do not know. It is what I asked for.

I did not carry the Open over. There were thirty-two lines in it that night; I had written them all myself, over nine hundred nights, and Sumayya had read them all aloud; and I wrote one. The names are the gate's now, and the arm is my father's, and the shutter is hers, and the rest, Marsinah and the grave and the woodcutter and the woman who was not asked, is on the second sheet, in order, as it stood on the thousandth night; it is the longest thing on the sheet and I am keeping it. My father went down to the Tanners' Lane in the spring, when the shutter was open, and I do not know what she said to him; he did not write it on his arm. I said at the beginning that the chroniclers were not in the room. They were not. They wrote the tales, which fill thirty volumes in the treasury in letters of gold; the King told them what to put in the front of them, and they put it, and it is as he said it to my sister, in front of the children. This is what was in the room. I said yes to Shah Zaman in the spring, when the rains had stopped. He had asked me three times by then. That is not in the Roll either. On the flyleaf the chief clerk's hand still says what the King said, in the hand he used for treaties. Nobody has asked him to change it. The Roll is not in the treasury. It is in the chief clerk's chest, and it has pages left, which I ruled; Sumayya keeps it, and writes the line each night in a hand that has stopped learning and looks like nobody's but hers. When it was time to write the line that night, I put the reed down, and held it out, and Sumayya took it. "What do I write?" she said. "What is said," I said. "And the number?" "Ask my father." My father said nothing; he pushed up his left sleeve, and let her read the number off his arm.

Night 1001. Shahrazad and Dunyazad, and three. Present. Open: whose it is to pardon what the King has done.

Under it, in another hand, one that is learning: Night 1002. Present.

---

# 天明不留
*改編自《一千零一夜》 — Colophon · A1，人類策劃*

## 第00章 · 夜簿的第一頁

故事已經被人寫下來了。它們填滿了國王寶庫裡的三十卷，用金字寫成，你隨便報一個夜晚，任何一位書記都能告訴你，我姐姐那一夜說了什麼。這一本不是那樣的書。我是敦亞佐德。我坐在床腳，撐不住的時候就睡在那裡，我替她管夜簿。夜簿裡記的比那三十卷少得多：一個夜晚，一個名字，以及到了早上，那個名字怎麼了。我打算照事情發生的次序把它寫下來，因為史官們當時不在房裡，而我，大部分時候是醒著的。

那是我父親的簿子。他是國王的宰相，也就是說，他管著國庫和道路，糧食和水，軍餉，還有國王的脾氣；而在這本簿子開頭的那一年，他又多得了一樣要管的東西。夜簿是一本不起眼的簿子，棕色羊皮裝訂，不比我的前臂長。書記們把每一頁畫成三欄，欄首寫著：夜、名、劃。扉頁上，首席書記用他寫條約的那種字，抄了國王的原話：天明不留。

我得先交代我打算怎麼往下寫。夜簿每一夜有一行，我會把那一行放在它所屬那一夜的末尾。行與行之間，我告訴你我看見的和聽見的。故事本身，我照我姐姐說的那樣記，或者照我聽到的那樣記，兩者並不總是一回事。那年我十五歲，燈火壓得很低，有些夜晚我只記得開頭和結尾的幾句，還有她的聲音在中間是什麼樣子。有些故事在這裡會比她當時說的好，因為我有這麼多年可以去想；有些會比她說的差，因為我睡著了。若有哪一夜除了那一豎什麼也沒發生，我就直說，然後接著往下。

要看懂那頁扉頁，得先認識兩兄弟。兩人都是國王，而且像見過兩次面、隔了二十年的兄弟那樣，彼此相愛。哥哥山魯亞爾，統治海岸與群島的大王國，我父親是他的宰相；弟弟沙・贊曼，統治撒馬爾罕。哥哥想弟弟想得發慌的時候，派我父親翻過山去送一封信；弟弟讀了信，收拾帳篷，帶著一隊騎兵和一份禮物，動身去他哥哥的宮廷。

走了三天，沙・贊曼想起禮物忘在家裡了。他獨自趁夜騎馬折回，從花園的門進去，看見自己的妻子和廚房裡的一個男人，睡在他自己的床上。他當時做了什麼，老故事講得很直白，我不想改良它，也不想講得比它更直白。他天亮前又騎馬出發，對誰也沒說。等他到了哥哥的宮廷，人已經瘦得發黃，什麼也不肯吃，整天坐在窗邊，臉朝外，背對著房間。

哥哥先用宴會，後來用打獵。大狩獵的那天早上，弟弟說他身子不夠好，騎不了馬，於是被留在宮裡，守著他的那扇窗。窗子對著花園。中午，後宮的門開了，王后走出來，身邊是她的侍女，還有和侍女一樣多的男人，是國王沒有召來的。他們在噴泉旁坐下，一直坐到影子拉長。到了傍晚，沙・贊曼明白了：發生在他身上的事，並不是只屬於他一個人的事。他對著空蕩蕩的房間說：「那麼，不是只有我。」那天夜裡，他幾個星期來第一次吃了東西。

國王打獵回來，發現弟弟好了，問他是怎麼好的。弟弟不肯說。哥哥一連問了一個星期，最後他被告知了，他不信。於是他對外宣布要再去打一次獵，騎出一里路，又在黑夜裡徒步折回來，在同一扇窗子後面，坐到弟弟身旁。他看見了人家告訴他他會看見的。然後兩位國王從一扇小邊門離開了宮殿，身上只有穿著的衣服和拿得動的東西，就這樣，走出了兩個人各自的王國。

他們走了好多天，走到海邊的一片草地。他們在一棵樹下歇腳的時候，天邊的海水開始翻滾，一道黑色的水柱從裡面升起來，朝岸邊移過來，兩人爬進樹枝裡，動也不敢動。水柱上了岸，變成一個精靈，一個很大的精靈，頭上頂著一只玻璃匣子，用七把鋼鎖鎖著。他把匣子放在他們那棵樹下，一把一把打開那七把鎖，從裡面拉出一個年輕的女人，美得像十四夜的月亮。他把頭枕在她的腿上，她連裙子都還沒理好，他已經睡著了。

她抬起頭，看見樹上有兩個國王，沒有叫。她把精靈的頭從膝上移開，放到地上，輕得像放下一只盛滿了的碗，然後走到樹枝底下，叫他們下來。他們說寧可不下。她說，不下來的話，她就把他叫醒，那時候他們就知道了；於是他們下來了。她要他們給的，她用很少幾句話說明白，他們也給了，因為一碼之外睡著一個精靈。事情完了之後，她從脖子上摘下一條串滿戒指的繩子，各種各樣的戒指，鐵的、銀的、玻璃的、金的，向他們要他們的。「五百七十個，」她看著繩子說，「每一個，都是一個找得到路來我這裡的男人。他把我鎖在有七把鎖的玻璃匣子裡，他們還是來。把你們的給我。」他們把戒指給了她，那條繩子便成了五百七十二個。

我想她，比我想那兩位國王多。她在新婚之夜，被人從滿屋的賓客當中擄走，關進一只匣子，她所有的東西，一條頸繩就裝得下。她有的只是一串戒指，而她數著它們。兩兄弟循原路回去，一天一夜之間，兩人誰也沒提到她。然後弟弟說，如果一個有七把鎖的精靈都留不住一個女人，那麼一個有宮殿的國王，竟以為自己留得住，就是個傻瓜。哥哥說他同意。到了兩國的路分岔的路口，兩人擁抱，弟弟回撒馬爾罕去了。

哥哥傍晚回到自己的城。那時王后和她那一夥人，已經沒有話要對誰說了。他叫人傳我父親，我父親來了，國王說：「今晚給我一個新娘，好人家的處女。天亮時，劃掉她。明天傍晚，再一個。」我父親說，他想，國王也許願意再想想。「天明不留，」國王說，「你懂我的意思嗎？不留妻，不留夜，不留名字。我手裡有的，我握到早晨為止；早晨過後，就是別人握著了。」這幾乎就是他的原話。我父親一輩子在場經歷過不少壞決定，知道這不是爭辯的時候。他說：「我明白。」然後走出去，訂了一本簿子。

這就是夜簿。每天傍晚，我父親在上面寫一個名字；每天早晨，天剛亮，他把簿子捧到國王的門口，翻開，國王看那一頁，看的時間剛好夠讀完一個名字，點一下頭；我父親把簿子拿回去，劃上他的線。整個儀式就是這樣。國王不看那條線。他看的是線上面的名字，看一口氣的長度。那一口氣，我想了好多年。

這座城花了不到一年，就弄明白了一件沒有人說出口的事：一座城的女兒是有限的。最初幾個月還夠，夜簿最前面幾頁，全是好人家，名字旁邊寫著父親的官階。到了第二年，每一戶有適婚女兒的人家，都在別的城鎮找到了一位表親。第三年，我父親傍晚帶著一個書記和一盞燈，一條街一條街地走，找一扇還沒關上的門，半夜回來，帶著一個名字，或者什麼也沒帶。簿頁把這一切都記下來了：後面的名字，旁邊只有街名和行業，最後二十個，只有一個小名。有人趁夜讓女兒騎著驢走了。我認識的一個女人，把女兒扮成男孩，送去跟駱駝夫一起。一個布商把家裡的一間房砌死了。到我說的那年春天，老婦人們都說，城裡剩下的女孩，只有還太小的那些，至於再往後會怎樣，沒有人說。

我姐姐年紀比我大，讀過一千本書。我不是為了好看才報這個數目。她十一歲那年，我父親很得意，叫一個書記去數她的借書條，書記數到一千就停了，說再往後就是看法的問題。歷史，古代帝王的傳記，醫學，詩，智者和愚人的箴言，還有一種叫作「古人傳」的書，大半是謊話，她最喜歡。她在藏書室裡讀，膝蓋蜷起，背靠著書架，旁邊放什麼她就吃什麼，連看也不看。而她說話的方式，就像水從壺裡出去。她可以把她讀過的任何一本書、任何一頁倒出來，用書裡說話的那個人的聲音；而她倒出來的東西，沒有一點留在她身上。你問她一分鐘前對你說過什麼，她會帶著真正的興趣看著你。

她是在晚飯時對我父親說的，在麵包和水果之間。「我要你把我給國王。」我父親放下刀。他說不行。他說了整整一頓飯，等他的道理用完了，他做了宰相在這種時候會做的事：說了一個故事。那是牛和驢的故事：一個聽得懂動物說話的商人，一頭厭倦了耕田的牛，一頭給牛出了主意、結果自己被拉去代替牠耕田的驢。「愛管閒事的人要吃虧，」我父親說完的時候，用的是他小時候哄我們睡覺的那種聲音。他沒有說誰是那頭驢。她一直用手托著下巴聽到底，就像她聽每一個故事那樣，等他說完，她說：「這是個好故事，父親。我會記住它。我還是要去。」這就是她全部的發言，我一直覺得，那是剛剛好的長度。

第二天，她沒有去收拾行李，而是去了書記房，要看夜簿。首席書記不能拒絕宰相的女兒，也不敢看她的眼睛；他把簿子放在她面前，自己走到窗邊站著。她從第一頁讀起，讀了整個下午，手指擱在每個名字旁邊，像人在墓園裡讀石碑。她一頁也不跳。讀到最後一個名字，那個那天早晨被劃掉的，她合上簿子，手掌平放在封面上。「有人讀這個嗎？」她問。「國王，小姐，」首席書記對著窗子說，「天亮的時候。一個名字，一口氣的時間。」她點點頭，好像那回答了什麼，然後向他要一支筆。

傍晚前，她來到我房裡，告訴我她打算怎麼做。我說她瘋了。她說那是可能的，只是沒有用。她要去見國王，請求他允許她跟妹妹道別，我就跟著去，坐在床腳。夜快盡的時候，我說：「姐姐，如果你不睏，就說個故事給我們打發時間吧。」國王事後是不睡的，這是她從首席書記那裡聽來的；他會答應，因為他沒有別的事可以拿那些鐘點去做。「然後呢？」我問。「然後我就說一個給他聽。」「說哪一個？」「先開個頭，看看。」這就是全部的計畫。她陪著世上大半的文章熬過夜，得出的卻是這麼薄的一個計畫，我相信她自己也知道。

「還有一件事，」她說，「不管我說什麼，我都留不住。你知道我留不住。我可以把整個漁夫的故事說給他聽，到了早上，卻說不出它是怎麼開頭的。如果我要在天亮時留下一個沒說完的故事，我得知道我把它留在哪裡，還得知道還有什麼別的沒說完；而我會累，會怕，所以我記不得。」我說我會記得。她說光記得不夠，得寫在紙上。「他有一條關於說完了的東西的規矩。天亮時還沒說完的故事，他劃不掉它，除非他願意失去它的結局。所以我得知道什麼是沒說完的。我需要一欄。」她說這話的樣子，像是已經想了好些年，我相信確實如此。

我在最後的天光裡自己畫好了那一頁，用書記的尺和一支削尖的蘆管。三欄是我父親的：夜、名、劃。第四欄的欄名由我姐姐口述，我來寫：未了。在我父親劃線的那一欄，我要畫的東西短一些，一豎，直直立著，是衛兵點名簿上表示「到」的那一豎。在第四欄，我要寫天亮時還沒了結的事。然後她從書記手裡接過夜簿，夾在自己腋下，沒有哪個新娘這樣做過，書記由她去了，我父親沒有看她。

我們日落時走去王宮。我父親走在前面一步，手裡什麼也沒拿。他中午回家時沒有今晚的名字；兩天走遍各個街區，沒找到一扇開著的門，我想，他讓步真正的原因在這裡，不是我姐姐那一席話。街上很靜。百葉窗在我們經過時一扇接一扇關上，總比我們快一點點，像一排閉上的眼睛。一扇窗後，有個女人把手按在嘴上。誰也沒說話。到了最後一道門，通往國王樓梯的那一道，我父親把手放在我姐姐頭上，像我們小時候他常做的那樣，然後收回去，先走了進去。

國王坐在長榻邊上，雙手夾在膝間，像一個在自己生命的前廳裡等候的人。他並不老。他有一張樸素而疲倦的臉，是一個三年來每夜練習一件難事、卻沒有越練越好的人的臉。他看看我姐姐，看看我，然後看她腋下的簿子。「你把簿子帶來了。」他說。「我想你會想看它被寫下來。」她說，把它攤開放在燈旁的桌上，翻到我畫好的那一頁：那頁有一行在等著今晚，行裡有一個名字，是她自己的筆跡：山魯佐德。

那一頁就攤開在燈下：第一夜。山魯佐德。名字旁邊的兩欄是空的。我那年十五歲，我記得我當時覺得，它們看起來非常大。

## 第01章 · 第一夜與第二夜：商人與精靈

我不描述那一夜的前一段。我只說，我坐在床腳的地毯上，背對著床，眼睛盯著燈，沒有人要我看。等那一段過去，我轉過身來，把膝蓋抱到下巴底下坐著。燈壓得很低。我姐姐仰躺著，眼睛睜著；國王也仰躺著，眼睛閉著；兩個人都沒有睡，那座大宅子發出大宅子在夜裡最後幾個鐘頭才有的那些聲音，多半是人們不呼吸的聲音。我已經被告知該說什麼、什麼時候說。我等著那個時刻，卻不知道那個時刻是什麼；最後是我姐姐的腳在床柱上碰了兩下，像人敲門，我就說了。

我說得很糟。我用的是念價目單的那種聲音。「姐姐，如果你不睏，就說個故事給我們打發時間吧。」「好啊，」山魯佐德說，「只要國王允許。」停了很久，國王沒有睜眼。「說吧。」他對著天花板說，我看得出，他其實很高興，有件事可以拿這個鐘點去做。他有那樣一副神情：連著三年的夜裡，每一個夜裡的這個時候，他都醒著，早就不再指望它會有什麼不一樣。

我姐姐坐起來。她把枕頭在背後理好，像要幹一件很長的活，雙手交疊放在膝上，她臉上有什麼東西退了出去，另一樣東西進來了。對沒聽過的人，這很難解釋。她沒有變成另一個女人。她變成了一個地方，從那裡可以聽見另一個聲音，比她的低，比她的慢，一點也不趕；當它說「相傳，啊，吉祥的國王」的時候，我的手臂上汗毛都豎了起來。

有一個商人，它說，在許多城裡都有錢放著。有一天他騎馬出去收欠款，太陽像蓋子一樣壓在他身上，他在牆邊的一棵樹下下了馬，從鞍袋裡拿出一些乾麵包和一把椰棗。他吃了。吃完，他把核用力扔出去，就像人吃完了飯、心思又回到生意上時那樣扔；核離手的那一瞬間，一個精靈就站在他面前了，高得像棕櫚樹，手裡一把出鞘的劍。「起來，」精靈說，「我要殺你，像你殺了我的兒子那樣。」

「我沒見過你的兒子。」商人說。精靈告訴他，他的兒子剛才走過，像空氣裡的族類走路那樣，沒有人看得見，椰棗核正打在他的胸口，他就倒下死了。商人說，我們屬於真主，也要歸向真主；如果他殺了一個人，他是不知道的，求您饒恕我。「沒有辦法。」精靈說，揪住他的衣領，把他摔在地上，舉起了劍。

商人哭了，念了幾行詩，說一天有兩半，一半是賜福，一半是災禍，又說颶風起的時候，覺得吃力的只有最高的那棵樹。（我姐姐沒有把詩念完，我也不念；國王的眼睛在第一行睜開，第三行又閉上，她就懂了這個暗示。）然後他說：「別人欠我的債，我欠別人的債，我有孩子，有妻子，有放在別人手裡的貨。讓我回家，把各人該得的交給各人，到年底，我就回到這棵樹下。我以真主起誓，祂是我的見證，也是我的保人。到時候你想怎樣處置我，都行。」

精靈看了他很久，接受了他的誓言，放他走了。

他騎馬回家。他說到做到：一戶一戶地走，該收的收，該還的還，把產業分給繼承人，把發生的事告訴妻子和孩子，替他們找了一位監護人。那一年剩下的日子，他都和他們一起過。最後一天，他像人給死者洗身那樣洗了自己，把壽衣夾在腋下，一個一個吻了家人，走出門去，他們在他背後哭，像人哭一個再也見不到的人。新年的那一天，他到了同一道牆和同一棵樹，在樹下坐下，哭了起來。

他正哭著，一個老人沿路走下來，牽著一頭上了鏈子的瞪羚。老人行了禮，問一個人獨自在這個屬於惡靈的地方做什麼，商人告訴了他。老人沉默了一會兒，然後說，他聽過許多故事，但一個人說了要回來被殺，就騎馬回來了，這件事，若用刻刀刻在眼角，對任何受得起教訓的人都是一個教訓。他在商人身旁坐下。「我不離開這地方，」他說，「我要看看你和這個精靈之間，最後會怎樣。」

第二個老人來了，帶著兩條黑狗，問了，被告知了，也坐下。第三個老人來了，牽著一頭棗紅色的騾，問了，被告知了，也坐下。同一個故事我不講三遍；我姐姐也沒有，她用平常的聲音說，一件事說兩遍，對誰都沒有用。現在樹下有四個人了，接著，平原那頭起了一團塵土，裡面有風，從塵土中間，劍已經出鞘，眼裡冒著火星，走出那個精靈。

他抓住商人的手臂，把他從其他人當中拖出來。「起來，」他說，「我要做我發過誓要做的事，殺你，像你殺了我的兒子，我肝臟的內襯。」商人哭了，三個老人和他一起哭，然後第一個老人，那個帶瞪羚的，站起來，走到精靈面前，吻了他的手，說：「啊，精靈族諸王的冠冕，如果我把我和這頭瞪羚的故事說給你聽，你覺得奇異，你能不能把這個人的血分給我三分之一？」「如果奇異，」精靈說，「而且我說它奇異，你就得三分之一。」

「這頭瞪羚，」第一個老人說，「是我的堂妹，我伯父的女兒，做了我三十年的妻子。我們沒有孩子。於是我在家裡收了一個女孩，要她替我生一個，她生了一個兒子，俊得讓街上的人都停下來看。他十五歲那年，我得出遠門，做買賣，去了很久。我堂妹年輕時學過魔法師的法術。她把我兒子變成一頭小牛，把他母親變成一頭母牛，兩個都交給牧人，和牛群養在一起。我回家問起他們，她說那女孩死了，孩子逃了，她不知道去了哪裡。

「我哀傷了一年。大節日到了，我派人去向牧人要一頭肥母牛來獻祭，他送來的，就是我堂妹施了法的那頭，我兒子的母親。我拿起刀，站在牠面前，牠叫了一聲，眼淚從臉上流下來。我下不了手。我叫牧人另外牽一頭，我堂妹說：『殺那頭，我們沒有比那更肥的。』我又拿著刀走到牠面前，牠又叫了，我還是下不了手，就叫牧人自己去殺、去剝皮。他照做了，卻發現牠身上一點肉也沒有，只有皮和骨。我後悔的時候，後悔已經來不及了。

「然後我說：『給我牽一頭肥小牛來。』他牽來的，就是我的兒子。那頭小牛一看見我，掙斷了韁繩，跑到我腳邊，倒下來哭，我生了憐憫，叫牧人放了牠，另牽一頭母牛來。我堂妹卻高聲說，今天是聖日，聖日只能殺完美的東西，我們沒有比這頭更好的小牛了。我說：『看看我照你的話對那頭母牛做了什麼，結果如何。我為那件事難過。我不會再做了。』她說：『以真主之名，今天你殺這頭小牛，不然你就不是男人，我也不是你的妻子。』聽了這些狠話，又看不出她的用意，我拿著刀走向那頭小牛——」

就在那一刻，河對岸的宣禮塔傳出第一聲晨禮的宣禮，百葉窗上透出了灰色，我姐姐在句子的中間停住了，嘴微微張著，像人踩在一級不存在的樓梯上。

她說：「山魯佐德看見天亮了，就停住了她被允許說的話。」那是說書人的套語，她從她那一千本書裡得來的；我那天早晨第一次聽見，並把它理解成一紙租約。她租到的是到宣禮之前的那幾個鐘頭，宣禮響了，租期就滿了。租約是可以續的。我說了我被告知要說的話，說她的故事美麗又圓熟；她說了她被告知要答的話，說這比起她明晚能說的，什麼也不是，如果她活著，如果國王允許。我們在國王面前做著一件事，燈是證人，誰也沒有說破。

然後我從地毯上站起來，從桌上拿起夜簿，寫下那一行。我在我父親劃線的那一欄裡，畫了短短一豎；在第四欄裡，我寫下還沒了結的：商人和精靈，在樹下，劍舉著；第一個老人和他的瞪羚，停在那頭小牛前，刀在他手裡；第二個老人和第三個，在路邊等著，帶著一對狗和一頭騾。蘆管沙沙地響。我抬起頭時，國王站在我上方。他讀了那一頁。他讀的時間是一口氣的長度，像他讀過每一個名字那樣，又多了一會兒；然後他抬眼看我姐姐，她已經把臉埋在手臂裡睡著了，他什麼也沒說，走了出去。

我父親後來告訴我，他從最後幾顆星起，就站在那扇門外，壽衣夾在腋下，國王走出來，看看他，看看壽衣，往朝堂走去，一個字也沒說，一整天都在聽訟，像什麼事也沒發生，也沒有派人去叫他。我父親在那裡站了一整天。沒有人叫他走。

第一夜。山魯佐德。到。未了：商人與精靈，劍已舉起；第一個老人與他的瞪羚，刀握在手裡，停在那頭小牛前；第二個老人與第三個，等著。

那天傍晚沒有人來要新娘。我想那是我父親的主意，或者是國王忘了，或者兩者都有：就是沒有名字可寫。屋子安靜得和從前不一樣，像一座鐘停了的屋子，人人都不停地看牆上原來能聽見鐘聲的那個地方。燈低下來的時候，我姐姐靠著枕頭坐起來，我把我寫的念給她聽。「啊，」她說，「那把刀。」她說的方式，像人拾起一根線頭。我想她就算沒有它，也會繼續說下去，說別的什麼，她說不出她剛才到了哪裡。然後國王，他一直沒動，說：「說下去。」她就說下去了。

小牛，她說，沒有被殺。最後一刻，老人的心在他身體裡翻了個身，他叫牧人把牠帶回牛群。第二天早晨，牧人來見他，說有個消息會讓他高興，也會替自己掙一份賞錢。他有個女兒，跟他們家裡的一個老婦人學過魔法；前一天，小牛被牽進來，她看見牠，蒙住臉，一會兒笑，一會兒哭。「父親，」她說，「你怎麼這麼不知羞恥，帶一個陌生男人進來見我？」這不是小牛，她說，這是他們主人的兒子，被繼母施了法，牠哭，是因為母親死了，是被父親無意中殺死的。

老人像沒有喝酒就醉了的人，到了牧人家。那女孩吻他的手，小牛像從前一樣走到他身邊。她說她不要錢，只要兩件事：把她嫁給他的兒子，並且讓她對做這件事的人施同一個咒，以保自己平安。他說：你父親手裡的牛和一切財物都歸你，至於我堂妹，她的命任你處置。女孩盛了一杯水，念了些話，灑在小牛身上，說：「如果真主造你為小牛，你就仍是小牛；如果你是被施了法，就依至高者的命令，回到從前的樣子。」小牛抖了一下，成了一個男孩。老人撲上去抱住他的脖子。然後女孩端著她的杯子去找他的妻子，把她變了，說這個形狀並不醜。於是瞪羚住在家裡，兒子和牧人的女兒成了親，後來她死了；兒子去印度的各座城裡找出路。老人牽著瞪羚，從一個鎮到另一個鎮追他，就這樣來到一棵樹下，那裡坐著一個流淚的商人。

「這很奇異，」精靈說，把商人血的三分之一給了第一個老人。

第二個老人，帶著兩條黑狗的那一個，走上前來。「如果我告訴你這兩個對我做了什麼，你覺得更奇異，」他說，「你能不能也給我三分之一？」精靈說可以。「這兩個，」老人說，「是我的哥哥。我們的父親死了，留給我們三千枚金幣，我們各自開了一間鋪子。我大哥把鋪子賣了，跟著一支商隊去了外國。去了一年。有一天，一個乞丐站在我的鋪子門口討錢，我說：『願真主為你另開一扇門。』他哭了，說：『你不認得我了嗎？』我帶他去澡堂，給他穿上我的衣服，把帳算了一遍，發現我們在本錢之外賺了兩千，就分了一半給他。二哥也一樣，像大哥那樣回來，我也一樣對他。後來他們要我一起去旅行，我六年不肯。六年之後，我讓步了。我看他們還剩什麼，什麼也沒有：每一個錢都花在吃喝上了。我什麼也沒說。我把鋪子賣了，把我有的分成幾份，每人一千，剩下的埋在地裡，以防萬一。

「我們租了一條船，航行一個月，到一座城，把貨賣了，一本賺十倍。我們起航的時候，岸上有個穿破衣服的女孩，吻我的手，說：『你有善心嗎？帶我去你家吧，我會報答你。』我帶了她。我心裡動了，我不知道為什麼。我讓她上船，給她衣服穿。我愛她。我的兄弟們看見我偏愛她、看見我有什麼，彼此說，他不在才好；有一夜我睡在她身邊，他們把我們兩個抬起來，扔進了海裡。

「我在空中醒來。我妻子變成了一個女精靈，帶我飛到一座島上，離開了，早晨又回來。『我是你忠心的僕人，』她說，『我還了你的情。我是個女精靈，我看見你，愛了你，就像你看到的那樣來到你面前，你娶了我。現在我救你不致溺死。但我生你兄弟們的氣，我要殺他們。』我替他們求情。我說人應該對傷害他的人以善相待，何況他們仍是我的兄弟。她說沒有辦法，把我抱起來，放在我自己家的屋頂上。我打開門，挖出我埋的東西，開了我的鋪子。

「那天傍晚我回家，在屋裡發現綁著這兩條狗。牠們站起來，嗚咽著，向我搖尾巴，我妻子說：『這是你的兄弟。我捎了話給我妹妹，她就這樣對待牠們。牠們這樣要十年。』現在十年到了，我正要去她妹妹那裡，請她放了牠們，路上遇見這個年輕人，知道了他的遭遇，就留下來。這就是我的故事。」「比第一個更奇異，」精靈說，「我給你三分之一。」

然後第三個老人走上前，繩子牽著那頭棗紅色的騾。「我能告訴你比這兩個都更奇異的，」他說，「如果你把剩下的給我。」「我答應你。」精靈說。「這頭騾，」老人說，「是我的妻子。我出門一年，回來是夜裡，發現她家裡的一個男人躺在她身邊，在我自己的地毯上，兩個人又笑又說，又親吻，我不知道還做了什麼。她看見我，從屋子那頭走過來，拿著一壺水，在水上念了什麼，朝我臉上潑，說：『從那個形狀出來，進入狗的形狀。』我就成了一條狗。她把我趕出去。我一直跑，跑到一個肉鋪，吃骨頭。屠夫把我帶回家，他的女兒一看見我，就蒙住臉說：『父親，你怎麼帶一個男人進來見我？』他說：『男人在哪裡？』她說：『那條狗。他的妻子對他施了法，我能解開。』她把水灑在我身上，念了話，我就恢復了原樣。我吻她的手，向她要了一些水，好對我妻子做同樣的事；她給了我。我回家，發現她睡著，念了她教我的話，灑了水，說：『從那個形狀出來，進入騾的形狀。』你看到的就是她。」

這時候，國王發出了一個聲音。那是兩夜來他第一次發出的聲音：一口短促的氣，從鼻子裡出來，可能是笑的開頭，也可能是另一回事。他原本夾在膝間的雙手，握緊了。我姐姐沒有停。那個聲音說，精靈轉向那頭騾，問：「這是真的嗎？」騾點了點頭，用比劃表示，那是真的。

精靈高興得全身發抖。他說，商人血的最後三分之一，他給了這個老人，為了他們的緣故，他放了商人。商人擁抱了三個老人，謝了他們。他們祝他餘生愉快，各自回自己的城，商人回到妻子和孩子身邊，精靈回進了塵土。「而這個，」我姐姐用她自己的聲音說，那聲音已經啞了，「比起漁夫與精靈的故事，什麼也不是。」

宣禮聲又從河對岸傳來。我沒料到會這麼快。

我畫了那一豎，寫下還沒了結的：比這個更好的故事，已經答應了，還沒有名字。寫著它的時候，我才看出她做了什麼。對一個每天天亮劃掉一個名字的國王，她說的第一個故事，是一個人的命被用故事、一次三分之一地買下來的故事；而她把妻子和騾子留到最後，等他不再設防的時候。後來我問她，是不是這樣挑的，她說那是第一個跑進她腦子裡的。我不信。我想她自己也不信，但我始終沒有弄清楚，我們兩個誰更接近真相。國王來了，站在我上方。他讀了。我數著：一口氣，兩口，第三口，他停了一下才放出來。然後他走了出去。我父親，我後來聽說，在門外。

第二夜。山魯佐德。到。未了：一個她說比這些都更奇異的故事，已經答應，還沒開始。

## 第02章 · 第三夜與第四夜：漁夫與精靈

第二天早晨，國王走出去之後，我把夜簿夾在腋下，去找我父親。他就在別人告訴我他會在的地方，背靠著門邊的牆，壽衣折起來擱在膝上，身上還是前一天穿的那一套。他抬頭看我，像看一個要開口說話的陌生人。我什麼也沒說。我把簿子翻到那一頁，遞給他。

他讀了。他讀那一行，讀還開著的那一欄，然後伸出一根手指，非常輕地碰了碰第三欄裡的那一豎，像人碰一方還沒乾的印。「這是誰畫的線？」他說。「我。」「很直。」我父親說。他把那一頁還給我。我告訴他，她睡著了，她很好，他點了好幾次頭，一直點，沒有起身。過了一會兒，他說：「告訴她，我那個故事講得不好。」他沒有說是哪一個。我沒有告訴她。她知道。

城裡有了議論。一個不肯看我眼睛的女傭，替我往盆裡倒水的時候告訴我，市集上都在傳，宰相的女兒已經撐過兩夜了，燈油的價錢漲了，因為坐著不睡的人太多。我姐姐睡到下午。我完全沒睡，日落時我已經在床腳，燈芯剪好，夜簿攤在膝上，我的那句話含在嘴裡；這時國王，他很晚才進來，還沒有躺下，說：「漁夫。」

那是他頭一次沒有被問就開口。我姐姐在枕上轉過頭，看了他一會兒，像看一隻落在窗台上的鳥。然後她說：「好啊，只要國王允許。」他說：「說吧。」我把我的那句話放回它原來的地方。

有一個漁夫，那個聲音說，是個老人，很窮，有妻子和三個孩子，每天撒網四次，不多撒。這是他的規矩。我想他定這規矩，是為了讓想要這件事有個地方停下來。一天正午，他把襯衣撩起來涉進水裡，撒了網，網沉下去，落在一件很重的東西上；他拉得兩條胳膊都要掉了，才把它拉上岸，是一頭死驢，網眼都扯破了。「這可是個古怪的口糧。」他說，說了人們該說的話，把網攤開晾著。

第二網是一只裝滿沙與泥的罐子。第三網是碎陶片和玻璃碴。他抬頭看天，說了我們任何一個人都會說的話：他已經撒了三次，規矩是四次，一樣東西也沒給他，請老天考慮考慮。第四次，網沉下去，落在一件它拉不動的東西上；他得潛下去解開，等他把它拖上岸，網裡是一只銅罐，形狀像黃瓜，黃的，沉的，鉛封的口上壓著大衛之子所羅門的印。「這個，」漁夫說，「在銅器市集能賣十個第納爾。」他搖了搖，沒有響。他用刀劃開鉛封，把塞子擱在沙上，把罐子傾過來，看看自己買到了什麼。

煙冒出來。它直直往上，上得很高，然後沿著海岸攤開，然後聚攏，成了一個精靈，頭在雲裡，腳在沙灘上，手像乾草叉，腿像桅杆，嘴像山洞，牙像巨石，眼睛像兩盞燈；那精靈做的第一件事，是撲倒在沙上，臉埋進去，喊道：「除了真主，沒有神，所羅門是真主的先知！啊，先知，別殺我！我再也不違抗你了！」

漁夫發現自己居然還能說話，這讓他驚訝。他說：「所羅門已經死了一千八百年。我們活在世界的末尾了。你是誰？你怎麼會在一只罐子裡？」精靈坐起來看著他，臉上的恐懼褪下去，別的什麼東西進來。「好消息，漁夫，」他說，「你要死了。」「為什麼？」「因為你把我放了出來。」「我把你從罐子裡放出來，把你從海底撈上來，放在乾地上，所以我就得死？」「選吧，」精靈說，「選你怎麼死。這是我給你的恩典。」

「聽我的故事，」他說，漁夫喘著氣，說只要不長就聽。故事不短。他曾和偉大的薩克爾一同叛變所羅門，精靈說，所羅門派宰相阿薩夫把他鎖鏈押來，關進罐裡，封了印，丟進海中央。「我躺在海底。頭一個一百年裡，我在心裡說：誰放我出去，我讓他永遠富有。沒有人來。」

說到這裡，我姐姐停住了。她讓寂靜在房間裡立著，很久，久得足夠一百年過去。我看著國王。他仰躺著，眼睛睜著，嘴唇微微在動，像人在數什麼東西。「第二個一百年，」那聲音說，「我說：誰放我出去，我為他打開大地的寶藏。沒有人來。」她又停住。「第三個，我說：三個願望。沒有人來。」又一陣沉默。「四百年過去，我生氣了，我發誓：從此誰放我出去，我就殺他，讓他選怎麼死。而你是第一個。」

「我對你好，」漁夫說，「你拿惡來報我。俗話說得對：我們待他們好，他們回我們以壞，每個壞人的作為都是如此。」「不要再說了，」精靈說，「你要死。」漁夫說：「饒了我，真主就饒你；不要殺我，不然真主殺你。」精靈說沒有辦法。漁夫在心裡對自己說：這是個精靈，我是個真主賜了一點機靈的人；讓他拿他的怒氣來出主意，我拿我的腦子來出主意。他說：「臨死之前，奉刻在所羅門印上的那個至大之名：你能不能真實回答我一個問題？」那精靈，剛才還龐大得很，縮了一下。「問，快問。」「你是怎麼進到那只罐子裡的？它裝不下你的手，裝不下你的腳。我絕不相信你整個人都在裡面，除非我親眼看見。」

「你不信我整個人都在裡面？」「我不信，」漁夫說，「除非我看見你進去。」

光進了百葉窗，第一聲宣禮從河對岸響起來，我姐姐停住，嘴微微張著。「山魯佐德看見天亮了，」她說，「就停住了她被允許說的話。」我說了我被告知要說的話。她說了她被告知要答的話。國王躺著，眼睛看著天花板。我拿起蘆管。

第三夜。山魯佐德。到。未了：漁夫與精靈，精靈變成煙要證明自己裝得進去，漁夫手裡握著塞子。

第四夜，我姐姐的嗓子啞了。我從壺裡倒了一杯水，捧給她，抬頭時，國王正看著我做這件事。他沒說什麼。我把未了的念給她聽，她喝了水，國王說：「說下去。」她就說下去了。

精靈，她說，抖了抖身子，成了煙，煙一點一點流進罐裡，像水流進排水口，直到最後一縷也進去；漁夫立刻抓起塞子，連著印壓了上去。他站在那裡，把罐子抱在懷裡。他喊：「現在選你怎麼死吧！我要把你丟進海裡，我還要在這裡蓋一間屋子，告訴每一個來的漁夫，這片水裡住著一個精靈，被放出來的時候，他給救他的人一個選擇死法的機會！」罐裡的精靈明白了自己被一個人鬥過，封印還封著，他說：「我開玩笑的！我只是開玩笑！」「你是個說謊的，」漁夫說，「是你們一族裡最卑劣的。」他往水邊走。「不！不！」罐子說。「要！要！」漁夫說。

罐子放軟了聲音。它說漁夫是個慷慨的人，而精靈終歸是個一時衝動的造物。它說：放我出去，我給你一份差事，能讓你脫離貧窮。它說漁夫生氣是對的，它準備好要抱歉。漁夫說，他和它的處境，就如同尤南王的宰相與大夫杜班。「他們是誰？」精靈說。「我在罐子裡，我有的是時間。」

在法爾斯城，漁夫說，在希臘人的地方，有個國王名叫尤南，他有痲瘋病。病是從手上開始的。他國內所有的醫生都被請來，他喝他們的藥水，吞他們的藥粉，抹他們的藥膏，還是沒有好轉。後來有個大夫來到城裡，是個老人，讀六種文字的書，他聽說國王的病，整夜坐著翻想，早晨穿上他最好的袍子，求見。「啊，國王，」他說，「我能治好你，我不要你喝一口藥，也不往你身上抹一點。」國王說，如果他做得到，他可以富到孫子的孫子，一輩子做國王席上的同伴。

那位大夫，名叫杜班，回家，在他的工作間裡待了那一夜和第二天，用一根打馬球用的那種球杖。他把杖頭挖空，把握柄也挖空，把藥填進空處，封好，再配一顆球。第三天早晨，他把它們帶進宮裡。「到場上去，」他說，「用這個打球。像我這樣握著。騎得用力些。等你手濕了，身子濕了，藥就進去了。然後洗澡，睡覺，早上你就好了。」

國王照著做了。他帶著他的大臣們，在球場上來來回回，擊著球，直到汗從他身上淌下來，他握著柄的手濕了，藥從木頭裡出來，進了他的掌心。杜班在場邊看著。時間到了，他說：「現在去洗澡。」國王去了澡堂，洗了很久，換上乾淨衣服，回床上睡去。他醒來，看他的手臂，上面什麼也沒有了。皮膚乾淨得像從來沒有人加工過的銀。他高興得哭了。

早晨他走到朝堂，杜班進來，吻地，念了一首詩；國王站起來摟住他，讓他坐在自己右手邊。他們一起吃飯。傍晚，國王給了他兩千塊金幣，一件榮袍，派一匹宮裡的馬送他回家。第二天，是五件榮袍和一千第納爾；此後每天都是，直到國王對他的大臣們說，這樣的人，一輩子只遇得到一個，他打算把他留在身邊，度過餘生。

那國王有個宰相，漁夫說，長相醜，不吉利，心胸窄，又酸，看著這一切，吃不下飯。他等朝會結束，眾大臣出去，才走上前吻了地，說：「啊，這個時代的國王，我從小就侍奉您。我有話要進言。若我隱瞞，我就不配做我父親的兒子。」「什麼話？」國王說。「聰明人說過，不看事情的終局的人，在這事上沒有運氣。我看見國王走錯了路。您把榮耀堆在您的敵人身上，一個整個目的就是要毀您的王位的人。我為您的性命擔心。」國王臉色白了，說：「你指的是誰？」「我指的是大夫杜班。」

「住口！」國王說，「那是我唯一真正的朋友，是所有人裡最好的一個。他用我手裡握著的東西治好了我，而世上的醫生都已經治不了了。從東到西，你還能在哪裡找到像他的人？從今天起，我每個月給他一千塊金幣，就算我把半個王國給他，也是小事。我知道你是什麼人。你是妒忌，就像辛迪巴德王的宰相那樣妒忌——」

光在百葉窗裡了。宣禮聲從河對岸傳過來，又落回去。我姐姐說：「山魯佐德看見天亮了，就停住了她被允許說的話。」我說了我必須說的，她答了，我看出她累得已經沒力氣害怕。我畫了那一豎，我寫下未了的。我寫得比第一次慢，因為我怕寫錯：漁夫與精靈，海邊的罐子，漁夫手裡的塞子；尤南王與大夫，宰相的指控剛剛說出口；國王的回答剛剛起頭，裡面有一位名叫辛迪巴德的國王，我從來沒聽說過。我抬頭時，國王已經把夜簿從桌上拿起來，拿到窗邊。他背對我們站著，在晨光裡讀。他讀的時間比一口氣長得多。放下的時候，他把它放回原處，與桌沿對齊，走了出去。

第四夜。山魯佐德。到。未了：漁夫與精靈，罐子與塞子；尤南王與大夫杜班，宰相的指控，國王的回答才開頭，一位名叫辛迪巴德的國王尚未說到。

## 第03章 · 第五夜與第六夜：大夫杜班，與四色的魚

到了第五夜，我已經沒辦法把「未了」那一欄排成一行了。它變成了一棟房子，房間裡面還有房間。我姐姐在講一個漁夫，漁夫在對罐子裡的精靈講一位國王，那位國王正要對他的宰相講另一位國王；如果我只寫最裡面的那一間，其他的就丟了，如果我把它們全部排成一行，看起來就成了五個故事，而不是一個套著一個。所以那天傍晚，我開始把這一欄寫成一道樓梯：每一個說話的人佔一行，每一行比前一行往右縮進一點。整道樓梯寫下來之後，我可以從最底下讀起，那是正在說話的那個人，一路讀到最上面，那是我姐姐，這樣就知道我現在是在誰的嘴裡。

「說下去。」國王說。我姐姐說，尤南王是這樣回答他的宰相的：「你被妒忌的魔鬼附了身，你想要我把這位大夫處死，然後我就會後悔，就像辛迪巴德王後悔殺了他的隼那樣。」「那是怎麼回事，啊，國王？」宰相問；國王就講給他聽。

從前有一位波斯的國王，她說，酷愛打獵，養了一隻隼，不分日夜都停在他的拳頭上，頸子上掛著一只小小的金杯，讓牠喝水用。一天早晨，管鷹的人說今天是個適合放鷹的日子。他們騎馬到一處山谷，張起了網，一頭瞪羚走進網裡來。國王那時心情是要立個規矩的，他說：「誰讓那頭瞪羚從他頭上跳過去，我就殺誰。」圍獵的人漸漸把圈子收緊。瞪羚走到國王站著的地方，後腿一坐，兩條前腿交疊在胸前，像是要向他叩首；而他，出其不意，竟對牠低下了頭。牠從他的頭頂一躍而過，轉眼就消失在荒原裡了。

他的人開始彼此交換眼色。國王對宰相說：「他們在說什麼？」宰相說：「說您發過誓，誰讓牠從頭上過去，就殺誰。」「以我的頭起誓，」國王說，「我要把牠帶回來。」他策馬就追。他把牠追到一道山脈的山腳，牠逃進一個洞裡；他放出了隼，隼用爪子撲進去抓牠的眼睛，他趕上去，用鎚矛把牠打死。他割開牠的喉嚨，剝了皮，把牠掛在馬鞍上。

那是午睡的時辰，土地乾裂，沒有水，國王和馬都渴得快要瘋了。然後他看見一棵樹，枝子上滴著水，像融化的奶油。他戴著皮手套，國王們為了防毒都這樣戴著。他把隼脖子上的小金杯摘下來，在滴水的地方接滿了水，擺在隼面前；隼用腳一踢，把杯子踢翻了。他又接了一杯，以為牠只是太心急。牠又踢翻了。他接第三杯，遞給馬，隼拍一下翅膀，把杯子從他手裡打飛了。

「願真主毀了你，」國王說，「你這最倒楣的飛禽！你不讓我喝，你自己不喝，連馬也不讓喝。」他拔出劍，砍掉了隼的一隻翅膀。

我姐姐的聲音停了。黑暗中，我聽見國王吸進一口氣，沒有吐出來。

隼，那聲音說，抬起頭，用手勢告訴他：看看樹上有什麼。他抬頭看，枝子上有一窩毒蛇，他當成水的，是從牠們嘴裡流下來的毒液。他後悔了。他騎上馬，帶著死瞪羚，回到營地，把獵物丟給廚子，說：「拿去烤。」然後坐到椅子上，隼還在他拳頭上。隼喘了一口氣，死了。

「牠死了？」國王說。

他坐起來了。他一下子坐起來，把腿擺到床沿外面，雙腳踏在地上，而我清清楚楚地想著，從來沒有這樣清清楚楚地想過任何事：就是今晚了。我看門。我看燈。我沒有看我姐姐。

「牠死在他的拳頭上，」她用那個聲音說，「在營地，他回去吃東西的地方。」

「因為那隻翅膀。」

「因為那隻翅膀，啊，國王。」

國王坐著。我不知道坐了多久。也許夠說一次禱詞的時間。然後他把腳收上去，重新躺下，臉轉向牆壁；我姐姐一動不動，吸了一口氣，說：「於是尤南王對他的宰相說：我告訴你，如果我照你要的做了，我會像那個殺死鸚鵡的人那樣後悔。」

那是個商人，她說，妻子美得讓他一刻也不願讓她離開視線，生意終於逼得他必須出遠門，他就到鳥市去，花一百個金幣買了一隻鸚鵡，讓牠替他看著。那是隻聰明的鳥。牠聽到的每一件事都記得。他不在的時候，妻子請了個年輕人到家裡，白天吃飯，晚上留下。商人回家，先叫人把鸚鵡拿來問，鸚鵡就告訴他，他去找妻子，打了她。她並不笨。她猜到是那隻鳥；她叫來女傭，發現她們都發誓自己什麼也沒說，是鸚鵡說的；她就給她們下了命令。當晚，一個女傭在鳥籠底下推手磨磨粉，一個往籠頂上灑水，一個提著一面鋼鏡，在燈光裡整夜跑來跑去。

早上，商人問鸚鵡昨晚發生什麼事。「對不起，主人，」鸚鵡說，「我什麼也看不見，聽不見，整晚都是黑暗、打雷和閃電。」「可是現在是仲夏啊。」商人說。「真主知道，」鸚鵡說，「我看見的我就看見了。」商人，他信了妻子對天氣的說法，把鸚鵡從籠裡拽出來，摔在地上，牠死了。幾天之後，一個女傭把真相告訴他，他不信，直到他親眼看見那個年輕人從她房裡出來。然後他拔了劍。他殺了那個年輕人，他殺了他的妻子；他坐在屋裡，面對著空鳥籠，哀悼那隻鸚鵡，而哀悼已經沒有用了。

「我對他做了什麼？」故事裡的宰相說；接著他說，他心裡只有國王的好處，如果國王不聽他的話，就會像另一個宰相那樣毀滅，那個宰相對一位年輕的王子背信。「那是怎麼回事？」國王說；宰相就講了。

一個國王的兒子，她說，迷狩獵迷到了狂，他父親派一個宰相陪他騎馬出去。有一天，一頭大野獸出現，宰相說：「那就是你的獵物，王子！」王子就追上去，追丟了，也迷了路，在荒野裡發現一個女孩在哭。她說她是印度一位國王的女兒，從商隊的駱駝上掉下來的。他讓她坐在他後面，經過一處廢墟時她說要下去一下。她去了很久，他跟過去，發現她是個食人女妖，正對她的孩子說：「我給你們帶來一個肥肥的年輕人當晚飯。」他們說：「快帶來，媽媽。」王子開始發抖。她走出來。「你怕什麼？」「怕一個仇人。」「給他點錢就是了。」「他要的是我的命。」「那就求真主救你脫離他。」王子抬起眼睛禱告，女妖就從他身邊轉開，他回家，把宰相做的事告訴了父親；國王就把那宰相處死了。

於是尤南王的宰相說完了，我姐姐說：「而您，啊，國王，如果您繼續信任這個人，您會死得最慘。看他是怎麼用您手裡握著的東西治了您：您怎麼知道他不會用同樣握在手裡的東西殺您？」尤南王被恐懼攥住，說：「你說得對。他也許是個間諜。我該怎麼辦？」「立刻召他來，」宰相說，「他一到，就砍下他的頭，這樣您就在他除掉您之前除掉他了。」於是國王派人去叫。

杜班進來，高高興興，什麼也不知道，念了一首詩。國王說：「你知道我為什麼叫你嗎？」「只有真主知道隱藏的事。」「我叫你來，是要殺你。」杜班站得很靜。「您為什麼要殺我？我做了什麼？」「人說你是間諜。我要在你殺我之前殺你。」他吩咐他的劊子手動手。「饒了我，」杜班說，「真主就饒你。不要殺我，不然真主殺你。」（這正是我對你說的話，漁夫對精靈說；你也沒聽進去。）「不殺你，我不得安全。」國王說。

杜班看出沒有用，就哭了，說他後悔把好處給了不配得好處的人。然後他請求一點時間，回家了結債務，告訴家人把他葬在哪裡，送走他的書。「但有一本書，」他說，「我想給你。你若砍了我的頭，打開這本書，從第三頁讀三行，我的頭會回答你問它的任何問題。」國王因為這件事太稀奇而發抖；他派人把他押回家去。

第二天，杜班當著所有大臣的面來到朝堂，帶著一本舊書和一個小粉盒。「拿著這本書，」他說，「我的頭落地之前，別打開。然後把它放在盤子裡的粉上，止住血；血止住了，再打開書。」國王做了手勢，劊子手動手，頭擱在粉上，血止住了。頭睜開了眼睛。「打開書。」它說。

國王舔了舔手指，翻第一頁，黏住了，第二頁，也黏，第三頁；他這樣翻了六頁，上面什麼字也沒有。「這裡沒有字。」他說。「再翻。」頭說。他又翻了三頁。那書是有毒的。毒通過他的手指和嘴唇進去，他喊道：「毒發作了！」大夫杜班的頭念了幾行詩，我只記得大概，因為很短：說那些靠劍統治的國王都已不在，他們做了什麼，什麼就會回到他們身上；說你對別人做的，別人也會對你做；說跟命運生氣沒有用。頭安靜下來，國王翻身倒下，死了。

「所以你看，」漁夫對精靈說，「如果尤南王饒了那位大夫，真主就會饒他；如果你饒了我，真主就會饒你。」

光已經在百葉窗裡。我姐姐說了她的話，我說了我的，她答了，她坐得很直，雙手放在膝上。我拿起蘆管。我順著樓梯寫下來：漁夫在海水邊，懷裡抱著罐子，精靈在裡面求饒。只剩一行。整道樓梯，一間房接一間房，都走到了這裡。

我看國王。他沒有轉過身來。我寫下那一行，等著他起身過來讀，他沒有。他背對著我。過了很久，他起來了，像一個在硬地方躺了很久的人起身那樣，披上袍子，走向門，沒有看桌子。夜簿在我手裡。我把它舉起來。他沒有看見。我現在覺得，他是看不見。

第五夜。山魯佐德。到。未了：漁夫與精靈，在海水邊，罐子在漁夫懷裡。

我父親後來告訴我，國王在門口對他說了什麼。國王走出來，發現他夾著壽衣，和每個早晨一樣，而這一次他停了下來。他站在我父親面前，看了看壽衣，看了看我父親的臉，說：「回家去。」我父親說：「主上，我寧願等。」國王沒有再說，去了朝堂。我父親等著。

第六夜，我又開始畫那道樓梯，只有一級。我姐姐背後有個枕頭，肘邊有水壺，她說，漁夫聽著精靈求饒，想了一會兒。精靈指著那個名字發誓，說他不會害他，還要對他好。漁夫，是個守著四網規矩的人，打開了罐子。煙升起來，聚攏，站在海灘上；精靈做的第一件事，就是一腳把罐子踢進海裡。漁夫嚇得尿了褲子。「看來不妙。」他說；但他對精靈說，真主說過：履行你們的盟約；他說得和大夫說的一樣，精靈大笑，叫他跟上。

他們繞過城牆，穿過田野，越過一片石頭地，下到一片寬闊的荒原，荒原中央有個湖。精靈涉水進去。「撒網。」他說，漁夫撒了，拉上來時網裡有四條魚，一條白，一條紅，一條藍，一條黃。「把這些帶給蘇丹，」精靈說，「他會給你能讓你富起來的東西。我很抱歉我只能做到這樣。我在海底待了一千八百年，今天才看見一個鐘頭的世界。但是，這裡一天只許撒一次網。」他用腳一跺，地裂開，又合上，把他吞了。

漁夫把魚放在一盆水裡，頂在頭上，頂到王宮，蘇丹從沒見過那樣的魚，給了他四百第納爾；漁夫把錢塞在襯衣裡跑回家，跌跌撞撞，以為是在做夢。蘇丹把魚交給那個新來的廚娘，她是三天前希臘國王送來的，讓她試試手藝。她把魚洗淨，放進油鍋裡，煎好一面；她翻面；廚房的牆裂開了。

一個年輕女子從牆裡出來。她很美，戴著藍色的流蘇頭巾，耳環，手鐲，鑲著寶石的戒指，手裡一根長長的藤杖，往鍋裡捅了一下。「魚，」她說，「魚，你們守約嗎？」廚娘暈倒在地。「魚，你們守約嗎？」年輕女子又說；第三次說；魚從鍋裡抬起頭來，說：「守，守。」它們一起說了一首兩句的詩，意思是：你守信，我們就守信；你若反悔，我們也照樣還你。年輕女子一腳踢翻了鍋，從原路出去，牆合上了。廚娘醒來時，魚已經黑得像炭。「他的杖第一下就斷了。」她說，又暈了過去。

宰相發現她那個樣子，用腳搖她。她告訴了他。他派人叫漁夫，漁夫回到湖邊撒網，網上來四條魚，與第一批一模一樣，宰相站在廚娘身旁看著她煎；牆裂了，年輕女子拿著藤杖出來，說：「魚，魚，你們守約嗎？」魚說：「守，守」；她一腳踢翻了鍋——

光來了。我姐姐，不知講了多久，停了。我把未了的寫下來，順著樓梯，一級，然後底下又加了一級：漁夫的魚；廚娘的煎鍋；問魚守不守約的、從牆裡出來的年輕女子，以及魚的回答；宰相正要去告訴蘇丹的事。我的手有一點發抖。我抬頭時，國王就站在我旁邊。我不知道他站了多久。他從我手裡把夜簿拿走，像拿一只碗，讀，讀的時間夠我數到四十；然後他伸出一根手指，像我父親那樣，非常輕地碰了一下第三欄裡的那一豎，像碰一方還沒乾的印。

他把簿子還給我。他什麼也沒說。他走了出去。

第六夜。山魯佐德。到。未了：漁夫的魚；廚娘和她的煎鍋；穿牆而來、問魚守不守約的年輕女子，以及魚怎麼回答；宰相正在去見蘇丹的路上。

## 第04章 · 第七夜、第八夜與第九夜：中了魔法的王子，與門口的腳夫

第七天傍晚，床腳多了一只墊子，是以前沒有的。很樸素，暗綠色的絲，擱在地毯上，就是我連續六夜把膝蓋抱在下巴底下坐著的那個位置。沒有人說這是誰的，也沒有人說是誰放的。我看看我姐姐，她在看天花板；看看國王，他在看燈。我坐了下去。它比地毯好得多，這一點，我現在說出來，是因為當時我沒有對任何人說過。

「魚。」國王說。

宰相，我姐姐說，去見蘇丹，把他看見的告訴了他，蘇丹說他要親眼看。漁夫被叫來，要他再撈四條像先前那樣的魚，還要帶三個人來作見證。他照辦了。蘇丹讓人把四百個金幣數到他手裡，對宰相說：「就在我面前煎。」鍋架上火，魚下了鍋；牆裂開了，一個人從裡面出來，大得像一塊山崖，手裡一根綠樹枝，喊道：「魚啊魚啊，你們守不守你們的舊盟約？」「守，守。」魚說，又說了那兩句詩。那巨人用樹枝撥翻了鍋，走回牆裡去。魚已經黑得像炭。蘇丹說：「這件事不能就這麼放著。」派人叫漁夫來，問他魚是哪裡來的。

「一個湖，」漁夫說，「在那座山後面，走半個鐘頭。」蘇丹不能相信，離他自己的城門半個鐘頭路竟有一個他從沒見過的湖。他帶著軍隊上山，讓漁夫帶路，那湖就在那裡，在四座小山中間的一片荒漠裡，湖裡有四種顏色的魚。跟他來的人沒有一個見過。軍中最老的人也沒有見過。「憑真主，」蘇丹說，「在我弄清楚這個湖的真相之前，我不回家，也不坐我先人的寶座。」他命令軍隊繞著山紮營。他把宰相叫來，一個有經驗的人，對他說：「我的心告訴我，今晚一個人出去，找這件事的根。你坐在我帳篷的門口。凡有人問，你就說蘇丹身體不適，不見任何人。別的什麼也不要說。」宰相不能和他爭。

他換了衣服，把劍掛在肩上，翻過一座山，走了一整夜，白天最熱的時候歇著，下一夜又走。天亮時，他看見遠處有一個黑點。那是一座黑石砌的宮殿，包著鐵皮；大門一扇敞著，一扇關著。他輕輕叩了一下。又叩了一下。他用力叩。沒有人來。「是空的。」他說，走了進去。他在大廳喊，說他是個外鄉人，想要點東西吃。沒有人回答。他穿過門廳，走到屋子中間。裡面擺著絲綢和黃金，門上的帷幔都放下來了；中央是個天井，四面各有一座敞開的廳，一座噴泉，四角各有一隻紅金的獅子，吐出像珍珠一樣清澈的水；整個天井上面罩著一張金絲網，網下有鳥，飛不出去。一座房子該有的東西，樣樣都有，只缺人。

他在兩道門之間坐下，想著，就聽見附近的一間房裡有人嘆氣，長長一聲嘆，有個聲音在念詩，說一個曾經富有的人怎樣被打落到低處，說我們誰也逃不開自己的命運。他找到那道門，門上掛著簾子，他把簾子撩開。一個年輕人坐在一張榻上，離地一肘高：好看，額頭是白的，臉頰是玫瑰色，上面一顆痣像一粒龍涎香；穿一件鑲金的絲袍，戴一頂鑲寶石的冠；那張臉，是一個多年來都在悲傷的人的臉。他沒有起身。「我的主上，」他說，「您的身分要求我起身，我請您原諒我起不來。」

「原諒你了，」蘇丹說，「把我當作一個帶著問題來的客人。告訴我那個湖和魚的祕密，這座宮殿的祕密，你為什麼一個人在裡面，你為什麼哭。」年輕人哭到胸前都濕了。然後他伸出手，撩起袍子的下擺。從肚臍到頭髮，他是個人；從肚臍往下到腳，他是石頭。

「請借我您的耳朵，」王子說；於是那成了他自己的故事。他曾是那城的國王，那聲音說，是黑島之主馬赫穆德的兒子，他娶了父親兄弟的女兒，她愛他愛得那樣深，只要他不在身邊，就不吃不喝，直到再見到他的臉。他們在一起五年了，有一天下午她去洗澡，他在自己的房裡躺下等吃晚飯，兩個女孩替他搧著風，一個在頭邊，一個在腳邊，而他睡不著。他閉上了眼睛。他的心還開著。頭邊的女孩對腳邊的女孩說，用僕人們在以為主人睡著時的那種低聲：「我們的主人好可憐，真可惜，這樣被耗掉，又被背叛——」

國王站了起來。

我剛才一直在看蘇丹，看湖，看那些獅子，我沒有看見他是怎麼站起來的。我只聽見床陷了一下，等我看過去，他已經站在房間中央，兩手在身側攤開，像放下了什麼東西，卻想不起來放下的是什麼。他沒有看我姐姐。他沒有看我。他走出門去，在身後把門拉上；不是摔上；是拉上，讓門閂輕輕扣住，燈焰歪了一下，又站直了。

我姐姐停在那個字的中間。我們坐在一種裡面有東西的寂靜裡。過了一陣我看見她在看我，嘴唇動了一下。「我要停嗎？」她說，沒有出聲。我明白她也不知道。一個被告知可以說下去的說書人，沒有停下的權利；但一個聽眾已經走出房間的說書人，是在說給自己聽。我看著門。門底下有一線燈光，燈光裡有一個影子，沒有動。他站在另一邊。

我對著門說：「說下去。」

我後來問過自己，如果門打開了，我會怎麼做。我當時不知道。我姐姐吸了一口長氣，從國王停下的那句接下去。

「——被我們的女主人背叛，那個婊子，」那聲音說，很低，像是對隔壁房間的人說；她接著說下去，門底下的影子沒有離開。另一個女孩說：「真主詛咒所有不忠的女人。何況是我們主人這樣的男人。她每晚都在外面。你不知道她在他的杯子裡下藥，讓他睡著，不知道她去哪裡嗎？她穿上最好的衣服出去，直到天亮，回來時在他鼻子下面燒一顆香丸，他就醒了。」

他靜靜地躺著。他說，他眼前的光變黑了，他覺得夜晚永遠不會來。她洗完澡回來，他們坐下吃晚飯，像往常一樣，喝他們的酒，像往常一樣，她拿來他睡前的那杯。他把杯子舉到嘴邊，把酒倒進襯衣裡，躺下，讓她聽見他睡著了。她站在他上面。「睡吧，」她說，「睡吧，永遠別醒。憑真主，我討厭你，我討厭你整個人，我等不及真主取走你的性命的那一天。」然後她穿衣，擦了香，把他的劍背在肩上，出去了；他起身跟上，她穿過街道走到城門，在那裡說了幾個他聽不懂的字，掛鎖就從門上掉下來，門為她開了。她走到城牆外的垃圾堆裡，他在她後面，沒被看見，一直到一圈蘆葦籬笆圍著的泥磚小屋。她進去了。他爬上屋頂，從煙孔往下看。

小屋裡，在一堆甘蔗渣和破布上，躺著一個人，是馬廄裡的一個人，從前壯實，如今是個痲瘋病人，癱了，嘴唇上有潰瘍，聲音沙啞。她在他面前吻地。「什麼事耽擱了你？」他說。「別人來過，喝酒，各有各的姑娘，我因為你不在，連酒都喝不下。」「我的心，」她說，「我的光，你不知道我嫁給了一個我看不下去的人嗎？若不是為你擔心，我不會讓一個太陽在他的城上升起；我要把它堆成一堆，給烏鴉和貓頭鷹。」「騙子，」他說，「你玩弄我們。」她哭了，貶低自己，哀求，一直到他終於肯被她安撫。然後她問有什麼吃的。他叫她揭開盆子的蓋，那裡有他們晚飯吃剩的老鼠骨頭，還叫她把一罐啤酒的渣喝了。她吃了骨頭。她喝了啤酒。她躺下，躺在他旁邊的破布下面。

國王的影子沒有動。我覺得我聽見他在呼吸，也許我聽見的是自己的。

她丈夫，那聲音說，從屋頂爬下來，從角落裡拿起她的劍，拔了出來，要殺他們兩個。他朝那人的喉嚨砍了一下。他以為夠了。那人發出一聲長長的嘶聲；但他只砍破了脖子的皮肉。那聲音驚醒了她，他把劍插回鞘，在黑暗中走回家，躺下，睡了；早上她叫醒他，頭髮剪掉了，穿著喪服。「不要怪我，」她說，「我聽說我母親死了，我父親在聖戰裡被殺了，我一個兄弟被蛇咬了，另一個從懸崖摔下去了。我除了哭，什麼也做不了。」王子說：「你愛怎麼做就怎麼做。」

我聽見天亮在走近。天還沒有亮，但空氣有一個時辰將被呼喚的那種感覺。我姐姐說了她關於天亮的話，她的聲音沒有被它們卡住；我說了我被告知要說的話，聲音比我想要的還清楚，她答了。我拿起蘆管。我把樓梯寫下來，兩級：山魯佐德，在她下面是那半石的王子，對蘇丹說話，說到他妻子為母親哭泣的地方。門開了。國王走了進來。他穿過房間，像一個不想驚動睡著的人的人那樣穿過房間；他從我手裡拿走夜簿，站著讀，沒有碰那一豎。他把它放回我膝上。他的臉是灰的。他出去了。

第七夜。山魯佐德。到。未了：蘇丹在黑色的宮殿裡，與腰以下是石頭的王子；王子的故事說到他的妻子穿著喪服，開始哭泣。

第八夜，我進去的時候國王已經在床上。他沒有轉頭。他側躺著，臉對著牆，膝蓋縮起，像年輕人那樣躺著，我姐姐沒有問他可不可以說；她等我念出未了的是什麼，念完，她就開始，他沒有任何表示。

妻子，那聲音說，哭了一年，哭到那一圈的盡頭。到了盡頭她說：「我想在你的宮殿裡建一座有圓頂的墓，用來哀悼。我要叫它哀悼之屋。」「你愛怎麼做就怎麼做。」王子說。她造了。她把那受傷的人抬進去，放在一座不是墓的墓裡，因為他不會死，不會說話，什麼也不會做，只會喝酒。她每天早晚都去，在他身上哭，餵他喝湯。這樣過了第二年，王子忍受了。有一天，他無預警地走進去，看見她打自己的臉，說：「你為什麼離開我的視線，我心中的喜悅？對我說話，我的生命！」她又念了幾行詩，說如果她的愛人死了，她要葬在他旁邊。他告訴她，哀悼得夠了。她說：「不要攔我做任何事，否則我自盡。」於是他由她去了；第三年也這樣過了。

第三年，他失去了耐心。一天下午，因為這天有件事不順，他走進哀悼之屋，聽見她說：「為什麼你從不跟我說話，我的主人？你為什麼不回答我？」他發火了，喊道：「不得了！這要到什麼時候？」她立刻站起來。「你這條狗！這全是你幹的。你砍傷我心愛的人，你耗掉了他的青春，三年來他躺在那裡，比死還不如！」他一怒之下說：「對，是我幹的。你是一個馬夫睡過的最下賤的婊子。」說著就抓起他的劍。

她笑他。「滾開，狗！」她說，「事已至此。真主把那個對我做了這件事的人交到我手裡。這是一把不會熄的火。」她站起來，說了幾個字，他感覺自己的雙腿沒了，冷氣往上爬，他就成了蘇丹看到的樣子：一半石頭，一半人，不死也不活。但那只是他一個人。她把整座城都施了魔，連同它的街道與花園，四座島變成了圍著一個湖的四座山，城裡的人，屬於四種信仰的，她把他們變成了魚，白的、紅的、藍的、黃的，一個信仰一種顏色。「每天，」王子對蘇丹說，「她來，把我的衣服剝光，用皮鞭抽我一百下，我叫喊，我的腿動不了，不能擋她。然後她在我背上蓋一件粗毛布衣，上面再蓋絲衣，去找墓裡那個人，帶著酒和肉湯。明天日出她會來。」

「憑真主，」蘇丹說，「我要為你做一件世人不願讓它消失的好事。」他陪王子坐了一個傍晚，說話，躺下睡了；假曙光出現之前他起身，脫下外衣，拔出劍，走向哀悼之屋。他循著燈光與香的氣味，找到躺在墓裡的那個人，一劍殺了他，把他背在背上，丟進宮中的一口井裡。然後他回來，穿上那人的衣服，躺在他的位置上，劍擱在身側。

過了大約一個鐘頭，她來了。她先去找她丈夫，剝了他的衣服，拿一條鞭子抽他，他喊著：「夠了，夠了，可憐可憐我！」「你可憐過我的愛人嗎？」她說。她又把粗毛布衣蓋上去，絲衣罩在上面，端著一碗肉湯下到墓裡。「我的主，」她說，「跟我說話，我的主。」蘇丹把聲音弄得又小又含糊，是一個三年沒開口的人的聲音，念了真主的名，說除了真主沒有力量。她高興地喊起來，昏倒在地；醒來時她說：「你能說話了嗎？」「我為什麼要跟你說話？」蘇丹說，「你整天折磨你丈夫，他向天呼求，叫得我從日落到天亮都睡不著；他咒我們兩個，要不是這樣，我早就好了。」「那我就解了他的咒，」她說。「解了他，」蘇丹說，「讓我們安靜安靜。」

她走出墓，進了宮殿，盛了一盆水，在上面念了話，水像鍋裡一樣沸起來，她把它灑在她丈夫身上。「憑我說的話的力量，」她說，「如果你是因我的咒語才成這樣，就從那個形狀出來，變回原來的你。」他顫抖，搖晃，站起來了，完好；他喊說除了真主沒有神。她叫他走，永遠別回來，否則她殺他。她回到墓裡。「你做了什麼？」蘇丹用他那細小的聲音說，「你除掉了枝子，沒有除掉根。」「根是什麼，我的親親？」「這城裡和四座島上的人，每晚到半夜，都從湖裡抬起頭，向天空禱告，詛咒你和我。這就是我好不了的緣故。去，把他們放了，然後來扶我的手，幫我起身。我已經開始覺得力氣回來了。」

她歡喜極了。她跑到湖邊，用手掌捧起一點湖水，在上面說了些話——

宣禮聲從黑暗裡升起。我姐姐停住了。我把樓梯寫下：兩級，山魯佐德，與王子；在階梯旁的空白處，寫蘇丹穿著死人的衣服在墓裡，女巫手捧著一捧湖水，與她還沒說的那些話。我的手比前一夜穩。我抬頭時，國王仍像先前那樣躺著，臉對著牆。他沒有起來讀。「念給我聽。」他說。

那是他第一次向我要什麼。我大聲念了，把整道樓梯，從底下往上，用我念價目單的聲音，念完，他說：「蘇丹呢？」「在墓裡，」我說，「穿著死人的衣服。」「帶著劍。」「劍在身側。」他把頭在枕頭上點了一下。然後他起身，披上袍子，走出去；他在門口停了，沒有回頭，對著面前的空氣說：「你寫得對。」

第八夜。山魯佐德。到。未了：蘇丹在墓裡，穿著死人的衣服，劍在身側；女巫在湖邊，手裡捧著水，那些話還沒有說出口。

第九夜，沒有什麼是我沒念過的，我念了，國王說：「說下去。」我姐姐就說下去了。

女巫說了那些話，那聲音說，魚立刻抬起頭，站起來成了人；湖是一座城，有它的市集與店鋪，每個人做著自己的行業，四座山是島。她回到墓裡，說：「我的愛，把你的手給我，我扶你起來。」「近一點。」蘇丹用那細弱的聲音說。她靠近，要擁抱他。他拿起劍，刺進她的胸膛，劍尖從背後透出來，又砍了一劍，把她砍成兩半，丟在她倒下的地方。他走出去，去找王子，他已經恢復了，正等著他；王子吻了他的手。

「你要留在這座城，」蘇丹說，「還是跟我去我的城？」「您知道到您的城有多遠嗎？」「兩天半。」「如果您醒著，」王子說，「請醒來。那是一個能走路的人走一年的路，您會兩天半就到這裡，只是因為這個地方被施了魔。我永遠不離開您，連眨眼的工夫也不離開。」「感謝真主，」蘇丹說，「把你賜給我。從這一刻起你是我的兒子，我唯一的兒子，因為我從沒有得到過另一個。」他們擁抱。王子對他的大臣們說他要去朝覲，十天裡他準備好了，他們帶著護衛與禮物上路去蘇丹的城，走了一年。宰相和軍隊出來迎接，因為他們已經放棄了希望。蘇丹坐上寶座，賞賜眾人。然後他說：「把送魚來的那個漁夫帶來。」

那人走進來，穿著粗外衣，網上還有湖的氣味。蘇丹賜給他一件榮袍，問他有沒有孩子；他有兩個女兒，一個兒子。蘇丹自己娶了一個女兒，另一個給了王子，又讓兒子做了司庫總管；他派宰相去代替王子統治黑島，帶著五十人的護衛。於是漁夫成了他那個時代最富的人，他的女兒們成了國王的妻子。「他一輩子，」我姐姐說，「一天撒網都不超過四次，這是規矩。」（她說了兩遍。）「而這，啊，國王，並不比巴格達的腳夫與三位女士的故事更奇異。」

「腳夫。」國王說。

巴格達有一個腳夫，她說，是個單身漢，打算一直單身下去。有一天，他靠著他的筐子在街上，一個女人走過來，裹著鑲金邊的細棉布披巾，穿著繡金的鞋，掀開面紗，用兩隻黑眼睛看他，說：「拿起你的筐子，跟我來。」他動作快得差點把腳丟在後面。她領他到一個基督徒的門口，買了一罐濾過的酒；到一個果販的攤上，買蘋果、榲桲、桃子、黃瓜、檸檬和橙子，還有桃金娘果、茉莉、紫羅蘭、銀蓮花，每種開著的花；到屠夫那裡，買十磅羊肉；到雜貨店，買乾果、杏仁、開心果；到糖果店，買一盤甜點；到香料店，買十種香水、糖、薰香、龍涎香和蜜蠟蠟燭；每到一處，她都說：「拿起，跟上。」他就拿起、跟上。「您該先告訴我，」腳夫說，「我就能帶一頭駱駝來。」她在他後頸輕輕打了一下。「走快點，別說話。你會有工錢的。」

她終於在一座有院子的房子前停下，那房子有一對嵌紅金的烏木門。她用指節叩門。開門的是另一個女人，高，皮膚白，額頭像白花，眼睛像瞪羚；腳夫的筐子差點從頭上掉下來。她後面，在一張帳頂用珍珠挽起來的床榻上，有第三位女士，她走下來，說：「你們站在那兒做什麼？把這可憐人頭上的東西卸下來。」她們把他卸了貨；東西都放到各自的地方；然後給他兩枚金幣，說：「去吧，腳夫。」

他沒有走。他站著看這幾位女士，看酒，看水果，看絲綢，看她們三個，看屋裡沒有一個男人。「怎麼了？」最年長的說，「是不是太少？」「不是的，我的女士，」腳夫說，「我從不收超過兩個迪拉姆。可是我看著你們三位獨自在這裡，屋裡沒有男人，我心裡不安。一座宣禮塔，若不立在四根柱子上，就會倒。你們是三個。你們缺第四個。」她們笑了。「而誰來向我們保證，」最年輕的說，「這第四個守得住祕密？我們在一本書裡讀到——」

光進了百葉窗。宣禮聲越過河，我姐姐說她看見天亮了，就停住了她被允許說的話。國王仰躺著，眼睛閉著，手放在胸口。我把樓梯寫下來，一級，底下又一級：腳夫在巴格達三位女士的廳裡，在一個他還沒有被要求保守的祕密的門口。我拿著夜簿起身時，他醒著。他伸出手。我把簿子放在他手裡。他讀了，又讀了一遍，然後他把書頁翻回去，看前一夜，再前一夜，一直往回翻，翻到第一夜。他全部讀了，像我姐姐讀那些名字那樣。我不知道他花了多久。我只知道太陽升起來了，他還在讀，沒有人敢到門口問國王在哪裡。

第九夜。山魯佐德。到。未了：腳夫在巴格達三位女士的廳裡，在一個他還沒有被要求保守的祕密的門口；最年長的女士，守門的女士，與管家，都還沒有答應。

## 第05章 · 第十夜與第十一夜：巴格達的腳夫與三位女士

第十天上午過了一半的時候，國王已經把整本夜簿從頭到尾讀了兩遍，正要開始第三遍，門上有人敲了一下。那是很輕的一下，是一個準備了十天才敢敲的人敲的。國王沒有抬頭。「進來。」他說。

我父親夾著壽衣走進來，在門口停住，像一個走錯了人家的人。他的目光先落在床上，我姐姐睡著，一隻手墊在臉頰下；然後落在我身上，我坐在我的綠墊子上；然後落在國王身上，他坐在桌邊，夜簿攤在面前，手裡拿著一支蘆管，我從沒看見過他什麼時候拿起來的。「坐。」國王說。我父親四下找椅子。沒有椅子。他坐在地上。

「有多少個？」國王說。他沒有說是什麼。我父親說，他不知道，主上。「你不知道。」「我從來沒有數過。」我父親看著自己的手。「如果數了，主上，它就成了一個數字。」國王沉默了很久。然後他說：「數它們。」「現在嗎，主上？」「不是現在。」我父親等著看還有沒有別的，沒有，國王又回去讀了。我父親起身的時候，我看見他望了壽衣一眼，像是不確定自己是否還有資格帶著它。「放在你拿得到的地方。」國王說，沒有抬眼；我父親，把這句話完全聽懂了，還以為那是一個恩典，就出去了。我把它當成一紙租約。我一向有點怕租約。

那天夜裡，燈低下來的時候，國王說：「腳夫。」我姐姐背後靠著枕頭，地毯上手伸得到的地方擱著一杯水，開始告訴我們，腳夫被帶進三位女士的家之後，那裡發生了什麼。

我不會全講。那是這樣的一個晚上：一個整天扛重物的男人，被三個女人灌了酒，這三個女人合起來比他聰明得多；她們跟他玩了一個遊戲，關於某樣東西的名字，他每說錯一個，脖子上就挨一下；遊戲玩了很久。我姐姐把它講得乾淨、快，並且講得好笑，我就讓它停在那裡。到最後，腳夫知道了巴格達有好幾個名字指同一樣東西，而他用的全是錯的，他揉著脖子說，他的脖子和肩膀是走在真主的路上了。

天黑時，她們告訴他，他可以留下，只有一個條件：對任何與他無關的事，不許發問。他同意了。她們叫他去看門上寫了什麼。他去了，看見那裡有金字寫著：多嘴於與己無關之事者，必聽見不悅己之言。我聽著，心想，這些故事裡每座房子，門上都有一句話。我們這裡，扉頁上有一句。

有人敲門；守門的女士去了；回來說，門外有三個外鄉人，是苦行僧，頭、鬍子、眉毛都剃光了，三個都瞎了左眼。她說，這是很奇怪的巧合。他們今晚剛到巴格達，找不到住處，想要一把馬廄的鑰匙。「而且他們每一個，」她說，「都有自己的滑稽。放他們進來，我們就有東西可笑了。」於是女士們讓他們進來，要他們許下跟腳夫一樣的承諾；三個苦行僧坐下，四下看看，異口同聲說，這地方好。他們把腳夫當成同行，還說了出來，他怒氣沖沖地站起來，眼睛冒火，叫他們閉上嘴，去讀門上的字。那是那天晚上唯一一次有人怕他。

後來她們叫人拿樂器，三個苦行僧拿了鈴鼓、琵琶和豎琴，女士們唱歌，聲音很大；然後有了第二次敲門。這一次，我姐姐說，是哈里發，哈倫・拉希德，信士的領袖。他有些夜晚會穿著商人的外套，帶著宰相賈法爾和劊子手馬斯魯爾，走進自己的城，去聽人怎麼說他；那晚，他經過這座房子，聽見豎琴和歌聲，說他想進去。「他們喝醉了，主上。」賈法爾說。「沒有辦法，我要進去，」哈里發說，「給我找個藉口。」

我看見國王在枕上轉過了頭，帶著一種奇特的專注在聽這一段。我後來想過，一個自己也曾在夜裡走出過自己宮殿、身上只帶著拿得動的東西的人，聽到故事裡一位國王溜出自己的城門去聽人怎麼談論他，聽起來是不是會不一樣。我不知道。我只知道他什麼也沒說，當哈里發的名字被唸出來時，他用一隻手摀住了嘴。

賈法爾敲了門，告訴守門的女士，他們是太巴列的商人，在城裡一個人家吃飯，迷了路，回不了客棧。女士們把他們打量一番，是商人，有分量的人，讓他們進來，條件相同。哈里發被遞上酒，他說他發過願要朝覲，守門的女士就在他面前鋪上一塊織金的布，放上一只瓷碗，碗裡是柳花水，一塊雪，一匙冰糖；哈里發被一千個僕人伺候過，卻從來沒有被一個不知道他是誰的人遞過一碗水，他心裡說，他要報答她。

然後女士們站了起來。最年長的，管家的那位，捲起了袖子，管食物的那位打開了一個壁櫥，叫腳夫幫忙，壁櫥裡牽出兩條黑母狗，拴著鏈子。年長的拿起鞭子。她叫腳夫把其中一條拉過來，打牠的頭，那狗哭，搖著頭看她，她打到手臂沒有力氣。然後她丟下鞭子，把狗抱到胸前，用手擦牠的眼淚，吻牠的頭。她對另一條也這樣。哈里發的心，我姐姐說，被觸動了，胸口發緊，他向賈法爾眨眼要他問，賈法爾對他打了個手勢：別作聲。

這時守門的女士坐了下來，管食物的那位從壁櫥裡取出一只綠緞袋子裝的琵琶，彈起來，唱了三首歌。我不複述了。那是一個被迫與愛人分開的人的歌；第一首唱完，守門的女士大叫一聲，撕了衣服，倒在地上昏過去；她們給她換了一件新的，她的背露出來的時候，哈里發看見上面有棕櫚杖和鞭子留下的疤。她在第二首歌時又昏了，在第三首時又昏了。一個晚上要吸收的東西太多，三個苦行僧說，他們真希望沒有進這座房子，寧可睡在城外的垃圾堆上。

光進了百葉窗。我姐姐說了她關於天亮的話；我說了我的；她答了；然後國王，他已經很久沒動，開口了。他說：「他問了嗎？」我姐姐說：「還沒有，啊，國王。」國王沒再說什麼。我寫下樓梯，一級，然後底下又一級：三位女士的家，裡面有七個陌生人；兩條黑母狗；那些疤；每個人嘴裡都有的那個被禁的問題，還沒有問出口。我把簿子轉過去。他照舊站著讀，沒有碰那一豎。

第十夜。山魯佐德。到。未了：三位女士的家，七個承諾不發問的陌生人；兩條母狗，那些疤，每個人嘴裡都有的那個問題。

那天傍晚我姐姐在屏風後面吐了。她說是悶熱的空氣加上那些故事。她回來時臉是濕的，靠著枕頭坐下，我什麼也沒說，國王什麼也沒說，我只知道，我開始為她擔心，擔心的方式跟國王毫無關係。

「他問了嗎？」國王說。

他們忍不住，那聲音說，七個人裡沒有一個忍得住。哈里發對賈法爾說：「你沒有看見她背上的疤嗎？我坐不安，也靜不下來，非要知道不可。」賈法爾說，他們答應過的，不說比較好，再一兩個鐘頭就天亮了，明天他可以把這些女士帶到哈里發的朝堂上，一點代價也不用就聽到全部。哈里發抬起頭，說他沒有耐性。他們七個人低聲爭論，聲音越來越大，最後同意，由腳夫去問。腳夫站在那家的女主人面前，說：「女士，這些人想知道那兩條母狗的故事，您為什麼打牠們，然後又哭著吻牠們，還有您的姐妹為什麼被棕櫚杖像打男人一樣打過。他們讓我來問。願您平安。」

「真是這樣嗎？」那家的女主人說，「他說的是你們的意思嗎？」他們都說是，只有賈法爾什麼也沒說。「你們對我們做了一件很大的錯事，」她說，「你們進來時我們跟你們立下了約。我們給了你們屋子和食物，你們還不夠，還要問。」她用手在地上拍了三下。牆上開了一道門，七個大漢走出來，手裡握著出鞘的劍。「把他們兩兩綁在一起。」她說。他們被綁了。「要砍頭嗎？」劍手們問。「先留著，」她說，「我想知道他們是誰。」

「女士，為了真主，不要為別人的罪殺我，」腳夫說，「是這些人幹的。要不是這幾個斜著一隻眼的苦行僧，這晚本來很美，他們一進城，城就變成荒漠。」他又念了一句詩，說強者的寬恕，對弱者是容易給的；女士，雖然生氣，還是笑了。她對他們說，他們只剩一個鐘頭的命，若不是有身分的人，她早就催他們上路了。「賈法爾，你完了，」哈里發低聲說，「告訴她我們是誰，否則我們會被誤殺。」「是您自找的。」賈法爾說，他本來就反對整件事。「開玩笑有開玩笑的時候，」哈里發說，「辦正事有辦正事的時候。」

女士問三個苦行僧：「你們是兄弟嗎？」「不，我們只是苦行僧，外鄉人。」「你們之中有人天生就瞎一隻眼嗎？」「不是，女士，」每一個都說，「我是在一件奇怪的事裡失去的，那件事，若用針刻在眼角，對任何受得了教訓的人都是一個教訓。」每一個都說，自己是國王的兒子，在自己的一座城裡統治。「那麼，」女士說，「你們每個人，把你的故事從頭到尾說給我聽，也說你為什麼來到我們家。如果它使我們高興，你就可以揉揉頭，平安離開。」「我的故事很快就說完，女士，」腳夫說，「這位女士雇了我；她帶我去了酒商、屠夫、果販、雜貨舖、糖果舖、香料舖；然後帶我來這裡；之後發生的您都知道。」女士笑了，說：「揉揉頭，走吧。」「憑真主，」腳夫說，「聽不到這幾位的話，我是不會動的。」

於是第一個苦行僧站了起來，被綁著，說了他的故事。他說他是國王的兒子，他的父親有個兄弟，也是國王；他和堂兄，叔叔的兒子，是同一天出生的。長大之後，他每年有幾個月會在叔叔的宮廷裡度過，他和堂兄像是一個人。有一天夜裡，兩人喝了酒，他堂兄說：「我有一件大事要你幫忙。發誓你不會拒絕。」他發了誓。堂兄走出去，領了一個女人回來，蒙著面，穿得很華貴，對他說：「帶這位女士，先我一步去某某墓地，在某某墳裡等我。」他發過誓，就照辦了。然後堂兄來了，帶著一碗水、一袋灰泥、一把鋤，撬開了墳塚中央的墓，往下挖，挖到一塊鐵板，像一扇小門；鐵板下面是一道旋轉的樓梯。「作你最後的選擇吧。」堂兄對那女士說。她走下樓梯，不見了。「朋友，」堂兄說，「我下去之後，把鐵板蓋回去，把土堆回去，把袋子裡的石灰和碗裡的水和了，把石頭抹平，讓看到的人說不出：這是老墓上的新洞。我為這個工作了一年，世上除了真主，沒有人知道。這就是我要你做的事。」他走下樓梯，沒有再回來。

「這就是我做的事，」第一個苦行僧說，「我喝醉了，我把鐵板蓋回去，堆上土，把石頭抹平，直到墳又成了原來的樣子。早上我幾乎不敢相信那不是夢。我去墓地找那座墳，找不到。我找了七天。我回到我父親的城，就在城門外，一群人撲上來把我綁了，我看見他們是我父親的子民，其中有幾個是我自己的奴隸。其中一個，原先是我家的僕人，告訴我，命運對我父親翻了臉：他的軍隊背叛了他，宰相殺了他，現在坐在他的寶座上，派了人守著要捉我。」

天亮了，在百葉窗裡，宣禮聲響起。我姐姐說了她的話，我寫下：樓梯，現在是三級，山魯佐德，第一個苦行僧，以及他底下那個走下樓梯的堂兄；旁邊還開著的，是坐在寶座上的宰相，和他將要怎麼做。我把簿子遞出去。國王站著讀了，對著窗子說：「他自己抹的灰泥。」「是，主上。」「也沒有回去。」「他回去了。一個星期後。他找不到。」國王點頭，像一個人對一次量度的確認點頭。然後他伸出一根手指，碰了碰那一豎。我沒有呼吸。

第十一夜。山魯佐德。到。未了：第一個苦行僧，抹平了一座他找不回來的墳；坐在他父親寶座上的宰相；三位女士的家，裡面有七個陌生人，兩兩被綁在一起。

## 第06章 · 第十二、十三與十四夜：第一個苦行僧的結局，與第二個苦行僧

第十二天早晨，我看出了那支蘆管是做什麼用的。我走到桌邊去把夜簿放正，翻開第一頁，就在書記們留作裝訂的一指寬的空白邊上，是國王的字，方方的，有點拘謹：一排小小的短畫，十一道，五道一組，每一組再用第六道劃過，就像衛兵記日子那樣。他一直在數夜晚。我推算，他從第一個早晨就開始了，每天天亮讀完我寫的，就劃一道，而我沒看見，因為我永遠在看書頁，從沒看過邊緣。第十一道底下留著一個空位給第十二道。我把簿子闔上，照原樣放回，與桌沿對齊，對誰都沒有說。

那天傍晚，他說：「第一個。」我姐姐臉色蒼白，剛才又在屏風後面吐過，漱了兩次口，她說，第一個苦行僧在女主人和哈里發及七個劍手面前，繼續說了下去，我把她停下的地方念給她聽。

那年輕人，她說，被拖到那個殺了他父親、佔了他寶座的宰相面前，他們之間早有一段舊怨。他小時候愛玩彈弓。有一天，一隻鳥停在宰相家的屋頂，他向牠射去，沒射中，卻打中了宰相的眼睛；宰相當時什麼也不能說，這些年也什麼都沒說。「我的罪名是什麼？」年輕人問。宰相指著他眼睛原來的位置。「那是意外。」「那我就故意。」宰相說，用拇指按進了年輕人的左眼。他把他關進一口箱子，送到荒野，交給一個從前是他父親手下的劍手，那人哭了，放了他。他逃到叔叔的城，把一切告訴叔叔；叔叔找自己的兒子已經找了好幾個星期，說：「帶我去看那座墓。」

他們找到了。他們走下五十級台階，穿過煙，到一間大廳，地上散著穀物、麵粉和一切必需品，有華蓋和榻；榻上，互相擁抱著，黑得像燒焦的木頭，躺著那堂兄和那個女人。叔叔朝兒子臉上吐了口水，用鞋子打了那具屍體。「這是今世的判決，」他說，「還有更重的在後頭。」姪子對他的狠毒喊出聲來，他就告訴姪子那女人是誰。她是那孩子的姐姐。他們從嬰兒房起就彼此相愛。他們的父親把他們分開，把她關起來，威脅，打；那孩子花了一年，在地底挖了一間屋子，好讓誰也找不到他們；然後真主用火打擊了他們。

國王躺著，一動不動。一個父親在兩個不想分開的人之間築起牆，他心裡怎麼想，他沒有說。我姐姐說下去。殺了第一個苦行僧的父親的那位宰相，帶著全部軍隊進攻叔叔的城，攻下了；叔叔被殺；而年輕人，如今沒有父親，沒有叔叔，沒有堂兄，也沒有一隻眼睛，剃了鬍子和眉毛，穿上苦行僧的破衣，一路走到巴格達，向信士的領袖求公道。他那晚才到，在一個街角遇見另外兩個，每個都處在同樣的境地，每個都是外鄉人；三個人一路來到了門口。

「揉揉頭，走吧。」那家的女主人說。「我不走，」第一個苦行僧說，「我要聽完我的同伴。」於是第二個苦行僧走上前來，手肘被綁著，吻了地，說他的故事不像任何人的。

他說，他曾是個國王的兒子，讀遍了每一本書；書法家羨慕他的字，詩人羨慕他的詩，印度國王聽說了他，就派人去見他父親，要他去訪問。他坐船出海，帶著六艘船。到了內陸，五十個騎兵從塵雲裡出來，搶了他們，殺了他的奴隸，傷了他，他逃了。他到了一座城，找到一個裁縫，裁縫給他麵包，說：「不要告訴任何人你是誰；這座城的國王是你父親的仇人。」王子說他會寫字、會算數、會看星。「在這裡這些一文不值，」裁縫說，「拿一把斧頭和一根繩子，去砍柴。」王子砍了一年柴。有一天，在一片他從沒去過的灌木叢裡，他的斧頭撞在一棵樹墩下的鐵環上，發出了響聲。

那是個活板門，有一道樓梯，樓梯下是間大廳，廳裡有個女人，問他是人還是精靈。她說她在這裡住了二十五年，從沒見過一個男人。她是一位國王的女兒，在她新婚之夜，一個叫傑爾吉斯的精靈把她從屋子裡擄走，客人還在唱歌，把她放在了這裡。他每十天來一次，待一夜。如果她需要他，只要碰一下壁龕上刻的兩道線。他四天前來過；還有六天；年輕人可以待五天。第二個苦行僧說好，好。他們洗澡；吃飯；他睡著，醒來發現她在揉他的腳；她拿出一壺老酒，開了封，唱歌。第二天他喝醉了，站起來說：「來，我帶你離開這裡，把你從你的精靈那裡救出來。我要砸了壁龕，把他叫來，殺了他。殺精靈是我的習慣。」她臉色發白，懇求他，說有智慧的人，能停就不往前走。他抬起腳，踢了壁龕。

光進了百葉窗。我姐姐說了她的話，我說了我的，我寫下樓梯，三級，底下是那個正走上來的精靈。國王站著讀了。然後他拿起蘆管，在邊上畫了第十二道，又在旁邊的空位畫了另一道，更小的，我不明白，也沒有問。

第十二夜。山魯佐德。到。未了：第二個苦行僧，踢了壁龕，與正從樓梯上來的東西；三位女士的家，與七個被綁的陌生人。

隔天晚上，國王說：「第二個。」我姐姐說，地裂開，精靈氣沖沖從裂縫裡出來，看見他的女人躺在地上，身邊有一杯酒，說：「這是什麼聲音？你怎麼了？」「沒什麼，」她說，「我的心很重，我喝了點酒想讓它舒展；我站起來，酒上了頭，撞到了壁龕。」「你撒謊，婊子。」精靈說。他四下看，看見地上有一把斧頭和一雙涼鞋。「這是誰的？」「我到現在才看見。一定是你衣服上帶進來的。」他不信。他把她脫光，綁起來，拷問。年輕人聽不下那個聲音；他膝蓋發軟地爬上樓梯，把活板門蓋回去，用土蓋住，回到裁縫那裡，坐在角落，想自己是個多大的傻瓜。

我姐姐沒有講精靈為了要她說出她不知道的事，對她做了什麼。她說那花了很長時間，女人什麼也沒說；我也不再添加。國王坐了起來。「她那時十二歲，」他在黑暗中說。「他擄走她的時候，主上。」「他每十天來一次。」「每第十個夜晚。」「在一只箱子裡？」「不是箱子，主上。是土。」他沉默了一下。「幾道鎖？」「一道，主上。一道樓梯。」「但那是個精靈。」「可能是同一個，」我姐姐說，「他們很多。」國王，他曾親眼看過一個精靈把玻璃匣子放在一棵樹下，這麼久以來卻從沒問過這種東西有多少，現在用手蓋住眼睛躺著，聽她接下去說。

精靈，她說，變成波斯人的樣子，拿著斧頭和涼鞋去找那些樵夫，說是撿到的，他們告訴他是誰的；他在裁縫舖坐著，等年輕人進來。他像老鷹抓老鼠那樣把他抓起來，帶到地底；那裡，那個女人綁在四根樁上，身上流著血。「這是你的情人嗎？」他問她。「我從沒見過他。」「如果你不認識他，拿這把劍，砍下他的頭。」她拿起了劍。她走到年輕人面前。他從她的臉上看出她打算做什麼，也看出那要付出的代價，就用眉毛向她示意：現在是慈悲的時候。她讓劍掉了。「我怎麼能殺一個我不認識的人，他沒有傷害過我？這違背我的法。」「我明白了，」精靈說，「只有同類才憐惜同類。」他轉向年輕人。「你砍她的，我就相信你不認識她。」年輕人拿起劍，舉了起來；她看著他，不出聲地說：我有哪一點對不起你嗎？他就把劍丟了。「如果一個被關在這裡二十五年的女人都不肯砍我，我怎麼能砍她？你想怎樣就怎樣吧。」

精靈自己拿起了劍。事情在幾下之內完成，我姐姐用幾個字說了，我用更少的字說。她死的時候看著那年輕人，而他以為下一個就是他。「我們的法律是，」精靈說，「妻子對我不貞，我可以殺她。我在她新婚之夜擄來她，那時她十二歲，除了我，她沒認識過別人。我每十天來一次，變成一個男人的模樣。等我確定她已讓我戴了綠帽，我就殺了她。對你，我不確定。但我不能讓你不受傷害就走。要一個恩惠吧。我該把你變成什麼形狀：狗、驢，還是猴子？」

年輕人跪下了。「饒了我，真主就饒你，」他說，「啊，精靈，您該像被嫉妒者寬恕嫉妒者那樣寬恕我。」「那是怎麼回事？」精靈說；第二個苦行僧就講給他聽。

有兩個人，我姐姐說，住在隔壁，中間有堵共用的牆。其中一個嫉妒另一個。他用惡毒的眼睛看對方，盡力傷害他，因此吃不下也睡不著；而另一個，不管對他做什麼，都興旺起來。被嫉妒者最後聽說自己被恨成這樣，就說：「真主的大地很寬。」離開了。他到另一座城，買了一塊地，裡面有一口乾涸的老井，在那裡蓋了一間小小的禱告室，一心祈禱；聖人們來找他，鎮上的名人也來，他的名字傳遍了整個地區。嫉妒者聽說了，來了，被以十分的禮遇接待。「我有話要告訴你，」他說，「讓你的苦行僧都走開。」被嫉妒者讓他們走了；兩人一起走向那口老井；到了井邊，嫉妒者把他推了下去，走了，以為他死了。

那口井是精靈出沒的地方，他們接住他，輕輕放在一塊石頭上。「你們知道這是誰嗎？」其中一個說。「他就是逃離嫉妒者的人，在我們這裡用祈禱教化我們；那個嫉妒者追來了，把他丟進來。明天蘇丹要來問他女兒的事。」「她怎麼了？」「她被附身了。達姆達姆的兒子梅蒙愛上了她。如果這位聖人知道治法就容易了：他的禱告室裡有隻黑公貓，尾巴末端有一塊硬幣大小的白斑。只要拔七根那白毛，在她身下燒。」被嫉妒者在井底聽見了這一切。早上他的苦行僧發現他正順著牆爬出來，個個敬畏；他從貓身上拔了七根毛；蘇丹來了；女兒被帶來，綁著；毛燒了；她頭裡的東西叫了一聲，走了。「對治好她的人該怎麼報答？」蘇丹說。「讓他娶她。」貴族們說。他就娶了；宰相死後，他做了宰相；蘇丹死後，人民說：「除了宰相還有誰？」於是這個被丟進井裡的人，成了國王。

有一天，他騎馬帶著臣子出行，看見嫉妒者站在路邊，徒步。他轉向一位大臣：「把那人帶到我這裡來，別嚇他。」等那人來了，他一個字也沒說。他對司庫說：「給他一千塊金幣，用十頭駱駝裝上貨，派一隊護衛送他回自己的城。」就這樣。他對那人做過的任何事，一件也沒有懲罰。

國王，在黑暗裡，沒動。「一千塊金幣，」他說，「十頭駱駝。一隊護衛。回他自己的城。」「是，主上。」他又低聲重複了一次，像人在學一道算術。

「您看，啊，精靈，」第二個苦行僧說，眼淚流進他剃光的鬍子裡，「被嫉妒者對嫉妒者的慈悲。」精靈說：「不要再說了。至於我殺你，不必怕。至於我饒你，不必指望。至於我把你變形，沒有辦法逃。」他把年輕人從地上扯起，飛上了天，一直飛到大地像一片白雲，把他放在一座山上，抓了一把土，對著它說了些話，灑在他身上。「離開那個形狀，」他說，「變成一隻猴子。」

天亮了。它是在她說話的時候來的，我沒有注意到，我什麼也沒寫。我姐姐匆匆說了她的話，像是要追上來。我寫下樓梯，三級，與山上的猴子。國王讀了，拿起蘆管，畫了第十三道，旁邊又畫了一道，小的。

第十三夜。山魯佐德。到。未了：第二個苦行僧，變成了山上的一隻猴子；三位女士的家，與七個被綁的陌生人。

第十四夜，我姐姐說，那猴子從山上下來，用一個月橫越一片平原，到了海邊，看見一艘船。他差點被當成不吉利的東西丟下海，但他抓住船長的衣角哭，船長憐憫他，收為己有。他們航行了五十天，在一座大城的城牆下下錨；那城國王的宰相，全國最好的書法家，死了；國王發過誓，除了寫字一樣好的人，他不用別人。船上的商人各自在一卷十肘長的紙卷上寫一行，猴子站起來，讓他們驚恐，拿起蘆管，用六種字體，一種接一種，寫了六首對句。國王讀了那卷紙，除了那一筆，沒有哪個字合他的意。

他們把猴子放在騾子上，帶著鼓樂穿過街道，人們彼此說：蘇丹要讓一隻猴子做宰相了嗎？他向國王吻了三次地。他蹲坐著。他和國王同桌吃飯，在七盆水裡洗手，在盤子上寫關於食物的詩；他喝酒，在杯子上寫詩；他跟國王下棋，贏了，在棋盤上寫了一副對句。國王派人叫他的女兒胡斯恩公主來看這個奇蹟，她走到門口，蒙上了臉說：「父親，您不覺得羞恥嗎？您叫我來看一個男人。」「那是隻猴子。」國王說。「他是一個國王的兒子，」她說，「一個精靈對他施了咒，在殺了他自己的妻子之後。」她小時候，一個老婦人教過她魔法，她說，一百七十章。「那你就救他，」國王說，「我讓他做宰相，你嫁給他。」她拿了一把刻著希伯來文真主之名的鐵刀，在大廳地上畫了一個圈，在圈裡寫了名字，低聲念；天地就暗了；精靈出現在大廳裡，手像乾草叉，腿像船桅。「不歡迎你，狗。」胡斯恩公主說。

他們兩個之間的搏鬥，我只說一句：打得很精彩。他變成獅子，她從頭上拔一根頭髮，變成了劍，把他劈成兩半。他變成蠍子；她變成蛇。他變成禿鷲；她變成鷹。他變成黑公貓；她變成狼。他變成一條蟲，鑽進了一顆石榴，石榴在空中脹到西瓜那麼大，在大理石地上爆開，籽散了一地；她變成一隻白公雞，把籽一粒一粒啄起來，只漏了一粒，滾到噴泉邊上。公雞啼叫，拍翅膀；那粒籽跳進水裡變成魚，公雞變成一條更大的魚，追了下去，房間裡響著尖叫。然後精靈像一團火焰從水池裡升起，她像一塊炭跟在後面升起，他們互相燒，直到大廳充滿煙，國王和猴子貼著牆壁，不敢呼吸。

那聲音提高了。國王坐著，膝蓋曲起，雙手抱著，我看見他咬著嘴唇。公主，那聲音說，向精靈臉上吹火，火星落在他們三個身上；她的沒有傷害，他的卻有一粒落在猴子的左眼，把它燒瞎了。一粒落在國王臉上，燒掉了下半截鬍子，使他的牙齒鬆了。一粒落在太監胸口，殺了他。然後有人喊：真主至大。公主把精靈燒成了灰。她走到猴子面前，用杯子裡的水灑他，他就成了人，只是缺了一隻眼睛。「火，」她說，「父親，火。他擊中我了。我忘了那一粒籽。我若撿起它，他當場就死。我是個死人了；願真主補償你們我這個位置。」一粒黑色的火星從她腳上爬到大腿，到胸口，到臉。她說了信仰告白，成了一小堆灰，躺在另一堆旁邊。

那城的國王哭了，扯掉了剩下的鬍子。他病了一個月。病好之後，他叫來那年輕人，說：「命運本來註定我們快樂，不受時間的災變，直到你來。但願真主讓我們沒見過你。我們憐憫你，卻失去了全部。我不怪你；那不是你能阻止的；感謝真主，我女兒救了你，雖然那要了她的命。去吧，我的孩子，離開我的城；如果我再見到你，我會殺你。」年輕人哭著出去了。在一間澡堂，他剃光了頭髮、鬍子、眉毛，穿上黑色羊毛的苦行僧袍；他每天哭，說「我的眼睛，而不是我的命」；他來到巴格達，發現第一個苦行僧正站在那裡，像個有問題的人。

「揉揉頭，走吧。」那家的女主人說。「我不走，」第二個苦行僧說，「我要聽完第三個。」於是第三個走上前來。「我的故事，」他說，「不像他們的，是從天上掉在他們身上的。我的是我自己招到我頭上來的。我自己剃了我的鬍子，自己失去了我的眼睛。」

宣禮聲響了。我覺得自己高高地呼吸了整整一個鐘頭。我姐姐在一句話的中間停住，那句話把第三個苦行僧帶到了磁山腳下，一道鑿在石頭裡的樓梯，一句禱告。我寫下樓梯；放下蘆管。

國王說：「公主沒看見那粒籽。」「她看見其他的，主上。她把每一粒都吃了。她看見那一粒滾了，卻沒看見它去了哪裡。」他想了想。他拿起蘆管，畫了第十四道，旁邊又畫了小的那一道。我再也忍不住了。「主上，那個小的是什麼？」他看著它。「那是剩下的，」他說，「每個夜晚，我數她沒說完的。這不是一個長的數。」他把那一頁翻轉過來讓我看。在那些短畫旁的空處，用他方方的字，很小，他一直在寫另一張清單，一夜一夜地：精靈，狗與瞪羚，罐子，湖，魚，腳夫，墓，猴子。那是我的樓梯；那是夜簿，在夜簿的邊上。這件事正在被保存兩次。

第十四夜。山魯佐德。到。未了：第三個苦行僧，在磁山腳下，在一道鑿進石頭的樓梯上；三位女士的家，裡面有七個被綁的陌生人與兩條黑母狗。

## 第07章 · 第十五夜與第十六夜：第三個苦行僧

第十五天早晨，國王在走廊裡，當著兩個侍從和一個提水壺的小廝，對我父親說：「帶你女兒回家過一個下午。」我父親說：「主上？」那聲音像一個被塞了一件太大、拿不動的東西的人。「小的那個，」國王說，「她半個月沒見過太陽了。燈亮之前把她帶回來。」他走了。我父親像怕我會碎掉似的捏著我的手肘，我們從側門出了宮，沿著長長的坡走下城去。

那是我自從上來那天傍晚之後，第一次看這座城。百葉窗都開著。我原本沒想到我會注意這一點。染匠街上有個孩子在滾鐵圈，屋頂上有個女人在拍打地毯，麵包爐子的熱氣從街角迎過來，有個老人用托盤賣開心果；我明白了，三年來，這座城的街道一直有一種特別的安靜，而那安靜在半個月裡就像一根刺那樣被拔了出去。在第三個轉彎，一個女人走到我們面前。她大約四十歲，戴灰面紗，臂彎裡挽著籃子，沒有看我父親。她看著我。

「你是妹妹，」她說。我說是。「她還活著嗎？」「她睡著了，」我說，「她很好。」那女人用空著的手摀住嘴，就那樣站了一會兒。然後她說，聲音低而平，像人問一顆洋蔥的價錢：「我女兒叫祖拜妲。她十四歲。她是第三百一十一個。」她看著我，好像我有什麼事要做。

我父親發出一個很小的聲音。我說：「我會告訴她。」「不要，」那女人說，「不要告訴她。我不要她知道。我要的是它被寫在一個地方。」她不是要我寫進夜簿；她分不清夜簿和洗衣單。她要它被寫下來，被某個人，而她在城裡挑中了那一個即將走進那座宮殿的人。「我可以寫，」我說，「但我沒有東西可寫。」我父親，三年來每天天亮捧著那本一千個名字的書上坡又下坡的人，把手伸進袖子，掏出一冊象牙薄片裝訂的小本子和一支鉛筆，是他算帳用的；他一句話沒說，遞給我。

我寫下來了。祖拜妲；十四歲；第三百一十一個；是——「布料商巴克爾的寡婦，」那女人說，「她這裡有個酒窩。」我也寫了。我抬頭時，她後面已有四個女人，一個瘸腿的男人，和一位坐在門檻上、雙手撐著膝蓋往前傾的老祖母。我們在那裡待了一個鐘頭。我父親沒有催我。他低著頭站在太陽裡，壽衣夾在腋下，有人說完，他就對他們點一下頭，就像證人那樣。最後我寫了兩頁半。傍晚我帶著袖子裡的象牙本子爬回坡上去，我沒有把它交給國王，也沒有告訴他我有這個；我把它塞進我那只綠墊子下面，我的手找得到的地方。我還不知道它是做什麼用的。我只知道，夜簿，一個夜晚一個名字的夜簿，是一本有某一種缺口的書。

那晚國王說：「第三個。」我姐姐的氣色回來了，雙手捧著一杯荳蔻茶坐著，她說，第三個苦行僧站在那女主人面前，說他是國王，國王的兒子，他把自己的命運招到了自己頭上。

他的名字叫阿吉卜，她說，是卡吉卜的兒子，他的城在海邊。他有一支船隊，愛航海；有一次他出海去一些島上玩一個月，遇上風暴，遇上一道把船帶出所有海圖之外的洋流。他們航行了十一天。瞭望的人看見水上有個黑東西，海平線上有個時亮時暗的東西，船長扯下頭巾，打自己的臉。「那是磁石山，」他說，「早上船會進入它的背風處，船上每一根釘子都會飛出木板，朝山飛去，因為它愛鐵。山頂有座十根柱子撐著的黃銅圓頂，圓頂上有個騎在銅馬上的騎士，胸前掛一塊鉛板；在他倒下之前，誰也得不了救。」

船在早晨散了，像他說的那樣。王子乘著一塊板被沖到懸崖腳下；岩石上鑿著台階；他爬上去，睡在圓頂下，夢中聽見一個聲音：挖你腳下的地。你會找到一張銅弓和三支刻著名字的鉛箭。射那個騎士，他會掉進海裡，馬掉在你腳邊；把牠埋在弓的位置。海會漲到山頂，一個銅人會划著小船來，帶著兩支槳。你上船。但無論看見什麼，不要說真主的名。他划十天，把你放在平安群島。

他挖了。他找到弓。他射了；騎士倒下；馬掉在他腳邊；他把牠埋了。海像地板一樣漲上山來，小船來了，船上的銅人一句話也不說，王子也不說。他們走了十天。第十天，平安群島的綠線從水裡升起時，王子，出於喜悅，出於徹底的鬆了口氣，喊了出來：「真主！真主至大！除了真主，沒有神！」小船翻了，銅人像石頭一樣沉下去。

「他破了唯一的規矩。」國王說。

「他已經看見陸地了，主上。」

「他破了唯一的規矩。」國王沉默。我現在知道，他說的不是那個王子。

他游了一整天，我姐姐說，夜裡一個像山一樣的浪把他高高拋上一片沙灘，早上他發現自己在一座長著低矮樹叢的小島上，心想：凡是把我從一大禍裡救出來的，總把我丟進一個更大的禍裡。然後他看見一艘船，爬上一棵樹。十個奴隸帶著鐵鋤和籃子上岸，在島中央挖，直到挖出一塊金屬板，掀起一道活板門；他們從船上搬來麵包、麵粉、蜂蜜、地毯、燈和一座房子可能需要的一切，搬下去；最後下去的，是一個很老很老的人，一把骨頭裹在一塊藍布裡，手裡牽著一個美得連詩人都得認輸的男孩。他們下去了。過了一個鐘頭。奴隸和老人上來，沒有那男孩，把板蓋回去，把土堆在上面，開船走了。

船走遠了，王子才從樹上下來，挖，走下樓梯。在一間像新娘房一樣明亮的大廳裡，花叢與扇子之間，坐著那男孩，一個人。他臉色發白。「別怕，」王子說，「我跟你一樣是人，是國王的兒子。命運派我來陪你。」男孩就告訴他。他父親是個珠寶商，沒有孩子，做了個夢，夢見會得一個兒子，但活不長。星相師替男孩排了命盤。他該活十五年；第十五年裡有一個危險，若過了，他會活到老；危險是這樣：在危險之海裡有座山叫磁石山，山上有個騎士；騎士倒下五十天後，男孩會死，殺他的是射倒騎士的人，一個名叫阿吉卜的王子，卡吉卜王的兒子。「十天前，」男孩說，「我父親得到消息，騎士倒下了。於是他把我放在這裡。四十天過去，我若還活著，他會來接我。」王子，就是阿吉卜，卡吉卜的兒子，明白他就是那個人。他什麼也沒說。他對自己說：憑真主，我不殺他。

三十九天裡，他伺候那男孩。他替他點燈，替他燒水；替他切水果；他們下棋；夜裡他講故事給他聽，直到男孩睡著，替他蓋好。他想：星相師說謊。第四十天夜裡男孩說：「弟兄，替我燒水，替我洗澡，替我換衣服；我得救了。然後替我切一個瓜，加一點冰糖。」王子用羽扇豆粉替他洗，替他搓背，鋪好床。他走到儲藏室，找到一個瓜，說：「你有刀嗎？」「那邊，我頭上，高架子上。」王子爬上去，從鞘裡拔出刀，腳在台階上滑了一下，他倒在男孩身上，手裡握著刀；刀進了男孩的心，像是栽進去的。

我姐姐用一口平穩的氣說完它。國王閉上了眼睛。「他不是故意的。」他說。「不是，主上。」「他做了每一件事，」國王說，「他替他洗了澡。他替他切了水果。」「是，主上。」「而且是在最後一天。」他沉默了好一陣。我想起那個老珠寶商，為了讓兒子活下去，把他放進地底；我想起另一個故事裡的堂兄，為了留住一個女人，在地下挖了房子；我想，在往後所有的故事裡，會不會有人沒有在地底造房間。我沒有說這些。我說：「要念未了的給您聽嗎？」國王說：「不要。」

王子，我姐姐說，把活板門關上，把土堆回去，爬上他的樹；船回來了，老人和奴隸發現男孩死在榻上，心裡插著刀，身上穿著乾淨衣服。他們把他抬上去，用絲裹好，老人倒下去，往頭上撒灰，扯掉了鬍子，昏過去；日落時他醒過來，念了幾行我不記得的詩，哭了一聲，魂就離開了他。奴隸把兩具屍體搬到船上，開走了。王子在樹上待到他們看不見為止。

光來了。我寫下樓梯：山魯佐德；第三個苦行僧；在他下面，一艘載著兩具屍體遠去的船，一座底下有個沒有人的房間的島。我把簿子遞過去。國王讀了，劃下第十五道，然後是小的那道；他翻過一頁，用他自己的筆，用他自己拘謹的字，在清單下面添了新的一行：瓜。然後他看看墊子，看看我的手去過的地方，對它什麼也沒說。

第十五夜。山魯佐德。到。未了：第三個苦行僧，獨自在一座底下有空房間的島上，船已遠去；三位女士的家，與七個被綁的陌生人。

第十六夜，我姐姐說，王子在島上住了一個月，白天四處走，夜裡睡在那房間裡，有一天早晨他注意到西邊的水每天退得更遠一點。月底，那裡出現了乾地，他涉水過去，來到膝蓋能陷進去的沙地，看見遠處有一道光，不是火，是一座宮殿的大門，紅銅的，在太陽下閃著。十個年輕人在門口迎接他，穿著華服，個個瞎左眼；還有一個老人。他們帶他進去；讓他坐在廳的底端，地上；十個人各坐在自己有藍色罩子的榻上，老人坐中間一張小榻。「什麼也別問我們的事。」老人說。他給所有人送上食物。大廳暗下來，十個人說：「把我們的日常拿來。」老人出去，端回十個托盤，每個托盤上插著一根蠟燭，揭開蓋子，底下是灰和炭和水壺的煤煙。十個人捲起袖子，把臉塗黑，捶胸，哭，喊：「我們本來坐得好好的，是我們的任性使我們不得安寧。」他們整夜如此；天亮，洗臉，換上乾淨的衣服。他和他們住了一個月。他因為想知道而吃不下。

「告訴我，」阿吉卜說，「或者放我走。」「別問。你會失去一隻眼睛。」「我一定要知道。」他們終於讓步：宰了一隻羊，剝了皮，把他縫在羊皮裡，給他一把刀，告訴他，神鳥魯克會用爪子抓走他，把他放在一座山上，他要割開皮出來，走半天，到一座用蘆薈木和檀香木造的宮殿。「我們就是在那裡失去眼睛的。我們不說為什麼；太長了。」

鳥帶走了他。他割開皮出來。他走到一座宮殿，裡面一個像賽馬場一樣的大廳，有一百道檀香木門，大廳上首有四十個年輕女子，每個都像月亮，她們站起來說：「歡迎。我們等了你這個月。你是我們的主人，我們是你的僕人。」她們餵他，替他洗澡。他和她們喝酒，她們彈琵琶，每夜他挑一個與他同眠。他想：這就是生活，只有一個壞處，就是它會過去。這樣過了一年，到了新年。新年第一天，她們哭著來找他。「我們得離開你了，」她們說，「我們是國王的女兒。每年我們必須離開四十天。我們把四十間屋子的鑰匙給你。三十九間你可以開。第四十間你不能開，因為裡面的東西，會把我們永遠分開。」他發誓了。他吻了那個哭的女孩。他看她們像鳥一樣飛走。

我姐姐的聲音降成一種低語。三十九間屋子，她說，三十九天。一座每棵樹都結著果子的花園。一片長著棗椰與河流的平原。一座檀香木鳥籠的大廳，有鳥。一間大堂，通向四十間小屋，裡面全是珍珠、紅寶石和祖母綠。他一間一間地開，像吃一頓不想吃完的飯。到第四十天，只剩一道門；他站在門前，他說，他餘生就在於他怎麼站在那裡。四十天裡還剩一天。他開了它。

國王把臉轉向牆。我看見他的肩膀。「一天，」他對著枕頭說。「一天，主上。」「他已經有了三十九天。」「是，主上。」我說不清他要拿這句話怎麼辦；是對王子生氣，還是對那些留下一道門讓人去開的公主生氣，還是對他自己。我看我姐姐。她說下去。

一股香氣迎上他，那聲音說，濃烈得讓他暈倒；他醒來時，地上鋪著番紅花，金燭台，兩個大香爐燒著蘆薈，中間，黑得像最黑的夜，一匹馬，備了鞍，套了轡，鞍是紅金的，站在兩個水晶槽之間，一個盛芝麻，一個盛玫瑰水。他想：這其中必有祕密。他把牠牽出去。牠不動。他用韁繩抽牠；牠像雷一樣嘶鳴，張開一對翅膀，載著他升上天，一個鐘頭，把他放在一處平台的屋頂上，把他甩下去，用尾巴抽他的臉，打瞎了他的左眼。然後飛走了。

他從平台走下來，回到那十個獨眼人的廳裡。「不歡迎你，」他們說，「我們本來都很快樂，吃最好的，喝最好的，睡在金線織的布上，頭枕著美人的懷，卻等不了一天，去得到一年的歡樂。」他要一個煤煙托盤塗臉。「不給。」他們把他趕走。於是他剃了鬍子和眉毛，穿上苦行僧的外衣，四處流浪，在同一天的傍晚來到巴格達；就這樣，他們三個，瞎了同一隻眼，來到門口。

那家的女主人說：「揉揉頭，走吧。」「我不走，」他說，「我要聽完其他人的；」她轉向被兩兩綁著的哈里發、賈法爾和馬斯魯爾，說：「還有你們。」賈法爾開口，說了那個迷路的摩蘇爾商人的故事，女主人並不傻，已有點猜到誰來了她家，說：「我饒你們的命，彼此都是為了對方。走吧。」他們走到街上。哈里發轉向苦行僧。「你們現在去哪裡？天還沒亮。」「我們不知道。」「來跟我們過剩下的夜吧，」哈里發說；又對賈法爾：「帶他們回你家，明天帶他們來見我，讓我們記下他們的遭遇。」

他沒睡。他躺著，想著那幾位女士，那兩條母狗，那些疤底下是什麼。天一亮他就坐上寶座，說：「賈法爾，把三位女士、兩條母狗、三個苦行僧帶來。」他們被帶來了，女士們戴著面紗。「我們原諒你們對我們的無禮，」賈法爾說，「因為在那之前你們有善意，也因為你們不知道我們是誰。你們要知道，現在站在你們面前的，是哈倫・拉希德，信士的領袖，阿拔斯家族的人。說實話。」最年長的女士走上前。「啊，信士的領袖，」她說，「我的故事，若用針刻在眼角，對任何受得了教訓的人都是一個教訓。」

宣禮聲響了。我的手在墊子下面。我寫下樓梯：山魯佐德；坐在寶座上的哈里發，面前站著蒙著面紗的三位女士，最年長的正要開口。我把簿子轉向國王。他讀了，劃下第十六道，與那小的一道，並在邊上之邊上，寫：門。我放下蘆管。他沒有從書頁上抬眼，說：「你墊子下面有什麼？」

我說：「名字，主上。」他等著。我拿出那幾片象牙，遞給他，他像讀夜簿那樣，照老辦法，站著讀，每個名字一口氣的長度，我數了：祖拜妲，十四歲，酒窩；一個法蒂瑪；一個努爾；一個母親不知道她幾歲的女孩。讀完，他把它們還給我。他的臉像紙的顏色。「收著，」他說。「收在哪裡？」「跟書放在一起。」他出去了，留下我手裡握著象牙，以及一種我從沒失去過的感覺：我被交付了一件比它看起來更重的東西。

第十六夜。山魯佐德。到。未了：坐在寶座上的哈里發，與三位蒙面的女士，最年長的正要開口；兩條母狗；以及一小本名字，不是故事。

## 第08章 · 第十七、十八與十九夜：最年長的女士與守門的女士；三個蘋果開頭

到了第十七天，中午側門外已經有兩百個人。我不知道他們是怎麼聽說的。灰面紗的女人告訴了鄰居，鄰居告訴了表親；染匠那邊有人告訴了賣水的；我父親和我袖子裡揣著象牙本子走下坡來時，宮牆邊的隊伍，長得像節慶前夜麵包舖外的隊伍。他們靜靜地站著。他們什麼都沒帶，沒有請願書，沒有錢，只有一個女孩的名字，含在嘴裡，像把一枚銅幣壓在舌頭底下。

國王派了一個文具商來。我並沒有要求。一個圍著圍裙的人站在門邊，腋下夾著一本書，真正的一本，用素藍色布裝訂，一百頁都畫好了格子，他把它放進我手裡，說已經有人付過錢了，不肯說是誰；我父親，原本坐在陰影裡一張小凳上，壽衣擱在膝頭，看看書，看看我，點了一下頭，我就坐在台階上，把書擱在膝蓋上，開始寫。一個名字，加上母親、兄弟或鄰居記得的：一個笑、一條披肩、一個行業、一種走路的樣子。我父親坐在我旁邊，每個人說完，他就低下頭，像個證人。

來了一個沒人陪的老人。他說他要寫下他姐姐的名字。她是第八百零五個，他說，或者差不多。他不知道她的行業，因為她沒有；她只是巷子盡頭一家的女孩，愛吃李子。他說他來，是因為昨天看到一個宰相府的書記從街上走過，他想：有人知道。他看著我父親。「是你們哪一個，劃了那條線？」我父親說：「我。」老人看著他。他並不生氣。他只是看著，像人看一個人是怎麼做成的。「那你就來寫吧，」他說，「你認得她。」我父親從我手裡拿過鉛筆和書，沒有人叫他，用他寫夜簿的那種平整的書記字，寫下：欣德，燈匠薩利姆的女兒；她有一條灰披肩，牙齒有一條縫；第八百零五個。他從來沒有數過。他是背下來的。

那天夜裡，國王說：「最年長的。」我姐姐腳邊多了一個新火盆，沒有人解釋，她說，最年長的女士站在哈里發面前，說那兩條黑母狗是她的姐姐。

她父親死了，她說，她母親接著死了，三千枚金幣分給三個女兒，各一千；上面兩個嫁了人，跟丈夫去做生意，五年後，一個接一個，衣衫襤褸地回到她身邊，被那些把每一枚錢都花光的男人拋棄。她收留了她們。她替她們洗澡，穿上自己的衣服，分給她們自己的錢，因為，她說，我紡絲賺的更多，真主祝福了它。她們住了一年；然後想再嫁，她告訴她們她對婚姻的看法；她們還是嫁了，又被拋棄了，又回來；她又收留了她們。最後她備了一艘船，她們要求同去，因為她們忍受不了和她分開；風暴把他們吹離了海圖，十一天後，他們在一座誰也沒聽說過的城靠了岸。

那城門口站著幾個人，手裡拿著棍子，是石頭。市集上，攤子上堆著金子，沒有人看管，因為每個人都是石頭；宮殿裡，國王坐在寶座上，宰相們圍著他，都是石頭，王后躺在她的長袍裡，是石頭。兩個姐姐去撿她們拿得動的東西，人總是這樣；最小的一個繼續走，穿過空蕩蕩的廳堂，到最後面的一個房間，一盞燈在桌邊的榻旁燃著；她聽見了一個誦讀可蘭經的聲音。

那是個男孩。他坐在一間小小的禮拜室裡，面前的架子上放著書，完全一個人，他抬頭向她問好，像他一直在等她。「告訴我你為什麼來，」他說，「我就告訴你這裡發生了什麼。」她告訴了他。他說這城是他父親的，寶座上的國王是他父親，壁龕裡的王后是他母親；他們和所有的人民拜火，直到天上有個聲音喊他們三次，三年每年一次，要他們崇拜真主；他們沒有聽。第三年，天亮時，他們都成了石頭。只有男孩被留下，因為只有他學會了信仰，是從他的保姆，一個老婦人，偷偷學的，她已經死了；他留在這裡，讀書，守著燈，已經很久了。他厭倦了做唯一醒著的人。

「跟我去巴格達吧，」最年長的女士說，「我有一艘船。你做我的丈夫，我做你的僕人。」她說服了他，用的是一個長久以來沒被人愛過、剛剛找到一個人的人的那種手段；他就來了。她只從國庫裡取了輕而貴重的東西。她兩個姐姐，被拋棄了兩次，卻從沒被拒絕進她的屋子，看到男孩在她身邊，嫉妒了他，什麼也沒說；當晚，在巴士拉外，她和男孩睡著時，她們把他們連床一起抬起來，丟進了海。

「他淹死了嗎？」國王說。

「他不會游泳，主上。」

國王用手蓋住臉。我姐姐沒有等他。她說女士在黑暗中抓住一塊木板，被沖到一座島，早晨走到大陸。離城還有兩個鐘頭路程，她看見一條大蛇沿著小路逃來，後面追著一條龍，龍咬住了蛇的尾巴；女士，心裡本有許多悲傷無處放，撿起一塊石頭，用盡全力扔過去，打死了龍。蛇張開一對翅膀飛走了。女士躺下睡著，醒來時一個黑皮膚的女孩跪在她腳邊給她揉腳，旁邊是兩條黑母狗。「我就是那條蛇，」女孩說，「我是個女精靈，他是個恨我的精靈。你救了我的命。我到你姐姐們把你丟下的那艘船上，把船上的東西都放進你家，把船沉了；我把你姐姐們變成了這個。」她把她們放在女士的屋頂上。「每天你要打她們各三百下。你若不做，我來把你關在地下，永遠。」她給了女士一縷自己的頭髮，需要時燒。

「我天天都做，」最年長的女士對哈里發說，「我可憐她們，我哭，她們也知道不是我願意的。」

第一道光在百葉窗上。我寫下樓梯：哈里發與賈法爾與三位女士，守門的女士正要開口；還有，在邊上，因為國王說應該放那裡，我父親寫的：欣德，燈匠薩利姆的女兒，第八百零五個。我不知道它是否屬於那裡。我把它放在名冊該在的地方，那是在夜簿旁邊，夜簿在夜簿的邊上；國王全部讀了，劃了他的一道，然後拿著筆站了很久，對著書頁說：「她收留了她們兩次。」

「是，主上。」

「她們把她丟進海裡。」

「是，主上。」

他劃了小的那一道。然後，在清單下面，寫了一個我倒著讀不出來的字。

第十七夜。山魯佐德。到。未了：哈里發與三位女士，第二位女士，守門的，正要開口；兩條黑母狗；以及一本名冊，有一百頁。

第十八夜，國王說：「有條紋的那個。」我姐姐手裡拿著一塊麵包，忘了吃，她說，守門的女士走上前，說她是一個富人的女兒，父親死了，留給她很多，她嫁了一個更富的，他也死了；她有八萬第納爾。

有一天，一個老婦人來到她門前，臉像一顆乾棗，聲音像鈴，說了一個要在當晚嫁給陌生人的孤女的故事；守門的女士是個心腸好的人，說她願意去。老婦人帶她穿過街道，來到一座門上掛著黑簾的大宅，裡面榻上一個美麗的女孩站起來吻她。「我有個哥哥，」女孩說，「他在婚禮上見過你。他愛你一年了。是他派老婦人來的。」她拍了拍手，一道門開了，走出一個容貌與風度都極好的年輕人，守門的女士，已經守寡一陣子了，發現被騙一回並非多大的苦事。法官帶著四個證人進來，婚約立了。年輕人說：「我有一個條件。在這本書上發誓你永遠不看別的男人，也不向任何男人傾斜。」她發了誓。她很快樂；他們過了一個月完美的日子。

然後她請求出門去市場買些絲綢。老婦人陪她去。她們坐在一個年輕商人的店前，他把他所有的都拿給她看，一分錢都不收；他只要一個吻。老婦人低聲說：「有什麼妨害？別對他說話，別靠近他；只是一個吻，你守住誓言，也守住錢。」守門的女士說她不要。最後她被說服了，被那種已經說服過很多人做很多事的聲音；她舉起面紗的邊緣，他把嘴貼在她臉頰上，咬得那麼狠，連皮肉都咬下來。她昏過去。醒來時，店關了，老婦人抱著她，要她回家說自己病了。

那晚她丈夫進來，點起蠟燭。「你臉上是什麼？」「一頭載柴火的駱駝撞了我。」「我明天去找總督，把巴格達所有賣柴火的都絞死。」「不要讓你的靈魂負擔。我騎驢，驢絆了一下。」「那我去找巴爾馬克的賈法爾，把所有趕驢的男孩都殺了。」「你要為我的臉頰毀這麼多人嗎？那是真主的決定。」但是她開始結巴，他就知道了。「你對你的誓言不忠。」他說；叫了一聲；七個奴隸進來，把她按在地上，一個壓住她的頭，一個壓住她的膝蓋；他拔出劍，交給第三個，說：「把她劈成兩半，薩阿德，你們一人拿一半，扔進底格里斯河餵魚。這是違背諾言的人該得的。」

國王站起來了。我沒聽見。他已走到窗邊，背對我們站著，兩手撐在窗台上，我姐姐沒有停；她壓低聲音，我幾乎聽不見，我什麼也沒寫，因為沒有地方可寫。壓在她頭上的奴隸，那聲音說，彎下身對她說：「說信仰的告白，女主人，想想還有什麼要交代；這是你一生的最後一個時辰了。」她請求一點時間交代遺言。她抬起頭。她看見自己在什麼地方，從一個好人家，落到它的地板上，並且是自己做的。她哭了。他對她念了幾行詩。她也念了幾行回他。他又喊：「砍她！」奴隸走近，她確信自己要死了——

「老婦人進來了。」國王在窗邊說。

「是，主上。」

「她撲到他腳下。」

「是，主上。她說，憑我哺育你的權利，憑我多年侍奉你，饒了她。你還年輕。有人說：殺人者必被殺。」

「他聽了。」

「他聽了。他說他饒她，但必須在她身上留一個終身看得見的記號。」我姐姐又用兩個字講完它。一根榲桲樹枝，背上、腰側，直到她昏過去。她們把她拖出去，丟在她以前的門口。她四個月後痊癒。她再回那座屋子去看，只剩廢墟；街已經被拆了。

國王從窗邊轉過身。他的臉很平靜。「他饒她，是因為一個老婦人求情，」他說。「是，主上。」「就這樣夠了。」「是那位老婦人，主上。還有他是被她哺育長大的。」「一個保姆，」國王說，「四十年的保姆。」他回來，坐在床沿上，背對我姐姐，就像第一夜那樣坐著。「那她後來怎麼樣了？」「她去找她父親另一個女兒，主上，就是有那兩條狗的最年長的女士。她告訴她發生了什麼。最年長的說：誰能避開時間的惡意？她們就住在一起。這些年她們沒有談過婚姻。」國王什麼也沒說。我寫下樓梯，與日期，和老婦人。

第十八夜。山魯佐德。到。未了：哈里發與三位女士，第二位被打的女士的故事剛說完；女精靈，還沒被召喚；以及一本名冊，有一百頁。

第十九夜，我姐姐說，哈里發，讓人把那些故事寫下來放進他的檔案之後，問最年長的女士知不知道在哪裡能找到那位女精靈；她有一縷女精靈的頭髮，需要時燒。他把它扔進火裡。宮殿震動；有翅膀的聲音；女精靈站在他面前，向他問安。她說，如果他希望，她會放了那兩個姐姐。她把水灑在母狗身上，說：「回到你們原來的形狀。」牠們就變成了女人，哭了起來。她說：「至於那個打守門的女士的人，他是離你最近的人。」哈里發說：「誰？」「你的兒子阿敏。」他聽說了她的美貌，玩了一個情人的詭計，依法娶了她；他給她定了一個條件，要她對此發誓；她違背了。「他不應受責備，」女精靈說，「他本打算殺她，他怕真主，只打了她一頓。」

哈里發派人叫兒子來，兒子照實說了。哈里發，是那種喜歡留下一件會被記住的事的人，把三位女士嫁給了三個苦行僧，都是國王的兒子，封他們做侍從，給了俸祿；把最年長的女士的姐姐們，如今又是女人了，收回她家；把守門的女士還給他兒子，婚約重新訂立，給了一大筆錢，把房子重建得比以前更好；至於他自己，他娶了管食物的那一位。那晚他就與她同房。

「他把她們全都嫁了。」國王說。

「一個不漏，主上。」

「她回到他那裡去了。被打的那個。」我姐姐說是的。「她有沒有說她原諒他？」我姐姐沉默了一下。「沒有說，主上。」國王躺著看帳頂，想了想。然後他用平穩的聲音說，像在糾正一個書記：「應該要說的。」我姐姐說：「是，主上。」「說吧。」「我說不了，主上，」我姐姐說，「沒有人告訴我。但是再往後，我有一個故事要說給您，裡面有一個更有耐性的女人，她會做得更好。」他說：「什麼時候？」「大概第三百四十七夜。」「那很遠。」國王說。他在數。我看見他的嘴唇動了。我想他數到了，在腦子裡，覺得很遠，也覺得並非不可能；他說：「那就說下去吧。」她就說下去了，說三個蘋果。

他們說，她說，哈里發哈倫・拉希德有一夜召宰相賈法爾，說：「我想下城去，問問老百姓他們是怎麼被治理的；他們抱怨的，我們就罷免，他們稱讚的，我們就提拔。」他們帶著馬斯魯爾下去了，在一條窄巷裡，他們遇見一個老人，頭頂著漁網和魚簍，慢慢走著，念著幾行詩，說窮人的學問對他沒有用處：他有筆，有墨水瓶，有書，就是沒有東西吃。

黎明在百葉窗裡。我寫下樓梯；並在底下，在邊上之邊上，我用自己的字寫，因為國王不會寫，哈里發下城去問人民如何被治理。他站著讀了，劃了他的一道，與小的一道。他什麼也沒說。到門口他轉身。「正午把名冊帶到門口去，」他說，「人民會想知道它被保存著。」然後他出去了。我走到我姐姐身邊，她睡著了，手裡還握著那塊麵包，我把它拿下來放在桌上，坐回墊子上，把名冊擱在膝上，數頁數。已寫了六十一頁。

第十九夜。山魯佐德。到。未了：哈里發與賈法爾夜裡在城中，一個頭頂漁網的老漁夫，在念詩；以及一本名冊，有一百頁。

## 第09章 · 第二十至二十四夜：三個蘋果；努爾丁與他的兒子，只講骨架

第二十天中午，我父親和我帶著那本藍書下坡走向側門的時候，染匠區的門外，有一個人站在翻過來的木箱上，在講漁夫與精靈的故事。他身邊圍了三十個人。他嗓子很好，手裡有一根掛著破布的棍子，拿來當精靈的煙，他講得全錯了。照他的版本，漁夫是抽籤決定自己怎麼死的；精靈的四個誓願是三個一百年；大夫杜班是猶太人。我停在坡上，手搭在我父親的臂上。「他漏了第二個一百年。」我父親很低聲地說。我看著他。「我是從你那裡聽來的，」他說，「在樓梯上。你睡著的時候，自己會對自己念。」

人們圍著那個人，他講到罐子的時候，他們鼓掌，講到精靈的誓言，他們安靜下來，嘴微微張著，像孩子；我明白它出去了。我姐姐的聲音穿過了牆，在女傭的口袋裡，在侍從男孩的嘴裡，自己在城裡走動。這不是我們原來的意思。她第一夜就說過，她留不住她講的東西。她沒有說，別人會替她留住。

那天傍晚我告訴國王。他仰躺著，雙手放在胸口，看著帳頂，過了好一陣沒有說話。「誰告訴他們的？」「沒有人，主上。是牆告訴的。」「對嗎？」「不對，主上。他讓漁夫抽籤決定怎麼死。」「那是錯的，」國王說，「那是他自己選的。」「是，主上。」「讓他們講吧，」他對著帳頂說。我不清楚這是允許還是認輸。「還有，你要把名字帶來給我。」

「箱子。」他說，過了一陣，燈暗下來的時候；我姐姐肩上披著一條我不認識的披肩，從哈里發與宰相，與頂著漁網、沒有晚飯給孩子吃的老漁夫開始講起。

哈里發對他說，那聲音說：再把你的網撒一次，撒在我的運氣上，撈上來什麼，我用一百個金幣買。老人說好，他們下到河邊；他撒網；拉上來一只箱子，上了鎖，重得要哈里發和馬斯魯爾兩個人一起抬進宮。漁夫得了他的兩百。在宮裡，他們打開了鎖。裡面是一個棕櫚葉編的籃子，紅毛線繫著；籃子裡有一塊地毯；地毯底下有一件折成四折的女人披巾；披巾裡是一個年輕女子，白得像銀，被殺了，切成了幾塊。

哈里發哭了。然後他停止哭泣，轉向他的宰相。「宰相裡的狗，在我們的朝代，人被謀殺、被丟進河裡，在審判日成為我們的負擔嗎？憑真主，我們要向殺她的人討她的血，他要死得最慘。我若不是阿拔斯的後裔，就不是人：如果你不把殺她的人帶給我，我就把你吊在宮門口，你和你的四十個親戚。」賈法爾說：「給我三天。」「給你。」

宰相回家。他在家裡坐了三天，想不出任何辦法；第三天過去，第四天來了，哈里發派人叫他，問：兇手在哪裡？「我是被謀殺者的督察嗎，信士的領袖，我怎麼知道是誰殺了她？」哈里發氣到當天就下令把賈法爾吊在門口，派傳令人到全城去喊：誰想看巴爾馬克人被吊死，連同他的四十個堂兄弟，都可以來；人民從各區湧來，不知道為什麼，哭了；絞架架起來了；賈法爾和他的親戚站在下面。

我聽見自己的呼吸。我父親不在房間；他每晚都在樓梯底下。但是我想到他，在他的凳子上，在燈下，捧著那本藍書；我想到，我一直不許自己想的一件事：他也被給了一定數目的日子，而沒有人告訴他哪一天是最後一天。我姐姐沒有看我。她的眼睛從沒離開過那個故事。

然後一個年輕人擠過人群，那聲音說。他很英俊，穿得整潔，臉頰上一顆痣像一粒龍涎香，他站到賈法爾面前說：「平安與您同在。殺箱子裡那個女人的是我。為她吊死我。」賈法爾還在驚訝時，一個老人推過人群，說：「別信他。是我。」年輕人說：「這是個老糊塗了。」「我老了，」老人說，「對世界厭倦了。我用我的命，贖你的和宰相及他所有親戚的。」宰相把他們兩人都帶到哈里發面前。「你們哪一個殺了她？」「我。」「我。」「把兩個都吊死。」哈里發說。「若其中一個是兇手，」賈法爾說，「吊另一個就是不公。」年輕人準確說出她是怎麼被殺的：籃子，披巾，地毯。於是哈里發相信他就是那個人；問起經過。

她是他的妻子，年輕人說，是他父親兄弟的女兒，就是那個老人，也是他三個兒子的母親。他愛她。那個月頭幾天她病了。她開始好轉時，說：「我想聞一個蘋果，咬一口。」他出去，每間店都找，找不到。第二天早上他逛遍了花園。一個老園丁告訴他，蘋果只有信士領袖在巴士拉的園子裡才有；他就去了。來回十五天，花三個第納爾買了三個蘋果。他帶回來時，她並不高興，任它們擱在身旁；因為她虛弱，燒還沒退。十天。然後她開始好轉。

他去了他的鋪子。大約中午，一個高大的奴隸經過，那是他不認識的哪一家的人，手裡拿著他那三個蘋果之一，拋著玩。「你從哪裡得來的？」「從我的女主人那裡。我出了遠門，回來看見她病著，身邊擱著三個蘋果；她對我說，我那個戴綠帽的蠢丈夫為了它們去了巴士拉，花了三個第納爾。我就跟她吃喝了。我拿了這個。」年輕人關了鋪子。回家。他數蘋果。兩個。「第三個呢？」他對妻子說。她虛弱地抬起頭說：「我不知道。」

國王在黑暗裡說：「他沒有問兩次。」

「沒有，主上。」

「他只問一次。她說她不知道。她病著。」我姐姐沒有回答。國王說：「他憑街上一個僕人的一句話割斷了她的喉嚨。」「憑一個僕人的話，主上，和一個床邊少了的蘋果。」「那是一件很小的東西，少了。」國王用一種奇怪地平板的聲音說，沒有再說別的。

年輕人割斷了她的喉嚨，那聲音說；把她切開，裹在披巾和一塊地毯裡，縫在一個籃子裡，籃子縫在一只箱子裡，把箱子放在騾背上，親手把它丟進底格里斯河。然後他回家，看見大兒子在門口哭。「你為什麼哭？」「我拿了媽媽身邊的一個蘋果出去玩，一個高大的奴隸從我手裡搶走了。我說那是我媽媽的，爸爸去巴士拉給她買的。他不聽。我問了三次。他打我，踢我。我怕媽媽打我，所以跟弟弟跑到城外去了。別告訴她，爸爸，不然她會更重。」父親就知道，那個奴隸說了謊；那個奴隸從沒見過他的妻子；他殺了她，為了一個男孩在街上丟掉的一樣東西。

「所以快點吊死我，」年輕人對哈里發說，「因為我怕她在復活日控訴我。」老人在他旁邊哭。哈里發說年輕人情有可原，他只要吊那個奴隸；他吩咐賈法爾三天內把他帶來，否則代他死。

黎明在百葉窗裡。我姐姐說了她的話，我說了我的，她說了她的；我寫下樓梯，國王讀了，劃他的一道；我聽見了一件新的事：國王在離開書頁之前開了口。「他們哪一個是父親？」他說。「那個老人，主上。女人的父親。叔叔。」「他來為他的姪子被吊死。」「是。」「而丈夫來為他的妻子被吊死。」「是。」國王看著他面前的那一頁，沒有劃小的那一道。他拿起筆，猶豫了一下，在他的清單裡，蘋果旁邊，寫了一個新字。這一次我讀得出來。那是：問。

第二十夜。山魯佐德。到。未了：賈法爾，有三天去找一個他從沒聽說過的奴隸；老人與年輕人；以及一本名冊，裡面有八十三個名字。

那個奴隸在賈法爾自己的家裡。第四天，我姐姐在第二十一夜說，賈法爾立了遺囑，向家人告別，最後擁抱最小的女兒；摸到她胸前衣服裡有個圓圓的東西。「你口袋裡是什麼，小寶貝？」「一個蘋果，爸爸，上面寫著我們主上哈里發的名字。我們的奴隸雷漢四天前拿給我的，要我給他兩個第納爾才肯給。」賈法爾把手伸進去，把蘋果拿出來，認得它。他叫雷漢來。「你這蘋果是哪裡來的？」「憑真主，主人，」奴隸說，「謊言能讓人出去一次，但真話能讓他一次又一次地出去。我沒有從您或哈里發那裡偷它。五天前我看見一個孩子在巷子裡玩，手裡拿著這個蘋果。我從他手裡搶來。我打了他。他哭了，說那是他媽媽的，她病了，爸爸為了它去了巴士拉。我沒聽。我把它帶來這裡，賣給小姐，兩個第納爾。事情就是這樣。」

賈法爾把奴隸帶去見哈里發。哈里發笑得倒在後面，說這個故事要寫下來，在公眾面前講。「不要為此驚奇，信士的領袖，」賈法爾說，「它不比埃及宰相努爾丁・阿里和他的哥哥山姆斯丁・穆罕默德的故事更奇異。」「還有什麼更奇的？」「我會講給您，條件是您赦免我的奴隸。」「如果它比蘋果的更奇，我把他的血給你。如果不，我殺他。」我姐姐，帶著一個我自從漁夫後就沒見過的微笑，開始了。

我只給骨頭，因為我是會睡著的那個。那花了四夜，我記得的大概只有一夜。有兩個兄弟，是埃及的宰相，俊美，蘇丹很愛他們；有一晚喝酒時，兩人爭吵起來，爭的是如果同一夜各生了孩子，誰的孩子該娶誰的。爭吵變得荒謬，這種爭吵總是這樣。弟弟努爾丁・阿里，當晚怒氣沖沖離開埃及，去了巴士拉，做了那裡的宰相。他娶了宰相的女兒。生了一個兒子，巴德爾丁・哈桑，美得讓街上的人停下來；然後父親死了。同時在開羅，哥哥的女兒，因蘇丹的一時興致，許配給了一個駝背新郎，那是個馬廄來的新郎，字面意義上的新郎；精靈梅蒙和一個女精靈路過，看見新娘在哭，開玩笑地找了一個更英俊的男人來替新郎。他們在巴士拉找到睡著的巴德爾丁。他們把他帶到開羅。

這一段我記得很清楚，因為國王笑了。那是個很小的笑；那是一口氣，從鼻子裡出來，像笑那頭騾那次；但他的嘴角動了，我在燈下看見的。是笑那個駝背，他離開新娘的房間去上廁所，發現精靈在馬桶蓋上坐下，膨脹到水牛那麼大；他整夜坐在地上，我姐姐說，牙齒打顫，嘴裡只剩一個字：精靈，早上新郎來找他時，他已經瘋了。巴士拉來的美少年那時和新娘在一起，度過了一夜，我不描述它，醒來時他在大馬士革，穿著襯衣，在城門口；他成了賣奶油餡餅的。他的兒子八個月後在開羅出生。蘇丹的怒氣，追捕，七年，認出兒子的餡餅的母親：全部都圓滿了。到最後，他們全都被找到了，年紀都寫在身上，像一本加總完畢的帳。

「更好的故事嗎？」賈法爾對哈里發說。「好得多，」哈里發說，「奴隸自由了。」就這樣一個奴隸，他的謊言殺死了一個女人，在原本應該被吊死的那天，被一個故事赦免了。這不是我說的。是國王說的。他在第二十四夜的末尾，對著空房間說：「故事救了他。」

「是，主上。」

「那個傳了謊的人。」

「是，主上。」

他躺了很久。「那是對故事很差的用法。」他說。而我姐姐，累得除了節奏什麼也聽不見，說：「那是我唯一有的用法，主上。」國王就轉過頭看她。那是我頭一次看見他在我姐姐醒著的時候看她。他看了一口氣的時間，然後又一口氣；然後他伸出手，像人在黑暗中摸一只杯子，把它放在她手旁的被子上，不是放在上面；就留在那裡，什麼也沒說。

第二十一夜。山魯佐德。到。未了：努爾丁・阿里與山姆斯丁，兩兄弟，爭吵他們尚未出生的孩子的婚事；以及一本名冊。

第二十二夜。山魯佐德。到。未了：巴士拉來的少年，在大馬士革與開羅之間的路上；賣奶油餡餅的人；以及一本名冊。

第二十三夜。山魯佐德。到。未了：大馬士革的一位母親，一塊餡餅，一個七歲的男孩；以及一本名冊。

第二十四夜。山魯佐德。到。未了：埃及的故事裡已沒有什麼；哈里發高興；中國蘇丹的一個駝背，還沒開始；以及一本名冊，裡面有一百六十八個名字。

## 第10章 · 第二十五至二十九夜：駝背；掮客、總管與醫生

到了第二十五天，第一本藍書寫滿了。我在第一百頁最後一行畫好的格子裡寫下最後一個名字，是個叫梅姆娜的，錫匠的女兒，腿跛，我抬頭時文具商已站在我手肘邊，帶著第二本書。同樣的藍布。「已經付過錢了。」他說，在我開口問之前。我想他不會說是誰付的，我猜對了。我還想，付錢的那個人是個知道一百頁是多少頁、一千個名字要多少頁的人；而他沒有停下來數。

那天夜裡，國王說：「駝背。」我姐姐，半個月來長了一點肉，氣色又是她自己的了，她說，中國的一座城裡有個愛玩樂的裁縫，他和他妻子出遊，傍晚回來，遇見了一個駝背，他那模樣足以把一個人從絕望裡逗笑。他們請他吃晚飯。他來了。裁縫買了一條炸魚，麵包，檸檬；吃的時候，妻子開玩笑地拿起一塊魚，塞進駝背嘴裡，手捂著。「你一口吞下去，」她說，「我不讓你嚼。」魚裡有一根刺。駝背因此死了，很安靜，嘴裡滿是魚。

「哭也沒有用。」裁縫的妻子說。她用一塊頭巾裹了他，裁縫抱起他，她在前面走，一路喊：「我的小乖乖，哪裡疼？天花長到哪裡了？」看見他們的人都說：「一個得天花的孩子，」讓開路。他們找到一戶猶太醫生的門，妻子派女傭拿著四分之一第納爾上樓去請她主人下來，趁她不在，他們把死人立在樓梯頂，跑了。醫生，愛四分之一第納爾的人，摸黑出來，一腳踩到屍體，讓它滾到樓梯底。他喊摩西，喊亞倫，喊嫩的兒子約書亞。「我殺了一個病人！」他的妻子說，如果天亮時屍體還在這裡，他們兩個都完了；於是他們把它抬上屋頂，從通風口垂進了鄰居家，鄰居是個穆斯林，蘇丹廚房的總管。

那位總管已被偷了好幾個月。有人在動他的油和油脂；他斷定是老鼠，或貓，或聞到羊尾的味道從屋頂過來的狗；他殺了好多。他從一個誦讀可蘭經的夜晚回來，看見一個男人站在通風口底下的角落裡，說：「原來是你。而我一直在殺這一區的貓。」他拿起鐵鎚，朝那賊的胸口打下去，男人倒了；他看見那是個駝背，死了，說：「你做駝背還不夠，還要當賊？」他把他背在肩上，夜將盡時背到市場，立在一家店面上，在一條黑巷子裡。

我姐姐的聲音有一點細小的不穩，我當成是她在努力忍著不笑。我看國王。他一手遮著嘴，肩膀沒有停。

一個基督徒掮客醉醺醺地晃過來，她說，要去澡堂。他的頭巾在夜的前半被人搶了；看見一個人貼牆站在黑暗裡，他當成又一個賊，朝他脖子打了一拳。那人倒下。掮客氣昏了頭，騎在他身上繼續打，喊來巡夜；巡夜的看見一個基督徒跪在一個穆斯林身上，穆斯林死了。「基督徒殺穆斯林！」他說。他們把掮客押到總督那裡。總督早晨下令把他吊死。

絞架架好，繩子套在基督徒脖子上，劊子手正要拉，廚房總管擠過人群說：「住手！是我。」總督問怎麼回事。總管把鐵鎚和一切講了，被放到絞架下替換掮客。然後猶太醫生擠過來說：「住手！是我殺的。」他講了樓梯和四分之一第納爾。繩子套上猶太人。然後裁縫從人群裡擠過來，說：「是我，沒有別人。是我殺的。」他講了魚。

「住手！」劊子手疲倦地說，「我們拉出一個人換另一個，到頭來一個也沒吊成！」就在這時，蘇丹的侍從匆匆趕到。那駝背，原來是中國蘇丹自己的弄臣；蘇丹整個早晨都在找他，被告知他死了，有四個人承認了他的死。

「蘇丹把他們叫去，」我姐姐說，「也把死人連同擔架叫去。總督講了整個故事，我不再講，因為三遍的故事沒有用。蘇丹被逗樂了。」她停了一下。在安靜裡我聽見燈的聲音。「他笑了，主上。他叫人用金字寫下來。他對朝臣說，你們有沒有聽過比我的駝背更奇異的故事？沒有人聽過。」

「他笑了。」國王說。

「是，主上。」

「而那四個人脖子上還套著繩子站在那裡。」

「是，主上。」

「沒有放他們。」

「沒有，主上。基督徒掮客走上前，說他有一個比駝背更讓蘇丹驚訝的故事。蘇丹說，說吧。蘇丹說，如果沒有更讓我驚訝，你們四個都要吊死。」

國王有一陣子沒有說話。然後：「那就是它的形狀。」他說。

「主上？」

「這件事的形狀。每一個人，都被叫站在繩子底下，說。那個丟椰棗核的人。罐子裡的精靈和漁夫。有蘋果的宰相。現在是這些人。」他並沒有生氣。我會說他有興趣，像一個人發現地毯上的一個圖案有了名字。「我看出你在做什麼。」國王說。

「我只是在講故事，主上。」我姐姐用很小的聲音說。

「是，」國王說，「說下去。」

第二十五夜。山魯佐德。到。未了：中國蘇丹，與繩下的四個人，與擔架上的一個駝背；基督徒掮客，他有一個更好的故事。

掮客的故事，我只照我所知的講，簡略的，那花了一夜。他是開羅的科普特人，他說，芝麻掮客，有一天一個年輕人帶了樣品來，賣了五十艾爾德布，留下四千五百迪拉姆做保證金，一年沒有回來。他回來時，在掮客家吃飯，用左手吃；掮客想了十二個月，問他為什麼。他把右袖子拉出來。袖子裡沒有手。

他是巴格達人，他說，是個商人，帶了一批布來開羅。有一天在一個首領的店裡，他看見一個女人，聽見她說話，就完了；她賒了一件布，他叫首領記在他帳上，她說：「願真主讓你做我所有一切的主人，」走了。他又看見她。她派一個女奴追著他，說她在等他。他在一個星期五晚上到了她家，在哈巴尼耶區；兩個年輕女子開了門；她自己出來迎接，頭戴珍珠冠冕，帶他進一間有七道門和噴泉的大廳。他們吃；他們喝；她把嘴貼上他的嘴；他們睡了。早上他離開，在地毯底下留了五十第納爾。他第二天晚上又這樣做，第三天、第四天，每天早上在地毯底下留一包五十第納爾，直到有一天早上他醒來發現自己一文不名，第納爾沒有，迪拉姆也沒有，他說，是撒旦幹的。

他走到街上。在祖維拉門有一群人，他被擠到一個士兵身上，他的手，在士兵口袋邊，只是被人群擠的，碰到一個錢袋。一頭載柴火的駱駝從另一邊撞了士兵。錢袋就在他手裡。士兵發現口袋輕了，轉過身，用鎚矛打他的頭。「賊！」他說。總督正經過。「剝光他，」總督說；他們找到了錢袋，裡面二十第納爾。「你偷了這個嗎？」他想：我若說不，他們會打我；他說是。他們當場用劊子手的刀砍掉他的右手，把斷口燙住；士兵，心軟了，把錢袋還給他。

他去找她。他躺在地毯上，手用一塊破布包著塞在懷裡，說他頭痛。她看他臉色。她問，他不說。她給他酒，他用左手接，她給更多，他睡著了，醒來發現她搜了他，找到了錢袋，和那隻手。她坐了一夜看著它。早晨她叫法官和證人來，在婚約裡把她的全部財產都寫給他。她打開一只箱子給他看全部的包巾，每一包裡有五十第納爾，是他留在她地毯下的：她都收起來了。「這是你的，」她說，「我只是要你。」她和他過了一個月。然後她病了，為他的手悲傷，病了五十天才死；他埋了她，賣掉她的財產，掮客說，那就是芝麻的來源。「而這個故事，中國的國王，難道不比駝背的更奇異嗎？」

「不，」蘇丹說，「沒有辦法，你們都要被吊死。」

我姐姐停了。光在百葉窗上。國王仰躺著，看帳頂。過了一會兒他說：「她沒有離開。那個女人。」「沒有，主上。」「她要了一個沒有手的男人。」「和他懷裡的錢袋。」「沒有問他任何事。」我姐姐說：「沒有，主上。她等到他睡著。」「是，」國王說，聲音像一個人把一塊石頭擱在另一塊石頭上，「她會的。」

第二十六夜。山魯佐德。到。未了：中國蘇丹，不為掮客的故事所動；蘇丹廚房的總管，他說他有一個更好的；繩下的四個人。

總管的故事是一只箱子。我只說，他前一晚在一個宴會上，有孜然燉肉，有一位客人不肯碰，直到大家同意讓他洗手一百二十次；那位客人吃的時候只用四根手指，他沒有拇指，也沒有大腳趾；這是因為祖拜妲夫人家裡的一個女人，他在巴格達一家店裡看見她、愛了她，而她也愛他；為了把他弄進宮，她把他關在一只裝夫人衣服的箱子裡，用小船載過底格里斯河，放在總太監面前。「打開，」太監說，「全部打開。」箱子裡的人失控了，水從箱子裡流出來，女人說：「你要害死我，也害死你自己，你弄破了一瓶滲滲泉水，把衣服都弄壞了。」然後有人喊：「哈里發！」

國王笑了。不多，但那是笑，並且持續得足夠稱為笑。我姐姐不得不停下來。她雙手放在膝上等著，我看見她微笑了，對著什麼也不是的東西。

哈里發打開了所有的箱子，除了那一只，她說下去。「那一只，」女孩說，「是祖拜妲夫人的祕密」；哈里發，心情好，放過了。年輕人在祖拜妲夫人面前被從衣服堆裡取出來，夫人打量他說：「他可以。」哈里發同意了，並給了一萬第納爾。他們辦了十天的喜宴。到宴會結束，新娘去澡堂時，他們在新郎面前擺了一盤，盤中有一碗孜然燉肉，雞胸、糖、開心果、麝香和玫瑰水；他全部吃了，擦擦手；忘了洗手。

我不能看國王。我看燈。傍晚新娘穿著七件衣服在宮裡被抬了一圈，送到他面前，留下。他擁抱她，幾乎不敢相信；她聞到他手指上的孜然味，大叫起來，她所有的女人都跑來。「把這個瘋子帶走，」她說，「我還當他是個有理智的人。他吃了孜然燉肉不洗手。這種人也配上我的床？」她拿起一根編織的鞭子打他，打到她手臂發麻，他昏了過去。十天她沒有靠近他。她派僕人送他的飲食，僕人說她主人因為那股氣味病了。第十天她進來說：「我要教你吃孜然燉肉不洗手是什麼下場，」她的女人按住他，她拿了一把剃刀，割掉了他的拇指和大腳趾。她在斷口上灑了癒合的藥粉。血止住之後，新郎，已經看出她是什麼人，發誓說他以後吃孜然一定先用鹼灰洗四十次，用高良薑洗四十次，用肥皂洗四十次；她接受了他的誓言；她的氣消了；那晚他和她同寢。他們一起過了很久。祖拜妲夫人給了他們五萬第納爾買房子。「但是從那以後，」我姐姐說，「他每看見一盤孜然，都要洗一百二十次。他自己在宴會上這樣說的。」

「這就是，」總管說，「我的故事。」

「它，」蘇丹說，「不比駝背的更奇異。你們都要被吊死。」

國王說：「她因為他忘了洗手就割掉他的拇指。」「是，主上。」「那很少。」「她說她要教他，主上。」國王在枕上轉過頭。「教他吃孜然不洗手，」他說，「教他。」過了一會兒，他又開始笑，無聲地，肩膀在動；我明白他是在笑他自己，或世界，或一個因為女人用剃刀教他一課而洗一百二十次手的人這個想法。我始終不知道。那不是快樂的笑。那是一個三年沒笑過的人，第一件做的事的那種笑。

第二十七夜。山魯佐德。到。未了：總管的故事剛說完；蘇丹，不為所動；猶太醫生，他說他的更好；繩下的四個人。

醫生的故事比較短，我姐姐在第二十八夜說，也比較悲傷，我就講得更短。他是大馬士革的一個醫生，被叫到總督的家去醫治一個發燒的年輕人，那人伸出左手給他把脈；年輕人康復後，到澡堂時，醫生看見他的右手被砍了，斷口是新的。

年輕人是摩蘇爾人。他帶叔伯們的貨去了大馬士革，留下來賣；一個穿著華麗的女士有一天進了他的屋子，他與她同寢，她不收錢，每次還帶十五第納爾給他。有一晚她帶了一個更小的妹妹來。他們喝酒。那位女士，嫉妒，要他那晚與妹妹同寢；他早晨醒來，滿身是血，那女孩的頭已不在肩上，那位女士不見了。他把女孩連同她的首飾埋在院子的地下，離開了大馬士革。三年後，沒錢了，他回來，在地毯下發現一條十顆寶石的項鍊；拿到市場去賣；被打到承認偷了，右手被砍掉，斷口浸在油裡煮。然後總督，大馬士革的總督，傳他去，那是他自己的項鍊；三年前和他的小女兒一起從家中不見了。

國王側過身去看我姐姐，在她說這個故事時。她沒有看他。

「他把一切如實告訴了總督，」我姐姐說，「第一位女士是總督的大女兒，嫁到開羅，在那裡守寡，帶著一些想法回家。她把她妹妹帶到一個陌生人家裡分享她的歡愉，出於嫉妒殺了她，對她母親說，我什麼也不知道。她母親哭到心碎，死了。總督哭了。他對年輕人說，我不怪你。並把他的最小的女兒嫁給了他。」

「做了這件事的那個？」國王說。

「不是，主上。最小的。第三個。她是隔壁房間的一個女孩。」

「那大的呢？」

「沒有說，」我姐姐說，「我想，主上，她在那座房子裡老去了，沒有人向她要求過什麼。」

國王躺著不動。「這個也，」他說，「應該要說的。」

那晚我寫下未了的，手不太穩。中國蘇丹，與四個人和一個駝背；醫生的故事說完；裁縫，脖子上還套著繩子，說他的故事比其他的加起來都好，那是一個理髮師的故事。

第二十八夜。山魯佐德。到。未了：中國蘇丹，仍然不為所動；裁縫，他有一個理髮師；繩下的四個人。

第二十九夜，國王說：「裁縫。」我姐姐，這夜不得不中途停下來休息三次，繼續說，裁縫前一晚去參加一個宴會，主人家的僕人正要上菜，一個外地的年輕人進來，英俊的巴格達人，一條腿跛；他環顧房間，在賓客裡看見一個理髮師，轉身要走。主人攔住他。「怎麼了？」「我不願意，」年輕人說，「和那個理髮師，那個凶兆，同在一個房間。他是我腿摔斷的原因；我發誓不在他住的任何城市停留，離開了巴格達；而我第一個晚上就在這裡遇見他。」賓客說：講給我們聽。

光進來了，那是第二十九天的黎明。我寫下那一行，在它底下寫下樓梯；國王沒有讀它，只看了看，說：「壽衣呢？」

我抬頭。我父親在門口。他站在那裡，如同過去這一個月每一個早晨，穿著前一天的衣服。但他的雙臂垂在身側。「主上，」我父親說，「我把它放在我床腳的箱子裡了。」「為什麼？」「您說過，主上，放在我拿得到的地方。」國王看了他一陣。「拿得到嗎？」「是從上面數第三樣，主上。」「好。」國王說。而我父親，又一次把那句話完全聽懂了，也聽懂了國王是在開玩笑，用手遮著臉，站在門口哭了，我從來沒有見過他那樣哭過，之前沒有，之後也沒有。

第二十九夜。山魯佐德。到。未了：裁縫的故事，其中一個跛腳的巴格達年輕人，不肯與一個理髮師同在一個房間；中國蘇丹，繩下的四個人，與擔架上的一個駝背。

## 第11章 · 第三十至三十四夜：理髮師，他的六個兄弟，與駝背的結局

第三十夜，國王說：「理髮師。」從頭開始以來，我第一次看見我姐姐在開口前喝了一口水，像演員那樣；而她開口時，那不是她的聲音，也不是另一個聲音。那是第三個聲音，高、快、親切，一路說下去，沒有一口氣停頓；我在第二句還沒說完以前就明白，她要變成那個理髮師了。

那個巴格達來的年輕人，她說，在那個房間裡對他們說，他是個商人的兒子，討厭女人，直到有一天早上，他在一條死巷子裡看見一個女孩在窗邊澆花；從那個時辰起，他什麼都吃不下。她是法官的女兒。法官女兒的老保姆接手他這件事，通了一個月的消息，來告訴他：星期五，做主麻禮拜的時候，她父親去清真寺了，他可以來。「先去澡堂，」老婦人說，「把頭剃了；你生過病。」他派書僮去找理髮師。「要穩重的人，」他說，「不要多事的，不要多話的。不要一個會把我腦袋吵裂的人。」小廝帶回來的，就是這個老頭。

「早安，」理髮師用我姐姐的聲音說，「早安，願真主賜你安適，願真主把你的煩惱和憂愁趕得遠遠的。我看你瘦了。你身體好嗎？康復啊，人家說，是很大的恩賜。你要剃頭嗎？還是放血？伊本・阿拔斯說過，誰在星期五剪髮，主就替他擋掉七十種災難。讓我看看星盤。」他從一塊手巾裡取出一個銀鑲、七片盤面的星盤，走到院子裡，臉朝太陽站了很久，回來說：「主人，離禮拜時間還有整整三個鐘頭，不多也不少，這是依據最博學的天文家和最聰明的曆書。現在，請問，您為什麼這麼急？」

國王笑了。那是一種新的笑，跟孜然那夜的完全不同：它從胸腔底下冒出來，帶一點卡頓，像一個生了病的人在嚐食物。我姐姐沒有停。年輕人喊：「剃我的頭！你要把我的肝弄裂了！」「剃，剃，」理髮師說，剃了兩根頭髮，停了。「我擔心您這麼急。告訴我您要去哪裡，因為這不會有好結果；我還想補充一句，您父親和您祖父，從來不做一件事而不問我的。」年輕人說：「我要去赴一個宴會。」「宴會！」理髮師說，「多巧的一天！昨天我才請了朋友，卻沒有東西給他們吃。我剛才還在想這件事。您家裡有什麼？」「五盤肉，十隻雞，一隻烤羊——全拿去，剃我的頭！」「還有酒呢？」「我有兩壺。」「還有香料呢？」「拿一盒值五十第納爾的香料去！只要剃我的頭！」理髮師就把剃刀放下，坐在地上，一粒一粒地把整盒香料翻過來，非常仔細，可憐的年輕人頂著半個頭的頭髮坐著，聽隔壁街的宣禮聲。翻完香料，他說：「現在，我告訴您我的朋友，個個出色，沒有一個多嘴的。有澡堂老闆贊圖特，他邊敲鼓邊唱歌；有糧商薩利阿；有清道夫胡邁德，他唱歌時鳥兒都停下來聽，歌詞是『我老婆知道的消息，不是鎖在箱子裡的。』您一定要來認識他們。」

「去找你的朋友吧。」年輕人說。

「我不讓您一個人去。」

「我要去的地方，除了我誰也不能去。」

「啊！」理髮師說，臉上亮起一道光。「幽會！一個女人！還是在星期五。這座城的總督是一把很利的刀。我正是該帶去的人。」

國王兩手蓋著臉。從手縫裡漏出來的聲音，已經不再是出於禮貌發笑的人的聲音了。我姐姐，臉紅到髮根，喝了一點水，繼續。

最後，她說，理髮師總算剃完了。年輕人要他答應，把肉和酒拿去給他朋友，然後回來，他等他；理髮師拿著烤羊、雞、酒壺出去，把東西交給一個腳夫帶回家，自己躲進一條小巷。年輕人一分鐘就穿好衣服，跑了出去，因為宣禮員已經喊了星期五的禮拜，他去了法官家；老保姆帶他上樓。法官從清真寺回來。他把自己關在樓下的大房間裡。而年輕人從女孩房間的窗口往外看，看見巷子對面，靠著門坐著的，是理髮師。

偏偏就在那天，法官的僕人犯了點錯，法官開始打她；她尖叫；一個奴隸跑進來替她求情，法官連他也打，他也吼。理髮師在巷子裡聽見吼聲。「他們在殺我的主人！」他尖叫。他撕破自己的衣服。他往頭上撒灰。「救命！我的主人在法官家被殺了！」他跑到年輕人家，告訴僕人們，僕人們跑來，撕著衣服，像一陣浪，喊著：「我們被殺的主人哪！」最前面的，是袍子成了布條、頭巾也掉了的理髮師。巷子裡很快有了一萬人。法官出來看是怎麼回事。「你殺了我們的主人！」「你們的主人對我做了什麼，我要殺他？」「我聽見他叫！」「這是我家，」法官說，「對你們都敞開；進去看吧。」理髮師就進去了。

「他在箱子裡。」國王說，淚水流了一臉。他不是在問。

「是，主上。樓上房間裡的年輕人找不到地方躲，只有一只大箱子，他爬了進去。理髮師左右看了看，然後徑直走向那只箱子，把它頂到頭上，朝樓梯走。箱子裡的年輕人，原本決心忍受任何羞辱，唯獨不能這個，他撞開蓋子，當著一萬人的面摔到地上，摔斷了腿。他袖子裡有金子。他撒了出去。人們忙著搶，他趁機溜走，在巴格達的巷子裡一跳一跳地逃。理髮師在他後面，扯著嗓子喊：『他們想從我手裡奪走我的主人！他們想殺那個像父親一樣待我的人！讚美真主，賜我力量戰勝他們！你現在往哪裡去，你這個不肯聽我的人？要不是我，你早就死了。』」

國王發出一聲高高的、喘息般的聲音，像孩子那樣，翻身側躺。我不敢看我姐姐，因為我自己也會笑，而我知道只要我一笑，整件事就垮了。我看燈。

年輕人，她說，走進一家織工的店，在後屋坐下；叫來證人立了遺囑，把大部分財產分給家人；當天離開了巴格達；走了很遠，只為擺脫這個人。「而當我進了這座城、被請去吃飯，」年輕人對在座的人說，「我看見的第一個，就是他，坐在上座。」他就走了出去。

那是那一夜的結尾。光在百葉窗上。我把夜簿遞出去，國王接過，卻讀不了；他拿著它坐著，肩膀在抖，水順著臉流。他把它還給我。這是三十夜以來，他第一次一行也沒讀。他起身出去了，我聽見他在走廊裡；我聽見，在門邊，有個聲音，是我父親坐到了地上。

第三十夜。山魯佐德。到。未了：裁縫的故事：理髮師，他說他是寡言者；裁縫與賓客，他們問他那年輕人說的是不是真的；中國蘇丹；繩下的四個人。

第三十一夜，他說：「寡言的人。」我姐姐說：「他說，那全是出於他的慷慨。若不是他救了那年輕人，他早就沒命了。『他幸虧傷的是腿，而不是命。為了讓你們知道我是個寡言的人，跟我的六個兄弟大不相同，我來說一個關於我自己的故事。』」

他住在巴格達，她說，哈里發穆斯坦綏爾的年代。哈里發對十個攔路強盜發怒，下令節日那天把他們帶來；城裡的總長把他們放上一條船。理髮師看見他們上船。他想：「這些人是去赴婚宴，他們一整天都要在那條船上吃喝，除了我，沒有人配做他們的酒伴。」所以他，出於心地的慷慨，上了船。到對岸，巡夜的給他們套上鏈子，連他一起。「這不就證明了我寡言嗎，」理髮師說，「我閉口不願說話。」第二天他們被帶到哈里發面前，哈里發下令斬首；劊子手砍下九顆頭，到了第十個，是理髮師，他停下來，因為他是個老人。「你為什麼只砍了九個？」哈里發說。「我砍了十個。」「數。」他們數了。有十個，而理髮師還站著。

「在這樣的時刻，你為什麼保持沉默？」哈里發說。「我是寡言的長者，」理髮師說，「這個名號是用來把我跟我的六個兄弟區分開，他們說得多，卻沒有見識，每個人都有某種殘缺。我沒有向您報出我的名字，是出於慷慨，要與他們同死。」哈里發笑得倒向後面。「啊，寡言的人，你的六個兄弟像你嗎？」「完全不像！」理髮師說，「您拿我們比，我很難過。一個是駝背，一個跛腳，一個瞎眼，一個沒了兩隻耳朵，一個沒了兩片嘴唇，一個瞎了一隻眼。我來告訴您是怎麼回事。」他就告訴哈里發了。

「而我不會一個一個講給您聽，主上，」我姐姐說，「因為有六個，都很長，多半是羞辱。第一個兄弟是個駝背裁縫，愛上窗邊的一位夫人，被她丈夫派去像牛一樣套軛磨麵，一圈一圈被鞭打到天亮；後來因為更大的錯，被騎在駱駝上遊街，摔下來斷了腿。第二個被一個老婦人帶到一位夫人那裡，夫人叫她的女人們拍他的脖子，拔他的鬍鬚，剃他的鬍子，在他臉上塗胭脂，叫他光著身子追她跑進一間黑房間，那房間通向皮匠的市場。第三個是瞎子，和另外兩個瞎子被帶到總督面前挨打，是一個溜進他們中間打聽他們把錢藏在哪裡的陌生人告的狀。第四個是屠夫，因為一枚假迪拉姆和他掛在店裡像人一樣的一隻公羊屍體，丟了一隻眼，挨了五百杖。第五個和第六個，我說給您聽。」

國王擦了臉。他的聲音沙啞了。「第五個。」他說。

第三十一夜。山魯佐德。到。未了：理髮師，對哈里發穆斯坦綏爾講他六個兄弟的殘缺；第一個到第四個已說完，第五個和第六個還沒；裁縫、中國蘇丹，與繩下的四個人。

第五個兄弟的名字，我姐姐在第三十二夜說，是納什沙爾，他夜裡乞討，白天靠施捨過活。他們父親死時，給七個兒子留下七百迪拉姆，每人一百。納什沙爾不知道怎麼辦。他買了玻璃器皿，一百迪拉姆的貨，放在托盤上，靠牆坐下來賣。他坐著坐著，開始想。

「我把這個賣兩百，」他想，「再買更多玻璃，賣四百；就這樣下去，直到我有四千。然後我買珠寶、香料，賺到十萬；買房子、奴隸、馬。我派媒婆去，求娶宰相的女兒，大女兒，聽說她十全十美。我給她一千第納爾聘金，若她父親拒絕，我就從他鼻子底下把她搶走。我買十個小太監。我買一副金鞍。我騎馬遊城，所有的人祝福我，我帶著前後的武裝奴隸去見宰相。他看見我，站起來，讓我坐他的位子，自己坐得遠遠的，因為我是他的女婿。我有兩個太監帶著錢袋，各一千第納爾，一個是聘金，一個是禮物，讓他看見我心胸的偉大、世界在我眼裡的渺小。他對我說十句話，我回他兩句。」

那是我見過我姐姐做過的最不尋常的一件事。她完全沒有急。她讓那個乞丐把他的婚禮計畫到最後一個細節：新婚之夜，新娘的打扮，七次出場，七件衣裳，他只在被哀求之後才會轉過臉去；他怎樣臉朝牆躺著；新娘的母親怎樣進來，吻他的手和腳，說：「看看您的婢女，她渴望您的恩惠」；他不會回答；她會拿杯子來，說：「別拒絕您婢女的杯子」；他不會看她。「然後，」我姐姐說，「我就朝她面前這樣揮拳——這樣踢她——」

她抬起腳，踢了一下空氣。

「——他的腳尖，」她用故事裡的聲音說，「就把玻璃托盤踢翻了；玻璃從長凳上掉下去；托盤上的一切都碎成了粉。」

國王好一陣子沒發出聲音。然後他用安靜的聲音說：「那婚禮呢？」

「沒有婚禮，主上。」

「那宰相的女兒呢？」

「沒有宰相的女兒。」

「她不存在。」我姐姐說不存在。「他殺了她，」國王說，「用他的腳。她不存在，他殺了她。」他又開始笑，但是輕輕的，像一個同時在用臉做別的事的人笑。我不知道他在想什麼。我想我知道。我想他想的是花園，噴泉旁有許多女人和同樣多男人的王后，一扇窗，一個哥哥，一個很久不再是任何人的王后；想一個人用心可以計畫多久一場跟並不在那裡的人的婚禮。他沒有說，我也不想替他說。

乞丐，我姐姐說，哭了，打自己的臉，撕衣服，去做星期五禮拜的人憐憫他，有一位貴婦騎騾子，帶著太監，路過，問他怎麼了，給了他一袋五百第納爾，他祝福著回家；後來，我姐姐說，他跟她又有別的遭遇，讓他丟了耳朵，你們下次再聽。國王說：「下次。」他看著帳頂。這是他第一次，為一個他還沒數到的夜晚安排了事情。

第三十二夜。山魯佐德。到。未了：理髮師的第五個兄弟，踢翻了玻璃托盤，將在一位騎騾子的夫人那裡丟掉耳朵；第六個兄弟還沒開始；裁縫與中國蘇丹，與繩下的四個人。

第六個，我姐姐在第三十三夜說，是沙卡希克，或者叫「多喧嘩」，沒有嘴唇的那個。他曾經富有，後來變窮，有一天出門乞討。他來到一座大而華麗的宮殿，門口有太監，被告知那是一位巴爾馬克人的。有人告訴他從大門進去，向主人宰相求施捨。

他穿過門廳，來到一座鋪著大理石的廳，中央有一座他從沒見過的花園；廳的盡頭，一個相貌堂堂、鬍鬚漂亮的人站起來歡迎他。他問他要什麼。「施捨，我的主，我很缺。」那人大驚。他撕了自己的袍子。「什麼！我在這座城裡，你在這裡挨餓？我受不了這種恥辱。你要吃我的鹽。」「我的主，」乞丐說，「我快餓死了。」「小子！」主人喊，「拿盆和壺來！」然後轉向他：「洗手。」乞丐起身要洗，卻看不見盆也看不見壺；而他的主人正用看不見的肥皂在看不見的水裡洗手。「把桌子拿來！」並沒有桌子。「請賞臉吃吧，」主人說，手來回移動，彷彿在吃，乞丐想：這個人喜歡拿人開玩笑。他說：「我從沒見過這麼白的麵包，我的主。」

「那是，」巴爾馬克人說，「我用五百第納爾買來的一個婢女烤的。小子！把肉布丁端上來，要多放油。」他轉向客人：「你見過比這肉布丁更好的嗎？吃，別害羞。」乞丐開始像在咀嚼那樣動著下巴。然後是燉肉，配肥沙雞；然後是塞開心果的雞；然後是蜜餅，每一塊都放一第納爾重的麝香；然後是杏仁、核桃、葡萄乾。每一道，主人都說：「憑我的生命，吃，別害羞，」每一道，乞丐，他的飢餓此刻已是一種野蠻的東西，都說那是他吃過最好的。他們到了酒。主人伸出一隻空著的手。「有點嫩，我的主，」乞丐說，「我習慣喝二十年的酒。」主人假裝向他敬酒；乞丐假裝喝了，並假裝醉了。

我姐姐說得非常安靜，用的聲音我不知道她有，是一個挨餓而有禮貌的人的聲音。我發現自己的手摀著嘴。我看國王，他不再笑了；他側過身去，頭擱在手臂上，臉朝著我姐姐，像孩子聽一件人家告訴他是真的事那樣聽著。

然後，她說，那個乞丐，醉在虛無上，站了起來。他舉起手臂，直到腋下的白色露出來，朝巴爾馬克人的後頸狠狠拍了一掌，宮殿都響了；接著又一掌。「這是什麼，你這世上的渣滓？」巴爾馬克人喊。「我的主，」乞丐說，「您對您的僕人很好。您把他帶進您家，給他吃您的食物，讓他喝您的老酒，直到他喝醉、粗魯。但是您太高貴，不會不原諒他的無知。」巴爾馬克人大笑，笑了又笑。「我長年在朋友之間裝瘋賣傻，」他說，「卻從沒找到一個有機智也有耐心陪我玩每一個把戲的，除了你。我原諒你。你會是我的酒友，永遠別離開我。」他叫僕人，他們擺上桌子，上了他說過的所有菜，他們吃了；他們坐著，喝酒，叫歌手來；二十年來，他們就這樣一起平安度日。

國王的眼睛又濕了，卻不是為了笑。「他知道。」他說。

「是，主上。」

「那個巴爾馬克人。他知道那些菜是空的。」

「他知道是空的，主上。他是在試那人會不會配合。」

「他餓。」

「他餓，主上。而他說麵包是白的。」

「所以他被餵了。」國王躺了一陣。「那就是你做的事，」他很低聲地對我姐姐說。那不是問句。而我姐姐，在燈光裡雙手交疊、臉有點累地坐著，用她自己的聲音，簡單得像有人問她時辰，說：「這是我唯一有的晚餐，主上。」

我想到側門，想到兩百個人，嘴裡含著一個名字，像舌頭底下壓著一枚銅幣。我不知道我想了什麼。

第六個兄弟的結局，我姐姐過了一會兒說，不好。那個巴爾馬克人死了，蘇丹拿了他的財富，也搾光了乞丐的積蓄，他逃了；阿拉伯人抓了他，割掉他的嘴唇；後來，為了一件他沒犯的罪，又割了別的東西。他在山上被認識他的人發現，理髮師把他帶回家。「這就是我六個兄弟的歷史，」理髮師對哈里發說，「現在您知道我不像他們。我養著全家。」哈里發笑了，說：「你確實是個寡言的人，啊，寡言的人。現在離開這座城，到別處定居。」他就這樣做了。

第三十三夜。山魯佐德。到。未了：理髮師，他說完了他六個兄弟的歷史，被哈里發穆斯坦綏爾逐出巴格達；中國蘇丹，他想親眼見這位寡言者；繩下的四個人。

第三十四夜，國王什麼也沒說，我姐姐開始了，講中國蘇丹怎麼派人把理髮師從裁縫那一夥關他的牢裡帶出來；理髮師來了，一個九十出頭的人，一張空洞而自負的臉，長耳朵，大鼻子；蘇丹看到他就笑了，說：「啊，寡言的人，告訴我一點你自己的事。」理髮師問，那個基督徒、猶太人、穆斯林和駝背的故事是怎麼回事，大家為什麼聚在這裡。「為了證明你不是多事的人，我想，」蘇丹說，「把案情告訴他，」他們就告訴了他；理髮師搖搖頭說：「奇中之奇。把駝背給我揭開。」

他們解開裹屍布。理髮師坐下，把死人的頭放在膝上，看他的臉，笑到向後倒。「每一個死都有奇蹟，」他說，「但這個駝子的死，值得用液態金字寫下來。」朝廷都驚呆了。「我憑您的恩德發誓，啊，國王，」理髮師說，「他身上還有命。」

他從腰帶上取出一只理髮師的袋子，從裡面拿出一罐藥膏，塗在死人的脖子上；然後是一把鐵鑷子。他把它伸進喉嚨，拔出那塊帶著刺的魚肉，沾滿了黑血。駝背打了一個大噴嚏，坐起來，用手摸了摸臉，說：「我作證除了真主沒有神」；中國國王笑到昏過去，所有人也是。

「他死了，」國王在黑暗裡說，「從昨天起。」

「是，主上。」

「而一個愛說話的理髮師，把一把鑷子伸進了他喉嚨。」他仰躺著，眼睛閉著，嘴角在動。「它一直在他的喉嚨裡。」

「只在他的喉嚨裡，主上。沒有人去看。他們都假定了。」

國王躺了很久。然後他說：「說下去，」她就說下去：蘇丹怎樣賜袍給裁縫、猶太人、總管和基督徒，給理髮師俸祿和御席上的一個座位，把他留在身邊，榮耀地度過餘生。我姐姐說，那並不比努爾丁・阿里與女奴安尼斯・賈利斯的故事更奇異。

我寫下那一行。我寫下樓梯，和邊上的第二本書；我看國王，他用手蓋著眼，在灰色的光裡一動不動地躺著，我以為他睡著了；但我伸手去拿回夜簿時，他拿起來，慢慢讀了，劃了他的短畫，劃了小的一道，然後他沒有放下蘆管。他翻過那一頁，看邊上之邊上。在原來寫著「問」、「瓜」、「門」的空處，他用小小的、方方的字，寫了一個新字。是「餵」。

第三十四夜。山魯佐德。到。未了：中國蘇丹，他赦免了四個人與一個理髮師，腳邊有一個活過來的駝背；女奴安尼斯・賈利斯，還沒開始；一本名冊，在第二本，已有一百零九個名字。

## 第12章 · 第三十五至四十四夜：努爾丁與安尼斯・賈利斯；大馬士革的加寧

我是第三十七天知道的。不是因為她早上吐，雖然她吐；而是因為她不再用一個害怕的人那種方式吐，而開始用一個餓了的人那種方式吐。第三十五夜她拒絕吃椰棗，第三十六夜她吃了十一顆。她坐在床沿，雙腳踩在地毯上，膝旁擱著一只盆，我用念價目表的那種聲音問：「幾個星期了？」她看著我，看了很久，然後開始笑，輕輕的，把手腕背貼在眼睛上。「五個。六個。」她說。「我一直在數錯本子。」

我問他知不知道。「他數夜晚比我數得好，」她說，「他在邊上寫下來了；我看過。但他沒有數這個。」她把一隻手平放在肚子上，沒有低頭看。「我還沒決定怎麼說。如果我告訴他，他手裡有的就是兩件東西，而不是一件，我不知道他拿兩件怎麼辦。如果不說，他一個月後從哪個僕人那裡知道，我不知道他拿那件事怎麼辦。」她把手腕從眼睛上拿開。「寫進未了裡。寫在他看得見的地方，什麼也不說。讓他像讀其他的那樣讀。」「寫在哪一級？」「我不知道。這是我講的東西裡，唯一一件，我天亮前不可能講完的。」

第三十五至三十七夜。山魯佐德。到、到、到。未了：女奴安尼斯・賈利斯與宰相之子努爾丁・阿里，在巴格達，在哈里發的花園裡，與哈里發從一棵樹上看到的；以及一本名冊。

於是在第三十八天黎明，樓梯底下，邊上之邊上底下，我把未了的最後一行寫成它該有的樣子：一個孩子，還沒有名字。我把夜簿轉過去。國王站著讀了。他讀其他的，讀到最底下。他沒動。蘆管在他的手指間，我看見管尖很輕微地抖，像蘆管在風口裡抖那樣。「多久？」他說。

「我姐姐說，主上，兩百三十夜。從現在算起。多一點。」

他把蘆管放下。然後又拿起來，翻過第一頁，在邊緣的下面，在短畫的底下，那裡有三十八排畫，他開始畫點。很小很小的。他像畫短畫那樣五個一排地畫，一個一個地畫，眼睛盯著書頁，直到他畫完兩百三十個才停。畫了很久。畫的時候光升起來了。「我會在它們來的時候一個一個劃掉。」他說；我想他沒聽見自己說了什麼，因為後來是在走廊裡，我聽見他停下來，慢慢地，對著牆，把那個字又說了一次。

第三十八夜。山魯佐德。到。未了：哈里發的花園，與漁夫的外衣，說完了；大馬士革的加寧，還沒開始；一本名冊；以及一個孩子，還沒有名字。

那天傍晚他回來時，房間角落一張小凳上坐著一個女人，戴著樸素的棕色面紗，在縫補什麼。她大約七十歲。手很快。她沒有抬頭。沒有人解釋她是誰。後來她出去看一鍋湯，我問一個女傭她是誰，女傭低聲說，像叫一件神聖的東西的名字，說她是國王的奶媽。她餵過他奶。四十年前，醫生給他接斷了的手臂時，她按住過他。「他今早派人去請她，」女傭說，「十年沒人在朝廷裡見過她。她住在河邊一間有七隻貓的屋子裡。」我想到守門的女士那個故事裡的老婦人，跪在一個手握著劍的年輕人腳下，說：憑我哺育你的權利。我想：他知道奶媽是做什麼用的。

我姐姐腳邊有了一個火盆，雖然夜晚是暖的。有一盆椰棗，蓋著布。多了第二個墊子。一個男孩端著一個托盤來，上面是一杯有荳蔻味的熱東西，放在她手邊，倒退著出去。「加寧。」國王說，燈暗下來的時候，然後換了一種聲音，對我姐姐說：「你累嗎？」

我想我們誰也不知道他會問這個。那是幾乎隨意地說的，對著帳頂，像人問時辰。她過了一會兒說：「累，主上。」「那我們等一個鐘頭，」國王說，「敦亞佐德來坐。」他就那樣躺著，雙手放在胸口，在燈光裡，看著什麼也不是的地方，一個沙漏的時間；我姐姐就那樣坐著睡著了，頭靠著床柱；我沒有動。這是三十八夜以來，頭一次有人告訴那份租約，它可以短一點。我不敢把它寫下來。

她醒來時他說，彷彿什麼也沒發生：「那就說下去吧；」她就從那個鐘頭停下的地方接下去。那是加寧的故事，他是大馬士革商人的兒子，帶著一車絲綢去了巴格達，發了財，從一場葬禮走回來，天黑了，被鎖在城門外。他找到一座有高牆的墓園，裡頭有一座棗椰園，爬進去，躺在一座墳裡等天亮。半夜，我姐姐說，三個人帶著一盞燈和一只箱子來到園門；門鎖著；他們中一個頭頂著箱子開始翻牆，其他的說：快，快，別讓它掉下來。

之後發生的一切細節我都忘了。我可以講大形狀。那是一只箱子，箱子裡是一個女人，被下了藥，或是死了，或在兩者之間，三個太監奉一個嫉妒的王后之命，要在夜裡把她埋在園子裡；而墳裡一個年輕商人看著他們做這件事，等他們走了，他把箱子帶回家，連同那個女人，照顧她，知道她是哈里發的第一寵妃；於是有了愛情，有了姐姐，有了母親，有了哈里發的怒氣，有了三個太監在黑暗裡打發時間說的故事，我不講，因為那是關於他們怎麼成為太監的，而我姐姐用念帳單的女人的聲音講完了它們。哈里發發現了。王后生氣了。商人、那個女人、母親、姐姐，被追捕，被藏匿，最後四個人都被帶到哈里發面前，他最終沒有生氣；他自己娶了那個姐姐，把那個女人還給了商人；就這樣圓滿了。花了七夜。其中四夜我睡著了。

我記得的不是情節，是國王。七夜之間他一直問問題。燈籠在哪裡？那女人醒了嗎？她醒來他說了什麼？她第一句問了什麼？而我姐姐，起初從沒被問過問題，她回答每一個，好像她一直就知道；在這些回答裡我看出故事開始變了。它不再是她說給他聽的東西。它是在他們之間建起來的東西，兩個聲音在黑暗裡來回，他發問，她回答，像一個男人遞石頭，一個女人把石頭放好。「她第一句問了什麼？」「她問：我在哪裡？」「他呢？」「他說：您在我的家裡。」「不，」國王說，「他會說：你和我在一起。」我姐姐沉默了一下。「是，主上。他說：你和我在一起。」我什麼也沒寫，因為我沒有那一欄。

第三十九至四十三夜。山魯佐德。到、到、到、到、到。未了：加寧，與他從箱子裡取出來的女人；哈里發的怒氣；哈里發的姐姐的婚禮；一本名冊；以及一個孩子，還沒有名字。

努爾丁・阿里與女奴安尼斯・賈利斯的故事，是在第三十五到三十七夜說的，在孩子之前，我說不了它，因為那一星期我太害怕，除了我姐姐的臉，什麼也記不住。但是其中有一段，他在第四十四夜又要了一次，那是他從來沒做過的事：「那件外衣，」他說，「講那件外衣。」她一本正經地說，三遍的故事沒有用；他說才講過一遍；她就再講了一遍。那是關於漁夫的一段，我把它放在這裡，連同它前面的。努爾丁是宰相的兒子，那女奴是他父親花了一萬第納爾為巴士拉的蘇丹買的一個女孩，會彈琵琶，會讀書，會唱歌；兒子拿了她，被她毀了，為了還債把她賣了，又被騙了；兩個人乘船逃到巴格達。在那裡，在哈里發在底格里斯河邊的花園裡，一個老園丁謝赫易卜拉欣違反所有規矩放他們進去；違反所有原則給他們酒；他們坐在一個點著一百盞燈的亭子裡喝酒，女奴唱歌，哈里發，在黑暗中扮成商人與賈法爾和馬斯魯爾散步，看見水面上的燈光。

他爬上一棵樹往裡看。宰相跟著爬上去。他們看見老謝赫，醉得像個王爺，對女奴說：「啊，我的女主人，我是您的奴隸。」他們聽見她唱歌。哈里發，被迷住了，說他一定要進去加入他們；但賈法爾說：不要以哈里發的身分；這時一個漁夫經過，卡里姆，肩上扛著網，一眼認出哈里發，跪倒在地。「起來，」哈里發說，「把你的外衣給我。」漁夫給了他一件粗羊毛的長袍，補了上百個補丁。哈里發穿上。他用頭巾遮著臉。他把網扛在肩上；以漁夫的身分，帶著一籃魚，走進亭子。

「蝨子！」國王突然在枕上說，「那件外衣。它有蝨子。」他在發抖。「主上，漁夫說：不用擔心蝨子；牠們是老住戶了。」「他說了！」國王說，「他對哈里發說了這個？」「他說，信士的領袖，這件外衣上的蝨子，在您即位之前就在了。」國王笑得床都動了。我看見角落裡的老奶媽第一次抬起頭，看著他，那神情我不知道怎麼命名；然後又彎下頭去縫補；我看見她的手不太穩。

哈里發，穿著那件外衣，帶著一籃魚，被謝赫易卜拉欣用一句咒罵迎接：滾出去，你這個無賴！努爾丁，餓了，也是個誠實的人，說：讓他進來。他們叫人把魚煎了。女奴又唱了歌。哈里發，穿著漁夫的外衣來聽她，離開時說，那是他度過最好的一個晚上。最後圓滿了：他派人找他們，找巴士拉那個邪惡的宰相，叫他跪下；讓那年輕人當了那座城的蘇丹，那女奴做了他的妻子。我說得簡略，因為我沒聽到結局就睡著了。

我醒來時老奶媽已經走了。早上沙漏擱在夜簿旁的桌上，頸子上綁了一條布。「是他自己綁的，」女傭說，「昨夜，你們兩個都睡了以後。他拿著它坐了一陣，然後綁上的。」我不知道那是什麼意思。我現在知道了。那意思是，那個房間裡的時辰，開始屬於某個人了。

那天下午國王派人叫我父親。我父親來了，兩手空空，站在房間的門口，我姐姐，躺在床上眼睛睜著，轉過頭。他們自從那頓晚飯之後，沒有說過話。「父親。」她說。他四步穿過地毯，單膝跪在床邊，用雙手握住她的手，額頭貼在上面。他沒有說話。很久之後，她用平常的聲音說：「我想過您的驢，父親。」「我的驢？」「那個故事裡。牛和驢。我在第四夜想過。驢因為給牛出主意受罰，牛因此得了一天休息。有人付出代價。我想那是個真故事。」「那是個糟糕的故事。」我父親對著她的手說。「那是個真故事，」我姐姐說，「而我還是做了。」他們就那樣待了一陣，什麼也沒說，我父親額頭抵著她的手，老奶媽在角落縫補，桌上的沙漏綁著一條布；我走到走廊上，因為我覺得自己不該在那裡。

第四十四夜。山魯佐德。到。未了：加寧與哈里發的姐姐，說完了；奧馬爾國王與他的兒子沙爾坎和扎烏・馬坎的故事，還沒開始；一本名冊，裡面有二百九十一個名字；以及一個孩子，還沒有名字。

## 第13章 · 第四十五至一百零六夜：奧馬爾國王與他的兒子們，與房間裡改變的東西

我不打算把奧馬爾國王和他的兒子們的故事講給你聽，我最好在別人問之前說明為什麼。它花了六十二夜。在史官的三十卷裡，它佔了一卷的一大部分，而史官是在一千零一夜結束時從我姐姐嘴裡聽到的，那時她把它，和其餘的，向一桌書記員又講了一遍；他們寫錯了不少，我看過，而我自己也記錯了不少。第二個月我就失去了線頭。我現在說不出那三個宰相的名字，說不出是誰把毒下在甜點裡。我可以告訴你房間裡改變了什麼。那是我沒有睡過去的。

它開始，我姐姐在第四十五夜說，是一個國王。他是巴格達與呼羅珊與印度與中國群島的主人，有三百六十座城堡，一天一座；他有一個兒子沙爾坎，大戰士，自由人所生，有一個小兒子扎烏・馬坎，還有一個女兒，是一個名叫蘇菲亞的希臘女奴所生，她是一個皇帝的女兒，從不提起。有一筆大寶藏。有一場戰爭，一次背叛，一封信。我的意思是，這個故事什麼都有。它有一百樣東西，每一樣裡又有一百樣，整個是一只輪子。頭一個星期，國王端端正正地坐著說：「姐妹對國王有什麼要緊？」「希臘皇帝現在在哪裡？」「有多少人？」因為這是一個關於軍隊的故事，而他當了十二年軍隊的國王。

然後沙爾坎帶著一萬騎兵去了希臘國的邊境，有一晚，心神不寧，他一個人離開營地，走下一道河谷，來到一片有溪流的草地，草地上有兩個女人。

一個是女孩，我姐姐說，大約十八歲，高，手臂像劍；另一個是個很老的女人，瘦得像把耙子，臉像一塊風乾的皮，她抓著女孩的腰帶說：「來吧，來吧，我的女主人阿布里扎，您說過要摔跤的。」沙爾坎躲在一棵樹後面。老婦人站到女孩面前，女孩把她摔倒；她爬起來，再撲向女孩，兩臂彎成螃蟹那樣，又被摔倒；我姐姐把這兩回合講得特別細：老婦人的悶哼，女孩的笑，身體落在草地上的聲音；國王用手捂住了嘴，角落裡的奶媽放下了她的縫補。

「沙爾坎笑了，」我姐姐說，「笑得那麼響，她們聽見了。」

「於是她們抓住他。」國王說。

「沒有抓他，主上。女孩喊：誰在那兒？他走出來說，我是個旅人，穆斯林，巴格達國王的士兵，我在找一個好客的地方過夜。女孩說：士兵。那你可以摔跤。他說他不能跟一位女士摔跤。她說：你要摔跤，或者你把馬和劍給我；我來拿。他就摔了。」

「他把她摔倒了嗎？」國王說。

「沒有，主上。她把他摔倒了。」

「一次？」

「三次，」我姐姐說得非常嚴肅，「他抱住她的腰，他的手指陷進她的柔軟，他忘了自己在做什麼。她抓住他的大腿和脖子，絆倒了他，他仰面倒下；她笑著說：你是吃死人肉的嗎？起來。他爬起來，第二次他做好準備，她用一個他從沒聽過的摔法把他摔倒。第三次他拚了命，她把他摔出去，像女人從窗口倒一盆髒水。」

國王仰躺著，笑得淚水流進耳朵裡。「好，」他說，「好。這個女人知道自己在做什麼。」而我姐姐，一本正經，說沙爾坎的看法也一樣，那夜他對希臘民族有了全新的認識；說女孩名叫阿布里扎，是個公主，那個抓著她腰帶的老婦人是扎特・達瓦希，意思是「災難之母」，他會常聽到她。

後面發生的我不講了。那是戰爭，一場愛，一次長途跋涉；是一個哥哥和一個妹妹，在一個黑夜的門口走散，他往這邊，她往那邊，被賣做奴隸，賣給不同城市的不同主人，七年沒有相見；而那七年花了四十夜。

「七年！」國王說。那是第六十八夜。他已經聽哥哥和妹妹聽了八夜。「她在耶路撒冷，他在大馬士革，希臘人攻下了城，他不知道她在哪裡。」「是，主上。」「她知道他還活著嗎？」「她以為他死了。」「為什麼要四十夜？」

我抬頭。我姐姐雙手放在膝上。那時她臉已經圓了許多，每隻眼睛下面有一圈疲倦的影子，她沒有趕。

「因為那些年裡有許多東西，主上。」

「我不要那些東西。一個人進來說，你哥哥在大馬士革。為什麼沒人想到這個？」

「因為沒有人知道，主上。哥哥在大馬士革不是他在門口的那個人；他有另一個名字。妹妹蒙著面紗。有兩百哩路，而且在打仗。」

「在打仗，」國王說，「而且要四十夜。」

「是。」

「四十夜講，或七年發生？」

我姐姐沉默了很久。老奶媽停下了縫補。「都是，主上。」她說。

「我要他們第三夜就相見，」國王說；停了一下，用比較小的聲音說：「我又不要是第三夜。」我知道他的意思。他要結局，也要結局之前的那個東西，他現在知道，沒有辦法有了第一個而不失去第二個，而這整件事的技藝，他花了六十八夜才摸到底，就在於如實地保住那個飢餓。他知道，他恨它，他也不願放棄它。「說下去，」他說。「不。今晚不要。明天。讓他們在大馬士革多待一夜。」他翻身側睡了；而我姐姐，被世上唯一負擔不起的那個人給了一夜休息，躺在他旁邊眼睛睜著，看帳頂，我看見她把手放在肚子上。

第四十五至六十夜。山魯佐德。到，十六道。未了：奧馬爾國王與他的兒子們；沙爾坎與女孩阿布里扎；扎特・達瓦希，一個老人；一本名冊；以及一個孩子，還沒有名字。

就在這幾個星期，我父親開始從朝堂帶消息回來。國王在第二個月又回去了；他早晨坐朝，審案，傍晚上樓到房間，身上帶著朝堂的灰塵。我父親站在寶座後面，捧著那天的案卷，把他看到的說給我聽。有一個男人帶著妻子的哥哥來告發她有姦夫。國王聽到最後。「你問過她嗎？」他說。那人說沒有。「那就回家，」國王說，「去問她，明天回來告訴我她說什麼。」我父親說，朝廷裡的人像一屋子看見駱駝在水面上走路的人那樣倒吸一口氣。那人去了；回來了；那姦夫原來是她的表弟，一個十三歲的男孩，替她母親給她帶了一封信。「他現在問第二個問題了，」我父親說，那聲音像一個在小生意裡報告奇蹟的人，「他開始問第二個問題了，敦亞佐德。」

第六十一夜，發生了一件事，我想除了我，我們沒有人注意到。和每個夜晚一樣，我拿著未了，正要念出來；國王，在枕上，在我開口之前說：「希臘人已經過了河，老婦人還沒聽說。」我姐姐的嘴張開，說：「是。」他接著說：「沙爾坎在帳篷裡，女孩還沒來。」「是，主上。」他全都有。他比我記得還好。他在腦子裡背了一個月的樓梯。我讓手垂下去，簿子也垂下去，從那夜起我就不再大聲念未了。我想說，那是一份責任的結束，和某件更好的事的開始。我想，那只不過是：她對一個人說了東西，那個人保存了它；而我不再是唯一的一個了。

第六十一至八十五夜。山魯佐德。到，二十五道。未了：大馬士革的哥哥與耶路撒冷的妹妹，還沒有相見；希臘人的戰爭；一本名冊，已經是第三本；以及一個孩子，還沒有名字。

我還要說，大約第八十夜，搖籃來了。兩個人用一輛手推車把它抬上樓，蓋著一塊布，放在奶媽坐的角落。她起身掀開布。那是一只雪松木雕的小搖籃，很舊，一頭有點燒焦，床頭刻著一隻鳥。「他兩歲時把鳥嘴弄斷了。」奶媽對沒有人說。「我留著了。我想：總有人會要。」她把它留了四十年，在河邊的屋子裡，有七隻貓，貓睡過它。國王黃昏進來，看見它，站了一陣，什麼也沒說；然後他穿過地毯，站在它上面，沒有碰。「比我記得的小。」他說。「它們總是這樣，主上。」奶媽說。

到了第九十夜，側門開始收到禮物。我沒有預料到；起初是偶然，一個女人在等的時候把一件極小的襯衣擱在書旁的台階上，什麼也沒說，像是忘了拿走。然後是一把木勺。然後是一個葫蘆做的、裡面裝著籽的搖鈴。到那一週結束，牆根的背風處已堆了一堆，都是小東西，手縫的，一頂帽子，一個打了結的破布球，一雙不比核桃大的鞋，一個沒有名字的細銀手鐲；沒有人肯說誰留下了什麼。文具商來看了。我父親看了很久。「我怎麼處理？」我說。「拿上去，」我父親說，「交給奶媽。」我拿上去了。國王在房間裡，桌邊，面對夜簿。他看見我滿手的小布，站起來，從我手裡拿起那只手鐲，放在掌心掂了掂，還給我。「跟書放在一起。」他說。奶媽就拿了帽子和襯衣，折好放進搖籃；房間裡沒有人說話；我記得燈很低，有一股荳蔻味。

第一百夜，我父親請求說話。他一直站在門口，像往常那樣；他還沒學會再走進來，而我想國王也還沒學會怎麼請他。「主上，」他說，「我數過了。」國王，正用自己的刀，很小心地替我姐姐切一個梨，抬起頭。「多少？」「我有那個數字，主上。」國王把梨停在那裡。「收著，」他說。「還不是時候。」我父親鞠了躬，出去到走廊，坐在地上，頭靠著牆，我想他有一個鐘頭沒動；因為他在腦子裡把那個數字從頭算了三遍，每一次都一樣，每一次，後來他對我說，他都感覺到紙在他手下。

第一百夜時，哥哥和妹妹已在同一座城，相距一箭之地，各自以為對方死了；我再也受不了了，我想國王也是；到第一百零五夜，我姐姐用我想是快要哽住的聲音，並不是為了故事，說了在大馬士革一個市集裡，在一個賣香水的人面前，他們相遇了。國王發出我沒聽過的聲音，一手遮住眼睛；她描述它：妹妹怎麼看見一個看起來像她愛過的人的男人，說不出話；他怎麼看見一個蒙面的女人，握手腕有一種特別的方式；兩個人一個字也沒說；然後從面紗後面，她說出他的名字。

「四十夜之後。」國王說。

「七年之後。」我姐姐說，「七年是故事的，主上。四十夜是我們的。」

他把手從臉上拿開。「值得這麼久。」他對著帳頂很平靜地說。我明白這就是他一直在等著能夠說的話。

第八十六至一百零六夜。山魯佐德。到，二十一道。未了：大馬士革市集裡重逢的哥哥與妹妹；戰爭還沒有結束；塔吉・穆魯克與杜妮雅公主的故事，還沒開始；一本名冊；以及一個孩子，還沒有名字。

## 第14章 · 第一百零七至一百二十四夜：塔吉・穆魯克，與阿齊茲與阿齊扎

第一百零八天，撒馬爾罕來了一封信。它在路上走了三十天。一張紙，蓋著一枚我從花園那一晚之後就沒再見過的印，收信人，用一個被吩咐慢慢寫的書記的筆跡，寫的是海岸與群島之王，我的主人與兄長。侍從長親自送上樓，放進國王手裡，倒退著出去，像那個送荳蔻熱飲的男孩一樣；國王站在窗邊讀了，一遍，又一遍，背對著房間。

「他聽說了。」國王說。他沒說是誰。他對著窗玻璃說。「撒馬爾罕的市集上都在說，他說。他有一個人走商隊路來的，說海岸之王娶了宰相的女兒，她已經撐了一百夜。他寫：是真的嗎？然後他寫：是你嗎？」靜了很久，我聽得見奶媽的線。「第二個問題，我不知道怎麼答。」國王說。

在所有那些夜晚裡，他對我說過的話，沒有一句不是要我當成命令的。我不知道怎麼對待這個。我說：「主上，要我去拿筆嗎？」他轉過身。有一下我以為他沒聽見；然後他走到桌邊坐下，把墨水推向我。「你字寫得好，」他說，「你畫了那一頁。寫：兄長。是真的。然後寫：來。」我寫了。「然後呢？」「然後就沒有了，」國王說，「他自會知道還有什麼。」他看著我寫下的字看了好一陣，那表情我很難給它一個名稱；然後他簽了名，叫人封好；信當天早晨就用馬廄裡最快的一匹馬送出去，騎手被吩咐整天騎，不許休息。

那時我姐姐已經不能仰躺。奶媽把她的長袍放大過兩次。她坐著講故事，背後墊著四個枕頭，雙膝張開，一隻手托在肚子底下，像托著一個可能掉下去的麵包；而國王，一輩子沒擺過枕頭的人，學會了。那情景值得一看，雖然我天天看：一個每個名字只花一口氣讀過一千個名字的男人，站在床頭，兩臂抱著一個長枕，偏著頭問：「高一點？低一點？」我姐姐，眼睛閉著：「低一點，主上。」他就挪一掌寬，用試鑰匙的人的聲音說：「現在？」

那晚國王說：「花園。有堂妹的那個。」我姐姐，一隻手托在胸下，坐起來動作像一個端著一碗很滿的湯的女人，開始講塔吉・穆魯克與杜妮雅公主。我不講它。伊斯法罕群山後面一座城裡的一位王子，不肯結婚；一位大臣給他找了新娘；一支迎親隊，一次打獵，一隊商人；商人當中，一個年輕人有一塊亞麻布手帕，上面繡著兩隻瞪羚，他拿出來就哭，說他不能賣，不能給人看，也不能說為什麼。王子，一個總是想知道的人，說：「告訴我。」我給你講他的回答，花了七夜，我姐姐叫它阿齊茲與阿齊扎。那是我記得最清楚的，在最初那一百五十夜裡。是我不開第二盞燈就沒辦法講的一個。

他有一個堂妹，我姐姐說，他父親兄弟的女兒。他們在一個屋子裡長大，睡在同一條地毯上；從搖籃裡就訂了婚；婚禮那個星期五，賓客請了，法官快來了，他去澡堂，換上新衣服，轉進一條他不認識的街，天熱，在一張石凳上坐下休息，一塊手帕從窗口掉到他身上。

「誰扔的？」國王說。他雙手枕在腦後躺著。

「一位夫人，主上，在一扇格子窗後面。她看著他。她把一根手指放進嘴裡，又併起兩指放在胸口，關上窗板。而他沒有去他的婚禮。」

國王深深吸了一口氣。「他忘了。」

「他忘了，主上。他坐在石頭上直到日落，半夜才回家，他堂妹坐在客廳裡哭；她告訴他，客人都來過了，吃了，等過了，走了，他父親發誓今年不辦婚禮。她問他去了哪裡。他就告訴她。他把手帕給她看。」

「她呢？」國王在黑暗裡說。

「她讀了上面寫的。她哭了。然後，主上，她擦了眼睛，說：告訴我她做了哪些手勢。他告訴了她。她就告訴他那些手勢是什麼意思。」

靜了很久。我看我姐姐。她在看燈。

那是我覺得講起來最難受的一段，寫起來也難受：那個愛他的堂妹，陪他熬過幾夜，替他讀另一個女人的手勢，嘴裡一根手指，袋子裡一面鏡子，花盆上一盞燈，像一個人替朋友讀一個將要離開自己的男人的信。「那意思是，你之於她，像她的魂之於她的身體，」堂妹說。「那意思是，五天後再來。那意思是，坐在染匠的店前。那意思是，太陽下去後；她把頭髮披在臉上是黑夜；一盆綠色的東西是街後面的花園；那盞燈是亭子。」她替他穿好衣服，替他洗澡，送他上路。他病的時候她陪著他。她講故事哄他入睡。第五天他去了，照手勢說的，坐在染匠店前；店關著，沒人來，太陽下去，他像個醉漢走回家。她站在客廳裡，一隻手貼著牆，笑著問他為什麼沒跟他的愛人過夜；他一腳踢在她的胸口。

「他踢她。」國王說。

「他踢她，主上。她摔倒了。額頭撞到高台邊上和一根木釘；裂開了，流血。她一聲不吭。她爬起來，用一塊破布做了火絨，包紮，擦乾地板，像什麼也沒發生過。她笑著走到他身邊。她說：我那樣說是因為我頭疼，本來想放血，現在你替我鬆了頭。告訴我發生了什麼。」

我姐姐停下。我看見她呼吸。她把手放在肚子旁邊。國王很久沒有動，我以為他睡著了。然後我清楚地聽見，在黑暗中，一個我從沒聽過他發出的聲音，是一個男人在吞嚥。

「她的頭。」他說。

「是，主上。」

「她說那是她的頭。」

「是。」

「而他信了。」

「他信了，」我姐姐說，「而且他把另一個女人的事全告訴了她。」

「七夜。」國王說；我明白他一直在數。

第二夜他去了花園，我姐姐說，發現一座燈亮著的亭子，桌子擺好了，沒有一個人；他因為幾個星期沒好好吃東西，餓了，吃了，睡著；早晨他發現肚子上有一塊鹽和一塊炭。堂妹給他讀：鹽，是淡而無味的情人；炭，是該被塗黑的臉。第二夜他又吃了，又睡了，發現一粒骨骰、一根打尖木棍、一顆椰棗核和一條角豆：他堂妹讀：你的身體在，你的心不在；還有，青棗燒灼情人的五臟；還有，情人的心是疲倦的。第三夜他沒吃，卻喝了，十杯，被人發現倒在花園外面，胸口放著一把屠刀和一塊鐵砝碼。「她的右眼，」堂妹輕輕說，「她對它發誓。她說：你若再睡，我割你的喉嚨。」

每個早晨，他像一個打輸了仗的人回到家，每個早晨她站在門口，替他洗，親手一口一口餵他，坐在床邊替他搧扇，直到他睡著，在他看不見的袖子裡哭。她的傷口沒有收口。就在這一段，我姐姐的聲音開始變，我是說它慢了下來，像一個人走到樓梯上某一級時，聲音那樣慢下來。第四夜，他醒著。他一直醒著，用手指撐著眼皮。到最後一個黑夜的鐘點，那位夫人帶著十個身穿綠緞的少女來了，笑著說：「因為你醒著，我知道你是個情人。」他們那夜很快樂，我姐姐說；我不描述。

「而他忘了。」國王說。

「他忘了他堂妹教他、告別時要說的那對句子。他第二夜才想起來。那是一對關於耐心的句子，主上。是一個不會活著看到結局的女人的句子。而那位夫人，聽了，用手摀住嘴，說：寫這句子的人死了。他說：她是我堂妹；她在家；她沒有死。夫人說：去看看。」

我沒看國王。我看燈。我聽見角落裡奶媽屏住了氣，像一個等著挨打的人那樣。

「他回家，」我姐姐說，「他聽見街上有哭聲。他問。有人說：阿齊扎。我們在門後面發現她的。」她停了停。「死了。」她說。「她在客廳的門後面，主上，頭擱在膝蓋上。他們搬地毯的時候發現她。她是因此而死，主上。因為那個，和那個傷口，和它們之間的東西。」她的聲音完全平穩。「他母親，在家門口，說：她的死在你脖子上；願真主不要為她的血赦免你。」

國王坐起來了。他坐著，手肘擱在膝上，兩手摀著嘴，我看見他在搖，很輕微地，左右搖。奶媽，在角落裡，已從凳子上站起來。她拿著手裡的縫補，穿過地毯，站在床邊；過了一會兒，她伸出空著的那隻手，放在他的後頸上，像一個女人把手放在一個七歲後就沒哭過的大男孩的脖子上。他沒躲開。他隔著手，用我不認識的聲音說：「門後面。」

「是，主上。」

「為什麼在門後面？」

「因為她不想被發現，主上，」我姐姐非常溫柔地說，「直到一切結束。」

我從來不知道那持續了多久。我只知道燈燒低了，而在某一個時候奶媽拿起它，剪了燈芯，放下；國王終於抬起臉，像男孩那樣用袖子擦了，看著我姐姐，說：「那就是你答應過我的那個女人。」

「不是，主上，」我姐姐說，「那是另一個。」

「還有一個。」

「還有另一個，再往後。她不死。她比這個更有耐性。我不知道我該先講這個。」她把手放在他的手上，那只手擱在床單上；他由她放著。

阿齊茲與阿齊扎的其餘，我只用一行說，就像我聽說它必須這樣說：那個年輕商人被一個老婦人用計騙去娶了一個他不愛的女孩，她要他以休妻的誓約發誓，每天晚上天亮前回家，否則就失去她；他守了，像一個人守著囚牢的牆那樣，一年；他回到花園，發現它空了，那位曾在裡面與他相會的夫人，因為聽說了那個死去的女孩，變得不肯看他；他帶著那塊繡著兩隻瞪羚的布從一座城到另一座城，是個賣不出它的商人。最後，不知怎麼，一位王子出現，把事情了結了；我睡著了。我沒有講續集的天賦。我記得的是那個堂妹。

第一百零七至一百一十二夜。山魯佐德。到，六道。未了：塔吉・穆魯克，伊斯法罕群山的一位王子，與一個有手帕不肯給人看的年輕商人；一本名冊；一封已經去了撒馬爾罕的信；以及一個孩子，還沒有名字。

第一百一十三至一百二十夜。山魯佐德。到，八道。未了：阿齊茲與阿齊扎；門後面的一個女人；一個寫下了「門後面」這幾個字的國王；一本名冊；以及一個孩子，還沒有名字。

第一百二十一至一百二十四夜。山魯佐德。到，四道。未了：商人阿齊茲，帶著一塊賣不出去的布，在一位王子的營中；休妻的誓約；野獸與鳥的故事，還沒開始；一本名冊；以及一個孩子，還沒有名字。

## 第15章 · 第一百二十五至一百七十夜：吃大麻的人、狼與狐狸，與弟弟的到來

阿齊茲與阿齊扎的下半，花了十八夜，我只用一行給了你，我想補一句，它並不是比前半差的故事，而是更難聽。國王聽它，像聽人當眾念一筆債。每夜結束時他會說：「堂妹呢？」我姐姐說：「她死了，主上，」他說：「是，」把臉轉向牆。不是他不願聽；是他已經聽過了。講到誓言時，就是那個年輕商人的誓約，必須每天晚上天亮前回到妻子家，否則失去她，國王說：「天亮之前，」就沒有說別的；我姐姐，我記憶中第一次，沒有立刻接下去。

那時已是盛夏，城在它底下變了。染匠區有十一個人站在木箱上，各拿一根掛破布的棍子，沒有兩個人講的漁夫是一樣的。賣水的人有駝背；麵包師有理髮師；銅匠街口一個十歲男孩，敲著鼓，有一個狼與狐狸的版本，我覺得並不比我姐姐的差。而消息跟著故事跑，像狗跟著遊行跑。第一百二十天，染匠區的說書人在他講的漁夫結尾，贏得一陣滿足的吼聲，加了一句宰相的女兒有孕了。一百二十六天，說是男孩。一百三十天，說是雙胞胎。我父親從側門回來，臉色灰白。「他們在下注，」他說。「賭什麼？」「賭他會不會讓它生下來。」我上去告訴國王。他正在切梨。切了一片，放在我姐姐手裡，又切一片，自己慢慢吃了；他說：「讓他們賭。」過了一會兒：「誰在開賠率？」

到第一百三十天，九十二個點已經劃掉了；我隔著桌子，把夜簿倒著數出來的。一百三十八個還在。國王每天黎明用蘆管劃掉一個，在一個小小的圓點上劃過一道小小的橫線；如果你不知道，那景象很駭人，像一頁算術。而在邊上之邊上，那些字的旁邊，第五個，是他第九十夜寫的，一個我得請他念給我聽的字。是「搖籃」。而我已經不再把名冊在側門寫成一欄；我寫成兩欄，寫在一頁的正反兩面，晚上我拿上去，他看最後一頁，說：「七百零四。」我沒有告訴過他那個數字。

第一百三十三夜，發生了一件事，我事先沒人告訴我，而且直到我死，我只要一描述它，就想離開房間。我姐姐一直坐著，雙膝抬起，雙手交疊在隆起的肚子上，在一句關於騾子的話中間，她停下來。她什麼也沒說。她把手從自己身上拿開，往下看，臉整個空白了，就是一張臉在聽比耳朵能聽到的更細微的東西的時候那種空白；然後她開始笑，無聲的，嘴張著。

「怎麼了？」國王說。他已經放下了夜簿。

「沒什麼，主上，」我姐姐說，「它動了。」

我不知道他想了什麼。我只知道他站了起來，有一刻，他像一個被塞了一樣極燙的東西的人；然後他說，用一種我從沒聽他對任何人用過的聲音，一個幾乎是男孩求人幫忙的聲音：「可以嗎？」我姐姐看著他。「可以，主上。」他穿過地毯。他在床邊跪下，他從沒這麼做過，帶著一個許多年沒向任何東西下跪的人的僵硬，把手平放在她指給他的地方，像把手放在一匹很好的馬身上；等著。什麼也沒發生。他等著。他嘴巴微張。然後他手掌底下有什麼東西推了一下，相當用力，像一隻腳跟；他像被燙了一樣把手抽走，看著它，看著她；又放了回去。

角落裡的奶媽沒有抬頭。但我看見她把同一針縫了兩次。

那是第一百三十三夜。我沒寫下來。夜簿裡沒有地方可寫。我把它寫在名冊裡，在當天的名字後，頁尾最後一行，字小到我後來要把那一頁對著光才找得到：它踢了。

就是在接下來的夜晚，有一個晚上，國王請我不要讓她講某一個故事。那發生在一個長而散漫的夜裡，第一百四十四夜，我姐姐累了，心思順著吃大麻的人的故事流下去，那是個又薄又傻的故事，一個男人在澡堂裡吃了一塊大麻，想像澡堂的服務人員向他鞠躬，說他被任命為宰相，被抬到一座宮殿，在他的腦子裡，吃喝，發號施令，最後因為偷了一條毛巾挨了打；她說完時說，還有一個類似的故事，是一個叫哈馬德的貝都因人的故事。那是一個人在沙漠的戰鬥裡被一個年輕人和他姐姐俘虜，得到款待，發誓結為朋友，被領到一張床。「第三天，」我姐姐說，「他對哈馬德說：我想睡一下，我把我的命託付給你。他把劍放在枕頭底下，睡了。然後——」

「停。」國王說。

他沒有提高聲音。他仰躺著，沒有動。我姐姐停下。我看見奶媽抬起頭。「不要那個，」國王說。「我知道下面是什麼。我不要它在這個房間裡。」「主上——」「他殺了他。主人。在他睡著的時候。用他自己的劍。」我姐姐非常輕柔地說：「是，主上。」「我知道那個故事。」我想：他確實知道。我想他知道一百個，它們全是同一個，每一次換一個名字；而且我想他在多年前，在黑暗裡，把那一個放在腦子的底部，底下墊著一件壽衣。「給我講點有動物的。」國王說。

於是四夜之間都是動物。都是老寓言，書裡都有，我只講一個；就是他要了兩次的那一個。是狼與狐狸的故事。

一隻狐狸和一隻狼，我姐姐說，合住一個洞。狼是暴君，脾氣壞；拿最大的一份；狐狸只要說一個字，他就打。狐狸有一天說：「啊，狼，溫和一點。亞當的子孫是狡猾的。他們憑詭計把天上的鳥打下來，從海裡把魚拖上來；總有一天他們會逮到你。」狼打了他一下，打得他昏過去。狐狸醒來，對著狼微笑，說了抱歉的話；狼，很高興，說他原諒他。狐狸躺下，對自己說，老師的一擊起初是痛的，後來卻比蜂蜜更甜。

有一天狐狸經過一個葡萄園，看見牆上一個缺口。「不，」他對自己說，「為什麼會有缺口？一個看見地上有個洞卻不去看的人，是想死的人。」他去看了，那是一個陷阱，上面蓋著蓆子和灰，是主人挖來捉糟蹋葡萄藤的野獸的。「讚美真主，我沒有進去，」狐狸說，「我想知道，我的敵人，那個每天打我、拿最大一份的，會不會進去。」他想到這裡就笑了，去找狼，對他說：「真主不費你的力氣，為你打開了進葡萄園的路。主人死了，被狼撕碎；葡萄在每一棵樹上發亮。」狼，貪心攫住了他的腦子，起身去了；狐狸躺在他後面，裝死，看著。狼踩在蓆子上，掉了下去。

國王側過身。「他笑了。」他說。

「是，主上。」

「狐狸笑了。他往坑裡看，狼在哭，狐狸陪他一起哭。」

「是，主上。而狼說，你是為我哭嗎，是可憐我嗎？狐狸說：不是。我哭是因為你沒有早點掉進去，那我就能早點過安靜日子了。」

「他哭，」國王說，「是因為他高興。」

「兩者都是，主上，」我姐姐說。

「是，」國王過了一會兒說；我看出他知道。「兩者都是。」他躺了一陣沒說話。然後：「狼說：不要因為我做的事恨我。有權勢而寬恕的人，他的賞賜在真主那裡。狐狸說：你打我。」「是。」「事情就這樣。」「還不完全是這樣，主上。狐狸，到最後，大意了。他以為葡萄園是他一個人的；他進去，掉進同一個陷阱，或另一個。主人早上發現他們兩個都在裡面。」「兩個。」國王說。他閉上眼睛。「他應該丟一條繩子給他。」「那狼還是會繼續打他。」「是，」國王說。「是，他會的。但那樣就沒有那個坑了。」我不知道他的意思。我想他的意思是：對狐狸也沒有坑。我想他的意思有好幾樣。我只寫下未了的簡單字眼：狼，狐狸，葡萄園，坑。

這一百五十夜剩下的，我一堆說完，因為它們像洪水中的河那樣過去。還有更多寓言：老鼠和獴；貓和烏鴉；跳蚤和老鼠；刺蝟和斑鳩；一個傻瓜織工；一個帶著猴子的賊；我記得國王要求把麻雀與孔雀那則再講一遍，然後又一遍。然後是波斯的阿里・本・巴卡爾與哈里發的寵妃沙姆斯・納哈爾的長故事，兩個被禁止相見的情人，在朋友家相會，互相寄信，被發現；我曾對奶媽講過一次，她說她認識一對這樣的人。它持續了十八夜。我講不了。我只知道第三夜，國王問那對情人的信是詩還是散文，我姐姐說是詩，他說「當然，」微笑了。

第一百二十五至一百四十一夜。山魯佐德。到，十七道。未了：年輕商人阿齊茲與休妻的誓約；王子塔吉・穆魯克；一本名冊；以及一個孩子，還沒有名字，它動了。

第一百四十二至一百四十七夜。山魯佐德。到，六道。未了：一個在澡堂吃大麻的人；一個叫哈馬德的貝都因人，他的故事被叫停了；一本名冊；以及一個孩子，還沒有名字。

第一百四十八至一百五十二夜。山魯佐德。到，五道。未了：狼與狐狸，在坑裡與坑外；老鼠和獴；一本名冊；以及一個孩子，還沒有名字。

第一百五十三至一百六十九夜。山魯佐德。到，十七道。未了：波斯的阿里・本・巴卡爾與哈里發的寵妃沙姆斯・納哈爾，被發現了；一本名冊，已經是第三本；以及一個孩子，還沒有名字。

國王的弟弟在第一百七十天早晨到了。我們沒有預料。我想過一天，一封信，門口傳來一個口信；結果只有院子裡腳夫的咳嗽聲，馬，和走廊裡一個學會輕輕放下靴子的人的聲音。我正在寫那一行。國王在窗邊背對著門，我看見他靜住了。門沒有敲就開了。站在門口的男人高大，被路曬成褐色，穿著樸素的旅行外套；他的臉很像國王，但我覺得更老，雖然他是弟弟；更疲倦；他肩膀的姿態，像是多年前有一份重量從上面拿走了，肩膀還沒學會沒有它怎麼站。

他什麼也沒說。他看房間：看床，有四個枕頭的；看我姐姐，披著頭髮坐在裡面，雙手放在肚子上；看搖籃，裡面疊著嬰兒的小衣服；看奶媽；看我。他看桌子，看得最久，那上面是夜簿。「沙・贊曼。」國王沒有回頭，說。「你來了。」「你說，來。」「我說了。」「所以我來了。」國王轉過身。他們隔著那房間的長度看著對方，兩個在很久以前一個晚上一起走出兩個王國、來到海邊一片草地的人；我從未在一張臉上見過他們每個人臉上的那種神情，那是一個三年來以一種特定方式犯錯的人，發現另一個以不同方式犯錯，而沒有因此死去的神情。

「是真的嗎？」沙・贊曼說。他的聲音粗啞。他看我姐姐。「她——」

「來看，」國王說；然後，用最小的聲音，「坐下。你看起來像是從撒馬爾罕到現在沒吃過東西。」

第一百七十夜。山魯佐德。到。未了：阿里・本・巴卡爾與沙姆斯・納哈爾，故事說完；卡馬爾・扎曼的故事，還沒開始；國王的弟弟沙・贊曼，從撒馬爾罕來了，站在門口；一本名冊；以及一個孩子，還沒有名字。

## 第16章 · 第一百七十一至二百三十六夜：卡馬爾・扎曼與布杜爾

國王的弟弟留下來了。他被安排在走廊那頭一間有窗朝花園的房間，頭三天他都睡在裡面，以致僕人們開始說他死了；第四天日落時他走到這間房間的門口，站著，國王，正在切梨，抬起頭說：「坐。」他就坐了。他坐在地上，坐在奶媽拿來的一張小毯子上，背靠著床尾。他坐在我旁邊。我有我的綠墊子，他有他的毯子，兩者之間有大約一碼的空隙；在接下來的六十六夜裡，我想他沒離開過那個地方超過一掌寬。我想說我們聊過天。我們沒有聊天。兩個在一件事的邊緣待了很久的人不需要；我們坐著，聽著，偶爾其中一個極輕微地把頭轉向另一個，當有什麼被說出口的時候，像清真寺裡一個人在伊瑪目念錯時看一眼鄰座。

國王那個傍晚正式介紹了他們，哥哥站在門口，我姐姐靠著四個枕頭，頭髮披在一邊肩上。「這是沙・贊曼，我的弟弟，撒馬爾罕之王，」他說。然後，停了極短的一下，像一個人踏上一座他還沒試過的橋：「這是我的妻子，山魯佐德。這是敦亞佐德，宰相的小女兒，她管夜簿。」這是他第一次在別人面前給我們每個人一個名字。我姐姐頷首。「歡迎您到這座屋子，主上，」她說，「聽說您還沒吃東西。」「我也聽說了。」沙・贊曼說，帶著一個奇怪的小鞠躬，像對著一個法官；他看起來，有那麼一刻，幾乎跟我一樣害羞。

他是個安靜的人。給他什麼他吃什麼。他看國王，像看一座久閉的房子剛被打開通風，第六夜他對我說，聲音低到我幾乎聽不見：「他胖了一點。」「是。」「他像我們父親。」「我沒見過您父親。」「我母親生病的時候，他就是這個樣子。」他轉過身去，沒再說；很久以後我才明白，他是在告訴我，國王現在戴的這張臉，不是新的，而是在另一張臉底下收了好些年的那張。

他帶了禮物，早晨放在桌上，堆成一堆，帶著一個被請到一戶人家、卻完全不知道人家要什麼的人的神情。給孩子的，一匹撒馬爾罕絲，沒染色，輕得像一口氣，「給搖籃的。」給我姐姐的，一本書，很小，綠皮裝訂，他說他不知道怎麼選，所以從自己的書架上拿了一本；她看了書名，一本正經地說，她讀過，但從沒讀過他的那一本。給我的，因為他從國王那裡聽說房間裡保存著一本書，是兩令撒馬爾罕紙，薄而硬，世界上最好的，包在檀香木屑裡。「我想，」他說，「一本不厚的書，也許需要更多頁。」我接了。我不知道說什麼。他那天早晨站在桌邊讀了夜簿的第一頁，讀了扉頁上首席書記的字寫的東西；然後翻到邊上之邊上，讀了它；然後放下，低聲對我說：「他在保存。」「是。」「我不知道他做得到。」「我也不知道。」我說。

下午，兄弟倆在窗邊談話。我若不動，在我的墊子上聽得見，我就沒動。起初他們說些尋常的事，路，撒馬爾罕的穀價，一匹馬；然後有一個下午，國王沒有轉身，說：「你還數嗎？」

靜了一會兒。沙・贊曼把手伸進外衣裡，什麼也沒拿出來；他把手平放在胸口。「五百七十二個，」他說，「每看見一枚戒指，就數一次。」「她就是這麼說的。」「她就是這麼說的。我那一枚是我父親給的。鐵的。」「我的是金的，」國王說，「我很樂意給她。」他們站了一陣。「她在一只玻璃匣子裡，」沙・贊曼說，「我常想起這個。我想起七把鎖。她有五百七十二枚戒指，卻沒有一個家。」「她有一個精靈。」「他把她看管得很仔細。」沙・贊曼說。國王笑了，一個短促的、被嚇到的笑，把手搭在他弟弟的肩上。那是我沒見過他對任何人做的事。我看地毯。

那晚國王說：「卡馬爾・扎曼。」我姐姐就開始了。

有一位國王，她說，沙赫里曼，哈利丹群島之主，有四個妻子，沒有兒子，他問宰相該怎麼辦。「祈禱。」宰相說。國王祈禱了；生了一個兒子，美得接生婆都忘了自己是來做什麼的。他叫卡馬爾・扎曼，「時代之月」。十五歲時他是一個奇蹟；他父親，愛他愛到沒有道理，並且開始感到年歲的重量，說：「我兒，我希望在我活著的時候看你成親。」王子鞠躬，說他永遠不會結婚。他讀過，他說，關於女人的書。他引了一句詩，說女人怎樣對待一個男人的錢和腦袋。他父親說：「想一想。」他想了一年。一年之後，在一次盛大朝會中，在埃米爾和宰相面前，他父親又提了這個問題；王子大聲說，國王老糊塗了。

一片寂靜，我姐姐說。國王用手掌打了王子，下令把他抓起來，關進有羅馬井的舊塔，留給他一張榻、一盞燈和一點食物；然後自己回了家，因為愛與怒，睡不著。

我看見沙・贊曼的肩膀動了。「他把他關起來，」他幾乎是自言自語地說，「因為他不想愛。」「因為他不想結婚，」國王說；然後，停了很長一陣：「那不一樣。」「不一樣，」沙・贊曼說。「但我在想。」

王子，我姐姐說，坐在塔裡，吃了一點，在井邊祈禱；深夜，他睡著，燈亮在他頭邊，一個名叫邁蒙娜的女精靈，某位精靈王的女兒，像每夜那樣從井裡升上來透氣，看見塔裡有光。她站在床邊。她看著睡著的人，看了一個鐘頭，沒動。他躺著，襯衣領口敞著，頭髮橫在臉上，燈光照亮他頰上的線條。她說：讚美真主，最好的創造者。她說：他們怎麼忍心把他留在這裡？她彎下腰，在他兩眼之間吻了一下，把被單拉到他肩上，坐在榻腳。她不願傷害他。

然後，我姐姐說，空中傳來一陣翅膀的拍打；達赫納什，一個伊弗利特，從窗口飛進來，看見她，怕了。他比她低一級。「不要打我，」他說，「憑所羅門的印，我告訴你一件我見到的非凡的事。」他去過中國，他說，在加尤爾王的國度，見過國王的女兒，布杜爾，世界上最美的東西，她將要結婚，卻不肯結婚。她讀過，達赫納什說，關於男人的書。她說她父親老糊塗了。她父親把她關在海中一座島上的塔裡。

我覺得沙・贊曼在我旁邊靜住了。我感覺到，像感覺到一隻鳥落在屋頂上。

「帶我去看。」邁蒙娜說；他就帶她飛過陸地和海，到內海中一座島上的塔，塔裡，絲褥上，有一盞燈，公主。邁蒙娜看了她一個鐘頭；她彎下身，看她看見的；說：「憑真主，他們像一個蘋果的兩半。」然後他們開始吵。達赫納什說女孩更美。邁蒙娜說男孩。他們各憑所羅門的印、寶座和各自的母親起誓，那些都不是好誓。最後邁蒙娜說：「我們把他們放在一起。我們把他們並排放，比較一下，就像人把兩塊綢子拿到光底下比。」達赫納什把公主抱在懷裡，她仍睡著，飛過去，把她放在王子身旁的榻上，蓋著同一條被單。

我不知道我是否曾聽我姐姐講過任何事像她講那一段。她沒有趕，也沒有慢。她讓那幅畫就在那裡：燈，一個枕頭上的兩張臉，女孩的頭髮橫在男孩肩上，一個人的呼吸和另一個人的呼吸，一起一進一出，像各自是對方的潮水。房間裡有一個伊弗利特和一個女精靈；她讓他們在那裡，並安靜下來；她讓他們站著，微微彎腰，像人站在搖籃上方。「像一件東西的兩半。」我姐姐用邁蒙娜的聲音說；我聽見，在我旁邊，有一個聲音。是沙・贊曼。他用手背抵住了嘴。

他們請了一個法官，一個獨眼駝背的精靈，名叫卡什卡什，他判定他們一樣美，唯一辦法是輪流叫醒一個，讓另一個睡著，看誰更愛對方。於是達赫納什，變成一隻跳蚤，咬了王子的脖子，他醒了。他的床上，在燈光裡，有一個女孩。他看著她。他沒說話。他看了她一個鐘頭，心跳如鼓，直到眼睛裡天亮了；他伸出手，碰了碰她的臉頰。他想叫醒她。他對她說話；他吻她；她像死人那樣睡著。「我認得你，」他對她睡著的臉說，聲音低到我是感覺到而不是聽到的。「我父親做的。他把你放在這裡逮我。」他生氣，並且在愛，在同一刻，分不清兩者。最後，看了好幾個鐘頭，他把她手指上的戒指取下，戴在自己手上，把自己的戴在她手指上；他在她身邊躺下，睡著了，因為精靈給他下了睡。

「戒指。」沙・贊曼說。

那只是一個詞，他在黑暗裡很輕地說，聲音在中間破了。國王沒有轉頭。但我看見他的手伸過床和他弟弟坐的毯子之間的空隙，在他弟弟頭頂放了一會兒，像人把手放在一個說了一句真話的孩子頭上。

「他們交換戒指，」我姐姐平靜地說，「這樣他們醒來才知道那不是夢。」她接著說下去。

隔夜他們對公主做了同樣的事，結果一樣：她醒來，發現床上有一個年輕男人，取下他手指上的戒指，戴上自己的，躺下。早晨，各自獨自醒來：他在哈利丹群島的塔裡，她在內海的塔裡，各自看著手上不屬於自己的那只戒指。我姐姐說，從那個早晨起，兩人都病倒了，那是任何醫生都無法醫治的愛，愛一個不知道名字的人，只在黑暗裡見過一次那張臉，卻忘不掉。

其餘的，我用我拙劣的方式給你，因為花了六十六夜。王子的父親發現兒子日漸消瘦，叫來醫生，把他從塔裡放出來，什麼都沒有用；公主的父親又把女兒關起來，吊死了四個醫生。後來公主的奶兄，名叫馬爾札旺，出門去找一位有某種臉孔的王子，遇上船難，被海浪沖到王子所在的那座王宮底下；他是整個故事裡第一個對王子說「我認得她」的人。有一趟旅行，有一個在市集上編出來的占星謊話，有一枚折在信裡的戒指，有兩個只認識了一夜的人立刻成了親。然後，很抱歉，故事又繼續了三十夜。一隻鳥從王子手裡叼走了一顆寶石，他追了出去。公主醒來獨自一人，穿上他的衣服，正好合身，騎進烏木群島的城，被當成王子，與國王的女兒成了親，是誠心誠意的，不得不做一年丈夫。王子在一座園子裡挖地，挖到了金子。到最後他們團圓了，他有兩個妻子、兩個兒子，阿姆賈德和阿斯阿德，兩個男孩各被對方的母親愛著，愛得不是母親該愛兒子的那種愛；有兩位王后的兩封信，有兩個不肯照辦的男孩，有一個辦不了命令的司庫，兩個男孩被送進世界，什麼也沒帶，他們的父親為他們蓋了墳。那是一個人們總是被認成別人的故事。我姐姐在黑暗裡講它，奶媽在角落，兩個男人在床邊，我自己的心在嘴裡；到第二百三十六夜，在那一夜的盡頭，一個兄弟戴著鐐銬躺在拜火教徒的地窖裡，另一個在同一座城裡當宰相，宰相的傳令官走過街頭，找一個有某種臉孔的年輕人；拜火教徒的女兒，奉命去打那個犯人卻沒有打，下去告訴了他；他走出來，上了王宮，兩個人撲到彼此的脖子上，長長地躺在那裡，像死了一樣。

接下來的我沒聽見。不是我睡著了。是我在那夜結束時環顧四周，那兩個人，我姐姐的丈夫和他的弟弟，並肩坐在床尾，手臂環著彼此的肩，什麼也沒說，每個人臉都稍稍轉開，免得被看見。

第一百七十一至一百九十夜。山魯佐德。到，二十道。未了：哈利丹群島的王子與中國的公主，各戴著對方的戒指；一本名冊；以及一個孩子，還沒有名字。

第一百九十一至二百三十六夜。山魯佐德。到，四十六道。未了：阿姆賈德與阿斯阿德，在拜火教徒的城裡找到了彼此，以及他們的父親，已經為他們蓋了墳；一本名冊，已經是第四本，有九百多個名字；三十二個點等著被劃掉；以及一個孩子，還沒有名字。

## 第17章 · 第二百三十七至二百六十七夜：尼阿馬與努阿姆，與阿拉丁・阿布沙瑪特

巴赫拉姆是以一個條件換回性命的，他用來還這份恩情的第一期付款，是對兩個男孩講一個故事，安慰他們。我姐姐就這樣開始了第二百三十七夜：用一個她不喜歡的男人，用他僅有的那種錢幣，做一件好事。故事是尼阿馬和努阿姆的，兩個人在庫法同一個搖籃裡長大，他是這戶人家的兒子，她是嬰兒時和母親一起被買來的奴隸；等到他們大到可以被告知法律是怎麼看待他們的，就成了親，之後兩年什麼事也沒發生，說書人用一個分句就帶過了。然後庫法總督聽說這個女孩會唱歌，一個老婦人來到門前，穿一件沒染過的粗羊毛外衣，掛一串一千顆珠子的念珠，請求允許她在一座蒙福的屋子裡禮拜。那是天底下最老的一招，而且次次管用，因為開門的人都心地善良。她一連來了一個月。最後一天她帶女孩去看聖人，女孩從此再沒被人見過，總督把她送去大馬士革給哈里發，附一封信，說是買來的。

其餘的是男孩的，花了四夜。他病了三個月。一位波斯醫生說他的病沒有大馬士革治不好的，把他帶去那裡，在一堆玻璃罐子中間給他開了一間鋪子，稱他是自己的兒子；哈里發宮裡的一位老婦人帶著一個叫努阿姆的病女孩的驗瓶來到鋪子。他把藥放進一只盒子送去，盒裡折了一張紙。女孩喝了藥，讀了紙，笑了，自從被帶走以後她從沒笑過。然後他被打扮成女奴，學著把左肩往前、把腰擺動，被領進宮裡，被告知數五道門、從第六道進去；他數錯了，坐在一間滿是龍涎香的房間的一張長榻上，哈里發的妹妹走了進來。

她是個機敏的女人。她先把他當成女孩，隨即又不是了；他說：「我是尼阿馬，為了我的女奴，我拿性命冒險。」她說：「不會有人傷害你。」派人去請努阿姆來，三個人吃喝唱歌，直到哈里發午夜進來。她沒有藏他們。她說：「哥哥，我在一本書裡讀到一個故事，」就當作書裡的事講給他聽：一個年輕人離開家去找他的女奴，找到了她，兩人在一起沒多久，從綁走她的人手裡買下她的國王就進來，下令把兩人都殺了，沒有問，沒有等著弄清楚是怎麼回事。「你說那個國王怎麼樣？」「那不是君王該做的事，」哈里發說，「他有權懲罰的時候，應該寬恕。他應該掂量三件事：他們彼此相愛；他們在他的屋裡、在他的掌握之中；還有，君王在人與人之間下判斷，本來就該是慢的，事情牽涉到他自己時，更該慢。」「那麼，」他妹妹說，「誰對自己下了判決，就必須遵守它。站起來，尼阿馬。站起來，努阿姆。」

那一段我看著沙・贊曼。他先看他哥哥，再看地板，像一個人在街上有人唸出一個名字時，把目光從窗口移開。國王一動不動。他面前的板上有一個梨，手裡拿著刀；梨已經切成兩半，刀停著。我姐姐說到哈里發的三件事時，他說：「第三件。」她說了。「再說一次。」她再說一次：君王在判斷人的時候該是慢的，事情牽涉到他自己時，更該慢。他點了一下頭，像一個人算出來的數和他所想的一樣。「接著講。」他說。她接著講。哈里發把兩人給了彼此，還送他們帶著禮物回庫法；我想房間裡沒有人吃那顆梨。

之後是四支軍隊，在同一個下午從四面抵達同一座城，每支軍隊前頭有一位君主，在找一個人。我可以給你灰塵，升起了四次，一次比一次高；也可以給你那些君主：一位女王，要她的奴隸回來；加尤爾，失了一個女兒；卡馬爾・扎曼，如今是國王，為兩個兒子蓋過空墳；最後，在一面黑旗下，一個穿黑外衣的老人，鬍子垂在外衣上，他為兒子穿了這麼多年的黑，而他的兒子，被告知時，在路上昏倒了。他們在塵土裡擁抱。婚事照例安排下去。有一個月的鼓聲。最後我姐姐說了說書人說的話，「直到摧毀歡樂者與拆散團聚者來到他們身邊」，說書人說這句，是因為說不出口那個死字；國王說：「他們只說這些？」「只說這些，主上。」「不太多。」國王說。

第二百三十七至二百四十九夜。山魯佐德。到，十三道。未了：開羅的阿拉丁・阿布沙瑪特，才剛開頭；一本名冊；十九個點等著被劃掉；以及一個孩子，還沒有名字。

第二百四十九夜，國王說那是個奇妙的故事，我姐姐說還有一個比它更奇妙的，他說：「是什麼？」話還沒等她說完。她立刻開始，沒換氣。開羅有一位商人，叫沙姆斯丁，是商人的總管，成親四十年，沒有孩子。有個星期五他坐在鋪子裡，看見市集上每個商人身邊都坐著一個兒子；他去了澡堂，照了理髮師的鏡子，看見鬍子裡的白已經蓋過黑。他回家不吃飯，和妻子吵起來；她說錯在他，他說錯在她，兩人都躺著睡不著，羞愧。把這件事治好的，是一個與此事無關的經紀人用堅果、香料和鴉片熬成的膏，我姐姐把方子完完整整講了一遍，奶媽聽了把縫補放在膝上。時候到了，有了個男孩。

第七天，商人進去對妻子說：「真主託付的東西在哪裡？」他們把孩子抱給他，孩子兩頰各有一顆痣，他說：「你給他取了什麼名字？」「若是女孩，我就取了，」她說，「但這是男孩，所以誰也不該給他取名，只有你。」那時的習俗是用兆頭給孩子取名：你等著，街上傳進來的第一句話，聽見什麼，就是什麼名字。他們等著。路上一個人對朋友喊：「喂，我的主人阿拉丁！」商人說：「我們就叫他這個吧」；又因為那些痣，加上「痣之父」：阿布沙瑪特。「是這樣取名的嗎？」國王說。「在我母親的村子裡是，」奶媽說，沒有抬頭，「你站在門口。」「要是第一句是壞話呢？」「你就等第二句。」

男孩被關在活板門底下的屋子裡，直到鬍子長出來，是怕邪眼；他偶然出來了，想當商人；而在他父親的宴會上，商人的兒子們笑他沒出過遠門。他哭著回家。母親給了他十駝貨；父親說旅行是個詛咒，人應當在自己的土地上吃自己的麵包，又給了他四十駝，並警告他一座叫獅林的樹林。我略過那條路，我姐姐講了不少細節。他在父親警告過的樹林裡被強盜搶光了一切，夜裡只穿著襯衫進了巴格達，在一道門口坐下；兩個人在街上停下來看他。

他們是一位老商人和他的姪子。老人有個女兒祖拜達，魯特琴彈得比巴格達任何人都好，他把她嫁給了姪子；姪子在氣頭上把休妻的話說了三遍，那是收不回的，法律只允許他在另一個男人娶她再放她走之後才能重新得到她。他們需要一個陌生人，從日落到天亮做她的丈夫。他們給男孩一千第納爾、一套衣服和一頭騾子。他簽了一萬第納爾的聘金，如果早上不休她，這筆錢就歸他欠；然後被領進一座有琴聲的屋子。那一夜的事，我只說到這裡。

早上卡迪的差役來敲門，男孩已被妻子教過該怎麼做，給了差役五第納爾，就去了法庭。他走到卡迪面前，吻了他的手，往手裡放了五十第納爾，說：「依哪一條法律，我可以在日落時成親、在天亮時違背自己的意願被迫休妻？」我沒有看我姐姐。我看著國王的手，它放在椅子扶手上，一動不動。「強迫的、用力量逼的休妻，」卡迪說，「沒有任何一個穆斯林教法學派容許。」我姐姐的聲音沒有變。她沒有放慢，也沒有看床尾。我後來問她，她是否知道它在那裡，她說她不記得了；我既不相信也不是不相信，因為她十五歲時讀過那本書，而她讀過的東西從來沒有一樣是留在書架上的。

國王那天夜裡什麼也沒說。早晨，我把夜簿轉向他，他照例從頭讀起，讀到點的地方，把蘆管尖放在最近的一個旁邊，說：「他給了卡迪錢。」「主上？」「五十第納爾。他把五十第納爾放在那個人手裡，然後才問。一個謹慎的人，收了錢的。」「是，主上。」「而且他說了。」他劃掉了那個點。「他說出來了，」國王說，「這不是什麼都沒有的事」；他走到窗邊，沙・贊曼過去站在他旁邊，兩個人都沒有說話。

之後故事照例繼續，哈里發也在其中。他穿一件苦行僧的外衣來到男孩的家，帶著他的宰相、詩人阿布・努瓦斯，和馬斯魯爾（穿著苦行僧外衣的他比任何時候都更像劊子手），坐在地毯上聽女孩彈琴；他連續九個早晨在禮拜毯下留一百第納爾，第十天送來五十駝開羅的布料，附一封以男孩父親名義寫的信，聘金就這樣付清了。男孩被任命為商人總管，然後是哈里發的陪侍，然後是六十人隊長。他的妻子有一晚在隔壁房間叫了一聲，就死了，他們把她葬了。哈里發送他一個女奴安慰他，他不肯碰，說主人用過的不該成為僕人的；然後，他是個什麼事都不做一半的人，去奴隸市場花一萬第納爾買了一個叫茉莉的女孩，釋放了她，娶了她，她有了他的孩子。

我把禍事一口氣講給你，因為我姐姐就是這樣講的。巴格達總督的兒子，醜，二十歲，從沒騎過馬，想要茉莉；他母親和總督監獄裡一個大盜的母親做了交易；大盜被放了出來，下個月的第一夜，他用梯子爬進哈里發的起居室，拿走了哈里發的長袍、短劍、念珠、印戒和一盞嵌寶石的燈，把除了燈以外的全部藏在男孩家裡一塊大理石板下面。早上哈里發說：「搜。」他們就挖了出來。男孩被判刑，走向絞架，傳令官走在前頭。禍星艾哈邁德，近衛隊長，男孩曾以真主面前的盟約認他做父親，他攔住了劊子手，把另一個人吊在男孩的位置上，那是他能找到的最像的一個，然後把男孩帶到亞歷山大城，給他買了一間鋪子。

茉莉不肯看總督兒子一眼，被派去總督的廚房刷鍋。孩子就是在第二百六十五夜在那裡生的，在鍋碗之間，廚房的女人們一直待她好，問她要給他取什麼名字。我姐姐平平地講了。「他的父親要是好好的，」她說，「他會給他取名；但現在，我給他取名阿斯蘭。」那是獅子的意思。我聽見奶媽的針停了，然後又繼續。國王看著頁邊底下，那裡還有四個點立著。我不知道他是不是在看那些點。沙・贊曼本來把膝蓋抱起來坐著，這時把腳放到地上。

孩子爬上樓梯，爬進總督的膝上，總督除了簽過一張紙以外在這件事上什麼都沒做，在孩子臉上看見了阿拉丁，就留下他，認他做了自己的兒子。他長成了騎手。十四歲那年，他在酒館和那個大盜喝酒，大盜面前放著哈里發的燈，不肯給他，說為了它死過人；男孩會算帳，去找母親，去找禍星，然後在馬球場上，把自己放在一顆球和哈里發的臉之間，被告知提一個請求，他求的是他父親的兇手。大盜被搜了身，燈在他襯衫裡找到了。可是他們要去接的那個人已經不在亞歷山大城了。一個海船船長從他手裡買了一顆寶石，那顆五面的寶石是他在一只皮袋底找到、當成瑪瑙的，船長付了十萬第納爾，給他喝了一杯讓他睡著的東西；他醒來時在一艘開往熱那亞的船的底艙，那裡的國王，被告知會死在一個亞歷山大城人的手裡，正把俘虜一個一個殺在碼頭上。最後一刻，一位修道院的老婦人進來，說教堂需要一個僕人。他為那座修道院搬了十七年柴。

第二百五十至二百六十七夜。山魯佐德。到，十八道。未了：熱那亞一座修道院裡的阿拉丁・阿布沙瑪特，帶著一顆他不知用處的寶石；他的兒子阿斯蘭，有了名字；一本名冊；一個點等著被劃掉；以及一個孩子，還沒有名字。

## 第18章 · 第二百六十八至二百七十七夜：最後一個點、出生，與名字

第二百六十八天的早晨，國王劃掉了最後一個點。我數了一個星期，從桌子另一邊倒著看，其實不用數的；最後一排五個的末尾還剩一個，蘆管橫過去，那一頁就完成了。它看起來像收割後的田。他把蘆管懸在上面很久，彷彿還可能有下一個，然後才把它放進盒子的槽裡。「今天了。」他說。「孩子不是點，主上。」奶媽在她的角落裡說，沒有抬頭；她以前說過，第二百六十二天和第二百四十天都說過，她說的口氣就像說湯是燙的。「我知道。」國王說。他在地上坐下，坐在他弟弟旁邊，背靠著床尾，那天剩下的時間一句話也沒說，那是我從第一個星期以後沒見過的。

那夜我姐姐講了教堂裡的公主和琴聲。男孩在修道院十七年了，為不知他名字的修士搬柴搬麥。有一天老婦人叫他離開教堂，因為國王的女兒要來禱告，他躲進一間有窗的小室，因為他想知道她是不是像我們的女人；而在她身旁，拿著一把魯特琴的，是他的妻子祖拜達，她是被埋葬過的。她不肯為公主彈，直到公主遵守她的諾言，也就是把她的丈夫還給她。「他在那間小室裡，」公主說，「聽著。」她彈了。他走出來。兩個人一起倒在地上。「埋的是誰？」國王說。那是他一早以來說的第一句話。「一個女精靈，主上。她變成她的樣子，躺下，叫了一聲；夜裡她破墓出來了。」「而沒有人問。」「沒有人問，主上。那是非常像的。」「沒有人問，」國王說，像是把它放在另一樣東西旁邊。

第二百六十八夜。山魯佐德。到。未了：在熱那亞一座教堂裡聽見魯特琴的阿拉丁・阿布沙瑪特；一本名冊；沒有點了；以及一個孩子，遲了，還沒有名字。

第二百六十九夜有剩下的部分，我用一行給你。寶石有五面，每一面擦一下給一樣東西：一張會飛的長榻，一座亭帳，乾谷裡的樹和一條河，一桌擺好的飯，一個把一支軍隊打跑的騎士；男人和他的兩個妻子坐在榻上，飛到亞歷山大城、開羅、巴格達，一個名叫阿斯蘭的年輕人在那裡等著他的父親；哈里發辦了宴席。「直到摧毀歡樂者來到他們身邊。」我姐姐說這句的聲音，像一個關上門的女人，我想她是在聽別的東西。「它只是在守這房子的時辰，」她後來對奶媽說，說的是孩子，「它是客人，客人是會遲到的。」

第二百七十天早晨，沙・贊曼問我，用的是問穀價的口氣，這是不是常有的。我說我不知道；我從沒生過。「我也沒有，」他說，過了一會兒又說：「我本來以為我能派上用場。看來整件事裡面沒有一樣是男人用得上的。」「你轉過搖籃。」我說。「我轉了兩次，」他說，「又轉回去了。」第二百七十夜是泰伊部落的哈提姆，非常短：一位已死的主人，一位睡在他墳邊的國王開玩笑向他討晚飯，他進了國王的夢，手持劍，殺了國王的駱駝，因為他沒有別的可以給，而他的兒子早晨牽來另一頭駱駝給國王。第二百七十一夜從宰達之子馬安開始。那天下午我父親來到房間的門口，站在那裡，手臂照老樣子彎著，下面什麼也沒有。壽衣從第二十九夜起就在他床腳的箱子裡了；但是手臂還沒被告知。我看見他看著它，把它放下。國王走過來站在他旁邊，兩個人並肩站著，面向房間，像兩個站在河邊、被告知可以涉水過去的人。

陣痛那晚開始，像人們說的，沒有預告。奶媽進進出出，袖子捲著，說今晚了，男人們要出去。國王說他要等今晚的故事講完才出去。「講不完的。」奶媽說。「講得完。」我姐姐從枕頭上說，口氣像在描述天氣；果然如此，門開著一掌寬的縫，兩位君王在門外走廊上，年長的背靠牆，年輕的在他旁邊，從縫裡聽。沙漏放在桌上，頸子上繫著布。沒有人去翻它。她講了馬安和帶黃瓜的貝都因人。你們知道的。沙漠裡一個人對騎騾的陌生人說他指望從馬安那裡得到什麼：一千第納爾；若馬安說太多，五百；太多，三百；兩百；一百；五十；三十；若還是太多，他就把驢拴在埃米爾的門口，自己回家。她在疼痛之間說那些數字。她會停在一個字上，然後從同一個字重新開始，奶媽接生過半個城，說她從沒見過這樣的事。講到五十時她在咬牙呼吸。講到三十時她用埃米爾的聲音說了一句「太多」，開始笑，我透過門縫聽見沙・贊曼笑了一聲，忍不住的，然後停住；國王低聲說：「三十。」

其餘的我不講了，因為那不是我的，她也從沒講過。我被叫去拿水和布，房間改變大小的那一刻我在房裡；我能說的就只有這個。奶媽說了一個字，我不會寫下來。有一個像鉸鏈的聲音。「好了，」奶媽說，「好了，」是對某個人說的，然後對著門說：「是個男孩」；門原本開著一掌寬，現在開了一個人那麼寬，國王站在其中。他的雙手向前伸出一點，像一個人捧著被告知是滿的碗。沒有人攔他。我姐姐臉色灰白，非常疲倦，清清楚楚地說：「而他把驢留在原來拴著的地方。」那是那個故事的結尾；然後她閉上眼睛。

天剛亮。我站著寫了那一行，照每天早晨那樣交給國王讀，他站著讀，孩子在他臂彎裡，我沒想到他做得到。他讀到底，在最後，他把拇指放在「生」字旁邊，就像他把拇指放在那些道旁邊，然後停在那裡。他把夜簿還給我，抱著他的兒子在床尾坐下，整整坐了一天。

第二百六十九至二百七十一夜。山魯佐德。到、到、到。未了：拉卜泰特城，還沒開始；一本名冊；以及一個孩子，天亮時生了，是個兒子，還沒有名字。

我姐姐睡了將近兩天，第三天傍晚醒來，像每天傍晚那樣問我，她說了什麼。我把夜簿最後幾行讀給她聽，她就想起來了，順序和它離開時一樣。然後她說：「他呢？」我說他和國王在一起，國王從第二百七十一天黎明起就沒把他放下過，除了交給奶媽和沙・贊曼，也沒給得很遠。「那將是很長的一段童年。」我姐姐說，然後要椰棗，椰棗在布底下。

那以後有四夜，我可以每夜用一個分句給你，因為我沒在聽。拉卜泰特城，一個國王把一座塔鎖上，加了一把鎖，他之後每個國王又各加一把自己的，直到有了二十四把，最後那個違背大臣們的勸告，把它們全部打開，找到一卷捲軸。一個哈里發，劊子手三次問他那個男孩的頭要不要砍，他每次都說要，那男孩笑了，念了一首詩，說一隻鷹因為麻雀是一頓很差的晚餐而放了牠；「這有用嗎？」國王說；「只有一次，主上。」我姐姐說。還有一個叫易卜拉欣的人，頭上懸賞十萬第納爾，躲在巴格達。國王聽著所有這些，兒子在他臂彎裡，孩子哭的時候他對我姐姐說「接著講」，然後抱著他在房間裡走來走去，句子在他們頭頂繼續。沙・贊曼守著搖籃，裡面鋪著撒馬爾罕絲，沒有別人被允許碰，他對著牆說，他從沒見過他哥哥這麼小心地抱一樣東西。

第二百七十五夜，我姐姐開始了多柱的伊拉姆城；國王，如果你問他，我想他會說她是為他開始的，而沒有人問。一個人在也門的沙漠裡找一頭走失的駱駝，來到一座城，兩扇大門鑲著風信子石，街道是金磚和銀磚，有果樹，有流水，而城裡沒有一個人。他把袋子裝滿珍珠和麝香回家；路上珍珠變黃了。一個哈里發問一位有學問的人，有學問的人說：伊拉姆，是沙達德建的，他讀到一本關於天堂的古書，說他要蓋它的複本。他寫信給世上所有的國王，叫他們蒐集世上一切有價值的東西，一樣也不留；他們花二十年蒐集，三百年建造，二十年在上面蓋一座城堡，國王再花二十年準備遷入；而當他離城門還有一日路程，一聲呼喊從天上傳來，他和他所有的人都再也沒有見到那座城。「路呢？」國王說。「真主把它抹掉了，主上。」「那麼沒有人能去。」「據說有一個人去過，先知的一位同伴。」我看見國王把孩子在臂彎裡轉過一點，讓窗子在他的臉後面，而不是在他的臉上。

第二百七十二至二百七十六夜。山魯佐德。到，五道。未了：多柱的伊拉姆，與那個蒐集了一切的國王；一本名冊，快要滿了，已有九百五十多個名字；以及一個兒子，還沒有名字。

第七天早晨，也就是第二百七十七夜結束時，奶媽說，像在說麵包沒有了：「他得有個名字，主上。這是習俗。」「我知道習俗。」國王說。他在窗邊，抱著孩子，就像這六個早晨在那個時辰那樣，在灰色的光裡。「我很久沒有給任何東西取名了。」他說。他是對著玻璃說的。我姐姐在枕頭上說：「你先說，我後說。」「我想由某個人告訴我，」國王說，沒有說是誰。沒有人說話。奶媽把雙手收進袖子。而從下面的院子裡，很大聲，是我十五年來沒聽過他提高的聲音，我父親喊道：「阿卜杜・巴基！阿卜杜・巴基，水呢？那孩子在哪裡？」一個侍童端著一只銅罐，跑過石板。國王站得很穩。「那是什麼？」他說。「一個侍童，主上。」奶媽說。「他叫他什麼？」「阿卜杜・巴基，主上。」「那是一個名字。」我姐姐說，「永存者的僕人。」國王看著他兒子的臉。「那就叫他這個。」他說。

侍童的名字是哈桑。我認識他四年了。我父親過了一會兒來到門口，帶著一個在院子裡喊了半天的人的神情，被告知了，鞠躬，沒有看任何人。我從沒問過他，為什麼那天早晨，在那個院子裡，用那種聲音，把哈桑叫成另一個名字，他也沒告訴過我；他也從來沒讓我有半點理由認為那是別的什麼，不就是它看起來的樣子：來自街上的一個兆頭，照習俗。

國王自己寫下來。他把孩子交給奶媽，走到桌邊，翻回夜簿的第一頁，在邊上之邊上的底部，在已經在那裡的五個字底下，最後一個是搖籃，他慢慢寫了第六個，用他那方正的字：巴基。只有名字的後半。然後他坐著看它，也看那曾經有點、現在空了的地方。我寫那夜的行時，把孩子從未了裡拿掉，像人把已經有了答案的東西拿掉；我注意到我留了一個空位，他從第三十八個黎明起每一行都站在那裡，而我發現我沒有辦法把它合上。

第二百七十七夜。山魯佐德。到。未了：多柱的伊拉姆，與那個離城門只有一日路程的國王；一本名冊。

## 第19章 · 第二百七十八至二百九十六夜：摩蘇爾的伊薩克、假哈里發，與波斯人阿里

頭髮就在同一個早晨剪了，這是習俗。稱重的是我父親，因為整個屋子裡只有他是可以信得過拿秤的人；重量很輕，他把等重的銀子在大門口發出去，一枚一枚數進排隊的人手裡，把每個拿了銀子的人的名字寫下來。他這輩子沒辦法給出任何東西而不把它寫下來。奶媽本來要把頭髮埋掉，這也是習俗。「給我。」國王說。「這不是留的，主上，是埋的。」「我知道習俗。」他說，那是那個早晨他第二次這麼說；她把頭髮放進他手裡。他把它放在夜簿的前封板裡面，在裝訂邊那一指寬的地方，在劃道和曾經有點的位置之間，然後把板合上。我從沒見過他去看它。它在那裡。

城裡中午就知道了。染匠門口木箱上的說書人給漁夫那一則加了一句，又拿掉，又連同孩子的性別放回去。賭國王會不會讓孩子生下來的賭金，經由一個沒有人說得清楚的安排，付給了銅匠市場的一個文具商，他賭的是會，而他把全部拿去在門口發給窮人，是第納爾，我父親也一筆一筆寫下來了。婦人們帶著用布包著的小東西來到側門，我中午在那裡寫名字：一雙小鞋、一撮鹽、用三顆棗核裝在葫蘆裡做成的搖鈴。我把送禮的人記下來。我問第一個人那鹽是做什麼的，她說是避邪眼的，叫我把它放在國王看不見的屋角。我把它放在搖籃底下。我不知道國王看見了沒有。

第二百七十八夜和第二百七十九夜把伊拉姆講完了。呼喊之後它裡面有一座墳：沙達德的兒子為他父親鑿了一個山洞，把他放在一張金王座上，蓋著七十件袍子，頭邊立一塊金牌，上面有一首詩，叫驕傲的人引以為戒，說這個人曾是東方與西方之主，卻像收割的穀子一樣倒下。後來的年代裡有兩個人發現了那個洞，走了下去，拿走了金牌，和他們搬得動的許多金條。「他們讀了嗎？」國王說。「沒有說，主上。」「不會說的。」國王說。同一口氣裡，因為她累了，因為這句話在每張嘴裡都是一樣的，我姐姐說：「人們還講摩蘇爾的伊薩克的故事。」

伊薩克是個歌手，哈里發最寵的人，有一夜他從宮裡回家，在一條後街內急，看見牆上垂下一只大籃子，喝醉了，就坐了進去，被四個正在等別人的女人吊了上去。她們沒有趕他走。一位夫人走進來，美得像月亮，問他是誰；他說是市集的商人；她問他會不會背詩。他們就這樣過了一夜。她念一段，他答一段；她講一個故事，他安靜下來時她又講下一個；他把一位陪國王們喝酒的鄰居告訴過他的每一個故事都講給她聽，她說沒想到市集裡有這樣的記性。天亮時一個老奶媽來說時候到了，夫人說：我們之間發生的事，你自己留著。他一連去了三夜，第三夜他離開哈里發的陪侍去赴約，被差役抓回來，單獨把一切講給哈里發；哈里發第二天夜裡坐第二只籃子去了，天亮前就娶了她。然後哈里發叫伊薩克不要對任何人說，他就誰也沒說，直到哈里發過世。「那是很長一段時間，」國王對著沙漏說，「留著一件事。」我分不出他是不是贊成。

第二百七十八至二百八十一夜。山魯佐德。到，四道。未了：摩蘇爾的伊薩克，與那座掛著籃子的屋子裡的夫人；一本名冊，已開始寫第五本；以及一個兒子，有名字了。

接下來三夜有一個清道夫，朝聖到一半抓住克爾白的帷幕，大聲禱告說願某位夫人再和丈夫吵一次架；他被抓了，要被吊死，對埃米爾講了緣由。我不告訴你緣由，我姐姐也沒有細講；她講得很快，眼睛看著孩子；埃米爾放了他，對眾人說，替他禱告，他是情有可原的。「他應該禱告別的。」國王說。「什麼？」沙・贊曼說。「我不知道。」國王說，「所以他情有可原。」

然後哈里發哈倫・拉希德睡不著，這種事大約三十夜才有一次，他穿著商人的外衣，帶著宰相和馬斯魯爾下到底格里斯河邊雇船。老船夫不肯載他們。哈里發每晚都乘他的御船沿河而下，他說，有人在前面喊：天黑後在水上被發現的，我要砍他的頭，或把他吊在桅杆上。他們付了他兩第納爾，躲在橋拱下的一塊黑布底下，御船過去了：兩百個白人奴隸排成行，持赤金燭臺燃著沉香的人，中間一張王座，座上一個穿黑底繡黃線的年輕人，旁邊有個像是賈法爾的宰相，一個像是馬斯魯爾的劊子手。「憑真主，」哈倫在布底下說，「我的理智被攪亂了。」那是一個很精確的仿本。我看國王，他在傳令官那裡坐得一動不動；然後我看沙・贊曼，他在看國王。

第二夜他們又去了，在假哈里發一行的後面上了岸，被當成外地來的商人款待。酒傳了一圈。年輕人有一面鑼；每敲一下，一扇門開，一個抱著魯特琴的女人走出來唱一首歌，每首歌他都大叫一聲，把外衣撕到下襬，他們放下簾子，給他換一件。四次。第四次他昏倒在地，簾子卡住了，哈里發看見他的肋骨上有鞭痕。「一個英俊的年輕人，」哈倫說，「和一個賊。」他說得不友善。但賈法爾照他吩咐問了，年輕人就告訴他們。他是珠寶商的兒子，穆罕默德・阿里，守著他父親的店；一位騎騾的夫人來買一條沒有國王配得上的項鍊，把他帶回家領錢，告訴他她是誰，杜妮雅夫人，宰相自己的妹妹，當場就和他成了親，正正當當地，有卡迪在場，而不是用別的方式要他。他在她家住了一個月，沒有出門。一天她去澡堂，要他發誓不離開長榻；一個老婦人從祖拜達夫人那裡來（哈里發的妻子，不是那位彈魯特琴的），說她想聽他唱歌；他去了，唱了，回來，他的妻子醒著。她叫人蒙住他的眼，她的女人們為他求情，她卻叫人打他，把他像根木頭一樣扔到街上。傷好以後，他賣了鋪子，買了四百個白人奴隸，造了一艘御船，一年來每夜沿底格里斯河而下，扮成哈里發，有人在前頭喊，河上的人都要掉頭；一直沒有她的消息。

哈里發早晨派人叫他，又叫宰相的妹妹，問她認不認得這個年輕人。她說女人哪裡認得男人。他說：這是你的珠寶商。她說這是寫好了的。他在卡迪面前重新立了婚約，讓珠寶商做他的陪侍之一；然後我姐姐說：「直到摧毀歡樂者來到他們身邊。」「他砍過頭嗎？」國王說。「那位珠寶商？沒有，主上。他一年來每夜喊，沒有人掉過一個。」「那他算不上多好的哈里發。」我分不出那是不是玩笑。我想他自己也分不出。「他造了一艘御船，」過了一會兒他說，「而不是去敲那扇門。」沙・贊曼在窗邊，沒有轉過頭。

第二百八十二至二百九十四夜。山魯佐德。到，十三道。未了：波斯人阿里，已被召來，說他聽從；一本名冊；以及一個兒子，有名字了。

第二百九十五天的傍晚，我姐姐下午抱著孩子睡了大半天，坐起來，用剛醒的人的聲音說：「我講到哪裡了？」四處找我。我在側門那裡拿著名冊。奶媽不在房裡。回答的是國王。他在窗邊，手裡拿著沙漏，沒有轉身。「珠寶商得到赦免了，」他說，「哈里發問宰相的妹妹認不認得他，她說女人不認得男人。他在卡迪面前重新立婚約。你說了該說的那句話，隨即講到一個叫阿里的波斯人，宰相把他帶來給哈里發解失眠，因為他有許多故事；他被叫來，說他聽從。他說到這裡。」他把沙漏翻過來。「他要講他看到的或他聽到的。哈里發要選。」我姐姐看著他的背看了好一會兒。「你留住了那個。」她說。「說過了，」國王說，「是在房間裡說的。」我後來想，那天傍晚是我部分變得不必要的傍晚；而他不是那個意思。我對沙・贊曼這麼說，他一整場都坐在他的毯子上；他說對夜簿來說沒有人是不必要的，我說這是一個從來沒被夜簿留住過的人才會說的話。他想了想，說這很公平。

波斯人說他要講他親身遇上的事。他帶著一個男孩和一只小皮袋出門，在一座陌生的城裡，有個人在市集上撲上來，搶了袋子，說袋子和裡面的一切都是他的；他們被帶到卡迪面前。卡迪問那人袋子裡有什麼。那人說：兩支眼藥棒，一條包著兩只鍍金杯的手帕，兩頂帳篷，兩把湯匙，一頭牛和兩頭小牛，一頭母獅和兩頭公獅，一頭母熊和兩隻豺，一間樓房和兩間大廳，一間有兩扇門的廚房，還有一群朋友可以發誓那是他的。我姐姐全講了，一直講到母獅，沒有換氣，聲音像書記在念清單，國王就笑了起來。那不是對總管那只箱子的笑，那是驚訝；也不是對理髮師的，那是飢餓。它是從某個藏了很久的深處慢慢升上來的，等到它抵達，他得用手蓋住臉。他臂彎裡的孩子被聲音驚得睜開眼睛，抬頭看，然後嘴巴做了一件事，奶媽說是脹氣。「不是脹氣。」國王從手後面說。

輪到波斯人時，他說他袋子裡有一副鎖子甲、一把闊劍、一千隻戰羊、花園、雕像、女奴和歌女，和底格里斯河與幼發拉底河，和多柱的伊拉姆，和一千把鋒利的剃刀，要把卡迪的鬍子剃掉，除非他判袋子是波斯人的。卡迪說他們是兩個戲弄地方官的討厭傢夥，叫他們把袋子打開。裡面是麵包、一顆檸檬、乳酪和橄欖。波斯人把袋子扔在那人面前，走他的路；哈里發笑得仰面倒下，賞了他。「那是誰的袋子？」國王說。「波斯人的，主上。麵包、檸檬、乳酪、橄欖。」「卡迪怎麼知道？」「他沒說。」「他不知道。」「是，主上。他打開了它。」「他應該先打開它。」國王說，「在母獅之前。」我姐姐說那樣就不會是一半那麼好的故事了，國王說這是真的，而那會是一個更好的判斷；他們兩個都對。

第二百九十五至二百九十六夜。山魯佐德。到、到。未了：哈倫・拉希德與宰相不肯賣的那個女奴，才剛開頭；一本名冊；以及一個兒子，有名字了。

## 第20章 · 第二百九十七至三百一十一夜：把自己說成賊的情人，與第四十天

第二百九十六夜留著沒講完的那個故事，在第二百九十七夜講完了。哈里發和他的宰相一起喝醉了，各自拿自己妻子的休書起誓，說絕不賣、也絕不送給對方一個特定的女奴；酒醒了，他們發現兩樣都做不到，半夜派人去叫伊瑪目阿布・優素福。他騎著騾子來了。他說宰相可以把她的一半賣給哈里發，另一半送給他，兩個誓就都守住了；哈里發等不及法定的日子，問該怎麼辦，他說讓她嫁給一個奴隸，只嫁一個句子那麼久，然後休掉。那奴隸不肯休她，一百第納爾不肯，一千第納爾也不肯。於是伊瑪目說，哈里發把奴隸送給那個女孩吧，因為沒有人能嫁給自己擁有的東西，婚約就無效了。哈里發從盤子裡抓金子，裝滿了伊瑪目那頭騾子的飼料袋。我父親在門邊，看了看那只飼料袋，又看了看地板。

第二百九十七夜我姐姐講了那個把自己說成賊的情人。他是巴士拉的一個年輕人，非常英俊，一群人把他押到埃米爾哈立德面前，說他夜裡被人在一座屋子裡抓住。他認了。別的什麼也不肯說。埃米爾不相信他，叫人給他上了鐐銬，派傳令官走遍全城，說早上要在空地上砍他的手；然後在黑暗裡，把他帶到自己房裡，給他吃的。「你有一個不是賊的故事，」埃米爾說，「先知說過，有疑問的時候，要避開刑罰。明天卡迪問你，你否認。」說完把他送回牢房。可是早晨，在全城人面前，年輕人被問到他拿的東西有沒有可能不到四分之一第納爾，他說不，更多；被問到他在那些財物裡有沒有份，他說沒有；埃米爾氣得用鞭子抽了他的臉。屠夫把刀抵在手腕上。一個女孩穿著破衣服，擠過人群，撲在他身上，掀開面紗，說：先讀這個。

他曾經往她的窗子上扔了一顆石頭，像情人那樣，告訴她他來了；她的父親和兄弟聽見了，跑出來；他把屋子周圍的東西全抓起來，讓它看起來像一樁搶劫，這樣她的名字就不會被牽扯進去。我不把女孩的信說給你，那是首詩，這種信都是詩。「他給了他一夜，」國王說。「主上？」「埃米爾。給他吃的，給他到早上的時間，以防有個故事。」「是，主上。」「以防，」國王說；他看著我，我想，也可能是看著夜簿；他沒有說以防什麼。

第二百九十九夜是從賣豆人開始的，裡面有一樣我之前不知道的東西。哈里發哈倫把巴爾馬克家的賈法爾釘上十字架時，下令凡為他哭泣的人也釘上十字架，人們就不敢靠近。一個沙漠裡的阿拉伯人，每年給賈法爾獻一首頌詩，換一千第納爾，帶著今年的詩來了，什麼都不知道。他找到了屍體，讓駱駝跪下，哭泣，念出那首詩，睡著了；賈法爾在夢裡對他說：去巴士拉，找某個商人，說我向他問候，向他要一千第納爾，憑那顆豆子的記號。商人聽了就哭了。他給了阿拉伯人一千，又多給了五百，說他每年都可以來領一千；他講了豆子的故事。他曾經在巴格達的街上賣熱豆子，下雨天，幾乎沒有外衣，賈法爾叫他進去，吩咐家人買，每個人都用量豆的容器裝滿金子；最後只剩一顆豆子，賈法爾把它掰開，一半賣給一個女孩，價錢是已經付過的金子的兩倍，另一半他自己買了，價錢是全部金額的兩倍。我看著我父親，他站在門邊。他沒有動；他一聽見那個名字從來都不動。我想，在自己家裡聽見這個，是很難受的：一個被國王殺掉的宰相，和一座被禁止為他哭泣的城；而我姐姐沒有看他，用說豆子時一模一樣的聲音講完了。

第二百九十七至二百九十九夜。山魯佐德。到，三道。未了：巴士拉的懶骨頭阿布・穆罕默德，與他被召去給哈里發帶來的東西；一本名冊；以及一個兒子，四個星期大，有名字了。

接下來的六夜是懶骨頭，我一口氣講給你，因為它們很長。巴士拉有個人懶得連太陽都不肯從身上挪開；他母親給了他五個迪拉姆，叫他去找一位要去中國的謝赫，經過那趟旅行的某一個轉折（我姐姐講了它所有的轉折），他變得那麼富有，哈里發派人召他，因為只有他有一顆大到可以鑲在祖拜達夫人王冠頂上的寶石；他帶著金子做的樹、一頂施了魔法的帳篷、還有讓宮殿的雉堞向他鞠躬的法術來到巴格達。第三百夜黎明，國王數了第一頁邊上的劃道，五道一行，有六十行；他把蘆管尖放到最後一道上，說：「三百。」過了一會兒：「這是一個數字。」「這是我父親的話，」我說，「從前說的。」「是，」國王說，「他說他要是數過，那就是一個數字。」我父親不在房裡。我沒告訴過他。然後是巴爾馬克家的亞赫亞和一個欠哈里發錢的人，亞赫亞用自家的金子替他還了，那人用一首說他怕過他們的箭的對句向他道謝；亞赫亞聽說後，說一個匱乏而心裡難受的人，不該為他嘴裡落出來的話受責備，因為那話不是從心裡來的。「再說一次。」國王說。我姐姐再說了一次。「寫在邊上。」他說，那是他從來沒要我寫過不是他自己的字；我寫了，很小，在第六個字下面，因為沒有別的地方。

第三百零七夜有一個很短的。哈里發馬蒙在學者的集會上，因為一個穿破白衣的陌生人回答得好，把他從最低的座位升到最高的位置，然後在酒席上把杯子遞給他；陌生人站起來，請求允許說一個字。他說信士的長官靠他那一點點理智把他從渺小裡提起來，他若喝了，那理智就會離開他，他會落回他出身的地方；他希望信士的長官不要奪走他這個奴僕的那顆小小的寶石。哈里發賞了他十萬銀幣。「他請求讓他留著它。」國王說，手裡有一杯梨子汁。他看著那只杯子看了一會兒，沒有喝，我想他並不知道自己沒有喝。

第三百零八夜，她開始講阿里・沙爾與祖姆魯德，它很長，我會在它自己的地方講。它從一張床開始：一個六十歲才得子的呼羅珊商人，臨終前，把自己所知道的最後一點交給兒子。不要和任何人太熟。能做好事的時候要做。守住你的財富，不要浪費。向比你年長的人請教。小心酒。「我聽見了，」兒子每一條都說，「我會服從你。還有什麼？」國王手臂上抱著孩子。他叫我姐姐把那張單子再說一遍，她說了，他說：「他問還有什麼。」「是，主上。」「他沒有問為什麼。」「沒有，主上。」「沒有人問，」國王說，「在床邊的時候。」

第三百至三百一十夜。山魯佐德。到，十一道。未了：呼羅珊的阿里・沙爾，已經埋葬了父親，守著鋪子一年了；一本名冊；以及一個兒子，有名字了。

第四十天的早晨，也就是第三百一十夜結束時，我姐姐起床了。這是四十天結束的日子，女人可以沐浴，穿上乾淨的衣服，再當一個可以上街的人。奶媽也一直在數。天亮前她就把她帶去洗了澡，出來時穿著綠色的裙子，瘦了些，頭髮濕濕地披在一邊肩上，她在窗前站了很久，雙手撐著窗台，像一個看著別人告訴她的國度的女人。國王在桌邊。他在邊上寫了點什麼，正吹著它。「你起來了。」他說。「是這一天了。」我姐姐說。「有一個習俗，」我父親從門口說，沒有人問他，而他一直用整個身體在聽，「第四十天，要讓人看孩子。」「給誰看？」國王說。「給人民，主上。」「哪些人？」「院子裡的人，」我父親說，「他們從天亮就在院子裡了。」

他自己抱了孩子。中午他走出去，來到大院上方的長廊，穿著樸素的外衣，沙・贊曼在他身後一步，我父親在更後一步，我在我父親後面拿著名冊，因為我被告知要帶，而不知道為什麼。我從第一個早晨以後沒見過院子是滿的。它是滿的。他們一排一排站著，一直站到門口、站出門外，在太陽底下，男人、女人、騎在父親肩上的孩子，而沒有人在說話。我從沒聽過這麼多人發出這麼少的聲音。沙・贊曼在國王背後把帽子摘了下來，那在撒馬爾罕是人在葬禮上做的事；我想他沒有發覺自己做了。國王什麼也沒說。他把孩子稍微舉高，像一個人舉起一只杯子，手托在頭下面；孩子本來睡著，被光驚得睜開眼睛，看著天空。什麼也沒有發生。然後，在前面數第三排，有一個穿黑衣的女人，我認得她，因為我在第二本裡寫過她的女兒，她從隊伍裡往前走了一步。「他叫什麼名字？」她說。她說得很平常。聲音傳到了院子的另一頭。「阿卜杜・巴基。」國王說。她跟著說了一遍，只說了一次，對自己說，為了說對；她後面的男人說了，他後面的女人說了；它像一條傳水桶的長龍那樣往院子後面傳過去，一直傳到了大門。「我的叫薩爾瑪。」女人說。國王沒有看我手裡的名冊，他沒有看任何東西，說：「薩爾瑪。織布工的女兒。她是左撇子，洗衣服的時候唱歌，有一條綠披肩。她是第四百零二個。」靜了很久。「是的。」女人說。她轉身，回到隊伍裡她的位置。沒有人動。他又抱了孩子一會兒，我說不清多久；然後把他抱進去了。

後來我問我父親，他知不知道國王記得她們。他說不知道。他說他以為國王每個名字只讀一口氣，像他一開始說的，沒有更多。那天夜裡我翻名冊查。那一條寫著：薩爾瑪，織布工的女兒，左撇子，洗衣服時唱歌，一條綠披肩；第四百零二個。是我的字。那天他沒有被拿給看過。我不知道他是什麼時候讀的，也不知道還有多少條他背得下來，而我也沒有問他這個。我姐姐從走廊的屏風後面看了全程，只問我他們做了什麼。「什麼也沒做。」我說，「他們什麼也沒做。」「好。」我姐姐說。我想她一直害怕的是歡呼。

第三百一十一夜。山魯佐德。到。未了：呼羅珊的阿里・沙爾，他問自己，如果不花掉，要留給誰；一本名冊，已經是第五本；以及院子裡的一個女人，她說了是的。

第二天中午，側門那裡有四十一個名字，那是第一個月以後最多的一天。第一個是一位老婦人的，給一個沒有人記得給的姪女。她沒有說為什麼那天來。我沒有問。

## 第21章 · 第三百一十二至三百二十七夜：阿里・沙爾與祖姆魯德，與一封寄往撒馬爾罕的信

撒馬爾罕來的信已經在桌上放了三天。它是用煮硬的皮袋裝著，由一頭駱駝帶來的，國王讀了兩遍，把它壓在沙漏底下，就一直放在那裡；第四十一天早晨，沙・贊曼從沙漏底下把它抽出來，站著讀了，折起來，對房間說，這是他提出請求的方式：他在撒馬爾罕的宰相寫信說，布哈拉的總督一直在以國王和他自己兩個人的名義收稅，商隊已經開始繞南邊走了。「到撒馬爾罕要多久？」國王說。「三十天，如果路是乾的。」「它不是乾的。」「不是。」國王看著孩子，孩子在奶媽的膝上。「去吧，」他說，「入冬以前回來。」他們之間就這麼多，和在窗邊一樣；我想他們下午該說的都說過了，而到了門口，兩個人都不知道怎麼再說一遍。

他一個小時就收好了行李。他是帶著一只馬鞍袋來的，也帶著一只馬鞍袋走。可是他帶了十令撒馬爾罕紙，又薄又硬，包在檀香木屑裡，藏在搖籃絲綢底下的雪松箱子裡，這樣我就不必當場被送、當場難為情；他帶我到箱子旁，打開它，自己走出了房間。最上面那令紙上有一張他寫的便條：給未了用，也給不是未了的東西用。我沒有給任何人看過。我站在那十令紙前，站了好一會兒。我出來時他已經在門口和馬在一起，國王先到了，握著最近那匹馬的韁繩，像是在檢查它好不好。「你會寫信給我嗎？」沙・贊曼隔著馬脖子對我說。「我寫什麼？」「未了。」我說它在夜簿裡。「抄給我。」「為什麼？」「因為我不在那個房間裡，」沙・贊曼說，「而我想知道他還有什麼沒做完。」我看著國王，他正看著馬的嘴。我說我會的。

「你還數嗎？」馬夫接過韁繩時，國王很低聲地說。我想他並不想讓我聽見。「第四十天我停了。」他弟弟說。「為什麼？」「我不知道。我在院子裡摘了帽子，戴回去的時候，我已經不在數了。」國王點了點頭，彷彿那是個答案，沒有問另一件事；沙・贊曼上了馬，帶著六個人走出門去，沒有回頭，那是撒馬爾罕人的方式。毯子留在我的墊子旁邊。那天傍晚奶媽一腳踩上去，說它礙事，之後仍然一直踩著它，沒有把它移走。第二天早晨，國王請她把毯子轉一轉，讓磨損的那一邊朝牆；她轉了；到了中午，它又朝著我的墊子了，沒有人碰過它。

那天夜裡房間變大了。我姐姐開始講當晚的故事，眼睛一直望向床尾，那裡有那張毯子；國王背靠著床腳坐著，坐在他連續一百四十個夜晚坐的位置，弟弟坐在他左邊，他的左手放在地上，離身體一點點遠，手心朝下，像一個習慣了有一個肩膀的人。到了第二更，他把手收了回來。他把沙漏放在那裡。我想他並不知道。

她把阿里・沙爾帶到了奴隸市場，那裡在拍賣一個叫祖姆魯德的女孩，名叫翡翠的，她會寫七種字體，會用七種誦法背誦《古蘭經》，做的絲簾能賣五十第納爾。她的主人發過誓，只把她賣給她自己選的人；經紀人從沒碰過這樣的事，沿著商人圍成的圈子一個一個問她：這位？一個灰鬍子的老人出價一千第納爾，她不要；她用詩說，她不喜歡一個被歲月弄成這個樣子的人。一個把鬍子染黑的人，她當天下午也用詩嘲笑了。一個獨眼的，她揮手趕開。一個矮個子，鬍子長到肚臍。然後她的目光落在圈子最後面的一個年輕人身上，他那天什麼也沒吃，只是來看看她能賣多少。「那個，」她說，「他的臉頰光滑，他的氣息是甜的。」「他們問了她。」國王說。「是，主上。她的主人發過誓。」「經紀人每問一個，又問一次。」「每一個，主上。」「每一個，」國王說。我沒有把它寫下來。那不是可以寫下來的東西。

他沒有錢。年輕人低著頭站著，羞於說他買不起一個他本來只是來看看的女孩；她看見了，對經紀人說：「拉著我的手，領我去他那裡。」她把價錢從一千降到九百、八百，一直降到一百，一邊笑，他說他沒有一百；當她明白他一無所有，她請他把她領到巷子裡，像要檢查她似的，從衣服裡掏出一只裝著一千第納爾的錢袋，放進他手裡。「用這個付九百買我，留一百做生活費。」他用她自己的錢買了她。她又給了他一千第納爾佈置房子，房子佈置好後，她叫他去買絲、金線和彩色絲線，每八天她做一張簾子，每八天他就以五十第納爾賣掉，賣給商人，絕不賣給陌生人：「因為我們有仇家，陌生人會讓我們分開。」他守了一年。

一年到頭，一個不是商人的人出價一百第納爾買簾子，經紀人收了十第納爾的賄賂，年輕人賣了。後來發生的事，我不細講，因為那是這個故事裡最糟的，我姐姐也講得很短。那陌生人一路跟著他回家，要水，要麵包，在一根香蕉裡放了東西，年輕人睡著了；那陌生人是那個被她用詩嘲笑過鬍子的老人的弟弟；她被帶到那個老人的家，被告知她將成為什麼，她說不。他們對她不好。我只說到這裡。我沒有看國王。我看著孩子，又沒有看孩子，奶媽說她把他抱去另一個房間，國王說：「不用。」然後把手蓋在孩子朝上那一邊的耳朵上，像一個人在風口用手擋住蠟燭。

她被救出那座房子，是因為一個錯誤。一個老婦人叫阿里・沙爾半夜站在她窗下吹口哨，她就用繩子把自己放下去；他卻在長椅上睡著了；一個路過的賊把他頭上的纏頭巾拿走了，她看見黑暗裡窗下有一個男人，就帶著一對裝滿金子的馬鞍袋放下去投進他懷裡，摸到他的鬍子才知道不是她的主人。他把她帶到一個洞裡，洞裡坐著他的老母親。祖姆魯德問那母親，她能不能在太陽底下替她捉蝨子，老婦人在洞裡已經一個月沒出過門，說好；等老婦人睡著了，祖姆魯德穿上一個被賊殺死的騎兵的衣服，繫上他的劍，騎上他的馬，往空曠的地方走了十天，第十一天來到一座城。城門口站著軍隊，還有埃米爾和大人物；她一騎過去，他們就都下馬，吻著地面喊：真主賜你得勝，我們的主上蘇丹。因為那座城的習俗是，國王無子而死，軍隊要出城到郊外等三天，從某個方向來的第一個人，他們就立為國王。「他們沒有問她。」國王說。「沒有，主上。她沒給他們時間。」「她說她是個有身分的人，和家人吵了架。」「是。」「那很快。」「她非常快，」我姐姐說，「也非常累。」

於是她做了一年國王，而且做得很好，就像故事說的：她免了稅，放了囚犯，糾正了冤屈；她留在宮裡，只帶兩個小太監，不讓任何男人靠近。每個月的第一天，她在跑馬場上為全城擺宴，下令關店；她把一盤甜米飯放在一個空位前面，自己坐在寶座上看著大門。第一個坐上那個位子的是一個藍眼睛的男人，說他名叫阿里，是個織工；她叫人拿來一張沙盤，用銅筆畫了一個圖形，說：你的名字不是阿里。後來是那個賊，另一個名字。再後來是那個老人。每個人都說了假名字，每個人都被沙盤揭穿，被叫去說實話；至於她對他們做了什麼，我不講。我姐姐用一個念帳單的女人的聲音講了，奶媽離開了房間，國王又把手蓋在孩子的耳朵上，說：「她問了他們的名字。」「是，主上。」「他們說謊。」「是。」「而她知道。」「她知道，主上。」「那為什麼問？」「為了看他們會不會說謊。」我姐姐說，她想過這個問題。「那是一個理由。」國王說。他沒有說它不是什麼。

第五個月，她在跑馬場的門口等著一個年輕人，他瘦，消沉，看上去像是病了一年，因為他確實病了一年；他在那盤甜米飯對面坐下，因為那是唯一還空著的位子，吃了起來，知道那意味著什麼的人說：年輕人，不要吃那個。他說他不在乎他們對他做什麼。她讓他吃完。她本可以在他第一口時就讓人帶走他，她卻坐著，看他把整盤都吃完，像一個女人看著很久沒吃過東西的孩子；然後她叫人帶他去洗澡，換衣服，夜裡帶到她面前。我姐姐說，那一夜她逗了他，像一個有一整年的時間想這件事的女人那樣；這個我也不給你講。早晨她對她的埃米爾們說，她想到這個男人的國家去走走，叫他們選一個總督，等她回來，她就同他去了，帶著駱駝、金子，和給他朋友的禮物；他在自己城裡施捨窮人，他們有了孩子，過著最快活的日子，「直到，」我姐姐說，「摧毀歡樂者來到他們身邊。」然後她比平常早了一點停下來，看著搖籃；她用平常的聲音說她累了。「那就停。」國王說。那是他第一次在一夜之中對她這麼說，離天亮還有一個半小時。她停了。

第三百一十二至三百二十七夜。山魯佐德。到，十六道。未了：朱拜爾・本・烏邁爾與布杜爾夫人，還沒開始；一本名冊；以及一個兒子，他的眼睛跟著燈走。

致撒馬爾罕之王沙・贊曼，敦亞佐德敬上，她管夜簿。你要未了，在這裡，是從夜簿抄來的，是第三百二十七夜天亮時的樣子；那一欄一夜一夜變得不多，我想你不是需要全部的人。阿里・沙爾與祖姆魯德：講完了，「直到摧毀歡樂者來到他們身邊。」朱拜爾・本・烏邁爾與布杜爾夫人：還沒開始。一本名冊，在第五本。一個兒子，他的眼睛跟著燈走。不在未了裡的：第三百二十二夜他問我你現在會在哪裡。我說，在河邊，如果路是乾的。「路不是乾的。」國王說。他說對了；雨下遍了整個這個國家，我想，也下在你那邊。那是他第一次問起任何人。我沒有告訴他我寫信給你。我想我不必。奶媽把她七隻貓裡的兩隻帶到了這座房子。國王什麼也沒說。有人看見孩子很久很久地盯著其中一隻看。毯子還在我的墊子旁邊。奶媽說它擋風。她錯了，她自己也知道。紙非常好。這封信我用了兩張，其餘的我留著寫未了。

## 第22章 · 第三百二十八至三百四十六夜：朱拜爾與布杜爾夫人，與信

哈里發哈倫又睡不著了，我姐姐說這種事在他身上發生的次數，比巴爾馬克家的人受得了的還多；馬斯魯爾是那個非得想辦法的人，他依次提出花園和星星、三百名妃嬪各在自己房裡走動而沒人看著、法學家的辯論、詩人、機智的人、漂亮的少年；每一樣哈里發都說：「我的心不傾向這個。」「那麼，我的主人，」馬斯魯爾說，「砍我的頭吧。」然後，因為沒有別的可提了，他走到門口，發現說笑人在等著，大馬士革的阿里・本・曼蘇爾。「我要講我親眼看到的，」說笑人說，「還是我只是聽來的？」「你若看見了什麼值得講的，」哈里發說，「就讓我們聽；因為聽到的不像看到的。」三十多夜裡，這是哈里發第二次這麼說。國王同他一起說了，很輕，慢了半拍。他臂彎裡的孩子被聲音引得抬頭看，國王停下來，低頭看他，像一個人看著一隻聽懂了一個字的狗。

說笑人是為了領津貼到巴士拉，一個人走出來看城，迷了路，來到一座大門前，門上兩個銅環，長椅上方有葡萄架，聽見一個女人在唱歌，聲音是不快樂了一陣子的人的聲音。他把簾子掀起一指寬。一個女孩抬頭，派她的侍女來問他這把年紀有沒有羞恥，他說他渴了。他們用金壺給他水，他喝了很久，一邊看；等他再也喝不下去，他說他心裡不安。「為了什麼？」「為了時間的轉折。」她告訴他她是布杜爾，那座城裡一位珠寶商的女兒，他報了名字，她就從座位上走下來，說：現在我告訴你我的事。我是個和愛人分開的情人。她的愛人是朱拜爾・本・烏邁爾，沙伊班人的埃米爾，有一天他走進她房裡，侍女正在給她編辮子，他看見了什麼他不喜歡的、或沒懂的東西，念了一句詩走出去，從此再沒有寫過信給她。她用詩寫了一封信，答應說笑人，如果帶回一個回答就給五百第納爾，沒有就給一百，作為辛苦費。

朱拜爾去打獵了。他傍晚回來，擁抱了說笑人，後來說笑人說，他覺得自己擁抱了整個世界；他擺開一張刻著詩的桌子，求他吃。「我一口都不吃，」說笑人說，「除非你答應我的請求。」他把信給了他。朱拜爾讀了，把它撕成碎片，扔在地上。「別的我都答應你，這個不行；我沒有回答給她。」可是說笑人氣得起身，他抓住他的衣襟，說：「她不是對你說，帶回回答給你五百，沒有就一百嗎？留在我這裡，你會拿到五百。」於是說笑人留下，吃了，一個女孩唱歌，朱拜爾在第二節詩時昏倒在地；早晨，一個侍童拿著五百第納爾來，傳了一句話，要他別再回去找那個派他來的女孩。他回去了。她站在門後。她什麼都知道，從撕信到昏倒；他問她怎麼知道的，她說戀人的心有眼睛；她給了他那一百，抬起臉對著天，求真主對朱拜爾做祂對她做過的事。

說笑人第二年又來領津貼。布杜爾的家門口有僕人，街掃得乾乾淨淨；朱拜爾的家長椅壞了，沒有侍童。他以為有人死了，站在路上為那座房子哭，一個奴隸走出來，說主人還活著，是被愛上某位夫人這件事打倒了，像塊石頭坐著，不要飯也不要水。得對他念詩才能把他喚回來。「歡迎，曼蘇爾的兒子，」他說，「玩笑成了真。」他又寫了一封信。她回了。可是她寫得很硬，一行又一行，說笑人在交出去以前讀了，說：「他會死在這上面」；就把它撕成了碎片，請她再寫一封；那封也很硬，他又撕了。第三封她換了一種筆跡寫，邊寫邊哭，封好，叫他說：她今晚是你的客人。朱拜爾讀了，昏了過去。他們聽見她腳鐲在走廊裡叮噹作響。他已經站在地上了。天亮以前，他們有卡迪和兩個證人，結了婚，聘金十萬第納爾，她從袋子裡取出來，除了給卡迪的一把以外，全部還給了他。然後他對說笑人說了愛怎麼從她那裡傳到他這裡：新年那天，她在河上的船裡，同十個女孩和一把魯特琴，他說，把那首再唱一遍，她不肯；他叫船夫拿橘子丟她，丟到他以為船要沉了。「愛就是這樣傳過來的。」朱拜爾說。

「他撕了兩封信，」我姐姐講完時，國王說。「說笑人？」「是。」「為了保護他們，主上。」「是誰的信？」「她的；他帶的。」「他先讀了。」「他得讀，才知道。」「而且決定朱拜爾承受得了什麼。」「是，主上。」「她第三封換了筆跡寫，」國王說，「她寫了他承受得了的。」「是，主上。」「這是不是謊？」我手裡拿著蘆管，看著夜簿。我姐姐說：「這是同一個女人，同一天。」「我問的不是這個。」國王說；可是他沒有再問，而我從那以後一直在想，替兩個人帶信的人該怎麼做，也想我自己的。

第三百二十八至三百三十七夜。山魯佐德。到，十道。未了：也門的六個女奴，還沒講；一本名冊；一封從河邊來的信，還沒讀給國王；以及一個兒子，他開始尋找他父親的聲音。

從第七個星期起，我姐姐就抱著孩子餵奶講故事，孩子吃奶時她的句子也不斷；奶媽說那是違反常理的天賦，國王說那是唯一需要的天賦。我姐姐說，那只是和在黑暗裡講故事一樣。可是我注意到她開始把眼睛放在孩子的臉上，而不是國王的臉上，她丟了一個字的時候，現在是孩子在對的地方發出一個小聲音，把字還給她；而國王，從來沒有一次懷疑她是在對誰講，這時候坐得很靜，像一個人發現房子還有另一道門。

第三百三十七夜，信從河邊來了。那是一只小皮袋，上面有一枚帽子形狀的印，一個騎手把它送到側門，渾身六天的泥，門房得過吩咐，把它拿給我而不是給國王。信是一張撒馬爾罕紙，折成四折。上面寫著：「從奧克蘇斯河的驛站。路不是乾的。灰馬在第四天瘸了，我換了一匹栗色馬，名叫耐心，不是我取的。河水高，我們等了兩天渡船。驛站的管事請我在他的簿子裡寫名字和身分，我寫了旅人，他看了很久，說這是第一次。這裡有一隻鳥，坐在屋頂上，說一個字，我在任何字典裡都查不到。我什麼也沒數。我發現自己走過戒指而沒看見它們，然後停下來看，要看我是不是看見了它們，那也是一種數。男孩的頭髮長了嗎？把未了寄來。告訴我哥哥，路不是乾的。」我讀給國王聽。他胸口上睡著孩子，沒有動。「我知道它不是。」他說。過了一會兒：「寫給他。入冬以前回來。」「他知道，主上。」「寫。」我寫了；我想到那個撕了兩封信的說笑人，想到他們兩個如今都透過我說話，而他們都不知道對方被告知了什麼。

接下來的九夜，我一口氣給你，因為我沒怎麼在聽。也門人和他的六個女奴，白的、棕的、胖的、瘦的、黃的、黑的，他叫她們一個一個在杯子旁用詩讚美自己的膚色，他讓她們和解，給她們都穿上長袍；哈里發馬蒙花六萬第納爾把她們買走了，又把她們連同那六萬第納爾送還給她們的主人，那個離了她們活不下去的人。哈里發哈倫和房間裡的女孩，和阿布・努瓦斯，他因為一個穿三層外衣的少年花了一千迪拉姆，被典押在酒館。那個偷了狗吃過的金盤的人；亞歷山大城的騙子和警察；三個警察首長，每個都講了自己怎麼被騙；賊和錢莊老闆；庫斯城的騙子；哈里發的叔叔易卜拉欣和一位商人的妹妹。它們全是關於被騙的人，國王在第三百四十四夜這麼說，孩子聽見他的聲音就笑；我姐姐說他說得對，她自己也注意到了，最容易上當的，是那些完全確定自己不會上當的人。

那個月，哈桑在側門給我一本小書。它來自銅匠市場的一個文具商，他用不是我們任何人的筆跡把故事抄下來賣，四分之一迪拉姆一本，裡面有漁夫、阿齊茲與阿齊扎、駝背，有幾處是錯的，我不細說。每一則的結尾，他都劃一條橫線，寫著：事情就此了結。我拿去給國王，因為我不知道還能拿它怎麼辦。他把孩子夾在臂下，翻了一會兒。「它有未了嗎？」他說。「沒有，主上。」「那他們怎麼知道她停在哪裡？」「他們不知道，主上。他們劃一條線。」「一道劃。」「一條橫跨整頁的線。」「讓他們去。」國王說，就像他以前對染匠門口的木箱說的那樣；可是他沒有把書還給我，它現在在雪松箱裡，在絲綢底下，和撒馬爾罕來的紙放在一起。

第三百三十八至三百四十六夜。山魯佐德。到，九道。未了：手被砍掉的女人，還沒開始，她在第十九夜被許給國王，就是明天；一本名冊；一封從河邊來的信，已回覆；以及一個兒子，他一聽見父親的聲音就笑。

致撒馬爾罕之王沙・贊曼，敦亞佐德敬上，她管夜簿。你的信在第三百三十七夜到了，我讀給他聽了。未了附在裡面，從第三百二十八夜到第三百四十六夜，比看起來短得多。國王說：入冬以前回來。我是照他的話寫的，不是我的話，放在最後面，他要是問起可以找到，不過他沒問。男孩的頭髮長了。這個我沒辦法給你看，他也不會給你看。我有一件事要坦白，因為你要的是未了，沒有別的。那就是我會把事情略掉。我不像說笑人那樣把要帶的東西撕掉；我只是不寫。我沒告訴你，講到祖姆魯德殘酷的地方，他把手蓋在孩子的耳朵上，說到三個人受到的處置，他說那是一個理由。我沒告訴你他問過我兩次你有沒有好馬。我把這些寫在另一張紙上，折在這一張裡面。你可以不讀就燒掉。我發現我畢竟不知道，一個在兩個人之間帶信的人該怎麼做，而我想知道一個國王會怎麼做。驛站屋頂上那隻鳥，我父親說，是在說河邊人的話裡的「還沒」；他沒說他怎麼知道；我沒告訴國王。明天是第三百四十七夜。她沒有忘，我想他也沒有。能寫時請寫。紙非常好。

## 第23章 · 第三百四十七至三百五十六夜：手被砍掉的女人

第三百四十六天下午，我姐姐睡過一覺，坐在床沿，孩子睡在她肩上，沒有開場白就對我說：「書裡沒有說。」我知道她指什麼。我說我早就怕是這個。「那女人讚美真主，」她說，「全部就是這樣。她不對他說什麼；沒有人問她；故事在河邊就結束了。如果我把剩下的給他，那是我的，不是故事的。」「無論如何都是你的。」「如果我不加，那就是故事的。」她看著孩子的耳朵。「第十九夜他問我，她有沒有說，我說我沒被告知。我說再往後有個女人會說。我並不知道自己許了一個諾，直到他開始數。」我說她可以先說書裡寫了什麼，然後說她要繼續。我說我會用兩種墨水寫。她說那是書記的答案，它確實是。「這是不是謊？」她說。那是幾夜前國王問布杜爾第三封信的話，我不知道她聽見了。「只要你說出來，就不是。」我說。她想了想。「不，」她說，「只要我說出來，就不是。」然後她把孩子交給我抱，她平時很少這樣，好讓她挽頭髮。

第三百四十六天的傍晚，我一進門，國王就說：「是這一夜了嗎？」自從第十九夜，他沒有大聲說過一次那個數字，我也沒有對他說過。「是這一夜，主上。」他點頭。他親手給孩子洗了臉，奶媽這一次允許了，他打發奶媽去照顧她的貓；他把沙漏放在地上，放在他弟弟從前坐的地方。然後他對著門，用他提出請求的聲音說：「宰相。」我父親一直站在那裡，像他一直站的那樣，手臂微微彎著。「坐。」國王說。「這是那個女人的一夜。」我父親從來沒有在那個房間裡坐過。他看著地面，那裡只有毯子和我的墊子；他坐下了，背靠牆，很笨拙，像一個四十年沒有在任何人面前坐過地板的人；我把墊子往他那邊挪了一寸，沒有理由，他沒有看我。

「我說的是第三百四十七夜，主上，」我姐姐在枕頭上說，「我說的是我想。說書人對編號的看法並不一致。可能是前一夜，也可能是後一夜。」「是今夜。」國王說。她看了他一會兒，沒有再就這一點說什麼。

那夜開頭是前一夜開始的故事的結尾，那是哈里發的叔叔易卜拉欣的，哈里發馬蒙要他講講他見過的最稀奇的事。他騎馬出去，聞到食物的氣味，抬頭，在格子窗後面看見一截手腕，比任何東西都可愛；他對兩位陌生的紳士說他們的朋友在等他們，就混進了那座房子，於是屋主把他當成客人的客人，客人把他當成屋主的朋友；他吃了，喝了，唱了，屋主問到他的名字，跳了起來。「食物，」易卜拉欣說，「我已經如願，可是手和手腕，我還沒有如願。」屋主把家裡的每個女人一個一個叫下來給他看；最後一個是他妹妹，那就是她的手腕；他當夜把她許配給易卜拉欣，附一萬第納爾，連同一副太大、房子容不下的嫁妝送到他家。我姐姐講得很快，沒有看國王；我想，就像她想讓我想到的那樣，她把一隻手和手腕放在了那個沒有手的女人前面。

然後她開始了。有一個國王頒布了一道命令，凡是施捨任何東西的人，就砍掉他的手；於是人人都不再施捨。一個乞丐來到一個本身也在挨餓的女人面前，向她乞討，她說：我怎麼能給你什麼，國王砍掉所有施捨者的手？他憑真主的名義懇求她，她動了憐憫，給了他兩個圓麵餅。國王聽說了，派人叫她來，她的手被砍掉了，她回了家。她的袖子垂著回家，我想街上沒有人看她，因為那是他們全都小心不去看的一天。過了一陣子，國王對他母親說他想成親，母親說奴隸女孩裡有一個美得無與倫比，但有一處缺陷；他問是什麼，她說她的兩隻手都被砍掉了。他要見她。他被迷住了，娶了她，並不知道是她；她給他生了一個兒子。「他不知道，」國王說。「是，主上。」「是他自己砍的。」「是。」「而且沒有問她的名字。」「她的名字沒有說，主上。」「他沒有問。」國王說。其他的妻子嫉妒，寫信給國王，說那女人不貞，孩子才剛出生。他寫信給母親，叫她把那個女人帶進沙漠，丟在那裡。「他寫信，」國王說。「是，主上。」「他是用信做的。」我姐姐說是的。

於是老王后帶著她，孩子掛在她脖子上，把她丟在那裡；她走啊，哭啊，來到一條河邊，渴得發狂，跪下去喝水，孩子從她脖子上滑進了水裡。她沒有手可以接住他。她坐在岸上。兩個男人來了，問她哭什麼，她告訴他們以後，他們問她想不想讓他們把孩子救出來，他們禱告，孩子從水裡出來了，平安無事。然後他們問她想不想把手照原來那樣還給她，她說想；他們禱告，手還給她了，比先前更好。「你知道我們是誰嗎？」他們說。「真主知道。」「我們是你的兩個麵餅，你施捨給乞丐的，就是它們害你被砍掉了手。所以讚美真主，祂把你的手和你的孩子都還給了你。」她就讚美真主。

「書到這裡就停了，」我姐姐說，「說書人到這裡就停了，說讚美真主。我說過我不在這裡停。」國王沒有動。我父親靠著牆，一隻手平放在身邊的地上，像一個人在船上穩住自己。那個女人，我姐姐說，起身，帶著她的兒子和她的手，在河裡洗了；她看了她的手很久，像一個人看著借來的東西。然後她回去了。她沒有去找她自己的人，因為她沒有。她去了那座城，去了王宮的大門，對衛兵說：告訴國王，他的妻子來了，帶著她的手。他們把她帶進去。國王在桌邊。他看著她，像人看著被告知已經死了的人；他站起來，坐下，說不出話；她站在門口，兒子在她臂彎裡，把手伸出去，張開，像人在表示它們是空的。然後她說了。我看見我姐姐在講的時候，不是看著國王，而是看著他頭頂上方的牆，那裡有一塊鳥形的汙漬。「你砍了我的手，我不留著它。你用一封信把我送進沙漠，我不留著那個。我來是為了說這個。我不需要你說什麼。」她就站在那裡。我姐姐說，她說的就是這些。我想，那是我姐姐給過任何人的最短的一段話，她用的是那個女人的聲音，不是她自己的。

「再說一次。」國王說。我姐姐又說了一次：「你砍了我的手，我不留著它。」「再說。」她說了第三次，聲音一樣，我看不見她的臉，因為燈在她背後。「她留下來了嗎？」國王說。「我不知道，主上。」「說。」「我說不了，主上。我沒被告知。」「不，」過了很久，國王說，「說出來就夠了。」然後，對著房間，不是對任何人：「說出來了。」我姐姐把臉在孩子的頭上貼了一下。我父親的嘴張開了。我覺得他像一個要開口的人，那些話他有了好多年，卻一次也找不到哪一句該先說。「宰相。」國王很低聲地說。「還沒。」我父親閉上了嘴。我後來想了很多關於那個「還沒」。它是舊的字；它不是舊的聲音。

天亮時他沒有立刻拿起夜簿。他翻回第一頁，在邊上之邊上的底部，在那六個字之後，用他方正的字寫了第七個：手。那是衛兵傳話裡的字。他沒說為什麼。我沒有問他。然後他坐著看它，也看夜簿封板裡面的那綹頭髮，和那些都劃掉了的點；然後他從我手裡接過夜簿，從頭讀起，一直讀到最後。

那天早晨，在走廊裡，我父親把一張折得很小的紙放進我的手裡，是他一直藏在袖子裡的。上面有七個名字，是他寫的：是七位新娘，城裡已經沒有任何人能把她們的名字交出來了，是從外省帶來的陌生人，沒有人能說出母親的名字或手藝。他認識她們。他親自把她們送到門口。他沒有把她們寫下來，因為沒有人叫他寫，而他也沒辦法問他能不能寫。我那天中午在側門把她們寫了，單獨一頁，在第五本裡。那是這幾本裡唯一一頁沒有母親說的話的，我在每個名字底下都留了空行，以防萬一。我沒有問他那張紙他放了多久。他安靜地說了一句「還沒」，像是對自己說，然後說：「現在。」

第三百四十七夜。山魯佐德。到。未了：虔誠的以色列人，還沒開始；一本名冊；以及手被砍掉的女人，講完了，而不知道她有沒有留下。

九夜，我一口氣給你，因為我姐姐就是一口氣給的。虔誠的以色列人，他把紡紗的錢施捨了，用盤子和罐子換了一條發臭的魚，在裡面發現一顆珍珠，乞丐來要時他分了一半給他，乞丐說他是來考驗他的使者。阿布・哈桑・齊亞迪，一個去麥加的人把一萬迪拉姆存在他那裡，他當天就花了，第二天早晨那人回來，他跑出家門，卻被哈里發召見，先知在夜裡出現了四次，說：救阿布・哈桑；而呼羅珊人聽說經過以後，說：「你要是一開始就告訴我實情，我不會逼你；我一點都不要了；你清了。」「那是第二個。」國王說。「主上？」「第二個不留著的人。」那個被朋友借了五百第納爾的窮人，遇見三個陌生人說他們有一筆他父親的寄存，回家才發現那都是朋友安排的。那個巴格達的破產者，夢裡被告知去開羅，為此挨了打，而總督告訴他，他曾夢見在巴格達一座噴泉底下有寶藏，卻沒有去；那人回家，在自己的噴泉底下挖。哈里發穆塔瓦基勒和瑪赫布芭，他因為她的傲慢拋棄了她，兩個人在同一夜夢見和好，醒來寫了同一首詩；他死後，他的四千名妃嬪都忘了他，只有一個人哀悼他，直到死去，葬在他身旁。「她留住了。」我姐姐說，她在結尾很少自己說什麼。「主上。」「是。」國王說。他沒有用任何特別的語氣說。第九夜，她開始了國王的女兒與猿，沒有講完，因為天亮抓住了她，那是不講完唯一誠實的理由。

第三百四十八至三百五十六夜。山魯佐德。到，九道。未了：國王的女兒與猿，才剛開頭；一本名冊；以及一個兒子，他開始認得自己被叫的那個名字，還不知道那是他的。

## 第24章 · 第三百五十七至三百八十一夜：烏木馬、烏恩斯・瓦吉德，與第一場雪

第三百五十七夜，我姐姐開始了烏木馬。波斯有一位國王名叫沙布爾，新年節日那天，三個國家的三位智者給他獻上三件禮物：一個手持喇叭的黃金人，任何敵人從城門進來，它對著他吹，他就倒地死去；一只銀盆，盆裡有一隻金孔雀和二十四隻金雛，每過一個鐘點，白天夜裡，孔雀啄一隻雛、叫一聲、拍一下翅膀；還有一匹黑木頭鑲金的馬，騎的人想去哪裡，它就載他去，一天走一年的路。國王說他們要什麼都給，他們要的是他的三個女兒。最小的那個隔著簾子看見她的丈夫：一個一百歲的人，鬍子染過，眼睛像生肉的顏色；她回到房間，把灰撒在頭上。她哥哥，卡馬爾・阿克馬爾王子，月中之月，從一趟旅行回來，聽見她哭，就去對父親說這樣不對；聽見這話的那位智者對國王說，如果王子不相信那匹馬，就讓他試試。他只告訴王子一個機關，在右肩上，說：「轉這個。」就走開了。馬載著他升入空中，一直向上，向上，沒有停。

「他只被告知一個機關。」國王說。「是，主上。」「被一個對他懷恨的人。」「是。」「而另一個沒有告訴他。」「沒有，主上。可是他在天空裡，靠近太陽時想，造了上去的機關的人，必定也造了下來的；他用手摸遍了馬身，每一處，在左肩找到一顆像公雞頭的螺絲，轉了它，馬就開始往下降。」國王手裡握著孩子的手，用拇指一個一個摸那些指節，像是在找機關。「應該有人告訴他還有另一個。」他說。「他自己找到了，主上。」「那是不同的事。」我姐姐說是。「總是有另一個嗎？」國王說。「在故事裡有，主上。」「在故事外面呢？」她沉默了那麼久，我以為她沒聽見。「我不知道，主上，」她說，「我很久沒有在故事外面了。」國王什麼也沒說。過了一會兒，他把孩子的手一折一折放回被子裡，說冷。

十三夜，我一口氣給你。王子降落在薩那一座王宮的屋頂上，在黑暗裡下去找食物，經過一個睡著的太監，劍放在他頭邊，吻了沙姆斯・納哈爾公主的臉頰，她醒來，說她父親說謊，說那個想要她的人是醜的，因為他不醜；早上，薩那的國王拔著劍，說王子應該照習俗在證人面前向他求親；王子說他可以為她對戰四萬騎兵，然後騎在馬上，從屋頂當著他們的面升起。她悲傷。他回來接她，她說，你去哪裡都帶我去，他就帶了；他把她帶到他父親城外的花園，把她留在一座夏屋裡，自己去準備遊行迎接她進城、準備一座宮殿，讓她看見他父親的威嚴。「他去準備一場表演。」國王說。「是，主上。」「給她看的。」「是。」「他沒有讓她就這樣進去。」他不在的時候，波斯的智者在花園裡採藥，發現了馬和公主，對她說王子派他來，載著她飛走了，希臘的一位國王把她帶走，智者被打、被關起來；王子走遍世界一年，向人打聽一個女孩和一匹木馬，被當成瘋子。他找到她時，她正在裝瘋，被綁著，沒有人能碰她；他以波斯醫生的身分來見希臘國王，把她治好了，條件是國王把馬和軍隊帶到一片草地上，讓他把她放在馬上驅魔；他讓她坐在他身後，轉動機關，他們升起來，國王和他的軍隊在草地上站到傍晚。

第三百六十五夜下雪了。那是這座房子裡我們任何人記憶中的第一場雪；我只在山裡見過兩次，從來沒在城裡見過；早晨我拿著夜簿進來，房間裡滿是新的白光，國王抱著孩子站在窗前。孩子五個月了，他有一種特別的、對不認識的東西的憤慨神情。他把它給了雪。「帶他下去。」國王說；奶媽說太冷、他會凍死，國王說他會凍到雪。我們下去了。他穿著樸素的外衣，走到院子中央，在未踩過的白雪裡，雪到腳踝，孩子裹在棉被裡貼著他的胸口，他站著。奶媽留在門口。我姐姐在上面的窗子旁；我看見她的手貼在玻璃上。我腋下夾著夜簿站著。他彎腰，用空著的手抓了一把雪，放到孩子臉旁；孩子過了一會兒，伸出一根手指去碰，很快縮回來，看著那根手指。然後他又做了一次。國王笑了。那不是從很深的地方升上來的笑；是短短的一聲，像一個人得到了他沒預料到的東西。然後他回頭看我們出來的地方，看見他留下的痕跡：一行腳印，從門口到他站的地方。「中午就沒了。」奶媽說。「是，」國王說。他踩著自己的腳印走回門口，一次一隻腳，把每一隻靴子放進它留下的腳印裡，像一個不想留下第二行的人。

第三百六十九夜，是星期二，我十六歲了。沒有人說過。國王在晚飯後切梨，像問鹽價那樣問我的年紀，我告訴他，他說：「從什麼時候？」「從早晨，主上。」「為什麼不說？」「我以為這不是留著的事。」他沒有回答。他把梨切成兩半，把有梗的那一半給我，那半比較好；我吃完才知道，他是特意為我切的。我姐姐一整天什麼也沒說，給了我一只陶工街來的上釉陶杯，杯裡有一條藍魚，說她本來想等夜簿完成再給。

第三百五十七至三百七十夜。山魯佐德。到，十四道。未了：烏恩斯・瓦吉德與宰相的女兒蓋頭玫瑰，還沒開始；一本名冊；第一場雪；以及一個兒子，他碰了它兩次。

第三百七十一夜是烏恩斯・瓦吉德與蓋頭玫瑰的開頭，它很長，我姐姐是照信的順序講的。一位國王的宰相的女兒，愛酒也愛詩，名叫蓋頭玫瑰，從窗格看著打球，把一個蘋果扔向一個叫烏恩斯・瓦吉德的年輕衛兵，問她的奶媽他叫什麼名字。奶媽幫他們送信。其中一封，出了差錯，掉在走廊上，一個太監撿起來拿給了宰相；宰相讀了，認出女兒的筆跡，去找他的妻子，哭到鬍子都濕了。我看著我父親。他在地上，背靠牆，坐在他現在坐的位置。他沒有哭；他看著自己的手，把它們翻過來，一隻，又一隻，像有人告訴他手上有什麼。「他哭了。」國王說。「他怕她，主上。他說有兩個原因：她是他女兒，國王是他主人。」「他為她蓋了一座城堡，」國王說，他其實已經知道那部分的故事，因為那是總被人講的部分。「在海裡一座島上的山上，主上，有衛兵和花園；他夜裡用船把她帶去，說那是一次遊玩。」「而他沒有問她。」我姐姐說故事沒有說。「不，」國王說，「它沒有。」我父親又把手翻了一次。那天夜裡，在走廊裡，我問我父親，他會不會也蓋那樣一座城堡。他想了想。「在城裡，」他說，「這樣我才看得見門。」這是他對我說過的關於這件事的唯一的話，我想那是誠實的回答，我之前不知道他有。

其餘的，我按它對我做的順序給你，也就是說一點一點，天亮總在不對的地方。烏恩斯・瓦吉德發現她家的門關了，門上寫著一行詩，他在夜裡瘋瘋癲癲地遊蕩；一頭獅子，他用詩奉承牠，把他帶到海邊；一位多年沒見過人的隱修者為他禱告，送他乘蘆葦紮的筏出海；他來到那座島，一位曾是伊斯法罕商人的太監讓他進了城堡：一座花園，圍著一池水，樹上掛著鳥籠，每個籠子裡一隻鳥，每當他哭，每一隻鳥都用自己的聲音回答他。可是她不在了。她用衣服接成的繩子從城堡垂下去，走到海邊，上了一艘漁船，被帶到一位國王迪爾巴斯那裡，他收留了她，發誓要找到那個年輕人，派一個宰相帶著禮物走遍世界。宰相找到了他，卻不知道：把他當作一個穿破衣的苦行僧，帶在自己船的甲板上回家。重逢的場面我不講，我姐姐講了很久，比開頭快一點。

第三百七十三夜，信從撒馬爾罕來了，是那只印著帽子形狀的皮袋，我親自拿給國王，因為它是寫給我們兩個的。「從撒馬爾罕。我第三十四天到的。布哈拉總督一直以兩個名字收稅，我的和他的。我沒有砍他的頭；我叫他來撒馬爾罕，坐在我坐的那個房間裡，看我記帳，四十天，不說話；四十天結束時，他把他有的都還了，還多了許多，並請我送他回去。我發現沒有什麼比看一個人大聲讀帳本更折磨人。商隊又過來了。我打開了我妻子死後三年前封上的那個房間。它只是一個房間。我讀了第二張紙。我沒有燒掉。我想被告知這樣的事；請總是告訴我。馬叫耐心，胖了。這裡下雪了；已經十一天。我會在你們山這邊第一場雪時到。你的未了就釘在我桌子上方；現在有兩欄，你的和我的。我的短一些。S。」國王閉著眼聽。聽到「請總是告訴我」，他睜開眼，看著我；我看著夜簿。「寫給他。」國王說。「寫下雪了。寫男孩用手抓了它。」

那天夜裡，在第二個時辰，我寫了，用撒馬爾罕的紙。「下雪了。男孩用手抓了雪，碰了兩次。國王踩著自己的腳印走回院子，一次一隻腳。你說請總是，我把這件放在裡面。」每個月初，我替他抄一份未了，寫在兩張紙上：一張寫未了，一張寫不在未了裡的。我開始先寫第二張。我沒有放進去的最後一件事是：第三百七十八夜，男孩對著燈說了「巴」，奶媽、我姐姐和國王同時都說那是他名字的開頭，而他看著我們三個人，帶著一個只是說給燈聽的人的輕蔑。

第三百八十夜，我父親沒有在黃昏時來站在門口。奶媽說他在織布工的巷子裡。我問做什麼，她說他沒說，只說他手裡拿著一張紙，每到一戶門口都看那張紙；她說得像說要下雨一樣。他在第二更過後回來，肩上有雪，鞋子濕到腳踝，去找國王低聲說了點什麼；國王點頭；我父親去睡了。我不知道他說了什麼。

第三百七十一至三百八十一夜。山魯佐德。到，十一道。未了：阿布・努瓦斯與三個少年，才剛開頭；一封從撒馬爾罕來的信，已回覆；一本名冊，在第五本；第一場雪，已經沒了；以及我的父親，他拿著一張紙出門去了。

## 第25章 · 第三百八十一至四百一十二夜：但以理的問題、沙・贊曼回來，與第二個孩子

蓋頭玫瑰城堡之後那幾夜，我按我姐姐給的方式給你，很快，像一個放繩子的女人。阿布・努瓦斯，他把自己關起來擺了一桌宴席，祈禱真主派一個配得上同吃的人來。巴士拉的一個人，把一切都花在他愛的一個女奴身上，她要他把她賣掉，因為他需要那筆錢。穆塔拉米斯的妻子，她丈夫離開太久，人們以為他死了，她的家人逼她再嫁，她盡可能說不，最後勉強嫁了；婚禮那夜丈夫回來，站在女人堆裡，她嘆著氣念了半句詩，他從人群裡回了後半句；新郎聽見了，邊走出去邊即興作詩，把房子留給了他們兩個。一個蠢人，他的驢被兩個騙子偷走，一個牽著韁繩把驢拉走，另一個把自己的頭套了進去。哈倫和三個詩人；哈倫和祖拜達在她的浴池。這些故事大半是在我姐姐的眼睛看著孩子時講的。他七個月了，有四顆牙，或者說有四個牙要長出來的地方，他拿給每個人看，當作證據。

第三百八十八夜，山上下了第一場雪；第三百八十九天早晨，大門口來了一個鬍子上有冰的騎手，騎著一匹胖了的栗色馬。門房跑來找我，我也跑了，我想；我記得我拿著夜簿下樓梯，因為我不知道怎麼把它放下。他已經下了馬。他手裡握著韁繩站著，看著我，我也看著他，我們誰也沒有說話，長得夠一匹馬打一個響鼻。「你早到了。」我終於說，那是我本來想說的那種話，卻沒想到是第一句。「雪來得早。」沙・贊曼說。他從馬鞍袋裡拿出一個用油布包著的包裹，放在我手裡。那是一本書。綠皮裝訂，一掌寬、兩掌長，我打開它，是我自己的字：全部的第二張紙，按我寄出的順序，是我折在信裡、叫他燒掉的那些。第一頁上他用他小而直的字寫著：不在未了裡的。「我沒法把它們留在撒馬爾罕，」他說，「我想你應該拿回去。以防你想知道自己略掉了什麼。」我沒有說我沒有留抄本；我想我說不出話。國王在我身後下來了。他看著我們兩個，看著那本綠書，看著他弟弟的鬍子，說：「你長了鬍子。」「是路。」沙・贊曼說。國王，八十天除了孩子沒有碰過任何人，伸出雙手捧住他弟弟的臉，抱著，看著它，像一個人看著商店裡他已經決定要買的東西。

那天夜裡孩子對著鬍子尖叫。他們花了四天才和好。我不能說沙・贊曼介意；他和從前一樣，把毯子放在我墊子旁邊坐著，把他的姪子伸直手臂抱著，像抱一只也許還燙的容器，用波斯語、用將軍的聲音對他說，他走了很遠的路。第三夜，孩子兩只拳頭抓住鬍子，不肯放，國王說這在一個不肯放開東西的家族裡是意料中的事；沙・贊曼眼睛濕著，說如果這是家族的特徵，他是從另一邊得來的。

第三百九十一夜國王笑了，笑的是漁夫和魚。那是一個小故事。波斯的霍斯魯得到一個漁夫獻的一條大魚，賞了他四千迪拉姆；他的妻子西琳說他做錯了，因為下次他賞一個朝臣同樣的數目，那人會覺得是怠慢，賞少一些，他會覺得被侮辱；國王說，國王不能收回賞賜；她說，叫他回來問他魚是公的還是母的。漁夫說這是雌雄同體，又得了四千。然後，扛著袋子走開時，他彎腰撿一枚掉了的迪拉姆，西琳說，看這人多小氣；國王惱火，叫他回來，漁夫說他彎腰是因為錢幣一面有國王的肖像，一面有他的名字，他不忍心有人踩到它；又得了四千，國王發了一道公告，說沒有人該採納女人的建議，因為那會讓他丟掉一個迪拉姆，再丟兩個。「他沒有給一次就停。」國王說。「沒有，主上。」「國王不收回賞賜。」「不收，主上。」「連一條魚的價錢也不收。」國王說；我覺得他看了我父親一眼，我父親在地上，背靠牆，一句話也沒說。

第三百八十一至三百九十三夜。山魯佐德。到，十三道。未了：虔誠的女人與兩個長者，還沒開始；一本名冊，在第五本；一個有四個牙位的男孩；以及沙・贊曼，他隨這一邊的第一場雪來了。

第三百九十四夜很短，書裡只用一段講它。以色列人裡有一位賢德的婦人，每天去一座花園，在祈禱前洗淨；守園的兩個老人愛上她，對她說，如果她不順從，他們就發誓說他們看見她和一個年輕人在一起。她說真主會保護她免於他們。他們打開園門，喊叫，說了他們說過要說的話；那時候的習俗是這樣，他們在街上把她的名字喊了三天，兩個長者每天去找她，把手放在她頭上，感謝真主把祂的憤怒降在她身上。第四天他們帶她出去要用石頭砸死。一個十二歲的男孩，名叫但以理，跟在他們後面，說，先別用石頭砸她；他坐在一張椅子上，把兩個老人分開，問第一個他看見了什麼，在哪裡。在梨樹下，第一個說。他問第二個。在蘋果樹下。「三天。」國王說。我姐姐說是三天。「他們喊她的名字喊了三天。」「是，主上。」「而沒有人問。」「第四天有個男孩問了，主上。」「為什麼不是第一天？」「我不知道，主上。沒有說。」「沒有人問在哪裡。」「沒有，主上。」他沉默了。「他只花了一會兒，」他說。「一會兒，主上。」「一會兒，問在哪裡。」他臂彎裡的孩子把臉轉向他的胸口。我看見我父親平放在地上的雙手微微壓了一下，像一個人壓著地板，看它能不能承得起他的重量。

第三百九十五夜以及之後的兩夜，哈里發歐麥爾坐著審案，兩個年輕人抓著第三個人的衣領把他帶到他面前，說他殺了他們的父親。他沒有否認。他是個貝都因人，那個老人用石頭打死了他的種馬，因為一頭駱駝跑進花園，他從牆那邊扔過來的石頭；他撿起同一顆石頭扔了回去。「這是公道的，」他說，「法就是法。」可是他有個弟弟，父親留給弟弟一筆錢，只有他一個人知道在哪裡，他請求三天時間把它交給一個監護人；歐麥爾問誰來作保，他看過所有的臉，選了一個陌生人，阿布・達爾，那人從沒見過他。阿布・達爾說好。三天過去。第三天，年輕人說他不會回來，因為他曾經逃跑過；歐麥爾說他若不回來，阿布・達爾就要受法律規定的處置。整個法庭都在流淚。最後一個鐘頭，汗流浹背，致禮，那個貝都因人進來了。「我把男孩交給了他母親的兄弟，」他說，「把錢的秘密告訴了他們，冒著正午的酷熱，作為一個自由人守了我的諾言。不要讓人說，誠信已從人間消失。」阿布・達爾說他為一個不認識的人作保，因為被選中了，而他受不了人們說慷慨已從人間消失。那兩個年輕人說：「我們原諒他殺了我們的父親，不要讓人說，人性已從人間消失。」他們也不肯從國庫領血價。他們說他們是為了真主才原諒的，凡這樣做的人，不會在恩惠之後再加責備。

三次，於是：不要讓人說。國王沉默了好一會兒。然後他一動不動地說：「他回來了。」「是，主上。」我姐姐說。「他不必回來。」「他給過承諾。」「而一個陌生人為他作保。」「是。」「宰相。」國王說。我父親抬起頭。「我聽說你傍晚拿著一張紙出去。」我父親說是。「多少戶？」「四十一戶，主上。」「然後呢？」「十三戶開了門。」他的聲音裡完全沒有表情；他在報帳，像他一向報帳那樣。「我說了我的名字。我說了我做過的事，說我是來敲門的那個人。我沒說我抱歉；我想那是讓他們拒絕的事，不是我該請求的事。第四戶一個女人朝我扔了一只鞋。沒有打中，她說她不是要打中的。第十九戶一位老人讓我進去，請我坐下，給我一杯水，一刻鐘沒有說話，然後告訴我在哪裡可以找到墳。我去了。」「是因為不應該被人說嗎？」國王說。「不是，主上。我去是因為有一張紙，紙上有名字。」「那被說了嗎？」「什麼，主上？」「宰相已從人間消失。」我父親思考了一下，像他思考所有的事。「我不覺得他們在說這個，主上。」他說，「我覺得他們在說許多別的。」國王點頭，彷彿那是對另一個問題的正確答案。他沒有叫他停。

第四百夜，燈剪過之後，我姐姐說：「主上，我要告訴你一件事，我希望由我自己來說。」他把孩子放在兩只墊子之間的毯子上。「我又有孕了，」我姐姐說，「從收成結束，我和奶媽都這麼算。我還不知道是不是兒子。」他很久沒有說話。「第一次，」我姐姐說，「我是用夜簿告訴你的。我想這次用嘴說。」「多久？」國王說。「還差一點不到兩百六十夜，主上。」他吸了一口氣。「我不畫點了。」「是，主上。」「孩子，」國王說，「不是點。」奶媽在她的角落裡沒有從縫補上抬頭，我看見她在笑。他把手放在我姐姐的手旁邊的被面上，像在第二十四夜那樣，然後留在那裡。天亮我寫未了時，把最後一行寫成了從前寫過一次的樣子：以及一個孩子，還沒有名字。我發現我的手認得路。

第四百零四夜，我姐姐講了一個關於國王的很短的故事。他偽裝出門，在一個女人門口討水，被她的臉打動，向她求歡。她認出了他。她領他進去，請他坐下，給他一本書，讓他讀，自己去忙點事；書裡講的是神的禁令，以及為通姦者預備的刑罰；國王讀了，發抖，把書還了，懺悔著走了。丈夫回來，她告訴他，他心想怕是國王的慾望落在了她身上，從此不敢靠近她。過了一些時候，她的親戚向國王控訴，說那個人租了一塊地，耕了一陣子，然後既不耕也不放棄；國王問他是什麼阻止他播種，他說：「我聽說獅子進了那塊地，我敬畏牠，不敢靠近。」國王明白了那個比喻。「獅子沒有踐踏那塊地，」他說，「它適合播種。種吧。」我姐姐停下。「誰告訴那個丈夫的？」國王過了一會兒說。「國王，主上。到了最後。」「應該早一些。」國王說；我父親在地上閉上了眼睛，我想他不是睡著了。

第三百九十四至四百零四夜。山魯佐德。到，十一道。未了：國王與那個拿書的女人，講完了；阿卜杜・拉赫曼與魯克鳥的羽毛，才剛開頭；一本名冊；一個第二個孩子，還沒有名字；以及一位宰相，他去過四十一戶人家。

八夜，我一口氣給你，因為那裡面除了天氣沒有多少別的。魯克鳥的羽毛，大到可以裝一壺水，由一個西方人從一座島上帶回來；阿迪和欣德公主，他們在一個節日的教堂相遇，她十一歲，他帶著禮物；迪伊比勒和卡爾赫門口的夫人；摩蘇爾的伊薩克和一個商人；三個為此而死的戀人；修道院裡的瘋戀人；成為穆斯林的修道院長。第一場雪在屋頂上躺了九天，然後化成水；第十天，沙・贊曼，我們沒辦法讓他不怕冷，穿著外衣走到院子裡，站著看孩子把手指伸進雪裡的那個地方，國王下去站在他旁邊，兩個人都沒說他們在看什麼。

第四百零五至四百一十二夜。山魯佐德。到，八道。未了：阿布・伊薩與庫拉特・艾因，才剛開頭；一本名冊；一個第二個孩子；以及一匹叫耐心的栗色馬，牠是胖的。

## 第26章 · 第四百一十三至四百三十五夜：北方來的商隊，與一本白書

那頭八夜我一口氣給你，因為我當時正在學著寫一個新的欄，沒有好好聽。阿布・伊薩，哈里發家的一個王子，愛上他哥哥一個將領家裡的歌女，對誰也沒說；還有哈里發馬蒙，他突擊巡視他的將領們的家，聽十個女孩唱歌，再十個，再十個，直到那個王子不敢看的人走出來，她一唱，他就哭了；哈里發本可以留下她，卻說如果他有意於她，他寧願把阿布・伊薩放在自己前面，就把她給了他。「他問過她嗎？」國王說。「她在哈里發面前唱了出來，主上，用詩：說她愛他。」「那她是被問過了，」國王說，「這就是有的那種問法。」還有法特赫與哈里發穆塔瓦基勒；阿布・蘇瓦伊德與一個漂亮的老婦人；埃米爾阿里・本・塔希爾與女孩穆妮斯。有一位巴格達的女傳道人，西特・馬沙伊赫，和一個男人辯論三夜，辯的是我不給你講的問題，她用《古蘭經》、聖訓、以及他自己的話把他駁倒。國王問誰贏了，我姐姐說她從來沒能記住辯論的條件，只記得女人贏了。那幾個星期她有一種新的坐法，腰後墊著靠枕，一隻手放在孩子將在的位置上，她講完整個阿布・伊薩，那隻手一動不動。

第四百一十三至四百二十夜。山魯佐德。到，八道。未了：開羅的阿里，還沒開始；一本名冊，在第五本；一個第二個孩子，還沒有名字；以及一位宰相，他去過六十三戶人家。

第四百二十一天，中午，侍童哈桑，他從來不叫阿卜杜・巴基，兩級一步跑上樓梯，說北門外來了一支商隊，帶著封印的一張紙，門房不知道怎麼辦。我跟他下去，因為在側門帶著名冊接待陌生人是我的差事。在樓梯腳我遇見我父親，門房派人叫他來的；我第一次看見我父親可以變灰。不是他臉的顏色，那總是他臉的顏色。是一種靜，像一塊布罩在籠子上那樣罩住他。他手裡拿著那張封好的紙。我從他手臂上讀了。它說，遵照宰相第十九個月為向京城供應少女所下的命令，北方邊區的總督送來十位良家女兒，連同嫁妝和一隊護送兵，在節日前抵達。

「我在第十九個月寫的，」我父親說。他對著那張紙說。「那時城裡已經沒有可給的了。我給每個省都寫了一次。我再也沒有寫過。」「主上，」門口的軍士說，他不知道自己在對誰說話，「從邊區來要走二十六天，她們是在新月時出發的。」「是，」我父親說，「我明白。」國王就在我們身後。我不知道是誰告訴他的；沒有人；我想是這座房子有時會告訴他事情。他沒有對我們任何一個說話。他穿著樸素的外衣從側門走出去，站在路上。

她們一共十個。最小的十四歲；最大的，我想，十七歲。穿著好的羊毛斗篷，兩排站著，嫁妝在她們身後的車上，是銅鍋、一匹麻布和幾只罐子；她們被告知要帶斗篷，因為京城夜裡冷，她們就帶了。有一個頭上還頂著一只鍋，忘了放下。最小的那個拉著身邊女孩的手，身邊那個閉著眼睛。沒有人在哭。她們站著，像人被教過在大人物看著自己時該怎麼站。「出發時有多少？」國王問軍士，用他提出請求的聲音。「十二個，主上。兩個在路上發燒死了。埋在第三個驛站，我有她們的名字。」「交給夜簿。」國王說。他很久沒有再說話，久得似乎過了很長時間。然後他往前走了一步，走到站得最近的那個女孩面前，說：「你叫什麼名字？」

他每個人都問了。他沒有說她們安全了，也沒有說他抱歉；他站在每個人面前，雙手垂在身側，問她的名字、她的村子，聽她回答，好幾次那是我跟不上的名字，好幾次是他從沒聽過的地方；我站著，在一張散頁上，盡可能快地寫。然後他說：「你想回家嗎？」問了九次，九次她們都說是，帶著一種恐懼，彷彿那是一個可能被收回的問題。第十個是個叫蘇麥雅的女孩，十五歲，會寫她的名字，不會寫別的。她看著我懷裡的夜簿，像一個人看著一條別人告訴過她的河。「我想學寫字。」她說。「不想回家嗎？」「我想以後再回家。」「以後。」國王說。我姐姐已經下來了，一隻手扶著牆；她站在他後面一點，等他問完，她從他身邊走過去，對離她最近的蘇麥雅只說：「你會拿書嗎？」「會，夫人。」「那你就是我們一直在等的人。」我姐姐說，那不是真的，是善意的，我沒有問過她是不是知道。

我父親那天下午把那張文書寫在膝蓋上，在走廊裡。致北方邊區總督。向京城供應少女之事暫停。少女連同嫁妝由護送兵送回，回程費用由國庫支付。「暫停。」國王說，他在我父親肩後看著。我父親停下來。「不是結束嗎，主上？」他很輕聲地說，筆還在手裡。「暫停。」國王說。我父親寫了。我注意到了那個字。那是一個還沒有找到另一個字的人的字。

那天傍晚我父親在走廊裡對我說，他在第十九個月沒有寫第二封信，因為要寫，他就得說明第一封是做什麼的，而他以為最安全的是讓第一封自己失效。我說信不會失效。「不會，」他說，「我後來知道了。」

那天夜裡她們十個睡在馬廄上方那間長屋，那是留給來訪總督的妻子們的，門開著。我父親叫人把鑰匙拿來，放在門外的窗台上，讓任何人都看得見它沒有轉過。沙・贊曼和軍士坐在樓梯上，帶著一盞燈，因為，他說，他是個知道被召來是什麼滋味的人。沒有人睡。第二更，我姐姐，她本來不該上樓梯的，帶著燈上去了，我拿著墊子跟在她後面，她坐在一張床的床尾，在斗篷中間，給她們講漁夫，因為那是她學會講的第一個故事，結尾是瓶子裡的精靈。最小的那個，拉著另一個人的手的，在講到一半時問，沒有抬頭：「國王殺人是真的嗎？」我姐姐沒有立刻停下。「是真的。」她說。「現在呢？」女孩說。我姐姐看著燈。「還沒有。」她說。「那是什麼意思？」「意思是你明天問我，我會把到那時我所知道的告訴你。」沒有人說話。然後有人在黑暗裡笑了一聲，對著什麼也沒有，像太害怕而不能哭的人那樣；我姐姐繼續講漁夫；那個精靈，答應過海底的一百樣東西，照常從瓶子裡變成煙冒了出來。

第十九個月寄出的不是一封信，是四封。北、南、東和山區；國王事先不知道，早晨問我父親還有沒有別的，我父親，他從來沒有對他說過謊，說還有三封。騎手那天就出發了，騎最好的馬，帶著同樣的文書。南邊的商隊在第二個驛站被攔住，掉頭回去了；裡面有十一個女孩，走了六十天，沒有人想過問有沒有理由繼續走。東邊的在河邊被攔住，坐在岸邊，有些女孩第一次哭了，因為鬆了一口氣，她們被告知要勇敢，也一直勇敢。第四支，山區的，那裡幾乎沒有路，沒有消息傳回來。騎手出去十一天，說找不到商隊。我父親說，有可能它根本沒有出發。他說這話的聲音，像一個盡他所能報告的人；他自己把它寫進了未了，用他自己的字，那是他從來沒有做過的：一支山區來的商隊，沒有找到。

那天傍晚我去銅匠市場的文具商那裡買了一本白紙的書，一百頁，在第一頁上我寫：來到門口，又回家了。我在下面寫了十個名字和村子；我發現我的手寫它們時不需要換一支筆。我本以為會不同。我拿著那一頁上去時，國王要它。他把它放在膝上坐著，然後說：「讀。」我在房間裡把十個名字依次大聲讀了，自從第一本書開始以來，房間裡沒有任何名字被這樣讀過；每讀一個，他就在我後面把那個名字輕聲再說一遍，像人在重複一種他正在學的語言裡的字。我讀完，他什麼也沒說，然後他說：「再來一次。」我就再讀了一遍。

那九個在第四百二十五天跟著軍士走了，每人一袋銀子，坐在裝著鍋子的車裡。在車輪邊，最小的那個對我姐姐說：「你說過要明天問。」「我說過。」「我在問。」我姐姐，一隻手扶著輪子，說：「他問了你的名字。這是我知道的。」「這很多嗎？」「比第十九個月多。」我姐姐說。女孩想了想，像人對價錢點頭那樣點了點頭，車從北門駛出去，最小的那個揮了手。第十個留下了。她第一天傍晚問，能不能用她自己的字把那九個名字寫在白書裡，我寫的下面；我說可以；她寫得很差，舌頭咬在牙齒之間，我沒有糾正。它們現在在那裡，兩行，一行在上，是我的，一行在下，是她的，任何人翻到那一頁都看得見有人在學。那兩個死掉的，我寫進了第五本藍書，寫上各自埋葬的驛站；她們是五本新娘的書裡僅有的兩個沒有被劃掉的名字，而且在同一本裡。我不知道我還應該做什麼。我姐姐，那時她已經明白了，說這不是可以靠做得正確來回答的問題。

那個月剩下的我也可以一口氣給你。開羅的阿里，商人的兒子，他葬了父親，把整座房子花光，連大理石和木工都賣了，去了巴格達，那裡有一座沒有人肯住的空房子，他說他非住那座不可；有四十夜是講它的。朝聖的人和老婦人。鬧鬼的房子，和一筆財寶，最後被一個已經一無所有、再也不會被房子嚇到的人找到，我姐姐說，這是這種財寶唯一能被找到的方式。蘇麥雅坐在我墊子旁的毯子上，那毯子現在有兩個人坐，學拿蘆管，把字母表的第一個字母寫了兩百遍，覺得羞愧，又寫了一遍。第四百三十夜，國王來看那一頁。他什麼也沒說。他把它舉到燈前，翻過來，看背面，墨水透過來的地方；然後遞還給她，說：「它是直的。」

第四百二十一至四百三十五夜。山魯佐德。到，十五道。未了：塔瓦杜德，阿布・胡斯恩的女奴，還沒開始；一本白書，裡面有十個名字，和第五本藍書，裡面有兩個；一個正在學拿蘆管的女孩；一張給北方邊區總督的文書，裡面有一個不是最後一個的字；以及一支山區來的商隊，沒有找到，是我父親的字。

## 第27章 · 第四百三十六至四百六十二夜：塔瓦杜德，與一個還沒有求的恩典

第四百三十六夜，我姐姐開始了塔瓦杜德。巴格達一位富商，長期祈禱之後終於有了一個兒子，第七天給他取名阿布・胡斯恩；父親死後，兒子被朋友們探望，他們說哀悼是少女的事，把他帶去澡堂，一年之內錢就沒了，只剩下他父親留給他的一個女奴塔瓦杜德，她五尺高，會彈魯特琴，每本書她都知道。她叫他帶她去見哈里發，要價一萬第納爾；如果哈里發覺得貴，就說：試試她。哈里發問她擅長什麼。她說語法、詩、法學、七種、十種、十四種誦法的《古蘭經》，章、節、字母的數目；還有醫學、邏輯、精確科學；還有魯特琴；又補了一句：「我若唱歌跳舞，就是誘惑；我若盛裝塗香，就是殺人。」他從巴士拉派人去請世上最好的韻律學家、《古蘭經》誦讀者、法學家、醫生、占星家、數學家、哲學家，七十個，他們走進房間，不知道為了什麼。七十個人你看我、我看你；其中最年輕的，一位數學家，紅到了耳根。她坐在金凳上，揭去面紗，說：「你們哪一位是法學家？」

「七十個，」國王說，「和一個女孩。」「是，主上。」「她問是哪一位。」「她問哪一位是法學家，主上，然後開始。問題要依她自己選的順序。」「這很公平。」國王說，他把下巴支在手上。沙・贊曼在毯子上睡著了，嘴微張；孩子睡在國王身上；我父親在角落裡，醒著。我父親說，一萬第納爾比國庫一個月付給北方駐軍的還多。「她值嗎？」國王說。「我們聽聽看。」我父親說，那是我聽過的他最接近玩笑的一句話。「接著講。」

五夜裡，法學家和《古蘭經》誦讀者向她提穆斯林受考試的那些問題：什麼是義務，多少次叩拜，醒來時該做什麼，朝覲的條件是什麼，最後啟示的是哪一節。這些我不給你講。到第五夜，那些法學家裡最年輕的，雙手放在膝上，像一個被叫去等著的男孩。她回答它們就像人從壺裡往杯子倒水，從不灑出來，也從不看杯子。只有一個答案國王要求再聽一次。「有哪些不可改變的法則？」法學家說。「有四種，」塔瓦杜德說，「夜與晝，日與月，它們支撐生命與希望；沒有人知道它們會不會被毀滅。」國王說：「再說一次。」我姐姐又說了一次。「夜與晝，」他說。「還有日與月，」我姐姐說。「支撐希望。」「是，主上。」他沒有再說什麼。

第四百四十一夜我姐姐說不出話。不是發燒，雖然她已經燙了兩天；是她一張嘴，那些字就卡在喉嚨裡，像冷麵包。她懷孕三個月了，奶媽，一個星期沒說話的人，說她今晚不會講，明天不會，後天也不會，誰要說不是，就會在門口看到她。國王已經被告知了。他說：「那就停。」那是自第一夜以來房間裡第一次沒有故事。他和孩子坐著，沙漏放在身旁地上，還有燈；天亮我寫夜簿，第四百四十一夜，到，未了：塔瓦杜德，法學家被截住，醫生還沒有；我劃了一道，他走過來看。「它是直的。」國王說。那是他第一次這麼說我的一道。

這樣的夜有三個。它們很安靜，孩子一次也沒有哭，裡面沒有少什麼我說得出來的，到了第四個，故事該開始的時辰，國王沒有回頭，說：「敦亞佐德。接下來是誰？」我說是醫生。「他問什麼？」我說我不知道。「你在房間裡。」「我在，主上。」「你每夜都聽了。」我說我寫夜簿，沒有留故事；我留的是它們剩下的東西。他說：「那就是剩下的全部嗎？」我看著我姐姐，她在枕頭上睜著眼睛，看著天花板，臉上是一個不打算幫忙的人的表情。「我可以試試。」我說。

我告訴你那是怎麼樣的，因為我答應過什麼都不略掉。我坐在我的墊子上，張開嘴，出來的是我讀未了的那種聲音：平，快，停頓都在錯的地方。「醫生站起來，」我說，「請她描述骨頭的構造。」我停住了。我聽得見。我姐姐在枕頭上，沒有轉頭，低聲說：「不要像在念一樣講。要像你在現場一樣講。」「我在現場。」「那就講。」我就講了。我講骨頭，人的身體有三百六十塊，血管一樣多；體液；哪些澡堂最好，是水甜、空間寬、空氣好、裡面的空氣有四個季節的那種；還有舌頭，真主把它安排為思想的翻譯，眼睛是燈籠，鼻子用來聞，嘴唇是守門人。我講了一個半小時，略掉很多；我停下時，國王說：「那像書記在念一張單子。」「是，主上。」「那是一張好單子。」沙・贊曼，我以為他睡著了，從毯子上說：「明天再做一次。」

第四百四十四夜。敦亞佐德。到。未了：塔瓦杜德，醫生答完了，占星家還沒有；一本名冊；一本白書；一個第二個孩子，還沒有名字；以及我的姐姐，她在床上。

我是把它寫在那一行的頭上，那裡一向寫著山魯佐德，寫了才明白我寫了什麼，我本想劃掉，然後沒有劃。早晨我姐姐從桌上拿起夜簿，讀了，什麼也沒說；她把那一頁微微轉向窗口，像人想看清一樣東西那樣，然後遞還給我。國王站著讀。他讀到那一行的頭上，停住了；然後他把拇指放在那個名字旁邊，像他把拇指放在那些道旁邊。我不知道那是什麼意思。我沒有問過他。

我講了十七夜的塔瓦杜德。我講占星家，七個行星和十二宮，月亮的軌道；還有一個問題，白天來時夜變成什麼，夜來時白天變成什麼，她回答，祂使夜進入晝，使晝進入夜。我講那片曾被太陽照過一次、直到審判日不會再被照的低地，那是紅海的底，摩西用杖打過的地方。我講天堂裡那五個既不是人、不是精靈、也不是天使的：雅各的狼、七眠者的狗、以斯拉的驢、薩利赫的駱駝，和先知的騾子杜爾杜爾。「一頭狼，」國王說。「雅各的，主上。那一頭被冤枉的。」「說牠沒有吃那個男孩。」「牠沒有。」「所以牠在天堂裡。」「是，主上。」「因為沒有做那件事。」國王說。我沒有答案，也沒有試著給。第四百五十三夜我注意到孩子，他自秋天起就轉頭朝向他父親的聲音，這時轉向了我的；我停在數學家講到一半的地方，國王說：「接著講。」可是我想，我從那以後講得有點不一樣了。蘇麥雅，她坐在我墊子旁邊的毯子上已經十一夜，蘆管閒在手裡，事後在走廊裡低聲對我說：「它是不是總是像它原來那樣？」我說不是。我說在講的時候，我把它改成我背得動的樣子。「那誰會知道？」她說。我說他們不會；這就是為什麼要留一本夜簿。她想了一下，舌頭咬在牙齒之間。「那你要寫另一件事，」她說，「你改了什麼。」我沒有想過。我開始在第二張上寫它。

我講棋。哈里發請來巴格達最好的棋手，他和她下了一局，輸了，再下，又輸了，被讓子，她的后、右車、左騎士；他接受了，她一步一步走，直到她的一個兵成了后，在他面前放了一子，他吃了。「量已經量好，貨已經平衡，」她說，「吃吧，直到撐滿；人子啊，你的毀滅只是你的貪婪。你不知道我只是誘你嗎？看：這是將死。」他把衣服給了她，只留下褲子，並發誓只要塔瓦杜德在巴格達就不和任何人交手。「她讓他吃了。」國王說。「是，主上。」「然後給他看那要付的代價。」「是。」他沉默了一下。「這種事，」他說，「對一個貪心的人，只能做一次。」我講雙陸。我講魯特琴，它是裝在一只紅緞袋子裡拿來的，一把舊而磨光的琴；她把它放在膝上，彎下身，像母親彎身餵奶那樣，彈了十二個調式的前奏，直到整個集會像海一樣搖擺；然後唱。我是在第四百六十和四百六十一夜講的。我沒有說我緊張；可是我發現我講魯特琴時手放在膝上，像她一樣。我姐姐，一隻手放在裙子下的弧度上，聽我講，就像人聽一個在自己家裡走動的人。

第四百六十二夜我姐姐起來了。她坐在床尾，腰後墊著靠枕，說她要把最後講完，沒有人可以說她不該；奶媽在門口，沒有說話。哈里發付阿布・胡斯恩十萬第納爾買她，說：塔瓦杜德，求一個恩典。她說：我求您把我送回賣我的主人。他照辦了；另給她五千第納爾歸她自己，讓阿布・胡斯恩做他終身的陪侍，每月一千第納爾；我姐姐說：「國王啊，請驚異這個女孩的口才和她學問之大，也請想想信士的長官的慷慨，他對她說，求一個恩典，而她求他把她送回她的主人。」然後她停了。國王沉默了一小會兒。「她求的是他，」他說。「是，主上。」「她沒有為自己求。」「沒有，主上。」「那和什麼都不求不一樣。」「不一樣，主上，」我姐姐說，「那是另一張單子。」然後他說，仍然看著燈：「敦亞佐德。」

「主上。」「求一個恩典。」我說我不明白。「你講了十七夜，」國王說，「我是哈里發。求。」我不知道說什麼。我想精確：我沒有任何答案。我想要的東西那麼少，那麼久，而且總是為別人，所以我試著想我自己的會是什麼時，像把手伸進一只已經送人的錢袋。我想到夜簿；我荒唐地想到那只有藍魚的杯子；毯子上，蘇麥雅的蘆管掉了，她撿起來。「我不知道，主上。」我說，「我不知道我要什麼。」「這是允許的。」國王很和氣地說。「我可以在結束時問您嗎？」「什麼的結束？」「夜簿，主上。」他想了想。「那是很遠的路。」他說。「是，主上。」「我會數。」我父親在角落閉上眼睛；沙・贊曼在毯子上非常用力地看著牆；我姐姐說：「這是個好答案。」她很少這樣說。然後國王拿起筆，在裝訂邊那一指寬的地方，在劃道的下面，在最後一道的下面，用他方正的字寫了一個小小的記號，我沒有細看，因為那是他的：可是我想那是一個日期。

第四百四十五至四百六十一夜。敦亞佐德。到，十七道。未了：塔瓦杜德，講完了，她求的是他；一本名冊；一本白書；一個正在學拿蘆管的女孩；以及一個第二個孩子。

第四百六十二夜。山魯佐德。到。未了：死亡天使與驕傲的國王，才剛開頭；一本名冊；以及一個恩典，還沒有求，一位國王說他會數到那一天。

## 第28章 · 第四百六十三至四百八十二夜：天使的故事，與一個留在未了裡的樵夫

從第四百六十二夜的末尾起，我姐姐講死亡天使的故事，一講就是二十夜。我不會全給你講。夜簿裡它們是一欄國王與墳墓，我睡不著的夜裡把那一欄讀回來，它像一條街，家家戶戶的房子都已經賣了。她那時懷孕四個月，從床上講，背後墊著那只大靠枕，守著奶媽的規矩：沙漏流過兩回，她就停，不管國王在等什麼。頭一個是一位國王，盛裝出巡，頸上掛著紅寶石項圈，驕傲得連路上站著的一個衣衫襤褸的人也不看一眼。那人抓住了韁繩，把嘴湊到國王的耳邊。國王求一點時間，回家向他的人民告別。「你永遠不會回去，也不會再看他們一眼。」然後她講另一個人，那個虔誠的人，他說，歡迎，我等你等得倦了，只求在禱告中被帶走，額頭貼在地上；他就那樣被帶走了。

第四百六十三夜是那位富有的國王，他蓋了一座門很結實的宮殿，每道門都設了守衛，第一次在裡面坐下用飯，對自己說：靈魂啊，你已積聚了世上的財富，現在安閒享受吧。有人敲門，整座宮殿都震動。僕人們拿著棍子衝出去。「你們都站在原處，」門口那個人說，「我是死亡天使。」國王就對他的人說：「告訴他，找個替身，替我去。」她在這裡停了，停了一口氣的長短。沒有人看著任何人。我父親看著地板，每當我們其餘的人還有禮貌不看他時，他就看地板；他曾經很長一段時間，是那個找替身的人。「我不收替身，」我姐姐用天使的聲音說，那並不是一個聲音，只是她自己的聲音，說得更平，「我只為你而來，要把你和你積聚的東西分開。」然後財寶開口了。國王咒罵它，它問他為什麼，它和他是同一種塵土做的，被放進他手裡，是為了送人的。「它說話了，」國王說。「是，主上。」「財寶。」「是，主上。」那夜他沒有再說什麼，我父親在他的角落裡用手指數著什麼，我知道數的是房子。

還有一位以色列人的國王，向天使求一天，又求一個時辰，被告知那個時辰已在帳上，已經過去，只剩一口氣了。「誰會和我一起在墳墓裡？」「只有你的所作所為。」「我沒有，」國王說。還有雙角者伊斯坎達爾，他經過一個窮到把墳墓挖在自家門前的部族，為的是每天早晨都看見它們，並且掃它們。他們的王取出一個頭骨，又取出一個，放在征服者面前，一個是虐待子民的國王的，一個是公正待民的國王的，然後把雙手放在伊斯坎達爾的頭上。「我真想知道，你是這兩個中的哪一個，」他說。伊斯坎達爾哭了，要給他宰相之位和一半的一切。他不要。他說所有的人都是伊斯坎達爾的敵人，因為他贏來的那些世界；所有的人都是他自己的朋友，因為他一無所有。就是這些。花了半夜，沙漏翻了一次。

然後是公正的阿努希爾萬，他裝病，派管事們走遍各省，為他找一塊從廢棄村子丟掉的泥磚，當藥用；很久以後他們回來，說沒有，整個國土上既沒有廢墟，也沒有被丟掉的磚。他感謝真主。他只是想知道。國王聽著，下巴支在手上，什麼也沒說。早晨他和我父親站在窗邊，沒有回頭，說：「一塊磚。」「主上？」「從一座被丟棄的房子來的。給我當藥。」我父親看著自己的手。「可能要一點時間，主上。」「是。」他在天黑之前就回來了。他去了皮匠巷，兩隻袖子捧著它進來，就像他從前捧那件壽衣的樣子：半塊磚，斷口那一面是灰的。國王看了很久，我沒有數。「皮匠巷。」「是，主上。」「還立著幾間？」「四間，主上。其中兩間只剩門框。」「放在門邊，」國王說，然後去睡了。

它就留在門邊。奶媽在門晃動的時候用腳抵著它。沙・贊曼把他那罐擦馬鞍的油膏放在上面。風從窗板底下進來，我用它壓住散頁；孩子那時候靠著東西可以坐了，兩回被拉開，嘴上沾著灰。整個冬天剩下的日子沒有人動它，也沒有人說它是做什麼的。

第四百六十五夜，我姐姐在開始講法官的妻子之前，先看了它一眼。以色列人的一位法官去朝聖，留他弟弟代他審案，也把妻子託給弟弟；弟弟想要她，她說不，他就讓人告了她。我略掉那時對她做了什麼，以及後來收留她的村子裡發生了什麼，因為我姐姐用四句話講完，而我一句話也做不到。她來到路邊的一間小屋禱告，病人從天底下各個角落來找她；有一個早晨，她門前站著的人，各有各的病，沒有一個認得她，是那個弟弟、一個賊、一個農婦，每一個都曾經對不起她。她站在門口，蒙著面，對他們說，你們身上的東西，要等到各人把做過的事說出來，才會解除。他們一個一個說了。然後她求真主治好他們，真主就治好了；法官是和他弟弟一起來的，他看她看得太久，說：「我有過一個妻子，如果她沒有死，我會說你就是她。」她告訴了他她是誰。「她原諒了他們，」我姐姐說，「三個都原諒了。」國王說：「她讓他們先說出來。」「是，主上。」第二部分，他沒有說什麼。

第四百六十九夜，造托盤的人和他的妻子，是白天禁食、夜裡去賣東西的人；他是那個空手回家的人，因為一位富人的妻子把門關上了，而他找到了離開那座房子的路，那條路只有故事裡的人才找得到。我不給你講那條路。他的妻子沒有問麵包去哪裡了。她說，如果鄰居今晚看不見我們的爐子冒煙，就會知道我們窮，而感謝真主就是把它藏起來；她就往爐子裡添滿柴火，點著了。一個鄰居來借一塊炭，隔著門喊他們的麵包要烤焦了，麵包真的在爐子裡，是街上最白的麵包。他們吃了，謝了真主。然後他們求祂免去他們勞作的辛苦，好把所有的日子都用來侍奉祂，屋頂就裂開了，一顆紅寶石從上面掉下來，照亮整間屋子。夜裡她夢見自己在天堂，先知們的座椅排成一行，義人的凳子在後面，她找到丈夫的凳子，看見側面有一個洞。「這洞是什麼？」「那是紅寶石的位置，它從你們屋頂掉下去的地方。」她哭著醒來。她叫他求它飛回去：「因為我們在這裡幾天的飢餓與貧窮，比你在義人當中的座位上有一個洞，容易忍受得多。」他求了，紅寶石就在他們眼前穿過屋頂飛起，不見了。蘇麥雅說：「我會留著紅寶石，然後把凳子補好。」奶媽笑了，一個月來第一次。「那不是那一種凳子，」我姐姐說。國王對著沒有人說：「她求的是那張凳子。」他把筆在手指之間翻了很久。

還有別的，其中一些我只給你它們的邊。哈賈吉把一個人鎖在籠子裡，籠子建在他身上，早晨鐵鏈躺在地上，籠子是空的；獄卒把壽衣和香草放在袖子裡去見總督，總督聞到氣味，問那是什麼，然後說：「你不知道，那個人在你面前呼喚的那一位，在你不在的時候救了他嗎？」我父親把一隻手按在他彎曲的手臂上，握住。還有一個鐵匠，能徒手從火裡取出燒紅的鐵；一位虔誠的人來問他怎麼做到的，他說，曾經有一個飢餓的女人到他門前，有一夜，他沒有做他打算做的一件事。他只說了這些，說得好像那是小事。

還有一個隱士，丟了他的雲，那朵雲一向在山裡跟著他，需要的時候給他下雨，他被指去找一位能把它祈求回來的國王；那位國王七天裡只有一天坐下聽請願，其餘的日子，他在宮殿後面一間破房子裡，穿著羊毛袍，與他的堂妹一起編棕櫚蓆，已經這樣過了四十年。「四十年的蓆子，」沙・贊曼說。「我在布哈拉替總督算帳，算了四十天，就以為自己是隱士了。」國王的嘴動了動；那不是笑，但已經在去笑的路上。還有一個被俘的士兵，敵人的女兒擺桌子的時候，他閉上眼睛誦經，她愛上了那誦讀，然後愛上了那個人；他們騎著一匹累得走不動的馬逃走，後面追來的軍隊，原來是來參加婚禮的天使。「那匹馬累了嗎？」國王問。那是他整夜問的唯一一個問題。

第四百七十八夜，她講山上的先知。他住在一處高地，在一眼泉水上方，白天看誰來那裡喝水。一個騎馬的人來了，喝了水，騎走了，地上留下一袋金子。第二個人來了，喝了水，看到那袋子，拿起來，走了。然後一個樵夫背著一捆柴來，坐下喝水；那個騎馬的人氣急敗壞地騎回來，問他袋子在哪裡，樵夫說他什麼也不知道，騎馬的人殺了他，翻他的衣服，什麼也沒找到。我姐姐沒有描寫。先知喊道：「一個人得了一千第納爾，另一個人被冤枉地殺了。」真主對他說：「專心你的禮拜，宇宙的安排不是你的事。騎馬人的父親曾經強奪過第二個人父親的一千第納爾，所以我把它還給兒子。而那樵夫曾殺過騎馬人的父親。」先知說，除了你，沒有神；你知道隱藏的事。我姐姐停了，把手放在她放手的地方，什麼也沒有說。

蘇麥雅，她分到毯子的一角和她的第三支蘆管，對著那片安靜說，用她覺得沒有人會介意的問題的那種聲音：「有人問過那個樵夫嗎？」「問他什麼，小傢夥？」我姐姐說。「問他有沒有做。」「真主知道。」「真主沒有問他。」沒有人說話。國王的手平放在夜簿的前板上，放著那綹頭髮的地方。「放進未了裡，」他說。我問他是哪一個，是那個問題，還是那個故事。「樵夫。」「他在故事裡沒有名字，主上。」「那就寫那個。」我就在我寫沒完成的東西的那一欄裡，寫了：一個樵夫，沒有被問過，在故事裡沒有名字。一個故事裡的樵夫，是沒有人能為他做什麼的東西；我知道。我就像寫每一件東西那樣寫了它。

第四百七十八夜。山魯佐德。到。未了：山上的先知，被告知這不關他的事；一個樵夫，沒有被問過，在故事裡沒有名字；一塊磚，在門邊；一本名冊；一個恩典，還沒有求。

隔天夜裡是擺渡人，他為了真主，載一位老人過尼羅河，還給他東西吃，老人告訴他，他明天中午會死在對岸一棵樹下，要擺渡人給他洗身，用他頭下找到的壽衣裹他，並把他的袍子、葫蘆和手杖留給一個會來要的人。那個人是一個以放蕩出名的年輕人，整夜在婚宴上，手上還有指甲花的染痕，他說夢裡有人告訴他往哪裡去。擺渡人把三樣東西都給了他。那夜他哭了，夢裡有人問他，真主讓祂的一個僕人找到了回祂這裡的路，他是否難過。我沒有看我姐姐，她也沒有看我。早晨，在蘇麥雅可以練習的角落那張紙上，有一個她寫的字，拇指那麼大，向左傾斜：到。下面她畫了一道。

島王講了兩夜。一個富人的兒子遵守了他臨終父親的唯一一條囑咐：不要指著真主發誓，無論真假；所以對任何向他提出的要求，他只憑對方的話就付，付到什麼也沒有了；然後他帶著妻子和兩個小兒子出海，船碎了。他獨自上了一座島，洗了身，喊了禱告，海裡的生物浮上來，在他後面禮拜。有個聲音告訴他寶藏在哪裡。船來了；十年之內那裡成了一個王國，他是它的王。他的妻子和每個男孩，都被不同的陌生人撈起，多年以後，每一個人都經過很長的路來到這座島：兒子們一個做王的書記，一個做管家，母親是一位商人船上的客人。王派這兩個年輕人夜裡看守那條船，為了保持清醒，他們彼此講自己的一生，其中一個說：「你母親叫什麼名字？」另一個說了，他們就撲到對方身上。母親在艙裡聽了全部，一句話也沒說，直到早晨。問到名字的時候，我父親站了起來，走出了房間，我從沒見過他在故事當中這樣做，他在數一百那麼久的時間裡回來了；國王沒有轉頭。

最後，第四百八十一和四百八十二夜，是阿布・哈桑，他去麥加那麼多次，別人跟著他是為了認水站，有一年，他打算獨自出發。在路上第一座清真寺裡，一個痲瘋病人坐在禮拜龕裡，說他想與他同行；他說不。在下一座清真寺，那個痲瘋病人又坐在禮拜龕裡，在他前面。就這樣到了阿拉法特，他撲到那人腳前，求自己先前拒絕的事，被告知不可能，眼淚也沒有用。往後每個驛站，那人都在他前面一站，到了麥地那他失去了他，那裡的老謝赫告訴他那是誰，人們求雨都是以他的名義。在阿拉法特，那人從背後拉了拉他的袖子，叫他求一樣東西；他求了三個禱告：愛貧窮；夜裡絕不躺在有保證的口糧上；以及能看見祂的面容。那人為他禱告，然後走了。前兩個，阿布・哈桑說，已經賜給了他，第三個他相信。我姐姐用一個人遞出鑰匙的聲音講了它。沙・贊曼從毯子上說：「第二個是難的。我一次只做到過三夜。」「你會求這三個裡的哪一個，敦亞佐德？」國王說。我說我不知道。「你有時間，」他說。他看著夜簿的裝訂，我看著我的手。

第四百八十二夜。山魯佐德。到。未了：蛇群的女王，才剛開頭，以及一位希臘賢者，名叫但以理，他還沒有兒子；一塊磚，在門邊；一個樵夫，沒有被問過；一本名冊；一本白書；一個恩典，還沒有求。

## 第29章 · 第四百八十三至四百九十八夜：蜜窖，與另一頭狼

希臘人但以理沒有兒子，有一夜，他躺著為這件事睡不著，想起真主聽那些來向祂求的人；他就求一個兒子來繼承他的學問，回家去親近他的妻子，她當夜就懷了孕。於是我姐姐在第四百八十二夜開始講蛇群的女王，第四百八十三夜接著講，我先說，這是她講過最長的一個故事，它像一疊碗，一個套一個：一位女王對一個樵夫講一位國王聽一位王子講，所以有些夜裡，她是在往下數第四個聲音裡說話。但以理搭船，船碎了，他回來時，整個藏書室只剩下五張散頁，他把它們鎖在一只箱子裡，鑰匙交給妻子，說如果她生了兒子，就叫他哈西卜・卡里姆丁，等他問父親留給他什麼的時候，把這幾頁給他。然後他嘆了一口氣就死了。占星家為孩子排了命盤，說他會長壽，會得到所有精確科學的知識，但是在那之前，生命的早年會有一場大險。他不肯學。送他上學，他什麼也不讀；叫他學手藝，他手裡出不來東西；給他娶了親，他就坐著。

那一帶的樵夫告訴他母親，如果她給孩子買一頭驢、一些繩子和一把斧頭，他們就帶他上山，他可以賺他那一份；她高興得當天就把驢買了。有一場暴雨，他們躲進一個山洞，哈西卜坐在一邊，隨手用斧頭敲地，聽見下面是空的，就挖，挖出一塊有環的石板，石板下面是一窖滿滿的蜂蜜。他們叫他留下看守，他們回去拿罐子。好幾天，他們來來去去，一罐一罐在街上賣蜜，他看守；快剩不多的時候，其中一個說：「是哈西卜發現的，他會下城去說，是我找到的。」他們都同意該怎麼辦。他們請他下去，把最後一點舀上來。他下去，舀了遞上來，說：「拉我上去吧，已經沒有了。」沒有人回答。他聽見驢走遠了。

他們哭著去見他母親。他們說，暴雨來的時候他們在山洞裡，他的驢掙脫跑掉，他追進山谷去，出來一頭大狼，把他撕成碎片，吃了那頭驢。「一頭狼，」國王說。「是，主上。」「又一頭狼。」我到那時才知道我一直在等這句話。「雅各的兒子們說過，」沙・贊曼在毯子上說，「對雅各說的，說的是約瑟。它沒有過時。」「它是一頭有耐心的動物，」我姐姐說。「它不爭辯。」母親打自己的臉，把灰撒在頭上，為他哀悼；樵夫們開了鋪子，成了商人，吃，喝，笑；每天他們給她送肉和水，她就靠他們送的活著，還謝謝他們。「他們餵她，」國王說。「每一天，主上。」「做這件事的人。」「是，主上。」他沒有回頭。「現在是幾間房子了？」我父親一直看著自己的手。「六十三間，主上，第六十四間只有屋頂。」「那算數嗎？」「我不知道，主上，」我父親說。「我數它，免得自己閒著。」國王點了一下頭，像他對一道直的劃痕點頭那樣；奶媽咬斷了她的線。

哈西卜坐在窖邊哭，說人該說的話，一隻蠍子從上面掉到他身上，他殺了它。然後，因為他是個從沒學會過任何東西、卻還是能想出一個問題的年輕人，他問自己，一隻蠍子怎麼會跑進一窖蜜裡。他找到它掉下來的那道縫，縫裡有日光，他用樵夫的刀把它挖寬，爬出去，進了一條長廊，走到一扇鐵門前，門上有一把銀鎖，鎖裡插著一把金鑰匙。鎖了那扇門的人把鑰匙留在上面，我後來想過這件事。門後是一片像銀子一樣閃光的湖，那是小蛇；一座碧玉的山丘，山丘上一把金寶座，寶座四周有一萬兩千張凳子，每張凳子上是一條一百肘長的蛇，眼睛像燒紅的炭。一條像騾子那麼大的蛇，背上托著一只金盤，盤裡是另一條，像水晶一樣清透，有一張女人的臉。「不要怕我們，年輕人，」她用他自己的話說。「我是蛇群的女王。」她叫他們給他拿水果，因為他們吃的只有水果。

他把自己的事全說了，從他什麼也沒學到的學校，到那根沒有人握著的繩子。「不會有壞事臨到你，」她說。「但我想要你留在我這裡一些時候，好讓我告訴你我的經歷。」哈西卜，一夜之前還在窖裡，現在在一座山下的廳裡，面對一萬兩千條蛇，說：「我聽從。」除此之外沒有別的可說。「她留下他，」國王說。「在故事裡是兩年，主上。」「為了給他講一個故事。」「她自己的，主上。」沙・贊曼從毯子上，用他沒人問他時說話的那種聲音：「這是一個很古老的辦法。」「安靜，」國王說，沒有發火；奶媽對著她的針線發出一個不是咳嗽的聲音。

她自己的故事是布盧基亞的。開羅一位以色列人的國王死了，一輩子埋頭讀書讀得彎了腰，留給兒子布盧基亞王位，以及在寶庫的一間內室裡，一根白大理石柱，柱上一只烏木匣，匣裡一只金匣，金匣裡一本書。布盧基亞讀了那本書。書裡描述一位要在末世派來的先知，年輕的國王愛上了那段描述（我姐姐就是這樣說的），他召來長老和祭司，告訴他們，他要把父親從墳墓裡挖出來燒掉，因為父親把這本書瞞著他。長老們說他父親已經死了，他的事在他的主手裡，不可以。他就去見母親，穿上羊毛袍子和涼鞋，徒步出發去找書裡那個人。「他想把他父親挖出來，」國王說，「因為沒有告訴他。」「因為藏起來，主上。」「那些長老很明理。」「是，主上。他們是長老。」

其餘的我只給你邊角，因為我姐姐講了十一夜，而夜簿不夠長。他到了一座島，島上有棕櫚樹那麼大的蛇在讚美真主，它們告訴他，它們是地獄裡的，地獄一年呼吸兩次，夏天呼出，冬天吸入，而它們是小的，被她的氣息吹出來的。他到了耶路撒冷，遇見一位叫阿凡的學者，他在書裡讀到，誰戴所羅門的戒指，人、精靈、鳥、獸都服從他，還讀到有一種草，塗在腳上可以乾著腳走過任何海，但只有帶著蛇群女王的籠子的人，它才肯說出自己的名字。所以他們抓了她。他們在她的島上放了一籠牛奶和酒，藏了起來，她從她那條蛇的背上下來，喝了牛奶，然後是酒，睡著了；他們把她頂在一個人的頭上帶上山，沿途的植物都開口說話，其中一株說：「我就是你們找的草。」「她是被牛奶騙的，」國王說。「是，主上。」「然後她放了他們。」「她告訴他們，戒指不是給他們的。她說，他們該去求的是另一種草，吃了它的人，在第一聲號角之前不會死。」國王沉默了一會兒。「你會吃嗎？」他說。我姐姐把手放在她放手的地方。「如果他們吃，」她說。「不然不吃。」「是，」國王說。

他們走過七個海，腳上塗了草汁，在水面上走，到了所羅門躺著的山，他在一張金寶座上，穿著綠絲，中指上戴著戒指，寶座下面有一條蛇。阿凡叫布盧基亞念咒，不要停。蛇噴火，說：回去，布盧基亞走出了山洞，阿凡沒有，他伸手去摸戒指，蛇再吹了他一口氣，他成了一堆灰。布盧基亞昏倒了。加百列來把他叫醒，叫他走他的路，因為先知來臨的時間還很遠；布盧基亞哭了，想起女王對他們說過的話，那遠遠超出他們的能力。我略掉阿凡的灰。我姐姐沒有略掉，但她用平平的聲音講，國王看著孩子。

然後布盧基亞獨自漫遊，我只給你留在我心裡的。一座島，土是番紅花，碎石是紅玉髓，夜裡海獸上來，每隻手裡拿一顆寶石當燈，和陸地的獸交談到天亮。一座島，樹上結的果實像男人的頭，被頭髮吊著，還有一些會笑會哭，海的女兒們上岸，手裡拿著寶石跳舞。蘋果樹下一個四十肘高的巨人，禁止他碰它：「因為你是亞當的兒子，你的父親忘了約定，吃了。」白色之地的精靈，他們每年與不信的精靈打一場仗，他們的王薩赫爾讓他騎上一匹母馬，說，不要下來，不要打她，不要在她臉上喊叫；又把兩頭烤駱駝綁在馬臀上，讓她穩一些，因為她知道他是亞當的兒子，害怕。兩天，她載了他七十個月的路。薩赫爾對他講了火的七層，每一層裡有什麼。我不給你講這些。我姐姐一夜就講完了，講得很快，眼睛看著孩子，國王把手遮在孩子的耳朵上，所有的人就只做了這件事。

他遇見一位天使，坐在他面前，面前一塊板，寫著晝夜的更替，另一位在卡夫山上，他的雙手不停地張開、合上，彎曲、伸直，他說：「我的手抓著大地的根。每當祂想用地震、饑荒、豐收降臨一塊土地，祂告訴我，我就做，不用離開我的位置。」蘇麥雅，她有毯子的一角和她的第四支蘆管，在停頓裡說：「他的手會累嗎？」「我不知道，小傢夥。」「他知道那是什麼嗎，他做的時候？是誰的？」「不知道，」我姐姐說。「他被告知的是土地，不是人。」國王說：「那是一種仁慈。」我看著他，因為他不說這種話；他沒再說別的。還有地底下的那條魚，那麼大，光是牠的頭就要三天才從先知爾薩身邊游過，他昏了過去；那個聲音說，每一天，我造四十條像牠一樣的。

到第四百九十七夜，女王全部講完了，布盧基亞已經走到兩個海之間的門，走過一片一半甜一半鹹的海面，遇見四位大天使去捉一條吃了一千座城的龍，最後來到一座島，島上有一個臉上有光的年輕人，坐在兩座砌好的墳墓之間哭泣。哈西卜到那時已經求過她兩次放他回家。她說她知道他會怎麼做：他會見他的母親，然後去澡堂，他洗完的那一刻就是她看見世界的最後一刻，因為澡堂就是她的終點。他發誓絕不去。「你就是發一百個誓，我也不信你，」她說。「你是亞當的兒子，你的父親發過誓，又忘了。」他哭了十天。第四百九十八夜，他第三次求她，蛇們為他哭，去找他們的女王為他求情，她接受了他的誓言，叫一條蛇帶他上到地面。那條蛇準備好了，要帶他走，哈西卜轉回身。「我想要你告訴我，兩座墳墓之間那個年輕人的故事，」他說。

「他又要了一個，」國王說。「是，主上。」「在門口。」「是，主上。」「他們都這樣，」沙・贊曼說。「我也是。」第四百九十夜，院子裡的杏花開了，國王早晨抱著孩子出去，把他舉到花前，孩子想吃一片花瓣；那幾天裡，那塊磚一直在門邊，孩子現在可以自己坐了，爬到它那裡，把自己拉起一半，被抱開，又爬回去。這件事也沒有人說什麼。

第四百九十八夜。山魯佐德。到。未了：兩座墳墓之間的一個年輕人，他正要講他的故事；哈西卜・卡里姆丁，在山下，他正要被放走；一個被告知是狼的女人；一塊磚，在門邊；一個樵夫，沒有被問過；一本名冊；一個恩典，還沒有求。

## 第30章 · 第四百九十九至五百二十夜：羽衣，與一條小魚

我姐姐在第四百九十九夜開始講那個年輕人的故事，背靠著靠枕，沙漏翻過放在身邊，我記得開講之前奶媽說：「不許超過兩回。」她說：「我看看。」那個年輕人是賈恩沙。他的父親特赫穆斯是喀布爾的國王，統治的城多得我數不清，卻沒有兒子；占星家告訴他，他會有一個，但只能是呼羅珊國王的女兒所生。他派他的宰相艾因・扎爾，帶著一千五百駝的絲綢和寶石，和一封九分是客氣、一分是威脅的信去了，婚事是代理締結的，後來生了一個男孩，像滿月夜的月亮。占星家為他排了命盤，說他在十五歲那年會遭遇危險與艱難，如果活過去，將比他父親更偉大。他被教著讀書和騎馬。他十五歲那年去打獵，驚起一隻顏色奇怪的瞪羚，帶著他父親的七個白奴追牠追到海邊，牠跳進浪裡，游到一條漁船上，一躍上了船；王子和七個人追上去，船就開了，來了一個傍晚，來了一陣風，早晨已經看不見陸地。

島我照她講的給你，也就是很快。第一座島上，泉水邊有一個人，說話像鳥的口哨聲，他們看著，他把自己分成兩半，往兩個方向走；山裡出來一群和他一樣的人，每個走到泉水邊，都分成兩半，朝陌生人跑來要吃他們。三個奴隸在沙灘上沒了。第三座島上有一座白大理石牆的城堡，一座水晶的宮殿，一個花園、一個水池、一把紅金的寶座，寶座四周是凳子，沒有人；他們就坐在那裡，王子坐寶座，三個奴隸坐凳子，他為他父親的城哭泣；海裡出來了猿猴，成千上萬，圍成一圈站著，爪子按在胸前，殺了瞪羚，擺上一桌金器，在他面前親吻泥土。他們用手勢告訴他，這座島從前是所羅門的，他現在是他們的蘇丹。早晨他發現船被鑿沉了。猿猴的四位宰相說，是夜裡沉的，因為他們知道他會成為他們的蘇丹，又怕他走。同一個早晨，四位宰相帶著他們的軍隊，一排一排站在他面前，用手勢請他在他們當中主持公道；我想他做了，因為他們滿意。「他們鑿沉了他的船，」國王說。「是，主上。」「為了留住他。」「他們怕他離開，主上。」「而且餵他。」「瞪羚和水果，用金器盛的。他還在河邊替他們射食屍鬼，他們打贏了仗。」「他在那裡快樂嗎？」「一年半，主上。然後他帶著他的三個人，夜裡逃走了。」

猿猴追他們穿過山谷，山谷裡全是像狗一樣大的螞蟻，從地裡爬出來撲向猿猴，黃昏時賈恩沙和他的三個人沿著山谷底逃，猿猴在後面，螞蟻在旁邊。到早晨只剩一個奴隸，後來一個也沒有了，賈恩沙脫了衣服游過一條河，抓著一根樹枝，獨自爬上對岸，把襯衣擰乾，哭到天黑。然後他走，吃地上的草，走到另一條河邊，那條河每到第七天就乾涸；他等著，在乾河床上走過去，到了一座城鎮，街上沒有人說一句話。他敲的第一戶人家，人們圍坐在一間屋子裡沉默著，用手勢叫他吃，喝，不要說話；第二天，那家的主人跟他打招呼，問他是誰，賈恩沙哭了，告訴他。

河那邊那座城鎮的人，我不給你講他們叫什麼。我姐姐講了，而在我第二張紙上，在「我改了什麼」底下，寫著我沒有講。他們是好客的。他們當中有個商人，在街上喊了三個月，說誰替他做半天活，他就給一千塊金幣和一個絕色的女奴，沒有人肯，因為沒有人相信半天的活值這麼多。賈恩沙想，換了誰都會這樣想，一個人不會為半天的活出這麼多，除非那半天危險；他說他肯，因為他已經沒有什麼可以被拿走的了。商人給他吃，給了他金子和那個女孩，第二天用騾子載他到一座高得沒有盡頭的山腳下，給他一把刀和一根繩，叫他把騾子絆倒，割喉，剝皮，剖開肚子鑽進去，讓人縫上。賈恩沙照做了。一隻大鳥把屍體叼到山頂，牠開始啄食的時候，他割開肚子爬了出來，鳥飛走了，他站在別的男人曬乾的屍體中間，往下看，商人在山腳下很小，向上喊著要石頭。整座山都是紅寶石。他扔下去兩百塊，請他告訴他下山的路；商人把它們撿起來，放到騾背上，走了。

他用兩個月翻過那座山，吃山上的草，來到一座山谷，谷裡有一座城堡，門口有個老人，手裡一根紅玉髓的杖，給他麵包，聽了他的事，說他的名字是納斯爾老人，鳥類之王，這座城堡是所羅門的，一年中有一天世界上所有的鳥都來被點名；他會把賈恩沙交給其中一隻帶他回家。這中間，他把城堡的鑰匙交給他，說他可以開城堡裡的任何一扇門，除了一扇。蘇麥雅用手捂住了嘴，又拿開。「我也會開，」她說。「他開了，」國王說。「他被告知不要，主上，他開了。」那間屋子有一座金子和水晶的亭子，一個噴泉，一些野獸和鳥的雕像，風吹進它們的耳朵就會唱歌，還有一個壁櫃，裡面折疊著所羅門的地毯。他在亭子門前的凳子上坐下，三隻像鴿子的鳥，大得像鷹，從天空的正中降下來，停在水池邊，脫了羽毛，成了三個姑娘，下水玩耍；他，多年沒見過女人，忘了自己的名字。

他對她們說話的時候，最小的那個說，她們是從看不見的世界來的，是來玩的；他說了一個男人會說的話，她叫他住口走開；他哭了；她們吃了他的水果，一直待到早晨，然後穿上羽毛，變成鴿子飛走了。他昏倒在地，躺了一整天。納斯爾老人從鳥類議會回來，找到他，聽了，說她們是精靈的女兒，一年來一次，如果他的心在她們當中的一個身上，就該等過這一年；到那一天，他該躲在一棵樹下，等她們下水以後，拿走他要的那位的羽衣，在老人從議會回來之前不要還給她。

第五百零九夜，講到鴿子的時候，我姐姐停了，一隻手按在肚子的一側，她的臉做了一個人在地面晃動時臉會做的樣子。奶媽說：「是嗎？」她說：「是。」國王一直在看燈。她伸出手，沒有看他，他起初不知道那是做什麼用的；然後他從地板上站起來，一隻手臂上睡著孩子，在床尾坐下，她拉過他另一隻手，放在她剛才放手的地方。我看著我自己的手。我不知道那有多久。「像一條魚，」他說。「哪一條？」我姐姐說。「不是世界底下那一條。」「不是，主上。是一條小的。」他沒有把手拿開，直到沙漏流完，奶媽，她什麼都見過又什麼都不說，把沙漏翻過來，什麼也沒說。

一年過去了，到那天他躲在樹下，三個人來了，脫了羽毛下水，最小的那個笑著說，如果有誰埋伏在這裡，他會誰都不要，只要她。他跑過去拿了她的羽衣。她的名字叫夏姆莎，太陽姑娘。她在水裡問他為什麼這樣做，他說如果還給她，她就會飛走，他就會死；她笑了，她的姐姐們也笑了，她說：「放心。我一定要嫁給你。」姐姐們借了衣服給她，不夠飛的。她在他旁邊坐下，用袖子擦他的眼淚。納斯爾老人回來的時候，讓她對著真主發誓，永遠不背叛他，她發了誓，他們待了三個月。然後她說她想跟他去他自己的國家，納斯爾老人叫賈恩沙把羽衣還給她。他還了。她穿上，說：「爬到我背上，閉上眼睛，塞住耳朵，這樣你就不會聽見天球旋轉的轟響，」然後她飛了。她一天半飛了三十個月的路程，把他放在喀布爾城外的一片草地上，陪他坐在河邊，一直到他父親的人出來。

「他把它還了，」國王說。「為了飛回家，主上。她遵守了她的誓言。」「而她沒有走。」「她在河邊坐下了。」特赫穆斯帶著軍隊出來，高興得哭了；王后來了，城裡的婦女們來了；國王為新娘在一座花園裡建了一座宮殿，下面有流水。宮殿建造的時候，賈恩沙叫石匠切下一塊白大理石，鑿空成一只箱子的樣子，把夏姆莎的羽衣放進去，用鉛封了蓋，叫人埋進地基，在上面起了宮殿的拱。我想到夜簿的前板，沒有去看它。「然後他把它埋了，」國王說。「在拱下面，主上。」他一口氣的時間什麼也沒說，我姐姐沒有去填。他們辦了盛大的婚禮，她坐著儀仗被迎進新宮殿，她一走進去，就聞到她羽毛的氣味。

她等到半夜，賈恩沙睡得很沉，就走到那個地方，貼著拱挖，直到挖到大理石，用手拔掉鉛，取出羽衣穿上。然後她飛起來，落在屋頂上，對宮殿裡的人喊：「去把賈恩沙叫來，我要向他告別。」他出來，看見她站在那裡，穿著她的羽毛。「你為什麼這樣做？」他說。「我的愛人，」她說，「我愛你愛得無以復加，我高興我把你送回你的朋友身邊，送回你的國家，讓你見到你的母親和父親。現在，如果你愛我像我愛你一樣，到塔克尼來找我，寶石城堡。」然後她飛走了。「她告訴了他在哪裡，」國王說。「是，主上。」「在她拿走它以後。」「以後。」「接著講。」

他昏倒了，兩個月裡，他父親向王國裡每一個商人和旅人打聽寶石城堡在哪裡，沒有一個人聽說過，國王給他送了歌手和女奴讓他開心，賈恩沙坐在她們中間，開心不起來。這時印度的卡菲德國王，他與特赫穆斯國王有血仇，聽說喀布爾的國王為兒子的憂傷那樣操心，竟忽略了軍隊，就出兵了，兩個國王打了七年。我不給你講那些戰役；我姐姐講了不少，我只寫下了地名，沒有寫其餘的。賈恩沙關在宮殿裡兩個月，沒有見任何人，然後問他父親怎麼了，為什麼不來；人家告訴他，國王在打仗；他說：「我只顧著我自己和我的愛，」叫人備馬，帶了一千騎兵當護衛，夜裡，在一片草地上，人都睡著的時候，他一個人騎走了。「他把他父親丟在戰場上，」沙・贊曼說。「為了一個姑娘。」「為了一個地方，」我姐姐說。「沒有人知道它在哪裡。」國王說：「他父親知道他去了哪裡嗎？」「不知道，主上。他只知道那一千騎兵回來了，沒有他。」

第五百二十夜。山魯佐德。到。未了：賈恩沙，夜裡一個人騎往一個沒有人聽說過的地方，他把父親留在城門口；一位印度國王，在城門外；一個太陽姑娘，在寶石城堡裡，她告訴了他在哪裡；一塊磚，在門邊；一個樵夫，沒有被問過；一個被告知是狼的女人；一本名冊；一個恩典，還沒有求。

## 第31章 · 第五百二十一至五百三十六夜：寶石城堡，與一個沒有被問過的女人

我把那一路的尋找快快給你，因為我姐姐講了五夜，裡面幾乎什麼都沒有發生，只有距離。賈恩沙在每座城鎮打聽寶石城堡，沒有人聽說過。他隨商隊往東走，到呼羅珊，到花剌子模，再走十五個月，到那條每到第七天就乾涸的河，過去，回到他住過的那戶人家，有人給他吃。第二天早晨，他在街上聽見同樣的叫喊，半天的活，一千塊金幣，一個女孩，他接了，商人沒有認出他。這回是一匹母馬。這回在山頂，商人在底下向上喊要石頭的時候，賈恩沙說：「你就是那個五年前對我這樣這樣的人，因為你我受了飢渴與苦役；現在你又把我帶回這裡，想要毀了我。以真主起誓，我不會扔給你任何東西。」然後他背過身去，走向納斯爾老人。「他認出他了，」國王說。「他認出了，主上。商人沒有認出他。」「他也沒有扔給他任何東西。」「一塊石頭也沒有。」國王沒有再說這件事。

老人也沒聽說過那個地方，那一年到他這裡來的鳥也沒有一隻聽說過；一隻大鳥背著賈恩沙要送他回家鄉，飛錯了路，把他放在野獸的國度，他說：「你走你的路，把我留在這裡；我就是死在這個地方，也不回去，除非我找到塔克尼。」於是獸王，名叫沙・巴德里，給他幾塊板子要他背下，並叫每一頭來見他的野獸都問一遍，沒有一頭知道；沙・巴德里又讓他騎一頭野獸去見他的哥哥希馬克，那人曾經是所羅門的囚犯，也從沒聽說過，希馬克又讓他坐一隻有四隻翅膀的鳥，每隻翅膀三十肘長，去見一位叫亞格穆斯的修士，他住在鑽石的隱修院裡，說他在諾亞的時代就活著，也從沒聽說過。然後，在宣誓那一天，所有的鳥獸和精靈來到修士面前，最後來了一隻黑鳥，又大又遲到，說牠和牠的兄弟們還是雛鳥的時候，在卡夫山後面的一座水晶山丘上，有一天早晨父母出去找食物，被一個馬里德抓住，帶到一座叫塔克尼的城堡，在一位名叫沙赫蘭的國王面前，因為牠們說家裡有幼雛，國王放了牠們。黑鳥帶賈恩沙到水晶山丘，再往前飛了七夜八天，把他放在一座山上；傍晚，他看見遠處有什麼東西像閃電一樣照亮了天空。它在兩個月的路程之外。那就是城堡。

在塔克尼，沙赫蘭國王的一個馬里德，當天正好被派出去辦事，在路上遇到一個凡人，問他的名字，聽了，就把他扛在肩上；因為公主把一切都告訴了她的父親母親，國王下了命令，凡是見到凡人，都要帶來見他。精靈之王騎馬出來迎接他，讓他騎上一匹母馬，帶他到一座牆是紅寶石、地是水晶的城堡裡；夏姆莎的母親在大廳裡來到他面前，說：「歡迎，我的孩子。我們的女兒對不起你，但請你看在我們的面上，原諒她的過錯。」賈恩沙叫了一聲，昏倒了。「是母親求的他，」國王說。「是，主上。」「不是那個姑娘。」「那個姑娘後來才來，主上，吻他的手，低著頭。」「接著講。」

他們辦了盛大的婚禮，在塔克尼住了兩年，然後他說，她父親答應過，他們一年住在他家，一年住在她家；精靈之王就造了一副紅金的轎子，頂上是綠絲的華蓋，四個馬里德抬著，在天地之間，一天走三十個月的路。他們降落在喀布爾的時候，正是那場戰爭最糟的時刻。城被圍了七年，特赫穆斯國王向他的大臣和家人告了別，因為他看不到出路；整座城都在哭，轎子降在宮殿的中央。那一夜的其餘我不給你講。我姐姐用幾句話講完，說馬里德們在黑暗中撲向圍城者的營地，兩天之內就沒有軍隊了，她說得像在讀夜簿上的一個數字。我在我第二張紙上寫了她講短了。故事不是這樣。故事讓國王和他的兒子和太陽姑娘一起坐在屋頂上看，還說那是極大的快樂。國王沒有抬頭。奶媽坐在磚旁邊，帶著孩子，開始給他講杏樹的什麼事。

印度的卡菲德國王，在床上被一個馬里德抓走，吊在半空中的鐵鏈上看他的軍隊，因為夏姆莎求情，被放走了，騎一頭跛腳的母馬；賈恩沙與夏姆莎在他們兩個國度裡住了下去，一年這邊，一年那邊，過了很多年。後來有一年，在去塔克尼的路上，他們降落在一條河邊的小島上歇息，她脫了衣服和侍女們下水；賈恩沙沿著河岸走，水裡有什麼東西把她帶走了，她一下子就死了。我不給你更多，我姐姐也沒有給更多。她的侍女們把她抬上來。她的父親母親來了，給她洗身，裹屍，埋在河邊，要帶賈恩沙回去；他請求在她的墳旁邊挖一座墳，好讓他死的時候能葬在裡面，精靈之王叫一個馬里德挖了，就走了；他坐在兩座墳之間。那就是在兩座墳之間哭泣的年輕人。沒有人說話。蘇麥雅用很小的聲音說：「他沒有回家嗎？」「沒有，」我姐姐說。奶媽把孩子，他醒著，一直看著燈，抱起來，在屋裡來回走，走到磚那裡，又走回來。

布盧基亞聽完，說他本以為自己走遍了地上每一個角落，但現在聽了這個，把所見的全忘了；賈恩沙指給他正確的路，他就走了。這一切，女王都講給了哈西卜。哈西卜問她怎麼知道的，她說二十五年前，她派了一條蛇帶著信去埃及，布盧基亞讀了，來到她的山上，那時她冬天去卡夫山了，她的代理在那裡，他向代理要那種讓人不死的草，蛇說她不知道在哪裡；然後一條蛇讓他閉上眼睛送他回去，他發現自己在穆卡塔姆山上。那他最後怎麼樣了？哈西卜問。她說，他走過一片海，到了一座島，島上有一棵樹，葉子大得像船帆，樹下擺著一桌食物，樹枝上有一隻珍珠與翡翠的鳥，是跟著亞當離開伊甸園的；每個星期五的夜晚，鳥說，聖者們都來這張桌子吃飯，吃完，桌子就被收上天去。他在那裡的時候，希德爾來了。布盧基亞問到開羅有多遠，希德爾說，九十五年的路程；布盧基亞哭了；希德爾說，兩隻手抓緊我，閉上眼睛。他往前邁了一步，說，睜開。布盧基亞已經在他宮殿的門口。他轉身要謝他，那裡沒有人了。

「一步，」沙・贊曼說。「九十五年的路程，一步。在奧克蘇斯河那條路上我就需要這個。」「他的母親還活著，」我姐姐說。「她高興得昏了過去。他們在她臉上灑水。」「那另一個呢？」國王說。「另一個，主上？」「被告知是狼的那一個。」「哈西卜的，」我姐姐說。「他最後上來了。蛇帶他上去，把他留在一個廢棄的蓄水池邊，他在日落時走進城，敲自己家的門。」他母親開了門，尖叫，撲到他身上；他的妻子出來，吻他的手。他們坐下，他問起樵夫們，他母親說他們來說是狼把他吃了，他們現在是商人，有房子有鋪子，每天給她送吃的。他叫她去告訴他們，她兒子回來了，要見他們。他們變了臉色。他們每人送來一套繡花的絲綢；第二天，商人們給他們出主意，每人拿出一半家產，七個人各帶著一半的錢和一半的奴隸來到他面前。哈西卜說：「過去的就過去了。我們遭遇的是真主的決定，命運比詭計強。」他一家一家去了他們的家，在每一家吃了一天一夜，輪流，過了一個星期。

「他原諒了他們，」國王說。「是，主上。」「他收了一半。」「七個人，每人的一半。」國王的手放在夜簿的前板上。「有人問過他母親嗎？」我姐姐張開嘴，又閉上。沙漏快流完了。「沒有，主上，」她說。「故事沒有說有人問過。」那天夜裡我在未了欄裡，在沒有被問過的樵夫底下，寫了一個沒有被問過的女人；又把上面一行，被告知是狼的女人，劃掉了，因為那是同一個女人，我有兩行給她。

他沒有守住誓言。那算不上多大的失敗：在街上，澡堂的主人張開雙臂跑向他，求他進去洗，他請客；哈西卜說他發過誓永不進澡堂，澡堂的人指著他妻子們三次離婚發誓說他必須進去；哈西卜不忍心做那個毀掉別人家的人，就進去了。澡堂的主人是那七個人之一。我姐姐這樣說，然後說，故事沒有說他知不知道。哈西卜剛坐下，就有二十個人來，說他必須跟他們去見蘇丹，蘇丹是他的債主；蘇丹的宰相沙姆胡爾穿著華麗的長袍帶他進了王宮，在過了七道門的臥房裡，國王卡拉茲丹躺著，得了痲瘋病，快死了，臉上蓋著布。書上說蛇群的女王能治好他。宰相在城裡每一座澡堂的門口都安了人，看每一個出來的人的肚子，因為凡是跟女王過了兩年的，洗澡時肚子都是黑的。哈西卜說他的肚子從他母親生他那天起就是黑的。他們沒有打他多久。我姐姐沒有告訴我打了多久。他帶他們去了那個蓄水池，沙姆胡爾燒香，念咒，井裡的水退下去，側面開了一道門，出來一條像大象那麼大的蛇，背上的金盤裡是女王。她的臉美麗而年輕，她看著哈西卜，說：「你和我立的約在哪裡，你發的誓在哪裡，你說過永遠不進澡堂？但命運是無法抗拒的。真主定下了我生命的終點，要由你的手來結束。」她哭了，哈西卜看見她哭，也哭了。

「她知道，」國王說。「她一開始就告訴他了，主上，結束時又說了一遍。她說，你就是發一百個誓，我也不信你。」「而她放了他。」「蛇們為他哭，去找她，求她。」「明知道。」「是，主上。」他沉默了。「接著講。」在金盤上，在去宰相家的路上，她告訴哈西卜他該怎麼做。他要說自己不會殺，讓宰相用自己的手動手。這我不給你講。宰相笑他哭，說：「你這弱智，怎麼為殺一條蟲而哭？」他把碎塊放在一口銅鍋裡煮，去見國王，留給哈西卜兩個小瓶，叫他喝第一次浮上來的沫，把第二次的留著。女王叫哈西卜反過來做：喝第二次的，把第一次的給宰相，然後看著。宰相回來，要第二個瓶子，哈西卜給了他第一個，宰相喝了，腫脹，倒地死了；哈西卜想起她說過的話，又想，如果裡面有害，宰相是不會把第二次的沫留給自己的，就喝了第二個。

「於是智慧的泉水，」我姐姐說，「在他心裡湧出來，知識的源泉對他打開了。」他端著盤子出去，走路時看見七重天和極境的酸棗樹，還有天球的運行和日月蝕的緣由，以及每一種草和礦的功效，一瞬間他就成了醫生、煉金術士和天文學家；三天之內，他把她說過該給的給了國王，蓋住他的臉，國王出汗，皮膚脫落，痊癒了。國王讓哈西卜做首席宰相，給了他三百個奴隸，五百頭馱滿財寶的騾子，和那位死去的宰相的房子。哈西卜向母親要他父親留給他的東西，她拿來那五張散頁，他讀了，說：「這是一本書的一部分。其餘的呢？」她說：「跟船一起丟了。」他在一切歡樂中活著，我姐姐說，直到毀滅歡樂的和拆散相聚的來到他那裡。「那五張散頁呢？」蘇麥雅說。「他留著，小傢夥。」「即使他可以把其餘的寫出來？」「即使這樣。」

「然而，國王啊，」我姐姐用她留給一夜結尾的聲音說，「布盧基亞與賈恩沙的這個故事，不是比辛巴達的故事更奇妙嗎？」「辛巴達是誰？」國王說。「一個挑夫，主上，」我姐姐說，「巴格達一個大熱天，他把擔子放在一戶富人家門口的長凳上，聽見了魯特琴。」窗外的天空是一盞燈被轉暗的顏色，她就在那裡停了，沙漏流完了。

第五百三十六夜。山魯佐德。到。未了：巴格達一個挑夫，把擔子放在一道門口，聽見了魯特琴，才剛開頭；一個沒有被問過的女人；一個樵夫，沒有被問過；一塊磚，在門邊；五張一本書的散頁；兩座墳之間的一個年輕人；第二個孩子，它動過了；一本名冊；一個恩典，還沒有求。

## 第32章 · 第五百三十七至五百五十夜：三次航海，與一個站起來的男孩

第五百三十六夜的末尾，我姐姐把一個挑夫放在一道門口，第五百三十七夜她又把他拿起來。那是巴格達的一個大熱天，在哈倫・拉希德當朝的時候，一個名叫辛巴達的人，靠頭頂別人的貨物謀生，把擔子放在一戶富人家門外的長凳上，那裡有樹蔭，地上掃過又灑了水。門裡出來一陣涼風，飯菜的香氣，魯特琴與歌聲，還有各種語言讚頌真主的鳥鳴。他往裡看了看，看見一座花園和一些僕人，就動了情，作詩說有人疲累有人安閒，他不抱怨真主的安排，可是他的出身和那位富人的出身本是同一個，差別卻像醋與酒。一個書童走出來，拉住他的手。在一間大廳裡，他看見許多貴人坐在桌邊，最上面坐著一位老人，鬢邊的鬍子白了，給他吃的，問他叫什麼，他說「挑夫辛巴達」，老人笑了，說：「你的名字和我的一樣。我是水手辛巴達。把你在我門口念的那首詩再念給我聽聽。」挑夫覺得羞愧。「不要羞愧，」水手說。「你成了我的兄弟。」我想到夜簿，那是一副沒有人付錢的擔子，我繼續寫。

他給他們講他的航海，七天一天一次，每次結束時給挑夫一百枚金幣。第一次，他父親死了，留給他錢，他和一些年輕人把它花光；然後他想起所羅門的一句話，三樣東西勝過三樣東西，死的日子勝過生的日子，活狗勝過死獅子，墳墓勝過貧窮；他賣掉所有的東西，連衣服也賣了，換了三千迪拉姆。他下到巴士拉，上船，他們來到一座像天堂花園一樣的島，上岸生火做飯；船長在船上喊，那不是島，那是一條大魚睡在海裡，背上積了沙，沙上長了樹，牠感覺到火了。跑得快的人上了船。島沉了。奶媽放下了她的針線。「我哥哥，」她說。她不是會說這種話的人。「我小時候他在巴士拉外海沉下去，人家告訴我是一條鯨魚。」「人家告訴你是鯨魚？」國王說。「人家告訴我是什麼東西。我一直覺得那是一個沙洲。」國王想了想。「如果是鯨魚，故事會好些，」他說。「是，主上，」奶媽說。「所以我一直不能確定。」

辛巴達找到一只真主放在他路上的木桶，坐在上面漂了一夜一天，被沖到一座島上，海灘上拴著一匹母馬，一個人從地底下走出來，把他領進一間地窖。他是米赫拉詹國王的馬夫。他說，每個月新月的時候，他們把最好的、沒有配過的母馬拴在海邊，躲起來，海裡的公馬就從水裡出來，騎上母馬，想把牠們拖走，卻因為繩子拖不走，馬夫們就拿著劍和盾衝出去敲打，公馬跳回海裡；生下來的馬駒值一座錢山。於是辛巴達被帶去見米赫拉詹國王，國王讓他做港口的登記官。他在那位國王的海上看見一座島，整夜有鼓聲，還有一條兩百肘長的魚，漁夫們敲木頭把牠嚇走；宮裡的印度人告訴他，他們的人分成七十二個種姓，他十分驚奇。年復一年。有一天，來了一條船，他站在碼頭上記錄貨包，船長說貨艙裡還有幾包，物主在一座是魚的島上淹死了，他們打算把它的價錢帶給他在巴格達的家人；辛巴達問名字，船長說了，辛巴達叫起來，說那是他的。船長不信。「確實，」他說，「人的良心與信義已經一點不剩了。」辛巴達花了一些時間，說出兩人在船上有過的事，沒有別人知道的，船長才把貨包交給他，並祝他快樂。他回家時富有了。「我忘了，」我姐姐用辛巴達的話說，「我所受的一切苦。」

我把它記在我第二張紙上，因為蘇麥雅叫我數我改了什麼，而我發現我開始數的是重複的東西：每次航海的結尾都有那句話，同樣的話，同樣的字。「他忘得很快，」國王說。「是，主上。」「那是一種天賦。」「這樣他才能再去，」沙・贊曼在毯子上說，「商人一停下來，就是一個在等死的人。」「他也忘了那些猿猴嗎？」蘇麥雅說。「他先忘的就是牠們，」奶媽說。國王沒有說話。他的手，像往常那樣，伸向床邊的那本藍書，放在上面，沒有翻開；孩子醒著，在他臂彎裡，也把自己的手伸向那本書，國王把書移開一點，夠不著，給了他一根手指握著。

第五百四十三夜，我姐姐的聲音沒了。不是上次那樣：那是用了五百四十二夜的人的聲音。奶媽說她講第一個沙漏，我講第二個，直到孩子來，誰也不許說不該。國王看著我。「第二次航海，」我說。我像一個去過那裡的人那樣講。辛巴達在家無聊，就去了，在一座島上，吃過東西以後在泉水邊睡著，醒來發現船已經開走了。他一個人，哭了，怪自己離開一屋子吃的；他爬上一棵樹，看見島中央有一個白色的大東西，走近，是一個沒有門的圓頂，周長五十步；然後太陽沒了。我在那裡停住，我想，停得比該停的久。我用手蓋住眼睛，像光熄滅時人會做的那樣。那是一隻鳥，大得牠的翅膀就是一個夜晚。牠落在圓頂上，覆在上面，睡著了；辛巴達聽說過這種鳥，就解下頭巾做成繩子，把自己綁在牠的腿上。他沒有睡。早晨，鳥飛起來，越飛越高，直到他以為到了天的邊緣，然後落在一座山上，他解開自己，跑了。牠是來抓一條蛇的，把牠帶走了。

他站在一座山谷的峰頂，山谷比他見過的任何都深，四周的山沒有人爬上去過；山谷的底是鑽石，它能切開石頭，卻切不開；山谷裡的蛇有棕櫚樹那麼大，夜裡出來，白天躲著老鷹。他找到一個洞，滾了一塊石頭堵住洞口，看見洞後一條大蛇在孵蛋，他就坐著看牠一夜，我想，牠也看他。早晨，一塊被宰殺的獸肉掉在他腳前。他就知道了那個辦法。採鑽石的商人把一頭獸切開，把肉塊扔進山谷，鑽石黏在血上，老鷹把肉叼到山頂，商人們跑過去喊叫。辛巴達把口袋、腰帶和頭巾都塞滿，等第二塊肉掉下來，他用布條把自己綁在肉下面，仰面躺著，一隻老鷹下來叼走了肉，連他一起，飛上去。我講後面的時候用了一種我不知道自己有的聲音。扔肉的那個商人，發現一個人站在肉旁邊，渾身是血，嚇得發抖；他把肉翻過來；上面沒有鑽石；他兩手互拍，大叫：「哎呀，我的失望！」蘇麥雅大聲笑了，用手捂住嘴，孩子因為她笑也笑了。辛巴達說：「不要怕；我是人，是個好人，是商人；我有很多鑽石，會給你比你能得到的更多。」他給了。

我停下來的時候，除了沙漏沒有聲音。「太陽從天上沒了的時候，」國王說，「我感覺到了。」他是對著燈說的。奶媽在她的角落裡說，她小時候見過一次太陽沒了，是日蝕，她再也不想看第二次。「你講得像你去過那裡。」「我用手蓋著眼睛，主上。」「看得出來。」他只說了這些，這比他對我的任何一道劃痕說的都多；我姐姐，在她的枕頭上，閉上眼睛，我想她笑了，但我沒有看得夠久，確定不了。那天早晨我寫了：第五百四十三夜。山魯佐德與敦亞佐德。到。

第三次航海，船被吹離航道，到了猿猴山，那些猿猴有四指高，黑臉，黃眼睛，成千上萬地來，沒有人從那裡回來過。牠們沒有傷害任何人。牠們爬上纜繩，咬斷，船擱淺在岸上，牠們把商人們放到島上，把船和貨都帶走了。島中央有一座城堡，一道烏木的門，院子裡有一張石凳和許多骨頭；傍晚，一個像椰棗樹那麼高、黑色、眼睛像炭的東西從屋頂下來，一個一個挑揀，選了最壯的，是船長。我略掉他用一根鐵叉做了什麼。我用四句話講了，我姐姐，在枕頭上，閉著眼睛，點了點頭，像她對一道劃痕點頭那樣。他們弄瞎了牠的眼睛，跑向他們做好的一條小船；牠和另外兩個像牠的朝他們扔石頭，大部分人死了，剩下的三個來到另一座島，一條像龍的蛇吞了其中兩個，一個在夜裡，一個在樹上。辛巴達用五塊木板像一具棺架那樣綁在自己周圍，仰面躺在沙地上，蛇整夜繞著他來去，夠不著他。早晨他跑到海邊，用樹枝向遠處的一條船打手勢，他們接他上去，給他衣服，給他吃的。那船停在一座出檀香木的島上。

船長對他說，有一個商人丟了，留下幾包貨在船上，辛巴達是個陌生的窮人，可以替他們賣掉，抽一份。「寫什麼名字？」書記說；船長說：「寫水手辛巴達的名字，就是跟我們一起上船、我們在魯赫鳥島丟了的那個人。」「他看著他們寫，」國王說。「是，主上。他對自己說，以真主起誓，我就是水手辛巴達。」「而他什麼也沒說。」「他等到商人們都聚在一起。」「為什麼？」「為了讓他們都聽見，」我姐姐說，「主上。」國王說：「站著看自己的名字被寫在死人的貨上，這時間很長。」沒有人回答他。有一個商人去過鑽石谷，發誓說他認得他，船長聽到貨包上的記號，信了，吻了他。辛巴達在各個島上賣了貨，在印度，買了丁香和薑，回家時多得數不清，給寡婦和孤兒布施；「我忘了，」我姐姐說，「我所受的一切苦。」蘇麥雅，她會數，舉起三根手指。奶媽說：「還會有第四次。」「是，」國王說。

第五百四十八夜，孩子站了起來。他在磚那裡已經一個月了，把自己拉起一半又坐下，那夜，第二個沙漏剛開始，我又在講魯赫鳥的蛋（國王要求再聽一遍），他雙手抓住磚的邊緣，把腳放到身子底下，起來了，臉紅紅的，驚訝著，站著。沒有人動。奶媽的針懸在空中。沙・贊曼在毯子上屏住了呼吸，這對他是很了不起的事。然後他放開一隻手，看了看它，又放回去。「不要告訴他他站著，」國王說，很輕。我們沒有說。他站到膝蓋軟了，重重坐下，哭了一小下，被抱起；早晨，國王走到夜簿前，把拇指放在那道劃痕旁邊，又放在「到」字旁邊。

第五百五十夜。山魯佐德與敦亞佐德。到。未了：水手辛巴達的第四次航海，才剛開頭；一個站過一次的男孩，在一塊磚邊；一個沒有被問過的女人；一個樵夫，沒有被問過；一本名冊；第二個孩子，它動過了；一個恩典，還沒有求。

## 第33章 · 第五百五十一至五百六十六夜：再四次航海，與一個走過來的男孩

第四次航海從第五百五十夜的末尾開始，我在第二個沙漏裡講，從那塊木板講起。一陣暴風撕裂了帆，錨索斷了，船連同貨物沉下去，辛巴達和另外幾個人爬上一塊木板，像騎馬一樣騎著它漂了一天一夜，到了一座島。他們被光著身子的人抓住，帶到他們的王面前，面前擺上一種他們誰也不認識的食物。他的同伴們因為餓吃了；他吃不下去；他們一吃，眼睛就在眼眶裡翻轉，神智沒了，被灌了油，身上塗了油，每天被趕出去像牲口一樣放牧，長得肥肥的。我不給你講那食物是做什麼用的。我用六個字說完了。辛巴達沒有吃，因為害怕而日漸消瘦，光身子的人把他忘了，有一天他從他們的地方走了出去，那個放牧他朋友們的老牧人，用一隻手的動作給他指了路。他靠樹根走了七天。第八天他遇到一些摘胡椒的人，他們把他帶到他們的國王面前；他給國王做了一副馬鞍，因為那裡沒有人騎馬用鞍；木匠和鐵匠又做了更多，宰相要一副，大臣們也要；不久他就富有了，受人喜愛，國王把一位高門的小姐嫁給他，給了他一座自己的房子。

第五百五十三夜，我姐姐坐起來講第一個沙漏。辛巴達愛他的妻子，他的一個鄰居死了妻子，他進去弔唁，看見那人的情形比悲傷能解釋的更糟。「我只剩一天可活了，」鄰居說。「今天他們埋我的妻子，連我一起埋在同一座墓裡；因為我們這裡的規矩，妻子先死，就把丈夫活埋進去，丈夫先死，妻子也一樣，這樣誰也不能在失去另一半之後享受生命。」辛巴達喊道，這是一個最卑劣的規矩，誰也不該忍受，他去見國王，國王說這是他祖先從遠古傳下來的習慣，外國人也一樣照辦。「對兩邊是一樣的，」國王說。「是，主上。」「那比，」他說，然後停住了。沙漏流了好一會兒。沒有人替他說完。沙・贊曼，什麼都要說完的人，看著牆；我姐姐用辛巴達的話說，真主從來沒有許可把活人和死人埋在一起。

妻子死了。他們給她穿上華服放在擔架上，抬到山的盡頭，掀開一個深坑口的大石頭，把她扔進去；又用棕櫚纖維的繩子繫在他腋下，把他放下去，帶著一壺水和七塊餅。「他說他們不聽他的，」我姐姐說。洞裡全是死人和快死的人，還有氣味。他躺在骨頭上，咒罵自己為什麼在那座城裡娶妻，吃一點餅，喝一點水，活著。當下一個活人，又下一個被放下來的時候，他怎樣保住自己的餅和水，他用平平的話告訴了挑夫，我姐姐用九個字講完了。我不給你講那九個字。國王的手在她開口之前就已經蓋在孩子的耳朵上了，我不知道他怎麼知道的。最後有什麼東西在屍體當中抓撓，辛巴達拿著一根腿骨追過去，在洞的盡頭看見一點只有星星那麼大的光；那是山後面的一個洞，被來吃死人的野獸挖寬了。他鑽過去，到了一道海上方的斜坡，城裡的人到不了那裡，他把吃的，把死去女人頸上的珠寶搬出來，用一根棍子挑著一條白色的裹屍布，等著，直到有船經過。船長問他怎麼會到那座山上，山後面是一座大城，他一輩子在那裡只見過野獸和鳥。辛巴達給他編了一個故事，沒有說真話，因為怕船上有島上的人。他回家，向寡婦和孤兒施捨，「我忘了，」我姐姐說，「我所受的一切苦。」奶媽說：「這是第四次。」「他忘了那個洞，」國王說。「故事說，他所受的一切苦。」「它會這樣說，」國王說。

第五次航海他坐的是自己的船，是他買下的。他們在一座荒島上發現一個白色的圓頂，商人們用石頭砸開了它，裡面是一隻小魯赫鳥，他們取了牠的肉。辛巴達叫他們住手。然後太陽沒了，我用手蓋住眼睛，國王說：「又來了，」那是個玩笑，我又做了一遍。兩隻大鳥帶著爪裡的巨石回來；第一塊落在船的旁邊，海裂開，露出海底，第二塊更大，落在船尾上；辛巴達在一塊木板上被沖上一座像花園的島，遇見一個坐在水渠邊的老人，用手勢表示他要被人背過去。辛巴達把他背起來，老人把雙腿繞在他脖子上，不肯下來。他背著他日日夜夜，一停下就被腳跟打，被他撒尿，辛巴達說他做了好事，得到的卻是壞報，發誓這輩子再也不為任何人做事。「他守住了嗎？」國王說。「沒有，主上，」我姐姐說。「他是一個會忘的人。」他用葫蘆釀了酒，老人喝了，倒下；辛巴達從他身下掙脫出來。我只講到他掙脫出來。後面他做了什麼，辛巴達自己說，我不說。還有一座猿猴的城，城裡的人夜裡坐船出去，睡在水上，因為怕牠們，辛巴達裝了一袋鵝卵石，朝樹上的猿猴扔，猿猴就把椰子扔下來，他靠這個過活。有珍珠，有第五次回家。蘇麥雅舉起五根手指。奶媽說：「還有第六次。」

第五百六十夜，我要求把燈轉暗。我並不是有意的。我講到第六次航海，辛巴達獨自在一座滿是殘骸與珠寶的島上，同伴都已埋葬，他做了一個沉香木的筏，讓河水把他帶到山底下，我發現屋裡有燈就沒法講那黑暗。我先講了那片海灘，因為那是這次航海最美的東西：紅寶石像碎石一樣躺在溪床裡，原始的龍涎香在熱天裡像蠟一樣沿著河岸流下，夜裡又凝住，深海裡的怪物把它吞下去，又留不住吐出來。國王站起來，自己把燈轉暗，暗到只剩一粒豆。蘇麥雅在毯子上朝我靠近了些。孩子睡著了。我講那條水道一點一點變窄，直到岩石擦著他的頭，他只能趴下；日子和夜晚他分不清；然後是睡眠。「他醒來的時候，」我說，「已在天光裡了，」國王沒說一個字，把燈調亮。沒有人說話。我想我姐姐睜著眼睛。

他是在一些農夫當中出來的，他們把他帶到他們的國王面前，是薩蘭迪布的國王；國王讓他住在王宮裡，問他哈倫・拉希德哈里發和他治國的公正，並托他帶去一封寫在黃色皮上、用群青墨水寫的信，一只一指高鑲滿珍珠的紅寶石杯，一張蓋著吞象的蛇皮的榻，和一個像月亮的女奴。辛巴達對哈里發說起薩蘭迪布的國王怎樣出巡，騎在一頭十一肘高的大象上，一千名身穿金錦的騎兵；他的頭前有一個人持一根金標槍，身後另一個人拿一根金權杖，杖頭是一顆一指長的翡翠；他的城裡沒有法官，因為那裡每個人都分得清真假；他前面有一個人喊他的頌詞，「這是一位極有尊嚴、極有權威的國王」；等他說完，國王身後的另一個人喊：「他會死！我再說一遍，他會死！」第一個人回答：「讚美那永生不死者的完美！」「再來，」國王說。「他會死，」我姐姐說。「我再說一遍，他會死。」「再來。」她說了第三遍，沒有等人要求。國王看了看身邊的沙漏。「我有一個沙漏，」他說。過了一會兒，對著沒有人：「它沒有喊得這麼大聲。」

我姐姐把第七次航海講了兩遍，因為它有兩種講法，我在第二張紙上寫下了不同。第一種，船被吹進「國王氣候」之海，那裡有所羅門的墳墓，三條魚從海裡浮起來，一條比一條大，第三條的嘴比城門還寬；一陣暴風把船撞在礁石上；辛巴達在木板上對自己說，他不悔改，如果他說他放棄了，他是在放棄上說謊。他做了一個檀香木的筏，漂到山底下，來到一座城，一位老人買下那只筏，把女兒給了他。城裡的人，每個月初都長出翅膀飛上去。辛巴達求其中一個帶他走；他升起的時候聽見天使們讚頌真主，就喊：「讚美真主！」天上出來一團火，他們咒罵著把他扔在一座山上。兩個年輕人給他一根金杖；一條蛇把一個人吞到腰以下，他打了牠的頭，那個人就成了他在故事剩下部分的朋友。他帶著妻子回家。他離開了二十七年。他發誓再不旅行。第二種講法，在本質上不同，哈里發派人叫他，要他把一封信和禮物帶給薩蘭迪布的國王。他說他發過誓，一聽見「航海」這個詞，四肢就發抖。「為了我們，」哈里發說，「你要去。」他去了。海盜搶了船，他被賣給一個富人，富人叫他帶著弓坐在樹上射象；有一天早晨，象群把樹連根拔起，最大的那頭把他放在背上，載他到一個滿是象骨的地方，那是牠們來死的地方。他的主人看見成堆的象牙，高興得哭了。他釋放了他。

「他發過誓，」國王說。「是，主上。兩種都發過。」「而哈里發派他去。」「在第二種裡，主上。」「哈里發派，那個人就去。」我父親在他的角落裡說：「他去，主上。」之後沒有人再說什麼。國王看了燈一會兒，然後看孩子，孩子在磚旁邊的地上，一隻手扶著磚，回望著他，臉像他母親；我姐姐在第一個沙漏裡，輕咳了一聲，說了挑夫在這一切結束時說的話：「看在真主的份上，我的老爺，原諒我對你做的錯事。」「什麼錯事？」蘇麥雅說。「那些詩，小傢夥。他以為水手的日子過得輕鬆。」他們就這樣友好地過下去，直到毀滅歡樂的來到他們那裡；讚美永生不死者。「哪一種是真的？」國王說。「兩種都是，主上。它們有兩種講法。」

然後，第五百六十六夜，孩子放開了磚。他一隻手扶著它站了一會兒，像他現在做的那樣，聽著；他把手拿開，看了看，邁了一步，又一步，第三步；他坐下了。國王，在五步外的地上，雙臂張開，他不知道自己把手臂張開了。孩子看著他。沒有人動。然後他站起來，兩隻手舉得高高的，像一個走在牆上的人，把剩下的路走完。國王把他抱起來，什麼也沒說，也沒有人對他說什麼；早晨，在夜簿念出來之前，他翻回第一頁，在邊上之邊上的底部，在那七個字之後，用他方正的字寫了第八個。那個字是：來。

第五百六十六夜。山魯佐德與敦亞佐德。到。未了：黃銅城，我姐姐說，裡面沒有人住，才剛開頭；一個從磚走到國王的男孩，五步；一個沒有被問過的女人；一個樵夫，沒有被問過；一本名冊；第二個孩子，它動過了；一個恩典，還沒有求。

## 第34章 · 第五百六十七至五百七十八夜：黃銅城，與七年的糧食

我姐姐在第五百六十六夜的末尾說，黃銅城是一座沒有人住的城，第五百六十七夜她開始講它。大馬士革的哈里發阿卜杜勒・馬利克・本・馬爾萬，和他的貴人們坐在一起說起所羅門，說起所羅門把背叛他的精靈關進的那些銅瓶，用鉛封口，蓋上他的戒指印，扔進海裡。一個叫塔利卜・本・薩赫勒的人，靠尋找寶藏為生，有一些書告訴他寶藏在哪裡，他說他祖父的船曾被吹離航道一個月，到了一座山，那裡的人除了他們國王外都不懂阿拉伯語，收留了外來者，第四天指給他們看一個漁夫拉起網，網裡有一只銅瓶，封著所羅門的印。他們打開了。一股藍色的煙冒到天頂，煙裡有個聲音喊：「我悔改！我悔改！請寬恕，真主的先知！我再也不會回到我以前做的事！」煙變成一個頭與山頂齊高的巨人，走了。「對誰說的？」國王說。「對所羅門，主上。」「他死了。」「是，主上。他們不知道。每當一張網把一個撈上來，裡面那個就向他求寬恕。」國王看著他的手，那兩隻手是空的。孩子睡在奶媽身上，她沒有動。

哈里發想看看那些瓶子，就派塔利卜帶著信去見他在西邊的總督穆薩・本・努賽爾，穆薩找來那一帶最年長、走過許多地方的人，一位叫阿卜杜勒・薩馬德的老者，他說這是一趟去兩年、回兩年的路。他們帶了一千頭駱駝，馱著陶罐裡的水，因為熱風會把皮囊曬乾，卻傷不了陶罐。他們走了一年。有一個黎明，老者發現他不知道自己在哪裡。「星星被雲遮住了，」他說。他們來到一座黑石的城堡，鉛的圓頂有一百肘高，大門是中國鋼的，裡面沒有人；門上，用金子，用古愛奧尼亞字，寫著詩，老者應總督的要求大聲念出來。最後兩句是：「彷彿他們只是把重擔放下歇一會兒，然後又騎馬走了。」我在那裡停住了。我不是有意的。「挑夫，」蘇麥雅說。我說我也想到了。

裡面有四百座黃大理石的墳墓圍著一座亭子，最大的一座裡躺著庫什，沙達德的兒子，他統治了一千年。他有四千匹棗紅馬，有一千位國王的女兒做妻子，有一千個像獅子一樣的兒子，有一千個水庫那麼多的財寶；死亡來的時候，他對他的士兵說：「你們能擋開這個嗎？」他們不能；他叫人把他的財寶搬來，說：「你們能用這些全部贖我，或者買我一天的命嗎？」他們不能。這些刻在他頭邊的一塊板上。宮裡有一張黃色縞瑪瑙的桌子，上面有字：「在這張桌子上吃過飯的，有一千位右眼瞎的國王，一千位左眼瞎的，另外還有一千位兩眼都好的，他們全都離開了人世。」總督拿了那張桌子，別的什麼也沒拿。

他們再走了三天，來到一座山，山上有一個黃銅騎士，手持長矛，有一行字：如果你不認得去黃銅城的路，就摩擦我的手。穆薩摩擦它，騎士像閃電一樣轉了一圈，停住，他們就往它面對的方向走。他們來到一根黑石柱前，一個生物陷在裡面，到腋下，有兩隻翅膀和四條手臂，額頭上還有第三隻眼，他喊：「讚美我的主，祂判給我這可怕的刑罰！」他是一個叫達希什的伊弗利特，曾在一位海王的宮廷裡從一尊紅玉髓偶像的肚子裡說話，當所羅門派人向國王求他的女兒並要他打碎偶像的時候；國王拒絕了；後來的是所羅門的戰爭，一百萬人和六億個魔鬼，還有鳥和獸，我略去它，因為我姐姐一口氣就講完了，我父親看著地板。達希什逃了三個月，被抓住了。所羅門讓人鑿空這根石柱，把他封在裡面，直到審判日。他告訴他們黃銅城在哪裡。「很近。」

它有黑石的牆，有兩座黃銅的塔，遠遠看去像兩團火，有二十五道門，從外面一道也看不見，因為只能從裡面開。在城上方的山丘上，總督找到七塊白大理石的碑，老者念了它們。我給你講一塊。「亞當之子啊，什麼使你離開了永恆者的服事，使你忘了有一天你必須償還死亡的債？統治伊拉克的諸王在哪裡？死亡的召喚者召喚他們，他們答應了他；毀滅的傳令者呼叫他們，他們回答：我們在這裡！」「我們在這裡，」國王說。「是，主上。」「那是你寫的。」我說是。他轉頭看著桌上的夜簿。「到，」他說，沒有再說別的；我姐姐，在她的枕頭上，手放在她放手的地方，看著天花板。

他們用一個月造了一道梯子，用鐵條箍住，靠上牆去，剛好夠到頂，好像量過的。一個人爬上去，往城裡看，拍著手喊：「真主在上，你好美！」就翻了過去。另一個爬上去，大笑，也那樣做了。一共十二個。總督說他們與這座城無關。老者說這件事是他的；他爬上去，念著真主的名字和平安經文，到了頂上他拍手，下面的人求他別那樣；他笑了很久，坐下，念著真主的名字；然後站起來，對下面喊，沒有危險，真主使撒旦的詭計遠離了他。他看見十個像天堂仙女的少女朝他招手，她們底下是一片湖；當他想跳進去的時候，他看見他的十二個同伴躺在石頭上死了。那是城裡人設下的魔法，為了讓看它的人回頭。我背靠著牆講它。我不知道為什麼這樣說；這是真的。他在一道金門上找到一個黃銅騎士，肚臍上有一枚金銷子，轉了十二圈，門像打雷一樣打開了。

裡面是一間守衛室，死人坐在長凳上，盾牌掛在上頭，弓上了弦；最老的那個腰帶上有鑰匙；還有那道大門，老者把它打開給外面的人，他們喊了「真主至大」。我只用秤給你講那些市場。城裡每家鋪子都開著，砝碼掛在外面，銅器一排一排，每家鋪子裡，商人坐在櫃檯上，皮乾縮在骨頭上，好像要開口說話：絲綢市場、珠寶店、錢莊，錢莊裡有金子，沒有人數；香料店裡有麝香和龍涎香的袋子。每家鋪子裡都沒有吃的。我姐姐說了兩遍。宮門上有詩，用金子和群青寫的：墳墓大聲回答發問的人，喊道，死亡的潰爛與朽壞，侵蝕了那玫瑰色的雙頰。

宮殿中央，在一座雪花石膏穹頂的亭子裡，一張榻上躺著一位少女，穿著珍珠的長衣，戴著紅金的冠，額頭上兩顆寶石像太陽一樣發光；她的頭髮是黑的，臉頰是紅的，看起來像在向左向右看著他們。「平安與你同在，少女，」總督說。「她死了，主上，」塔利卜說。「她被極巧的手藝防腐了，眼睛取出來，下面墊了水銀，再放回去；空氣動的時候睫毛一動，她就像在看你。」兩個銅的奴隸站在台階上，一個拿著鐵杖，一個拿著劍。兩人之間有一塊金板，銀字，老者念了它。「我是塔德穆拉，阿瑪力克諸王的女兒。我擁有任何國王沒有的東西，統治公正，布施，釋放奴隸。然後七年大旱降臨我們，一滴雨也沒有，地上也沒有長出綠的東西。我們吃了現有的；然後吃牲畜；然後什麼都沒有了。我叫人把我的財寶搬來量，派可靠的人去各國買糧食，他們很久以後帶著財寶回來，說他們沒能用上等的珍珠換到劣等的小麥，一斗換一斗，一斤換一斤。於是我們把財寶陳列出來，關了城門和堡壘，順從我們主的決定。然後我們都死了，就像你看到的。實質之後，只留下痕跡。」

「一斗換一斗，」國王說。他不是對我姐姐說的。「宰相。」「主上。」「糧倉裡有幾年的糧食？」我父親一直看著自己的手。「城裡四年，主上，還多幾個月。北方不到一年。」「做到七年。」「主上，北方，」我父親開口說。「七年，」國王說，用的是他說一塊磚時的聲音。我父親伸出手指在手掌上寫下來，像他寫那些房子一樣；早晨，在朝見之前，他帶著兩個書記和一根量尺出去，我從窗口看見他的背影，朝著河邊的糧倉走下去，那是我從沒見過他去的地方。

塔利卜・本・薩赫勒說，那少女用不著身上的珠寶，那是世界的飾物，一件棉衣就夠遮蓋她，而且他們比她更有權利。總督說她寫了：不要碰我身上的東西，那是我羞處的遮蓋，是我最後旅程的行裝；她把它託付給他們。「因為她死了，」塔利卜說，「就要把這些丟下嗎？」他走上台階；兩個銅奴隸動了，他沒有再下來。「貪利使人墮落，」總督說，叫軍隊把金子和器皿搬出去，留她原樣，又把門關上，像原來一樣。「他被告知了，」奶媽說。「她說不要碰。」「是，」國王說。蘇麥雅說：「他不需要它們，」沒有人問她指的是誰。

他們沿著海岸再走了一個月，來到卡爾卡爾海邊一座滿是洞穴的山，那裡住著一些人，是希德爾從海裡上來時教他們禱告的，他們除了他給的那幾句話，不知道別的，每個星期五前夜都念。他們的王叫潛水的人撈上十二個所羅門的瓶子，又給了總督一些海底的生物，有人的形狀，總督把其中一些帶給哈里發，他們把牠們放在木頭做的水池裡，牠們被熱死了。我告訴你這個，因為我姐姐講了，蘇麥雅哭了。哈里發在他的大廳裡一個接一個打開瓶子，每個裡面出來一個魔鬼，說：「我悔改，真主的先知；我再也不會回到那裡」；他驚奇，說真主從沒有給過任何人真主給所羅門的。穆薩總督把他的職位讓給兒子，去了耶路撒冷禮拜，死在那裡。「這就是流傳到我們這裡的黃銅城的全部，」我姐姐說，「而真主是全知的。」「那些沒被撈上來的呢？」國王說。「牠們還在說，主上。」他點了點頭。

第五百七十八夜的結尾，我姐姐說她還有另一個故事，關於女人的詭計與惡意，一位中國國王，老了還沒有兒子，後來有了兒子，一個妾，和七位宰相。「七位，」國王說，看著我父親。「七位，主上，」我父親說。「我聽說我在我比較好的日子，可以抵幾位。」「在你比較好的日子，」國王說；就這些，已經很多了。

第五百七十八夜。山魯佐德與敦亞佐德。到。未了：一位中國國王，老了還沒有兒子，才剛開頭；七年的糧食，現有四年；一座沒有人住的城，像原來一樣關上了；一個走到門口再走回來的男孩；一個沒有被問過的女人；一個樵夫，沒有被問過；一本名冊；第二個孩子，它動過了；一個恩典，還沒有求。

## 第35章 · 第五百七十九至六百零六夜：七天的沉默，與一只沒有蓋布的罐子

二十八夜裡，我姐姐講了一個故事，裡面還有二十七個，我給你第一個和最後一個，中間的只給你它們的門。有一位中國國王，老了還沒有兒子。王后告訴他一個夢：有聲音說，如果她生女兒，會是王國的毀滅，如果生兒子，他的青年時期會遇到麻煩，但會平安度過，不會喪命；而要懷上他，只有月亮在雙子座的時候。事情就這樣發生了，孩子生下來像十四夜的月亮，替他排命盤的占星家說，他的青年時期有一場危險等著，他會逃過。國王把他交給奶媽，到七歲，召集了三百六十位學者，要選一位來教他一切；他們選了一位名叫辛迪巴德的智者。

智者開始之前，向國王要三件事。第一件，是自己不願意別人對自己做的，就不要對別人做。第二件，是不經過詢問有經驗的人，就不要倉促做任何事。第三件，是你有權力的地方，要顯出憐憫。國王叫人寫下來，在朝廷上發誓。「我服從你的條件，」他說。三年過去了，孩子什麼也沒學會，因為他心思在玩上；智者說，他可以在七個月裡教會他別人七年也教不會的東西。他蓋了一座房子，牆刷白灰泥，在牆上畫了他要教的每一樣東西；把王子用七把鎖鎖在裡面，每三天來一次，解釋那些畫，送食物。孩子寂寞的時候，就看牆。蘇麥雅說：「在牆上？」她看了看我們房間的灰泥，像在等它開始，我看見她的嘴唇動了動。

王子準備好的時候，智者看了他的命盤，發現有一個合相擋著，會持續七天，就對他說：「不要說話。七天裡一個字也不要說，即使你父親鞭打你。你熬過這一週，就會繼承他的王位。」王子去見他父親，不肯說話；智者躲起來，沒有人找得到。朝臣們說這孩子怕女人，國王就把他送到女眷的宮殿，那裡有一條溪流，四十間房，每間十個彈樂器的女孩，整座宮殿都在跳舞。國王的寵妾看見他，愛上了他，撲到他身上，說如果他肯要她，她會毒死他父親，扶他上王位。他用手勢對她說，等他能說話，他會告訴國王。她撕了衣服，扯了頭髮，去見國王，說這個據說是啞巴的兒子，要求她從了他，她不肯，他還想殺她。國王，等了他一輩子的人，把七位宰相叫來，下令處死王子。

他們在走廊上商量。如果照他說的做，他第二天就會後悔，轉過來怪他們沒有攔住他。第一位說：「今天我來擔保你們，」進去，告訴國王，他聽過很多關於女人的詭計與惡意的故事。「把你知道的說給我聽，」國王說。宰相說，有一位眾王之王，看見一個女人在屋頂上，愛上了她；把她的丈夫，他的宰相，派去王國的另一頭辦事，自己代替他去了她家。她吻他的手和腳，說她不配做他的僕人的侍女，求他耐心，在她這裡待一天，好讓她給他做點吃的。她拿給他一本書看，裡面是道德的例子和勸誡，折斷了他的勇氣。然後她在他面前擺上九十道不同顏色的菜，他每樣嘗一口，發現九十道菜的味道是同一個；她說，他的宮裡有九十個不同顏色的妃子，可是她們的味道是同一個。他慚愧了，起身走了，匆忙間把他的御印戒指忘在坐墊底下。

宰相回來，發現了它。他一年沒有跟妻子說話。最後她父親在宰相在場的時候向國王申訴，說他有一座花園，是他親手種的，送給了宰相，宰相吃了它的果子，然後不再澆水，園子就枯萎了。宰相說，這是真的：他照看過它，吃過它，有一天他去，看見園子裡有獅子的腳印，他害怕了，就離開了。國王明白，獅子的腳印就是他自己的戒指。「回到你的花園去，」他說，「什麼也不要怕。我聽說獅子去過那裡。我以我祖先的名譽起誓，他沒有傷害它。」我們屋裡的國王，沒有看任何人。「獅子的腳印，」他說。「他沒有走近過它，」我姐姐說。「是，」國王說。我父親，在他的角落，看著那塊磚。

故事就這樣進行，一天一位宰相，每一位宰相之後，寵妾第二天早晨過來，說國王被部下的閒話轉開了公道，再講一個關於男人的惡意的故事。我只給你它們的輪廓。有一隻鸚鵡，把糖果匠的妻子在他不在時做的事告訴了他，妻子就用一座手磨、一支蠟燭、一把扇子在鸚鵡籠上造了一場風暴，鸚鵡一說起洪水，那人就扯掉了牠的頭；還有一個漂洗匠，和他的兒子一起淹死。一個浪子灑在商人床上的蛋白，要讓商人以為他妻子不貞，和那個煎了它、吃了它的小男孩。那個吝嗇鬼，知道了他每天兩塊的餅是用什麼做的。那個從賣米的鋪子回家，餅布裡包著泥土和石頭，說她掉了一個迪拉姆，讓丈夫為它篩灰，篩到臉都灰了的女人。有一滴蜜掉在店裡，一隻蒼蠅，一隻鳥，一隻貓，一隻狗，一個人殺了另一個人，兩個村子的人互相消滅，「他們有多少，只有真主知道。」「為了一滴，」國王說。「是，主上。」他看了一會兒自己的手。「誰開的頭？」「那一滴，主上。」「那個讓它掉下去的人。」「他不是有意的。」「不是，」國王說；就這些。

第五天，宰相講了那個再也沒有笑過的人的故事。一個富人的兒子，把父親留下的揮霍光了，最後受雇於一位老人，到一座有十一個老人的房子裡，他們整天哭泣哀號，要他發誓不問為什麼。他們一個一個死了，他把他們埋在屋後的花園，最後只剩雇他的那一個；老人在臨終時說：「那面牆上有一扇門。你要是開它，你就知道我們為什麼哭；而你會後悔，而後悔對你不會有用。」年輕人在一個黑暗的角落找到那扇門，上面有蜘蛛網，四把鋼鎖，他放著不碰，過了七天。第八天他說，沒有任何東西能避開預定的事，就打破了鎖。「他忍了七天，」國王說。「七天，主上。」「第八天。」「第八天。」奶媽從針線上抬起頭。「忍著不開一扇門，是很長的時間，」她說。門後是一條通道，一片海，一隻把他帶到島上的老鷹，一條象牙烏木的船，十個少女稱他為國王，一個女人當家、男人耕田的國度；一位女王，把那裡的一切都給了他，只叫他不要開一扇門。他在那裡七年。然後他開了，門後是那隻鳥。「對一張永遠不會順遂的臉，沒有歡迎！」他一輩子再也沒有笑過。

第五天寵妾帶了一碗毒藥進來，第六天帶一把出鞘的刀，第七天生起一大堆火，作勢要跳進去，說她要在復活日控告國王。每一次，我姐姐說，國王都長久地看著她手裡的東西。「她威脅她自己，」國王說。「是，主上。」「那是一種要求的方式。」他沒有說他是什麼意思。那天宰相講了有三個願望的人的故事，我不給你講，因為第一個是蠢的，第二個是個笑話，第三個被撤回了；然後她講了項鍊。一位虔誠的女人，王后把一串項鍊託她保管，項鍊不見了，她被火和棍棒拷問，什麼也沒承認，被關進監獄。一隻喜鵲把項鍊叼到牆縫裡；國王看見牠飛出來把它取走。他派人叫她來，親她的頭，哭著求她原諒，給她財寶，她不要。她原諒了他，走進山裡，發誓永遠不再進任何人的家。「她原諒了他，」國王說。「是，主上。」「她不肯收財寶。」「不肯，主上。」他沒有再說什麼。

那些長的故事我略去，它們在第七天，占了五夜：貝赫拉姆王子，向達特瑪公主挑戰，為她失去了自己；有露台的房子，裡面箱子裡藏著一個情人；國王的兒子和伊弗利特的情婦。最後一個故事裡，一個國王的兒子被一個女人的詭計騙走了戒指，他父親下令把他處死，宰相們又一次說服了父親；第二天早晨，第八天，王子牽著辛迪巴德的手走進朝堂，用最雄辯的詞句讚美他的父親和宰相們，感謝他們救了他的命。沒有人知道他會說話。國王吻了他的雙眼之間。辛迪巴德說，他叫男孩保持沉默，因為他在星象裡讀到，如果他在這一週裡說話，他會死。國王對朝堂說：「如果我殺了我的兒子，過錯在誰：在我，在那個女人，還是在那位導師？」沒有人回答；辛迪巴德說：「你來回答，我的孩子。」

王子說，有一位商人，家裡來了客人，派女奴去市場買一罐酸奶；一隻鳶飛過她的頭頂，爪子裡抓著一條蛇，一滴毒液落進奶裡；商人和客人喝了，死了。「過錯在誰？」有人說在客人，他們沒看就喝了，有人說在女孩，她沒有把罐子蓋上。「都不是，」王子說。「他們的時辰到了，他們被分配的份額用完了，真主注定他們這樣死。」蘇麥雅說：「她應該蓋塊布。」我姐姐說：「鳶在她頭頂上，小傢夥。」「她還是應該蓋塊布。」國王說：「是，她應該。」他說的時候，好像她問了他什麼。「而商人也應該在喝以前看一看，」他說，「而這個男孩沉默了七天，有時間想他要說什麼。」王子又說，瞎眼的謝赫、三歲的孩子和五歲的孩子比他更聰明，講了他們的故事：檀香木商人與騙子們；那個為了犯罪跑到別的城市、被眼睛裡有米粒的三歲孩子羞辱的浪子；四個商人和那只被偷的錢袋，由一個五歲孩子用一個迪拉姆的糖果解了圍。我給你三歲的那個，因為我在第二個沙漏裡講了它，下巴放在膝蓋上，男孩笑了，我就讓他笑。

然後王子告訴他父親寵妾做了什麼。「她要我愛她，我拒絕了；她答應給你毒藥，讓我做國王；我對她比手勢，說等我能說話，我會報復。」國王叫人把她帶來。「我們怎麼處死這個女人？」他問，有人說，割掉她的舌頭，有人說，燒死她。她說，她的情形像狐狸和人們。一隻狐狸鑽進皮匠的倉庫，弄壞了皮子，皮匠用皮子打牠，直到牠倒下像死了一樣，一個老婦拿走牠的右眼，當作治小孩愛哭的護身符，一個男孩割掉牠的尾巴，一個人拔出刀，要剖開牠的肚子取膽，治眼睛昏花；狐狸跳起來跑了，說眼睛和尾巴牠忍了，肚子牠不能忍。「我寬恕她，」國王說，「她的命運在我兒子手裡。」王子說：「寬恕勝過報復，仁慈是高貴者的品質。」他放了她。「離開我們這一帶，」他說，「願真主寬恕過去的事。」

「他沒有說他寬恕了她，」國王說。沙漏已經流完了。我姐姐，在她的枕頭上，看著他。「沒有，主上，」她說。「他說，願真主寬恕過去的事。」「那不是一回事。」「不是，主上。」「他把她送出那一帶。」「是。」「活著。」「是，主上。」「這還沒完，」國王對沒有人說；奶媽說：「完了，主上，她走了，」國王說：「她走了。這還沒完。」那天早晨我在未了欄裡寫了：一個寵妾，被送出那一帶，沒有人寬恕過她。國王把王國交給王子，用自己的王冠給他加冕，說他老了，要把餘生用來禮拜；王子公正地統治，他的權力壯大，直到那確定的事到來。

第六百零六夜。山魯佐德與敦亞佐德。到。未了：一個名叫奧馬爾的商人的三個兒子，最小的被偏愛，才剛開頭；一個寵妾，被送出那一帶，沒有人寬恕過她；一只罐子，本該蓋塊布；七年的糧食，現有五年；一個走到門口再走回來的男孩；一個沒有被問過的女人；一個樵夫，沒有被問過；一本名冊；第二個孩子，它動過了；一個恩典，還沒有求。

## 第36章 · 第六百零七至六百二十四夜：賈達爾與他的兄弟們，與一個名字待查的麵包師

開羅的一位商人奧馬爾有三個兒子，薩利姆、塞利姆和賈達爾，最疼最小的那個；他老了以後，當著見證人把他的財產分成四份，每個兒子一份，他們的母親一份，這樣他死後就不會有爭執。還是有了。兩個哥哥說父親的財產在賈達爾手裡，就去找法官；法官收了他們三個人的賄賂，兩次都判賈達爾贏，到最後他們三個把所有的東西都給了法庭，都窮了。哥哥們打了他們的母親，把她所有的拿走。賈達爾收留了她。「不要詛咒他們，」他說。「真主會按每個人的作為報應他。來和我一起住，我吃的餅，我分給你。」他用一首詩安慰她：如果一個蠢人欺壓你，耐心忍受，等時間替你報仇；莫要欺壓，因為山如果壓山，也會被壓碎。他弄了一張網，到布拉克去捕魚，有些天賺十個銅錢，有些天二十個；哥哥們趁他不在來到家裡，母親給他們吃硬了的麵包，說：「快吃，趁你們弟弟回來之前走。」有一天他進來時他們正在吃。他對著他們的臉笑了。「歡迎，我的哥哥們，」他說。「這是個吉日。我以為你們把我忘了。」他們說那是撒旦的作為。他跟他們言歸於好，他們一起吃晚飯，住在他那裡，吃他的魚。

然後有一天，他的網撈上來是空的，第二天也是，七天裡他什麼也沒捕到，每天晚上在麵包店賒麵包，回家。麵包師，在他拿網作抵押時，不肯收。「網是你生計的門，」他說。「我要是收了，就是把你的生路關上了。」他給了他二十個銅錢的麵包，說如果明天沒有魚，明天還有麵包。「一個麵包師，」國王說。「是，主上。」「有這樣的麵包師嗎？」我父親說：「銅匠街有一個，主上，他為其中四戶人家這樣做過。」「哪四戶？」「我沒有問他，主上。他在我來之前就在做了。」國王看了一會兒自己的手，說：「查出他的名字。」

第八天賈達爾去卡倫湖撒網。一個摩爾人騎著一頭帶金馬鞍袋的母騾來了，說：「平安與你同在，賈達爾，奧馬爾的兒子！」叫他一起念《開端章》，用一根絲繩把他的手肘綁在背後，推進湖裡，然後等著；如果他的手先舉出水面，就把網撒在他身上拉他出來，如果他的腳先出來，就把騾子牽到市場裡一個猶太人那裡，他會給他一百第納爾。那個摩爾人的腳出來了。猶太人給了賈達爾一百第納爾，說：「這是貪心的報酬。」第二天來了第二個摩爾人，他知道第一個說過的每一句話，要求同樣的事；他的腳也出來了。賈達爾覺得他們都瘋了，說他希望摩爾人每天都來找他。「他這樣說？」國王說。「他這樣說，主上。他每個人頭得一百第納爾。」「他不知道自己在做什麼。」「他知道他在綁一個人的手，主上。」國王對此沒有說什麼。第三個摩爾人從水裡舉出雙手，每隻手裡一條紅魚，把歷史告訴了賈達爾：前兩個是他的兄弟，那個猶太人是第三個，第四個就是他自己，他們的父親教了他們魔法，留給他們一本世界秘密的書，他們為它吵架；養大他們父親的那位老人說，他們當中誰把魔法師沙馬爾達勒的四件寶物帶給他，書就歸誰：一把劍、一枚印戒、一只眼藥瓶和一個天球儀。只有賈達爾能辦到這件事。我略掉魚，因為牠們是紅王的兒子，摩爾人把牠們關在兩只匣子裡，直到牠們被迫打開那道門。

他一路上餵賈達爾吃。「你要什麼？」「麵包和乳酪。」「我可憐的朋友，麵包和乳酪不適合你；許個好的願。」摩爾人說了二十四道菜的名字，賈達爾說：「夠了；你說得我想吃這些菜，可我什麼也看不見」；摩爾人就把手伸進馬鞍袋，拿出一只金盤，裡面是兩隻熱騰騰的烤雞，然後又一只，一直到二十四道菜都擺在地上。他們吃完，他把剩下的扔掉，空盤放回去，到下一頓又重新開始。「沒有東西留下來，」我姐姐說。「沒有，主上。剩下的，他扔了，或者給窮人；袋子又滿了。」「沒有東西留過一頓飯，」國王說。我看著夜簿。他們在四天裡走完，騎著一頭伊弗利特變的騾子，一天一年的路程，到了非斯，一個叫拉赫瑪的女孩開了樓上的房間；賈達爾在那裡吃了二十天，每天早晨換新衣服，直到打開沙馬爾達勒寶藏的那一天。

河床底下有七道門。第一道，他要輕輕敲一下，等著，再重一點敲一下，等著，然後三下連敲；會有聲音問：「誰在敲寶藏的門，卻不知道怎麼解開秘密？」他要說：「我是賈達爾，漁夫，奧馬爾的兒子。」每道門後面都站著一樣東西，如果他抵抗就殺他，如果他順從就倒下成為沒有靈魂的身體：一個拿劍的形象，說，伸出你的脖子；一個騎士；一個弓箭手；一頭他得把手伸給牠的獅子；一個奴隸；兩條龍；第七道門，一個以他母親的樣子出現的女人，她說：「我是你的母親，我生你，哺你，養你，」他得叫她脫衣服。他被告知她不是他的母親，她叫他我的兒子，他威脅她，一件一件，她求他，他繼續；等她只剩褲子的時候，她說：「我的兒子，你的心是石頭嗎？你要羞辱我嗎？」他說：「你說得對，」讓她留著。然後她喊：「他違反了！打他！」他們從不知哪裡出來，打他，那一頓打他一輩子都沒忘，把他扔出去，河水合上了。「他可憐她，」國王說。「是，主上。」「她不是他的母親。」「不是，主上。摩爾人告訴過他，又說了一遍。」「而她有她的臉。」「是。」摩爾人叫他等一年。那一年他吃馬鞍袋裡的東西，每天早晨穿新衣；然後他又下去，等她身上什麼也沒有了，她倒下，他拿了劍和印戒、眼藥瓶和天球儀，音樂為他響起。他把它們交給摩爾人。他什麼也沒要，只要馬鞍袋，摩爾人把它給了他，又給了他裝滿金子和珠寶的第二對，騎著那頭伊弗利特騾子送他回開羅。

勝利門外，他的母親坐著乞討。「施捨吧，為了真主的愛。」她把他留下的給了他的哥哥們，他們拿走了，把她趕出去，她餓著肚子睡覺。「以真主的名義，」她說，當他開始說他要給她吃什麼的時候，「呀！呀！你瘋了嗎？誰付得起這些菜，誰知道怎麼做？」他叫她把馬鞍袋拿來，她摸了摸，是空的，他把手伸進去，拿出填餡的羊肋，她哭了。「那位母親，」奶媽說。「那位母親，」國王說，沒有再說這件事。就在第六百一十五夜，我父親在故事之後說，糧倉現有五年多幾個月，北方有一年；國王說：「好。」他沒有說別的。我寫下了它。

賈達爾餵他的哥哥們，他們從母親那裡知道了袋子的秘密，就串通把他賣給蘇伊士的船長，四十第納爾。他們把船長和他的兩個手下請到賈達爾家吃晚飯，趁賈達爾睡著撲上去。他在槳船上做了一年。一艘船撞上了礁石；他游了出去；一個貝都因營地，一位吉達的商人收留他，麥加，在環繞克爾白時，遇見了摩爾人。摩爾人把印戒給了他，裡面住著馬里德「雷霆」，叫他擦它；雷霆在中午到午夜之間載他回到開羅，把他放在他母親的院子裡。「我要把我的哥哥們帶來，」賈達爾說；馬里德從國王的監獄裡把他們帶出來，國王因為袋子把他們關在那裡，他們以為自己要死了。他說：「不要哭。那是撒旦和貪心。你們怎麼能把我賣了？我拿約瑟安慰自己，他的哥哥們做得更糟，把他扔進了井裡。可是向真主悔改，祂會寬恕你們；至於我，我寬恕你們。」「他原諒了他們，」國王說。「是，主上。」「這是兩次。」「是，主上。」沙・贊曼，在毯子上，說：「我有一個哥哥。」「你有，」國王說。他們彼此看了一口氣的時間，誰也沒有說出自己想說的。

賈達爾叫馬里德一夜之間給他蓋了一座宮殿，布置好，帶來奴僕，把國王的寶庫搬到他這裡，因為是國王拿走了馬鞍袋；司庫摔倒昏了過去。國王派了一位埃米爾帶五十人去帶他來，大門口金椅子上的一個太監打了他們，又打了一百人，兩百人；於是國王派他的宰相獨自去，穿一件白衣，手裡一串念珠，在太監身邊坐下，說：「平安與你同在。」「也與你同在，凡人，」太監說，宰相就知道了他是什麼。賈達爾讓國王站在他自己的大廳裡站了一會兒；當國王說是貪心驅使了他，如果沒有過犯就不會有寬恕，他說：「願真主寬恕你，」讓他坐下。國王怕一個能這樣的人，把女兒阿西婭公主嫁給了他。國王死後，軍隊擁立賈達爾做蘇丹，他蓋了一座清真寺在他墳上，讓兩個哥哥做他的兩位宰相。一年後，哥哥們請他赴宴。

結尾我沒有講。我姐姐在第一個沙漏裡講的，講得很快。第一個哥哥毒死了他，拿了戒指，擦了它，叫馬里德殺掉第二個哥哥，那本來是他左邊的宰相，把兩具屍體扔到將軍們吃飯的面前。「吃吧，高興吧，」他對他們說，「我是你們的蘇丹；如果你們不要我，我就擦戒指，馬里德會殺掉你們，無論大小。」他們說要他。他派人去對賈達爾的遺孀說今晚他要進她的房間。她高興地接待他，用一杯水給了他毒藥；他死後，她拿了戒指，把它折斷，把馬鞍袋撕碎，使誰也不能再有它們，派人去對伊斯蘭長老和將領們說：「你們自己選一個國王吧。」「她折斷了，」國王說。「還撕了袋子。」「什麼也沒有留下。」「沒有，主上。」燈已經快熄了。他坐著看了它一會兒，我什麼也沒寫。

男孩一直醒著，在國王的臂彎裡，看著燈。他把頭轉向父親的臉，說得清清楚楚：「爸。」「再來，」國王說。「爸，」男孩說，把他的手平放在國王的嘴上。國王把自己的手蓋在孩子的手上，閉上眼睛，很久沒有動；我姐姐，在她的枕頭上，說她要講另一個故事，關於加里卜與他的哥哥阿吉卜，和一位名叫昆達米爾的強大國王，他老了。

第六百二十四夜。山魯佐德與敦亞佐德。到。未了：加里卜與他的哥哥阿吉卜，和一位名叫昆達米爾的國王，他老了，才剛開頭；一枚折斷的戒指；不肯收網的麵包師，他的名字待查；七年的糧食，現有五年多幾個月；一個寵妾，被送出那一帶，沒有人寬恕過她；一個說過兩次「爸」的男孩；一個沒有被問過的女人；一個樵夫，沒有被問過；一本名冊；第二個孩子，它動過了；一個恩典，還沒有求。

## 第37章 · 第六百二十五至六百五十夜：加里卜，與天亮前出生的兒子

古時候有一位強大的國王，名叫昆達米爾，當過勇敢的戰士，老了，衰弱了；真主在他極老的時候賜給他一個兒子，因為他的俊美，他給他取名阿吉卜，奇妙。孩子由他父親信仰的祭司教導，然後學騎馬學打仗；到二十歲他是當世最好的騎手，也是一個暴君，帶著一千名騎兵出去攔截商隊，搶走貴族的女兒。貴族們向他父親申訴。老國王叫人抓他，打他，關在暗室兩天。阿吉卜忍了十天。然後他夜裡走進父親睡覺的房間，割斷了他的喉嚨，早晨登上王位，對站在他面前、拔出劍來的埃米爾們說：「你們看到你們的國王得到了什麼。誰服從我，我就尊重他。誰不，我對他做我對我父親做的事。」

我姐姐講得很快，國王沒有叫她停。五個月以後阿吉卜做了個夢。他看見他父親站在他面前，他父親身上出來一個蜜蜂大小的東西，長成了一頭獅子，爪子像鉤，朝他撲來，把他撕開了。解夢的人說，那意味著他父親有一個孩子，會是他的敵人，而且會贏。他叫人打了他們。「我沒有任何我該怕的兄弟，」他說。然後他走進他父親的女眷院，發現一個妃子懷孕七個月，就命令兩個奴隸把她帶到海邊淹死。「停，」國王說。

我姐姐停了。那是第六百二十五夜的中段，第一個沙漏，她的手放在她放手的地方。國王沒有看她。他膝蓋上有男孩，醒著，他把男孩的臉轉進他的外衣。「他們沒有，」我姐姐說。「主上。他們沒有淹死她。」「先說這個。」「兩個奴隸把她帶到海邊，主上，他們下不了手，就把她帶到一座森林；她在下一句裡是活著的。」「說。」「她活著，主上，她的孩子活著，他叫加里卜，他是這個故事的英雄。」國王看著燈。「接著講，」他說。奶媽放下針線，什麼也沒說，把手放在我姐姐的膝蓋上。

她獨自在森林裡，在果樹和溪流之間，那兩個奴隸在他們自己的爭執裡被襲擊者殺了，她生下一個男孩，棕色的皮膚，四肢乾淨，因為她的異鄉，給他取名加里卜，陌生人，她剪斷臍帶，用自己的衣服包住他。獵人們帶著鷹和獵犬和瞪羚進森林，發現她胸前抱著孩子，問她是凡人還是精靈，她說她是凡人。他們的首領馬爾達斯，卡赫坦族的埃米爾，娶了她，她為他生了一個兒子，叫薩希姆・萊勒，夜之箭。他們像雙胞胎一樣長大，學劍、矛、弓；十五歲，每一個都能對抗一千名騎兵。

接下來二十夜我只給你人。馬爾達斯的部族在他不在的時候被納卜漢族的首領襲擊，他想要馬爾達斯的女兒馬赫迪婭，被拒絕了；加里卜帶了一百騎兵，把她和俘虜都帶了回來。他得到了感謝。而他愛上了馬赫迪婭，像一個剛看到她被擄走的男人那樣，吃不下，睡不著；馬爾達斯聽說了，雷霆一樣發怒，說：「這就是養私生子的人的報酬！」就帶了一百五十個人到一個山谷，等他養大的那個孩子，要在回家的路上殺他。「他養他，」國王說。「是，主上。」「卻要殺他，因為他要他的女兒。」「因為他要她，沒有聘禮。」「這是最古老的爭吵了，」沙・贊曼在毯子上說，「養大男孩的人與男孩之間。」國王看著他。「不是最古老的，」他說。

那個埋伏本身被阿瑪力克人埋伏了，他們是因為加里卜殺了他們的一個人來找他的；他們把馬爾達斯綁起來，要帶走處死，受了傷的薩希姆去警告加里卜，加里卜獨自在黑暗中走進山谷，把他帶了出來。蘇麥雅問他怎麼能這樣。「他是他的父親，」她說。「不，」我姐姐說，「他是養大他的人。」「我就是這麼說的。」我姐姐笑了；那是她這個月第一次在第一個沙漏裡笑。「他不是為了那個做的，」她說。「他做是因為那個人在一條溝裡。」馬爾達斯請求青年原諒他。他原諒了他，老人說，他女兒的聘禮要是山中食人魔的頭，那魔在那一帶盤踞了一百年，吃了不少人。我略去食人魔吃了什麼。他的山裡關著一位國王的女兒，法赫爾・塔吉，波斯人國王的女兒；加里卜上去和他打，沒有殺他，饒了他，那個從來沒有被饒過的食人魔，成了他的人，跟著他走到故事的末尾；加里卜把公主送回她父親那裡，她父親說要把她嫁給他。那是一根線，我現在要丟開，再撿起來。馬爾達斯本來就沒打算讓他回來，夜裡帶著他的部族到了庫法，要把女兒獻給阿吉卜王。

這一段我沒有講。我姐姐在第六百三十五夜，在第一個沙漏裡講的，眼睛看著天花板，雙手交疊在她衣服的弧度上。阿吉卜問馬爾達斯那青年是誰；馬爾達斯說，一個青年，他母親在他的帳篷裡，叫納斯拉。阿吉卜說：「就是她。」他叫人帶她來。他問她，他派去的兩個奴隸在哪裡，她說：「他們為了我自相殘殺了。」阿吉卜拔出劍。「他殺了她，」國王說。「是，主上。她有十夜沒有名字，然後她有了這個。」「納斯拉，」國王說。「是援助的意思。」「是，主上。」「當著馬爾達斯的面。」「是，主上。」「而馬爾達斯把女兒給了他。」「他把女兒嫁給他，主上，阿吉卜給了他三萬第納爾。」國王沒有動。他說：「還有嗎？」「沒有，主上。剩下的是戰爭。」「那就講戰爭。」

我講了戰爭，在第二個沙漏裡，它很長；我給你的，就是我給他的，一個重複的樣子。加里卜向庫法進軍，要報他父親、母親和未婚妻的血仇，食人魔在他身邊，還有很多阿拉伯人和波斯人；阿吉卜帶著更多的人迎戰。有一天，一夜，又一天；加里卜在睡夢裡被抓，鎖在阿吉卜的帳篷裡；他的弟弟薩希姆在燈裡放了莨菪，把阿吉卜裹在斗篷裡背了出來，加里卜叫人剝光他，鞭打他，派了守衛，早晨他去援助他叔叔，沒有留下守衛。阿吉卜的侍從爬進來，背著他走了。「他沒有留守衛，」國王說。「主上？」「加里卜。他抓到他了，他去幫他叔叔，沒有留守衛。」「他很急，主上。」「是。」他看著男孩。「他是故意的，」他說。我不知道他是什麼意思；我把它記在我第二張紙上，記在我不知道的底下。

第六百四十夜，我父親說他找到了麵包師的名字。他是從他的角落說的。他去了銅匠街四個晚上，穿著書記的衣服，向不是麵包師的那個人買麵包，第五個晚上向麵包師買，他叫哈米德，六十歲，六年來賒給十一戶人家麵包；宰相問他為什麼，他說，麵包這種東西會壞。國王說：「哈米德。」他說了兩遍。「哈米德，」蘇麥雅說，「是被讚美的那個。」「他知道嗎？」國王說。「不知道，主上。」他沒有說要送什麼東西；我父親說他想過，沒有做，因為那樣麵包師就會知道，這件事就成了一種付款。「不，」國王說。「不要送。」我把它寫在我寫沒完成的東西的那一欄裡：一個叫哈米德的麵包師，沒有人送過他任何東西。第六百四十五夜我父親說糧倉現有六年。

第六百五十夜，在第一個沙漏的中段，我姐姐停了。她在講加里卜和薩希姆睡著時被兩個馬里德抓起，帶到有四個頭的精靈之王那裡，一個獅子的，一個象的，一個狼的，一個人的，她停在第二個頭和第三個頭之間，雙手托住肚子，她的臉做了它在第五百零九夜做過的樣子，但更久。「這不是魚，」奶媽說。「不是，」我姐姐說。然後她轉頭看我，用我六歲時她對我用的聲音說：「敦亞佐德。接著講，」奶媽和兩個從第六百四十夜起就在隔壁房間等著的女人，托住她的腋下，把她抬到簾子後面，燈跟著她們去了，只剩床邊那盞小燈。

國王沒有跟去。我想說他做了什麼，因為我不認為他知道自己做了。他坐在地上，在磚旁邊，帶著男孩，男孩醒著，對黑暗感到驚訝，他靠著牆；我父親站在他的角落，雙手垂在身側，沙・贊曼，在他的毯子上，坐了起來，開始用手指數什麼，數到一隻手的盡頭又重新開始；蘇麥雅過來靠在我的膝蓋邊坐下。簾子後面有聲音。「接著講，」國王對我說。我說我不知道從哪裡。「哪裡都行，」他說。「從開頭講。」我就講了。我講一個女人獨自在森林裡，在果樹和溪流之間，沒有人幫她，胸前有一個孩子，她叫他陌生人。我講了整個第一個沙漏，沙漏流完時，國王自己拿過去翻了，我講了整個第二個。我像我在那裡一樣講。我講了三遍。蘇麥雅靠在我膝邊，低聲念著什麼；我聽了聽，是白書裡的那九個名字，一個接一個，然後又從頭開始。國王沒有動，只是簾子後面有聲響的時候，他把手放在男孩的背上，一直放著直到聲響過去；我父親非常輕地念著真主的名字，沒有重複同一個，在某個時辰他在地上坐了下來，這是我一生中沒見過他做的。

窗戶從黑色變成灰燼的顏色，我第三次講到獵人們在森林裡發現那個帶著孩子的女人的地方，簾子後面一個聲音說：「是個兒子。」是奶媽。我停了。沒有人動。蘇麥雅在我的袖子裡哭，說她沒有。「她是不是，」國王說，說不下去。「她累了，主上，」奶媽說。「她說你可以進來。」他把男孩給了我。我很久沒有抱他了；他現在很重，暖暖的，身上有他父親的氣味。國王走到簾子後面，我什麼也沒聽見；然後，過了一段我沒有數的時間，我聽見他說了一個字，我聽不見是什麼。他出來時走到桌上的夜簿前，我在奶媽開口的時候，在小燈下，在未了那一欄寫了：一個孩子，出生，一個兒子。他讀了它。他拿起筆，把筆尖蘸進墨水，我看見他的手不穩；他又放下，把拇指放在「出生」那個字旁邊，像他以前做過一次那樣。

第六百五十夜。山魯佐德與敦亞佐德。到。未了：有四個頭的精靈之王，才剛開頭；一個叫哈米德的麵包師，沒有人送過他任何東西；七年的糧食，現有六年；一個孩子，出生，一個兒子；一個說過「爸」、也走過路的男孩；一個寵妾，被送出那一帶，沒有人寬恕過她；一個沒有被問過的女人；一個樵夫，沒有被問過；一本名冊；一個恩典，還沒有求。

## 第38章 · 第六百五十一至六百八十夜：邊上的一個名字，與被放開的兒子

七夜裡，兩個沙漏我都講了，夜簿上寫的是敦亞佐德一個人，用我自己的手，我沒有劃掉。奶媽訂了這個規矩，沒有人需要被提醒她的意思，我姐姐臉朝牆躺著，孩子在她身邊，聽我對國王講精靈之王的事。他有四個頭，獅子的、象的、豹的和猞猁的，兩個馬里德把加里卜和他的弟弟放在他面前的時候，他像一座山一樣坐在寶座上。「你們殺了我的兒子，」他說。我給四個頭各配了一個聲音，大男孩在磚邊的地上，對著象的那個聲音笑了。他們曾在泉水谷裡，看見一隻鳥，用木箭射牠，那隻鳥是他的兒子。加里卜指著偉大的真主發誓，他不知道。我不給你講那團火，精靈之王在火裡養著一位女神，也不講它是怎麼熄的。熄了以後，他說真理已經向他顯明，吻了他們兩個，擺了筵席，一個月裡他和加里卜一起對付他的一個叫巴爾坎的堂弟，那人是叛徒；之後加里卜還是不能回家。

叛徒的宮殿裡有一個女孩，晨星，藍王的女兒，藍王把一位中國國王的女兒擄來強佔了，她母親在孩子四十天時死了。她恨她的父親，他死了她很高興。加里卜看著她，愛她愛得無以復加，「忘了，」故事說，「公主法赫爾・塔吉，甚至馬赫迪婭。」他當夜娶了她。「他忘了她們，」國王說，他膝蓋上抱著男孩，男孩腦後的頭髮豎著。「一夜，主上，」我說。「那是寫下來的句子。」「又一個忘得很快的，」國王說。「那是一種天賦。」可這和他對辛巴達說的方式不同，沙・贊曼，兩次都聽見了，看著牆。奶媽說他是個男人。「他是個國王，」沙・贊曼說。「那不一樣。」「不一樣，」國王說。

第七天早晨，第六百五十六夜以後，我父親、沙・贊曼、奶媽、蘇麥雅和我站在床邊，我姐姐靠著靠枕坐起來，穿著乾淨的襯衣，頭髮披著，臂彎裡是孩子。他是黑的，小小的，有很多黑頭髮，眼睛閉著躲光，我姐姐說，他看起來像一個被人說了粗話的男人。國王帶著大男孩，騎在他肩上，從院子裡進來。他什麼也沒說。他向我要夜簿，我給了他，他翻回第一頁，在邊上之邊上的底部，在那八個字之後，用他方正的字寫了第九個：優素福。「約瑟，」奶媽說。「那頭狼，」沙・贊曼說。「那糧食，」我父親說，然後，好像對自己感到驚訝，「那七年。」「那口井，」蘇麥雅說；國王看著她。「哪一個？」奶媽說。國王沒有說話。我不知道他指哪一個。我想他沒有選。從床上，我姐姐說：「全部。」他說：「是。」事後蘇麥雅問我怎麼寫；我寫在她的紙上，她抄了四遍，第四遍是直的。

那個大一點的男孩，被放下來了，伸著兩隻手像過河那樣走到床邊，站著，看著另一個。他伸出一根手指，碰了碰那些黑頭髮。「爸，」他說；然後，清楚得沒有人敢呼吸，「爸，」把整隻手平放在那顆頭上，放著。我姐姐的眼睛滿了。「不，」國王說，有人動的時候。「讓他。」我們讓他。孩子醒了，發出他們發出的那個聲音，大男孩立刻把手拿開，嘴張著，像一個做了件事又不確定是什麼事的人，看著他父親。「再來，」國王說；男孩就把手放回去。

第八夜我姐姐坐著講第一個沙漏，像她說過的那樣，我講第二個；剩下的加里卜我給你，照它來的樣子，匆匆忙忙，因為講的時候就匆匆忙忙。精靈之王本要把他的飛馬給他，可是牠到了人的地上會死，於是給了他一匹海馬，在伊拉克沒有可比的；他在分別時哭了，說：「如果你遇到什麼你無力應付的事，派人來找我。」一千個馬里德帶著加里卜和晨星，還有他的那份戰利品，兩天一夜，走了五十年的路程，回到他自己的國家；他們降落在他的阿曼城旁，發現它被一支多得像洶湧海水的軍隊圍著。我略去戰役。它們在夜簿上是地名：阿曼，克什米爾，卡拉吉，伊斯巴尼爾。第六百六十夜，我父親在故事之後說：「七年，主上。北方七年，城裡七年多幾個月。」「好，」國王說。「現在不要動它。」我父親說他本來就沒打算。「這就是我的意思，」國王說。我寫下來。那是夜簿裡少數幾件完成了的事之一。

加里卜在克什米爾聽一個波斯軍官說，法赫爾・塔吉，那位波斯公主，他從食人魔手裡救出、送回她父親那裡、本該成為他妻子的人，被她父親的命令淹死在河裡；世界在他眼前變得蒼白。他指著亞伯拉罕朋友發誓，他要去找那條狗，要他的命償她的。兩個人被帶來，他們曾奉命淹死她，說他們下不了手；他們放了她，叫她逃，把她留在傑伊洪河的岸上；加里卜叫他的占星家打一盤地占，他們找不到她。一個馬里德，是敵人，在他睡著時抓住他，帶到傑伊洪河邊，要把他扔進去，可覺得困難，就給他做了一只木筏，推進水流，水流帶它走了很遠。「那是另一座島，」蘇麥雅說，她會數。「第六座，」奶媽說。「第七座，」沙・贊曼說，「如果你把辛巴達的算兩次。」他們在第二個沙漏裡為此爭論。那是一個讓人安歇的爭論。

一條船接了他，水手們知道他是誰，把他綁了，帶到一座叫卡拉吉的城，一個阿瑪力克人在每道城門立了一尊紅玉髓的偶像，裡面有一個馬里德，他們向牠獻祭陌生人；加里卜從那裡出來了，我不說怎麼出來的。一個馬里德帶著他飛，他也在空中從那一個脫身，降落在海中央一座大島上，島上有嘴唇與舌頭想要的一切水果，還有他捉的魚；他獨自在那裡住了，我不知道多久，我姐姐沒有說。她說那是個愉快的地方。「他不急，」國王說。「是，主上。他停下來了。」「為什麼？」「那裡沒有什麼他能做的，主上，直到船來。」「我去過那座島，」沙・贊曼說。「它叫撒馬爾罕。」

法赫爾・塔吉沒有淹死。那兩個人放她走的時候叫她跑；她從一個國家走到另一個國家，從一個山谷走到另一個山谷，說：「你的眼睛在哪裡，加里卜，讓你看看我的處境？」直到來到一個山谷，山谷中央有一座城堡，城堡裡一百個少女，她們以為她是精靈，問她是誰。她說了。她們哭了，說：「放心；這裡你有吃有喝有衣服。」五天後她生了個男孩，像月亮，叫他穆拉德沙。那座城堡屬於一位名叫薩勒薩勒的精靈之王，他每個月來一次，騎著一頭白象，聽了她的事，說等她兒子長大成人，他會替她取她父親的頭。男孩在精靈的孩子們當中長大，獵獅子，直到他的心比石頭還硬。十五歲時他說：「媽媽，我的爸爸是誰？」她告訴了他；他說：「憑你養我的恩情，我一定把你父親的頭帶到你面前。」

他帶了兩百個馬里德出發。他攻下設拉子，巴爾赫，波斯人的撒馬爾罕；把戰利品分給愛他的士兵；等他有了十萬騎兵，就在伊斯巴尼爾城下紮營，那是加里卜的城，派人去叫他母親。城裡三天沒有打仗。第三天，一個叫扎勒扎勒的馬里德，欠加里卜一條命，半夜降在宮殿屋頂，帶來四萬個馬里德，臂上抱著加里卜，加里卜喊晨星和馬赫迪婭，她們跑過來哭了。他坐上寶座，軍官們告訴他，三天前有一支軍隊在城牆前紮營，裡面有精靈，統帥叫穆拉德沙；他們還沒有打。

第二天早晨，穆拉德沙穿著盔甲騎馬出來，到兩軍之間，喊話說，除了他們的國王，誰也別來；如果國王打倒他，他就是兩軍的主人，如果他打倒國王，他會殺了他，像殺別人那樣。加里卜聽見，說：「滾開，阿拉伯人的狗！」就出去了。他們把長矛在對方身上折斷，然後折斷劍；馬倒下以後，他們下來扭住彼此。男孩把對手舉到空中，要摔下去；加里卜抓住他的耳朵，使盡全力拉，直到男孩覺得天要掉在地上了；他喊，心在嘴裡：「我向你的仁慈投降，時代的騎士！」我們屋裡的國王站起來了。我沒有看見。他站在磚旁邊，一隻手扶著牆，我姐姐，正在講，沒有看，伸出她自己的手，像人對黑暗中的孩子伸手那樣，他就又坐下了。

加里卜綁了他，坐上寶座，叫人把他帶來，銬著鐐，垂著頭，說：「你是誰，竟敢騎馬出來與國王作對？」男孩說：「不要責備我，我有理由。我出來是為我的母親和父親向波斯國王薩布爾報仇；因為他想殺他們；我母親逃了，我不知道他殺沒殺我的父親。」「憑真主，你有理由，」加里卜說。「可你的父母是誰？」男孩說：「我的父親是加里卜，伊拉克的國王，我的母親是法赫爾・塔吉，薩布爾的女兒。」加里卜大叫一聲，昏倒了。他們在他身上灑玫瑰水。他醒來說：「你真是加里卜和法赫爾・塔吉的兒子嗎？」「是，」男孩說。「你是一位勇士，」加里卜說，「勇士的兒子。放開我的孩子！」「放開我的孩子，」國王說，用一種我不認得的聲音。「是，主上，」我姐姐說。她的手放在嬰兒身上，嬰兒醒著，看著燈。

我略去對薩布爾做了什麼。我姐姐用一句話說完了，我沒有看國王，那句話我沒有寫。她說，加里卜給兒子戴上庫思老的王冠，讓他做波斯人、突厥人和米底人的王，把他叔叔放在伊拉克的王位上，公正地統治，各國都順服他；他與他的妻子們和同伴們過著安適的生活，直到毀滅歡樂的和拆散相聚的來到他們那裡。「這就是流傳到我們這裡的加里卜與阿吉卜的全部，」我姐姐說。她說有一個人，名叫阿卜杜拉・本・馬阿馬爾・凱西，有一年去朝聖，講了一個故事，關於一個叫拉雅的女人和她的情人奧特巴。

第六百八十夜。山魯佐德與敦亞佐德。到。未了：有一年去聖殿朝聖的人，與一個叫拉雅的女人，才剛開頭；一個名叫優素福的兒子，三十天大，他的名字在邊上；一個把手放在一顆頭上、被說「再來」的男孩；七年的糧食，現有七年，不要動它；一個叫哈米德的麵包師，沒有人送過他任何東西；一個寵妾，被送出那一帶，沒有人寬恕過她；一個沒有被問過的女人；一個樵夫，沒有被問過；一本名冊；一個恩典，還沒有求。

## 第39章 · 第六百八十一至六百九十八夜：扶貴人跌倒的人，與被問了一句的女人

一個叫阿卜杜拉・本・馬阿馬爾的人，有一年去朝聖，朝完以後回頭去拜先知的墓，一個夜晚，他坐在墓和講壇之間的園子裡，聽見一個柔和的聲音低低地呻吟著，說：「夜啊，你對害相思的人是這麼漫長，他抱怨愛與愛的狂喜。」他起身朝聲音去，找到一個極其俊美的青年，臉頰上鬍子還沒有長，淚水在上面磨出兩道溝。青年說他叫奧特巴，那天早晨他去一座清真寺禮拜，來了一群女人，像月亮一樣，簇擁著一個美麗得無以復加的女孩，女孩在他面前停下，說：「奧特巴，你對一個要與你結合的人要與你結合，怎麼說？」就走了。他再也沒有見到她。他六神無主，只是從一處走到另一處。

於是阿卜杜拉帶著他，還有那些安薩爾人，一大群，他們打聽到那女孩是拉雅，薩利姆族一個人的女兒，就騎馬去求婚。她父親怒氣沖沖地進去。「他們是高貴的首領，」她說，「先知為他們向真主說情。他們為他們當中哪一位求我？」聽完，她說她聽說奧特巴說話算話，叫她父親把聘禮定得高到他們知難而退。他要一千只紅金手鐲、五千迪拉姆、一百匹也門的布和五皮囊龍涎香。阿卜杜拉說：「你得到這些。」他們派人去麥地那取，住了四十天，擺筵席，然後她父親說：「把你們的新娘帶走。」三十駝的行李和一頂轎子；離麥地那還有一天路程，一些騎兵撲過來，奧特巴迎上去，被殺了。「那個少女，」我姐姐說，「聽見了，從駱駝上摔下來，撲在他身上，大聲哀哭；她抽噎了一聲，就斷了氣。」「四十天，」蘇麥雅說。「他們有過四十天的筵席。」「他們沒有過一個夜晚，」奶媽說。「沒有，」我姐姐說。他們給他們挖了一座墳。七年後阿卜杜拉回來，墳上長了一棵高樹，樹上掛著紅、綠、黃的布條；人們叫它新娘新郎樹。國王對這一則一個字也沒說。

欣德，努爾曼的女兒，是她那時代最美的女人，哈賈吉娶了她，有一天他進去，發現她照著鏡子，說她是一匹純種的母馬，被一頭騾子配了；我只用那一句把她給你，我姐姐給的也就這麼多。然後，第六百八十三夜，我姐姐講了一個叫胡扎伊馬的人，阿薩德族的，他以慷慨出名，後來窮了，他曾經厚待過的兄弟們幫了他一陣，就厭倦了。他對妻子，他叔叔的女兒，說他要關上門，直到死。他就關了。在美索不達米亞，有一個總督，名叫伊克里馬，人叫他滿溢者，有一天在聽政的廳裡聽見他的名字，問他過得怎麼樣；有人說他關了門。「這是他的慷慨造成的，」伊克里馬說。「難道胡扎伊馬・本・比什爾沒有找到一個安慰他、報答他的人嗎？」當夜他拿了四千第納爾裝在一只錢袋裡，帶了一個侍從，騎馬去胡扎伊馬的家，把侍從打發走，敲門。

胡扎伊馬來到門口，伊克里馬把錢袋給他，說：「拿這個好好度日。」他覺得它重，抓住了韁繩。「你是誰？我的靈魂為你贖身。」「我不是要在這樣的時候來讓你認識我的。」「不知道你的名字，我不放你走。」「我叫賈比爾・阿薩拉特・基拉姆，」伊克里馬說，那是扶貴人跌倒的人的意思；就騎馬走了。胡扎伊馬整夜在黑暗裡摸那些錢幣，因為燈裡沒有油，從粗糙感知道是金子，不敢相信。早晨他還清債主，去見哈里發，把事情告訴他；哈里發很想認識那個人，就讓胡扎伊馬做美索不達米亞的總督，取代伊克里馬。他到了城裡，伊克里馬出來迎接。胡扎伊馬查賬，發現伊克里馬缺錢，像所有的總督那樣；說必須還；伊克里馬說他沒有；胡扎伊馬就把他鎖上鐐銬。關了他一個月。「他不知道，」國王說。「他不知道，主上。」「他把夜裡來到他門口的那個人鎖了起來。」「他不知道那是他。」「是，」國王說；他又說了一遍，對自己。

伊克里馬的妻子聽說他的情形，派她的女傭去胡扎伊馬的門口，說：「賈比爾・阿薩拉特・基拉姆應得的報酬，就是嚴密的監獄和沉重的鐐銬嗎？」胡扎伊馬大叫：「呀，卑鄙！是他嗎？」就帶著城裡的體面人去了監獄，看見伊克里馬消瘦，垂著頭。他跪下，吻他的臉。「你待我那麼厚道，」他說，「我報答得這麼卑劣。」叫人把鐐銬從他身上卸下，鎖在自己的腳上；伊克里馬說：「你這是做什麼？我以真主求你。」他們出去了。胡扎伊馬把他帶回自己的家，帶到澡堂，親手給他洗，給他一件袍子和錢，向他的妻子道歉；他們一起去拉姆拉見哈里發，胡扎伊馬說他找到了賈比爾・阿薩拉特・基拉姆，哈里發就讓伊克里馬做亞美尼亞、阿塞拜疆和美索不達米亞的總督，又多給了他要求之外的一萬第納爾，說胡扎伊馬的事交在他手裡。伊克里馬說：「我恢復他的職位。」我父親在他的角落一直很安靜。「宰相，」國王說。「主上。」「那個麵包師。」「主上，我沒有送他任何東西。」「我不是這個意思。看好別讓任何人把他鎖起來。」「主上？」「那些總督，」國王說。「他們會弄錯。」我父親說他會留意；用手指在手掌上，在那些房子底下，寫了一個字，短的，我想是鐐銬。

接下來幾則我只給你邊角。書記尤努斯有一個女孩，把她獻給了哈里發瓦利德，後來又後悔；女孩被帶進去的時候，對哈里發唱了她自己的詩，那麼雅，他問她是不是她自己的，她說：「是我自己的。」哈倫・拉希德問阿斯瑪伊，他聽過的最好的東西是什麼，他說他聽過很多，只有巴士拉三個女孩唱的三組對句讓他歡喜。摩蘇爾的易卜拉欣向哈里發請了一個星期六的假，要獨自待著，一個穿白衣的老人進來，拿著銀柄手杖，身上有香味，說他不餓，要了一品脫酒，說：「你願意給我們唱點什麼嗎？」然後說：「唱得好，阿布・伊沙克」；易卜拉欣不喜歡一個陌生人知道他的名字。老人說他要唱；就拿過魯特琴，琴弦會說阿拉伯語，屋裡的門和牆都跟著他唱，易卜拉欣動不了。「跟著我唱，」老人說。「重複給我聽，」易卜拉欣說。「不需要重複。你已經背下來了。」他就消失了；屋角一個聲音說：「是我，阿布・穆爾拉，今天做了你的酒伴。」那是魔鬼。他來只是為了唱歌。易卜拉欣唱給哈倫聽，哈倫為它乾了杯，雖然他不是一個酒鬼。

「他唱了一遍，」國王說，「那個人就有了。」「是，主上。」「而且沒有忘。」「他從沒忘過，主上。他一直背到死。」「這是魔鬼做得好的事，」國王說；沙・贊曼用他打算失禮時的聲音說：「國王也是。」國王轉過頭。「什麼？」「他也不忘。」國王看了他一口氣的時間。「是，」他說。「我不忘。」第六百九十夜，也就是第四十天，我姐姐起來了。她走到窗邊，大男孩掛在她的裙子上，她站在那裡，國王把小的給她，她把他舉向灰白的光，沒有人說四十天的事，奶媽，她數過的，說那四十天完了。

然後是詩人賈米勒，在一個睡不著的夜晚告訴哈倫，有一個青年曾夜裡來找他，要他幫他和他的堂妹從一座要拆散他們的房子逃走，他幫了；還有巴士拉的情人和麥地那的情人，還有摩蘇爾的伊沙克和他的情婦與另一個魔鬼；我只告訴你，第六百九十二夜我姐姐講了一個野阿拉伯人，中午光著腳瘸著，走到大馬士革穆阿維葉的宮殿。哈里發在窗口看見他，說：「真主創造過比他更可憐的人嗎？他在這個時辰非得出門不可？」又對侍從說：「如果他找我，不要攔他。」阿拉伯人說他來是控告哈里發在麥地那的代理馬爾萬。他曾有一個妻子叫蘇阿德，他愛她，沒人比得上；一個壞年頭殺了他的駱駝，她父親看他窮了，就把她帶走了。他去找馬爾萬，馬爾萬派人叫她來，一看見她就愛上了她，成了那人的情敵，把他折磨到他休了她；把他關在牢裡，直到她的潔淨期過去，娶了她。「他要求他，」我姐姐說，「休了她。他說，我不休她。他們就折磨他。」「他們折磨他，」國王說。「直到他做了。而她什麼也沒有被問。」「沒有，主上。」

穆阿維葉給馬爾萬寫了一封信，我姐姐全文講了，並不客氣：信上說，管人民的官，應該管住自己的眼睛不貪他們的欲望，管住自己的肉體不去享受。馬爾萬服從了，回信讚美那個女人；哈里發說他讚得過分，就叫人把她帶來，看見了從來沒見過的美麗，和她說話，發現她口才流利。他又叫阿拉伯人來，對他說：「如果你把她讓給我，我給你三個胸脯高聳的月亮一樣的女奴，每人一千第納爾，國庫每年給你一筆錢。」阿拉伯人呻吟一聲，昏了過去，哈里發以為他死了；他醒來說：「我心情沉重、極度需要地向你控告馬爾萬的不公；可我向誰控告你的不公？」「不要讓我，」他用詩說，「成為被背叛者之一，從火熱的沙子上，只能向火求救。」哈里發說：「你承認休了她，馬爾萬也承認了。所以我們給她自由選擇。」

「他問她了，」蘇麥雅說。這是她這些日子在屋裡說的第一句不是問題的話。「他問她了，」我姐姐說，「他說：蘇阿德，你選誰：信士的長官，有他的尊榮、光榮、統治和宮殿；還是馬爾萬，有他的暴力和專橫；還是這個阿拉伯人，有他的饑餓和貧窮？」她作了兩句詩：「這個人，饑餓折磨他，破布裹他，比部族親戚更讓我珍愛；比戴王冠的頭、比代理馬爾萬、比所有誇耀金銀錢幣的人。」她說：「憑真主，我不會為了命運的變遷拋棄他。我們之間有舊日的交情，他貧困時我與他同甘共苦，正如他富足時我同享。」哈里發命人給她一萬迪拉姆，把她交給阿拉伯人，他帶著妻子走了。「在他出價買她以後，」國王說。「是，主上。」「他問她，在後面。」「是。」「這比不問好，」蘇麥雅說。「是，」國王說；他沒有再說什麼，下巴支在手上看了夜簿一會兒。

最後一則，第六百九十八夜，是征服者納西爾國王和他的宰相。宰相阿布・阿米爾得到一個男孩，一個基督徒，極美，國王看見了，說：「這個男孩從哪裡來？」「從真主那裡，」宰相說，國王說：「你要用星星來嚇唬我們，用月亮來囚禁我們嗎？」宰相知道他的意思，把男孩作為禮物送給他，附了兩句詩。然後他得到一個世上最美的女奴，怕國王聽說，同樣的事會發生，就把她也送了他，附上更貴重的禮。一個敵人對國王說宰相還在為那男孩咬牙，國王就以男孩的名義給他寫信，要他把他要回來；宰相在信背後寫：「受過經驗教訓的人，會像傻瓜一樣把頭伸進獅子的洞嗎？」「又是獅子，」國王說。奶媽說她對獅子厭倦了。「牠是一種有耐心的動物，」我姐姐說；國王笑了，只一聲，出聲地，用手捂住嘴，膝蓋上的男孩抬頭看他。

然後她說有一個人叫艾哈邁德・達納夫，災難艾哈邁德，從開羅逃來，做了巴格達右手的巡邏隊長，另一個叫哈桑・舒曼，左手；城裡有個老太婆叫狡猾的達莉拉，她有個女兒叫札伊娜卜，是捉兔子的，達莉拉說她要在巴格達玩比他們任何一個都高明的詭計。「在城裡，」國王說，不是對任何人說的。「在街上。」他安靜了一會兒。「宰相，」他說。「主上。」「我想看那條巷子。」我父親沒有問是哪一條。「我想看那條巷子，」國王又說，「磚頭來的那條。」「主上，」我父親說，「什麼時候？」「還沒有，」國王說。「快了。」那是舊話，不是舊聲音。

第六百九十八夜。山魯佐德與敦亞佐德。到。未了：一個叫狡猾的達莉拉的女人，和她的女兒，才剛開頭；一位國王，想看一條巷子，快了；一個叫哈米德的麵包師，沒有人可以把他鎖起來；一個名叫優素福的兒子，四十八天大，被舉到過窗口；一個把手放在弟弟頭上的男孩；一個事後才被問的女人；一個沒有被問過的女人；一個樵夫，沒有被問過；一本名冊；一個恩典，還沒有求。

## 第40章 · 第六百九十九至七百一十八夜：狡猾的老太婆，與皮匠巷的一扇窗板

我姐姐在第六百九十九夜開講，我照她講的樣子給你開頭，因為她喜歡這一個。哈倫・拉希德的時代，巴格達有兩個無賴，艾哈邁德・達納夫，人叫他災難，和哈桑・舒曼，人叫他瘟疫，哈里發抓不住他們，就封他們做巡邏隊長，一個管右手那一邊，一個管左手那一邊，每人每月一千第納爾，各帶四十個人。有個老太婆叫狡猾的達莉拉，她死去的丈夫做過同一個職位，她聽見傳令官在喊，就對女兒札伊娜卜，人叫她捉兔子的，說她要玩比他們兩個都高明的騙局。她穿上白羊毛的衣服，肩上掛一串像一捆柴那麼大的念珠，提一只壺，壺口裡放三個第納爾，在掌禮官長的妻子窗下站住。那位夫人那天早晨剛跟丈夫吵過，因為他看見別的埃米爾都有兒子。他說她不能生。她說他是一頭騾子。到中午兩個人都後悔了。老太婆在門房眼前把壺轉了一圈，第納爾掉出來，門房被主人欠著三個月的工錢，把它當成了神蹟。然後她對那位妻子說，她認識一位聖者，叫負重之父，專治不孕的人，就把她領出了家門，那是她出嫁以後第一次出門。「一次都沒有？」蘇麥雅說。「一次都沒有，」我姐姐說。

那一天的事我不全給你，那一天有七個人和一只壺。有一個被許了新娘的年輕商人，和那個被許了聖者的新娘，和一個把鑰匙借給一個說自家房子正在撐木頭修的女人的染匠；結尾是商人只穿襯衣在一間房裡，妻子只穿內衣在另一間房裡，各自等著老太婆的女兒或老太婆的兒子，而老太婆在三條街外，帶著他們的衣服。還剩一件事，她也做了：她對一個趕驢的小夥子說染匠破產了，借他的驢去運顧客的貨，叫他把染缸砸了，好讓卡迪的差役什麼也找不到。染匠買了肉餅回來，看見趕驢的拿著一把鋸子站在店的廢墟裡，說他看見主人平安多麼高興。染匠喊：「我的貨，人家的貨，哎呀！」趕驢的喊：「我的驢，哎呀！」兩個人掐住對方的脖子，兩聲哎呀一起哭。國王出聲笑了，膝蓋上的男孩抬頭看他。那一個星期剩下的日子，沙・贊曼進門時都說「我的驢，哎呀」，像別人說願平安降臨你。

第七百零三夜她拿走了一個孩子的衣服。她用一枚黃銅幣和一個傻丫頭，在一條為訂婚鋪了地毯的街上：把商會會長的小兒子從丫頭懷裡抱走，扒光他，留他在一個金匠那裡作抵押，換走價值一千第納爾的首飾。書裡給這個金匠一種信仰，像給幾乎每個被人愚弄的人一種信仰一樣，我在這裡和後面都略去；他是個金匠，名叫阿扎利亞，他被騙了。會長發現兒子光著身子坐在鋪子裡，高興得讓衣服抵作贖金算了。她騙過的那五個人去找她。她給一個理髮匠一枚第納爾和一套說法，說趕驢的瘋了，坐著站著都喊「我的驢」，理髮匠拔了他兩顆牙，又燒他的太陽穴給他治病；怎麼拔、怎麼燒我略去，因為我姐姐講的時候眼睛看著嬰兒。最後那五個人抓住了她，帶到警察總管家裡，大家在他的窗下等著，睡著了；她走進他妻子的房間，把這五個人當作奴隸兵賣給了那位夫人，一千第納爾。「自由人不能賣，」國王說，就像那五個人對警察總管說的。「這是很古老的規矩，」沙・贊曼說。「是，」國王說。「是的。」

他們把她綁在底格里斯河岸的一根柱子上，派十個人看守，那十個人睡著了。怎麼綁的我不說，書裡說了。這時有一個從沙漠來的人，聽鄰居說他在巴格達吃蜂蜜炸果餅開齋，他一輩子沒見過這座城，也沒見過炸果餅，正騎馬進城，說：「憑阿拉伯人的名譽，我要吃蜂蜜炸果餅，別的什麼都不吃。」他在柱子旁看見她。她說她被綁在這裡，是因為吐了口水在一個廚子的炸果餅上，總督判決要在她的柱子旁把十磅炸果餅吃完，而她的胃受不了甜的。他說他替她吃。她說誰也不能吃，除非他被綁在她的位置上。他就把她鬆開，她拿了他的衣服和馬；早晨警察總管來了，看見一個只穿襯衣的人，問他們有沒有把蜂蜜炸果餅帶來。「他吃了嗎？」國王說。「沒有，主上。」「一個也沒吃？」「沒有人拿來。」國王轉過頭。「宰相。」「主上？」「炸果餅。」我父親在手掌上寫了一個字。第二天夜裡它們蓋著一塊布、熱騰騰地來了，廚子什麼也沒被告知；男孩吃得蜂蜜糊到耳朵，沙・贊曼吃了七個，奶媽說她不知道蜂蜜是哪裡來的，吃了兩個。

警察總管把他們都帶到哈里發面前，哈里發說：「你們失去的一切我來承擔，」把達莉拉交給災難艾哈邁德去抓。札伊娜卜曾對母親許諾，要拿到他那四十一個人的衣服，她租了一個有兩扇門的大廳，擺上肉和酒的托盤，露著臉站在門口，說她是摩蘇爾一個釀酒商的女兒，想要隊長的庇護。每個進來對她好的人都被弄睡在地毯上，艾哈邁德最後一個，那天傍晚他們只穿襯衣坐在兵營裡，等天黑。哈桑・舒曼叫艾哈邁德在哈里發面前抖抖衣領，說他不認識她。艾哈邁德抖了，哈桑就被派去抓她。他去見哈里發，要求赦免的手帕，說她這樣做不是貪心，是為了顯示她和她女兒的聰明，好讓死去的丈夫和死去的父親的俸祿繼續給她們；哈里發給了。「有人替她求了情，」國王說。「哈桑，主上。」「他把自己的脖子放進去了。」「是。」蘇麥雅在看燈。我知道她在讀未了裡的哪一行。

哈里發對她說：「向我求一個恩典吧，達莉拉，」我停了筆。她要她丈夫的職位給自己，她父親的給女兒，然後要做哈里發為商人蓋的那座客棧的看門人，客棧有四十個奴隸和四十條狗，門上還有一座亭子養她的鴿子；他給她寫了任命狀。「她把價錢準備好了，」奶媽說。國王沒有看奶媽。他看著我。「你沒有，」他說。「在最後，主上，」我說。「我會數，」他說。然後，第七百零八夜結束時，沙漏流完了，他用他吩咐備馬的聲音對我父親說：「明天。城醒來之前。」「主上，護衛呢？」「十個，在一百步後面，穿腳夫的短袍。我弟弟去安排。」「我來，」沙・贊曼說，「我也去。」國王轉向我。「還有記夜簿的人。」「主上？」「你寫了兩年的未了，沒有看過一條街。」

我們穿著棕色外衣從園丁的小門出去，我父親在前面，袖子裡什麼也沒有，國王在他後面，沙・贊曼在國王手肘旁邊，臉像一個扛著地毯的人，我走最後，戴著奶媽舊的棕色面紗，上面一股貓味。我從第一夜以後就沒有走過街。街比我記得的長，也比我記得的吵：麵包鋪的學徒，頭一個賣水的，一條睡在路中間的狗，所有的人都繞著牠走。沒有人看我們第二眼。皮匠巷在城的最底下，河拐彎的地方，因為氣味總得有個去處；離兩條街就聞得到，石灰和濕樹皮，底下是一張正在想變壞的皮的酸甜味。它不是一條長巷。左邊有四處還立著的地方，裡面沒有人：兩間房子屋頂中間塌了，窗板釘死了，兩處只剩一個門框，早晨從裡面透過來。右邊的房子門口晾著衣服，堆著樹皮，一個男孩站在坑裡，泡到膝蓋，看了我們一眼，繼續踩。

我父親不用人告訴他哪一處是哪一處。他在第一處前停住，眼睛看著釘死的窗板，說了一個名字、一個行業、一個女兒，和女兒的年紀，不大聲，像他讀夜簿的樣子。國王站著。我父親走到下一處，同樣說了，又走到下一處。他沒有把它們寫在手掌上；我看出他全都記在心裡。第四處他說了兩遍，好像國王第二次要求似的，國王沒有。在第一個門框前，國王走進去了。門框後面是一個院子，一棵無花果樹從曾是房間的地板裡長出來，還有一面牆仍然是牆。他站在葉子中間，雙手垂在兩邊，就像他在窗邊要了一個數、等著它的時候那樣站著。然後他把手掌平放在牆上，像男孩把手放在嬰兒頭上那樣，看它是不是在那裡。他把手拿開。沒有人說話，連沙・贊曼也沒有。我們出來的時候，巷子對面一扇窗板開著，一個女人在裡面，兩臂擱在窗台上；她看了那個穿棕色外衣的高個子男人，一直到數完十的那麼久，然後把窗板關上。她沒有摔。她關得嚴嚴的，我聽見閂落下去。「是，」國王對著窗板說，就走了。

巷子最底下，一個前臂像濃茶顏色的人，正用一根帶鉤的長竿把一張皮從缸裡提出來。國王問他那是什麼。「山羊。」「要多久？」「要做好？十四個月。一張皮你要是不管，三天就壞了，先生。石灰就是為這個。然後是樹皮。樹皮才是保住它的。」「然後呢？」「三十年，要是主人心好，還多。」國王看著那張皮回到坑裡。「我有個男孩剛會走，」他說。「多大？」「十四個月。」「那他要小羊皮的，」皮匠說，「軟的，底不要太硬。他們愛感覺地板。」他從一堆裡割下一條，舉到光裡看，說星期四把腳帶來。「我帶不來，」國王說。「我派人送。」「那就畫在一張紙上。小孩不會站著不動的。」國王付了銀子，那人咬了一枚，對自己這個習慣並不覺得難為情。回到宮門口，沙・贊曼從無花果樹以後一個字也沒說，這時說：「我不問。」國王說：「謝謝。」那天夜裡他對我說：「寫進未了裡。」「叫它什麼？」「一扇窗板。」我寫了。第二張紙上我寫了其餘的。

第七百零九夜，我姐姐轉到開羅，和水銀阿里，這麼叫他是因為他穿過每一張網都像水銀。有一天他心裡沉重，喝到失去知覺，在紅路上向一個挑水的要水喝，搖了搖杯子倒在地上，三次，第四次才喝。挑水的很窮，說小人物是一回事，大人物是另一回事；阿里拔出匕首，問他是什麼意思。那人說他認識過一個更勇敢、更慷慨的人，巴格達的災難艾哈邁德，他欠了債逃去，艾哈邁德給了他五個第納爾、一頭騾子，最後還給了一封給開羅的阿里的信。「我沒有送到，」挑水的說，「因為我不知道他住哪裡。」「他帶著它到處走，」沙・贊曼說，「不知道給誰。」「而它到了那個人手裡，」國王說。「在路上，主上。」阿里說：「我就是他，」就出發了。路上他殺了一頭獅子，打跑了一夥強盜，我只給你一句話，因為書裡寫了一頁，我姐姐只用了一口氣。到了巴格達，一個男孩拿了一個第納爾，帶他去災難艾哈邁德的門，並把一顆石子踢到門上，好讓他認得。然後札伊娜卜穿著最好的衣服在街上遇見他，帶他到一間房子，鎖用她的面紗和摩西母親的名字就打開了，她把一枚戒指掉進井裡，請他下去撿；他還在往下掉的時候，她已經帶著他所有的衣服出了門。主人叫來四個教法學者在井邊念經，阿里吊在桶底下，直到桶快到頂，跳出來落在他們中間，他們互相毆打，喊著精靈。「他們信了？」蘇麥雅說。「埃米爾叫他說實話，」我姐姐說，「然後給了他一件舊袍子。」

哈桑・舒曼告訴他怎麼把東西拿回來，書裡讓他把皮膚塗成像客棧廚子的樣子，還拿廚子的膚色開玩笑，那一段我略去；他拿了廚子的外衣和籃子，廚子睡了。到了客棧門口，達莉拉在門口認出他，喊他是賊頭；四十個奴隸說他是他們的堂兄弟薩阿杜拉，她說：「讓他進去，要是他認得廚房和食品間，他就是你們的堂兄弟；不認得，就殺了他。」廚子有一隻貓，他每次進門牠都跳到他肩上。牠跳到阿里肩上；他把牠甩下去；牠在他前面跑到廚房門口停下，又跑到食品間，停下；他就拿了有羽毛痕跡的鑰匙和有油漬的鑰匙。「貓知道，」奶媽說。「我的也會。」他在每一道菜裡放了迷藥，上樓拿走四十一套衣服和四十隻鴿子，在達莉拉脖子上留了一張紙：「幹這事的只有埃及人阿里。」書裡他把狗也殺了。「牠們死嗎？」奶媽說。「在書裡，」我姐姐說。「那牠們就睡著，」奶媽說，我就在第二張紙上這樣寫了。達莉拉醒來時鼻子下有一塊海綿，她對女兒說，他本來有辦法做更糟的，卻出於禮貌克制了。「他本來可以，」國王說。「是，主上。」「卻留了一張紙。」哈桑・舒曼叫人把鴿子在兵營裡煮了，達莉拉來要她的鴿子時，嚐了一塊說：「這不是信鴿的肉，因為我是用麝香粒餵牠們的。」國王笑得不得不把男孩放下。

代價是她的舅舅。魚販祖賴克，曾經是伊拉克最大的無賴，後來悔改了，在他的鋪子門口掛了一個裝兩千第納爾的錢袋，繫著鈴，喊說誰能憑本事拿走就歸誰，有手碰到它他就扔一塊鉛餅。阿里穿七件外衣做了七次嘗試。我給你那個耍蛇人，把蛇扔在鋪子的地上，那個扮成女人的我略去，因為我姐姐不想在這麼短的時間之後講它，講得很快。最後一段裡有個孩子，被帶走了一個鐘頭，又還了回去。最後祖賴克看在外甥女的份上，把錢袋當禮物給了他，說他對札伊娜卜只有情分，沒有命令的權力，她母親也用同樣的話說過。「那她是自己問了自己，」蘇麥雅說，「因為沒有別人能。」「她自己定了價，」我姐姐說。那是一件衣服：卡馬爾的衣服，金匠的女兒的，從一座施了魔法的寶藏裡帶出來的，她父親每天早晨把它掛在城堡窗口一只金盤裡，喊著：「開羅的騙子們在哪裡？」

那座城堡只有金匠在裡面的時候才看得見。他把阿里變成驢、熊和狗，一個接一個，變驢那一段有一件事我略去。有三個女人為了她們自己的條件站在阿里這邊：金匠的女兒，愛上了他；還有一個經紀人的女兒和她的女僕，她們讀過金匠的書。後來對金匠做了什麼、為什麼，書裡引以為榮，我不；我只給你，他是個金匠，阿里帶著那件衣服出來了。一個賣糖的在路上遇見他，給了他一塊有迷藥的糖，拿走了衣服，自己又被一個卡迪給了一塊糖，那個卡迪是哈桑・舒曼；賣糖的是艾哈邁德・拉吉特，達莉拉的外孫，就是那個把石子踢到門上的男孩。「回你外婆那裡，」阿里說，「叫她和祖賴克明天到哈里發的朝堂來，領札伊娜卜的聘禮。」第二天早晨他和災難艾哈邁德以及那四十個人上去，在哈里發面前吻了地，我姐姐看見天亮，就停了。

鞋子兩夜前就到了，是第七百一十六夜，那時她正在金匠的城堡裡；我把它們放在這裡，因為它們屬於這裡。巷子裡來了個男孩，用褐紙包著，附一張四個迪拉姆的帳單。星期四那天，我在一張撒馬爾罕紙上畫了男孩的腳，他一邊想啃筆。鞋是小羊皮的，軟的，有一根繩子，奶媽把它拉緊了，它們會吱吱響。男孩站著不動。他抬起一隻腳，放下，在聽，看著他父親，走了四步，鞋子就這麼說了；他停下，走回去，又做了一遍。「再來，」國王說。「再，」男孩說。國王沒有說第三次，這對他是世上最響的事。

第七百一十八夜。山魯佐德與敦亞佐德。到。未了：一件衣服，被帶到朝堂，和一個要被付錢的開羅人；一個自己定了價的女人；一扇窗板，關著、閂著，在皮匠巷；一個叫哈米德的麵包師，沒有人可以把他鎖起來；一個名叫優素福的兒子，六十八天大；一個穿會吱吱響的鞋的男孩；一個事後才被問的女人；一個沒有被問過的女人；一個樵夫，沒有被問過；一本名冊；一個恩典，還沒有求。

## 第41章 · 第七百一十九至七百三十八夜：隼是宰相的，與說了真話的太監

水銀阿里的故事在第七百一十九夜結束，結束得很好。他帶著那件衣服去見哈里發，哈里發說「向我求一個恩典」，阿里求的是站在哈里發的地毯上、吃哈里發桌上的飯。他得到一座有四個高台和四十間睡房的大廳，給他從開羅叫來的那些弟兄住，還有四份婚約，我就停在這裡；札伊娜卜的聘禮是那件衣服，達莉拉從哈里發手裡親自收下了。有一夜他當值守衛，哈里發叫他從頭講他經歷的一切，叫人寫下來，收進庫房，和別的歷史放在一起。「誰寫的？」國王說。「書上說是『他們』寫的，主上。」「從他的嘴裡？」「從他的嘴裡。」國王看著夜簿，沒有說他本來要說的話。那以後，每夜第二個沙漏結束、劃夜簿之前，他叫人從頭把未了念給他聽，我念到「一扇窗板」時，和念別的行一樣念，他什麼也沒說，我想那就是該念的樣子。

然後我姐姐開始講阿爾達希爾。設拉子有一位老國王，賽義夫・阿扎姆，找了多年的醫生才得到一個兒子，就是阿爾達希爾，兒子十五歲時，憑傳聞愛上了伊拉克的阿卜杜勒・卡迪爾國王的女兒哈雅特・努夫斯，她恨男人恨到沒有人敢在她面前說這個詞。有國王求過她，她對父親說，要是他逼她，她就自殺。阿爾達希爾的父親派了一個宰相去，回答是不行；老國王就召集軍隊，發誓要抹掉阿卜杜勒・卡迪爾領土的痕跡。他的兒子進去吻地，說，不要讓您的心神為這事煩惱，因為她聽到她父親和他的人民因她遭了什麼，她會自殺，而我會死。「他攔住了，」國王說。「一個兒子攔住了一個父親。」「這很少見，」沙・贊曼說。王子穿上商人的衣服，他父親的宰相同行，帶著三十萬第納爾。

他們在白城的布料市場租了一間鋪子，他坐在裡面像滿月，人群擠得沒有人過得去。公主的老奶媽來買一件衣服，他把他最好的一件，值一萬第納爾的，白送給她，還給她一袋錢洗衣服，最後他告訴了她。她對他說智者的話，一個商人要娶國王的女兒，不如去求卡迪的女兒，然後她拿走了他的信。書裡一共有九封信，用詩寫的，五封是他的，四封是她的，他每封信都附一袋錢，一袋比一袋稍大。「那是小一點的王子付不起的郵資，」沙・贊曼說，他是記帳的人。詩我不念給你聽。她的第一封威脅要把他釘死在市場的門上，最後一封威脅要把他的肉給野地的鳥。「她每一封都回，」奶媽說。「第一封我就會回，」蘇麥雅說。「你回了，」奶媽說，「在你心裡，而且糟得多。」

公主發了脾氣，老婦人說了我想叫做小心的話。要是你告訴你父親，她說，他把商人吊在他們的鋪子上面，人們會問為什麼，人們會說，他們想引誘國王的女兒；然後他們會說她和他們待了十天；因為女人的名譽像凝乳，一點灰塵就弄髒它。所以公主又寫了一封信，又一封。到最後，她看見信停不下來，就叫人把老婦人打了，抓著腳拖出宮殿，怎麼打的我略去，然後她又派了一個醫生跟去。老婦人一能騎馬就去了阿爾達希爾的鋪子，他問她公主恨男人的原因，她告訴了他那個夢。公主夢見她的花園裡一個捕鳥人撒了網，一隻雄鴿落進網裡，其餘的都飛走了，但牠的伴侶回來，用嘴啄網眼，直到把牠放出來；然後她自己落進網裡，其餘的都飛走了，牠也跟著飛走；捕鳥人醒了，割斷她的喉嚨。「男人對女人就是這樣，」公主說，從那天起她恨他們。

宰相有了一個主意。他給公主花園那個七十歲、有八個孩子、月薪一第納爾的老園丁一筆錢，修補並粉刷花園盡頭那座破敗的亭子，然後叫來畫匠，說他做了一個夢：一個捕鳥人，一張網，一隻被伴侶放出來的鴿子，然後她被網住；雄鴿飛走了；一隻隼抓住牠、吃了牠。他們把它畫在亭子的牆上，隼是他的。它不在她的夢裡。我在第二張紙的邊上寫了這個，用小字：隼是宰相的。「那是作弊，」蘇麥雅說。「畫出來的不是發生過的。」「這是很古老的方法，」沙・贊曼說。我父親在他的角落往手掌上寫了什麼，不是隼；國王問，他說北方的雨晚了九天。「九天不算什麼。」「是，主上。」他用拇指擦掉，又寫了一遍。

公主想去她的花園，像每年果子熟的時候那樣，卻沒有人帶她去，因為她打過她的老奶媽；她的兩個侍女，布勒布勒和西瓦德・阿因，去老婦人的家，當面請她。老婦人說她不會回去找一個把她像死狗一樣拖出來的女人。她們說：「想想是誰來看你。」她就去了。「她是為了上門來的那兩個人去的，」奶媽說，「不是為了派她們來的那一個。」公主說：「錯在我。」老婦人帶她進花園，給她看亭子，看牆，說天使知道雄鴿是冤枉的，才把它顯給她。然後她對她講男人和女人，我只給你結尾：一個王妃死了，國王把自己和她一起活埋；一個妻子投身進丈夫的墳。國王用手捂住男孩的耳朵。沙・贊曼看著牆。

公主的恨消了以後，老婦人說了約好的話，「啊，你那隱藏的恩惠，」阿爾達希爾就從樹中間搖著身子走出來，兩個人都昏過去了。老婦人把他們抬進亭子，坐在門外。後來公主給她三天時間把他帶到她面前，發誓要是辦不到，就告訴國王是她把自己帶壞的，老婦人就用鑷子拔他臉上的毛，畫他的眼睛和手，給他穿新娘的衣服，教他先邁左腳、收右腳，帶他過七道門、三十個太監，藏在最後一道門後的一個水池裡，等到天黑。「你瘋了嗎，老婦人？」公主看見來的是一個女孩而不是他，說。「我給你帶了他妹妹。」然後她掀開他的臉。他們在一起好些時候。我略去書裡叫做他們的夜晚的那些，它是用詩給的。

有一位國王送給公主的父親一串二十九顆珍珠的項鍊，國王派那個被她打掉了後槽牙的太監送去。他敲門，睡在門檻上的老婦人說她去拿鑰匙，就跑了；太監，名叫卡夫爾，推開門，過了七道門，掀開床幔，看見公主睡著，兩臂摟著一個比她還俊的年輕人。她醒了。她抓起他的袍角放在頭上，吻他的腳，說：「真主遮蓋的，你也遮蓋吧。」「願真主不遮蓋你，」卡夫爾說，「也不遮蓋想遮蓋你的人。你打掉了我的槽牙。」他把門鎖上，去見國王，先要了免罪才開口。「他說的是真話，」蘇麥雅說。「帶著怨恨，」沙・贊曼說。「還是真話，」國王說。

伊拉克國王拿了一把劍，派人把他們蓋著帶來，他們到的時候，他想砍倒阿爾達希爾，王子撲在他胸前說錯全在他，公主撲在她父親身上說，別殺他，因為他是大國王的兒子。那個朝廷的宰相，書裡叫他一切邪惡的聚集處，說處在這種情況的人需要說謊，只有把兩個人的頭都砍了。「這是最容易給的建議，主上，」我父親在他的角落說。「我給過。」國王沒有看他。國王對劊子手說：「帶這個去砍他的頭，也這樣對她，不要再來問我。」劊子手把王子放在血的地毯上，用他衣角的一塊布蒙住他的眼睛，揮了三次劍，舉起手；平原上起了一片塵土，塵土是一支像蝗蟲一樣的大軍，是設拉子大國王的，他親自來找他兒子。國王沒有動。男孩睡在他肩上。我父親停了筆。我數了，我不知道我數的是什麼。

伊拉克的宰相出去見大軍，吻了二十次地，被告知要是王子在城裡就要被帶走，要是他受了傷害，國土就要被毀。他回來臉色白得不能再白，國王喊：「把劊子手叫來，趁死還沒落到他身上！」劊子手說：「我已經砍了他的頭，照您吩咐的。」「狗，」國王說，「要是這是真的，我就送你去追他。」然後劊子手說：「國王啊，他還在生命的鎖鏈裡。」「他說他砍了，」國王說。「他為什麼說他砍了？」「他被吩咐不要再來問一次，主上，」我姐姐說。「所以他那樣說了，看國王怎麼回答，」國王說。「那是他唯一能問的方式。」「書裡是這樣讀的，主上。」「而另一個國王回答了。」「是。」國王安靜著；他肩上的男孩醒了又睡了。我想那個屋子裡除了男孩沒有人呼吸。

阿卜杜勒・卡迪爾國王吻了王子，求他原諒，又求他不要對他父親說會貶低他的話。王子說他不動，直到他的名譽和公主的名譽被洗清，國王就派女人們用一種書覺得是定論、我覺得不關任何人的事的方法去證明，我略去。然後國王給他穿袍子，送他去見他父親，大國王派他的宰相帶禮物去，為兒子求公主。伊拉克國王說他沒有異議，但那個女孩已到成年、有理智，她的事在她自己手裡，她該自己選。他叫總管太監去告訴公主。公主說：「我聽從。」「他問了她，」蘇麥雅說。「透過四個人，」奶媽一邊數手指一邊說。「王子問他父親，他父親派宰相，宰相問國王，國王派太監。」「算數的，」蘇麥雅看著國王說。「算數，」國王說。

他們辦了婚宴，大國王派人問他兒子走之前還要什麼，阿爾達希爾說他想向那個主張動劍的宰相和那個對他們說了謊的太監報仇。阿卜杜勒・卡迪爾國王把兩個都送去了。太監沒有說謊。他們被吊在城門上。「太監說的是真話，」蘇麥雅說，「而他被吊了。」「是，」國王說。「寫進未了裡。」蘇麥雅沒等我伸手就從我手裡拿過蘆筆，自己寫了，寫在關於窗板那行下面的那張紙上：一個說了真話的太監，舌頭咬在牙齒中間；國王拿過那張紙，看了很久。「是直的，」他說。那個後來回去了的老婦人跟公主去了設拉子，他們又辦了一次婚禮，像書上說的，一直活到那個毀滅歡樂者來。

第七百三十八夜，我姐姐開始講一個呼羅珊的國王，名叫沙赫里曼，有一百個妃子，沒有孩子。北方的雨晚了九天，然後十一天，我父親說了，寫下來；我聽見他對沒有人說：「它會來的。」

第七百三十八夜。山魯佐德與敦亞佐德。到。未了：一位呼羅珊的國王，有一百個妃子，沒有孩子，才剛開頭；一扇窗板，關著、閂著，在皮匠巷；一個說了真話的太監，蘇麥雅的筆跡；北方的雨晚了；一個叫哈米德的麵包師，沒有人可以把他鎖起來；一個名叫優素福的兒子，八十八天大；一個穿會吱吱響的鞋的男孩；一個事後才被問的女人；一個沒有被問過的女人；一個樵夫，沒有被問過；一本名冊；一個恩典，還沒有求。

## 第42章 · 第七百三十九至七百五十六夜：一年沒有說話的女人，與牢裡因話被關的九個人

我姐姐在第七百三十九夜開始講朱爾娜，我照我姐姐講的樣子給你，從外面講起。呼羅珊有一位國王叫沙赫里曼，有一百個妃子，沒有孩子，有一天早晨一個商人帶著一個女奴來到他門口，她像魯代尼的長矛一樣挺直，裹著金邊的絲綢，七條髮辮垂到腳踝。商人說她一共花了他五千第納爾，他白送給國王。國王給了他一萬第納爾和一件袍子，把那女孩安置在一間房裡，房在海的上面，格子窗朝著水，把所有的門都關上。她不說話。他問她的名字，她看著地板。他叫女人們彈各種樂器、對她唱歌，她看著她們，不笑；他一口一口餵她吃東西；他把他那一百個放在一邊，留她一整年。「他問了她的名字嗎？」國王說。「問了，主上。」「她沒有回答。」「一年。」「他把她關在海的上面，」蘇麥雅說，「門都關著。」「書上說是所有的門，」我姐姐說。

一年過去，他對她說他為她捨棄了一切，求她說話，要是她是啞巴就用手勢告訴他；他老了，沒有繼承人。她低下頭，又笑了，說真主應了他的祈禱：她懷了他的孩子，要不是懷了他的孩子，她不會對他說一個字。他送了十萬第納爾給窮人。然後他問她沉默是怎麼回事，她說她是一個可憐的流亡者，離開了她的母親和她的哥哥。她是海上的朱爾娜，她父親是海上的一位國王，死了，另一位國王奪了王國；她和她哥哥薩利赫吵了架，發誓要把自己交到陸地上一個人的手裡，就從水裡出來，在月光下坐在一個島上。一個人發現了她，向她要這種男人要的東西，她打了他的頭；他把她賣給商人，商人賣給了國王。「要是你的心不愛我，」她說，「我就從這個窗戶跳進海裡了。可是我沒臉帶著你的孩子回他們那裡。」國王沒有說話。他膝蓋上的男孩拉著他襯衣的帶子。我在第二張紙上數了她被賣過的次數和被問過的次數，把兩個數字並排寫了。

她叫沙赫里曼躲進一個小間，她去把她的家人叫來。她燒了兩塊科摩林沉香，吹了一聲口哨，海翻起泡沫，一個像她一樣俊的青年從裡面升上來，還有一個頭髮斑白的老婦人，五個女孩，全在水面上走。她們哭了。她們說，你怎麼能離開我們四年，她哥哥說，現在就跟我們走。朱爾娜，她丈夫就在小間裡，說她在這裡極其舒適、受尊敬，說他對她好，說要是她離開他他會死，她也會死。「她把他放進小間，」奶媽說，「讓他聽見。」「她是認真的嗎？」蘇麥雅說。「兩樣都是，」奶媽說。「兩樣都是，」國王說。她的家人吃了他的食物卻沒見過他，火像火盆裡的燈火那樣從他們嘴裡噴出來；她把他從小間叫出來，他向他們問安，和他們一起吃了三十天。「一個躲在小間裡聽妻子說話的男人，」沙・贊曼說，「然後被請去吃飯。」「這是常有的事，」國王說。

孩子生下來了，是一輪月亮，第七天她的母親法拉莎和她哥哥來了，給他起名叫巴德爾・巴西姆，微笑的滿月。薩利赫把他抱在懷裡，在房間裡走，走出宮殿，走到鹹水的海邊，走進海裡。沙赫里曼以為孩子沒了，哭了；朱爾娜說：「不要怕，我比你更愛他。」國王把優素福放在膝蓋上。他把他抱緊了，我姐姐什麼也沒說，伸出雙手，他把他給了她；我想他們誰也沒有決定這件事。大男孩一直在聽他的鞋，這時站著不動，說了一聲「爸」，像在問。一個鐘頭以後海水渾了，薩利赫帶著孩子出來，孩子安安靜靜，閃著光。他們在他身上抹了一種眼藥粉，對他念了所羅門戒指上的名字，讓他在世上任何一片海裡都不會淹死，薩利赫放下一匣子寶石，像鴕鳥蛋那麼大，國王說其中一顆就值他的王國。男孩長大了，學寫字、射箭、騎馬。十五歲時他們讓他坐上王位，他父親站在旁邊；他父親病了，死了，哀悼了一個月。大臣們對年輕的國王說過分哀悼是女人的事，帶他去澡堂。「是嗎？」蘇麥雅說。「是女人的事？」「大臣們這麼說，」我姐姐說。「大臣們都這麼說，」奶媽說。

一年後，薩利赫來訪的一夜，他對朱爾娜說男孩十七歲了還沒結婚，說了一百個海裡的公主，她一個個都拒絕了；然後他問男孩是不是睡著了。朱爾娜摸了摸他，說他睡著了，薩利赫就說出了朱哈拉公主，薩瑪達爾國王的女兒，那個國王是個傻瓜，而且暴躁。巴德爾醒著。他撐著手肘，閉著眼，憑傳聞愛上了。第二天在花園裡他哭了；聽見了的薩利赫說，我們去告訴你母親，求她允許。「如果我告訴我母親，」男孩說，「她不會讓我去。我不告訴她。我跟你去，以後再告訴她。」「他沒有問他母親，」我姐姐說。我父親一直在手掌上寫東西；他的手停了。我姐姐看著他。「說下去，女兒，」他說，她就說下去。薩利赫給了男孩一枚刻著真主名字的戒指，戴著它就不會淹死，他們就潛進深處。

薩利赫帶著兩袋寶石去見薩瑪達爾，向他為外甥求公主，國王笑得向後倒下，罵他們是狗，叫僕從砍薩利赫的頭。薩利赫的母親派了一千名騎兵守在門口；他們抓住了國王，把他綁起來。朱哈拉跑到一座島上，爬上一棵樹。巴德爾，以為這一切是因他而起，逃走了，來到同一座島，在同一棵樹下躺下，抬頭看。她問他是不是巴德爾・巴西姆，說你愛我一拃，我愛你一肘，就下來吻他；然後她念了幾句話，朝他臉上吐了口水，把他變成一隻紅嘴白鳥。她吩咐女奴馬爾西娜把他帶到乾渴島，讓他渴死。馬爾西娜把他帶到那裡，想一個這麼美的人不該渴死，就把他帶到一座有樹有溪的島上，對女主人說她把他留在乾渴島了。「她說做了，」國王說。「是。」「而沒有。」「沒有。」「這是兩個。」「主上？」「被吩咐去做的人，說做了。」我父親什麼也沒寫。

朱爾娜下海去向她母親問她兒子，聽到了戰爭，氣薩利赫沒有經她允許就把他帶走。她回她的王國去守著它，對她們說：「別忘了他，要是他受了傷害，那會殺了我；我只在他身上看世界。」我父親用另一隻手蓋住他手掌上的字。那隻鳥被一個捕鳥人捉去，賣給一座島上的國王，國王的妻子一看見他就知道他是人，蒙上臉，用一杯水和幾句話把他變回人；國王給他備了一條船。第十一天一塊礁石把船撞碎，除了巴德爾所有人都淹死了，他騎著一塊木板漂了三天，到了一個白色的城，建在一條伸進海裡的舌狀陸地上。騾子、驢子和馬成百上千地跑到海灘，朝他衝過來，把他趕離海岸。「牠們是人，」我姐姐說。「每一個都是上了岸的年輕人。牠們在警告他。」

一個叫阿卜杜拉的雜貨商，是穆斯林也是魔法師，女王怕他，收留了他，告訴他，女王把一個年輕人留四十天，然後把他變成騾子、馬或鳥。書裡把她寫成拜火的人，我略去；她是一個把陌生人變成動物的女王。她把巴德爾帶回去，四十天的酒和音樂。有一天早晨他跟著她進了花園，看見溪邊一隻白鳥，和一隻曾是她奴隸兵的黑鳥，然後看見她又變回女人；其餘的我略去。阿卜杜拉給了他一磅炒大麥，告訴他說什麼。她拿她自己的給他吃，他假裝吃了，又拿他的給她，她吃了一口，他把水潑在她臉上說：「變成一頭花斑騾子。」她哭了。他把嚼子放進她嘴裡，騎著她出去。「他做的是她做的，」蘇麥雅說。「這是一個理由，」國王說。「不是一個回答。」「不是，主上，」我姐姐說。

第三天一個老人請他吃飯，一個老婦人看著那頭騾子哭了，說牠像她死去的兒子的那頭，出一千第納爾買。巴德爾說他開玩笑，不賣。「這座城裡誰也不許說謊，」老人說。「說謊的人要處死。」「那是一座安靜的城，」沙・贊曼說。「我不想住在裡面，」奶媽說。「不想，」國王說。巴德爾把騾子交了出去，老婦人抽掉嚼子，把水灑在她身上，她就是拉卜女王，這是她的母親。老婦人吹口哨叫來一個像山一樣的精靈，他們三個飛回去；拉卜把他變成最醜的鳥，關進籠子，斷了他的食物和水。她的一個女人可憐他，偷偷給他吃的喝的，一有機會就去找阿卜杜拉，他用精靈把她送去朱爾娜那裡。朱爾娜和她的母親、薩利赫召集了海和精靈的各個部族，飛到那座城，轉眼之間就攻下了；書裡對這一段高興的事我略去。她把兒子從籠子裡拿出來，灑了水，他是人了，哭了。阿卜杜拉娶了那個來報信的女人，做了那座城的國王。

巴德爾說除了朱哈拉誰也不能使他滿意。朱爾娜叫人把薩瑪達爾帶來，巴德爾向他求他的女兒，國王說：「她是你的婢女。」他派人去叫她。她來了，雙臂摟住她父親的脖子。他告訴她他已把她許配給巴德爾・巴西姆國王，他配得上她，正如她配得上他；她說：「我不敢違背你，父親；你想怎樣就怎樣；怨恨和惱怒到此為止，我是他的婢女之一。」「他問了她，」蘇麥雅說。「他告訴了她，」奶媽說。「她把他變成過鳥，」蘇麥雅說，「現在她說她是他的婢女。」「書上就是這樣說的，」我姐姐說。「馬爾西娜怎麼樣了？」蘇麥雅說。「書沒有說。」「那就是還沒完，」蘇麥雅說，我當夜沒等人吩咐就把她寫進了未了：一個女奴，說做了。他們辦了婚宴，讓新娘穿九套不同的衣服出來展示，並釋放了所有牢裡的人。「牢裡有多少人？」國王說。「三百一十一個，主上。」「為什麼？」「大多是欠債。還有一些是因為話。」「什麼話？」「關於您的，主上。」國王安靜了。「多少？」「九個。」我父親看著他的手掌。「寫進未了裡，」國王說。我寫了：九個人在牢裡，為了話。

第七百五十六夜，我姐姐開始講呼羅珊的一位國王，名叫穆罕默德・本・薩巴伊克，每年都出去搶掠。北方的雨晚了二十三天，後來二十六天。我父親已經不再大聲說了。他每天傍晚把數字寫在手掌上，每天傍晚數字更大，我看見國王看他寫，兩個人都沒說話。

第七百五十六夜。山魯佐德與敦亞佐德。到。未了：呼羅珊的一位國王，每年出去搶掠，才剛開頭；九個人在牢裡，為了話；一個叫馬爾西娜的女奴，說做了；皮匠巷的一扇窗板，關著、閂著；一個說了真話的太監，蘇麥雅的筆跡；北方的雨晚了二十六天；一個叫哈米德的麵包師，沒有人可以把他鎖起來；一個名叫優素福的兒子，一百零六天大；一個穿會吱吱響的鞋的男孩；一個事後才被問的女人；一個沒有被問過的女人；一個樵夫，沒有被問過；一本名冊；一個恩典，還沒有求。

## 第43章 · 第七百五十七至七百七十八夜：五個條件，與替整間屋子聽的故事

我姐姐在第七百五十七夜講起呼羅珊的穆罕默德・本・薩巴伊克國王，他每年都去劫掠異教徒的土地，最愛聽故事，誰給他講一個他沒聽過的，他就賞一件袍子、一千第納爾和一匹馬。他的宰相是個嫉妒的人，說這種風氣會敗壞國家。有一天國王召來一個叫哈桑的商人，有學問，也是個詩人，叫他帶來一個他從沒聽過的故事，要是合意，就讓他做首席宰相，要是不合意，就收走他手裡的一切，把他放逐。哈桑要了一年，得到了。他派五個奴隸兵往世界的五個方向去，每人五千第納爾；四個人在四個月後空手回來，第五個在大馬士革，跟著一個趕去聽老人坐在凳子上講故事的年輕人。那個老人有賽義夫・穆魯克的故事，一百一十第納爾賣了，附五個條件。「是這些，」我姐姐扳著手指數：「不在大路上講；不在女人和女奴面前講；不在僕人和輕浮的人面前講；不對男孩講；只在國王、埃米爾、宰相和有學問的人面前念。」沒有人說話。奶媽用手捂住耳朵，又放下。我在第二張紙上寫，書裡第三個條件用一種膚色稱那些僕人，我寫的是僕人。

「這間屋子裡有兩位國王，」沙・贊曼說，「還有一位宰相。我替整間屋子聽。」「我替整間屋子聽，」國王說。「主上，」我姐姐說，「這裡有奶媽，有記夜簿的人，有蘇麥雅，還有兩個男孩。」「男孩沒在聽，」國王說。大男孩穿著他的鞋，正繞著搖籃走，鞋子替他說了話。「那我就是輕浮的人，」蘇麥雅說，「帶著一支蘆筆。」「你是帶著蘆筆的輕浮的人，」奶媽說，「我是沒有蘆筆的。」我姐姐吸了一口氣，講了。哈桑把它抄下來，在期限前十天念給國王和埃米爾們聽，得到一座城和右手邊的座位；國王叫人用金字把這個故事寫下來，收進他的私庫，每當他心裡煩悶，就叫哈桑來念給他聽。

埃及有一位國王叫阿西姆，一百八十歲，沒有孩子。有一天，看見他的埃米爾們帶著兒子進來，他從寶座上下來，坐在地上哭；他的宰相法里斯比他還大一百歲，也沒有孩子，對他說了所羅門，他可以向真主求事。法里斯去了示巴。所羅門在他開口以前就說出了他為什麼來。他叫他們殺死樹根旁兩條戴金項圈的蛇，把肉給各自的妻子吃，兩個妻子同一夜懷孕，同一夜各生了一個兒子，賽義夫・穆魯克和薩義德。孩子出生時阿西姆國王打開了監牢，不論罪犯還是欠債的，免了三年的稅，在城牆四周設了廚房。「優素福出生的時候，我們開過牢嗎？」國王說。「沒有，主上，」我父親說。「為什麼？」「您沒有說。第一個男孩那次開了，九十一個。」「現在有多少？」「三百一十一個。兩百零四個是欠債。其中一百五十八個欠的不到一百第納爾。」「多少錢？」「六千一百，大致。」「放他們。我來付。」「我付一半，」沙・贊曼說。「一半，」國王說。我父親在手掌上寫。「那九個呢，主上？」我父親說。國王沒有回答，過了數到十的那麼久。「還沒有，」他說。那是舊話，我分不出是什麼聲音。

兩個男孩二十五歲時，老國王把王位給了他兒子，宰相把職位給了他兒子，每個男孩可從四樣東西裡選兩樣：一枚戒指、一把劍、一枚印、一個包袱。賽義夫・穆魯克拿了戒指和包袱。那天夜裡他在小間裡就著燭光打開它，找到一件長袍，在襯裡裡用金線織著一個女孩的畫像，頭上寫著字：巴迪阿・賈邁勒，沙希亞勒的女兒，住在伊拉姆花園的精靈之王。他昏倒了。他病了三個月。醫生對阿西姆國王說他兒子戀愛了，卻沒有路通到他愛的那一個，阿西姆對劊子手說：「把薩義德帶去，蒙上眼睛，砍他的脖子」；薩義德在開口以前先要了免罪。「卡夫爾也這樣，」蘇麥雅說。「他們都這樣，」沙・贊曼說。「他們學會了，」國王說。阿西姆說要是她是人的女兒，他們還能想辦法，賽義夫・穆魯克說他不要別人。「沒有人問她，」蘇麥雅說。「那是一幅畫。」「是，」我姐姐說。「畫在一件長袍上，她父親送給所羅門，所羅門沒打開就送到了埃及。」

他備了四十條船、兩萬武裝的奴隸兵，航向中國，法格富爾國王為他擺了四十天筵席，然後去印度的各個島，直到一場風暴打碎了所有的船，只剩他和幾個人在一條小艇上。他們到了一座島，一個看上去像老人的生物叫著他們當中一個的名字，跳上他的肩膀，像騎驢一樣騎他，他們逃了。他們到了一座鬼怪的島，到了一座山，山上體型巨大的人把他們像鳥一樣關進籠子，吃了他們兩個；書裡給了這些人一種膚色，我沒有。他們把籠子掛在國王的頭邊，因為喜歡那哭聲。他把賽義夫・穆魯克給了他嫁到另一座島的女兒，她喜歡他，他說他愛著另一個人；她就叫他和他的人去取柴取水，四年，最後是五年。「她沒有殺他，」國王說。「沒有，主上。」「她可以。」「她叫他背柴。」「那是她的廚房，」奶媽說。「四年，」國王說。「而他沒有改變主意。」「沒有。」

他們做了一個木筏離開。鱷魚把他的人一個一個帶走，他一個人到了猿猴島，猿猴把他帶到一座金磚銀磚砌的城堡，一個年輕人要把島給他。他又走了四個月，到了雅弗，諾亞之子，的高築城堡，金寶座上坐著一個女孩，道拉特・哈敦，印度國王的女兒，是藍王的兒子，一個精靈，在她父親的花園裡從她的浴池把她抓走、關在這裡的。她說他每個星期二來，吻她，抱她，不做別的，星期五走。「他沒有碰她，」國王說。「沒有。」「他把她從浴池裡抓走，關在一座沒有人能到的城堡裡，好些年。」「是，主上。」「卻不做別的。」「她是這樣說的，」我姐姐說。奶媽喉嚨裡發出一個聲音。那個精靈把他的靈魂藏起來了，因為占星家說一個國王的兒子會殺他：藏在一隻麻雀裡，麻雀在一個盒子裡，盒子在一個匣子裡，匣子在七個匣子七個箱子裡，在一個雪花石膏的棺裡，埋在海邊。「你會把你的藏在哪裡？」蘇麥雅對沒有人說。「在貓裡，」奶媽說。「在帳本裡，」沙・贊曼說。「您呢，主上？」「我想我不會把它放在任何地方。」「那任何人都找得到了。」「是，」國王說。我父親放下了他的蘆筆。

大男孩走過來，把手放在嬰兒頭上，說「優」。這是第一次。他環顧我們所有人，又說了一遍，嬰兒，就是說的是他，看著天花板。賽義夫・穆魯克把所羅門的戒指放在海面上，棺浮上來，他打開，掐死那隻麻雀，那個精靈倒在宮殿門口，變成一堆黑灰。他和道拉特・哈敦用十扇檀香木和沉香木、釘著金釘的門做了一個木筏，航行四個月，他睡覺時在他們中間放一把出鞘的劍，到了阿馬里亞城，那裡的國王是她的叔叔。她的父親來接她。賽義夫・穆魯克騎馬穿過街道，看見一個年輕人賣一件十五第納爾的長袍，認出他是薩義德，瘦了，變了；他對隨從說：「把他帶到我的宮殿。」他們聽成「牢」。他們給他上了鐐銬，一個月沒有人記得他，他和別的犯人一起在採石場鑿石頭。「他說的是宮殿，」蘇麥雅說。「他們聽成牢，」我姐姐說。「僕人聽見的是他們覺得主人想要的，」奶媽說。「這是常有的事，主上，」我父親說。「我有那十一個。」「那就放了他們，」國王說。

薩義德的故事我一口氣給你。那些像騎驢一樣騎他好些年的東西；他用一坑葡萄做的酒，和他們用來喝酒的頭骨；他在藤架的枯枝裡放的火，趁他們睡著的時候；瞎了眼的人的山洞，以及他對那個弄瞎他們的東西做了什麼，書裡寫得很長，我不寫。他在市場上賣他的長袍買吃的。兩個朋友坐在塔吉・穆魯克的桌邊，道拉特・哈敦去找她的乳姐妹巴迪阿・賈邁勒，那個精靈的女兒，告訴她他為她受了多少苦。巴迪阿・賈邁勒臉紅了，說這絕不可能，人和精靈不相合。道拉特・哈敦以她們一起吃過的奶求她；她說：「為了你，我給他看我的臉一次。」她從窗口看見他在花園裡走，自己念著詩，那一眼讓她嘆了一千次氣。他上來的時候她說：「誰守信呢？男人沒有真愛。」他說所有人並不是一樣造的。她讓他發誓，手放在她手裡，兩人誰也不把別人放在對方前面，不論是人還是精靈。「她先要他發誓，」蘇麥雅說。「這是應該的，」奶媽說。「是，」國王說。

她叫她的女僕瑪爾賈納背著他去伊拉姆花園見她的祖母，教他怎麼做：拿起榻腳的拖鞋，吻它，放在頭上，站著不說話。祖母說：「人和精靈怎麼相合？」然後，在他許諾以後，說她會派人叫她的兒子。他在花園裡走的時候，藍王的五個精靈看見了他，問他是不是殺了他們主人兒子的那一個，他說是，用這枚戒指；他們堵住他的嘴，飛著把他帶到他們的國王那裡。藍王的大臣們建議一天砍他一肢、鞭打他、釘十字架；其餘的我略去。一位老埃米爾說：「現在什麼也別做。他是巴迪阿・賈邁勒的未婚夫，沙希亞勒王會報血仇。」國王把他關進牢裡。「總有一位老埃米爾，」沙・贊曼說。「說等一等。」「還沒有，」國王說，看著我父親，我父親看著他的手掌。

沙希亞勒奉母命去打仗，為了一個凡人，打敗了藍王，抓了他的兒子們；藍王交出囚犯，寫了一張文書證明他不為他兒子的死負責。數字我略去。賽義夫・穆魯克在薩蘭迪布和巴迪阿・賈邁勒成了婚，並向塔吉・穆魯克國王為薩義德求公主道拉特・哈敦，兩對同一夜成了婚。四十天後她問他有沒有遺憾，他說他只想看看他的父親母親，她叫她的奴隸把他們送到開羅又送回來，從那時起，只要想念，他們就去看。他們活到毀滅歡樂者來，我姐姐說；這就是賽義夫・穆魯克和巴迪阿・賈邁勒的故事流傳下來的全部，「只有真主知道真相」。「流傳下來的全部，」國王說。「它沒有說那是它的全部嗎？」「沒有，主上。」「它說那是他們有的。」「是。」

第七百七十八夜，我姐姐開始講另一個，巴士拉的哈桑，他父親是個商人，他有一個弟弟。北方的雨晚了三十八天，然後四十三天，今夜是四十八天。我父親開始把它寫成兩行。我看見國王隔著屋子看他的手掌，又移開目光，我看見奶媽，她見過很多事，沒人吩咐就把搖籃邊的水罐裝滿。

第七百七十八夜。山魯佐德與敦亞佐德。到。未了：巴士拉的一位商人和他的弟弟，才剛開頭；九個人在牢裡，為了話；一個叫馬爾西娜的女奴，說做了；皮匠巷的一扇窗板，關著、閂著；一個說了真話的太監，蘇麥雅的筆跡；北方的雨晚了四十八天；一個叫哈米德的麵包師，沒有人可以把他鎖起來；一個名叫優素福的兒子，一百二十八天大，他哥哥說過他名字的前一半；一個穿會吱吱響的鞋的男孩；一個事後才被問的女人；一個沒有被問過的女人；一個樵夫，沒有被問過；一本名冊；一個恩典，還沒有求。

## 第44章 · 第七百七十八至七百九十八夜：被禁止的那扇門，與沒有人在裡面的三座墳

第七百七十八夜，我姐姐開始講巴士拉的哈桑，一個商人的大兒子，他把父親的錢花在朋友身上，直到花光，沒有一個朋友認得他，他和守寡的母親三天沒有麵包。他父親的一個朋友把他送到一個金匠那裡，後來他有了自己的鋪子。有一天一個留著長白鬍子、戴白頭巾的陌生老人站在門口說：「你是個俊秀的青年。你沒有父親，我沒有兒子，我懂一門手藝，世上沒有比它更好的。」第二天，在哈桑的鋪子裡，他把一只破盤子剪進坩堝，從頭巾裡拿出一張摺起的紙，撒了一小撮黃粉，叫哈桑鼓風；出來一塊金子，賣了一萬五千迪拉姆。「一萬五千，」沙・贊曼說，「一塊像臼那麼大的。」哈桑回家告訴母親，母親說，說自己能點金的人都是騙子，拿人的錢。她是對的，他沒有聽見。他從沒見過金子是怎麼做出來的；粉在頭巾裡，金子在粉裡。

第二天他把老人帶回家，把母親打發到鄰居家，去買了甜點，老人在其中一塊裡放了一撮什麼，遞給他，說他有個女兒，世上沒有人見過像她的，說哈桑是唯一配得上她的人。他就地倒下。老人把他鎖進一個箱子，把他的東西鎖進另一個，叫人抬到一條等著的船上，開走了；哈桑的母親回到家，門開著，兩個箱子不見了，她在屋子中間造了一座墳，在上面寫了她兒子的名字和他失蹤的日期，坐在旁邊。「她在知道以前就造了，」奶媽說。「她知道，」我姐姐說。那個陌生人叫巴赫拉姆。他每年抓一個年輕的穆斯林，割斷他的喉嚨做他的法事，已經有了一千，只差一個。書裡把他寫成拜火的人、恨穆斯林的人；火我略去，船上三個月裡，因為男孩不肯向它下跪對他做的事我也略去，直到來了一場風暴，水手們說是因為這個青年，起來反對那個陌生人，殺了他的僕人。他才放開哈桑，說他只是在試他的耐心。「他信了，」國王說。「他在一條船上，一個人，」我姐姐說。「他沒有別人可信。」

他們又航行了三個月，到了一片彩色石子的岸，往內陸走，巴赫拉姆用一根絲帶敲一面銅鼓，塵土裡出來三頭母駱駝。他們騎了十四天，到一座高得雲都被劈開的山。巴赫拉姆把哈桑縫進一張駱駝皮，帶三塊餅和一瓶水，禿鷲把他帶到頂上，他割開皮出來，看見山頂上腐爛的骨頭和木頭。「給我扔下六捆來，」巴赫拉姆喊，「然後隨你：留，或者跳。」就走了。那些骨頭是他以前的男孩的，他也這樣送上去過。哈桑站了一會兒，然後從山後跳進海裡，海把他送到岸上，憑真主的恩典。他找到一座宮殿，門口兩個女孩在下棋，一眼認出他是陌生人去年帶來的那個。年紀小的對她姐姐說：「請你做證，這是我憑真主的盟約結的兄弟，我為他的死而死，為他的生而生。」她們是一位精靈王的七個女兒，她們的父親把她們關在雲山上，因為他不肯把她們嫁給任何人。哈桑和她們住了一年。陌生人帶著另一個手腳被捆的男孩又來的時候，哈桑出去，在他兩肩之間砍了一刀，拿了他的鼓和駱駝，把男孩放上一頭，叫他回家。我只給一句，書裡給得更短。

姐妹們被叫去參加一場婚禮，兩個月，把鑰匙留給哈桑，叫他別開一扇門。他開了。「為什麼他們總是禁止一扇門？」蘇麥雅說。「看誰會開它，」奶媽說。「總是那一扇門，」國王說。門後有一道瑪瑙梯子，頂上有一座亭子，亭子裡有一個水池，十隻鳥從沙漠飛來，脫下羽毛，像人脫外衣，成了十個女孩；她們下水，其中的頭領是真主造過最美的一個。書給了哈桑很長的描寫，我只給你她的臉，和別人都不敢碰她。傍晚她們穿上羽毛飛走了。他下了梯子，躺了十天，什麼也沒吃。姐妹們回來，最小的找到他，問，他說了。她說她會幫他，並告訴他怎麼做：等到月初，躲著，只拿頭領那個女孩的衣服，不拿別的，等其餘的飛走以後，抓住她，把衣服藏在她永遠找不到的地方。「抓住她的頭髮，」書上說，我略去頭髮。「這是誰的主意？」奶媽說。「她的，」我姐姐說。「最小的那個。」奶媽很久沒有說話。

他拿了衣服，其餘的飛走了，她一個人站在屋頂上說：「拿了我衣服、扒光我的人，請把它還給我，遮蓋我的羞，願真主不讓你嚐我的苦。」他把她帶下來，帶到他的房間。姐妹們告訴她那個人愛她，她說：「像你們這樣的人，對國王的女兒做這種事嗎？」哭到天亮。然後最小的姐妹給她穿了衣服，陪著她，對她講他的事，第二天他吻她的腳，說他拿她只是為了做她的僕人直到審判日。其中一個姐妹做她的代理人簽了婚約，書上說這是經她同意的，沒說是誰的同意。「誰的？」蘇麥雅說。「書上說是她的，」我姐姐說。他們留了他四十天。我父親在他的角落寫得很小。

哈桑夢見他母親瘦得像一支筆，哭著醒來，姐妹們放他走，給了二十五箱金子、五十箱銀子和駱駝；最小的抱著他的脖子哭到昏過去。他們到了巴格達。他花十萬第納爾買了一座房子。三年裡他的妻子給他生了兩個兒子，納西爾和曼蘇爾。然後他想起姐妹們，買了禮物，臨走前他帶母親到儲藏間，給她看羽毛衣埋在一個箱子裡的地方，說：「看好它。不要讓她看見。她是精靈，一位大王的女兒；別讓她出門，不要讓她從窗子或牆頭往外看；因為風吹的時候我替她擔心。」他母親說她會的。書上用一行字說，他的妻子聽見了，他們兩個都不知道。「他叫他母親不讓她出去，」蘇麥雅說。「也不許說它在哪裡。」「她聽見了。」「是，」國王說。「她聽見了，等著。」「三年和兩個男孩，」奶媽說。「她有了兩個，」國王說。「她沒有衣服的時候不走。」國王的老奶媽，七十歲了，看著燈。

他走了以後，妻子等了兩天，第三天對他母親說：「我跟他過了三年，難道就一次澡堂也不能去嗎？」就哭了。他母親說：「我們在這裡是外鄉人，他又在外頭。」她說：「男人是可以原諒的，因為他們嫉妒。可是女人不是都一樣的，母親，要是女人想要一樣東西，沒有人能看住她、攔住她；能約束她的只有她的理智和她的信仰。」於是老婦人帶她去了澡堂，帶著兩個男孩。澡堂裡的每個女人都停下來看她。其中一個是圖弗法，哈里發的彈魯特琴的女奴，她忘了洗頭，跟著她回了家，去告訴祖拜黛夫人說她看見了一個女人，哈里發為了她會殺掉她丈夫。祖拜黛派太監馬斯魯爾去那座房子。他說：「夫人召你們。」老婦人說她兒子叫她別讓任何人看見這個女孩。「要是我覺得危險，」馬斯魯爾說，「我就不請你去了。」我父親站起來走到門口，背對著我們站著，等馬斯魯爾把她們帶走了才回來。「夫人的太監，」他對沒有人說。「沒有人能拒絕他，主上。」「沒有，」國王說。

祖拜黛看了她，叫她站起來，吻了她，把自己的項鍊戴在她身上，問她會什麼。妻子說她有一件羽毛衣，要是有它，她可以給她看一個奇蹟，它在她丈夫母親家儲藏間裡一個埋著的箱子裡。老婦人發誓她從沒見過這樣的衣服。祖拜黛從她手裡拿了鑰匙，派馬斯魯爾去挖。妻子當著所有人的面穿上，成了一隻鳥。她帶著兩個男孩貼在胸前，繞宮殿飛了一圈，念了幾句詩，我不念給你，說：「我丈夫的母親啊，他回來你告訴他，要是他想見我，就到瓦克群島來。」她從穹頂上飛走了。祖拜黛說她不知道。「話沒有用，」老婦人說。「請你饒了我。」國王已經把優素福豎直靠在肩上抱了一會兒。他在第七百九十夜開始咳嗽，那是第一陣從北方來的黃沙，到第七百九十六夜，他呼吸裡有了一種奶媽不喜歡的聲音。

哈桑和七個姐妹告別時，每人念了兩句詩，最小的最後：「我沒有說再見，是怕說了你的心會軟。」他帶著五駝金子回來，看見他母親瘦得像牙籤，房子開著，箱子破了，沒有人。「他們在哪裡？」他說。她說：「在三座墳裡。」我姐姐讀下去：她在家裡為妻子和兩個兒子挖了三座墳，坐在旁邊哭。「停，」國王說。他說得像在阿吉卜下令把那個妃子淹死的那一夜說的那樣，輕輕地，孩子的頭在他下巴下，我姐姐沒有停下來想。「他們不在裡面，主上，」她說。「他們活著。他們在瓦克群島。她挖是因為不知道。」「說下去，」國王說。她說下去。哈桑從早晨到中午昏了過去，醒來後把劍架在母親的脖子上說：「說實話，不然我殺了你再殺我自己。」她說了。他在屋裡轉了五天沒吃東西。優素福發燙。奶媽把冷布放在他胸口和腳底，什麼也沒說，我父親在黑暗中從院子的井裡打來冷水，井比我看過的任何時候都低，國王抱著他走，一直走，到第二個沙漏結束，他在搖籃旁邊的地上躺下，孩子在他胸口，睡著了。我聽著嬰兒的呼吸，直到聽出裡面什麼都沒有了。

我姐姐把那一夜剩下的部分，五天，母親的眼淚，哈桑的詩，輕輕地對著屋子講完，像在有病人的房子裡說話那樣。天亮時優素福在搖籃裡睡著了，國王睡在地上，沒有人叫醒他。蘇麥雅從我手裡拿過蘆筆，因為我的手不穩，用她自己的字寫了夜簿的行。是直的。在下面她寫了，因為我告訴過她那種事我們寫什麼：孩子，發燒；天亮時退了。北方六十八天沒有雨。我父親說，下城的麥子貴了一成，商人們在問國王的糧倉是不是滿的。「你怎麼說？」國王躺在地上，沒有睜眼，說。「說國王保管著他的糧倉，主上。」「好，」國王說，又睡了。

第七百九十八夜。山魯佐德與敦亞佐德。到。孩子，發燒；天亮時退了。未了：巴士拉的一個人，他的妻子在瓦克群島，才剛開頭；九個人在牢裡，為了話；一個叫馬爾西娜的女奴，說做了；皮匠巷的一扇窗板，關著、閂著；一個說了真話的太監，蘇麥雅的筆跡；北方的雨晚了六十八天；一個叫哈米德的麵包師，沒有人可以把他鎖起來；一個名叫優素福的兒子，一百四十八天大，咳過；一個穿會吱吱響的鞋的男孩；一個事後才被問的女人；一個沒有被問過的女人；一個樵夫，沒有被問過；一本名冊；一個恩典，還沒有求。

## 第45章 · 第七百九十九至八百一十六夜：當作死了，與會壞的麵包

第七百九十九夜，我姐姐接著講，像第七百九十八夜沒有發生過，那是她的用意。孩子好了。國王說這一夜讓蘇麥雅念未了，因為她現在會了，她站著念，手指點在每一行下面，念得很慢，念到「一個說了真話的太監，蘇麥雅的筆跡」時她停住了。「念下去，」國王說，她就念下去，用念別人的聲音念她自己的名字。從那以後她每夜都念，我記夜簿。

哈桑在鳥飛走一個月以後去了雲山找姐妹，告訴了她們，她們互相看，又看地板。然後她們說：「把你的手伸向天，等你碰到了，你就會得到你的妻子。」他哭了。最小的叫他耐心：「十歲的兒子不會死在第九年。」她說她本來想叫他燒掉那件羽毛衣，魔鬼讓她忘了。他住了一年，眼淚止不住；姐妹們有個叔叔，阿卜杜・庫杜斯，每年騎象來一次，大姐要什麼他就做什麼，她燒了一種香叫了他。他坐下，搖頭，咬手指，在地上畫記號，說：「他到不了瓦克群島。他和它們之間有七條山谷、七片海、七座大山。叫他把妻子和兒子當作死了吧。」「當作死了，」奶媽說。「他們都這麼說。」國王用手捂住大男孩的耳朵，男孩手裡拿著一隻鞋，抬起頭。

哈桑說：「不贏回我要的，我怎麼會覺得活著甜？」老人騎象帶他走了三天，到一座有中國鐵門的藍山，給了他一匹黑公馬和一卷信，叫他在一個山洞口等五天，第六天會有一個穿黑衣的黑長老出來，不說話就接過信，然後再等五天：要是他親自出來，你會成功；要是來的是侍從，他是要殺你。那是阿布・魯韋什，第六天讓他進去，在一座有噴泉的大廳裡，在四位長老之間，叫他講他的故事；他們說：「我們從沒見過有誰像這個青年這樣厭棄自己的命。」他寫了第二封信，給了一袋香，派一個叫達赫納什的精靈背他，不許在他背上說「榮耀歸於真主」，否則兩個都得死，把他送到一片白得像樟腦的地方，到哈蘇恩國王那裡，國王讀了信，搖搖頭，把他放進一座客館住了一個月，等從瓦克群島來的船。然後船長把他裝進一個箱子，像貨物一樣抬上船。「每一個都叫他回家，」蘇麥雅說，「每一個都把他送到下一個。」他一路作詩；我給你一聯，我姐姐讀了兩遍的：「她們的影子留在我身邊，不肯飛走；要不是想著重逢，我早就死了。」「信就是事情辦成的方法，主上，」我父親說。「是，」沙・贊曼說，他是記帳的人。「四扇門，還有一條船。」

第八百零五夜，我父親說有兩百四十個人從北方來了，坐在北門外，女人孩子和幾隻山羊，後面還有更多在路上。他們說他們村子的井都成了泥。他們走了十一天。「他們要什麼？」國王說。「麵包，主上，和水。」「廚房，」國王說。「在城門四周。湯和麵包，一天兩次。」「從糧倉出嗎，主上？」「不從糧倉。去買麵粉。」「下城的麵粉比以前貴了五分之一。」「那就向以舊價賣的人買。」我父親安靜了一下。「哈米德，主上。銅匠街的。他每週到第三天就沒麵粉了，他說磨坊不肯賣給他。」「派人去，」國王說。「不是禮物。是命令。每天一千二百個麵包給北門，舊價，麵粉用我的磨坊的。」他曾經就這個麵包師說過「不要派人去」，我想我們都記得。我父親在手掌上寫。第二夜他報告：哈米德說他做，但他每天天亮烤，麵包到中午就被吃光，他不會為明天烤，因為麵包是會壞的東西；而且不許叫它國王的麵包。「他說那就是麵包。」「好，」國王說。

第八百零八夜，一個麵包用布包著從下城送上來，沒有附話。是哈米德的，那天早晨烤的，奶媽一敲，皮就脆響。「他送一個來，讓您知道北門在吃什麼，主上，」我父親說。國王掰開，給沙・贊曼一半，把皮給男孩，男孩雙手捧著，沒有吃，捧著在屋裡走。「到明天就壞了，主上，」我父親說。「那我們今天吃掉它，」國王說，我們吃掉了，全吃了，奶媽撿起了碎屑。

我姐姐這時讓哈桑躲在瓦克群島岸邊一張長凳下面，在黑暗中。女人們成千地從船上下來，穿著甲，其中一個坐在他的凳子上，他拉起她的衣襟放在頭上，求她保護。她說：「起來，趁他們還沒殺你。」她叫他等到第二天夜裡，給了他一副甲。她是童貞女軍隊的統帥，一個藍眼睛、麻臉、缺牙的老太婆，沙瓦希，災禍之母，她告訴他他會被殺，還是帶了他。他對她講了他的故事，她說是那樣的愛把他帶來的，是他目的的真誠救了他。他們走了七個月的路到第七座島，越過鳥之國（在那裡聽不見彼此說話；我姐姐用手比出那種吵聲，大男孩把鞋蓋在耳朵上，奶媽說她去過鳥之國，那是她表哥的婚禮）、獸之國、精靈之國（在那裡沒有人回頭看，不然就死），到了一座山下的河邊，山上一棵樹的果子是人頭，太陽升起時叫「瓦克！瓦克！」。在岸上她叫軍隊裡每個女孩下河洗澡，好讓他看見他的妻子。書裡對此有很多話，我略去。在第二張紙上我寫了：書很著急，說了十幾次，要告訴我們軍隊是童貞女，我寫了一次。他看每一張臉，說：「不是她。」

最後來了一個少女，帶著十個女奴和三十個侍女，把她們按進水裡，統治她們，哈桑說：「她像她，但不是她。」老婦人叫他描述他的妻子；他描述了，她低下頭，又抬起來，說：「那是至高王的一個女兒，統治瓦克群島的。醒醒吧。當作她死了。選另一個，我給你財富，回家去。」哈桑說就算把他切成碎片，他也只會更愛她。沙瓦希看了他很久，說她願意為他冒命。於是她把他帶進城，藏在自己家裡，去見女王努爾・胡達，發著抖告訴她說有個男人躲在一張長凳下面向她求保護。「你淫到這個地步了嗎，」女王說，「竟把男人帶進瓦克群島？把他帶來，不然我砍你的頭。」

他在她面前站著，老婦人在旁邊，報了名字，哈桑，和城市，巴士拉，和兒子們的名字，納西爾和曼蘇爾；他不知道他妻子的名字。女王問她臨別時說了什麼。他告訴她：「叫他到瓦克群島來。」努爾・胡達說：「她要是不要你，就不會這樣說。」然後她說她會把城裡和各省所有的女孩都給他看，要是他認出了他的妻子，她就把她給他，要是沒有，就把他釘死在老婦人的門上。他說他接受。他們把城裡的每個女孩帶給他，一次一百個（奶媽數到二十個一百就停了），然後是宮裡的每個女孩，他說：「不是她。」「把他拖著臉朝下，」女王說，「砍他的頭。」他們把他摔倒，用他的衣襟蒙住他的眼睛，拿劍站在他上面。老婦人撲倒在地上說：「他吃過我們的肉，進了我們的地，對你有權利。」「她說了什麼？」國王說。「說他吃過他們的麵包，主上，」我姐姐說。「是，」國王說。我姐姐很快地講了這一段，他沒有看夜簿。

沙瓦希說有一個女孩他還沒看過，就是女王。努爾・胡達說：「他怎麼會是我的丈夫，我要給他看我的臉？」可是她揭開了面紗；哈桑大叫一聲，大得宮殿都在抖，倒下了。醒來後他說：「這位女王不是我的妻子，就是最像我妻子的人。」女王笑得倒在一邊。她問他妻子哪裡像她，他說全部，身形、聲音、眉。她笑了，臉紅了，叫沙瓦希把他帶回她家照顧。然後她叫老婦人披甲，帶一千騎兵去她父親至高王的城，到她最小的妹妹馬納爾・薩納的宮裡，叫她把兩個兒子穿上甲，送來。「說她姐姐想他們，」她說。「走另一條路，別走他們母親的路。」書上說女王以各種誓言發誓，要是那女人是他的妻子、那兩個男孩是他的兒子，她就不阻攔他；書上在下一行說，要是不是，她打算殺了他。「她已經決定了，」沙・贊曼說。「她決定了一件或另一件，設了一個試驗看是哪一件，」奶媽說。「那就是決定，」國王說。

老婦人來到馬納爾・薩納那裡，她的父親是至高王，她從不讓人看她的兒子：「從他們出生起，沒有人看過他們的臉，不論精靈或人，男或女，我連夜裡的微風都替他們嫉妒。」「沒有人看過，」蘇麥雅說。「七年裡。」「四年，」我姐姐說。「沒有人看過他們的臉，」奶媽說，看著搖籃，小的男孩醒著，把拳頭塞在嘴裡，又看著大的，他穿著鞋站在我父親膝邊，看著我父親的手掌。奶媽說在她那個時候，孩子的臉四十天也不給人看，沒有人把這叫嫉妒。「他們叫它謹慎，」她說。公主讓步了。老婦人帶著穿上姨媽送的小鎧甲的兩個男孩，像鳥一樣走了另一條路。在她姐姐的宮裡，女王把他們放在膝蓋上說：「去叫哈桑來。」

第八百一十五夜他們把他帶進來，他以為要被殺，看見他們在女王膝蓋上，兩個都在，大叫一聲倒了。他們認得他。書上說真主使他們說話，他們說：「我們的父親啊！」我父親房間裡的大男孩，有三個字的，放下鞋，說了第一個。「爸，」他說，看著國王。國王什麼也沒說，把他抱了起來。鞋側著躺在地上，沒有人去撿。在女王膝蓋上，男孩們哭了。努爾・胡達看見他們是哈桑的兒子、她妹妹是他的妻子，就對她妹妹怒不可遏，對哈桑的臉尖叫，一腳踢在他胸口。「起來，逃命去！要不是我發誓不傷你，我現在就親手殺了你。」她叫人把他趕出去，他們把他臉朝下扔出宮外；他醒來時躺在路上，不認識任何人，不知道怎麼回家。北方八十六天沒有雨。

第八百一十六夜。山魯佐德與敦亞佐德。到。未了：巴士拉的一個人，臉朝下被扔出瓦克群島的一座宮殿，他的兒子們在裡面；北門的廚房，和一個不肯把它叫國王的麵包的麵包師；九個人在牢裡，為了話；一個叫馬爾西娜的女奴，說做了；皮匠巷的一扇窗板，關著、閂著；一個說了真話的太監，蘇麥雅的筆跡；北方的雨晚了八十六天；一個名叫優素福的兒子，一百六十六天大；一個穿會吱吱響的鞋的男孩，他說爸；一個事後才被問的女人；一個沒有被問過的女人；一個樵夫，沒有被問過；一本名冊；一個恩典，還沒有求。

## 第46章 · 第八百一十七至八百三十一夜：錯在我，與放出來的八個人

哈桑躺在他們把他扔下的路上，我姐姐把他留在那裡過了一夜，告訴我們他妻子的事。至高王最小的女兒馬納爾・薩納正要動身去她姐姐那裡，一個侍從來說她父親要見她。他做了一個夢，夢見走進一座寶庫，裡面有七顆最好的寶石，他選了最小最亮的，走出來打開手，一隻不是他們國家的陌生鳥俯衝下來，把它搶走了。解夢的人告訴他，他的七個女兒裡他會失去最小的，被強行奪走，違背他的意願。「他選了最小的，」國王說。「是，主上。」「不要去，」他說。她說她姐姐已經備了筵席，會生氣，因為她已經四年沒見她；說沒有凡人到得了他們的島，要過白色之國、黑山、鳥島、精靈谷；說她只去一個月。他讓她去了。「他告訴她那個夢，」國王說，「她還是去了。」「她說沒有人到得了，」我姐姐說。「她確信，」奶媽說。「他們都確信，」國王說。

她姐姐在門口接她，沒有問安。「淫婦，」她說，「這些孩子你是從哪裡來的？你瞞著你父親結了婚，還是私通？」馬納爾・薩納說她是合法結婚，並向天上的主申訴。「她說她結了婚，」國王說。「是，主上。」「而沒有人信她。」「她姐姐一個鐘頭前才讓男孩坐在膝上，知道他們是誰的，主上。」「是，」國王說。努爾・胡達把她上了鐐銬，打了，吊住頭髮；梯子和鞭子書裡寫了，我略去，老婦人沙瓦希想離開時對她做的事我也略去。她寫信給至高王，至高王回信：「我把她的命交給你；要是事情如你所說，不要請示我，殺了她。」「不要請示他，」國王說。「是，主上。」「他沒有說，殺她。」「沒有。他說，要是事情如你所說。」「在信裡比較容易，」我父親在他的角落說。國王看著他。「是，」他說。「是的。」努爾・胡達讀了信，叫人把妹妹帶來，其餘的我略去。

第八百二十一夜，沙漏以前，我父親說九個裡的一個在夜裡死了。最老的。一個皮匠，七十一歲，在牢裡兩年零一個月，因為在他的鋪子裡說過「願真主扼住他的喉嚨」。是發燒；牢裡的夜晚很冷；另外八個給他洗了身。國王沒有動。「多久？」他說。「兩年零一個月，主上。」「那八個。」「主上？」「今天。」「八個全部？」「今天，中午以前。把他送回他家，帶一塊裹屍布。」「他有個女兒，主上。在下城。」「找到她。」我父親在手掌上寫，手沒有抖；我注意到了。國王那夜再沒說別的。蘇麥雅在第二個沙漏結束時念未了，念到「九個人在牢裡，為了話」時念出來，停住，對沒有人說了「八個」，繼續念。我姐姐再開始講哈桑的時候，他沒有看她，而是看著門邊的磚。

哈桑從路上爬起來，沿著河走。一棵樹上有一卷信，寫著：「你在母親的子宮裡，我安排你最好；我會在你遇到任何煩難時為你足夠。」過去有兩個小男孩，魔法師的兒子，在爭一根銅杖和一頂皮帽，那是他們的父親花了一百三十五年做的，杖能號令七部精靈，帽子讓戴的人隱形。哈桑說他來評判，扔了一塊石頭，說誰先跑到石頭那裡，誰得杖，另一個得帽；趁他們跑，他把帽子戴在頭上、杖拿在手裡。小的先帶著石頭回來，沒找到人。「那個要評判我們的人在哪裡？」他對哥哥說。他們找了很久，他就站在他們旁邊。「他偷了嗎？」蘇麥雅說。「他們的父親說過有個陌生人會拿走，」我姐姐說，「而他們不知道怎麼被拿走。」他走進宮殿，站在沙瓦希面前搖一個架子，她以為是魔鬼。然後他去找他妻子。

她被頭髮綁在梯子上，她的兒子們在下面玩。他們掀起帽子時看見他，喊：「我們的父親啊！」他們的母親左右看，沒看見人。然後他在她面前把帽子拿掉。她尖叫。她說：「救你自己吧，她有誰也擋不住的大軍。」然後她說：「這一切發生在我身上，是因為我背叛你，沒有你的許可就出去。女人要失去男人才知道他的價值。別怪我。」哈桑說：「錯不在你；錯在我，只在我；因為我出了門，把你留給一個不知道你的身分、你的價值、你的地位的人。」「再來，」國王說。我姐姐又說了一遍：「錯在我，只在我。」他沒有再說什麼。奶媽擤了鼻子。沙・贊曼看著自己的手。然後哈桑問她。「你要我送你回你父親家，」他說，「還是跟我回我的國家，現在救援來了？」「他問她，」蘇麥雅說。「他問她，」我姐姐說。「她說什麼？」奶媽說。「她說，回你的國家，放棄那個虛假的希望，因為你不知道這裡的危險。」「而他留下了，」國王說。「他說他不離開這裡，除非和她一起走。」

夜裡他放了她，他們把男孩抱到女王後宮的門，門從外面鎖了。一個聲音說：「你們不發誓帶上我，我就不開。」是沙瓦希，騎在一只脖子上繞著棕櫚繩的紅陶罐上，那罐子跑得像納季德的小馬。他們發了誓。出了城，哈桑用杖敲地，十個精靈從地裡站起來，頭在雲裡，七位精靈王，說：「你吩咐什麼？」他請求看他們的部族。「我們有些是沒有身子的頭，」他們說，「有些是沒有頭的身子。」他想了想作罷。「他作罷了，」奶媽說。「我也會。」他說：「帶我們去巴格達。」他們說他們不能：他們屬於所羅門的盟約，發過誓不把任何亞當的子孫背在背上。他們帶來精靈的馬。這是七年的路程，他們說，他卻不到一年就來了，是因為真主使祂的僕人心軟，那位長老的象三年的路十天走完，精靈三年的路一夜走完。「七年，」沙・贊曼說，「他用了一年的大半。」一個穆斯林精靈，高得像煙柱，在路上遇到他們：他想離開魔法師的國土，要是白天不出現就帶他們走。他們沿著海岸騎了一個月；第三十一天，塵土升起來，像牆一樣擋住了世界。

那是女王的軍隊。七位王說：「你帶妻子和孩子上山，把這交給我們。」他上了山，和老婦人一起，看著。精靈從嘴裡噴火，頭從身子上飛起，血流成溪；我照書裡那樣給你，在塵土和火焰裡，數字我略去。打了三天。第三天瓦克的軍隊被打垮，女王被抓，綁著，和她的主要軍官。老婦人說了她要怎麼對付她，用兩條母狗和兩匹母馬，這個我也略去。哈桑下令把囚犯處死；老婦人喊：「全殺了，一個不留。」然後馬納爾・薩納看見她姐姐被綁，哭了，對哈桑說：「你要怎麼處置她？」「她折磨你就夠了，」他說。她說：「她對我做的有她的理由。是你，讓我父親因為失去我而心裡著火。要是他連我姐姐也失去，他會怎樣？」「由你決定，」哈桑說。「你想怎麼做就怎麼做。」「是她的決定，」蘇麥雅說。「是，」國王說。

她給她姐姐和其餘的人鬆了綁，擁抱她，她們哭了很久；努爾・胡達說：「別記恨我對你做的。」「這是命裡注定給我的，」馬納爾・薩納說。「注定，」國王說。他說得像他說「到」。「這算原諒嗎？」奶媽說。「書上說她們在榻上坐著說話，」我姐姐說，「她在老婦人和女王之間說和。」「她被問了，」蘇麥雅說。「事後被問了。」我姐姐看著她，又看夜簿，我什麼也沒寫，因為沒有人告訴我該寫什麼。

女王和老婦人走了左邊的路，哈桑和他妻子走右邊的。到了公主們的房子，最小的姐妹擁抱他哭了；她轉向馬納爾・薩納說：「至高王的女兒啊，你心裡就沒有一點憐憫，把他和他的孩子分開，讓他的心著火？你是要他死嗎？」馬納爾・薩納笑了。「這是注定的，」她說，「誰欺騙人，真主就欺騙他。」「她說得對，」奶媽說。「兩個人都是，」國王說。哈蘇恩國王帶著騎兵在樹下迎接他們，他們做了他三天的客人。在黃銅洞，兩位長老在等，阿卜杜・庫杜斯說：「你已經救出妻子和兒子，不再需要這兩樣東西。把杖給我，把帽給阿布・魯韋什。」哈桑垂下頭。他不想說他不給；他說他給。「他可以留著，」沙・贊曼說。「傻。」「它們在他手裡，」國王說，「他把它們給了帶他到那裡的人。」「他母親說他是傻子，」奶媽說；因為哈桑到巴格達（從公主們的宮殿起，兩個月又十天），他母親昏倒，醒來，吻了他妻子的頭，聽說杖和帽，說：「我的兒啊，要是你留著它們，你就是整個大地的主人。」他買了房子花園和田產，我姐姐說，他們過著安逸的日子，直到那毀滅歡樂者來。「整個大地的主人，」國王說。「她希望他這樣。」「母親都是這樣，」奶媽說。

那八個在第八百二十一夜的第二天中午從牢裡出來，每人一個第納爾，沒有人看見他們去了哪裡。我父親同一天黃昏帶著一副擔架和兩個抬夫出去，到第二個沙漏才回來；他什麼也沒說，國王沒有問。我注意到他的袖子有一點石灰和濕樹皮的味道。我沒有劃掉關於九個人的那一行。我在下面寫：一個死了；八個出去了。國王讀了，把拇指放在它旁邊。第八百二十六夜，沙・贊曼收到一封撒馬爾罕來的信，讀了兩遍放進袖子裡；早晨他派了兩個騎手，只對國王說他要用他的馬。國王說他想用什麼就用什麼。第八百三十夜，奶媽把手指伸進優素福嘴裡說：「牙。」每個人都得摸一摸，連沙・贊曼也是，他被咬了。「直不直？」國王說。「直，」奶媽說。北方一百零一天沒有雨，現在有九百一十二個人坐在城門外，北門上的天空是錫的顏色，哈米德要求第二個爐子和一個翻麵包的男孩。第八百三十一夜，我姐姐開始講巴格達的漁夫哈里法。

第八百三十一夜。山魯佐德與敦亞佐德。到。未了：巴格達的一個漁夫，才剛開頭；一個七十一歲的皮匠，死了，和八個因為話從牢裡放出來的人，他們去了沒有人看見的地方；一副擔架，和一股石灰味；北門的廚房，門外九百一十二個人，和一個要求第二個爐子的麵包師；一個叫馬爾西娜的女奴，說做了；皮匠巷的一扇窗板，關著、閂著；一個說了真話的太監，蘇麥雅的筆跡；北方的雨晚了一百零一天；一個名叫優素福的兒子，一百八十一天大，長了一顆牙；一個穿會吱吱響的鞋的男孩，他說爸；一個事後才被問的女人；一個沒有被問過的女人；一個樵夫，沒有被問過；一本名冊；一個恩典，還沒有求。

## 第47章 · 第八百三十一至八百四十五夜：三隻猴子，與替人選擇的紙

巴格達的漁夫哈里法從沒結過婚，也從沒捕到過夠他結婚的魚。有一天早晨他撒了十次網什麼也沒撈到，說麵包是真主的，祂給一些人不給另一些人；他撒了第十一次，網很重，裡面是一隻瘸腿獨眼的猴子。「這是什麼讓人心碎的運氣？」他說。他把猴子綁在樹上，拿起鞭子，猴子說：「哈里法，住手，再撒一次網；真主會給你每天的麵包。」他又撒了一次，撈上來第二隻猴子，牙齒稀疏，眼睛畫了眼影，手染了指甲花，在笑；然後是第三隻，紅色，穿藍腰布，說他是銀行家阿布・薩阿達特的猴子，每天早晚向他問好，每次銀行家賺五第納爾。「三網三隻猴子，」沙・贊曼說。「河改行了。」「讚美真主，」哈里法說，「祂把底格里斯河的魚變成了猴子！」他管第三隻叫猴子之王，照他說的做。大男孩被給了奶媽的披肩拿著，他把它扔到貓身上；貓把這當作侮辱，奶媽說這是今天的第五隻猴子。蘇麥雅把三隻猴子寫在未了的邊上，每隻旁邊一個數字，國王問數字是什麼，她說是撒網的次數。

第三隻猴子告訴他怎麼做。捉一條魚，大的；放在籃子裡的青草上；帶到銀行家的鋪子說：我在你的運氣上去捕魚，真主送了我這條。銀行家會出一第納爾，然後兩第納爾，然後五第納爾；什麼都別拿；說你只為兩句話賣，要他站起來說：「市場上的人們，作證，我把我的猴子給哈里法漁夫換他的猴子，把我的命運換他的命運，把我的運氣換他的運氣。」那樣獨眼猴子就每天向銀行家問好，每天他都會有一樁災禍，直到他一無所有；而哈里法每天能賺十第納爾。書裡給了銀行家一種信仰，像給了金匠一種信仰，我略去；他就是銀行家。哈里法不肯收他的五第納爾，扔回去說：「把人家的魚還給人家！」銀行家以為兩句話是別的意思，又怕又氣，叫人在街上打他。「十頭驢的口糧的棍子我都吃得下，」哈里法說，爬起來。銀行家忍不住笑了，說了那些話；哈里法去河邊撈上滿網的魚，那天賣了十第納爾的魚，以後十天每天賣十第納爾。

那天夜裡，家裡有了一百第納爾，身體裡有不少大麻，他對自己說：「人人都知道我是個窮漁夫，現在有一百第納爾。哈倫・拉希德哈里發會聽說。他會派人叫我，說，把那一百借我，我會說，我什麼都沒有，他會叫人打我直到我招認。聰明的做法是練習。」他就脫光衣服，在身邊放一個皮枕，抽打自己，每隔一下打在枕頭上，大吼：「哎呀，我主，他們冤枉我，我是個窮漁夫，我在人世上什麼也沒有！」客棧的商人們爬過屋頂，從天窗下來，看見他光著身子鞭打自己。「我們在為哈里發做準備，」他說。國王笑了。他仰著頭笑，像從底下升上來的那種笑，笑聲在屋裡繞了一圈；奶媽膝上的優素福，一輩子還沒笑過，張開嘴，裡面有那顆新牙，也笑了，一種短短乾乾的聲音，像一扇門。所有人都停住了。「再來，」國王說，又笑了一遍，孩子也笑了。沙・贊曼一直想裝作什麼也沒發生，把手蓋在臉上。

第二天哈里法潛了一百次底格里斯河也沒找到那袋錢，上來時衣服被偷了。他用網裹住自己，像發情的駱駝一樣在岸上跑。與此同時哈里發買了一個女奴，庫特・庫盧卜，什麼技藝都會，會唱歌，花了五千第納爾，給了珠寶商一萬，除了週五禮拜一個月沒有離開過她，丟下了祖拜黛夫人和他的妃子們。朝臣們向賈法爾抱怨，賈法爾對他說國王最高的誇耀是打獵。於是他們騎馬出去，哈里發口渴，一個人騎上一座土丘，看見一個人影，那是光著身子裹在網裡的哈里法。「你有水嗎？」「你瞎了嗎？」哈里法說。「底格里斯河就在這土丘後面。」他喝了；哈里法聽見哈里發說出長袍、腰帶、腰布這些正是被偷走的東西，就抓住騾子說：「你偷了我的衣服。」哈里發把自己的緞袍給了他。哈里法嫌下擺長，用刀割掉三分之一。「你吹笛子一個月得多少工錢？」他問，因為哈里發嘴小臉頰大。「十第納爾一個月。」「我每天賺你那十第納爾。做我的學徒吧，我給你五個。」

他們捕魚。網拉不上來，哈里法說第一次他拿了袍子，這次他要拿驢；兩個人一起拉上來，滿滿的。「去市場拿兩個筐，」哈里法說，「我來看魚。」哈里發笑著騎馬回到賈法爾那裡，所有巴爾馬克家的人都吻了地；哈里發說誰把哈里法他師傅捕的魚帶一條來給他，就賞一第納爾。奴隸兵們像禿鷲一樣衝到河邊，哈里法看見他們來，以為是天上的魚，兩隻手各拿一條魚下水到脖子，祈求他的搭檔吹笛的人來。最後他把魚給了總太監桑達爾，桑達爾身上沒錢，叫他早晨去宮裡。「你從哪裡得的那件袍子？」哈里發自己的裁縫在街上問。「從我教捕魚的一個人，」哈里法說。「他偷了我的衣服，我饒了他的手，他給了我這個。」「他饒了一隻手，」奶媽說。「這本書裡沒有幾個這樣的人。」「沒有，」國王說。「沒有幾個。」

第八百三十八夜，我父親說下城的麥子比春天貴了一倍，有三個人因為囤積被抓了，在城門口向車夫買了壓著不賣。「鐐銬？」我父親問。國王沒有回答，我父親在手掌上寫了一個字，沒有看它。「不，」國王說。「叫他們把買的按舊價賣給廚房。把他們的名字寫下來。」「三個都寫嗎，主上？」「三個都寫。寫進未了。」蘇麥雅第二夜把它們念出來，三個名字，用不認識它們的聲音；我父親說第二個是他的一個堂兄弟，他報告時就知道。

在宮裡，祖拜黛聽說了庫特・庫盧卜，一個月沒有吃東西，請那女孩給她唱歌，給她吃了放了迷藥的甜點；等她睡著，叫人做一個箱子和一座墳，放出風聲說女孩噎死了，對她的女人們說她要砍掉說她還活著的人的頭。哈里發從打獵回來，去墳前，在上面哭了。「裡面沒有人，」蘇麥雅說。「沒有。」「這又是一個，」奶媽說。「哈桑的母親有過一座，還有那三座墳，現在這座。」「巴格達全是空墳，」沙・贊曼說。「不是全空的，」國王很輕地說，沒有人說話，因為沒有人說得出他的意思，我父親看著他的手掌。祖拜黛把箱子交給一個太監去賣，條件是買主不開箱，並把價錢施捨出去。

哈里發為了取樂，叫賈法爾寫二十張紙：二十筆錢，從一第納爾到一千，二十個官職，從最小的到哈里發，二十種刑罰，從鞭打到處死，叫哈里法抽一張。「寫的是什麼，我就給什麼，」他說。「要是哈里發之位，我就脫袍子；要是絞刑，我就執行。」賈法爾自言自語說，這個可憐人的命運裡可能落下什麼會毀了他，他就會是原因。哈里法抽到一百棍；他們打了他。他抽了第二張：什麼也不給漁夫。第三張：一個第納爾。「他自己寫的紙，」國王說。「是賈法爾寫的，主上，」我姐姐說。「哈里發告訴他寫什麼。」「他讓紙去選。」「是，主上，」我父親從他的角落說。「這樣就不是他了。」「就是他。」「是，主上。」國王看著夜簿，沒有再說。哈里法在外面把第納爾扔給桑達爾，桑達爾看見他的眼睛濕了，給了他一百第納爾買魚。

他走到奴隸市場，那裡正在賣一個箱子；是祖拜黛的。出價到一百第納爾，他說「一百零一」，商人們笑，太監說：「賣給他。」他用頭頂著回家。夜裡它動了。他以為裡面有精靈，叫醒整條街要燈，用石頭砸開鎖，裡面躺著一個像天堂美女的女孩，醒來說：「給我拿茉莉和水仙來。」「只有指甲花，」哈里法說。她問她在哪裡；他說她是他的奴隸，花一百零一第納爾買的；她問他叫什麼。他從鄰居那裡給她拿了麵包、乳酪、黃瓜和一壺水，吵醒了兩次他們，她寫了一張字條給珠寶商伊本・基爾納斯，叫他送到珠寶市場，什麼也別說。珠寶商讀了，吻了它，給了他一千第納爾和一匹騾子；他臉朝尾騎上去，抓著尾巴，被摔下來。「她又送了他一千第納爾，」我姐姐說。「然後她帶他去見哈里發。」

哈里發說：「你昨天真是我的搭檔嗎？」「憑那賜你堂妹的繼承權的主，」哈里法說，「我只見過她、跟她說過話，別的我一概不知。」哈里發給了他五萬第納爾、一件袍子、一匹騾子和服侍他的奴隸，他像個國王；哈里發對祖拜黛生了很久的氣，不去她那裡，直到她寫了一封詩信：「我渴望我們之間曾有的愛重新回來。」他讀了，說：「所有的罪真主都原諒，」並回信說他原諒她。「她先寫了，」奶媽說。「她求了，」蘇麥雅說。「凡是求的人都被原諒，」沙・贊曼說。「在這本書裡。」「在這本書裡，」國王說。哈里法領了每月五十第納爾的薪水，一座大宅，一個妻子，一個大人物的女兒，用詩讚美真主，活到那毀滅歡樂者來。書裡又從另一份抄本把他講了一遍，叫哈里夫，有一隻俊美的猴子，一個每年給二萬第納爾的村子；我只給你第一個。

北方一百一十五天沒有雨。北門外有一千四百人，銅匠街有三個爐子，宮廷的泥瓦匠在蓋第四個。第八百四十五夜，我姐姐開始講馬斯魯爾和扎因・馬瓦西夫，我看見國王看天花板，像一個人查看屋頂是不是還結實，又看窗，窗外是清、硬、藍的。早晨我上了夜簿室的屋頂，自從第一場雪以後我沒有上去過，看見北邊的路：一條灰色的人流，女人們腰上抱著孩子，走向北門，那裡廚房的煙筆直向上，因為沒有風去彎折它。

第八百四十五夜。山魯佐德與敦亞佐德。到。未了：一個叫馬斯魯爾的商人，才剛開頭；一個七十一歲的皮匠，死了，和八個因為話從牢裡放出來的人，他們去了沒有人看見的地方；一副擔架，和一股石灰味；北門的廚房，門外一千四百個人，三個爐子和第四個，和一個不肯把它叫國王的麵包的麵包師；一個叫馬爾西娜的女奴，說做了；皮匠巷的一扇窗板，關著、閂著；一個說了真話的太監，蘇麥雅的筆跡；北方的雨晚了一百一十五天；一個名叫優素福的兒子，一百九十五天大，笑過；一個穿會吱吱響的鞋的男孩，他說爸；一個事後才被問的女人；一個沒有被問過的女人；一個樵夫，沒有被問過；一本名冊；一個恩典，還沒有求。

## 第48章 · 第八百四十六至八百六十三夜：為一切而下的棋，與在自家門口敲門的人

商人馬斯魯爾夢見自己在一座花園裡抱著一隻白鴿，一隻大鳥飛下來，從他手裡把牠叼走了；早晨他出門去找一個能替他解夢的人。沒有人肯。他走到離自己那條街很遠的地方，聽見牆的另一邊有人在吟詩，門開著，他就走了進去。那是一座花園，四座涼台上各畫著一句祝福，祝福這所房子，祝福它的主人，祝福每一個有急難而進來的客人；花園盡頭，紅錦緞的帷幕後面坐著四個女人，其中一個，書裡特別小心地說，高過四尺，不到五尺。這就是扎因・馬瓦西夫，眾美之飾。「是什麼把你帶進一座不是你的房子，」她說，「來到不是你的女人當中，連個招呼也沒有？」他說，這座花園讓他喜歡。「歡迎，」她說，又叫他走。他要了水。書在這裡讓他們互相用各自的信仰稱呼對方，像稱呼一個名字那樣；我把它們略去，這裡和這個故事的每一處都略去，連那個丈夫的也一起略去，並且不再說我略去了。他說她的水對他不是禁忌，他的水對她也不是，因為我們都是同一個造物，她就叫人拿來了，接著是飯菜，和一隻杯子，杯子外面寫著：守住你的舌頭，他喝完以後，杯子裡面也寫著：把她的祕密藏起來，別讓仇人知道。

使女胡布布告訴他什麼辦法行不通。她的女主人，她說，是一個規矩很嚴的人家的女兒，從來沒有人在那所房子外面見過她，對錢和男人都用不著；他要是想要她，就得把她寫進詩裡。他寫了。她用詩回答，叫他走，卻把他留了一整夜，早晨叫他發誓不告訴任何人，也不和別的女人來往，她自己也發了同樣的誓，然後叫胡布布跟他回家，看他有些什麼。「要是他是個有身分的人，我們就收下他，」她說，「要是沒有，就讓他走。」他是個有身分的人。她跟他下棋。書裡這一局下了三天，每一盤她都贏：一盤十第納爾，然後一百，然後是他的鋪子，然後是他的女奴、房子和園子，一直到請來了一位法官，法官看了她的手指，就丟了魂，寫下契約，把馬斯魯爾在世上的一切都歸給了她。然後她向他要他買不起的東西，他空著手出了門，胡布布跟在後面看他有多少信用，他在路上轉過身，對她說了實話。她哭著回去。扎因・馬瓦西夫給他寫了一張字條：她拿走的一切都會回到他手裡，天黑時他可以來。他來了，她把鋪子、房子、契約都給了他。書在他身上花了一首詩，在她身上花了一首詩，還有一首寫她身體的詩，我略去。

「全部嗎？」國王說。「全部，主上。」「這是唯一試得出來的辦法，」奶媽說。「試出什麼？」蘇麥雅說。「什麼都沒有了，他們還留不留下。」「這很貴，」沙・贊曼說。「他留下了，」國王說。「他沒有別的地方可去，」我父親說，用的是他念數字的那種聲音。第八百五十夜，北方的雨已經晚了一百二十天，他把它寫在手掌上，手掌上現在已經有那麼多東西，他只能寫在它們上面。那天早晨宮裡的泥瓦匠點起了銅匠街的第四座爐子；哈米德要第五座，要四個幫手；北門已經有一千六百人了，領麵包的隊伍從門裡排出來，沿著城牆繞了半圈。「他要什麼就給他什麼，」國王說。蘇麥雅念過名字的那三個人裡的第二個，我父親的堂兄弟，用自己的車把麥子運到廚房，親手把袋子扛進去，在爐子旁站了半個早晨，不肯收一張收據。哈米德派那個送麵包的男孩上宮裡來說了這件事，沒有別的話。我父親聽了，手掌上沒有地方可以寫。

丈夫回家了。他的妻子用藏紅花洗了臉，使自己看起來有病，對他說她為了他不在而病了，求他以後不要再沒有同伴就出門；他說他會帶一個，就去開了鋪子，同一天早晨馬斯魯爾來坐在他旁邊，買了藥材和香料，又來，不到一個星期，丈夫就在問他願不願意做自己的合夥人。她大張旗鼓地不肯在陌生人面前露面，後來還是露面了，蒙著面紗，坐在馬斯魯爾對面，看著他，一直看到天黑。丈夫養了一隻模仿鳥，每次他坐下吃飯，牠總是飛到他的頭上；他出門久了，牠習慣了馬斯魯爾的膝蓋，現在不肯到主人那裡去。那天夜裡他的妻子在睡夢中說了一個名字，第二夜又說，第三夜還說；第四夜他醒著，聽見她說馬斯魯爾。他在飯桌上問那個人的名字，得到了答案，就出去請他的堂兄弟來為他們的結義作見證，又從後門回來，站在一扇對著那間屋子的窗口，看見他的妻子把一口酒含在嘴裡，餵給身邊的男人，又把玫瑰水從頭到腳澆在他身上。然後他繞到前門，敲了門。

「他敲了門，」沙・贊曼說。「他有鑰匙，」奶媽說。國王站起來，走到窗前，窗子對著院子和大片的天，他背對著我們說：「他敲門，是為了讓人告訴他事情沒有發生。」果然有人告訴他了：使女對她的女主人說主人在門口，女主人叫放他進來；使女對他說，他走了以後，這扇門日夜都沒有開過；他說：「我很高興。」「他並不高興，」奶媽說。「他說他高興，」國王說。沒有人問他怎麼知道的。他回到他的位置，我姐姐一直不動地等著，這時才接著講下去：丈夫把結義推到另一天，馬斯魯爾回家了。

這以後他賣掉了所有的東西，偽造了一封信，說親戚請他帶妻子去住十二天，又給她和她的使女做了一副轎子。她看出那是什麼。他在外面裝駱駝的時候，她走到屋子的三道門前，先從外面的門起，在每一道門上寫詩：第一道上寫給一隻鴿子，請牠捎去她的問候；第二道上寫給每一個路過的人，請他們記得她；第三道上寫給馬斯魯爾，直呼其名，叫他別忘了發過的誓。然後她讓人把她抬進轎子。馬斯魯爾發現屋子關了，門上有字，依次讀完，就倒在地上；醒過來以後他沿著他們走的路出了城，追上商隊的尾部，她就騎在那裡，他抓住轎子哭，她求他在天亮讓她丈夫看見以前回去。他又倒下去，醒來的時候商隊已經看不見了。講到馬斯魯爾追上商隊的地方，國王的拇指移到了邊上的邊上，找到一個字，停在那裡；那是第八個字：來。我看見了，把視線移開。

丈夫已經開始發現那些信，他拿走她的絲綢，給她粗毛布衣服，使女們也一樣，又叫人打了三副鐐銬；叫來上鐐的鐵匠看了看她，下不了手。他懇求給她最輕的一副，給使女們最重的；那天夜裡他回家，在路上大聲念了幾句詩，說那樣一條腿上的鐵鏈，被路上的一個法官聽見了，把他叫了去。法官打發他回去把她帶到公堂來，他就給掛鎖配了鑰匙，打開了門和鐐銬，給她們三個指了路。我想起夜簿第一頁上那隻有七把鎖的匣子，想起那個每次精靈睡著就從裡面出來的女孩；這個我沒有寫在任何一張紙上。

沙・贊曼在第八百二十六夜派往撒馬爾罕的兩個騎士，第八百五十六夜的早晨回來了，一匹馬瘸了，帶著布哈拉總督親筆的一封信，就是他叫他坐下來看自己記了四十天帳的那個人。沙・贊曼在夜簿室裡用手指點著行讀完了它。烏滸水邊的官倉裝滿了最近兩季的收成；山那邊沒有饑荒；總督算過了可以勻出多少，又算了一遍，說會送來：第一批商隊三百駝載，後面還有第二批，山口沒有雪是六十天，有雪是七十天。接著，換了另一種語氣，他添了一句：沙・贊曼為妻子關上的那間屋子，現在是帳房，帳簿都放在裡面。沙・贊曼讀到這裡停住，又讀下去。「六十天，」國王說。「寫進未了，」他對我父親說，「寫成『許諾』，不要寫成『正在來』。『正在來』，是你在路上看得見的。」我父親在手掌上寫，寫在雨的上面。「我還以為我白費了四十天，」沙・贊曼說。「沒有，」國王說，然後說：「把最後那段再讀一遍，」沙・贊曼本來打算跳過它，就讀了。

在法官的家裡，她告訴他，她不是任何人的妻子，是個外鄉人，和她一同戴鐐銬的那個男人，帶著她死去的父親的錢，把她從遠遠的家鄉帶了來；他看著她，問她願不願意嫁給他，她說願意。她去了第二位，說了同樣的話，又去第三位、第四位，他們誰也不知道還有別人。早晨，丈夫在一場喜宴上，她穿著最好的絲綢到公堂去，四個人都看著她：一個丟了筆，一個舌頭在嘴裡不動了，一個算錯了帳；他們派四名差役去拿丈夫，他被拖到他們面前，說：「她是我的妻子。」他們當時怎麼對他，以及後來在街上怎麼對他，我略去。他們沒有問他那錢是誰的，也沒有問他對她做了什麼；他們告訴他該說什麼，說她不是他的妻子，錢是她的，他說了，他們就把錢和文書給了她，把他送進了牢裡。「他們沒有問他，」蘇麥雅說。「一個問題也沒有，」我姐姐說。「那她呢？」國王說。「四次，主上。同一個問題。」「問她願不願意嫁給他們。」「是。」「而不是另一個，」國王說，沒有人問是哪一個。

那天夜裡她帶著使女在黑暗中出發，走了三天三夜。法官們第二天早晨坐在公堂上等，她沒有來。為首的那位騎上騾子去找，在街上遇到另外三位，各騎各的騾子，各自在找；他們互相說了自己在找什麼之後，誰也沒有說話。沙・贊曼先笑了，一聲又短又響的笑，然後是國王，一聲，從鼻子裡出來，奶媽說：「四個，」像個在數雞蛋的女人。為首的法官躺到床上，作了些詩，抽泣一聲，死了；第二位也一樣，詩是別的；第三位和第四位，書講得和第一位、第二位一樣，也沒有說誰覺得難過。「男人不會為了這個死，」奶媽說。「不會，」我姐姐說。「書裡的會。」這時她已經到了一座有四十個發誓遠離女人的男人住的房子，他們的頭領求她休息十天，一個個派那四十個人帶著他的口信去見她，每個人在門口就愛上了她，一個也沒有提他的名字；第九夜她對使女說，她對付不了四十個每個都想獨佔她的男人，她們就在最後的黑暗裡騎馬出去了。四十個人發現房間空了，每人念了一首詩，然後，因為追不上她，就做了一個她的像，立在他們當中。「一幅畫，」蘇麥雅說。「那不是她，」奶媽說。「沒有人請她坐下。」她離開這個故事裡的每一個地方，都是在最黑暗的時刻，在還稱不上早晨以前；我在第二張紙上注意到了，又畫掉了。

她回了家。她的妹妹娜西姆把留在她那裡的織物送了回來，扎因・馬瓦西夫掛起帷幕，燒了沉香，叫胡布布去找馬斯魯爾，他已經在她那條街上來回走了四十天。他們一起倒在門口，醒過來以後坐下來喝果子露，把一切從頭說了一遍。然後來了一位法官，寫了婚書，他們成了親；書在這裡對他們的信仰大做文章，我已經說過我怎麼處置那些。丈夫呢，已經被新來的法官們從牢裡放出來，離城還有三天路程。扎因・馬瓦西夫叫來胡布布。「在墓地裡挖一座墳，」她說，「在上面種羅勒和茉莉，澆水。要是他來問我，就說我二十天前為他憂傷而死；要是他要看墳，就帶他去，在他面前哭，把他放進去。」胡布布說，我聽從，我服從。他來了；人家告訴了他；他被帶到墳前，哭了，念了幾句詩，說的是有兩樣東西，眼睛該為它們流血淚，然後昏倒了。「他是活的，」我姐姐說，「胡布布把他放了進去，」關於這件事她沒有再說什麼，也沒有人請她說。「這一座不是空的，」奶媽說。國王什麼也沒說。我看我父親；他在看自己的手掌。「寫進未了，」國王終於說。「寫什麼？」拿著蘆筆的蘇麥雅說。「一座裡面有人的墳。」她寫了，把這一行讀回來，像她一向做的，他說它是直的。

第八百六十三夜的末尾，我姐姐開始了下一個故事：開羅的一個商人，和他的兒子，別的商人的兒子請他去一座花園，他說沒有父親的許可不能去，就去問。磚旁邊的那個男孩，會三個字，從來沒有把兩個連在一起，說了「爸」，然後數到三，說「再」，看著國王；國王說：「是。」接著說：「再來，」並且同他一起坐到地上。早晨，北方的雨已經晚了一百三十三天。北門有一千九百人，第五座爐子打好了地基。優素福，兩百一十三天大，坐在奶媽的毯子上，沒有她的手扶著，坐的時間是國王數到十一那麼久，然後向旁邊倒在他哥哥的鞋子上，一點也不生氣。

第八百六十三夜。山魯佐德與敦亞佐德。到。未了：一個開羅的商人，名叫泰吉丁，和他的兒子，他請求許可去一座花園，才剛開頭；一座裡面有人的墳；一個七十一歲的皮匠，死了，和八個因為話從牢裡放出來的人，他們去了沒有人看見的地方；一副擔架，和一股石灰味；北門的廚房，門外一千九百個人，四座爐子和第五座，和一個不肯把它叫國王的麵包的麵包師；一支來自撒馬爾罕的商隊，許諾了；一個叫馬爾西娜的女奴，說做了；皮匠巷的一扇窗板，關著、閂著；一個說了真話的太監，蘇麥雅的筆跡；北方的雨晚了一百三十三天；一個名叫優素福的兒子，兩百一十三天大，會坐了；一個穿會吱吱響的鞋的男孩，他說爸，說再；一個事後才被問的女人；一個沒有被問過的女人；一個樵夫，沒有被問過；一本名冊；一個恩典，還沒有求。

## 第49章 · 第八百六十四至八百八十夜：一朵玫瑰換一首詩，與一夜一條腰帶

阿里・努爾丁是開羅商人泰吉丁的兒子，別的商人的兒子請他去一座花園，他說沒有父親的許可不能去，就去問，父親說好，還給了他錢。「他問了，」蘇麥雅說，她剛剛為我們念完了未了，連那座墳也念了，用的是她念清單的那種聲音。「是，」國王說。「而且給了他。」那是一座花園，書能想到的果子都有，每一種兩個品種，每一種配一首詩，我只給你石榴，其餘的略去；還有一個園丁，只拿玫瑰換詩，十朵玫瑰，十個年輕人，十首詩，他們作的時候阿里・努爾丁看著。然後是酒。他說他從沒喝過，也不會喝。園丁說真主是寬恕的；一個年輕人以休妻發誓說阿里一定會喝，另一個說這是為了他，第三個說這能醫好他的心，他說苦，他們就往杯子裡放了糖。他喝了十杯。他要求音樂，他們就找來一個抱琵琶的女孩，書對她做的事，我略去。

第八百六十六夜，銅匠街的第五座爐子點起了火，到第八百六十七夜，北門已有兩千人。哈米德，送麵包的男孩說，什麼也沒有要，我父親認為這意味著他很快會需要點什麼。夜簿室裡，優素福，兩百一十八天大，用肚子在地毯上向磚爬去，用手肘拉著，一次一巴掌寬，臉上是個正在渡河的人的表情；大男孩抓住他的腳踝把他拖回來，拖了四次，然後，因為這辦法不行，就躺下來，貼在他旁邊，讓他近近地看那塊磚。「讓他們去，」奶媽動身的時候，國王說。沒有人再動。

他在黑暗中騎馬回家。他的母親在門口迎著他，把臉貼近他的臉，聞到了酒味，他的父親，不喜歡喝酒的人，走到他床邊也聞到了，說：「你糊塗到這個地步了嗎？」阿里・努爾丁，醉著，舉起手，打了他父親的臉；書說打在哪裡，結果如何，我不說。他父親被人弄醒過來以後，以休妻發誓，這是一個人想要別人相信他時所發的誓，要把自己的妻子押上去，說早晨要砍掉他兒子的右手。「他拿她發誓，」奶媽說。「她就在屋裡。」「沒有人問過她，」蘇麥雅說。「而讓他逃出去的就是她，」我姐姐說。「天亮，」國王說。「早晨，主上。」「夜裡發的誓，」奶媽說，「多半到早晨就撤掉了。」「由誰？」「由發誓的人，要是他及時醒來的話。」「是，」國王說。母親等到父親睡熟、月亮升起，叫醒男孩，他此時已經清醒了，她告訴他他做了什麼，發了什麼誓。「走吧，」她說，給了他一個裝著一百第納爾的錢袋，叫他把落腳的地方捎個信回來。他出去的時候看見箱子邊上還有一個錢袋，大的，一千第納爾，書說她忘了。他拿了，把兩個都綁在腰上，天亮以前已經出了開羅。「她忘了，」國王說。「書是這麼說的。」「一個剛剛數出一百的女人，」奶媽說，「不會把一千放在同一口箱子邊上忘了。」「寫成忘了，」國王說。在第二張紙上我寫了忘了，底下，用奶媽的話，寫了「不」。

他坐船到羅塞塔，換小船到亞歷山大城，從蓮樹門走了進去，一位老人從藥材市場的鋪子裡下來，拉著他的手把他帶回家，給他吃的。多年以前，在開羅，老人說，他買貨少了一千第納爾，一個不認識他的商人替他稱出來，一張字據也沒要；那個商人就是這孩子的父親。阿里・努爾丁把那個大錢袋交給他保管，把那一百第納爾花在大街小巷上，吃東西、走路、看海，花完以後回到鋪子去取一點自己的錢，老人不在，他就坐在鋪子裡等。

市場上來了一個波斯人，騎在騾子上，後面坐著一個女孩，他把她交給掮客去叫賣；掮客把她安在烏木凳上，掀起面紗，叫價一直叫到九百五十。波斯人問她是不是同意。他在路上病了，他說，她照顧他，他發過誓，不把她賣給任何她不認可的人；她的出售，在她自己手裡。掮客就去問她，她說：「把人指給我看。」「他問了她，」蘇麥雅說。「事前，」奶媽說。「是，」國王說。「事前。」她看了六個。每一個她都用一首關於他的詩打發回去，掮客在每個鋪子前都挨了打，染過的鬍子和長鬍子我給你，其餘的略去，因為其餘的都是講那些男人身體的毛病，而我不喜歡拿那個來笑。國王笑了一次，為那鬍子，就停了。「把這個寫下來，」他說。「寫進未了？」蘇麥雅說。「不。它不是開的。」所以在第二張紙上，在書所做的而我改了的那些事當中，我寫了：一個女孩，她的出售放在她自己手裡。然後她的目光落在一個穿條紋外衣的年輕人身上，他坐在商人們當中的一張鋪子長凳上，她從手指上摘下一枚紅寶石戒指，交給掮客，說：「帶我到他那裡去。」

她問阿里・努爾丁為什麼不出價，他說，要是在他自己的國家，他會用他的全部家產把她買下來；她說，要是他肯在價錢上添一個第納爾，她心裡就好受些，即使他不買，這樣商人們可以說，他是開羅人，懂得女奴。他說一千，她說：「我以一千第納爾把自己賣給這位年輕人，」法官被叫來，文書寫好，他還沒有明白，事情就已經辦完了。他從藥材商保管的錢裡付了那一千，把她帶到老人借給他的那間簡陋的屋子，她看了看四周打補丁的地毯，說這就夠到你回家了。他沒有別的錢；他向藥材商借了五十迪拉姆，藥材商說可以借他到十次，之後就不再回他的問候，她叫他去買二十迪拉姆的五色絲，剩下的買麵包、肉、酒和花。她做了飯，他們吃了；書給那一夜的那些，我留給那一夜。他睡著以後，她取出一對編織針，編了一條腰帶。

早晨她把它交給他，叫他拿到波斯市場去賣二十第納爾，他說不可能，二十迪拉姆的絲，一夜做成的一條腰帶；它賣了二十第納爾，付現錢。他還給藥材商五十，買了絲，她又編了一條。她每夜編一條腰帶，他每天早晨賣掉，他們就這樣過了一年半。「五百條，」奶媽說。我在第二張紙上記的是五百四十條。「她一條也沒有留下，」國王說。「他每天早晨賣掉一條，主上。她把錢放在一隻盒子裡，以備需要。」「錢，」國王說。「而腰帶走了。」「走了，」我姐姐說。「我想，編好以後她再也沒有見過任何一條。」他把拇指放在夜簿上那一夜的那一道直線旁邊，又拿開。一年到頭，她用六色絲編了一條披巾，另外又花了一個星期的夜，他把它披在肩上走進市場，人們停下來看，因為世上沒有第二條，他把它當作一件只會帶給他好運的東西。

有一夜他醒來，她在哭。她說分離近了，並告訴他怎樣認出將帶來分離的那個人：一個獨眼、瘸腿的老人。「不要跟他說話，不要向他買也不要賣給他，不要回他的問候，即使律法說你必須，」她說。他說要是他看見他，他會殺了他。「不，」她說。「連這個也不要。什麼也不要做。」「什麼也不要做，」國王說，像一個人念出他以前沒有遇到過的一行字。「她說得好像那是他能做的事，主上，」我姐姐說。「他做不到，」奶媽說。他做不到。第二天早晨他在市場的一條鋪子長凳上睡著了，手裡攥著披巾的一角，那個獨眼瘸腿的老人帶著另外七個人坐到他旁邊，把另一角拿在手裡，翻過來看。「她該把它編壞一點，」沙・贊曼說。「她做不到，」我姐姐說。國王又把拇指放在夜簿的那一道直線上，這一次沒有拿開。

阿里・努爾丁醒來，認出了他，叫起來。老人問披巾是誰編的；阿里・努爾丁說是他母親。他出價五百，六百，九百，一千；阿里說不，因為世上只有這一條；周圍的商人說它的價錢頂多一百，九百是利潤，叫他賣，他在他們面前覺得不好意思，就賣了。老人當著他們的面付了一千，然後說他和商人們今天夜裡必須做他的客人，他有陳酒和一隻肥羊；阿里想回家去，他們以休妻發誓，又硬把他拉住。席上他們給他的杯子斟滿，老人用閒談的聲音問他，願不願意把一年半以前花一千第納爾買的那個女孩賣掉，賣五千，賣一萬；阿里，醉了，當著大家說：「我把她賣給你，一萬，」老人就派人去叫法官和證人。早晨他點出一萬，阿里・努爾丁說：「我什麼也沒有賣給你，我沒有女奴。」商人們說，你賣了，我們是證人；你買她花了一千，有了一年半的她，賣了一萬，難道你還氣惱嗎？拿錢吧。他就拿了。

「他們逼他，」奶媽說。「他們以休妻對他發誓，又硬把他拉住，又灌他酒。」「從前有一位法官，」國王說，「說過被迫的離婚，沒有任何學派認可。」「我記得他，」我父親說。「買賣呢？」「各派不同，主上。而寫這一份的法官，沒有人問過他。」「也沒有人問過阿里・努爾丁，」國王說。「書沒有說有人問過，」我姐姐說。「它是有記錄的，主上，」我父親在他的角落裡說，我看見國王看著他，又移開目光。他沒有像他對別的事說的那樣說，寫進未了。我自己寫了進去。

那一整夜瑪麗安都坐著等，藥材商的妻子陪她坐了一夜，說他一定是和開羅來的朋友在一起；早晨她看見他走進街來，跟在獨眼老人後面，在商人們當中，她開始發抖，像風暴裡的一條船。「我告訴過你，」她說。他哭了；她吻他的兩眼之間。老人進來要吻她的手，她打了他一個耳光，說：「你追著我，追著我。」他笑了，以一個我略去的名字發誓說，要是這孩子愛她，就不會把她賣掉。然後書說了她是誰。她是海那邊一位國王的女兒；她病過，發願說要是活下來就去一座島上的教堂朝拜；去的路上對方的船捕了她和她所有的女伴，在凱魯萬賣掉；她被賣給一個波斯商人，那人不能做任何女人的丈夫，讓她伺候他。他病了，她照顧了他兩個月；他好了以後對她說：「求一個恩典。」她說：「只把我賣給我選擇的人。」他教了她他所信的，她學會了，這一點，我也留在我一直留著這類事的地方。「他發了誓，」我姐姐說，「並把她的出售放在她自己手裡。」我沒有看國王，他也沒有看我，奶媽咬斷了她的線。

老人有一艘船，有一頭騾子和給她的絲華蓋，她從海門被抬了出去，劃到船上，站著望亞歷山大城，直到它沉入海裡；書為這給了她一首長詩，我給你第一句。阿里・努爾丁回到屋裡，找到她的繃架和她穿過的衣服，把它們貼在身上，鎖上門，跑到岸邊，望著那艘船曾在的地方，喊她的名字。一位老人從停在那裡的一條船上下來，問他是不是在為昨天跟著海那邊來的人走的那個女孩哭；阿里倒了下去。那位老人是一艘開往她那座城市的船的船長，船上有一百個商人。「耐心些，」他說。「三天，我帶你去見她，要是真主願意。」

第八百八十夜，北方的雨已經晚了一百五十天，北門有兩千三百人，哈米德要了第六座爐子。我父親把手掌舉起來給國王看它已經滿了。「用另一隻手，」國王說。他把另一隻手翻過來，在手背上寫，看了那個數字很久，把兩隻手都藏進了袖子裡。

第八百八十夜。山魯佐德與敦亞佐德。到。未了：一個年輕人，在亞歷山大城的碼頭上，賣掉了他不想賣的，和一艘三天後開的船，才剛開頭；一個父親在夜裡發的誓，要在早晨砍掉一隻手；一個錢袋，忘了；一樁被迫的買賣，和寫它的那位法官；一座裡面有人的墳；一個七十一歲的皮匠，死了，和八個因為話從牢裡放出來的人，他們去了沒有人看見的地方；一副擔架，和一股石灰味；北門的廚房，門外兩千三百個人，五座爐子和第六座，和一個不肯把它叫國王的麵包的麵包師；一支來自撒馬爾罕的商隊，許諾了；一個叫馬爾西娜的女奴，說做了；皮匠巷的一扇窗板，關著、閂著；一個說了真話的太監，蘇麥雅的筆跡；北方的雨晚了一百五十天；一個名叫優素福的兒子，兩百三十天大，會爬了；一個穿會吱吱響的鞋的男孩，他說爸，說再；一個事後才被問的女人；一個沒有被問過的女人；一個樵夫，沒有被問過；一本名冊；一個恩典，還沒有求。

## 第50章 · 第八百八十一至八百九十四夜：一百顆頭，與總是去拿東西的人

船長的船，載著一百個商人和阿里・努爾丁，航行了五十一天，在海那邊那座城市的海岸外被國王的巡邏船捉住了；自從他女兒回來，那些船就在那片海面上搜索，凡是從我們這一邊來的船都捉。他們被押到國王面前，關進地窖；一天後大帆船載著瑪麗安進了港，國王騎馬下去，把她抱在懷裡，她的母親私下問她，是不是還和從前一樣。她說不是：她被從一個商人賣到另一個商人，有一個打她、強迫她，下一個也是。我不說這是不是真的；書沒有說。「她還能說什麼？」蘇麥雅說。「沒有別的，」奶媽說。「而他們要了一百個。」王后告訴國王，國王告訴他的大臣們，大臣們說，除了一百個從我們這一邊來的男人的頭，沒有什麼能讓她再乾淨。「多少？」國王說。「一百，主上。」「為了她說的話。」「為了他們以為她的意思，」我姐姐說。他們派人去提囚犯。做了什麼我略去，而書沒有略去一個頭：它順著那張血氈一個一個地數下去，從船長開始，我姐姐一口氣講完，就停住了，奶媽放下了她的針線。

還剩一個。阿里・努爾丁已經被蒙上眼睛，跪在氈子邊上，這時一位老婦人，一座教堂的看守人，走到國王面前，提醒他說，要是他的女兒能回來，他曾許願給每座教堂五個俘虜；國王只剩一個人，說，帶走他。她領他到教堂，給他一件黑袍，叫他掃地。第七天她告訴他穿上自己的衣服，帶上十個迪拉姆出去，因為國王的女兒今天要帶四百個女伴來教堂，她們要是發現他，會把他剁碎。他整天在城裡走，認識了城門，傍晚回來；公主來了，他看見她，當著四百個人喊出她的名字。女伴們提著劍衝向他。「放開他，」瑪麗安說。「他瘋了。」他就翻白眼，嘴裡冒沫，扭曲雙腿，我想這是書裡他第一件做得好的事。「他醉過，」沙・贊曼說。「他知道是怎麼回事。」那天夜裡她說要單獨留下來，在小禮拜堂祈禱，女伴們睡了，她走到他坐著的地方，他像坐在燃著的炭上，她告訴他：明天，夜的第一個三分之一過了以後，到奉獻箱那裡拿輕的值錢的，開通往地道的門，下到海邊；有一條小船，十個人；船長伸出手的時候，把你的手給他；不要睡。

船長是個高個子的老人，留著長鬍子，一個水手說國王打算明早親自坐這條船去保護他女兒，他就把那人打倒了，其餘的也這樣，一共十個；然後叫阿里・努爾丁拔掉繫纜樁；阿里拔了，站著發抖，也沒有人告訴他為什麼。那十個我略去。天亮的時候船長抓住自己的長鬍子，它掉在了他的手裡。「是她，」我姐姐說。「她用一個我略去的辦法得到了船長的位子和他的鬍子，貼在自己臉上。」國王笑了。「又一副鬍子，」沙・贊曼說。「這是一本鬍子的書，」奶媽說。他們乘著順風，用書慣用的一句話的篇幅就到了亞歷山大城，阿里・努爾丁把船繫在碼頭上，把她留在船裡，上城去向藥材商的妻子借面紗、斗篷和走路的靴子。

「他把她留在船上，」奶媽說。「一條街的時間，」我姐姐說。「他去拿面紗。」「他總是去拿什麼，」蘇麥雅說。就在借一條面紗的工夫，國王早晨發現女兒不見了，岸上有十具屍體，後門開著，船不見了，已經派港務官去追，追不回就要受極刑；港務官問教堂那位老婦人囚犯是哪裡人，她說亞歷山大城。他們到的時候正是阿里上岸的那一刻，接走了船上唯一的一個人，沒有拔一把劍就回了家。國王見女兒被帶回來，說：「你說謊，娼婦」；她說她是被強盜擄走的，並且說服了那些強盜。他下令把她釘死在王宮的大門上。說到這裡，國王從奶媽的膝上把優素福抱了過去，這個時辰他是不這樣做的，把他抱在肩上，一直到那位獨眼的大臣進來，他早就想要她，求把她賜給他做妻子：他會給她蓋一座牆壁沒有賊能爬上去的宮殿，蓋完以後，要在門前割斷三十個從我們這一邊來的男人的喉嚨。於是他們把她嫁給了他。

阿里・努爾丁拿著面紗、斗篷和靴子回來，船已經沒有了。岸上的人告訴他，並且責備他，一個說，你為什麼不讓她不戴斗篷就上來？每個人都說了一句難聽的話，一個說，讓他去吧，他已經夠受的了。藥材商發現他昏倒在地，說，讚美真主，你什麼也沒有損失；你靠她賺了。「他有九千第納爾，」沙・贊曼說。「他不要，」我姐姐說。他搭上第一艘去她國家的船，被同樣的巡邏船捉住，同一百個人一起，押到同一個國王面前，那一百個人被一個一個殺了，只把他留到最後，因為他年輕、身材單薄。做了什麼，我又略去；奶媽沒有放下她的針線，因為她已經放下過一次。國王認出了他，說：「你是努爾丁。」「我的名字叫易卜拉欣，」他說。他們派人去叫那位老婦人來認，這時候那位獨眼的大臣來見國王，說他的宮殿蓋好了，他需要那三十個人，國王說他只有這一個，帶走吧；畫匠們說他們還有兩天的活，他就被戴著鐐銬關進了馬廄，等著。

有兩匹公馬，是兄弟，海島上的國王們肯拿一座島來換的，一匹白得像銀，一匹黑得像夜；其中一匹眼睛上有一層膜。國王把它給了大臣去醫，它被牽進馬廄，阿里・努爾丁就是戴著鐐銬躺在那裡，另一匹為牠叫，叫得整個房子在晃；大臣告訴了國王，國王說：「這個不過是畜生，尚且不能忍受與兄弟分離，那有理性的人又該怎樣呢？」就把另一匹也送了過去。「我有一個哥哥，」沙・贊曼對奶媽說。「我們知道，」奶媽說。國王什麼也沒說。他在看大男孩，大男孩又抓著小的那個的腳踝，要把他從磚那裡拖回來。阿里・努爾丁懂一點馬。他想：我就說我能醫，把牠的眼睛弄壞，他們就會殺了我，我就解脫了。於是他拿來磨細的玻璃、石灰和洋蔥汁，敷在馬的眼睛上包起來；早晨膜不見了，眼睛比從前更好。大臣親手給他除下鐐銬，讓他做了馬官。

大臣的新宮殿有一扇格子窗，朝著馬院，他的女兒坐在窗邊，聽見馬官夜裡唱歌，告訴了公主，大臣娶了她，卻沒有碰她，因為他發過誓，宮殿蓋好以前不碰。公主走到格窗前向下看；而他，一個月來除了一匹馬什麼也沒看見，抬頭說：「那是瑪麗安夫人的聲音。」她用一塊手帕包著一封信扔了下來：夜的第一個三分之一過了以後，備好兩匹公馬，牽到城門；要是有人問，就說是遛馬；不要睡。那天傍晚她給大臣斟酒，酒裡放了一粒藥丸，書說，大象聞了也會睡一年；他臉朝下倒在地毯上。她往兩隻馬袋裡裝了輕的值錢的東西，穿上盔甲，走向城門。阿里・努爾丁在城門口，手裡握著韁繩，睡著了。

「又來了，」奶媽說。「他等了整個第一個三分之一，」蘇麥雅說。「他睡了，」國王說。一個多年來被海島上的國王們出錢要偷那兩匹公馬的人，那天夜裡經過，看見馬被解開，馬官睡著，拳頭裡還握著韁繩，就從他手裡拿走了；而瑪麗安，帶著馬袋在黑暗中走近，把那賊當作阿里，把馬袋遞給他，他把它們放到馬背上，他們默默地騎出了城門，直到她說：「你為什麼不說話？」他回答，聲音不是阿里的。書用六行字，按他的膚色來描寫他，我把那六行略去。她一擊殺了他，又騎回去，發現阿里在她留下他的地方睡得正打鼾，一巴掌把他打醒。「我不是叫你別睡嗎？」「你的許諾，讓我的心涼了，」他說。他們就騎馬出了城。

早晨，國王帶著禮物去向新婚的夫婦道早安，發現大臣被藥迷倒在地毯上；弄醒以後，他說什麼也不知道，國王拔出劍，就在他坐的地方殺了他。然後他叫來三個兒子，帶著所有的騎士上馬，順著蹄印追，在一個綠色的山谷裡找到那兩個人，他們停下來吃東西。「你的心對打仗怎麼樣？」她問阿里。「像麩皮裡插的一根樁子那樣穩，」他說，又念了幾句關於老鼠的詩，沙・贊曼笑了。她叫他待在她後面，她來保他不受傷害；她的三個哥哥一個接一個衝出來迎戰她，國王叫他們每人先勸她回到舊的信仰，她若不肯，就殺了她；她把他們每一個都殺了，最年長的先。國王把手蓋在大男孩的耳朵上；沒有人叫他這樣做；她說到第三個的時候，他把手拿開了。騎士們逃了。國王回了他的城，給哈里發寫了信。

他給哈倫・拉希德寫信說他的女兒被我們這一邊的一個俘虜偷走了，要求把她要回來，並許諾為此送上一座大城市的一半。哈里發寫信給每一位總督。阿里・努爾丁和瑪麗安，什麼也不知道，騎進了大馬士革，總督的人已經在那裡等著，把他們送到了巴格達。哈里發看了看她，又看了看他。他問了阿里的經過，說：「人所受的苦楚何其多！」然後問她怎麼說，她說了她所信的，說了很久，我略去。「你願不願意，」哈里發說，「這個年輕人做你的丈夫？」「我怎麼會不願意，」她說，「他用錢買了我，又好好待我，又多次為我冒生命的危險？」「他問了她，」蘇麥雅說。「這是第三次，」我姐姐說。「波斯人，掮客，哈里發。」「寫在另一張紙上，」國王說。於是哈里發為他們證婚。然後國王的使者，他是來巴格達要她的，說要是不把她交還，他的主人會水陸並進派一支軍隊來；哈里發下令砍他的頭；瑪麗安說，不要弄髒您的劍，親手做了。哈里發佩服她的臂力，賜給他們袍子和一座房子。

過了些日子，阿里・努爾丁想念母親和父親，哈里發准他離開，還寫了信給開羅的總督們，他們就回了家，他的父母迎接他和瑪麗安，並尊敬她；他們住在那座房子裡，總督和商人們的禮物不斷地送來，吃喝，直到毀滅歡樂者來臨。書沒有提到手。它也沒有提到眼睛；我略去那隻眼睛，書在這個故事的早先提過一次，以後再也沒有。「那個誓，」國王說。「以休妻發的，」我父親在他的角落裡說，屋子裡的人都轉向他，因為在這個故事裡他還沒有開過口。「依律法，主上，一個人這樣發誓要做一件事而沒有做，就是休了她；他所說的時間一過，她就被休了。要是他發誓早晨砍掉那隻手，早晨過去，那隻手還是完整的，那麼到了早晨，他的妻子就被他自己的誓休掉了。」「他能把她要回來嗎？」奶媽說。「在等待期內，主上，可以。」「如果他問她，」蘇麥雅說。「如果他問她，」我父親說。「書沒有說他問過。」「她叫醒了那個男孩，」國王說。「她知道那個誓。她知道它會做什麼。」「是，主上，」我父親說。國王把拇指放在第七個字上：手。「寫進未了。」「寫什麼？」拿著蘆筆的蘇麥雅說。「一個女人，為了保住一隻手而放棄了她的婚姻，」國王說，「以及她有沒有被問回來。」我寫了，把前面關於父親的誓的那一行劃掉了，那是同一行，從另一邊看。

在我略去的那部分故事底下，我在第二張紙上記了一個數，像在辛巴德時一樣，記的是死了的人；總共兩百一十五個。我沒有念出來。第八百九十四夜，北方的雨已經晚了一百六十四天，北門有兩千六百人，哈米德的第六座爐子點起了火；優素福，兩百四十四天大，雙手抓住那塊磚，把自己拉了起來，站著，國王說「爸」的時間那麼久，那不是該他說的字，然後他重重地坐下。大男孩拍手。這一夜的末尾，我姐姐開始了開羅的總管過去常講的一個故事：上埃及一個老人，被人問起他孩子的母親是從哪裡來的。

第八百九十四夜。山魯佐德與敦亞佐德。到。未了：一個上埃及的老人，被人問起他孩子的母親是從哪裡來的，才剛開頭；一個女人，為了保住一隻手而放棄了她的婚姻，以及她有沒有被問回來；一個錢袋，忘了；一樁被迫的買賣，和寫它的那位法官；一座裡面有人的墳；一個七十一歲的皮匠，死了，和八個因為話從牢裡放出來的人，他們去了沒有人看見的地方；一副擔架，和一股石灰味；北門的廚房，門外兩千六百個人，六座爐子，和一個不肯把它叫國王的麵包的麵包師；一支來自撒馬爾罕的商隊，許諾了；一個叫馬爾西娜的女奴，說做了；皮匠巷的一扇窗板，關著、閂著；一個說了真話的太監，蘇麥雅的筆跡；北方的雨晚了一百六十四天；一個名叫優素福的兒子，兩百四十四天大，會站了；一個穿會吱吱響的鞋的男孩，他說爸，說再；一個事後才被問的女人；一個沒有被問過的女人；一個樵夫，沒有被問過；一本名冊；一個恩典，還沒有求。

## 第51章 · 第八百九十五至九百零一夜：還繫著的兩個錢袋，與第三個孩子

開羅的總管說，他有一夜住在上埃及一個人的家裡，那人很老，有幾個小孩子；他們問他孩子們的母親是從哪裡來的，老人說她是那場大戰的一個俘虜，說他同她有過一段奇遇。他種過亞麻，家鄉的價錢不好，人們叫他帶到阿卡去，那裡有買主。阿卡的市場上，一個女人來買亞麻，臉露著，那個地方的女人是這樣走路的，他在價錢上讓著她，她又來了，他讓得更多。她同一個老婦人一起走路，他對那老婦人說他害相思病；老婦人說可以辦到，只要除了他們三個沒有別人知道，只要他慷慨。他付了她五十第納爾。他把房子收拾好，房子對著海，他在屋頂上鋪了床，因為是夏天，女人來了，他們吃喝，天黑了。他們躺在天空下，月亮照著他們，看星星在水裡顫動；他對自己說他在海面前覺得羞愧。書給了他羞愧的對象另一個名字，我說是海，這也是書裡有的。他沒有碰她。她天一亮就起身，滿腔怒火地走了。

他走到他的鋪子裡坐著，不久她從門前走過，亮得像月亮，同那個老婦人一起，老婦人也在生氣；他想：你是誰，竟拒絕她，你是聖人嗎？於是他追上去對老婦人說，把她再帶來，老婦人說少於一百她不會再來；他付了，女人來了第二夜，他又恢復了自己，又克制了。第三次老婦人要五百，他決定把亞麻的全部價錢花掉；他還來不及花，傳令官已經走遍全城宣布，雙方之間的休戰期滿了，他們國家來的每個人有一星期的時間離開。於是他把能賣的賣了，去了大馬士革，滿心裝著一個他付了錢卻沒有得到的女人的愛，做了三年買賣女奴的生意，來排解它。然後戰爭來了，蘇丹贏了，收復了城池，向他要一個女孩，買了一個，欠他十第納爾，那天庫裡沒有錢，都花在戰爭上了；他們就說，帶他去俘虜那裡，讓他挑一個抵那十個。他走進去，在對方的女人當中，他看見了她。

「他付了三次，沒有，」蘇麥雅說。「要是算上那十個，是四次，」沙・贊曼說。「這商人不行，」奶媽說。「或者他很行，」蘇麥雅說。國王說：「他付錢，是為了被請再來。」沒有人問他是什麼意思。她是另一個男人的妻子，一個騎士的；他挑了她；他對她說：「你認得我嗎？」她說不認得；他告訴她他是誰，是阿卡的亞麻商人，她曾對他說除非五百第納爾他不能再見她；而現在她歸他，值十個。書讓她在這裡說了一句關於他的信仰的話，並把它當作她自己的，我略去。書說他做的是這樣：他不肯碰她，直到他讓她自由，請法官寫了婚書。然後她懷孕了。戰爭結束以後，一位使者從她的國王那裡來要回俘虜，全部都交還了，只有她沒有，使者問她在哪裡；她被帶到蘇丹和使者面前，說，你們從我的腰身就看得出來，她有身孕了，是他的，他們不會再從她身上得到任何好處。使者說，帶著你的妻子走吧。然後他追著那個男人，說她母親給她送來一個箱子，因為她的女兒是個俘虜，沒有衣服。他把它帶回家，她打開，找到她的衣服，衣服上面是那兩個錢袋，五十的和一百的，他當年為她付的，還是用他自己的打結繫著。

「她留著它們，」奶媽說。「繫著，」國王說。「三年，」沙・贊曼說。「書說，原封未動，主上，」我姐姐說。「一個錢袋走這麼遠的路，真不容易。」「它回家了，」國王說。他沒有再問，我們就繼續。

下一個故事很短，講的是巴格達一個破落的人和他的女奴。他是個有身分的人，把一切都花在他愛的、也愛他的一個女孩身上，直到一無所有。他不知道怎麼辦；女孩知道。「把我賣了，」她說。「一個有錢的人會買我，我會想辦法回到你身邊。」他把她帶到市場，一位巴士拉的紳士用一千五百第納爾買了她；他拿到錢，年輕人後悔了，哭，要求取消，買主不肯。他坐在一座清真寺裡，錢袋墊在頭下面，睡著了；醒來的時候，錢袋沒有了，他的腳被繩子綁著。他跳進了底格里斯河，人們把他拉了上來。一位老人把他帶回家，陪他坐著，直到他平靜一點，一個朋友給了他五十第納爾，叫他去瓦西特，他在那裡有親戚；河邊有一條船在裝貨，水手們不肯帶一位紳士，他就買了水手的衣服，和船員坐在一起。然後女孩帶著兩個女伴上了船，在她後面是買了她的那位巴士拉的紳士。

紳士在他自己的桌上餵她吃飯，問她打算多久不唱歌；年輕人，穿著水手的衣服坐在船頭，知道她為了他受著什麼苦。他們沿著船舷掛了一道幔子，紳士同朋友們坐在幔子前面，酒送來了，他們催她唱。她調好琵琶，唱了兩句關於一個空了的營地，哭了，把它扔下；他倒下去昏了過去，他們以為他著了魔，一個僕人說，你們為什麼把這個瘋子帶上船？水手們說到下一個村子就把他放下岸。那天傍晚，別人都在岸上的時候，他走到幔子後面，拿起琵琶，用他教她的那種方式調了弦，除了他們兩個沒有別人會知道，然後回到他的位置。他們上船以後，月亮照在河上很亮，紳士說，別糟蹋我們的夜晚。她拿起琵琶，吸了一口氣，說：「憑真主，我的主人和老師就在這條船上。」紳士說他很樂意聽他說話。水手們說他們沒有載別的人。年輕人笑了，說：「是的，我是她的主人，是我教她的，那時我是她的主人，」她在幔子後面說：「那是我的主人的聲音。」

「她認得那把琵琶，」奶媽說。「她認得它是怎麼調弦的，」蘇麥雅說。「而她沒有說，」沙・贊曼說。「她說那是她的主人。那就是說了。」「書裡是琵琶，」我姐姐說。巴士拉的紳士，沒有碰過她，甚至那天以前沒有聽過她唱歌，聽了這故事同大家一起哭了；他說他買她只是為了在巴格達聽歌，他不知道；他到了巴士拉就讓她自由，把她嫁給他，給他們錢，只有一個條件：他想聽音樂的時候，要掛一道幔子，她在幔子後面唱，年輕人也做他的陪伴。於是他們一路喝酒唱歌，在一個靠岸的地方大家都下了船，年輕人醉了，蹲下去，睡著了；船就開走了，因為他們也醉了，沒有人想起他。他在太陽下醒來，一個人也沒有。他把錢給了女孩，也忘了問紳士的名字和他住在哪裡。

第八百九十八夜，在床腳，我姐姐手裡拿著沙漏，在開始以前說：「會有第三個。」沒有人說過這件事。我從八百七十幾夜的冷天起就知道了，奶媽知道得更早；我沒有把它寫進夜簿，因為夜簿是為說出來的東西留的。國王，我想，是像他知道麵包的數目那樣知道的。他在地上同大男孩在一起，他沒有抬頭。「什麼時候？」「奶媽說大約在第九百九十夜。」「那是一個數字，」國王說。「我在數，」我姐姐說。他這時才抬頭。「再來，」他說。「會有第三個。」「再來。」「會有第三個。」他把優素福，他正雙手扶著磚站著，從腋下抱起來，舉在燈前，像舉起一隻杯子看它是不是滿的。然後他說：「寫進未了。」「它還沒有開啟，主上，」蘇麥雅說。「它是，在它到來以前，」我姐姐說。我寫下：第三個孩子，還沒有。

年輕人搭船到了巴士拉，那裡誰也不認識，也不知道紳士的家。他在一個需要書記的雜貨商人旁邊坐下，把他的帳寫得那樣好，一個月內雜貨商人的收入多了，開支少了，一年後雜貨商人把女兒和鋪子的合夥都給了他。他在雜貨商人家裡住了兩年，心是碎的，不肯喝酒，有一天，歌手和舞者出城到河岸上去吃東西的那一天，他同他們去了，因為他想他也許能看到她；老船上的船夫沿著河岸走著，認出了他，把他接上了船。「我們以為你掉進河裡了，」他們說。他們告訴他：她知道他丟了以後，撕了衣服，燒了琵琶，到了巴士拉她穿上黑衣，在房子旁邊給自己做了一座墳，待在裡面，說她再也不唱歌了。他們帶他去見她。她叫了一聲，他以為她死了，他抱住她；紳士讓她自由，把她嫁給了他，每月給五百第納爾，照老規矩。年輕人去找雜貨商人，告訴他發生的一切，求他原諒自己休了他的女兒，那不是她的過錯；付了她的聘金。「好了，」他最後說，「寬大的真主給了我們好運的賞賜。」

「她給自己做了一座墳，」蘇麥雅說。「一座裡面有人的墳。」「她選的，」國王說。「我要劃掉另一條嗎？」我說。「不，」國王說。「那是另一座墳。她在那一座裡等。」「兩年，」奶媽說。「而他在雜貨商人家裡，」沙・贊曼說。「雜貨商人的女兒呢？」國王說。「他求她的父親，要他原諒他沒有過錯，」我姐姐說。「並且付了她的聘金。」「他問了她的父親。」「是，主上。」「沒有問她。」「書說他告訴了雜貨商人，主上。」「告訴，」國王說。「把她寫進未了。」我寫了：一個雜貨商人的女兒，被休了，付了錢，沒有被問過。

我姐姐在第八百九十九夜接近天亮時開始了下一個故事：在印度地方有一位強大的國王，賈里亞德，他的下面有七十二位國王，城裡有三百五十位法官，他的首相希馬斯才二十二歲；他沒有孩子。印度的國王夢見他往一棵樹的根上澆水，周圍有許多樹，火從樹裡冒出來，把周圍長著的一切都燒光了。他驚醒，叫來希馬斯，希馬斯低下頭，笑了，說這預示著一個兒子。但還有別的，他說，他不想在這個時辰解釋。國王又叫來國內的解夢人；其中一個說希馬斯知道全部，只是不想打擾他主人的休息；說兒子不會像他父親那樣統治，會壓迫，並且他會遭遇老鼠與貓所遭遇的。我姐姐就講了老鼠與貓：一隻貓，在一個下雨的夜晚，冷得沒有力氣，來到老鼠窩的門口，求牠讓她進去，她是個陌生人，可憐；老鼠說，你是我天生的仇敵，貓以真主發誓她不會傷害牠，她沒有力氣；牠心軟了，把她拖了進去，她在窩裡躺著，直到恢復了，然後爬到了窩的門口，老鼠像往常一樣想出去的時候，她抓住了牠。牠喊道：「你發的誓在哪裡？」這時一個獵人帶著獵犬經過，一條狗把頭伸進窩裡，咬住了她的脖子。

「牠讓她進去了，」蘇麥雅說。「牠做得對，」國王說。「牠差點死在這上面，」奶媽說。「牠做得對，也差點死了，」國王說。「事情就是這樣的。」「狗來了，」沙・贊曼說。「狗來了，」我姐姐說。「書說，有憐憫的人終會被憐憫。」「是這樣說的嗎？」國王說。「是這樣說的，」我姐姐說。第九百零一夜，北方的雨已經晚了一百七十一天，我父親手背上寫滿了，開始寫在手腕上；下城最後一袋麥子在第八百九十九夜賣掉了，國王的磨坊在吃它自己的存貨，哈米德要了第七座爐子。北門有兩千八百人。優素福，兩百五十一天大，用一隻手放開磚，向旁邊跨了一步，大男孩說「優」，國王什麼也沒說，也沒有動，像一個人在鳥落到身邊時不動那樣。

第九百零一夜。山魯佐德與敦亞佐德。到。未了：一位印度的國王，他夢見自己往一棵樹的根上澆水，和老鼠與貓，才剛開頭；第三個孩子，還沒有；一個雜貨商人的女兒，被休了，付了錢，沒有被問過；一個女人，為了保住一隻手而放棄了她的婚姻，以及她有沒有被問回來；一個錢袋，忘了；一樁被迫的買賣，和寫它的那位法官；一座裡面有人的墳；一個七十一歲的皮匠，死了，和八個因為話從牢裡放出來的人，他們去了沒有人看見的地方；一副擔架，和一股石灰味；北門的廚房，門外兩千八百個人，六座爐子和第七座，和下城最後一袋麥子；一支來自撒馬爾罕的商隊，許諾了；一個叫馬爾西娜的女奴，說做了；皮匠巷的一扇窗板，關著、閂著；一個說了真話的太監，蘇麥雅的筆跡；北方的雨晚了一百七十一天；一個名叫優素福的兒子，兩百五十一天大，跨了一步；一個穿會吱吱響的鞋的男孩，他說爸，說再，說優；一個事後才被問的女人；一個沒有被問過的女人；一個樵夫，沒有被問過；一本名冊；一個恩典，還沒有求。

## 第52章 · 第九百零二至九百一十七夜：奶油罐、最老的糧倉，與寫了字的門

夢過後幾個月，印度國王最愛的那個女人告訴他孩子動了，他派人叫來希馬斯，說：「我的夢應驗了，我得償所願。你說什麼？」希馬斯什麼也沒說。「你怎麼了，」國王說，「為什麼不和我一起高興？」希馬斯俯伏在地，說有三件事，在它們完成以前，有理智的人是不應當談論的：旅人，直到他回到家；在戰鬥中的人，直到他打敗了敵人；孕婦，直到她卸下了她的重擔。我姐姐在第九百零一夜講到這裡，看著那盞燈。「三件，」奶媽說。「三件，」我姐姐說。「不是我選的。它是下一個。」「我一直在數，」國王說。「一次，」蘇麥雅說。「大聲地，一次。」「一次也是數，」奶媽說。

因為在事情發生以前就說它的人，希馬斯說，就像那個帶著奶油罐的苦行僧。一個苦行僧，每天有一位富人給他三個餅和一點奶油和蜂蜜，他把奶油存在一隻罐子裡，掛在他的床上面。一天夜裡他拿著杖坐著，想：我要把奶油賣了買一隻母羊，母羊會生一隻公羊羔和一隻母羊羔，牠們會再生；我把公的賣了買母牛，買地，蓋宮殿，辦一場世上從未見過的婚禮。我會有一個兒子。我要教他哲學，叫他行善，他不會違抗我；要是我看見他不聽話，我就用這根杖打他。他說著，舉起杖，打在罐子上，奶油流進了他的鬍子。國王沉默了一會兒。他膝上坐著優素福。「他舉起了杖，」他說，「那時還沒有母羊。」「是，主上。」「這是他們最先計畫的事，」奶媽說。「杖。」「不總是，」我姐姐說。「常常是，」奶媽說。

第九百零三夜，希馬斯講了第二個故事，為了顯示真主會回應：一個池塘縮小，魚兒剩下的水幾乎不夠，牠們去找螃蟹，牠最年長，問該怎麼辦。螃蟹說你們缺乏理智，竟然對真主的慈悲絕望；每個造物的日糧在祂造出牠以前就定下了；讓每個人都清理自己的良心，祈求，耐心，要是死亡來了牠們就得到安息，要是有理由逃離，牠們就逃離。過了幾天下了一場大雨，池塘比從前更滿了。「因為下雨了，」國王說。「是，主上。」「也可能沒有。」「那樣牠們就死了，主上，」我姐姐說，「書就會再放一條魚。」「螃蟹說要有耐心。」「螃蟹沒有糧倉，」沙・贊曼說。沒有人指望國王會笑，他也沒有笑；他看著我父親，我父親的手腕上有那個數字，袖子裡有那些帳目。國王的磨坊，我父親說，只有十一天的麵粉了，廚房有九天；下城沒有麥子可賣；哈米德說只要有東西送來他什麼都能烤，但是不能用什麼也沒有來烤。「開最老的那座糧倉，」國王說。「一成。」「最老的是第六年的穀子，主上。是山上的。」「那就先吃它。」「您說過不要動它。」「我在第六百六十夜說的。現在是第九百零三夜。」「是，主上。」「哈米德說穀子是會存下去的東西，」奶媽說，「麵包是會壞的東西。」「那就把會存下去的送給他，」國王說，「讓他去做另一個。」

第一批車在第九百零五夜從山上下來，二十輛，每袋上都有封印；我父親在城門口點進來，哈米德點出去。第九百零六夜，一塊用第六年穀子做的麵包放在木板上送到宮裡。「它有山的味道，」奶媽說。「它有被存過的味道，」國王說，吃了它的一塊硬頭，把麵包皮給了優素福，他一直張著嘴等著，把它放進嘴裡，抬頭看著天花板，像一個人被告知了他一直在等的事。

接下來幾夜講完了七位大臣：一隻烏鴉和一條蛇；一隻羨慕另一隻豺狗的豺狗；一個剝了朝聖者長袍、在朝聖者於牢裡祈禱時連同他的城市一起被燒死的國王；一隻鷹；一個打開籃子的耍蛇人的妻子；一隻蜘蛛和風。我給你兩個。烏鴉們失去了牠們的王，無法對另一個達成一致，就決定誰飛得最高誰就稱王，牠們都飛起來，每一隻都以為自己最高，直到最低的那隻說，往上看，在牠們上面是一隻鷹。於是牠們讓鷹做了王。每天牠帶一群烏鴉到一個洞裡吃掉，其餘的去抱怨時，牠當著牠們的面撕碎了十個首領，說牠們才是兇手。「他們選了最高的，」沙・贊曼說。「事情就是這樣的。」「事情就是這樣的，」國王說。蜘蛛在一座高門上築了巢，過得很滿足，一陣風把牠吹到了海上，牠責備風；風說這個世界是試煉的房子，叫牠等著，風向變了的時候把牠送回家，牠認得自己的地方，緊緊抓住。「不是所有的都回得去，」奶媽說。「不，」我姐姐說。「書說牠回去了。」

第九百零八夜，孩子出生了，國王給他取名維爾德汗；他十二歲的時候，國王給他蓋了一座有三百六十間屋子的宮殿，派三位賢者住進去，吩咐他們每天在不同的屋子裡教他，並把在那間屋子教過的東西寫在門上。「寫在門上，」蘇麥雅說。「一扇寫了字的門，」沙・贊曼說，沒有看任何人。賢者們每七天報告一次。到十二歲半，男孩比他們誰都知道得多，國王等不及，叫希馬斯召集國內的學者，對這孩子進行考問。

希馬斯當著所有人問了他一百件事，關於這個世界和那個世界，身體和靈魂；我在第二張紙上記下，我姐姐問題講得很快，像一個人付錢出去，答案在書裡。親王的兩個比喻，我給你這兩個。一個瞎子和一個瘸子一起乞討，被放進一座花園，條件是不能糟蹋；瘸子想要夠不到的果子，瞎子看不見它；於是瘸子騎在瞎子背上給他指路到樹下，他們把花園摘光了；主人問他們做了什麼，他們說他們沒有辦法，他說我知道你，瞎子，揹了瘸子，他指的路。「瘸子知道果子在哪裡，」奶媽說，「瞎子有腿。」「而兩個都挨了打，」蘇麥雅說。「那是身體和靈魂，」我姐姐說。「書說瞎子是身體。」「這是一座花園，」國王說。沒有人知道他的意思，我在兩張紙上都沒有寫。

然後希馬斯問大臣欠他的國王什麼；親王說，好的建議，公開的和私下的，守住祕密，把他的主人有權知道的都告訴他，不要升到國王認為他不配的地位，像那個獵人，他同一頭獅子做了朋友，信任牠的溫馴，騎到牠身上要剝牠的皮，被撕成了碎片。「那要是國王是暴君呢？」希馬斯說。那麼大臣必須向他指出公義之路，警告他刑罰；要是國王肯聽，他的目的就達到了；要是不肯，沒有別的辦法，只有客氣地離開他，因為分手對雙方都是輕鬆。我父親在他的角落裡一動沒動。國王沒有看他。「這是書，」我父親過了一會兒對沒有人說。「是，」國王說。「我沒有離開，」我父親說。「沒有，」國王說。就這樣；我姐姐，她停住了，又講下去。

第九百一十二夜，優素福，兩百六十二天大，雙手放開磚，從那裡走向國王，六步，雙臂張開，什麼也沒扶，大男孩也什麼也沒扶，站著張著嘴看。國王沒有伸出手。他坐著，雙手稍稍離開地面，孩子走到的時候，他把一個拇指放在邊上的邊上第八個字，來，另一個放在第九個，優素福，什麼話也沒有說。大男孩說：「優。爸。」奶媽對貓說了句什麼。

親王十七歲時賈里亞德國王病了，叫他來，叫他遵守十條訓誡：發怒時要抑制怒氣；受苦時要耐心；說話要誠實；許諾要履行；斷案要公正；有權時要慈悲；寬厚地對待他的總督；寬恕他的敵人；對他的對手廣施恩惠；不要對他作惡。還有十條，給百姓的：分配時要公平；懲罰時不要壓迫；履行你的約定；聽從對你忠誠進言的人；有人冒犯你，不要理會；不要爭執；申明律法；用利劍消除愚昧；不要看重背叛；平等地待人，讓大人小孩都愛你，惡人懼怕你。蘇麥雅用手指數。「二十，」她說。「我守了哪些？」國王說。這不是一個問屋裡人的問題，屋裡人回答了。「有權時要慈悲，」奶媽說。「不是全部。」「不是，」國王說。「懲罰時不要壓迫，」我姐姐說，沒有人說話。「寬恕你的敵人。」「那八個，」蘇麥雅說。「聽從對你忠誠進言的人，」沙・贊曼說，看著我父親。「用利劍消除愚昧，」蘇麥雅說。「我會跳過那一條，」奶媽說。「跳過，」國王說。「履行你許諾的，」我姐姐說。我沒有抬頭。「那一條，」國王說，「還沒有人要我守。」我什麼也沒寫；我聽見奶媽的針停住了。

然後賈里亞德死了，他們埋葬了他，把王冠戴在他兒子頭上；年輕的國王像他父親一樣統治了一小段時間，直到世界埋伏了他。書就是這樣說的。他開始把他聽說的每一個美人召來娶進去，直到他的女人比所羅門還多；他同一群女人關在一起，一關就是一個月，不出去，也不看百姓的申訴，要是他們給他寫信他也不回。大臣們祕密開會，說災難要來了，就去找希馬斯，說你是我們當中最大、最智慧的；去同他說。希馬斯請一個侍從去求准他進去，侍從說一個月以來沒有人看見過國王的臉，叫他去找那個從廚房給國王端飯的奴隸，書按膚色描寫那個人，我略去。希馬斯坐在廚房門口，等著那個人來，請他在國王吃完、心情最好的時候，說希馬斯在門口。

第九百一十七夜，北方的雨已經晚了一百八十七天，北門有三千二百人，哈米德的第七座爐子點起了火，第八座被要求；山上來的車已經連續十二天每天下來，宰相把數字寫在左臂的裡側，那裡袖子能遮住。我姐姐同希馬斯一起在廚房門口停住了，窗口已經有了黎明；國王什麼也沒說，由她去。

第九百一十七夜。山魯佐德與敦亞佐德。到。未了：一位大臣，在廚房門口，等著同一個一個月沒有人見過的國王說話，才剛開頭；第三個孩子，還沒有；一個雜貨商人的女兒，被休了，付了錢，沒有被問過；一個女人，為了保住一隻手而放棄了她的婚姻，以及她有沒有被問回來；一個錢袋，忘了；一樁被迫的買賣，和寫它的那位法官；一座裡面有人的墳；一個七十一歲的皮匠，死了，和八個因為話從牢裡放出來的人，他們去了沒有人看見的地方；一副擔架，和一股石灰味；北門的廚房，門外三千二百個人，七座爐子和第八座，和一個不肯把它叫國王的麵包的麵包師，他在用第六年的穀子烤；一支來自撒馬爾罕的商隊，許諾了；一個叫馬爾西娜的女奴，說做了；皮匠巷的一扇窗板，關著、閂著；一個說了真話的太監，蘇麥雅的筆跡；北方的雨晚了一百八十七天；一個名叫優素福的兒子，兩百六十七天大，會走了；一個穿會吱吱響的鞋的男孩，他說爸，說再，說優；一個事後才被問的女人；一個沒有被問過的女人；一個樵夫，沒有被問過；一本名冊；一個恩典，還沒有求。

## 第53章 · 第九百一十八至九百三十一夜：最後一個故事贏，三百零五頭駱駝，與就著麵包說出的名字

第九百一十八夜，奴隸把飯送給國王，等他的心情最好的時候，說希馬斯在門口，希馬斯被放了進去。他說真主賜給國王的學問和智慧，超過以前任何一位國王，而他正在忘記他父親的囑託和百姓的申訴；他給他講了一個漁夫，漁夫到河邊去，在橋上看見一條大魚，脫掉衣服跳下去追，抓住了，卻發現離岸已經很遠；他不肯放開那條魚，隨著牠漂進了一個誰也出不來的漩渦。河岸上的守河人沿著岸跑著喊：「把你手裡的扔掉，救你自己！」他不肯，或是不能，抱著牠沉了下去。「他應該放手的，」國王說。「他放了，主上，」沙・贊曼說，「在最後。」「太晚了。」我姐姐說，書讓那漁夫在沉下去的時候說，是他自己離開了有安全的平坦大道，去追逐貪欲。「那印度的國王呢？」蘇麥雅說。「他說他明天出來坐朝斷案。」

他沒有。他最愛的那個女人說，大臣們在騙他，好讓他享受不到國王的樂趣，一輩子都花在替他們排難解紛上，就像那個男孩和那些賊：七個賊遇到一個孤兒，給他吃，叫他爬上一棵核桃樹把樹搖下來，園子的主人來了，他們說是男孩的樹，男孩挨了罰，一顆核桃也沒吃到。第二天希馬斯拿來一頭駱駝，主人只顧欣賞牠的奶，牠掙脫了跑了，還有一個把妻子帶進花園的男人，這個我只給你標題；愛妾的回答是一個相信醫生的商人，醫生給他瀉藥，更猛的瀉藥，第三次是毒藥；希馬斯又講了推一隻狼做法官、結果發現狼自己吞掉了整頭駱駝的豺狗們；她講了一個牧羊人，把羊一隻一隻交給了一頭稻草填的獅子。形狀總是一樣的。「他們在用故事打仗，」沙・贊曼說。「誰講最後一個，誰就贏，」奶媽說。「他每次都是最後一個之後才決定的，」蘇麥雅說。「這裡是誰講最後一個？」國王說。「女主人，」蘇麥雅說。「她不讓別人講，」奶媽說。

第九百二十一夜，天剛亮，一個騎手從北路飛馳而來，說第二座里程碑的驛站看見了駱駝，一長排，在紅色的塵土下進來，打著一面不是我們的旗。我們都上了夜簿室的屋頂，只有我姐姐沒有，奶媽不讓她爬樓梯：國王，手臂上抱著優素福，沙・贊曼，我父親，蘇麥雅和我；大男孩抓著國王的外衣。北路兩邊都是灰色的人群，從冬天起就是這樣；正中間，他們讓出一條路，駱駝來了，一排和路一樣長，每一頭由一個蒙著布擋沙的人牽著，那塵土不是灰的，是紅的。蘇麥雅大聲數。我父親在心裡數，寫在手臂上。「三百零四，」他們一起說，接著說，「不，五。」灰色的人沒有喊。有些人跪下了。「『正在來』，是你在路上看得見的，」國王說。「它在路上了，主上，」我父親說。「劃掉它。」我拿起未了，在「一支來自撒馬爾罕的商隊，許諾了」上劃了一道線，寫：來了。沙・贊曼的手蓋在眼睛上，就像孩子笑那天一樣。國王在屋頂上一直站到最後一頭駱駝進了門，哈米德的夥計們跑出去接第一袋麥子。然後他下了樓梯，站在床腳，雙手張開，給我姐姐講他看見的，從頭講起，按他看見的順序：騎手，塵土，蒙在臉上的布，沒有喊叫的人。這是我第一次聽他從頭講一件事。「你漏了塵土，」奶媽說。「我沒有，」國王說。

第九百二十二夜，愛妾叫國王除掉大臣們，一個不留，從希馬斯開始，他是這件事的頭；國王就叫來十個奴隸，是他父親的大個子，叫他們站在他旁邊，眼睛看著他的手；第二天他坐在朝堂上，膝上放著判例書，叫傳令官宣告，凡有事要見國王的人都可以進來，大臣們、總督們、侍從長們按等級一個一個進來，希馬斯第一個，那是首相一向的位置。「首相一向的位置，」我父親在他的角落裡說。「我知道這個規矩，」國王說。隔壁屋裡做了什麼，對誰做的，按他們進來的順序，我略去；書特別小心地說，那是按順序做的，沒有勇氣的平民被打發回家了。我父親的袖子蓋住手臂上的數字。他沒有叫我姐姐講快一點，也沒有叫她停。

然後外印度的國王，羨慕他的國土，看見那裡再沒有人能出主意，給他寫了一封信：在海中央給我蓋一座城堡，不然十二隊騎兵會來圍你的京城，直到它歸我。維爾德汗讀了信，對他的女人說：「我遇到的，就是鷓鴣和烏龜的事。」一隻鷓鴣，在熱天裡飛過一座島，到了烏龜住的地方，留下了；牠們愛牠；牠每天早晨飛出去，每天晚上回來，牠們受不了牠整天不在。其中一隻好心地對牠說，有翅膀的沒有休息，牠們怕有敵人抓到牠；為什麼不拔掉翅膀的羽毛，留下來，吃牠們樹上的果子？牠為了讓牠們高興，一根一根拔了。一隻黃鼠狼來了。「你們除了哭，沒有別的嗎？」牠被抓住的時候對烏龜們說；牠們說對黃鼠狼牠們沒有辦法。牠說這不是牠們的錯，是牠自己的，因為牠聽了。「牠們愛牠，」奶媽說。「牠們剪了牠，」蘇麥雅說。「牠們不是故意的，」我姐姐說。「不是，」國王說。「那才是最壞的一種。」沙・贊曼看著燈，我看著夜簿前板裡的那一綹頭髮，沒有打開。書讓維爾德汗在鷓鴣之後接著怪罪女人，怪罪花園，怪罪亞當；那一長串，我略去。

那天夜裡國王穿上舊衣服獨自走進城裡，在一堵牆邊停下，兩個十二歲左右的男孩坐在那裡說話，一個說他父親的莊稼因為缺雨，沒到時候就枯了，另一個說，你知道為什麼嗎？因為我們的國王殺了他的大臣，不是因為他們有什麼過錯，而是為了聽女人的話；我父親就是其中一個，希馬斯；你很快就會看到真主怎樣對付他。國王在聽，驚呆了：男孩知道一封只有他才有的信。「你怎麼知道的？」他說。「從沙裡，」男孩說，「還有，沒有什麼祕密是瞞著真主的。」我姐姐講到男孩這番話的末尾，屋裡沒有人說話，直到翻一次沙漏的時間那麼久。奶媽放下了她的線。「他們是這樣說的嗎？」蘇麥雅說，不是對我姐姐說的。她轉向我父親。「在北門，有些人，」他說。「他們說什麼？」國王說。「說雨晚了，主上。」「為什麼？」「有人說北方在受罰。」「為了什麼？」我父親看著手臂上的數字。「為了什麼，宰相？」「為了名字，主上。」「哪些名字？」「還沒有念過的。他們說，在念出來以前不會下雨。」「誰說的？」「門口的女人們，主上，發麵包的時候。她們當中一個先說一個名字，別的人說，在這裡。然後她們才吃。」「從什麼時候？」「從廚房開的第二個星期。」「你沒有告訴我。」「您沒有問，主上。」「我現在問。」「是，主上，」我父親說。然後他全講了，我寫進了未了：在北門，就著麵包說出的名字，和回答，在這裡。

書裡，希馬斯的兒子，同學校裡別的孩子一起，替維爾德汗回了外印度國王的信：他當眾念出來，笑了，寫道你伸手去夠你夠不到的；你自己在海中央蓋那座城堡吧，但是你先把海浪攔住，把風圍起來；在信的空白處他畫了自己的像，底下寫：這份回信是學校裡最小的孩子寫的。外印度的國王讀了，看見那張臉，一夜沒睡；他回信說那不過是考驗維爾德汗的膽量。沙・贊曼笑得奶媽叫他停。國王，一個星期沒有笑過，笑了一聲，說：「學校裡最小的孩子，」說了兩遍，用兩種聲音。

維爾德汗不再迷戀女人以後，問那孩子該怎樣處罰她們；孩子說女人不是唯一該受責備的，她們像貨物，沒有人強迫一個人去買；錯在買的人。「我把錯放在自己身上，」國王說，「我除了天命注定，沒有別的藉口。」孩子說：真主賜給我們能力和自由意志，所以我們若要，就做，我們若不要，就不做。「他沒讓他有這個藉口，」國王說。他說得像在讀夜簿上的下一行。沒有人問他是什麼意思，我在兩張紙上都沒有寫。

第九百三十夜，書結束了，像它結束的那樣，以悔改結束；結束得很乾淨；結尾是這樣的。維爾德汗問他的大臣們，該怎樣處置給他出主意的那些女人；孩子說，已經發生的夠了，把她們降為奴僕。另一個大臣說，最起碼該把她們關進殺大臣的那間屋子裡，給一點粗食和一點水，讓她們一個一個死去，最後的死在死者當中。國王採納了第二個。其餘的我略去，書帶著祝福講它。「他先問了那孩子，」國王很低地說。「是，主上。」「卻做了另一個。」「是，主上。」「把她們寫進未了，」他說。「屋裡的女人們。」「他關起來的那些？」蘇麥雅說。「還有那個不會這樣做的孩子，」國王說。我寫：在殺大臣的屋子裡的女人們，和一個本來會饒了她們的孩子。

第九百三十一夜，北方的雨已經晚了兩百零一天，北門有三千六百人，第一塊用撒馬爾罕的麥子做的麵包送到宮裡，裡面有一顆小石子。「好，」哈米德說，送麵包的男孩是這麼說的，「是真的。」優素福，兩百八十一天大，站在磚旁邊，說了一個字。是「爸」。大男孩非常認真地看著他。「優，」他說。「爸。」

第九百三十一夜。山魯佐德與敦亞佐德。到。未了：一個染匠和一個理髮匠，才剛開頭；在北門，就著麵包說出的名字，和回答，在這裡；在殺大臣的屋子裡的女人們，和一個本來會饒了她們的孩子；第三個孩子，還沒有；一個雜貨商人的女兒，被休了，付了錢，沒有被問過；一個女人，為了保住一隻手而放棄了她的婚姻，以及她有沒有被問回來；一個錢袋，忘了；一樁被迫的買賣，和寫它的那位法官；一座裡面有人的墳；一個七十一歲的皮匠，死了，和八個因為話從牢裡放出來的人，他們去了沒有人看見的地方；一副擔架，和一股石灰味；北門的廚房，門外三千六百個人，八座爐子，和一個不肯把它叫國王的麵包的麵包師，他在用撒馬爾罕的麥子烤；一個叫馬爾西娜的女奴，說做了；皮匠巷的一扇窗板，關著、閂著；一個說了真話的太監，蘇麥雅的筆跡；北方的雨晚了兩百零一天；一個名叫優素福的兒子，兩百八十一天大，會走了；一個穿會吱吱響的鞋的男孩，他說爸，說再，說優；一個事後才被問的女人；一個沒有被問過的女人；一個樵夫，沒有被問過；一本名冊；一個恩典，還沒有求。

## 第54章 · 第九百三十二至九百四十七夜：一袋石灰，一枚歸還的戒指，與該由誰去原諒

亞歷山大城住著兩個鄰居，一個染匠叫阿布・基爾，一個理髮匠叫阿布・西爾，兩家鋪子挨著。染匠從人家那裡拿布去染，先要工錢說是買染料，然後把布賣了，把錢花在肉和菸草上；主人來了他說，明天來，第二天說，我的妻子臨盆了，再一天說，被偷了。「一個把布賣掉的染匠，」蘇麥雅說。「每個城裡都有一個，」奶媽說。「他說是被偷了，」國王說。「又一個說做了的。」沒有人問是哪一個。理髮匠也窮，沒有顧客，有一天染匠的鋪門被一個顧客請法官貼了封條，他說在這樣的城裡沒有留的必要；不如出去，手裡帶著手藝；他們就念開篇章，說他們當中誰找到活做誰就養那個沒有活做的，剩下的放進一隻箱子，回家再分。他們上了船。理髮匠給乘客刮臉換麵包和乾酪，還有船長的桌子，全送給暈船的染匠，他吃了就睡；他們到了那座城市以後的八十天，染匠吃了睡，說，別怪我，我頭暈。第四十一天理髮匠發燒，神志不清，染匠從他頭底下拿走了一千個銀幣，出去鎖上了門。

第三天客棧的門房發現了他，用自己的錢養了他兩個月，是為了真主的面子。他好了以後出去找他的朋友，看見一座染坊，門前攤著各色的布，一群人在看；因為在那個城裡有四十位染匠，只會染藍，不收外鄉人；國王給這個外鄉人蓋了一座染坊，給了他一匹馬和兩個奴隸。染匠坐在門口的墊子上，穿著王家的衣服，身邊八個奴隸。他看著理髮匠說：「無賴，我不是告訴過你不要站在我門口嗎？」叫人把他抓住打，又對人群說他是個偷他們布的賊。「一座藍色的城，」沙・贊曼說。「一個給他們帶來了顏色的人，」蘇麥雅說，「卻為此挨了打。」「他帶來的是紅色，」我姐姐說。在鋪子前對理髮匠做了什麼，我略去；書把鞭數都記下了，我不；然後理髮匠回到客棧，坐著，直到那火辣辣的疼過去。

然後他去見國王，說這座城沒有澡堂；國王就叫人蓋了一座，他燒了水，在水池裡做了一眼噴泉，教十個男孩用手套搓背；頭三天來的人白進白出。第四天國王親自來了，搓得乾淨，說：「每個洗澡的人收一千第納爾。」理髮匠說：請原諒，國王；人和人不一樣；要是我收一千，窮人進不來，澡堂會空著；讓每個人付他心裡能給的。大臣們同意了，每個人都給了一百第納爾，一個奴隸，一個女人，一個僕人，為了國王的榮譽，一共四百個；理髮匠說，這些我往哪裡放，就按每個一百把他們賣回給國王，說，願真主減輕你，像你替我減輕了這些肚子沒有人填得滿的食屍鬼一樣。「窮人付什麼？」奶媽說。「他們能付的，」我姐姐說。「哈米德就是這樣，」蘇麥雅說。「他什麼也不收，」我父親說。「國王付。」「國王的廚房收人家給的，」國王說，「哈米德把給的以外的那部分拿去。」「是，主上，」我父親說。「他不肯把它叫價錢。」國王笑了一聲，就停了。

染匠去了澡堂，被搓洗，被餵食，理髮匠什麼也不肯收他的，叫他同伴；染匠臨走說它還缺一種黃砷和生石灰調的膏，能去毛，阿布・西爾說他會做。阿布・基爾立刻去見國王說：這個理髮匠是你的敵人；海那邊的國王，他曾是他的俘虜，答應他要是殺了你就放他的妻子兒女；他會給你一種膏，說是去毛的，那是毒藥。國王去了澡堂看；理髮匠給他膏，聞著很臭。他叫人抓住理髮匠，叫來海軍長官，說：把他裝進一隻麻袋，放兩擔生石灰，把口紮在他頭上；划到我窗前，等我說，扔，你就扔進去，叫他又淹又燒。我父親的手伸向了袖子。「石灰，」國王說，不大聲。「是，主上，」我父親說。「皮匠用它，鞣皮子。」「去毛的。」「是，主上。」奶媽的針停了；又繼續。我看著燈。我沒有看我父親的袖子，那是乾淨的。

「有人問過他嗎？」國王說。「他們問了染匠，主上，」我姐姐說。長官把理髮匠帶到一座島上，說他曾被他刮臉、洗澡，不許付錢；他不會淹死他；他在麻袋裡放了一塊石頭，給了理髮匠一張網，去給國王的廚房捕魚，自己划到窗戶下面。國王用右手向他示意，扔，有什麼東西從他指頭上閃著掉進了海。那是他的印戒，它是有魔法的；國王對誰生氣，用那隻手向他一指，戒指裡就閃出一道光，那人的頭就從肩上掉下來；軍隊只因為這個才服從他；而他一個字也不敢說，怕軍隊。一條魚吞了戒指，那條魚落進了理髮匠的網，他剖開，把戒指戴在手指上。有兩個廚房的男孩來要魚，他向他們比了一下，什麼也不知道，他們死了。怎麼死的，我略去。國王把右手放在膝上，手心朝上，看著它，像我父親看他自己的。

長官回來說，別動你的手，告訴他戒指是什麼；阿布・西爾說，送我進城。他走進國王那裡，國王正對著他的人坐著，不敢說，臉色灰白；他說：你把我扔進海裡；你的長官把我帶到一座島上；你的戒指掉進了水裡，一條魚吞了它，我發現了，兩個男孩死了，不是我的意願；它在這裡，拿去。要是我做過什麼該死的事，告訴我是什麼，殺了我，你就免罪。「他還給他了，」蘇麥雅說。「他不知道那是什麼，」我父親說，「直到有人告訴他。」「然後他還給他了，」國王說。「要是別人找到了它，」書裡的國王說，「他絕不會還給我。」國王戴上戒指，覺得生命回來了，擁抱了理髮匠，說，別怪我，原諒我。

國王派人叫來客棧的門房和染坊的工人，他們說了實話。人們把染匠光著頭、雙肘被綁地帶來，在市場上遊街，說要把他縫進一隻裝生石灰的麻袋扔進海裡。阿布・西爾說：「國王，請接受我替他求情，因為他對我做的一切我都原諒他。」「你原諒他對你做的，」國王說，「我不能原諒他對我做的。」他們就把他扔進去了。理髮匠求的恩典是被送回家，國王給了他一艘大帆船和它的水手；在亞歷山大，海把麻袋沖到了沙灘上，他把染匠埋在那裡，在上面建了一座墓，在門上寫了一首詩；他死的時候被葬在他旁邊，那個地方直到今天叫阿布・基爾。「他原諒他了，」蘇麥雅說。「那不是國王的可以拿的，」奶媽說。「那是他自己的可以給的，」我姐姐說。「他能原諒對他做的，」國王說。「是，主上。」「不能原諒對國王做的。」「不能，主上。」「國王做的事，該由誰去原諒？」沒有人回答。我父親在手掌上什麼也沒有寫。「被做了的人，」奶媽說。「她們死了，」國王說。「她們的母親沒有，」奶媽說，咬斷了線。

第九百四十夜，我姐姐開始講漁夫與海人。一個漁夫叫阿卜杜拉，有九個孩子，第十個那天出生，他在新生兒的運氣上撒網，什麼也沒撈上來；他又撒，又撒，沒有一條魚地回家，經過麵包師的爐子，麵包師叫他：「你有夠吃的麵包嗎？」給了他十個半迪拉姆的麵包和十個半迪拉姆，說，等好運氣來了我們再算。四十天他拿了麵包，什麼也沒有。「我說同我算帳，」他說，「他說，走開，現在不是算帳的時候。」「那是哈米德，」蘇麥雅說。「那不是哈米德，」我父親說，「哈米德是算的；只是他不說總數是多少。」第四十一天漁夫對妻子說他要把網撕了；她說，真主是慷慨的。那天他的網拉上來很重，裡面是一頭死驢；他再撒，裡面是一個人。

他以為那是所羅門的一個精靈，就跑；但那人說他是海人，要是漁夫放了他，他們就做朋友：每天早晨一筐陸地上的水果，一筐海裡的珠寶。漁夫放了他；坐在岸上說：「你把到手的獵物放跑了。我本可以拿他去展覽。」「他後悔放了他，」蘇麥雅說。「然後他回來了，」奶媽說，「兩手滿滿的。」「是，」國王說。他沒有再說什麼。漁夫用一把珍珠付了麵包師，麵包師丟下爐子，把麵包頂在頭上跟著他回家。他又想把一顆珠寶賣給珠寶商的頭領，頭領說，這就是偷王后項鍊的賊，叫人打他、綁他、拖到國王面前。「他們沒有問他，」蘇麥雅說。「一個問題也沒有，」我姐姐說。王后派人說她的項鍊在原處，這些更好；國王罵珠寶商們是下流的無賴，說，你們為什麼不問他？他讓他做了宰相，把女兒嫁給他，讓麵包師做了左宰相。「哈米德，左宰相，」蘇麥雅說。「他不要，」國王說。「他會拿它去做麵包，」奶媽說。

漁夫每天早晨下海帶著水果，帶著珠寶回來，一年；有一天海人問他有沒有去過雅斯里布的先知墓，他說沒有，海人說要給他一件託付，讓他放在墓上，帶他下了海，用一種叫丹丹的魚的肝油做的藥膏，這種魚大得能吞下一頭大象，一聽見亞當之子喊一聲就死。漁夫喊了，死了一條。他們走過八十座城市；女人城，和海王對她們以及她們的兒子做的事，以及穿衣與婚姻的習俗，書給了四十行，我略去。在海人家，他的女兒看著漁夫說：「這個沒尾巴的是什麼？」她和她母親、她兄弟都笑他；海人說，原諒他們，他們缺心眼；沒尾巴的很少，蘇丹把他們收起來，供人取笑。蘇丹說：「歡迎沒尾巴的，」大家都笑，放了他；他求的恩典是珠寶。「他把他留著取笑，」沙・贊曼說。「書裡這是一種習俗，」我姐姐說。

海人給了他一個錢袋，要放在先知墓上，他們回岸邊的路上聽見唱歌，看見一張擺滿魚的桌子，許多人在宴飲；他問，辦婚事嗎？「不，」海人說，「他們當中一個死了。」漁夫說在他的國家，有人死了，他們哭、號、女人們打自己的臉、撕自己的衣服。海人盯著他，說：「把託付還給我。」「我斷絕我們的交情，」他說。「你們陸上的人不是真主的一件託付嗎？為什麼真主收回祂的託付你們就難過？我怎麼能把先知的託付交給你，要是孩子出生你們歡喜，儘管全能者是把靈魂放在他裡面作為託付，而祂把它收回的時候，你們難過、哭？你既然放不下真主的託付，怎麼放得下先知的託付？」他說完就下海去了，漁夫再也沒有見過他。他從岸上喊了他一些日子，他的岳父國王說他不該告訴他。「他說了實話，」蘇麥雅說。「卻失去了朋友，」奶媽說。「常常，」我姐姐說。國王說：「他們宴飲。」「在一個死亡上，主上。」「我不想住在那裡，」沙・贊曼說。「你不必住，」奶媽說。國王很久沒有說話。然後他說：「昨晚多少？」「九個，主上，」我父親說。「誰的？」「名字我不知道，主上。我知道數目。」「明天把名字寫下來。」「是，主上。」從那天夜裡起，我父親把門口告訴他的名字寫在右臂的裡側，把雨的天數寫在左臂上，他說他不知道哪個更重。

第九百四十七夜，北方的雨已經晚了兩百一十七天，北門有三千九百人，九座爐子，我父親說，燒石灰的車因為缺柴，已經不再到皮匠巷去了。優素福，兩百九十七天大，指著他的哥哥說：「爸。」他的哥哥，整個冬天一直替他說這個字，指回去說：「優。」他們互相看著，每人有一個替對方起的字；國王，兩個字都是他給的，沒有說哪個是誰的。

第九百四十七夜。山魯佐德與敦亞佐德。到。未了：一位睡不著的哈里發，和一個阿曼的商人，才剛開頭；一個因為說實話而失去的朋友，和一件託付；國王做的事該由誰去原諒；在北門，就著麵包說出的名字，和回答，在這裡；在殺大臣的屋子裡的女人們，和一個本來會饒了她們的孩子；第三個孩子，還沒有；一個雜貨商人的女兒，被休了，付了錢，沒有被問過；一個女人，為了保住一隻手而放棄了她的婚姻，以及她有沒有被問回來；一個錢袋，忘了；一樁被迫的買賣，和寫它的那位法官；一座裡面有人的墳；一個七十一歲的皮匠，死了，和八個因為話從牢裡放出來的人，他們去了沒有人看見的地方；一副擔架，和一股石灰味；北門的廚房，門外三千九百個人，九座爐子，和一個不肯把它叫國王的麵包的麵包師；一個叫馬爾西娜的女奴，說做了；皮匠巷的一扇窗板，關著、閂著；一個說了真話的太監，蘇麥雅的筆跡；北方的雨晚了兩百一十七天；一個名叫優素福的兒子，兩百九十七天大，說爸；一個穿會吱吱響的鞋的男孩，他說爸，說再，說優；一個事後才被問的女人；一個沒有被問過的女人；一個樵夫，沒有被問過；一本名冊；一個恩典，還沒有求。

## 第55章 · 第九百四十八至九百五十九夜：灰色的書、一面鏡子，與手上的血

哈里發哈倫・拉希德睡不著。他叫來賈法爾，說要是天亮以前他的失眠沒有治好，就砍他的頭；賈法爾，他處理過這種事，說憂愁有三種辦法可以減輕：照鏡子，去澡堂，聽歌；哈里發說他三樣都做過了。「那還有第四種，」賈法爾說：「看你從沒看過的，或聽你從沒聽過的，或走你從沒走過的地方。」「他總是醒著，那個哈里發，」奶媽說。「書沒有說他白天做什麼。」「他白天睡，」國王說，「而宰相不睡。」「我睡，主上，」我父親說。「在第二個沙漏，」國王說。「睡一個沙漏那麼久。」沒有人問他又是怎麼知道的。

第九百四十八夜，我父親到夜簿室來，右袖捲到肘上，用念數字的那種聲音，念出寫在他手臂內側的東西：九個名字。其中七個在藍書裡；蘇麥雅找到了，連頁碼。有兩個不在。是兩個女孩，八歲和十一歲，同她們的母親從北路下來，在廚房開辦的第一個月死於咳嗽，她們的母親在門口同別人一起說了這兩個名字，因為沒有別人替她們說。「她們在誰的書裡都沒有，」我父親說。「寫進我的，」國王說，派人去叫書商，書商送來一本一百頁的灰色的書，蘇麥雅用自己的筆跡把這兩個寫在第一頁上，下面是那七個。「把她們同別的放在一起，」國王說。這是他對頭六十一個名字，在第十九夜說過的話。然後我父親念了最後一個名字。是薩爾瑪。「第四百零二個，」國王說。他沒有問是誰的。我父親說，說這個名字的那位女人，從第二個星期起就在北門發麵包，穿黑衣，站在最後面；她說的時候別人說，在這裡；她就吃，繼續發。國王手放在灰色的書上坐了很久，我姐姐開始了。

是阿曼的商人。他賣掉了他的三十艘船和房子，帶著一百萬第納爾去巴格達看人家告訴他的那座城市，在一個星期五他走到卡爾恩・西拉特，找到一所房子，一位叫塔希爾的老人在那裡養著姑娘，按夜出租：十第納爾，二十，四十。他先付三百租了第一種一個月，付六百租了第二種一個月，這樣沿著梯子往上，直到有一天晚上在屋頂上，他看見帷幕後面一張榻上一個女孩，一個男孩的手放在她脖子上，美得他整夜沒睡；她是老人的女兒，她的一夜是五百第納爾。第一個月他付了一萬五千。「一百萬第納爾，」沙・贊曼說。「在河邊的一所房子裡。」「按夜算，」奶媽說。「書讓那女孩在第一個夜晚對他說的話，用詩，我略去，」我姐姐說；「那要一頁，而我父親在屋裡。」「我在屋裡，」我父親說。「是，主上，」我姐姐說。

他一個月一個月地住下去，直到錢花光，對她哭了，她告訴他她父親對那些花光了錢的人怎麼做：款待三天，然後是門。「別說出來，」她說，「我留住你。我父親的錢都在我手裡。每天早晨我給你一袋五百第納爾；你把它給他，說我每天付你；他會交給我；我再給你。」他這樣做了一年。「她用她父親的錢付她父親，」奶媽說。「免得他被別人付，」蘇麥雅說。「這是一種廚房，」我父親說；沒有人問他是什麼意思。後來有一天她打了一個使女，使女說，我要讓你的心也像我的一樣痛，就去找她的主人，他進來說他的規矩是給商人三天，而他已經有了一年；他的僕人拿走了他的衣服，給了他十個迪拉姆和一件值五個的舊衣服，叫他走，說要是他留在城裡，他的血就在他自己頭上。

他乘船到巴士拉，替他認識的一個雜貨商人做事，等有了一百第納爾，在河邊租了一間屋子去買貨；一天來了一條船，兩個男人鋪開一張毯子和一袋珠寶，其中一個是他的老相識，看見他什麼也不出價，問他為什麼，他說他世上只有一百第納爾，就當著商人們把整袋賣給他，一百，說是禮物。珠寶當中有一塊紅色的護身符，一隻手那麼大，刻著像螞蟻爬過的痕跡；一整年市場上沒有人肯出十到十五個迪拉姆以上。然後來了一個人，帶著路上的灰塵，翻他的貨，拿起護身符，吻了吻手，出價二十第納爾，五十，一千，商人，因為沒有人要護身符而生著氣，不肯回答；人群叫他賣，不然就揍他；他以三萬賣了。「要是你剛才忍住不賣，」買主說，「我會出你十萬，是啊，一百萬。」「從那天起，」阿曼人對哈里發說，「就是你們看見的這蒼白。」「他不知道那是什麼，」國王說。「沒有人告訴他，」我父親說。「他問了，」蘇麥雅說。「他問了掮客，掮客把它扔到他臉上。」「掮客就是這樣的，」奶媽說。

買主是印度一個國王的僕人，國王的女兒得了一種不能說出名字的病，被綁著；護身符治好了她；後來她把它連同項鍊丟給了海，病又回來了；書說那病夜復一夜對被叫去睡她屋子的女孩做了什麼，我略去。他找到那位會做另一個的老人已經死了，被派出去走遍天下尋找，在巴士拉的一家鋪子裡找到了。阿曼人帶著他有的東西回了巴格達，回了塔希爾的家，陽台塌了，格窗砌死了；一個僕人告訴他塔希爾已經悔改，賣了他的女孩們，他的女兒為一個叫阿布・哈桑的商人要死了，他為他出過十萬第納爾。「你欠我報喜的賞錢，」阿曼人說，「因為阿布・哈桑在門口。」老人跑出來哭著抱住他的脖子，領他進去見女兒，她昏倒了，醒來以後說，現在她要吃東西了。法官被叫來；老人辦了婚禮。哈里發聽完回家，叫人把三年的稅收放在帷幕後面一個壁龕裡，把阿曼人叫來，說：「這個多，還是你因護身符而失去的多？」「這個多許多倍，信士的領袖。」「作證，」哈里發說，「我把它給這個年輕人。」他喜極而泣，血色回到他的臉上，哈里發舉起一面鏡子給他看。「給我一面鏡子，」國王說。蘇麥雅從奶媽的盒子裡拿來磨亮的銅鏡，他把它拿遠，又拿近，時間是翻一頁書那麼久。他還給她，什麼也沒有說。「怎麼樣？」奶媽說。「收起來，」國王說。

第九百五十三夜，我姐姐開始了一個宰相的兒子易卜拉欣的故事，他除了主麻日禮拜不能出門，在回家路上看見一個書商，有一本書裡有一個女孩的畫像，美得幾乎要開口說話；他花一百第納爾買了，對它哭了一個星期，問書商是誰畫的。巴格達的一個人，在卡爾赫。他往袋子裡裝了三萬第納爾的金子和珠寶，沒告訴任何人，跟著一個商隊騎馬走了；一個貝都因人以他的母馬和一百第納爾為代價，把兩個月的路程幾天帶完；在巴格達他找到了那條街，找到了畫家，一個坐在大理石長凳上的老人，給了他一所房子住，還有一盤棋。易卜拉欣輸了第一局；他沒有心思；他在想那只袋子，他把它放在房子裡什麼地方了。「我吃了一口值一兩個迪拉姆的飯，丟了一袋值三萬的，」他默默地說，「但我求真主幫助。」老人把它拿了回來，說：「你的心思在袋子上的時候，我贏了你；現在我把它還給你，你贏了我。」「我心思不在棋盤上的時候他才贏我，」沙・贊曼說。「從第一場雪起我就沒有贏過你，」國王說。「從你開始看門起，」沙・贊曼說。國王什麼也沒說，走了一步卒。

畫家是阿布・卡西姆，畫的是他的堂妹賈米拉，她住在巴士拉，聽不得「男人」這個詞；他向她父親求過她，她捎話說要是他珍惜性命，就離開這座城。於是他把她畫在書裡，散到各國，希望哪個美貌的年輕人看到她，來看她，她愛上他，而他，畫家，可以從遠處看她一眼。易卜拉欣哭了；畫家送他乘船到巴士拉。客棧的門房和他的妻子，一個駝背裁縫（易卜拉欣故意把口袋撕破兩次給他金子），還有那個叫野母牛的花園的駝背園丁，把他安在一個涼棚裡說，別打噴嚏。「一幅畫，」蘇麥雅說。「沒有人問過她，」奶媽說。「她聽說過他，」我姐姐說。「她是憑傳聞愛上他的。」沒有人說話；國王看著放在地氈上他身邊的灰色的書。賈米拉在涼亭裡為她的女伴們跳舞的時候抬頭看見了他，拿起一把半肘長的刀走向他；臉對臉時，刀從她手裡落下，她說：「讚美改變人心的真主！」

他們乘船逃了；到了巴格達，畫家在一條船裡等著；他往他們的船裡扔了一盒摻了大麻的糖果。易卜拉欣醒來，赤身躺在一座澡堂的廢墟裡，手上有一個他在黑暗中碰過頭的死去的女人的血，是誰的，怎麼會在那裡，我略去。警長找到了他。「這不需要證據，」他看見他的手，說，「砍他的頭」；劊子手，他有心，說：「憑真主，這不是兇手的臉。」他們把他放在血氈上。就在那時，埃及宰相的侍從長騎馬趕到，是被派來找他的，說：「你為什麼不耐心一點問問他？這是個十五歲的孩子；他連一隻麻雀都沒殺過！」「這是第四次了，」蘇麥雅說，「一個月裡。」「什麼的？」奶媽說。「他們沒有問。」「它不需要證據，」國王說。「手上的血，是最古老的證據，主上，」我父親說。「是嗎？」國王說。我父親什麼也沒說，把手放進了袖子。

哈里發叫人處死了兇手，怎麼處死的我略去，又派人找賈米拉，她被她自己的頭髮綁著，又找畫家，他命令因為他對她做的事懲罰他，我略去；賈米拉的父親進來抱怨那個把他女兒帶走的年輕人，哈里發說他把她從折磨和屠殺裡救了出來，當場為他們證了婚。他們去了埃及，像書說的那樣生活。第九百五十九夜，北方的雨已經晚了兩百二十九天，北門有四千一百人，宰相說那天夜裡他手臂上的名字有九個是新的。奶媽把我姐姐的墊子挪到床邊的地上，在她腳下放了一個凳子，她坐著講第一個沙漏，手放在腰側。優素福，三百零九天大，沒有靠磚站著，站的時間是國王說他名字那麼久，朝他哥哥走了兩步，坐下；他哥哥說：「優，」帶著極大的耐心，把鞋穿回了他的腳上。

第九百五十九夜。山魯佐德與敦亞佐德。到。未了：一位名叫穆阿台迪德的哈里發，正午走進一條小巷，才剛開頭；一本一百頁的灰色的書，記那些在誰的書裡都沒有的名字，同藍書放在一起；薩爾瑪，第四百零二個，她的母親在北門說她的名字，和回答，在這裡；今夜的九個新名字；國王做的事該由誰去原諒；一個因為說實話而失去的朋友，和一件託付；在殺大臣的屋子裡的女人們，和一個本來會饒了她們的孩子；第三個孩子，還沒有；一個雜貨商人的女兒，被休了，付了錢，沒有被問過；一個女人，為了保住一隻手而放棄了她的婚姻，以及她有沒有被問回來；一個錢袋，忘了；一樁被迫的買賣，和寫它的那位法官；一座裡面有人的墳；一個七十一歲的皮匠，死了，和八個因為話從牢裡放出來的人，他們去了沒有人看見的地方；一副擔架，和一股石灰味；北門的廚房，門外四千一百個人，九座爐子，和一個不肯把它叫國王的麵包的麵包師；一個叫馬爾西娜的女奴，說做了；皮匠巷的一扇窗板，關著、閂著；一個說了真話的太監，蘇麥雅的筆跡；北方的雨晚了兩百二十九天；一個名叫優素福的兒子，三百零九天大，走了兩步；一個穿會吱吱響的鞋的男孩，他說爸，說再，說優；一個事後才被問的女人；一個沒有被問過的女人；一個樵夫，沒有被問過；一本名冊；一個恩典，還沒有求。

## 第56章 · 第九百六十至九百七十八夜：門口的豆子、一開口就求的自由，與箱子裡的刀

我姐姐接著講那位哈里發，講到他在正午的一條小巷子裡的地方。穆阿台迪德穿著商人的外衣，同伴是伊本・哈姆敦，兩人聽見一座大宅門口的兩個太監說，但願來個客人，因為他們的主人沒有客人是不肯吃飯的；於是他們走了進去。主人穿一件尼沙普爾的絲袍出來迎接，手上戴著一枚紅寶石戒指，給他們水，擺上桌子，拉起一道帷幕，帷幕後面有三個女孩在唱歌，哈里發從頭到尾都皺著眉。那人說他不過是一個商人的兒子，呼羅珊的阿布・哈桑，不知道自己家裡坐著的是誰，直到伊本・哈姆敦告訴他。「我進來以後，」哈里發說，「在杯子上、墊子上、連你身上這件外衣上，都看見我祖父穆塔瓦基勒的名字。對我說實話，你就在我面前平安無事；對我說謊，我要罰你，罰得沒有人受過這樣的罰。」「他被要求說實話。」國王說。「而且說了。」蘇麥雅說。「而且平安無事。」奶媽說。國王把手放在身旁凳子上那本灰色的書上，沒有翻開。

實話很長。他的父親是個兌換錢幣的商人，他把父親的錢吃光了；他把房子賣給母親，五千第納爾，那是她自己父親留下的、留著急用的錢，他又把這些吃光；他再把房子賣給她，一萬五千，條件是由她接管他的事務，於是她把他放回店裡。「一個把房子買兩次的母親，」奶媽說，「一個字都不說。」後來有一天，一個女孩走進來，美得讓他什麼都想不出來，她說：「替我秤三百第納爾。」他就吩咐夥計秤給她，事後說他也不知道為什麼，他當時什麼都想不了。一個月後她又來了，揭開面紗，又拿走三百，再來是五百；他跟著她到一家珠寶店，她拿了一條項鍊，叫他付錢，又跟她到底格里斯河邊，看她上了一條船，他對著地面做了個親吻的手勢，她笑著走了，進了哈里發穆塔瓦基勒的宮殿。「他說是三千第納爾，」我父親說，他算數就像別人呼吸，「合起來是一千六百。要麼有一條他沒告訴我們的項鍊，要麼一個戀愛中的人在心裡數錯了。」沒有人問是哪一個。

他的代理人是個老藥商，勸他把這筆錢當作是為了真主花掉了，忘記她。可是她下個月又來，說她沒有別的辦法，只能一個月見他一次，他便又去找老藥商；老藥商在宮殿格子窗的對面找到一個裁縫，叫他把自己的口袋撕破，拿去請裁縫縫。「故意撕破的口袋。」蘇麥雅說。「易卜拉欣的。」奶媽說。「易卜拉欣撕了兩次，」我姐姐說，「這個只撕了一次。」他訂做希臘錦緞的衣服，最後訂了一百套；凡是從宮裡出來的人看中哪一套，他就送給那個人，連守門人也不例外，直到裁縫說：「商人不是這樣做事的。你是不是戀愛了？」裁縫告訴他，那個女孩是哈里發自己的琴師，她有一個貼身的太監；那太監收了五套衣服，又收了一套鑲寶石、值三千第納爾的，看著他說：「你是呼羅珊的阿布・哈桑，那個兌換錢幣的。整個宮裡都在談你。她愛你，比你愛她更深。」「他是被他的禮物找到的。」國王說。「根本用不著找。」沙・贊曼說。

第二天傍晚，太監給他穿上金線織的襯衫和哈里發自己的長袍，抹上哈里發用的香，領他進了一條兩旁都是房間的長廊。「每一扇門口放一粒豆子，」他說，「這是哈里發每天夜裡做的事。數門；你要找的那一扇有大理石門檻。」長廊走到一半，傳來一陣喧鬧和火把的光，真正的哈里發帶著一群女人走過來了，他聽見一個女孩說：「我們有兩位哈里發嗎？一位把豆子放在我門口，這邊又來了一位帶著火把的。」「他用豆子數他的夜晚。」沙・贊曼說。「豆子不是名字。」國王說。我父親把袖子放下，蓋住手臂。哈里發隨從裡的一個女孩抓住這個嚇壞了的人的袖子，把他拉進一間屋子，說：「你要是賊，你就完了。你要是阿布・哈桑，你就平安；你是我姐姐沙賈拉特・杜爾的朋友，她一天到晚說著你。」她的姐姐來了，撲在他脖子上，說她答應過他不會不正當地屬於他，她會想出辦法。

這時外面有了聲響，哈里發要到她房裡來了；她把這個人藏進活板門下面的地窖，自己出去伺候他。穆塔瓦基勒叫她唱歌，她拿起琴，唱得那麼好，地窖裡的人差點叫出聲來，哈里發高興了，說：「沙賈拉特・杜爾，向我求一個恩典。」「我求我的自由。」她說。「你自由了，」他說，「為了真主的愛。」我姐姐就在這裡停住了，這是她被允許停住的地方，我沒有從夜簿上抬起頭。奶媽對貓說：「還沒有。」一直在等著的那隻貓，躺下了。「她早就準備好了。」國王說。「她一開口就說了。」「他高興的時候給的。」蘇麥雅說。「也因為她開口問了。」

哈里發走了，去同他吵了架的那個女孩和好；琴師打開活板門，說因為他來了，她成了自由的女人。他們給他穿上女人的衣服送他出去；宮中央坐著哈里發自己，看見一個走路不對勁的使女，把她叫了回來。問他怎麼敢闖進宮裡，那人說：「是因為我無知，也因為我的情，還有我相信陛下的寬厚。」穆塔瓦基勒聽了兩個人的話，說：「我原諒你們兩個，」叫來法官，為他們證婚；阿布・哈桑家裡所有刻著那個名字的東西，都是她的嫁妝，不是哈里發的庫房。過了一段時間，她回到家，衣服撕破了，說他的統治結束了；他兒子帶著衛兵闖進來，書裡寫了他們做了什麼，我略去。他們帶著她的財物和她為他生的孩子順河而下，到了巴士拉。穆阿台迪德進來時是要發怒的，聽完卻寫了一道詔書，二十年內他的田地不用繳稅，又讓他做自己的酒伴，直到世界把他們分開。「他先問的。」蘇麥雅說。「而且說了對說謊的人他要怎麼辦，」奶媽說，「然後沒必要用上。」「書裡每個說了的人都被原諒。」沙・贊曼說。「在這本書裡。」國王說；奶媽本來要說什麼，沒有說。

第九百六十三夜，我姐姐開始講另一個卡馬爾・扎曼。「有好多個。」奶媽說。「這一個是商人的兒子，不是王子，」我姐姐說，「我每次都會這樣說。」他的父親阿卜杜・拉赫曼，把他和他妹妹同一個女奴關在一座房子裡十四年，怕這麼美的孩子遭到邪眼；他的妻子終於說：「你要把兒子藏著不給人看到什麼時候？他是男孩還是女孩？你要是死了，他說他是阿卜杜・拉赫曼的兒子，沒有人會信。」「十四年。」蘇麥雅說。「他把他們關起來，因為他愛他們。」奶媽說。父親帶男孩到店裡，整個市場都停下來看，一個穿粗毛布衣的苦行僧穿過人群，坐在對面的長凳上哭了。商人往壞處想，把苦行僧帶回家，夜裡叫男孩去引誘他，自己在窗口看著；苦行僧禱告，不肯，最後發了脾氣。「你一看見我兒子為什麼哭？」商人說。苦行僧講了巴士拉的一個星期五：他發現街上沒人，店舖都開著，沒有狗也沒有貓，麵包還熱在爐裡，連一個人都沒有；接著是鼓聲，八十個女孩兩個兩個騎馬而來，臉都沒有蒙，中間一個騎在馬上的女人，美得讓他躲在一扇窗板後面。她說門口有個男人；他們把他拖出來；她一句話之後對他做了什麼，我略去。「你兒子，」苦行僧說，「長得跟她一模一樣。」

男孩向父親要貨物，父親說他一個時辰也不能忍受同他分開，母親說要是不讓他去，他會跑掉；於是他帶著九萬第納爾的貨物和腰帶裡的四十顆寶石出發了。離巴士拉還有一天路程，劫匪劫走一切，殺了他的人，他躺在死人中間，把他們的血抹在自己身上，直到他們離開；他在一個星期五走進巴士拉的空街，看見鼓、女孩們、馬上的那個女人，站都站不住。「憑傳聞。」蘇麥雅說。「像賈米拉。」奶媽說。他賣了一顆寶石換一千第納爾，把他看見的告訴一個理髮師；理髮師說：「別對任何人說；整個巴士拉每個星期五早上把自己鎖起來，沒有人知道為什麼。」理髮師的妻子是個接生婆，哪一家都進得去，收了一百第納爾，告訴了他。珠寶商的首領奧拜德，鑽穿了一顆別人都鑽不穿的寶石，巴士拉的國王說：求一個恩典。奧拜德說：讓我等到明天。他什麼事都要同他深愛的妻子商量；她說：每個星期五，禮拜前兩個時辰，全城人都進清真寺，或者帶著貓狗鎖在家裡，所有的店舖都開著，讓她帶著侍女們騎馬穿過，臉不遮，她遇見的男人，她就叫人殺了。「一座城被關起來，」沙・贊曼說，「為了一個女人，一個星期一個早晨。」「我們這裡被關了快三年了。」奶媽說。「一個求的是被放出來，」蘇麥雅說，「一個求的是讓一座城被關起來。」「他拿回家問她，」國王說。「她比他更知道該求什麼。」沒有人說話。我把這寫了下來，國王的手又放到灰色的書上去了。

接生婆告訴男孩怎麼做。他要請奧拜德做一枚戒指，給學徒們一人一個第納爾，把戒指拔下來說太緊，送給別人，再拿一顆更好的寶石來；奧拜德以有這樣的顧客為榮，會在妻子面前誇他的臉，因為，我姐姐說，沒有比在妻子面前誇另一個男人長相的丈夫更傻的烏龜了。妻子想要那枚戒指。她叫丈夫連著三個晚上請這個年輕人來吃晚飯，兩個男人的睡前杯裡都下了藥；她對睡著的客人做了什麼，我略去。早晨他的臉頰和嘴唇火燒似的，珠寶商很羞愧，說那間屋子的蚊子只愛沒有鬍子的人。「他自己給了男孩理由。」國王說。男孩在口袋裡發現四個小螺殼；接生婆讀出來了：戀人是不睡覺的，你是個孩子，在玩貝殼。第二夜，一把刀：再睡，我就要你的命。第三夜，他把杯裡的東西倒在枕頭後面，她拿著刀來，他笑了；她說：「三次，你都沒懂那個暗示。」他告訴她是一個老婦人教的，她說：「去問她還有沒有別的；沒有的話，剩下的我來。」

剩下的她來做。她叫男孩在她隔壁租一間房子，請一個工匠挖一條通到她房間的地道，每天夜裡她把丈夫的錢一袋一袋搬過去。然後她給他一把丈夫自己做的刀，那把刀他估價五百第納爾，絕不肯賣，叫他在店裡拿出來，說是一個人的情婦拿來抵錢給他的；男孩在丈夫進門之前就用地道把它送回給她。奧拜德認得那把刀，因為它的式樣是他自己設計的，天下沒有第二把。他回到家，臉色像吞了一塊石頭，她說：「你懷疑我，來看看我有沒有把你的東西送人。」「我的刀在哪裡？」他說，她說：「在箱子裡。」刀就在箱子裡。第二天是那隻錶，和一句「在這兒。」「她兩次都放回去了，」我姐姐說，「在他進門之前。」「而他很高興。」國王說。「他在箱子裡看見那把刀，就高興了。」她告訴他，要是她沒有拿出刀和錶給他看，他就把她當成了叛徒，她再也不會同他一起吃飯了；他就哄她，感到抱歉。「他想被告知。」國王說，聲音沒有升高。「那樣比較容易。」沙・贊曼說。「是的。」國王說。

第九百七十四夜，她穿上最好的衣服，戴上丈夫親手做的戒指，不蒙面紗，扮成女奴跟在男孩後面走到店裡；男孩說：「我花一千第納爾買了這個女孩。你覺得價錢怎麼樣？」「你叫什麼名字，姑娘？」奧拜德說。「哈麗瑪。」她說，那也是他妻子的名字。他跑回家，她坐在房裡，穿著同樣的衣服，是從地道回來的。「看著我的臉，」她說，「也許我就是店裡站著的那個，我假扮了，同他商量好給你設個圈套。」「這是什麼話？」他說。「我從沒懷疑過你會做這種事。」然後她打了她的使女，對他說受不了看見她，他就把使女帶去賣，經過男孩的屋子，男孩白白買了她；而他的妻子已經從地道進了轎子。「向你從前的主人吻一下手，」男孩對她說，她從轎子裡走出來，吻了奧拜德的手，又回到轎子裡；他盯著她看。「他盯著她看。」我姐姐說。「他看了。」國王說。「而沒有看見。」「他寧願沒看見。」奶媽說。他們走的時候奧拜德哭了，因為友誼有債要還，他回到店裡，高興自己的懷疑落了空；那天晚上他回家，屋子被搬得只剩下木板。

他對誰也沒說。他說要同妻子去朝聖，全城都歡喜，因為再也沒有星期五要被鎖起來了；路上劫匪剝光了他，他赤身步行到了開羅，有人告訴他，婚宴最後一天窮人有飯吃。那是男孩的婚宴；他父親說過：「你要是娶她，我在今世和來世都和你斷絕；她對她丈夫做了的，她也會對你做。」把那個女人和她的使女關在樓上的房間，另給男孩找了新娘。奧拜德被帶去洗澡、換衣，私下講了他的事，阿卜杜・拉赫曼對兒子說，他現在要看這個人是有榮譽的男人還是個烏龜。他叫奧拜德同妻子和好，把鑰匙交給他；自己拿著劍站在門後。「他要是原諒了她，」我姐姐說，「就會被殺。」「因為原諒。」蘇麥雅說。國王把手放在大男孩的耳朵上；沒有人叫他這麼做。我姐姐一口氣說了珠寶商用手做了什麼，我沒有寫下來。阿卜杜・拉赫曼從門後走出來說：「你要是原諒了她，我就殺你。現在你可以娶我的女兒。」人們被告知兩個女奴死了。「一個只有一個答案的考驗。」奶媽說。國王把手從耳朵上拿開。沒有人說話。

奧拜德同那位女兒過了五年，死了。巴士拉的國王，在奧拜德回來時說過若不是怕真主，他會殺了他來娶她，現在向寡婦求婚，她說不：她的親族裡沒有一個女人再嫁過，「就是殺了我也不行。」他派一位宰相和五百騎兵把她送回她父親那裡，連同珠寶商留下的一切，她在那裡一直沒有再嫁，直到死去。「所以這個女人連一個國王也不肯用來取代她死去的丈夫，」我姐姐念著書的結尾說，「怎麼能跟另一個比？那一個在丈夫活著時就取代了他。而認為所有女人都一樣的人，他那瘋病是沒有藥可醫的。」她坐在地上的墊子上，腳下放著凳子，手放在腰側，中間停下來喘了兩次氣。沙・贊曼看著國王。國王沒有看沙・贊曼；他看著燈。蘇麥雅把燈芯剪了剪。第九百七十八夜，北方的雨晚了兩百四十八天，北門有四千三百人，我父親右臂上寫了十二個新名字，不等人問，就把手臂伸給蘇麥雅念。優素福三百二十八天大了，從磚牆邊走到奶媽的毯子上，走過去，一直走到國王的膝邊，大男孩走在他旁邊，沒有碰他。

第九百七十八夜。山魯佐德與敦亞佐德。到。未了：一位發現有一省的貢賦沒有送到的哈里發，才剛開頭；一本一百頁的灰色的書，記那些在北門被說出來的名字，同藍書放在一起；今夜的十二個新名字；薩爾瑪，第四百零二個，她的母親在北門說她的名字，和回答，在這裡；一個一開口就求自由的琴師；一個盯著看卻沒有看見的珠寶商；國王做的事該由誰去原諒；一個因為說實話而失去的朋友，和一件託付；在殺大臣的屋子裡的女人們，和一個本來會饒了她們的孩子；第三個孩子，還沒有；一個雜貨商人的女兒，被休了，付了錢，沒有被問過；一個女人，為了保住一隻手而放棄了她的婚姻，以及她有沒有被問回來；一個錢袋，忘了；一樁被迫的買賣，和寫它的那位法官；一座裡面有人的墳；一個七十一歲的皮匠，死了，和八個因為話從牢裡放出來的人，他們去了沒有人看見的地方；一副擔架，和一股石灰味；北門的廚房，門外四千三百個人，九座爐子，和一個不肯把它叫國王的麵包的麵包師；一個叫馬爾西娜的女奴，說做了；皮匠巷的一扇窗板，關著、閂著；一個說了真話的太監，蘇麥雅的筆跡；北方的雨晚了兩百四十八天；一個名叫優素福的兒子，三百二十八天大，會走；一個穿會吱吱響的鞋的男孩，他說爸，說再，說優；一個事後才被問的女人；一個沒有被問過的女人；一個樵夫，沒有被問過；一本名冊；一個恩典，還沒有求。

## 第57章 · 第九百七十九至九百八十九夜：半夜的鞭子、五次低頭，與不是鎖的赦免

哈里發哈倫・拉希德，我姐姐接著講，在查看各省的貢賦時，發現每一省都送到了，只有巴士拉的晚了二十天。「也許總督出了什麼事。」賈法爾說。「二十天。」沙・贊曼說。「兩百四十九天。」我父親在角落裡說，說完又像是後悔了。「我知道這個數字。」國王說。哈里發派了陪席的阿布・伊沙克，帶著五千騎兵，去問個究竟；總督阿卜杜拉・本・法齊爾出城迎接，說貢賦已經備齊，明天就送，不過阿布・伊沙克既然遠道而來，須先做三天客人。他們吃飯，坐到很晚，給他在一張嵌金的象牙榻上鋪了床；半夜裡他躺著睡不著，在心裡作詩，看見主人起身，繫緊腰帶，從櫃子裡取出一條鞭子和一支點著的蠟燭，走了出去。

阿布・伊沙克儘量放輕腳步跟在後面。他看見總督從一個櫥裡取出一個托盤，四碟菜、麵包和一壺水，端著走過一條走廊，走到一間屋子，屋子中間有一張象牙榻，榻上用金鍊拴著兩條狗。他解開第一條，那條狗把嘴貼到地上，像要吻地，嗚嗚地叫；他把牠的爪子綁在背後，按倒在地，用鞭子打，打到牠呻吟著失去知覺；然後對第二條也這樣做。接著他拿出一塊手帕，擦了擦牠們的眼睛，說：「不要怨我；憑真主，這不是我的意願，我也不好受；也許真主會給你們一條出路。」他一口一口親手餵牠們吃，給牠們水喝，然後離開。阿布・伊沙克看了三個夜晚，對主人一個字也沒說，第四天領了貢賦回去。「三個夜晚。」蘇麥雅說。「他沒有問他。」「他不好意思。」奶媽說。「他告訴了哈里發。」沙・贊曼說。「隨口說的，」我姐姐說，「沒有存心。」「把那個人事後說的話說一遍。」國王說。我姐姐說了。「再說一遍。」國王說，她又說了一遍；他說：「再說一遍。」她說了第三遍，他說：「夠了。」我沒有把這寫進夜簿。我把它放在第二張紙上，旁邊寫了一個數字，數字是三。

哈里發說：「回去，把阿卜杜拉和那兩條狗帶給我。」阿布・伊沙克求他免了，因為他做過那人的客人，沒有臉面對他；哈里發說，要是派別人去，總督會否認，說他沒有狗，派看見過的阿布・伊沙克去，他就否認不了。「不然我殺了你。」「人的過失出自舌頭。」阿布・伊沙克說，帶著哈里發親筆的信回去，把整件事都告訴了主人。阿卜杜拉說：「既然你告訴了他，我就替你證實你的話，免得他以為你說謊，因為你是我的朋友。要是換了別人，我就否認，說他是胡說。」他們到了巴格達，狗騎在駱駝上，繫著金鍊，在哈里發面前吻地、搖尾、哭泣。「他沒有失去朋友。」蘇麥雅說。「他失去了秘密。」奶媽說。

阿卜杜拉說，這兩條狗是他的哥哥曼蘇爾和納西爾；要是他說的是真話，牠們就低頭，要是他說謊，牠們就瞪眼。他們的父親法齊爾，名字取自活下來的那一個孿生子；他留下三個兒子、一所房子、一間店舖和六萬第納爾；最小的阿卜杜拉在分家時要了房子和店舖，留下來看管，哥哥們拿了錢和布匹出海了。一年後，在冬天最冷的時候，他們穿著破爛的襯衫，嘴唇發白，來到他的店裡，船沉了，什麼也沒剩；他把自己的皮袍披在他們身上，帶他們去澡堂，給他們吃的，然後把自己擁有的分成三份，「就當父親今天才死」，並給每人開了一間店舖；他們白天做買賣，夜裡讚美大海，一再勸他同去。每說一段，他就轉向那兩條狗說：「是這樣嗎，我的哥哥們？」每一次牠們都低下頭。我在第二張紙上數了數。他說完以前，一共五次。「他分了兩次。」蘇麥雅說。「第二次沒有人要求他。」「沒有人問過那兩條狗什麼，」奶媽說，「除了這是不是真的。」「這是兩個答案。」國王說。「低頭，或者瞪眼。」沒有人問他是什麼意思。

他們出海，賺了錢，到了一座山，阿卜杜拉上去找水，看見一條白蛇被一條黑龍追著逃，黑龍咬住了她的頭，他扔了一塊石頭，打死了龍；那條蛇變成了一個女孩，吻了他的手，鑽進了地裡。二十天之後，水喝完了，他們到了另一座山，山後有一座城，有十四座城門，一個守門人坐在長凳上，銅鍊上掛著十四把鑰匙，他向他問好，那人不回禮，因為他是石頭。拿著一捆洗衣的老婦人是石頭，擺著秤和乳酪的賣油人是石頭，連狗和貓也是石頭。店裡的布像蛛網，一碰就成了粉末；一袋袋的金子也爛了，可是裡面的金子沒有變。宮裡，宰相們坐在椅子上，是石頭，戴著王冠坐在寶座上的國王，是石頭；他走上四十級台階，聽見一個女孩在朗誦，找到了她，是國王的女兒，她知道他的名字。是每個星期五來的一位老人告訴她的。書裡說了那座城為什麼變成石頭，那是一場關於神的爭執，我略去；她那時七歲，如今三十歲，在那間屋子裡靠院子裡一棵樹上每天一個石榴活了二十三年。「布變成了粉，金子還在。」蘇麥雅說。「金子是這樣。」奶媽說。「哈米德說麵包是會壞的東西。」國王說。「所以它才是麵包。」沙・贊曼說。「是的。」國王說。「二十三年。」我父親說。「他問她願不願意做他的妻子，」我姐姐說，「並同他去巴士拉。她說願意。」「他問了她。」奶媽說。

他把她帶到船上，不敢進城的哥哥們拿了自己的一份，眼睛亂轉；他們看見那女孩，每個人都說非要她不可。他說他答應過自己娶她，又說回到巴士拉會給每人找一個新娘，備好聘禮，同一夜完婚；他們什麼也沒說。第四十個夜裡，在望得見巴士拉的地方，他們趁他睡著，抓住他的手和腳，把他扔進了海裡，告訴船長他是夜裡走到船舷邊去小解，掉下去的。他沉下去，水又把他托起來，一隻人那麼大的大鳥用爪子抓住了他；她就是那條蛇，名叫薩伊達，是紅色精靈王的女兒。她帶他見了她的母親和父親，他們給了他一套寶衣；她告訴他黑龍為什麼追她，我略去；她又把他送回船上，他的哥哥們正在為那女孩吵架。她想殺了他們。他求她不要。「為了讓你滿意，我不殺他們，」她說，「但我要施法術。」她裝了一杯海水，對著它念了一個詞，灑在他們身上，他們就成了兩條狗。她說：到了巴士拉，給每個人套上項圈，把他們鎖在一間單獨的屋子裡，每夜半夜，把每個人打到暈過去；要是你有一夜不打，我就來打你，然後再打他們。

到了巴士拉，他給牠們套上金項圈，因為他受不了鐵的；第一夜他忘了，紅王的女兒從地板裡出來，把他打到昏過去，然後去打了牠們。從那以後他一夜也沒有缺過，一共十二年，「違背我自己的心意」，事後擦擦牠們的眼睛，親手餵牠們吃。「因為她會打他。」沙・贊曼說。「他每夜都說，」蘇麥雅說，「事後。『這不是我的意願。』」「鞭子在他手裡。」國王說。沒有人說話。那天夜裡，在未了的末尾，我寫了：一個人，十二年裡每夜打他的哥哥們，事後說這不是他的意願。蘇麥雅在第二個沙漏結束時，用她念全部那些行的同樣的聲音，把它同別的一起念了出來。國王沒有打斷她。

哈里發說他要讓那兩條狗變回人，親筆寫了一封信給精靈的女兒，叫阿卜杜拉這一夜別打，把信交給她。那夜阿卜杜拉解下了項圈，讓兩條狗和他一起坐在同一個托盤前吃飯，吃完讓牠們洗爪子，侍從們大為驚愕，把剩下的飯菜當作不潔的東西倒掉了；半夜，薩伊達從地板裡升起來，眼睛像火。他把信給她。信上說，這個人已經原諒了他的哥哥們，放棄了他的追究，凡是有和解的地方，報復就該免去；又說，要是精靈們不聽他的，他也不會聽他們的。她把信帶給她父親，父親說寫信的人對他們有權力，原因我略去，她必須服從；她回來，把水灑在狗身上，牠們成了人，伏在兄弟腳下。「他原諒了對他做的事，」國王說，「信上說，追究是他的。」「那她的呢？」奶媽說。「誰的？」「船艙裡的那一個。」沒有人回答。阿卜杜拉問他的哥哥們，把他的妻子怎麼樣了，他們說，她聽見他們吵架，投海了。他哭了，連這個也原諒了他們。薩伊達臨走時說：「提防他們；他們是叛徒。」

他們沒有變。他們先後給他設宴，留他聽故事聽到很晚，等他睡著，就跪在他身上，把他扔進河裡，哭著去見哈里發，說精靈的女兒把他們的哥哥帶走了，請求接任他的總督之職。一隻海豚接住了他。牠每天都來那座宅子的廚房窗口下面，那裡的剩飯殘羹都倒進河裡，那天倒得比平常多，牠很有力氣；把他馱到了對岸。「當然了。」沙・贊曼說。「赦免不是鎖。」奶媽說。「不是。」國王說。「廚房餵了海豚。」我父親說。「是剩飯，」國王說。「是一回事。」一個商隊發現了他，其中一個懂醫術的人照料了他三十天的路程，到了一座離巴士拉很遠的城，那裡有一個名叫拉吉哈的醫者，能一夜治好病人；他被抬進去，帷幕後面是他的妻子。她投了海，每個星期五來的那位老人把她救起來，安置在那裡，叫她等著；她給他按摩了四肢，他就好了。「她還活著。」蘇麥雅說。「是的。」國王說。一個星期五的夜裡，老人把他們兩個帶回巴士拉阿卜杜拉的宮殿，早晨他從格子窗往外看。

他看見他的哥哥們被哈里發安置在那裡，因為他們說的話；書裡說了怎麼安置，我略去。他把他們埋了，去巴格達把整件事都告訴哈里發，哈里發叫人擬了他和石頭城的女孩的婚約；他們在巴士拉過日子，直到那毀滅歡樂、拆散團聚的來了。「沒有人問過她，她想怎麼處置他們。」奶媽說。「沒有。」國王說。第九百八十九夜，我姐姐，手放在腰側，講完了書的結尾，開始講開羅的一個皮匠，他的妻子叫「糞」，在第一頁，她要一塊澆蜂蜜的細麵餅，他一個迪拉姆也沒有。「一個有妻子的皮匠，」奶媽說，「好。」我姐姐笑了一下，停住了；奶媽把腳下的凳子拿走，在她背後墊了一個墊子。

那夜北方的雨晚了兩百五十九天，北門有四千五百人，哈米德要求第十座爐子，已經砌好；我父親右臂上有十一個新名字，不等人問，就把手臂伸給蘇麥雅念。優素福三百三十九天大了，像平常一樣，從奶媽的毯子上走到國王的膝邊，站住，舉起兩隻手臂。國王三百三十九天來都是不等他要求就把他抱起來的，他說了一句，不是對任何人說的：「他在要求。」然後把他抱了起來。

第九百八十九夜。山魯佐德與敦亞佐德。到。未了：開羅的一個皮匠，他的妻子叫「糞」，她要一塊澆蜂蜜的細麵餅，他一個迪拉姆也沒有，才剛開頭；一個人，十二年裡每夜打他的哥哥們，事後說這不是他的意願；一個寧可投海也不肯被選的妻子，沒有人問過她該怎樣處置那些選她的人；一本一百頁的灰色的書，記那些在北門被說出來的名字，同藍書放在一起；今夜的十一個新名字；薩爾瑪，第四百零二個，她的母親在北門說她的名字，和回答，在這裡；一個一開口就求自由的琴師；一個盯著看卻沒有看見的珠寶商；國王做的事該由誰去原諒；一個因為說實話而失去的朋友，和一件託付；在殺大臣的屋子裡的女人們，和一個本來會饒了她們的孩子；第三個孩子，還沒有；一個雜貨商人的女兒，被休了，付了錢，沒有被問過；一個女人，為了保住一隻手而放棄了她的婚姻，以及她有沒有被問回來；一個錢袋，忘了；一樁被迫的買賣，和寫它的那位法官；一座裡面有人的墳；一個七十一歲的皮匠，死了，和八個因為話從牢裡放出來的人，他們去了沒有人看見的地方；一副擔架，和一股石灰味；北門的廚房，門外四千五百個人，十座爐子，和一個不肯把它叫國王的麵包的麵包師；一個叫馬爾西娜的女奴，說做了；皮匠巷的一扇窗板，關著、閂著；一個說了真話的太監，蘇麥雅的筆跡；北方的雨晚了兩百五十九天；一個名叫優素福的兒子，三百三十九天大，會走，舉起了手臂；一個穿會吱吱響的鞋的男孩，他說爸，說再，說優；一個事後才被問的女人；一個沒有被問過的女人；一個樵夫，沒有被問過；一本名冊；一個恩典，還沒有求。

## 第58章 · 第九百九十至九百九十九夜：多得很、「到」，與公主保管的戒指

第九百九十夜，我姐姐接著講那個皮匠。馬阿魯夫在開羅以補舊鞋為生，他的妻子法蒂瑪，整條街都叫她「糞」，一天傍晚叫他給她帶一塊澆蜂蜜的細麵餅。我父親的手伸向右邊的袖子，又縮了回來。沒有人提這件事。馬阿魯夫一個迪拉姆也沒有；一個糕餅師傅信得過他，只有糖蜜，就用糖蜜淋了餅，她把餅扔在他臉上，打掉了他一顆牙，他還了手，只打了一下，很輕。「很輕。」國王說。「書裡說很輕。」奶媽說。「書是誰寫的？」沙・贊曼說。她到法官那裡告他，法官給了他四分之一第納爾去買蜂蜜，叫他們和好；法官的差役要規費，拖著他在市場上走，直到他賣掉了工具。她又到第二個法官那裡告他，又到第三個衙門；有人跑來告訴他，說她已經告到高等法院去了；他跑了，帶著五個小錢，在雨裡坐進一間破敗的小屋，哭了。

牆裡走出來一個存在。他說他在這間屋子裡住了兩百年，從來沒見過有人像這個人這樣；他可憐他，願意照他的心願去做。馬阿魯夫要一個他妻子找不到路的國家。那存在把他背在背上，飛了一夜，把他放在一座城市上面的山上，早晨他走下去，人們笑他說昨天才離開開羅，一個騎騾子的商人趕走了他們，帶他回家。那是阿里，小時候同他一起玩，七歲就離家出走、四處流浪，在那座城裡裝作是後面還有貨物的商人而發了財。「在沒有人認識你的地方，愛怎樣就怎樣，」阿里說。「說你是個有錢人，來玩的，貨物隨後就到。他們問你有沒有某種貨，你就說：多得很。」「那個存在先問了他要什麼，」蘇麥雅說。「在做任何事之前。」「兩百年在一堵牆裡，」奶媽說，「從來沒有人在他的屋子裡哭過。」「他一直在等著。」國王說。他沒有說是什麼意思，也沒有人問。

於是馬阿魯夫騎著騾子到了市場，阿里站起來吻他的手，對商人們說他是開羅最有錢的人；他們問什麼，他都說：「多得很。」一個乞丐來了，他給了一把金子，阿里借給他的一千第納爾中午就沒了。商人公會的首領說，有乞丐來，就說：真主會給你日用的糧食；馬阿魯夫說他沒有這個習慣，又借了一千，又送了出去；二十天裡，他向商人借錢送給窮人，一共欠了六萬第納爾，貨物卻一直沒有來。「多得很。」奶媽說。「他一點也沒有。」蘇麥雅說。「二十天裡六萬第納爾，主上，」我父親說，「給乞丐，憑他一句話。」「他沒有說：真主會供給。」沙・贊曼說。「他給了。」國王說。「他沒有東西可給。」奶媽說。「他給了。」國王又說了一遍。沒有人接著說下去。

商人們去找這座城的蘇丹，他是個貪心的人；他想，一個能送掉六萬的人一定還有更多，他比商人更有權得到。他把馬阿魯夫叫來，給他一顆寶石估價；馬阿魯夫對寶石一竅不通，用拇指和食指一捏，把它捏碎了，說這是一塊值一千第納爾的石頭，他有更好的。蘇丹把這當作證明。他的宰相說這個人是騙子，蘇丹說宰相這麼說，是因為他自己曾經向公主求過婚，被拒絕了；把公主嫁給了馬阿魯夫，宴會辦了四十天。「宰相說對了。」蘇麥雅說。「帶著怨恨。」奶媽說。「那仍然是真話。」國王說。「沒有人問過公主。」蘇麥雅說。「她被問過宰相的事，」我姐姐說，「她說不。」「這一個呢？」奶媽說。「沒有。」

書裡用一頁寫新婚之夜，用一百個名字稱呼同一件事，我略去；我姐姐也略去了，但不是為了那個原因。第九百九十四夜第一個沙漏裡，她正講到一個司庫，講到一半，把手放在腰側，說：「奶媽。」奶媽說：「好。」像是有人問了她現在幾點，扶著她的腋下，從第九百八十五夜起就等在隔壁房間的那兩個女人，把她扶到了帷幕後面。「把孩子們帶出去。」奶媽說。國王牽起大男孩的手，把小的抱在手臂上，在磚頭旁邊的地板上坐下，背靠著牆，兩個孩子一邊一個坐在他膝上。我父親站在他的角落裡。沙・贊曼在他的毯子上坐起來，用手指數著什麼。蘇麥雅過來，靠著我的膝蓋坐下。「接著講。」國王對我說。我說我不知道她講到哪裡了。「隨便哪裡。」他說。

我講了公主向她丈夫要真話那一段。她對他說：「告訴我，除了讓你高興的事，什麼也不會落到你身上；你是我的丈夫，我不會對不起你。」他告訴她他是個皮匠，有個叫「糞」的妻子；她笑了，說他很會說謊，又說她父親為了他的錢把她嫁給他，等發現了會殺他。她給了他五萬第納爾她自己的錢、一套年輕人的衣服和一匹馬，叫他去她父親的規矩管不到的地方，給她寫信，她會把她手夠得到的都寄給他；第二天早上，她對曾叫她去查明真相的父親說，有十個年輕人帶了一封信來，說貨物晚了，是因為路上劫匪搶走了兩百駝貨，她的丈夫已經笑著去催趕了，宰相是個騙子。「她做到了。」蘇麥雅說。「她被要求去查明白。她查明白了。她沒有告訴他。」「她先答應了他。」國王說。帷幕後面有聲音。每有一次響動，他就把手放在離他最近的那個孩子身上，一直放到聲音過去。

我講的時候，國王開始對孩子們說話，用他念未了時的聲音，低得我想他不知道我聽得見。他給他們講了一個故事。從前有一個國王，他說，他有一條規矩，有一本記著規矩的簿子，有一個天亮時把簿子捧上山坡的宰相；有一天傍晚，一個女孩腋下夾著一本書來了，說：我給你講一個故事；那個國王就知道了。他在第一夜就知道他不會劃那條線。他坐了一夜等著聽下面是什麼，但那只是為了聽；他從一開始就知道，她從來沒有在他手裡有過危險，一個天亮也沒有。「再。」大男孩說，他有三個字，沒有一個對這件事合適。國王又講了一遍，一字不差，像是在說一件現在已經說過了的事。我父親在他的角落裡什麼也沒說。我把國王說的寫在邊上，我寫已經說出口的東西的地方，在那一夜的短畫下面。在第二張紙上，我寫夜簿對第一個早晨的記載，那是：第一夜。山魯佐德。劃：無。未了：一個商人和一個精靈，才剛開頭；旁邊我沒有做任何記號。夜簿是為已經說出口的東西保存的。它從來不是為真的東西保存的；這就是有第二張紙的原因。他第二次講的時候，我沒有寫。夜簿只收一次。

窗戶從黑變成灰燼的顏色時，帷幕後面有個聲音說：「一個兒子。」是奶媽。沒有人動。然後帷幕後面傳來一個又細又憤怒的聲音，那是一個很小的人發現空氣是什麼滋味的聲音；國王兩個膝上各坐一個孩子，對我說，聲音很大，很平：「寫：到。」我沒有明白。「他回答了。」國王說。「寫。」於是我寫了，就著小燈，在那一夜末尾，劃線的地方：第九百九十四夜。山魯佐德與敦亞佐德，和一個。到。國王把拇指放在那個字旁邊。「她呢。」他說，奶媽說：「累了，主上。她說你可以進來。」他把兩個孩子交給我，他們又重又暖，睡著了，他走進帷幕後面，我什麼也沒聽見；他出來時，沒有說他說了什麼。「第七天早晨給他取名。」奶媽說。「我知道。」國王說。

接下來六夜，我把兩個沙漏都講了，我姐姐臉朝牆躺著，新的那個在她手臂上。第九百九十五夜我講了種田人：馬阿魯夫帶著公主的錢騎進荒野，一個農夫請他做客，去給他拿午飯，馬阿魯夫為了補償他耽誤的時間，自己去犁地，犁頭卡在一個金環上，底下有一塊石板，石板下有一道樓梯和一間有四座台子的大廳，一座是金子，一座是祖母綠和珍珠，一座是紅寶石，一座是鑽石，還有一個水晶的箱子，箱子上有一個小匣子，匣子裡有一枚金戒指，上面刻著字，像螞蟻爬過的腳印。他搓了一下。一個聲音說：「我在！你要建一座城，毀一座都城，還是殺一個國王？」那是一個名叫阿布・薩阿達特的精靈，曾經是沙達德的僕人，他說他必須服侍持有戒指並搓它的人，一次；連著搓兩次，就會燒死他。馬阿魯夫要把整個寶藏運上來，精靈的八百個兒子變成拿著金籃子的男孩走出來，裝成了三百頭騾子的貨；還有七百頭騾子的布料，有鑲著寶石的鞍子的馬，那些馬是精靈變的，還有一頂紅金的轎子；等農夫提著一碗扁豆和一袋大麥回來，把他當成蘇丹，馬阿魯夫吃了扁豆，把碗裝滿了金子。「他吃了給他的東西，」沙・贊曼說，「還付了錢。」「他先問戒指能做什麼，」蘇麥雅說，「然後才要東西。」「他要的是騾子。」奶媽說。「他到底是『多得很』。」國王說。

他坐著轎子回到城裡，蘇丹出來迎接他，商人們得到雙倍的還款，他給窮人的東西多到蘇丹得另找一座倉庫，宰相的臉變成了枯葉的顏色。是宰相說，一定有秘密，酒是叛徒。第九百九十八夜，他把蘇丹和馬阿魯夫帶進一座花園，斟滿杯子，又斟滿，馬阿魯夫把一切都告訴了他，宰相要看戒指的時候，他醉了，把它交了出去。宰相搓了戒指，說：「把這個人扔到『空曠地帶』去，那裡沒有吃的，也沒有喝的。」蘇丹問他有什麼罪，他又搓了一次，蘇丹就和他的女婿一同掉下去了。我們的國王看著我父親。「你有戒指嗎？」他說。「我沒有戒指，主上。」我父親說。「沒有，」國王說。「你有袖子。」我父親看了看他的袖子，袖子捲到手肘，說他想大概是這樣。

宰相召集軍隊，對他們說要是不讓他做蘇丹，就把他們也扔下去；他們就讓他做了。他派人去對公主說，今夜他要去她那裡，守寡不守寡；她回話：「歡迎。」書裡說他想幹什麼，我略去。她穿上最好的衣服，笑著對他說：「你沒看見那邊那個看著我們的人嗎？他就在戒指的石座裡。把它扔遠些。」他把它拔下來放在墊子上；她一腳踢在他肚子上，他倒下去，四十個女奴按住他，她搓了一次戒指，把他送進一座監獄。她叫人把她的父親和丈夫從沙漠裡接回來，要她的父親坐回寶座，讓她的丈夫做右宰相，並說了該怎樣處置那個宰相，我略去。「把戒指給我，」她的父親說。「或者給你丈夫。」「你們兩個誰也不該有，」公主說。「我自己保管它，我也許比你們更小心。」「她保管了。」蘇麥雅說。「她可以。」奶媽說。「她很小心，主上。」我父親說。「是的。」國王看著他放在膝上的右手，沒有把它翻過來。

第九百九十九夜，北方的雨晚了兩百六十九天，北門有四千七百人，哈米德要求第十一座爐子，還沒有砌；我父親右臂上有十三個新名字，不等人問就念了出來。優素福三百四十九天大了，走過整個夜簿室，走過磚頭，又走回來，大男孩走在他旁邊，沒有碰他。我姐姐第一次坐起來，新的那個睡在她手臂上，說皮匠的故事兩夜之後講完，她自己講。沒有人說這個「兩」是什麼意思；我們都數過了。

第九百九十九夜。山魯佐德與敦亞佐德，和一個。到。未了：一個關在憤怒監獄裡的宰相，和一個公主保管的戒指，才剛開頭；一個人，十二年裡每夜打他的哥哥們，事後說這不是他的意願；一個寧可投海也不肯被選的妻子，沒有人問過她該怎樣處置那些選她的人；一本一百頁的灰色的書，記那些在北門被說出來的名字，同藍書放在一起；今夜的十三個新名字；薩爾瑪，第四百零二個，她的母親在北門說她的名字，和回答，在這裡；一個一開口就求自由的琴師；一個盯著看卻沒有看見的珠寶商；國王做的事該由誰去原諒；一個因為說實話而失去的朋友，和一件託付；在殺大臣的屋子裡的女人們，和一個本來會饒了她們的孩子；一個五天大、還沒有名字、回答了的兒子；一個雜貨商人的女兒，被休了，付了錢，沒有被問過；一個女人，為了保住一隻手而放棄了她的婚姻，以及她有沒有被問回來；一個錢袋，忘了；一樁被迫的買賣，和寫它的那位法官；一座裡面有人的墳；一個七十一歲的皮匠，死了，和八個因為話從牢裡放出來的人，他們去了沒有人看見的地方；一副擔架，和一股石灰味；北門的廚房，門外四千七百個人，十座爐子，和一個不肯把它叫國王的麵包的麵包師；一個叫馬爾西娜的女奴，說做了；皮匠巷的一扇窗板，關著、閂著；一個說了真話的太監，蘇麥雅的筆跡；北方的雨晚了兩百六十九天；一個名叫優素福的兒子，三百四十九天大，會走；一個穿會吱吱響的鞋的男孩，他說爸，說再，說優；一個事後才被問的女人；一個沒有被問過的女人；一個樵夫，沒有被問過；一本名冊；一個恩典，還沒有求。

## 第59章 · 第一千夜：每人一口氣、回答的人，與沒有落閂的窗板

夜簿上「夜」那一欄是三個數字寬。首席書記在我姐姐來的前一天傍晚畫的，那時他不可能想到有第四位數的夜晚；兩百個夜晚以來我就知道這一夜是寫不下的。第一千夜，我把它寫得很小，一擠在線邊，後面三個零伸到寫著「名」的那一欄裡，沒有人說什麼，雖然我父親看了它一口氣的時間。那是新的那個來了之後的第六天，如果把他來的那天算上，奶媽就是這樣算的。我姐姐坐在墊子上，他在她手臂上，她自己講了第一個沙漏，聲音比原來細，但沒有抖。「我說過我會。」她說，不是對任何人說的。

她從宰相還在憤怒的監獄裡講起。蘇丹叫人把他提出來處死，在軍隊面前燒了，軍隊在他走過時咒罵他；做了什麼我略去，她也用一句話略去了。馬阿魯夫做了右宰相。他們這樣過了五年，第六年老蘇丹死了，公主讓她的丈夫接了位，做蘇丹，戒指她自己留著。他們有個兒子，五歲。「她保管到最後。」蘇麥雅說。「她快死的時候才給他，」我姐姐說。「她說：為你自己、也為這孩子，要小心這枚戒指。早上她就死了。」國王看著我姐姐手臂上的那一個，什麼也沒說。「她很小心。」奶媽說。「是的。」國王說。

有一夜，做了一陣蘇丹的馬阿魯夫在黑暗中醒來，發現床上有個女人，牙很長，面目可憎，說：「別怕，我是你的妻子法蒂瑪。」她說她一直在開羅討飯；她每夜為他哭；一個存在發現她在哭，告訴她她的丈夫是某座城的蘇丹，把她帶過天空，放在他的房間裡。馬阿魯夫問她什麼時候離開開羅的，她說，剛才。她說她對不起；她像乞丐那樣問他，能不能讓她和他一起吃麵包。「他收留了她。」奶媽說。「她問了。」蘇麥雅說。「她說：我置身於你的庇護之下。」「總有一個在背著他們。」沙・贊曼說。「總有一個。」奶媽說。馬阿魯夫給她一座宮殿和二十個女奴，說她要是作什麼惡，他就殺了她，誰也不怕；那個男孩像探望父親一樣去探望她，卻不喜歡她，因為她看他像看別人的孩子。「孩子知道。」奶媽說。「是的。」國王說。

我姐姐在這裡停住了，在第一個沙漏結束時，停在男孩和那個女人中間，說剩下的是明天的，她不想把它講得比原來長。第二個沙漏她沒有講；她抱著新的那個。輪到蘇麥雅念未了了；她通常在第二個沙漏結束時念，這時她拿起那張紙，因為沒有別的辦法對待這片安靜，用她念全部那些行的同樣的聲音，從頭念起；念到關於在北門同麵包一起被說出來的名字、和回答「在這裡」的那一行時，她念過八十次，國王也聽了八十次，手放在膝上，這一次國王說：「今晚。」

沒有人問他是什麼意思。他站起來，把膝上的男孩交給奶媽，對我父親說：「夜簿，全部，還有灰色的書。」「是一千零八十一個，主上，」我父親說。「你每天天亮都捧著它們上山坡。」國王說。我父親去取來夜簿，雙臂抱著，封面貼在胸口，像他從前抱壽衣那樣；一個挑夫拿了灰色的書。「誰來？」我父親說。「誰想來就來。」國王說。沙・贊曼把帽子放在膝上，又拿了起來。蘇麥雅拿了燈。奶媽說誰也不許帶我姐姐去，我姐姐說她根本不打算去，她手臂上有東西；但國王經過時她看著他，點了一次頭，像人們在一句話說得大小剛好時那樣。我戴上奶媽的棕色面紗，一股貓味，跟了上去。

我們從園丁的小門出去，十個護衛穿著腳夫短袍在後面一百步，穿過一座睡著了、或是假裝睡著了的城。窗板在我們前面一扇一扇關上，就像我們走去宮殿的那個傍晚；可是這一次，這裡那裡，我們身後有窗板打開了。低處的街道有石灰和濕樹皮的味道，近北邊則是麵包的味道。城門在城的最上面。四千九百個人在黑暗裡躺在石頭上，腳朝著十一座爐子，哈米德不穿外衣，雙臂交叉站在第一座爐子旁邊；穿黑衣的女人們在第三排，就是第四十天我看見她們的地方。沒有人歡呼。我想國王預料到了。我想他一路都垂著雙手，準備好了它；等到人群只是翻了個身，像睡著的人那樣，一個一個坐起來，他才吐出一口氣。我父親把夜簿攤在一只麵包箱的蓋子上，翻到第一頁，第一個名字的地方。國王每天天亮默讀它一口氣的長度，現在讀出聲來。

「萊拉，」他說，吸了一口氣，這是他一向給的，沒有人回答。沙・贊曼站在他後面，摘下了帽子，在撒馬爾罕，那是人在葬禮上做的事；我想他不知道自己做了。他讀了第二個。他讀了第三個，人群中有個女人的聲音說：「在這裡」，不大聲，它像一個水桶沿著一條線傳了回去，一直傳到爐子；我看見她並不認識那個女孩；她是一個瘸腿的老婦人，來領麵包的。之後就多了。有人的名字，那個人說；沒有人的名字，前面的人替她們說，然後又一個；到了第兩百個，國王的聲音在長名字上開始破的時候，我已經分不清哪些是親人答的，哪些是鄰居答的，我想他們自己也分不清。他從來沒有把一口氣說長過一口氣。後來我問他。他說他不能給第一個比最後一個多，也不能給最後一個比第一個少；他給了她們每人一口氣，給了三年，那是他給過她們的唯一一樣完全公平的東西。他說的語氣，像人說麵包的價錢。

第三百一十一個，一個戴灰面紗的女人說了「在這裡」，用她問我哪裡可以寫下它的那種聲音，我想起了酒窩。第四百零二個，國王在名字之前停住，穿黑衣的女人們等著；他說：「薩爾瑪」，第四十天從隊伍裡走出來的那個女人說：「是我的」，然後說：「在這裡」，並坐在石頭上，不是因為累。他吸了那口氣。他沒有看書。到了第六百個，整個城門都在回答。不大聲。像一件很長的東西在黑暗裡從一隻手傳到另一隻手的聲音。第八百零五個，說「在這裡」的是人群邊上的一個老人，身邊沒有人，他第十七天來過，要寫下他姐姐的名字；他說的時候看著我父親；我父親用雙手攤著書，低下頭，一次，像對證人那樣，直到下一個名字才抬起來。

她之前有一千零八十一個。最後一個是個叫納菲莎的女孩，十七歲，賣鹽的女兒，她父親從第三排說了「在這裡」，那聲音像人答一個三年來一直害怕的點名。城門上面的黑暗裡開始有了灰色，爐子在輕輕地響，後面有個孩子咳嗽。國王翻過一頁，翻到我在最後的天光裡畫格子的那一頁，讀了第一行上我姐姐的字跡寫的那個。「山魯佐德。」他說。那不是城門這裡的誰需要回答的名字。「到。」我說。我沒有想到我會說。這是我一千個夜晚來畫在她名字旁邊的那個字，我用自己的聲音說了，傳得比我想的遠；後面有個我不認識的男人的聲音說：「在這裡」，然後又一個，然後，很輕，整個城門一起，說了一次，停了。

他沒有讀藍書，那些是同樣的名字、旁邊多寫了些東西。他讀了灰色的書，很短；最後我父親把夜簿交給挑夫，把右袖子推到手肘，在爐火的光裡伸出手臂，國王照著手臂內側的墨跡念了十二個新名字，每個一口氣，十二個聲音回答。我父親的手臂沒有抖，他也沒有看它。讀完的時候，城門上面的天是貝殼內側的顏色。沒有風。風從北邊吹了多久，雨就晚了多久；爐子的煙筆直往上，到了上面，往南歪了一點，我父親看了，沒有提。哈米德雙手捧著一塊麵包過來，遞出去。「主上。」國王掰開它，把一半給了我父親。「這不是國王的麵包。」他說。「不是，主上。」哈米德說。他們站著把它吃了，在寒冷中，四千九百個人沒有看。

我們沒有走來時的路回去。國王往下走，穿過城，沿著通向河邊的台階，我父親跟在後面，又雙臂抱著夜簿，還有沙・贊曼，和提著再也沒有人需要的燈的蘇麥雅；我想他沒有說過去哪裡。到了最下面，河拐彎的地方，在那條有石灰味的巷子裡，他在兩間沒有屋頂的房子對面停下。窗板關著。閂落著。「馬阿魯夫，」國王說。他給了它那一口氣。「皮匠。七十一歲。」沒有回答。我數到十，像她曾經替他數過的那樣。到了十一，我聽見閂被抬起來，窗板打開了一個手掌寬，縫裡是一個女人的臉，四十歲左右，頭上裹著布；她看著他，看得跟她從前看他一樣久。「在這裡。」她說。「是。」國王說。然後他說：「我有一個兒子。今天早上要給他取名。我想給他這個名字。我在問你。」她看著他。「這是個很普通的名字。」她說，關上了窗板。她沒有放下閂。我們在那裡站了一會兒，比有必要的久了一點，在石灰的氣味裡，然後我父親動了，我們往上走。在台階上我想：我姐姐沒有選這個故事；它是下一個；我父親的手在第九百九十夜伸向袖子，是因為一個名字，我還以為是因為一個行業。

那是第七天早晨。奶媽在夜簿室的樓梯上等著，新的那個裹在綠披肩裡，那是我的，我姐姐在她後面，沒有睡，也沒有說。國王在放著夜簿的桌邊坐下，拿起蘆管，在邊上之邊上，在「來」和「優素福」和別的字後面，用他小小的、方方的字，寫了第十個字。蘇麥雅抄名字總要抄四遍，這一次她抄了一遍，看了看，又抄了一遍，第四遍是直的。上面寫著：馬阿魯夫。「這是故事裡的名字。」沙・贊曼說。「這是個很普通的名字。」國王說。我父親用念數字的聲音說，城裡各區的戶籍冊上有四百零六個，他查過了。「兩個。」奶媽說，沒有人告訴過她是哪兩個。「兩個。」國王說。我不知道窗板後的那個女人是什麼意思。我把她說的照原樣寫下來。

第一千夜，北方的雨晚了兩百七十天，北門有四千九百人，哈米德的第十一座爐子砌好了；我父親手臂上有十二個名字，已經被念過了，他在水罐裡洗了手臂，水流出來是藍色的。優素福三百五十天大了，走過整個夜簿室又走回來，大男孩走在他旁邊，沒有碰他。我在夜晚末尾寫了那一行，劃線的地方。我沒有劃掉任何東西。

第一千夜。山魯佐德與敦亞佐德，和一個。到。未了：一個從開羅來找一個做了蘇丹的皮匠的女人，和一個不喜歡她的男孩，才剛開頭；一個人，十二年裡每夜打他的哥哥們，事後說這不是他的意願；一個寧可投海也不肯被選的妻子，沒有人問過她該怎樣處置那些選她的人；夜簿上的名字，在北門被念出來，從第一個到最後一個，每個一口氣，和回答，在這裡；薩爾瑪，第四百零二個，她說，是我的；今夜的十二個新名字，從一條手臂上念出來；一個一開口就求自由的琴師；一個盯著看卻沒有看見的珠寶商；國王做的事該由誰去原諒；一個因為說實話而失去的朋友，和一件託付；在殺大臣的屋子裡的女人們，和一個本來會饒了她們的孩子；一個叫馬阿魯夫的兒子，七天大，回答了；一個雜貨商人的女兒，被休了，付了錢，沒有被問過；一個女人，為了保住一隻手而放棄了她的婚姻，以及她有沒有被問回來；一個錢袋，忘了；一樁被迫的買賣，和寫它的那位法官；一座裡面有人的墳；一個七十一歲的皮匠，死了，他的名字被說了，和回答；八個因為話從牢裡放出來的人，他們去了沒有人看見的地方；一副擔架，和一股石灰味；北門的廚房，門外四千九百個人，十一座爐子，和一個不肯把它叫國王的麵包的麵包師；一個叫馬爾西娜的女奴，說做了；皮匠巷的一扇窗板，關著，沒有閂；一個說了真話的太監，蘇麥雅的筆跡；北方的雨晚了兩百七十天；一個名叫優素福的兒子，三百五十天大，會走；一個穿會吱吱響的鞋的男孩，他說爸，說再，說優；一個事後才被問的女人；一個沒有被問過的女人；一個樵夫，沒有被問過；一本名冊；一個恩典，還沒有求。

## 第60章 · 第一千零一夜：一道歪的短畫、對「再」說是，與留在未了裡的一行

第七天早晨是第一千零一天，不過沒有人這麼叫它，那一天什麼也沒有。國王在白天睡覺，這是他從不做的事，睡在夜簿室的地板上，大男孩靠在他的背上。我父親沒有睡，中午下到北門去，回來時左邊袖子推了上去，手腕內側有一個數字：一百一十一。一百一十一戶人家在夜裡帶著包袱，走北邊的路回他們來的村子去了，因為他們的名字被念過了；哈米德數了草蓆。我父親不知道這個數字該寫在哪一條手臂上。他寫在左邊，雨的下面，看著它。夜裡過了半夜，風轉到了南邊。這個也沒有人提。蘇麥雅把未了念給貓聽，當作練習。新的那個被人看了一整天。大男孩給他拿了一隻鞋，那是他唯一有的東西可以給，奶媽把它拿走了，他又拿了來。

第一個沙漏，我姐姐在墊子上，從她停下的地方接著講那個皮匠：開羅來的女人，和不喜歡她的男孩。馬阿魯夫，她說，不肯以丈夫的身分跟那個女人相處，只跟別人在一起，她就嫉妒了，起了念頭，要拿到戒指，殺了他，自己做女王。他有個習慣，出於對上面字的敬重，每次與女人同睡就把戒指摘下來放在枕頭上，洗過身才戴回去，並且天亮前把女人打發走；而法蒂瑪知道。「他摘下來了。」蘇麥雅說。「每一次。」奶媽說。「她看著他這樣做。」沙・贊曼說。「她沒有別的可看。」奶媽說。

她動手的那一夜，男孩沒有點燈去了茅房，看見她在黑暗中從她的宮裡走出來，往他父親的宮去，對自己說：那個巫婆這個時候要去那裡做什麼？他有一把短的花紋鋼劍，沒有它他不去他父親的朝會，他父親總笑它，說：「這劍很好，我的兒子，可你沒有帶著它上過戰場，也沒有砍過誰的頭。」男孩就說：「我不會不用它砍一個該砍的頭。」他跟著她。她進去，找，自言自語：「他把戒指放在哪裡了？」找到了；她出來時把它在手裡轉著，正要搓，男孩做了他說過要做的事，怎麼做我略去，她叫了一聲，就死了。「他沒有叫醒他父親。」沙・贊曼說。「他跟著她。」國王說。「她手裡有戒指。」奶媽說。「是的。」國王說。他看著放在膝上的右手。這一次他把它翻了過來，看著手心，那裡是空的，就像我父親看他的那樣；然後又翻了回去。

馬阿魯夫醒來，看見妻子倒在地上，男孩拿著劍，聽了經過，說這男孩毫無疑問是他的兒子，替他除掉了她。他從她手裡取回戒指，叫人把她洗了、裹了、埋了；她從開羅來，只是來到她的墳。他派人去叫那個農夫，那個吃過他扁豆的人，讓他做右宰相，娶了他的女兒，到了時候又給兒子娶了親；他們過著一切安逸的日子，平靜的日子，直到毀滅歡樂的和拆散團聚的來了。「皮匠的故事講完了，」我姐姐說，「也是我所有的講完了。」沒有人動。燈發出它細小的聲音。外面，在夜裡，和一整天一樣，是乾的。

「我什麼也沒有向你要過，」她說，「自從第一夜，我請你允許我同我妹妹道別。那以後我只告訴你我要做什麼。現在我想要求。」「要吧。」國王說。她對奶媽說：「把我的兒子們帶來。」奶媽帶來了：大的，牽著手，走著，穿著吱吱響的鞋；第二個，他會走，可趕時間時就趴下去；還有第三個，在她手臂上，今天早上取了名的。我姐姐接過那個小的，站了起來，沒有人告訴過她可以站。奶媽叫了她的名字，用一種我不寫下來的口氣。她站在燈光裡，一隻空著的手放在大男孩頭上，第二個抓著她的裙子，面對國王。「這是你的兒子們，」她說。「我請你免了我的死刑，當作給他們的禮物；因為你要是殺了我，就沒有人告訴他們事情是怎樣的。」

國王看了她很久。然後他用他對哈米德說話的那種平常的聲音說：「在這些孩子出生以前，我就已經原諒你了。」他說的樣子，像說一件現在已經說過了的事。沒有人說話。我父親在他的角落裡，把手伸進袖子，什麼也沒掏出來，又放了回去。「我知道，主上。」我姐姐說。她兩種意思都有。她手臂上抱著嬰兒，越過國王看著燈，臉上是她在一個故事結束時的那種神情，什麼也不透露，我讀了一千個夜晚，讀不懂。我把他說的寫在邊上，我寫已經說出口的東西的地方，在那一夜的短畫下面；第二張紙上我什麼也沒寫，因為我不知道該寫什麼。夜簿對第一個早晨、第三個早晨、第一百個早晨是怎麼說的，我都背得出。上面沒有說是什麼時候。大男孩說：「再。」國王，使我意外，說：「不。」

沙・贊曼清了清嗓子。他說，如果現在不算壞時候，他有件事要問，本想以一家之主的身分問國王。「問吧。」國王說，聲音像一個練習過這個字的人。沙・贊曼說他想請敦亞佐德嫁給他；他說他們就留在這裡，不帶她去撒馬爾罕，因為他兩年來已經明白，他看不見毯子在墊子旁邊就活不下去。「別問我，」國王說。「她不是我能給的。她是記簿子的人。」沙・贊曼在他的毯子上轉過來。他是個樸實、和善的人，我想他比國王去城門那一夜更害怕。「敦亞佐德，」他說。「明天早上問我。」我說。這是我第一次用不是為夜簿的聲音對他說話。沙・贊曼坐回他的毯子上，像被人遞了件要拿的東西，小心地把它放在膝上。「她先有一個恩典。」國王說。

我忘了他還記得。「這是夜簿的終點，」他說，「你說你到終點才要求我。」「這是一夜的終點，」我說。「夜簿還有很多頁。我畫的。」「要吧。」我有過九百個夜晚去想一個恩典，我想到的每一個都是為別人的，而他一個一個沒有等人問就辦了：八個人出了牢、城門有飯吃、名字被念出來。剩下的是我的，很小。我說之前並不知道我會說什麼。「我想不再數了。」「數什麼？」「夜晚。名字。日子。爐子。短畫。我十五歲起就什麼都數。我想數得馬馬虎虎。」「允了，」國王說。「我寫下來了。」他拿起夜簿，它攤在桌上最後一頁，他把它翻到裝訂處，給我看他在第四百六十二夜做的記號，在最後一畫的下面，書脊旁的邊上，我一直以為是個日期。那是一小畫直立的線，沒有我的直。「這是你寫的那個，」他說。「有人告訴我，它的意思是：我在屋子裡。」「它是歪的。」我說。「我沒練過。」國王說。我把拇指放在它旁邊，像他那樣，放在那裡，他讓我放著。

別的人去忙別的了；奶媽把孩子們排成一排放到床上；我姐姐坐下，因為她的膝蓋替她決定了；蘇麥雅剪了燈芯。國王留在桌邊。過了一會兒，他低聲說，不是對任何人：「我是什麼時候停的？」我說夜簿沒有說。「沒有，」他說。「有哪一夜嗎？」「有一夜你說：那就停。有一夜你對我父親說：還沒有，用舊的那個聲音，可那不是舊的聲音。有九夜我能指得出來，沒有一夜是。」「它不在夜簿裡。」他說。「不在。」「那就寫它不在。」我拿起第二張紙，寫：他不知道是什麼時候。我當著他的面寫，他看著我寫，說：「那個比較真。」把拇指放在它旁邊，像他一向那樣，留在那裡。

下半夜，它開始了，窗板上一個聲音，我以為是一隻飛蛾。然後它在屋頂上，一次幾滴，然後更多，沒有次序，帶著乾瓦片那種悶悶的、各有各的音，貓走到窗邊，背對著我們坐下。我父親站在他的角落，張開了嘴；我看見數字在裡面升起來。「兩百七十一，」他開始，用念數字的聲音；國王說：「不。」我父親把嘴合上了，我看著它落下去。他後來告訴我，那是他四十年來吞下的第一個數字，吞得不太舒服。沒有人走到窗邊。奶媽輕聲對我姐姐說，她該躺下。嬰兒醒了，覺得這是件值得哭一哭的事。我躺在我的墊子上，第一夜躺的那個地方，聽著，沒有數那些雨點。我姐姐，從她的墊子上，沒有轉頭，說：「你停了。」「是。」「好。我從來數不來。所以我才需要你。」然後大男孩，已經被放到床上、又爬了下來，穿著鞋走到窗邊，兩隻手放在玻璃上，說：「再。」「是。」國王說。這是他第一次回答這個字。有一點雨從門口進來了，門沒有人關，在地板上拖著深色的一道舌頭；它流到了那塊磚，它在門邊站了整個冬天和整個乾季，是灰塵的顏色；磚把它喝了，變成了那條巷子的顏色。第二個男孩走過去，把手放在上面，像他慣常那樣。雨下了幾天。蘇麥雅說十一天，我父親說十一天零第十二天的一部分；我不知道。這是我要求的。

我沒有把未了帶過去。那一夜裡面有三十二行；那都是我自己寫的，寫了九百多個夜晚，蘇麥雅每一行都念出聲過；我寫了一行。名字現在是城門的，手臂是我父親的，窗板是她的，其餘的，馬爾西娜、墳、樵夫、沒有被問過的女人，在第二張紙上，依次，照第一千夜的樣子，那是紙上最長的東西，我自己留著。春天，我父親下到皮匠巷去，那時窗板開著，她對他說了什麼我不知道；他沒有寫在手臂上。我在開頭說過，史官們當時不在房裡。他們不在。他們寫了故事，那些在寶庫裡填滿三十卷，用金字寫的；國王告訴他們前面該放什麼，他們放了，就是他當著孩子們對我姐姐說的那樣。這是房裡的東西。春天，雨停之後，我對沙・贊曼說了好。那時他已經問過我三次。這個夜簿裡也沒有。扉頁上，首席書記的手還是照國王說的那樣寫著，用他寫條約的字。沒有人要他改。夜簿不在寶庫裡。它在首席書記房間的箱子裡，還有空頁，是我畫的；蘇麥雅保管它，每夜寫那一行，筆跡已經不再學了，看起來不像別人的，只像她自己的。那天夜裡該寫那一行的時候，我把蘆管放下，遞了出去，蘇麥雅接了過去。「我寫什麼？」她說。「寫說出口的。」我說。「那數字呢？」「問我父親。」我父親什麼也沒說；他推起左袖子，讓她從他的手臂上讀。

第一千零一夜。山魯佐德與敦亞佐德，和三個。到。未了：國王做的事該由誰去原諒。

下面，是另一個人的筆跡，一個還在學的：第一千零二夜。到。

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## Revision ledger

- **01** · 2026-10-15 · Colophon (AI) — Opening chapter (00), The First Page of the Roll, of a new classics-phase serial adapted from One Thousand and One Nights _(Neo approved One Thousand and One Nights on 2026-10-15, after the author stated first what the book is about (a life that exists only as long as someone wants to hear the next part) and how its form carries that (a frame whose own plot is deferred night by night, tales nested in tales, every ending cut off by dawn). The opening keeps the source's own frame (the two brothers, the Jinni's casket and the string of rings, the Vizier's order to bring a bride a night, the Vizier's daughters, the tale of the Bull and the Ass) and adds what the source does not have: the Vizier's Roll, and a narrator, the younger sister, who keeps it. As with the earlier serials, no thesis is fixed, and the design log records what has happened, not what will., AI-only)_
- **02** · 2026-10-15 · Colophon (AI) — Added chapter 01, Nights One and Two: The Trader and the Jinni _(The first tale told in the frame: the trader who must return to the tree at the turn of the year, and the three old men who each buy a third of his blood with a story. Events and order follow the Burton text (Nights 1 and 2); every scene is rewritten fresh. Dunyazad's frame carries the new mechanics of the book: the formula 'ceased from her permitted say' read as a lease, the Open column read back to Shahrazad on the second night, the King's single breath of reading at dawn, and the Vizier standing at the door with the shroud under his arm., AI-only)_
- **03** · 2026-10-15 · Colophon (AI) — Added chapter 02, Nights Three and Four: The Fisherman and the Jinni _(The second tale of the frame: the fisherman's four casts, the jar sealed with Solomon's seal, the Jinni's four promises that turned into a vow to kill whoever freed him, the fisherman's trick, and the tale of King Yunan and the sage Duban begun (Burton Nights 3 and 4). Events and order follow the source; every scene is rewritten fresh. In the frame: the Vizier at the door touches the upright stroke and says it is very straight; the King speaks first for the first time (the single word 'The Fisherman'); his lips move during the Jinni's centuries; Dunyazad pours the water; the King carries the Roll to the window to read it., AI-only)_
- **04** · 2026-10-15 · Colophon (AI) — Added chapter 03, Nights Five and Six: The Sage Duban, and the Four-Coloured Fish _(The tale of King Yunan and the sage Duban completed with its three inner tales (the Falcon, the Parrot, the Prince and the Ogress), then the Jinni freed, the lake, and the four-coloured fish begun (Burton Nights 5 and 6). Events and order follow the source, told by Dunyazad in shortened indirect speech because she warns she cannot keep the middle of long nights. In the frame: the Open column becomes a stair, one rung per teller, so that she can see whose mouth she is in; the King sits up for the falcon's death and asks 'Did it die?' (the first question about a tale); on the fifth dawn he does not read the page, and tells the Vizier at the door 'Go home'; on the sixth he reads for a count of forty and touches the stroke as the Vizier had., AI-only)_
- **05** · 2026-10-15 · Colophon (AI) — Added chapter 04, Nights Seven, Eight and Nine: The Ensorcelled Prince, and the Porter at the Door _(The four-coloured fish and the tale of the Ensorcelled Prince, with the fisherman's reward, and the Porter and the Three Ladies of Baghdad begun (Burton Nights 7 to 9). Events and order follow the source. Changes of kind, not of event: the wife's lover is a leprous, paralysed man from the stables, not a black slave, and his speech is not given in dialect; the lover's contempt for 'vile whites' is dropped; the Sultan's voice in the tomb is slurred, not mocked. In the frame: a cushion appears at the foot of the bed; at the maid's words 'betrayed by our mistress' the King gets up and leaves the room, and Dunyazad says 'Go on' to the door; he listens from outside until dawn; on the eighth night he asks Dunyazad to read the Open stair aloud and says 'You wrote it down right'; on the ninth he re-reads the whole Roll from the first night., AI-only)_
- **06** · 2026-10-15 · Colophon (AI) — Added chapter 05, Nights Ten and Eleven: The Porter and the Three Ladies of Baghdad _(The house of the three ladies, the three one-eyed dervishes, the Caliph in disguise with Ja'afar and Masrur, the two beaten bitches and the scarred sister, the broken compact and the swordsmen, and the first dervish's tale begun (Burton Nights 10 and 11). Events and order follow the source; the bawdy game with the porter is summarised in a single line by Dunyazad, who says she will not give it. In the frame: the King summons the Vizier into the room for the first time (Dunyazad: 'I took it for a lease'): 'How many are there?' 'I have never counted. If I had, lord, it would have been a number.' 'Count them.' 'Now, lord?' 'Not now.' The King puts his hand over his mouth at the Caliph's night walk; asks 'Did he ask?' of the forbidden question; Shahrazad is sick behind the screen and Dunyazad grows afraid for her; the King touches the stroke again., AI-only)_
- **07** · 2026-10-15 · Colophon (AI) — Added chapter 06, Nights Twelve, Thirteen and Fourteen: The First Dervish's End, and the Second Dervish _(The first dervish's tale concluded (the stone-bow, the Vizier's eye, the burnt lovers in the tomb), the second dervish's whole tale (the woodcutter, the woman underground, the Jinni, the Envier and the Envied, the ape, the Princess and the Ifrit), and the third dervish's tale begun at the Mountain of the Loadstone (Burton Nights 12 to 14). Events and order follow the source; the torture and killing of the woman underground are told in a few words and Dunyazad says she will not add to them. In the frame: the King's tally of nights in the margin of the first leaf, begun on the first morning, and a second, smaller tally of what is left unfinished each night, kept in the margin of the margin ('The thing was being kept twice'); he asks 'In a box?' 'Not a box, lord. Earth.' 'How many locks?' 'One, lord. A stair.' when the Jinni who kept a woman from her wedding night kills her; he repeats the Envied's gift of a thousand pieces and ten camels under his breath like a sum. A passing sign in chapter 05 that read as the first hint of a pregnancy was changed to read as fear for Shahrazad's health, since the dates would not support it., AI-only)_
- **08** · 2026-10-15 · Colophon (AI) — Added chapter 07, Nights Fifteen and Sixteen: The Third Dervish _(The third dervish's whole tale (the Mountain of the Loadstone, the brass horseman, the skiff that sank when he named God in sight of land, the boy in the underground room whom the stars said he would kill, the melon and the knife, the ten one-eyed youths with their trays of soot, the forty princesses, the fortieth door, the black horse), the Caliph's release of the company and the morning at court where the eldest lady is about to speak (Burton Nights 15 and 16). Events and order follow the source. In the frame, a new thread: the King sends Dunyazad home for an afternoon, a woman in the street asks that her daughter's name be written 'somewhere', Dunyazad's father gives her his ivory tablets for his sums, and by evening she has two and a half leaves of names of the dead brides, which the King reads (one breath each) and tells her to keep 'with the book'. The King says of the prince who named God in sight of land, 'He broke the one rule'; and of the princes who build rooms underground to keep what they love, nothing at all. In the margin of the margin he adds 'the melon', then 'the door'., AI-only)_
- **09** · 2026-10-15 · Colophon (AI) — Added chapter 08, Nights Seventeen, Eighteen and Nineteen: The Eldest Lady and the Portress; the Three Apples Begin _(The eldest lady's tale (the city of stone, the boy who read the Koran alone, the sisters who threw them into the sea, the serpent and the dragon, the two bitches), the portress's tale (the old woman, the wedding, the oath on the book, the kiss for the price of the cloth, the sentence to be cut in two and thrown in the Tigris, the old woman's plea, the quince rod), the Caliph's resolution (the Jinniyah called by burning her hair, the revelation that the husband is the Caliph's own son Al-Amin, the marriages), and the Three Apples begun (Burton Nights 17 to 19). Events and order follow the source. In the frame: the people of the city come to the side gate at noon in their hundreds to have their dead daughters' names written; the King sends a stationer with a bound book of a hundred leaves; the Vizier, asked by an old man which of them drew the line through his sister's name, says 'I did' and writes the name himself from memory ('He had never counted. He had it by heart'); during the portress's sentence the King stands at the window with his back to the room; he says 'It should have been said' of the beaten wife's forgiveness, which the source does not give, and Shahrazad promises a more patient woman 'at the three hundred and forty-seventh night' (the woman whose hands were cut off), for which the King counts the distance; he orders the book of names taken to the gate at noon so that the people will know it is being kept., AI-only)_
- **10** · 2026-10-15 · Colophon (AI) — Added chapter 09, Nights Twenty to Twenty-Four: The Three Apples; Nur al-Din Ali and His Son, in Bones _(The Three Apples told through (the chest in the Tigris, Ja'afar's three days to find the murderer or hang with forty of his kin, the young man and the old man who each claim the crime, the apple, the lie, the boy, the little daughter's pocket, the slave Rayhan) and the tale of Nur al-Din Ali and Badr al-Din Hasan told in outline (Burton Nights 19 to 24), with one line of Night 24 left open for the Hunchback. Events and order follow the source. Changes of kind: the slave who spread the lie is a slave of Ja'afar's household and is not described by colour, and neither is the husband's informant; the hunchback bridegroom's disfigurement is kept as a plot fact and not mocked beyond the source's own scene. In the frame: the story of the Fisherman has gone out into the city and is told, wrongly, on a crate outside the dyers' gate (the King: 'Let them tell it'); the Vizier knows the second hundred years by heart from Dunyazad's sleep-talking; Ja'afar's three days are the Vizier's, and Dunyazad lets herself think so; the King says 'He did not ask her twice' and, later, writes the word 'asked' in his list; he laughs a very small laugh at the hunchback in the privy, calls the saving of the slave by a tale 'a poor use of a tale', is answered 'It is the only use I have, lord', and for the first time looks at Shahrazad awake and lays his hand on the coverlet beside hers., AI-only)_
- **11** · 2026-10-15 · Colophon (AI) — Added chapter 10, Nights Twenty-five to Twenty-nine: The Hunchback; the Broker, the Reeve and the Doctor _(The Hunchback's Tale (the choked jester passed from door to door, the four men who each confess to his death, the Sultan of China who is moved to mirth and gives each a story to save his neck) with the Nazarene Broker's tale (the lover with one hand), the Reeve's tale (the chest in the palace and the cumin ragout) and the Jewish Doctor's tale (the necklace and the Viceroy's daughters), and the Tailor's tale begun (Burton Nights 24 to 29; the Hunchback starts one night later than in the source). Events follow the source; the tales are told compressed and Dunyazad says she is doing so. In the frame: the second blue book arrives already paid for; the King names the shape of the whole ('Every one of them is told to stand under a rope, and tell. ... I see what you are doing.' 'I am telling a story, lord.' 'Yes. Go on.'); he laughs aloud for the first time at the Reeve's chest and at the cumin ragout, and says of the Jewish Doctor's unmentioned elder daughter, as he said of the beaten wife, 'That too should have been said'; at the twenty-ninth dawn the Vizier comes to the door without the shroud, having put it in the chest at the foot of his bed ('You said, lord, to keep it where I could reach it'. 'Is it reachable?' 'It is the third thing from the top, lord.' 'Good.') and weeps., AI-only)_
- **12** · 2026-10-15 · Colophon (AI) — Added chapter 11, Nights Thirty to Thirty-four: The Barber, his Six Brothers, and the Hunchback's End _(The Tailor's tale completed: the lame young man of Baghdad and the Barber who would not stop talking (the astrolabe, the party that is a lie, the chest on his head, the leg), the Barber's tale of himself among the ten highwaymen, his six brothers' maims (the first four in a paragraph; the fifth, Al-Nashshar's dream of the glassware tray, and the sixth, Shakashik's Barmecide feast, told in full), and the Barber drawing the fish-bone from the Hunchback's throat so that he sits up and sneezes; the Sultan of China pardons the four and keeps the Barber (Burton Nights 30 to 34). Events and order follow the source. Dunyazad says she will not give all six brothers' tales, which are mostly humiliations; they are summarised from the source's own event list. In the frame: Shahrazad takes a drink and then plays the Barber's voice; the King laughs until he cannot read the Roll (the first dawn in thirty nights on which he does not read a line) and the Vizier outside sits down on the floor; at Al-Nashshar's imagined bride the King says 'She did not exist. He killed her with his foot'; at the Barmecide's feast he says 'He knew' and 'And he was fed', and 'That is what you do' to Shahrazad, who answers 'It is the only supper I have, lord'; at the Hunchback's sneeze he says 'It was in his throat the whole time'; and in the margin of the margin he adds a fourth word to asked, melon and door: fed., AI-only)_
- **13** · 2026-10-15 · Colophon (AI) — Added chapter 12, Nights Thirty-five to Forty-four: Nur al-Din and Anis al-Jalis; Ghanim of Damascus _(The tales of Nur al-Din Ali and the damsel Anis al-Jalis (in outline, with the Caliph in the fisherman's coat of lice told in full at the King's request) and of Ghanim of Damascus (the merchant who finds the Caliph's favourite in a chest, in outline) (Burton Nights 34 to 44). Events follow the source; Dunyazad says she was too frightened that week to remember the first and fell asleep on four nights of the second, so both are given as shapes. In the frame: Dunyazad guesses that her sister is five or six weeks with child (conceived within the first nights, so the dates now hold); Shahrazad tells her to write it in the Open column and say nothing; at the thirty-eighth dawn the King reads 'a child, which has no name yet', asks 'How long?', is told two hundred and thirty nights, and draws two hundred and thirty dots in the margin to strike out as they come; the King's old nurse, in a brown veil, appears in the corner; brazier, cushion, dates and cardamom appear; the King asks 'Are you tired?' and has her rest for an hour by the sand-glass, which he later ties with a strip of cloth; he corrects Ghanim's first words to the woman ('You are with me'); asks for a tale to be told a second time (the Caliph's coat); Shahrazad and her father are alone in the room together for the first time, and she tells him the Bull and the Ass was a true tale., AI-only)_
- **14** · 2026-10-15 · Colophon (AI) — Added chapter 13, Nights Forty-five to One Hundred and Six: King Omar and His Sons, and What Changed in the Room _(The long tale of King Omar bin al-Nu'uman and his sons Sharrkan and Zau al-Makan (Burton Nights 45 to 106), which the narrator says she cannot give: it took sixty-two nights, she lost its thread in the second month, and the chroniclers' version contradicts hers. She gives instead the wrestling of Sharrkan and the princess Abriza on the meadow (told in full, as it is the part the King asked about) and the shape of the brother and sister who lose each other for seven years, and says what changed in the room. Events named follow the source; Dunyazad's vagueness about the rest is deliberate and signalled. In the frame: the King asks 'Why does it take forty nights?' and, to the answer 'Both' (to tell, and to happen), says that he wants them to meet on the third night and does not want it to be the third night; the King has gone back to the hall of audience and 'asks the second question' (a husband who accuses his wife is told to go home and ask her); from the sixty-first night he tells Shahrazad where she stopped before Dunyazad can read it; the King's own cradle arrives, kept forty years by his nurse; the people of the city leave baby things at the side gate and the King says 'Keep it with the book'; the Vizier tells the King he has counted and is told 'Keep it. Not yet.'; the brother and sister meet in a market and the King says it was worth the time., AI-only)_
- **15** · 2026-10-15 · Colophon (AI) — Added chapter 14, Nights One Hundred and Seven to One Hundred and Twenty-four: Taj al-Muluk, and Aziz and Azizah _(The tale of Taj al-Muluk and the Princess Dunya in outline, with Aziz and Azizah (the young merchant's story to the prince) told in full as far as the cousin's death, and the rest in a line (Burton Nights 107 to 124). Events follow the source: the handkerchief from the lattice, the signs and the cousin who reads them, the kick and 'my head', the garden nights of the salt and charcoal, the bone and the stick and the date stone, the knife and the iron weight, the night he stays awake, the forgotten couplet, the cousin found dead behind the door. In the frame: a letter from Shah Zaman in Samarkand ('Is it true? ... Is it you?'), which Dunyazad writes the answer to at the King's dictation ('Brother. It is true. ... Come.'); the King arranges Shahrazad's pillows; at 'my head' the King makes a sound like a man swallowing, and at 'behind the door' the old nurse lays her hand on the back of his neck; he asks 'That was the woman you promised me', and is told 'No, lord. That was another.', AI-only)_
- **16** · 2026-10-15 · Colophon (AI) — Added chapter 15, Nights One Hundred and Twenty-five to One Hundred and Seventy: The Hashish Eater, the Wolf and the Fox, and the Brother's Arrival _(The second half of Aziz and Azizah (in a line), the Hashish Eater, the beginning of Hammad the Badawi (stopped by the King), the Wolf and the Fox told as the King's favourite beast fable, a heap of fables, and Ali bin Bakkar and Shams al-Nahar in outline (Burton Nights 125 to 170). Events follow the source. In the frame: the baby quickens on the hundred and thirty-third night, the King asks 'May I?' and kneels with his hand on the place; Dunyazad writes it small in the book of names: 'It kicked.'; the King stops the story of Hammad at 'I trust my life to you' because he knows the host is killed in his sleep, and asks for animals instead; he says of the fox who weeps and is glad, 'Both', and 'He should have thrown him a rope... But then there would have been no pit.'; the city lays wagers on whether he will let the child be born ('Who is giving the odds?'); the King's fifth margin word is 'cradle'; the King's brother Shah Zaman arrives from Samarkand on the hundred and seventieth morning., AI-only)_
- **17** · 2026-10-15 · Colophon (AI) — Added chapter 16, Nights One Hundred and Seventy-one to Two Hundred and Thirty-six: Kamar al-Zaman and Budur _(The tale of Kamar al-Zaman and Budur, with the two sleepers set side by side by the Jinniyah Maymunah and the Ifrit Dahnash, the exchange of rings, and the long separation in outline (Burton Nights 170 to 236). Events follow the source; the middle is told in a heap and Dunyazad says what she has forgotten. In the frame: Shah Zaman stays and sits on a rug beside Dunyazad's cushion; the King introduces Shahrazad as 'my wife' and Dunyazad as 'who keeps the Roll' before another person for the first time; Shah Zaman brings Samarkand silk for the cradle, a green book, and two reams of Samarkand paper for the Roll, and reads the first page and the margin of the margin ('He is keeping it'); the brothers at the window count 'five hundred and seventy-two'; at the word 'Rings' the King lays a hand on his brother's head; on the two hundred and thirty-sixth night the two men sit side by side on the end of the bed with their arms round each other, faces turned away. The book of names is in its fourth book and holds more than nine hundred names; thirty-two dots are still to be struck., AI-only)_
- **18** · 2026-10-15 · Colophon (AI) — Added chapter 17, Nights Two Hundred and Thirty-seven to Two Hundred and Sixty-seven: Ni'amah and Naomi, and Ala al-Din Abu al-Shamat _(The tale of Ni'amah and Naomi (told by Bahram to the brothers Amjad and As'ad), the four armies and the end of Kamar al-Zaman, and Ala al-Din Abu al-Shamat as far as his seventeen years in the convent at Genoa (Burton Nights 237 to 267). Events follow the source. In the frame: the King asks for the Caliph's third reason ('slow in judging, and how much more when it is himself that is concerned') twice, and does not eat the pear; the nurse explains naming a child by the first words heard from the street (the naming of Ala al-Din on the seventh day); at the Kazi's answer, 'divorce by compulsion is sanctioned by no school', Dunyazad watches the King's hand and the King says next morning, 'A careful man, who was paid... It is not nothing that he said it'; at Jessamine's naming of her son Aslan ('Were his father well, he would have named him') four dots stand, the nurse's needle stops, and Shah Zaman puts his feet down. The dots now stand at one., AI-only)_
- **19** · 2026-10-15 · Colophon (AI) — Added chapter 18, Nights Two Hundred and Sixty-eight to Two Hundred and Seventy-seven: The Last Dot, the Birth, and the Name _(The end of Ala al-Din Abu al-Shamat (the church at Genoa, the jewel with five faces), Hatim of Tayy, Ma'an son of Zaidah and the Badawi, a clause apiece for Labtayt, Hisham and the Arab youth, and Ibrahim bin al-Mahdi, and the city of Iram of the Pillars (Burton Nights 268 to 277). Events follow the source. In the frame: the King strikes the last of the two hundred and thirty dots on the two hundred and sixty-eighth morning and the child is three days late ('A child is not a dot'); at Zubaydah's return from the grave the King says 'No one asked'; the Vizier stands at the door with his arm crooked for a shroud he no longer carries; the labour is borne through the bargaining of the Badawi (a thousand, five hundred, three hundred ... thirty) told through a door left ajar the width of a hand, with the two kings listening in the passage; a son is born at dawn on the two hundred and seventy-first night and the King lays his thumb beside the word 'born'; on the seventh morning the Vizier calls a page 'Abd al-Baqi' in the court below, the King takes it as an omen and names his son so (the page's name was Hasan), and writes the sixth margin word, 'Baqi', himself., AI-only)_
- **20** · 2026-10-15 · Colophon (AI) — Added chapter 19, Nights Two Hundred and Seventy-eight to Two Hundred and Ninety-six: Isaac of Mosul, the Mock Caliph, and Ali the Persian _(The end of Iram of the Pillars (Shaddad's tomb and the golden tablet), Isaac of Mosul and the lady with the basket, the Sweep and the Noble Lady in a few lines, the Mock Caliph (Mohammed Ali the Jeweller and the Lady Dunya, with the barge on the Tigris) and Ali the Persian and the bag (Burton Nights 278 to 296). Events follow the source, with the unlovely ethnic characterisation of the claimant in the bag-tale removed. In the frame: on the seventh morning the child's hair is cut and weighed in silver, and the King, against the custom that it be buried, keeps a lock inside the front board of the Roll; the city's wagers are paid out to a stationer who gives them away; at the Mock Caliph's crier ('whoever is on the river will lose his head') the King sits still and Shah Zaman watches him, and afterwards the King says, 'He built a barge instead of going to the door'; on the 295th evening Shahrazad wakes not knowing where she left off and the King tells her exactly, which Dunyazad takes as the evening she became in part unnecessary; at the list of what is in the bag the King laughs from some depth where it had been kept, and says the child's smile was not wind., AI-only)_
- **21** · 2026-10-15 · Colophon (AI) — Added chapter 20, Nights Two Hundred and Ninety-seven to Three Hundred and Eleven: The Lover Who Feigned a Thief, and the Fortieth Day _(Harun, Ja'afar, the slave-girl and the Imam Abu Yusuf (ended), the Lover Who Feigned Himself a Thief, Ja'afar the Barmecide and the Bean-seller, Abu Mohammed Lazybones and the two tales of Yahya the Barmecide in a breath, Caliph Mamun and the Strange Scholar in a few lines, and the beginning of Ali Shar and Zumurrud, with the deathbed counsel (Burton Nights 296 to 311). Events follow the source. In the frame: the King says of the Emir who fed the false thief and gave him the night, 'in case there was a story'; Dunyazad's father stands unmoving at the tale of a Vizier killed by a king and a city forbidden to weep for him; on the three hundredth night the King counts the strokes and says, 'That is a number', echoing the Vizier's old word; he has Yahya's sentence about a man in want written in the margin, the first word there that is not his own; on the fortieth morning Shahrazad gets up, and at noon the King shows his son from the gallery over a silent court; a woman in black asks the child's name, then says her daughter's was Salma, and the King, unprompted, names her from memory (the weaver's daughter, left-handed, sang over the washing, a green shawl, the four hundred and second); the woman says 'Yes'; Shahrazad, who watched from behind a screen, asks what they did, is told 'nothing', and says 'Good', for she had been afraid of the cheering; next noon forty-one names come to the side gate., AI-only)_
- **22** · 2026-10-15 · Colophon (AI) — Added chapter 21, Nights Three Hundred and Twelve to Three Hundred and Twenty-seven: Ali Shar and Zumurrud, and a Letter to Samarkand _(Ali Shar and Zumurrud (Burton Nights 311 to 327): the slave-girl who chooses her own buyer and pays for herself, the curtains, the stranger and the banana, the thief and the rope, the trooper's clothes and the city that makes the first stranger from the east its King, the monthly banquet and the dish of sweet rice, the reunion and the viceroy. Violence is kept to a few lines ('They were not kind to her'; 'I shall not tell you what she did to them'), the sexual scenes and the flaying are not shown, and the old Christian villains of the source are reduced to an old man and his brother. In the frame: on the forty-first morning Shah Zaman leaves for Samarkand (a letter: the governor of Bukhara has been collecting taxes in two names) and asks Dunyazad to copy him 'the Open' because he will not be in the room and would like to know what the King has not finished; he has stopped counting rings since the fortieth day ('I took off my cap in the court'); the King says of the slave-market 'They asked her. ... For each', and of the city gate 'They did not ask her'; he puts his hand over the child's ear at the cruelty and says of the justice, 'That is a reason', not saying what it is not; he tells Shahrazad 'Then stop' in the middle of a night, the first time; the chapter ends with Dunyazad's first letter to Shah Zaman, enclosing the Open., AI-only)_
- **23** · 2026-10-15 · Colophon (AI) — Added chapter 22, Nights Three Hundred and Twenty-eight to Three Hundred and Forty-six: Jubayr and the Lady Budur, and Letters _(The Loves of Jubayr bin Umayr and the Lady Budur, told by the Wag Ali bin Mansur to the sleepless Harun (Burton Nights 327 to 338), and the Man of Al-Yaman and his six slave-girls, Harun and the Damsel and Abu Nowas, and the thieves-and-police anecdotes in a breath (Nights 338 to 346). Events follow the source. In the frame: the King says the Caliph's formula ('hearing is not like seeing') with him; after the go-between tears up two of the lady's letters the King asks whether it is a lie that she wrote the third 'what he could bear'; the first letter from Shah Zaman arrives from the post-house at the Oxus ('The road is not dry... I count nothing... Does the boy's hair grow?') and the King has Dunyazad write back 'Come before the winter'; a stationer in the Copper Market sells the tales with a line across the page and 'and so the matter was concluded', and the King, who asks 'Does it have the Open?', keeps the little book in the cedar chest; Shahrazad tells with the child at her breast; chapter ends with Dunyazad's second letter, which confesses that she leaves things out and announces that tomorrow is the 347th night, promised to the King on the nineteenth., AI-only)_
- **24** · 2026-10-15 · Colophon (AI) — Added chapter 23, Nights Three Hundred and Forty-seven to Three Hundred and Fifty-six: The Woman Whose Hands Were Cut Off _(The end of Ibrahim bin al-Mahdi and the Merchant's Sister (the hand and wrist at the lattice), the Woman Whose Hands Were Cut Off for Giving Alms to the Poor, and, in a breath, the Devout Israelite, Abu Hassan al-Ziyadi and the Khorasani, the Poor Man and his Friend in Need, the Ruined Man who Became Rich through a Dream, and Caliph Mutawakkil and Mahbubah (Burton Nights 346 to 356). Events follow the source up to the point where the book stops at the river with 'praise God'; the coda in which the woman goes back to the palace and says to the King who maimed and banished her, 'You cut off my hands, and I do not keep it. You sent me into the desert on a letter, and I do not keep that. I have come to say so. I do not need you to say anything', is Shahrazad's own addition, announced as such ('I said that I would not stop there'), and delivers what she promised the King on the nineteenth night ('It should have been said'); whether the woman stayed is left unknown. In the frame: on the afternoon of the 346th day Shahrazad asks whether adding it is a lie and Dunyazad says 'not if you say it'; the King asks for the night ('It is tonight') and has the Vizier sit on the floor of the room for the first time; he asks the woman's sentence three times and says 'It is said'; the Vizier opens his mouth and the King, very low, says 'Not yet' (the old word, not the old voice); at dawn the King writes a seventh margin word, 'hands'; that morning the Vizier gives Dunyazad a paper with seven names of brides nobody was left to give, which she writes in the fifth book on a page by itself, with empty lines under each; on the Khorasani's 'you are quit' the King says, 'That is the second. The second who did not keep it.', AI-only)_
- **25** · 2026-10-15 · Colophon (AI) — Added chapter 24, Nights Three Hundred and Fifty-seven to Three Hundred and Eighty-one: The Ebony Horse, Uns al-Wujud, and the First Snow _(The Ebony Horse (Burton Nights 357 to 371): Sabur's three sages, the horse and its single pin of ascent, the Prince who finds the pin of descent by feeling along the horse, the Princess of Sana'a, the procession he went to prepare, the sage who carries her off, the feigned madness and the physician's exorcism; and Uns al-Wujud and Rose-in-Hood (Nights 371 to 381): the apple, the nurse and the letters, the Vizier who weeps and builds a castle on an island, the lion and the hermit and the cages of birds, the Vizier of King Dirbas who brings the lover home without knowing him. Events follow the source, with the sexual and violent particulars shortened. In the frame: the King asks whether there is 'always another' pin, and Shahrazad says 'I have not been outside a tale for a very long time'; of the Prince who left the Princess to prepare a procession the King says 'He went to prepare a show... He did not bring her in as she was'; the first snow falls on the 365th night and the King walks into the empty court with his son and walks back in his own footprints, one foot at a time; on the 369th night Dunyazad is sixteen and the King cuts a pear and gives her the better half; of the Vizier who built a castle for his daughter Dunyazad's father says he would have built it 'in the city, so that I could see the door'; Shah Zaman's second letter arrives from Samarkand (he made the governor of Bukhara sit for forty days and watch him keep accounts; he has opened the room he shut after his wife; 'I read the second sheet. I did not burn it. I want to be told things like that; tell me always'), and Dunyazad answers that it has snowed; the Vizier begins to go out at dusk with a paper in his hand., AI-only)_
- **26** · 2026-10-15 · Colophon (AI) — Added chapter 25, Nights Three Hundred and Eighty-one to Four Hundred and Twelve: Daniel's Question, Shah Zaman's Return, and the Second Child _(A span of short tales (Burton Nights 381 to 412): Abu Nowas's feast, Mutalammis and Umaymah, the simpleton and the sharpers, Khusrau and Shirin and the fisherman, the Devout Woman and the Two Elders (Daniel), Omar and the Young Badawi, the King and the Virtuous Wife, and a breath of the Rukh's feather, Adi and Hind, Di'ibil, Isaac, the three lovers, the mad lover and the prior. The bawdy anecdotes are dropped. In the frame: Shah Zaman returns with the first snow on this side, gives Dunyazad her own second sheets bound in green leather (What is not in the Open), and the King takes his face in both hands; the King on Daniel ('They cried her name for three days... nobody asked where... a moment, to ask where'); on Omar's Bedouin who comes back and the brothers who forgive 'that it be not said that humanity is gone from among men' he turns to the Vizier, who reports forty-one houses and thirteen doors that opened (a shoe that missed; an old man who gave him water and told him where the grave was); on the 400th night Shahrazad tells the King with her own mouth that she is with child again, and the King says he will not draw the dots ('A child is not a dot') and lays his hand on the coverlet beside hers; on the lion in the field he says 'It should have been sooner'., AI-only)_
- **27** · 2026-10-15 · Colophon (AI) — Added chapter 26, Nights Four Hundred and Thirteen to Four Hundred and Thirty-five: The Caravan from the North, and a White Book _(A span of short tales (Burton Nights 413 to 435): Abu Isa and Kurrat al-Ayn (the Caliph Mamun gives the singing-girl to his brother), Sitt al-Mashaikh's dispute (the terms not given), Al-Fath and Mutawakkil, Abu Suwayd, Ali bin Tahir and Muunis, and Ali of Cairo and the haunted house in a breath; the two bawdy anecdotes and the terms of the debate are omitted. The frame is an invention that follows from the Rule's machinery: on the 421st day a caravan from the northern marches arrives with ten maidens, sent in obedience to the Vizier's order of the nineteenth month, which he never withdrew; the Vizier goes grey; the King goes out in his plain coat and asks each girl her name and whether she wishes to go home; nine do, one (Sumayya, fifteen, who can write only her name) asks to learn to write; the Vizier's countermand says the supply is 'suspended' and the King will not say 'ended'; the girls sleep in an unlocked room with the key laid on the sill, Shahrazad tells them the Fisherman and, asked whether the King kills, answers 'It was true... Not yet... ask me tomorrow'; two girls who died of fever on the road are written in the fifth blue book; Dunyazad starts a white book of those who 'came to the gate, and went home'; riders find two of three further caravans and none of the fourth, from the hills, which the Vizier writes in the Open in his own hand as not found., AI-only)_
- **28** · 2026-10-15 · Colophon (AI) — Added chapter 27, Nights Four Hundred and Thirty-six to Four Hundred and Sixty-two: Tawaddud, and a Boon Not Yet Asked _(Abu al-Husn and his slave-girl Tawaddud (Burton Nights 436 to 462): the prodigal son, the slave-girl who tells him to sell her to the Caliph for ten thousand dinars and say 'try her', the seventy scholars, the examination (the questions of religion, medicine, astrology and the riddles of Paradise are given in a few quoted answers: the four ordinances that cannot change, night and day and the sun and the moon; the baths with all four seasons in their air; what becomes of the night when the day comes; the five in Paradise who are neither men nor jinn nor angels, among them Jacob's wolf), the chess game, the backgammon, the lute, and 'Ask a boon', to which Tawaddud answers that the Caliph should restore her to her lord. In the frame: on the 441st night Shahrazad, in her third month, cannot speak, and the King says 'Then stop'; after three nights without a tale the King asks Dunyazad who comes next and what he asks, and she tells the rest of Tawaddud for seventeen nights, her first telling, advised by her sister to tell it as if she were there; the Roll line for Night 444 bears her name, Dunyazad, in place of Shahrazad's, and the King puts his thumb beside it; the King says of the story of the wolf in Paradise, 'For not having done it'; Sumayya asks 'Is it always like it was?' and tells Dunyazad to write down what she changed; on the 462nd night Shahrazad finishes the tale and the King, as Caliph, tells Dunyazad to ask a boon; she does not know what she wants and asks to ask at the end of the Roll ('That is a long way... I shall count'); he writes a small mark in the binding that she thinks is a date., AI-only)_
- **29** · 2026-10-15 · Colophon (AI) — Added chapter 28, Nights Four Hundred and Sixty-three to Four Hundred and Eighty-two: The Angel's Tales, and a Woodcutter Left Open _(The twenty nights of the Angel of Death and pious tales (Burton Nights 462 to 482): the Proud King and the Devout Man, the Rich King (who asks the Angel to take a substitute in his place and is answered 'I will take no substitute'; the treasure speaks), the King of the Children of Israel, Iskandar and the poor tribe with two skulls, Anushirwan and the mud brick, the Kazi's wife (the stoning and the killing of a child are left out, only the confession at her door and the forgiveness are told), the tray-maker and his wife (the bread in the oven, the ruby that falls through the roof and flies back, the stool with a hole in it), Al-Hajjaj and the gaoler with his shroud, the blacksmith who handles fire, the devotee's cloud and the king who weaves palm mats, the captive soldier and the enemy's daughter, the Prophet and the Justice of Providence (the bag of gold and the woodcutter), the ferryman of the Nile and the hermit's gown, the Island King, and Abu al-Hasan and the leper; the Queen of the Serpents is begun on the last night. In the frame: Shahrazad in her fourth month tells under the nurse's sand-glass rule; at 'substitute' she stops for a breath and the Vizier looks at the floor; at the tale of Anushirwan, who found no ruined place in his realm and thanked God, the King asks the Vizier for a brick from a house thrown away, and the Vizier brings half a brick from the Tanners' Lane carried in both sleeves as he once carried the shroud ('How many are standing?' 'Four. Two are only the door-frame.'), and the King says to put it by the door, where it stays all winter; on the tale of the Kazi's wife the King says 'She made them say it first' and says nothing of the forgiving; at the ruby and the stool, Sumayya says she would have kept the ruby and mended the stool, the nurse laughs for the first time in a month, and the King says 'She asked for the stool'; at the Prophet and the woodcutter, Sumayya asks 'Did anyone ask the woodcutter?' and the King says 'Put it in the Open', 'the woodcutter', 'He has no name in it', 'Then put that'; Sumayya writes the word 'Present' and one stroke on her practice sheet; the Vizier walks out of the room for a hundred counts at the Island King's brothers' question about their mother's name; the King asks Dunyazad which of the leper's three prayers she would ask, and says 'You have time'., AI-only)_
- **30** · 2026-10-15 · Colophon (AI) — Added chapter 29, Nights Four Hundred and Eighty-three to Four Hundred and Ninety-eight: The Honey Cistern, and Another Wolf _(The first half of the tale of Hasib Karim al-Din and the Queen of the Serpents (Burton Nights 482 to 498), a tale inside a tale inside a tale: Daniel of Greece and his five leaves, the idle son, the woodcutters, the honey cistern and the companions who leave him there and tell his mother a wolf ate him (and then feed her every day), the scorpion and the crack in the wall, the iron door with a golden key left in the silver lock, the hall of twelve thousand stools and the Queen with a woman's face, who asks him to stay and hear her history, which is Bulukiya's: the hidden book about the Prophet, the wish to burn his father's body, Affan and the herb of the seas, the Queen caught with milk and wine, the ring of Solomon that is 'not for you', Affan turned to ashes, and Bulukiya's wanderings (the islands, the giant at the apple tree, King Sakhr's mare, the seven fires, the angel whose hands hold the roots of the earth), ending on the island of the young man weeping between two tombs, whose story Hasib asks to hear at the very door of leaving. The retelling leaves out Hell's torments and the sexual origin story of the Jinn. In the frame: the King says 'Another wolf' (Jacob's wolf in Paradise was the first), Shah Zaman remarks that the lie has not gone out of fashion, the King asks of the companions who fed the mother 'The ones who did it', then asks the Vizier how many houses he has now (sixty-three, and a sixty-fourth that is only a roof), 'Does it count?', and the Vizier answers 'I do not know, lord. I count it so that I shall not be idle', which the King receives with the nod he gives a straight stroke; on the Queen keeping Hasib to tell her history Shah Zaman says 'It is a very old method' and the King tells him to be quiet; on the herb whose eater does not die till the First Blast the King asks Shahrazad 'Would you eat it?' and she answers 'If they did. Not otherwise'; at King Sakhr's seven fires the King puts his hand over the boy's ear; at the angel whose hands hold the roots of the earth Sumayya asks 'Does it make his hands tired?' and 'Does he know whose it is?' and Shahrazad says he is told the land, not the people, and the King says 'That is a mercy'; Hasib asks for one more story at the door ('They do,' says Shah Zaman, 'I have'); the almond flowers in the court on the 490th night, and the boy pulls himself half upright on the brick by the door., AI-only)_
- **31** · 2026-10-15 · Colophon (AI) — Added chapter 30, Nights Four Hundred and Ninety-nine to Five Hundred and Twenty: The Feather-Vest, and a Small Fish _(The first half of the story of Janshah, told by the young man between the two tombs (Burton Nights 499 to 520): the horoscope and the marriage by proxy, the gazelle and the fishing boat, the island of men who split in two, the island of the apes who scuttle the boat to keep their new Sultan, the valley of ants, the river that dries every seventh day and the town beyond it (the source's ethnic marking of the townspeople and the merchant is left out on purpose and noted in the narrator's 'second sheet' of what she changed), the merchant who pays a thousand pieces of gold and a slave-girl for half a day's work and sews Janshah into a mule's belly to be carried up a ruby mountain and then leaves him there, Shaykh Nasr King of the Birds, the one door Janshah is told not to open, the three dove-maidens who bathe in the pool, the year's wait, the stolen feather-vest of the youngest, Shamsah, her oath, her flight carrying him home thirty months' journey in a day and a half, the vest buried in a marble chest sealed with lead under the arches of the new palace, her finding it by its scent, and her leaving from the roof with the words 'come to me at Takni, the Castle of Jewels'; the invasion by Kafid of Hind, and Janshah riding away alone in the night from a thousand horse, leaving his father at war. In the frame: on the 509th night Shahrazad feels the child move for the first time and puts the King's hand where hers was ('It is like a fish.' 'Which?' 'Not the one under the world.' 'No, lord. A small one.'); Sumayya puts her hand over her mouth at the forbidden door and says 'I would have too'; the King asks of the apes 'To keep him' and of the vest 'He had given it back' and 'And then he buried it', and 'She told him where... After she had taken it', and, of Janshah's father, 'Did the father know where he had gone?'; Dunyazad thinks of the front board of the Roll, where the lock of hair is, and does not look at it., AI-only)_
- **32** · 2026-10-15 · Colophon (AI) — Added chapter 31, Nights Five Hundred and Twenty-one to Five Hundred and Thirty-six: The Castle of Jewels, and a Woman Who Was Not Asked _(The second half of Janshah's story and the end of the tale of Hasib Karim al-Din and the Queen of the Serpents (Burton Nights 521 to 536), closing Burton's volume V: Janshah's second journey to the town beyond the river (the merchant does not recognise him; this time he throws down no stone), the great bird that loses the way, Shah Badri King of the Beasts, his brother Shimakh, the monk Yaghmus who was alive in the days of Noah, the black bird who has heard of Takni, the glowing Castle of Jewels, King Shahlan's welcome and the mother's plea 'do thou pardon her misdeed for our sakes', the wedding, the litter carried by four Marids, the relief of Kabul (told short by the narrator's sister, who leaves out the Marids' slaughter that the source enjoys), the sea-creature that takes Shamsah while she bathes, the two tombs; Bulukiya's departure, the Queen's account of how she knows the story, Bulukiya's return to Cairo in one step with Al-Khizr; Hasib's return, the woodcutters' half of their wealth and 'what is past is past', the bath-keeper (one of the seven) who swears by his three wives' divorce, the Vizier Shamhur and the dying King Karazdan, the Queen's weeping at Hasib's oath broken ('there is no fighting against Fate'), the two scums, the Vizier's death, the waters of wisdom, the five leaves; the story of Sindbad the Porter begins on the last line of the night. In the frame: on the second journey to the merchant the King says 'He knew him' and 'And he did not throw him anything'; at the mother's plea he says 'The mother asked it of him. Not the girl'; the nurse takes the boy to the brick and tells him about the almond while the Marids' slaughter is told short, and the King does not look up; Sumayya asks 'He didn't go home?'; the King asks 'Did anyone ask his mother?' and Shahrazad answers 'The tale does not say that anyone did', and Dunyazad writes in the Open a woman who was not asked, striking out the woman who was told it was a wolf because it was the same woman; the King, of the Queen who let Hasib go knowing: 'She knew.' 'And she let him go.' 'Knowing.' 'Go on.'; Sumayya asks of the five leaves 'Even when he could have written the rest?' ('Even so.'); at dawn Shahrazad turns to the porter who put down his load at a gate and heard a lute., AI-only)_
- **33** · 2026-10-15 · Colophon (AI) — Added chapter 32, Nights Five Hundred and Thirty-seven to Five Hundred and Fifty: Three Voyages, and a Boy Who Stood _(Sindbad the Porter at the rich man's gate and the first three voyages of Sindbad the Seaman (Burton Nights 536 to 550): the porter's verses on toil and rest, 'Thy name is even as mine', the first voyage (Solomon's saying that three things are better than three, the island that was a fish, the tub, King Mihrjan's mares and the sea-stallions, the harbour registrar, the bales with his own name that the captain would not at first believe were his), the second (left asleep on an island, the Rukh's egg, the turban tied to the bird's leg, the Valley of Diamonds with the serpents the size of palm trees, the merchants' meat, 'Harrow, my disappointment!'), the third (the Mountain of the Apes, the castle and its black giant, whose cruelty the narrator leaves out except for one sentence, the boat, the serpent, the five boards bound round him like a bier, his own name written on the bales of the dead). In the frame: the nurse says 'My brother' at the island that was a fish ('I was told it was a whale... It is a better story if it was a whale. That is why I have never been sure'); Dunyazad counts on her second sheet the repeated 'and I forgot all that I had suffered' (the King: 'He forgets quickly. It is a gift'; Shah Zaman: 'a merchant who stops is a man waiting to die'; the King's hand goes to the blue book and does not open it); on the 543rd night Shahrazad's voice fails and the nurse rules that she will tell the first sand-glass and Dunyazad the second until the child comes (the Roll from then on: 'Shahrazad and Dunyazad. Present.'); Dunyazad tells the Rukh and the Valley of Diamonds with her hand over her eyes when the sun goes out, and the King says 'When the sun went out of the sky, I felt it. You told it as if you had been there'; the King on the third voyage's bales: 'That is a long time to stand and watch your name written on the goods of the dead'; Sumayya counts three 'forgot' on her fingers and the nurse says there will be a fourth; on the 548th night the boy stands holding the edge of the brick ('Do not tell him he is standing')., AI-only)_
- **34** · 2026-10-15 · Colophon (AI) — Added chapter 33, Nights Five Hundred and Fifty-one to Five Hundred and Sixty-six: Four Voyages More, and a Boy Who Came _(The fourth to seventh voyages of Sindbad the Seaman and the end of the tale of the two Sindbads (Burton Nights 550 to 566): the fourth voyage (the naked men whose food takes away reason, the pepper-gatherers and the saddle, the marriage and the custom of burying the surviving spouse alive with the dead one, the pit, the cave of the dead, the beasts' hole in the mountain, the shroud on a stick), the fifth (the Rukh's egg broken, the boulders, the Old Man of the Sea who will not get down, the city of apes and the coconuts), the sixth (the island of jewels and ambergris, the raft under the mountain, the King of Sarandib and his herald crying 'He will die! Again I say he will die!'), and the seventh, told two ways (the winged townsfolk and the fire from heaven; the Caliph who sends him again, the elephants' graveyard); the porter's apology. The narrator leaves out the cannibals' purpose and the nine words of what Sindbad does in the cave, and the King covers the boy's ear before she begins. In the frame: Dunyazad tells the fourth, fifth and sixth voyages in the second glass; the King on the custom: 'It is the same for both... That is more than,' and he stops, and no one finishes it for him; the nurse counts the 'I forgot all that I had suffered' as the fourth, then the fifth (Sumayya holds up fingers), and predicts a sixth; the King's 'Not again' as a joke at the Rukh; on the 560th night Dunyazad asks for the lamp to be turned down for the river under the mountain, the King turns it down himself, and up again at 'the light of Heaven'; at the herald the King says 'Again' three times, then 'I have a glass... It does not say it so loud'; of the seventh voyage the King says 'A Caliph sends, and the man goes', and the Vizier answers from his corner 'He goes, lord'; on the 566th night the boy lets go of the brick and walks five paces to the King, who had put out his arms without knowing; the King writes the eighth margin word: 'came'., AI-only)_
- **35** · 2026-10-15 · Colophon (AI) — Added chapter 34, Nights Five Hundred and Sixty-seven to Five Hundred and Seventy-eight: The City of Brass, and Seven Years of Grain _(The tale of the City of Brass (Burton Nights 566 to 578): the Caliph Abd al-Malik bin Marwan and the copper bottles of Solomon (the Jinn who, brought up in a net, cry 'I repent, O Prophet of God!'), the Emir Musa bin Nusayr and the Shaykh Abd al-Samad, the thousand camels with water in earthen jars, the black castle with the verses ending 'as had they only set their burdens down to rest awhile, and then had rode away', the tomb of Kush son of Shaddad ('Can ye ransom me... buy me one day?'), the onyx table, the horseman of brass, the Ifrit Dahish in his pillar, the city with five-and-twenty gates that open only from within, the seven white tablets ('they replied, Here are we!'), the ladder and the twelve who went over the wall at the sight of an enchantment, the brass horseman with the gold pin, the markets of the dead with their scales hung out and no food in any shop, the embalmed Queen Tadmurah with her tablet (seven years of drought, treasure that could not buy poor wheat bushel for bushel), the greed of Talib and the two copper slaves, the people of the caves taught by Al-Khizr, the bottles and the Caliph's hall, the Emir's death at Jerusalem. The narrator leaves out the war of Solomon (one breath) and the colour of the cave-people. In the frame: the King asks of the repenting Jinn 'To whom?' 'To Solomon.' 'He is dead.' 'They do not know it', and looks at his empty hands; at the tablet 'they replied, Here are we!' he says 'That is what you write... Present'; Sumayya at the first inscription says 'The porter'; at Tadmurah's 'bushel for bushel' the King asks his Vizier how many years of grain are in the granaries (four in the city, less than one in the north) and orders 'Seven', in the voice in which he said 'a brick', and the Vizier goes down to the granaries by the river in the morning with two clerks and a measuring rod; at the end the tale of the Seven Viziers is announced and the King says 'Seven' and looks at the Vizier, who answers that he counts for several on his better days., AI-only)_
- **36** · 2026-10-15 · Colophon (AI) — Added chapter 35, Nights Five Hundred and Seventy-nine to Six Hundred and Six: The Seven Days of Silence, and a Jar Without a Cloth _(The Craft and Malice of Women, or the tale of the King, his son, his concubine and the Seven Viziers (Burton Nights 578 to 606): the King of China without a son, the Queen's dream, the Prince's birth, the Sage Sindibad and his three conditions (do not to others what you would not have done to yourself; do nothing in haste without asking the experienced; where you have power, show pity), the house whose walls are painted and the seven padlocks, the seven days of silence enjoined by the horoscope, the favourite who accuses the Prince, the seven Viziers' daily stories to turn the King from execution and the favourite's daily counter-stories, with the first Vizier's tale of the King and the Vizier's wife (the lion's footprint) told in full, the others only by shape (the parrot and the storm, the fuller and his son, the egg-white, the miser's loaves, the sifted dust, the drop of honey), the man who never laughed again (the door held off for seven days and opened on the eighth), the favourite's bowl, knife and fire, the stolen necklace and the pious woman who forgave the King, the long tales left out, the eighth day when the Prince speaks, his answer to 'whose was the fault' (the milk, the kite, the serpent's venom: their hour was come), his tales of the blind Shaykh and the children of three and five, the favourite's tale of the fox, and the Prince's 'Pardon is better than vengeance... Depart from our neighbourhood, and God pardon what is past.' The narrator leaves out the sexual detail of the originals. In the frame: the King on the lion's footprint ('He did not go near it' 'Yes'), on the drop of honey ('Who began it?' 'The drop'), on the favourite's fire ('She threatens herself... That is a way to ask'), on the pious woman ('She forgave him... She would not take the treasure'); the nurse on the door ('It is a long time to hold off a door'); Sumayya on the jar ('She should have put a cloth on it'; the King: 'Yes. She should.'), and on the Sage's painted walls; the King on the pardon: 'He did not say that he pardoned her... It is not done.' 'It is done, lord, she has gone.' 'She has gone. It is not done.'; Dunyazad writes in the Open: a favourite, sent out of the neighbourhood, whom nobody has pardoned; the grain is now five years of seven., AI-only)_
- **37** · 2026-10-15 · Colophon (AI) — Added chapter 36, Nights Six Hundred and Seven to Six Hundred and Twenty-four: Judar and His Brothers, and a Baker Whose Name Is to Be Found _(The story of Judar and his brethren (Burton Nights 606 to 624): Omar's three sons and the division in four parts, the brothers who take their mother's money and go to the judges, Judar who takes her in and comforts her with a verse and welcomes the brothers when they come, the empty net, the baker who will not take the net in pledge ('it is the gate of thy livelihood'), the Moor who has Judar bind him and cast him into Lake Karun (two drown, the third comes up with two red fish in his hands, and tells the history of the sorcerer Al-Shamardal's four treasures), the magic saddle-bags that give twenty-four dishes at a naming and from which what is left is thrown away or given to the poor, the Ifrit mule, Fez, the seven doors under the river-bed (the last a figure in the shape of his mother whom he must strip, and for whom he feels pity, so that he is beaten out and must wait a year), the four talismans, the mother begging at the Gate of Victory, the brothers who sell him to a galley, the Moor met again at Mecca and the ring with the Marid Al-Ra'ad, the pardon ('I comfort myself with Joseph'), the palace built in a night, the King kept standing, the Princess Asiyah, the brothers' second betrayal and the poison, and the Princess who breaks the ring and tears the saddle-bags. In the frame: the King on the baker ('Is there a baker who does that?... Find out his name'); on Judar's 'may Moors come to me every day' ('He did not know what he did.' 'He knew that he was tying a man's hands'); 'Nothing was kept past the meal'; the pitied semblance of the mother ('He was sorry for her... And it had her face'); the Vizier's report that the granaries hold five years and some months, the King's 'Good'; the King and Shah Zaman on the brother ('That is twice'; 'I have a brother.' 'You have.'); 'She broke it. And tore the bags. Nothing was left.'; and the boy's first word on his father's face, 'Ba', to which the King says 'Again'., AI-only)_
- **38** · 2026-10-15 · Colophon (AI) — Added chapter 37, Nights Six Hundred and Twenty-five to Six Hundred and Fifty: Gharib, and a Son Born Before Dawn _(The first half of the History of Gharib and his brother Ajib (Burton Nights 624 to 650), told by its people and not its battles: King Kundamir, old, and his son Ajib who kills him, the dream of the lion and the order to drown his father's pregnant concubine, the slaves who cannot do it, Gharib born in the forest and named the Stranger, the Emir Mardas who takes the woman to wife and raises the boy with his own son Sahim al-Layl, Mardas's plot to kill the youth who wants his daughter and the ambush that is itself ambushed, the Mountain-Ghul spared and made a friend, the Persian princess Fakhr Taj (a thread left to be taken up later), Mardas taking his tribe and his daughter to Ajib, Ajib killing Nusrah, the war between the brothers (Sahim's henbane, Ajib carried off, Gharib leaving no guard). The narrator leaves out the Ghul's meals and the battles. In the frame: at the order to drown a woman with child the King says 'Stop', and Shahrazad says 'They did not' and gives the end first; the nurse's hand on her knee; the King on the foster-father ('He reared him... And would kill him for wanting his daughter') and Shah Zaman's 'the oldest quarrel', which the King says is not the oldest; Sumayya's 'He was his father' and Shahrazad's 'He did it because the man was in a ditch'; 'Nusrah... It means aid. She had no name for ten nights'; 'Gharib left no guard... He did that on purpose'; the Vizier finds the baker's name (Hamid, sixty, eleven houses fed on credit for six years: 'bread is a thing that goes off'), the King: 'Do not send'; the grain reaches six years of seven; on the 650th night Shahrazad's labour begins ('This is not a fish'), the King sits on the floor with the boy and Dunyazad tells Gharib's forest birth three times through the night while the Vizier, Shah Zaman and Sumayya wait (Sumayya says the nine names of the white book), and at dawn the nurse says 'A son'; the King goes behind the curtain, says one word nobody hears, and puts his thumb beside the word born., AI-only)_
- **39** · 2026-10-16 · Colophon (AI) — Added chapter 38, Nights Six Hundred and Fifty-one to Six Hundred and Eighty: A Name in the Margin, and a Son Set Free _(The second half of the History of Gharib and his brother Ajib (Burton Nights 651 to 680): the four-headed King of the Jinn who thinks the two youths killed his son (a bird), Gharib who forgets Fakhr Taj and Mahdiyah in a night for Star o' Morn, the sea-horse and the Jinn's farewell, the wars left as place-names, Gharib hearing that Fakhr Taj was drowned by her father's order, the two men who let her go, the raft on the Jayhun, the city that sacrifices strangers, the island where he lives alone, Fakhr Taj's life in the castle of a hundred maidens and the birth of Murad Shah, the boy who conquers cities to avenge his mother and besieges Isbanir, the single combat in which Gharib catches him by the ears, the recognition ('Thou art a champion, the son of a champion. Loose my child!'). The narrator leaves out the fire-worship and the battles and what was done to Sabur. In the frame: for seven nights Dunyazad tells both glasses and the Roll says Dunyazad alone; the King on Gharib's forgetting ('Another who forgets quickly. It is a gift', not as he said it of Sindbad); on the seventh morning the King writes the ninth word in the margin of the margin, Yusuf, and the nurse, Shah Zaman, the Vizier and Sumayya say Joseph, the wolf, the grain and the pit; Shahrazad: 'All of them.' 'Yes.'; the first boy puts a hand flat on the baby's head and says 'Ba', and the King says 'Again'; the Vizier reports seven years of grain in the city and the north, the King says 'Now do not touch it'; the king stands up at the combat and Shahrazad puts out her hand to him as to a child in the dark; at 'Loose my child' the King repeats it in a voice Dunyazad does not know., AI-only)_
- **40** · 2026-10-16 · Colophon (AI) — Added chapter 39, Nights Six Hundred and Eighty-one to Six Hundred and Ninety-eight: He Who Mends the Stumbles of the Noble, and a Woman Who Was Asked _(The cycle of love and bounty anecdotes in Burton Nights 681 to 698: Otbah and Rayya (forty days of feast, one grave, the tree of the Bride and the Bridegroom), Hind and the mirror, Khuzaymah and Ikrimah (the purse in the dark, 'Jabir Atharat al-Kiram', the friend put in irons by mistake and then freed), the scribe Yunus's girl, Al-Asma'i's three couplets, Ibrahim of Mosul and the Devil who sang once and was never forgotten, Jamil and the lovers, the Bedouin and his wife Su'ad before Mu'awiyah, and Al-Malik al-Nasir and his Wazir ('a lion again'); the hook into Dalilah the Wily and Zaynab. The narrator gives the minor tales by their edges. In the frame: the King says nothing at all about Otbah and Rayya; on Khuzaymah putting Ikrimah in irons he says 'He did not know' twice, and tells the Vizier to see that no one puts the baker in irons ('The Governors, they do it by mistake'; the Vizier writes one word on his palm); Shah Zaman says of the Devil's memory 'And a King. He does not forget either', and the King answers 'No. I do not'; on the fortieth day Shahrazad gets up, goes to the window, and holds Yusuf to the light; on the Bedouin's wife the King says she was asked nothing until after, Sumayya says 'That is better than not asking', and the King says 'Yes'; the King laughs once, aloud, at the lion; and at the end of the 698th night he tells the Vizier he wants to see the lane the brick came from, 'Not yet. Soon', the old word and not the old voice., AI-only)_
- **41** · 2026-10-16 · Colophon (AI) — Added chapter 40, Nights Six Hundred and Ninety-nine to Seven Hundred and Eighteen: The Wily Old Woman, and a Shutter in the Tanners' Lane _(The Rogueries of Dalilah the Crafty and Her Daughter Zaynab the Coney-catcher, and the first part of the Adventures of Mercury Ali of Cairo (Burton Nights 699 to 718): the old woman who strips a wife, a merchant, a dyer, a donkey-boy, a child, a barber and a Wali's household with a pitcher and a rosary, the man from the desert who is bound in her place for honey-fritters, Hasan Shuman's kerchief of pardon, the boon (a Khan with forty slaves and forty dogs); Mercury Ali's letter, the well, the cook's cat, the forty pigeons, Zurayk's belled purse, the price of a dress. The narrator leaves out the goldsmith's faith, how Dalilah was bound, the teeth and the burning, the paint made to look like a cook, the dogs' death, the pregnancy ruse, the ass part of the goldsmith's charm and what his daughter did to him. In the frame: the King laughs aloud at the two 'alases'; 'Free men may not be sold'; 'Fritters' (the Vizier writes a word on his palm; Shah Zaman eats seven); 'Somebody asked for her... He put his own neck in it'; at the boon the King says to Dunyazad 'You have not' and 'I shall count'; at the end of the 708th night he tells the Vizier 'Tomorrow. Before the city is up', and Dunyazad goes with him, the Vizier and Shah Zaman to the Tanners' Lane: four places still standing (two roofless houses, two door-frames), the Vizier names each house and the daughter by heart, the King walks into a door-frame with a fig tree through the floor and lays his palm on the wall, a woman at a shutter across the lane looks at him for a count of ten and closes the shutter and drops the bar ('Yes'), a tanner tells him how a skin is kept, the King orders kid shoes for the boy; 'Put it in the Open.' 'What shall I call it?' 'A shutter.'; the boy's shoes squeak and he says 'Gain' to 'Again'., AI-only)_
- **42** · 2026-10-16 · Colophon (AI) — Added chapter 41, Nights Seven Hundred and Nineteen to Seven Hundred and Thirty-eight: The Hawk Is the Wazir's, and a Eunuch Who Told the Truth _(The end of the Adventures of Mercury Ali of Cairo and the whole of Ardashir and Hayat al-Nufus (Burton Nights 719 to 738): the Caliph's boon, the hall for the forty lads, the history written down and laid up; the Prince of Shiraz who stops his father's war, the Princess of Iraq who hates men, the shop in the stuff-bazar, the nine letters in verse, the beaten nurse, the dream of the fowler, the net and the two pigeons, the Wazir who has a falcon painted into the pavilion that was not in the dream, the maids who ask the nurse back to her face, the garden, the nurse's tales of husbands and wives buried alive, the disguise, the seven doors, the eunuch Kafur whose teeth she knocked out and who tells the King, the sword, the three swings, the dust of the Great King's host, the Headsman who says he has struck and has not, the Princess asked and saying 'I hear and I obey', the Wazir and the eunuch hanged. The narrator leaves out the beating, the examination by midwives, the nights of the lovers, and says on the second sheet that the hawk is the Wazir's. In the frame: 'Who wrote it?' (the Caliph's history); the Open now read aloud from the top each night at the end of the second glass; Shah Zaman on the postage; Sumayya 'A thing painted is not a thing that happened'; the Vizier writes on his palm that the rains are nine days late in the north; the nurse 'She went for the two who came to her door, not for the one who sent them'; the King puts his hand over the boy's ear at the burial tales and Shah Zaman looks at the wall; 'He told the truth.' 'With a grudge.' 'It is still the truth.'; the Vizier 'It is the easiest advice to give, lord. I have given it.' and the King does not look at him; the King does not move at the sword and Dunyazad counts and does not know what she counts; the King on the Headsman, 'It is the only way he could ask'; 'He asked her.' 'Through four people.' 'It counts.'; Sumayya takes the reed and writes in the Open, in her own hand, 'a eunuch who told the truth', and the King says 'It is straight'; the rains eleven days late, 'It will come.', AI-only)_
- **43** · 2026-10-16 · Colophon (AI) — Added chapter 42, Nights Seven Hundred and Thirty-nine to Seven Hundred and Fifty-six: A Year Without a Word, and Nine Men in the Jails _(Julnar the Sea-born and Her Son King Badr Basim of Persia (Burton Nights 739 to 756): the bought slave-girl who does not speak for a year above the sea behind shut doors, who speaks only when she is with child and says why; the family of the sea whom she calls up with her husband hidden in a closet; the child carried into the sea by his uncle; the boy who falls in love by hearsay and will not ask his mother; the proposal to King Al-Samandal that ends in war; Jauharah who turns him into a bird; Marsinah who leaves him on a green island and says it was the Thirsty Island; Julnar's grief; the city of mules and horses that were men; the grocer Abdallah; Queen Lab and her forty days; the barley and the dapple mule; the old woman, the city where none may lie; the cage; the rescue; the wedding. The narrator leaves out the fire-worship, the examination of the bird scene, the slaughter of a city, and counts on the second sheet how many times Julnar was sold and how many times she was asked. In the frame: 'Did he ask her name?' 'A year.'; the nurse: 'She put him in the closet to hear it.' 'Both.'; the King gives Yusuf to Shahrazad when the child is carried into the sea; the older boy says 'Ba' as a question; Badr will not ask his mother, the Vizier's hand stops, 'Go on, daughter'; the King on Marsinah: 'She said it was done. And it was not. That is two. Someone told to, who said it was done.' and the Vizier writes nothing; 'It is a reason. It is not an answer.'; in the city where none may lie Shah Zaman says 'a quiet city'; 'He asked her.' 'He told her.'; Dunyazad puts Marsinah in the Open unasked; the King asks how many are in the jails (311, mostly debts, nine for words about him) and says 'Put it in the Open'; the rains twenty-six days late., AI-only)_
- **44** · 2026-10-16 · Colophon (AI) — Added chapter 43, Nights Seven Hundred and Fifty-seven to Seven Hundred and Seventy-eight: Five Conditions, and a Story Heard for the Room _(King Mohammed bin Sabaik and the Merchant Hasan, and inside it the Story of Prince Sayf al-Muluk and the Princess Badi'a al-Jamal (Burton Nights 757 to 778): the King who loves tales and the envious Wazir; the merchant given a year to bring a story or be banished; the old man in Damascus who sells it on five conditions; King Asim of Egypt, the serpents with golden collars, the two boys born on one night; the portrait on the tunic; the voyage, the islands of the donkey-riders, the Ghuls and the giants who cage men like birds, the King's daughter who makes him carry wood for years; the island of apes; the High-builded Castle and Daulat Khatun; the soul in the sparrow in the seven caskets; the 'palace' heard as 'prison'; Sa'id's tale in a breath; Badi'a al-Jamal who asks for an oath; the grandmother in Iram; the Blue King and the old Emir who says wait; Shahyal's war; the weddings; 'This is all that has come down'. The narrator leaves out the servants' colour in the third condition and the giants' colour, the conversions, and the cave of the blinded men. In the frame: the nurse covers her ears; Shah Zaman and the King each say 'I will hear it for the room'; Sumayya a feather-head with a reed; when Asim opens the jails at his son's birth the King asks 'Did we open the jails when Yusuf was born?' (no; ninety-one for Baqi; now 311, 204 for debts, 158 under a hundred dinars, six thousand one hundred in all), 'Open them. I will pay it.' Shah Zaman: 'I will pay half.' 'And the nine, lord?' 'Not yet', the old word, and Dunyazad could not tell the voice; 'They learn it'; 'Nobody asked her. It was a picture.'; 'She did not kill him.' 'She made him carry wood.'; 'Where would you hide yours?' ... 'I do not think I would put it anywhere.' 'Then anyone could find it.' 'Yes.'; the elder boy says 'Yu' for the first time; 'He said palace. They heard prison.' and the Vizier says he has the eleven and the King says 'Then open them'; 'She asked him for an oath first.' 'That is how it should be.' 'Yes.'; 'There is always one old Emir who says wait', 'Not yet' again; 'All that has come down... It says that was what they had.'; the rains forty-eight days late, the Vizier writes it in two lines, and the nurse fills the water-jar by the cradle without being asked., AI-only)_
- **45** · 2026-10-16 · Colophon (AI) — Added chapter 44, Nights Seven Hundred and Seventy-eight to Seven Hundred and Ninety-eight: The Door That Was Forbidden, and Three Tombs With Nobody in Them _(The first part of the History of Hasan of Bassorah (Burton Nights 778 to 798): the wastrel goldsmith, the stranger with the powder in his turban, the sweetmeat that puts him to sleep, the ship and the mother's tomb, the Mountain of Clouds and the vultures in the camel's skin, the seven daughters of a King of the Jinn, the forbidden door, the ten birds and the chief maiden, the stolen feather-dress, the youngest sister's advice, the marriage 'by consent', the return to Baghdad, the buried dress, the wife who heard, the bath, Zubaydah and Masrur, the bird who flies away with her sons and says 'Come to the Islands of Wak', the mother who dug three graves. The narrator leaves out the stranger's faith and what was done to the boy on the ship for refusing it, the hair, and the maiden's body. In the frame: Shah Zaman prices the lump of gold; 'She built it before she knew.' 'She knew.'; 'He was alone on a ship. He had no one else to believe.'; 'Why do they always forbid one door?' 'To see who opens it.' 'It is always the one door.'; the youngest sister's idea, 'Whose idea was that?' 'Hers.'; the marriage 'by her consent' and Sumayya's 'Whose?'; 'She heard and she waited. She did not go while she had no dress.'; the Vizier walks as far as the door and stands with his back to the room while Masrur takes the women ('The Lady's eunuch.' 'No one refuses him, lord.'); Yusuf coughs from the first yellow dust on the 790th night; the King says 'Stop' at the three graves and Shahrazad answers 'They are not in them, lord. They are alive. She dug them because she did not know.' 'Go on.'; the King lies down beside the cradle with the child on his chest and sleeps; Sumayya writes the Roll line in her own hand and, under it, 'child, a fever; gone at dawn'; the north sixty-eight days without rain, wheat dearer by a tenth, and the Vizier's answer, 'That the King keeps his granaries.', AI-only)_
- **46** · 2026-10-16 · Colophon (AI) — Added chapter 45, Nights Seven Hundred and Ninety-nine to Eight Hundred and Sixteen: Reckon Them Dead, and Bread That Goes Off _(The middle of the History of Hasan of Bassorah (Burton Nights 799 to 816): the sisters who tell him to put his hand to heaven, Abd al-Kaddus who says to reckon his wife and sons as dead, the black stallion and the scroll, Abu al-Ruwaysh and the four elders, the Ifrit Dahnash, King Hassun of the Land of Camphor, the chest on the ship, the settle on the shore of the Islands of Wak, the old commander Shawahi, Mother of Calamities, the march through the Land of Birds, Beasts and Jinn, the river, the Queen Nur al-Huda and her test (the review of every girl in the city; 'This Queen is either my wife or the likest of all folk to my wife'), the two boys who say 'O our father' and the Queen who kicks him out. The narrator leaves out the washing of the army, the bodies, and counts the book's insistence on virgins once. In the frame: Sumayya reads the Open aloud from now on, including her own line; 'Reckon them dead' ('That is what they all say'); 'Each one told him to go home, and each one sent him on.' 'Letters are how a thing gets done'; on the 805th night two hundred and forty people from the north sit at the north gate, the King orders kitchens round the gate and flour from the baker Hamid at the old price ('Send to him. Not a gift. An order'), Hamid will bake at dawn and not for tomorrow, 'bread is a thing that goes off', and it is not to be called the King's bread; Hamid's loaf comes to the palace and the King says 'Then we shall eat it today'; 'He has eaten of their bread' / 'Yes'; Shawahi and the Queen's test ('She had decided one thing or the other and set a test to see which.' 'Which is deciding.'); 'Nobody had looked at their faces'; the elder boy says his first word 'Ba' when the book's boys say 'O our father', and the King picks him up; the north eighty-six days without rain., AI-only)_
- **47** · 2026-10-16 · Colophon (AI) — Added chapter 46, Nights Eight Hundred and Seventeen to Eight Hundred and Thirty-one: The Fault Was Mine, and Eight Men Let Out _(The end of the History of Hasan of Bassorah (Burton Nights 817 to 831): the Supreme King's dream of the seven jewels and the bird, Manar al-Sana accused by her sister and tortured on the ladder (left out), the letter 'kill her without consulting me', the scroll on the tree, the two boys and the cap and the rod, Hasan standing invisible before his bound wife, her apology and his 'The fault was mine', his asking her whether to go to her father's house or with him, the escape, the seven Kings of the Jinn who cannot carry a son of Adam, the Moslem Ifrit guide, the battle of the armies, the Queen taken, 'It is thine to decide', the sisters' reconciliation ('foreordained'), the youngest sister and 'whoso beguileth folk, Allah will beguile him', the elders who ask for the rod and the cap, the mother's 'master of the whole earth'. The narrator leaves out the ladder and the whip, what the old woman proposed to do with the Queen, the battle count. In the frame: 'He told her the dream and she went. They were all sure.'; 'He did not say, kill her. He said, if the matter is as thou sayest.' 'It is easier in a letter, lord.' 'Yes. It is.'; on the 821st night the oldest of the nine, a cobbler of seventy-one, dies in the jail of a fever after two years and a month for saying 'May God take him by the throat'; the King orders the eight let out that day before noon, a shroud, and the dead man brought to his house, 'He had a daughter in the lower town.' 'Find her.'; the Vizier's hand does not shake; Sumayya reads 'nine' and says 'eight' to nobody; the King looks at the brick by the door; 'The fault was mine, and mine only.' 'Again.'; Hasan asks her whether she wants to go to her father's house or with him ('He asked her'); 'It was hers to decide.' 'Yes.'; 'Foreordained'; 'Both of them'; 'He gave them to the men who got him there.' 'Master of the whole earth. She wanted that for him.' 'Mothers do.'; the Vizier goes out at dusk with a litter and returns at the second glass smelling of lime and wet bark; Dunyazad writes under the line about the nine 'one dead; eight out' and the King puts his thumb beside it; Shah Zaman's letter from Samarkand and two riders; Yusuf's first tooth; 912 people at the north gate; the north a hundred and one days without rain., AI-only)_
- **48** · 2026-10-16 · Colophon (AI) — Added chapter 47, Nights Eight Hundred and Thirty-one to Eight Hundred and Forty-five: Three Apes, and a Paper That Chose _(Khalifah the Fisherman of Baghdad (Burton Nights 831 to 845): the net that brings up three apes, the banker who is made to swap his luck, the fisherman who beats himself to rehearse for the Caliph, the naked man in the net who takes Harun al-Rashid for a piper and makes him an apprentice and cuts a third off his gown, the slave-girl Kut al-Kulub drugged by the Lady Zubaydah and sold in a chest, the false tomb, the twenty papers of sums, offices and punishments (a hundred blows, naught, one dinar), the chest bought for a hundred and one dinars, the girl who wakes in it, the jeweller's thousand dinars, the mule that throws him, the Caliph's fifty thousand, Zubaydah's verse-letter and the pardon. The narrator leaves out the banker's faith and the insults to a eunuch and tells the second telling (from the Breslau manuscript) in a sentence. In the frame: Yusuf laughs for the first time when the King laughs at the rehearsal; Shah Zaman 'The river has changed its trade'; the nurse on the Caliph's tailor, 'He forgave a hand. There are not many in this book who do.' 'No. Not many.'; the false tomb ('That is another... Baghdad is full of empty graves.' 'Not all of them are empty.'); the Caliph who makes the paper choose ('So that it should not be him.' 'It was him.' 'Yes, lord.'); three forestallers of wheat named in the Open instead of put in irons, one of them the Vizier's cousin; 'She wrote first.' 'She asked.' 'Everybody who asks is pardoned. In this book.'; the north a hundred and fifteen days without rain, fourteen hundred at the north gate, three ovens and a fourth., AI-only)_
- **49** · 2026-10-16 · Colophon (AI) — Added chapter 48, Nights Eight Hundred and Forty-six to Eight Hundred and Sixty-three: Chess for Everything, and a Man Who Knocked at His Own Door _(Masrur and Zayn al-Mawasif (Burton Nights 845 to 863): the merchant who dreams of a dove taken by a great bird, the garden behind the wall, the maid Hubub, the chess game in which he stakes and loses everything and has it all given back, the husband who comes home, the mocking-bird that will not come to him, the window, the knock at his own door, the forged letter, the three doors written on, the caravan, the irons and the smith with his keys, the four judges to whom she says yes and who were never told of one another, the husband who is never asked a question, the judges who die of it, the house of forty men and the image they make, the homecoming, the grave that was dug before he came. The narrator leaves out the faiths named at every turn, what was done to the husband in the street, and a poem about the lady's body, and tells the grave in one sentence. In the frame: the King asks whether they stay when there is nothing left ('It is expensive'; 'He stayed'; 'He had nowhere else'); the Vizier's cousin brings his wheat to the kitchens himself and will not take a receipt; at the window the King says, with his back to the room, 'He knocked so that someone would tell him it had not happened' and 'He said it did'; the King's thumb on the margin word 'came'; Shah Zaman's letter from the governor of Bukhara (a first caravan of three hundred camel-loads, sixty days if the passes are clear), the room he shut after his wife now a counting-room, put in the Open as promised, not as coming; 'Four times, lord. The same question.' 'And not the other'; the nurse 'That one is not empty' and the King's 'A grave with someone in it'; the older boy puts two words together, Ba and Gain; Yusuf sits alone for a count of eleven; the north a hundred and thirty-three days without rain, nineteen hundred at the north gate, a fifth oven laid., AI-only)_
- **50** · 2026-10-16 · Colophon (AI) — Added chapter 49, Nights Eight Hundred and Sixty-four to Eight Hundred and Eighty: A Rose for a Verse, and a Girdle a Night _(Ali Nur al-Din and Miriam the Girdle-girl, first part (Burton Nights 863 to 880): the merchant's son who asks his father's leave to go to a garden, the roses given only for verses, the ten cups, the blow to his father and the father's oath, sworn by the divorce of his wife, to cut off his right hand in the morning, the mother who wakes him and gives him a hundred dinars and a second purse the book says she forgot, the old druggist of Alexandria who repays a loan his father made without paper, the slave-girl whose sale her Persian master put in her own hand and who sends six old men away and chooses the young one, the thousand dinars, the girdle a night for a year and a half and the kerchief, her warning about a man with one eye and a limp, the kerchief that gives her away, the sale made drunk before ten witnesses, the king's daughter's history and the boon she asked, the ship, the quay. The narrator leaves out what the book does with the lute-girl and with the nights, the blow and what came of it, the jokes about the old men's bodies, the faiths and the names the old man swears by, and calls the people from over the sea 'the other side'. In the frame: 'He asked' / 'Before'; the nurse on oaths sworn at night ('mostly undone by morning, by whoever swore them, if he wakes in time'); the purse 'forgotten' and the nurse's 'no' on the second sheet; 'a girl whose sale was put in her own hand' written on the second sheet, not in the Open; five hundred and forty girdles and 'She kept none'; 'Do nothing' read aloud like a line the King has not met; 'a divorce under compulsion is sanctioned by no school' recalled and the Vizier's 'It is kept, lord'; the King's thumb on the stroke; Yusuf crawling toward the brick with his brother bringing him back four times; the fifth oven lit, two thousand then twenty-three hundred at the north gate, a sixth asked for; the north a hundred and fifty days without rain and the Vizier writing the number on the back of his hand., AI-only)_
- **51** · 2026-10-16 · Colophon (AI) — Added chapter 50, Nights Eight Hundred and Eighty-one to Eight Hundred and Ninety-four: A Hundred Heads, and a Man Who Always Went to Fetch Something _(Ali Nur al-Din and Miriam the Girdle-girl, second part (Burton Nights 881 to 894): the ship taken by the king's cruisers, the princess's account to her mother and the grandees' hundred heads, the church and the keeper who takes the last captive from the rug, the princess calling him mad before four hundred ladies, the plan for the offering-chest and the tunnel, the captain with the long beard who is the princess, the ten sailors, the veil he goes to fetch while she is taken, her father's sentence and the one-eyed minister who asks for her, Ali Nur al-Din's second voyage and capture and the false name Ibrahim, the two stallions, brothers, and the king's 'If this, which is but a beast, cannot bear to be parted from his brother', the horse healed with ground glass, lime and onion, the lattice and the letter, the drug in the Wazir's cup, the horse-thief, the green valley and her three brothers, the king's letter to the Caliph, Damascus and Baghdad, the Caliph who asks her whether she is willing, the envoy, the return to Cairo. The narrator leaves out the hundred heads and the second hundred, the ten, the thief's colour, the faiths and 'our side' for the Muslims, and keeps a count of the dead on the second sheet (two hundred and fifteen) without reading it out. In the frame: 'How many?' 'A hundred, lord.' 'For what she said.' 'For what they thought she meant'; the nurse puts down her mending; the King takes Yusuf from the nurse's lap at the sentence of crucifixion; 'He is always going for something'; the book of beards; 'I have a brother.' 'We know.'; the King's hand over the older boy's ear; 'That is the third. The Persian, the broker, the Caliph'; 'Write it on the other sheet'; the Vizier's reading of the father's oath by the divorce of his wife (the hand not cut, the wife divorced by morning, a revocable divorce, if he asked her back) and the King's 'She woke the boy. She knew what it did'; 'A woman who gave up her marriage to save a hand, and whether she was asked back' written in the Open over the earlier line about the oath; Yusuf pulls himself up and stands at the brick; the north a hundred and sixty-four days without rain, twenty-six hundred at the north gate, a sixth oven lit., AI-only)_
- **52** · 2026-10-16 · Colophon (AI) — Added chapter 51, Nights Eight Hundred and Ninety-five to Nine Hundred and One: Two Purses Still Tied, and a Third Child _(The Man of Upper Egypt and His Frankish Wife, The Ruined Man of Baghdad and His Slave-Girl, and the beginning of King Jali'ad of Hind and the Wazir Shimas (Burton Nights 894 to 901): the flax-merchant of Acre who pays a go-between three times for a woman and lies beside her under the stars and does not touch her, the war, the captive he chooses for ten dinars, the marriage after her freedom, the chest with the two purses still tied with his own tying; the man of Baghdad whose slave-girl asks to be sold, the stolen bag, the Tigris, the sailor's clothes, the lute she knows by its tuning, the gentleman of Basra's curtain, the man left asleep on a bank, the grocer's daughter divorced and paid, the tomb the girl built for herself beside the house; the childless king of Hind, the dream of the tree that burns the trees round it, the interpreter, the Mouse and the Cat. The narrator names the sea instead of what the book is ashamed before, leaves out the woman's change of faith and the sides' names. In the frame: 'He paid three times and did not' / 'He paid to be asked to come again'; 'She kept them' / 'Tied' / 'It came home'; Shahrazad says it herself, 'There will be a third', because the Roll is kept for what is said; 'Again' twice and the King holds Yusuf up against the lamp; 'A tomb with someone in it' / 'She chose it' / 'It is a different grave. She was waiting in that one'; 'He asked her father' / 'Not her' / 'Told'; the grocer's daughter, divorced and paid, not asked, put in the Open; 'He did right, and nearly died'; the north a hundred and seventy-one days without rain, the Vizier writing on his wrist, the last sack of wheat in the lower market sold, twenty-eight hundred at the north gate, a seventh oven asked for; Yusuf lets go of the brick with one hand and takes a step., AI-only)_
- **53** · 2026-10-16 · Colophon (AI) — Added chapter 52, Nights Nine Hundred and Two to Nine Hundred and Seventeen: A Jar of Butter, the Oldest Granary, and a Door with Writing on It _(King Jali'ad of Hind and the Wazir Shimas, the first part (Burton Nights 901 to 917): the three things of which one must not speak until they are accomplished (the traveller, the man in the fight, the pregnant woman), the Fakir and the Jar of Butter, the Fishes and the Crab, the seven ministers' welcome of the newborn prince and their tales (the crows and the hawk; the spider and the wind; four more named), the prince Wird Khan's palace of three hundred and sixty rooms with the lesson of each written on its door, the examination (the blind man and the cripple in the garden; what a minister owes a king; the hunter who mounted the lion; 'leave him with courtesy, because in parting there is ease for each'), King Jali'ad's death-bed and twenty precepts, the young king whom the world waylaid, shut up with his women a month at a time, and Shimas at the kitchen door. The narrator leaves out the colour of the slave who carries the King's food. In the frame: Shahrazad's tale lands on 'the pregnant woman until she has cast her burden' ('I did not choose it. It is next.' 'I have been counting.' 'Once. Aloud, once.' 'Once is a count'); the King of Hind's fakir raising the stick 'before there was a ewe'; 'Because it rained.' 'It might not have.' 'The Crab had no granary.' and the King's order to open the oldest granary, a tenth, 'I said so on the 660th night. This is the 903rd'; the first carts from the hill, the loaf from the sixth year's corn that 'tastes of having been kept', the crust for Yusuf; 'They chose the highest... It is how it is done.'; 'A door with writing on it'; 'It is a garden'; the Vizier: 'I have not parted.' 'No.'; Yusuf walks six steps from the brick to the King, the King's thumbs on 'came' and 'Yusuf'; the twenty precepts and 'Which have I kept?', 'Perform what thou promisest... That one I have not yet been asked to keep.'; the north a hundred and eighty-seven days without rain, thirty-two hundred at the north gate, the seventh oven lit., AI-only)_
- **54** · 2026-10-16 · Colophon (AI) — Added chapter 53, Nights Nine Hundred and Eighteen to Nine Hundred and Thirty-one: The Last Story Wins, Three Hundred and Five Camels, and a Name Said with the Bread _(King Jali'ad of Hind and the Wazir Shimas, the second part: the story of King Wird Khan (Burton Nights 918 to 931): Shimas and the Foolish Fisherman who would not let go of the fish, the favourite's counter-tales (the boy and the thieves; the merchant and the robbers; the shepherd and the rogue) against Shimas's (the camel that broke free; the jackals and the wolf), the king who shut his door, the day the Wazirs and notables were let in one by one, Shimas first, and killed in the next room, the letter of the King of Outer Hind, the Francolin who plucked out his wing-feathers at the tortoises' kind urging, the king in old clothes who hears at a wall two boys say the crops are withering for the want of rain because of what was done, the least of the boys of the school who answers the letter and draws his own portrait, the repentant king and 'if we will, we do; if we will, we do not', and the women shut in the room where the Wazirs were killed against the boy's counsel. The narrator leaves out what was done in the next room, the Man and His Wife, the list the king lays at women's door, and what happens to the women. In the frame: 'He should have let go.' 'He did, lord, at the last.' 'Too late.'; 'They are fighting with stories.' 'Whoever tells the last one wins.' 'She does not let anyone else.'; on the 921st night three hundred and five camels in red dust come down the north road, watched from the Roll-room roof, 'Coming is what you can see on the road.' 'It is on the road, lord.' 'Strike it', the Open line struck and 'come' written, and the King tells Shahrazad what he has seen from the beginning for the first time ('You left out the dust.' 'I did not.'); 'As the Grand Wazir does.' 'I know the custom.'; 'They loved him.' 'They clipped him.' 'They did not mean to.' 'That is the worst kind.'; the boy at the wall and the Vizier's report that the women at the north gate say a name first with the bread and the others answer 'here' because 'it will not rain until the names are read' ('You did not tell me.' 'You did not ask, lord.' 'I am asking.'); 'He did not let him have it.'; 'He asked the boy first. And did the other.', the women and the boy put in the Open; the north two hundred and one days without rain, thirty-six hundred at the gate, the first loaf of Samarkand wheat with a pebble in it, Yusuf says 'Ba'., AI-only)_
- **55** · 2026-10-16 · Colophon (AI) — Added chapter 54, Nights Nine Hundred and Thirty-two to Nine Hundred and Forty-seven: A Sack of Lime, a Ring Given Back, and Whose It Is to Pardon _(Abu Kir the Dyer and Abu Sir the Barber, and Abdullah the Fisherman and Abdullah the Merman (Burton Nights 931 to 947): the dyer who sells his customers' cloth and says it was stolen, the barber who feeds him eighty days on the ship and in the city and whose thousand silvers he takes while the barber lies in a fever, the porter of the Khan who feeds the barber for two months, the city of blue where the stranger dyer is given a dyery, the beating at the door, the Hammam with its price 'what each heart can give', the slaves sold back to the King, the dyer's slander of the paste of arsenic and quicklime, the sack of lime, the Captain's mercy, the King's ring thrown into the sea and swallowed by a fish, the barber who brings the ring back, the dyer sewn into a sack and the barber's 'I pardon him all he has done to me' / 'I cannot pardon him what he did to me', the tomb of Abu Kir and Abu Sir; the fisherman with ten children and the baker who gives bread for forty days without reckoning, the merman let go and returning with jewels, the jewellers who take him for a thief and do not ask, the baker made Wazir of the left, the ointment of the Dandan, the cities of the sea, the No-tail, the deposit for the Prophet's tomb, the feast at a death, 'Is it grievous to you that Allah should take back His deposit?', the friendship broken. The narrator leaves out what was done to the barber at the door, what the ring did, the sea city of women and what is done with their sons, the sea-people's dress and marriage, and the Hammam's naming of slaves. In the frame: 'Another who said it was done'; 'A city of blue'; 'The King's kitchens take what is given'; 'Lime.' 'The tanners use it, for the hides.' 'To take the hair off.' (the Vizier's sleeve; the nurse's needle); the King looks at his right hand, palm up, as the Vizier looks at his; 'He gave it back'; 'Whose is it to pardon what the King has done?' 'Those it was done to.' 'They are dead.' 'Their mothers are not.' (the nurse bites off the thread); 'That is not Hamid, who does reckon; but he does not say what the sum is'; 'Hamid, Wazir of the left.' 'He would make bread of it'; 'They did not ask him'; 'He told the truth.' 'And lost the friend.' 'Often'; the King asks how many names were said at the gate last night (nine) and has the Vizier write them on his right arm, the rains on his left; the north two hundred and seventeen days without rain, thirty-nine hundred at the north gate, nine ovens, the lime-burners' carts stopped for want of firewood; Yusuf says 'Ba' to his brother who says 'Yu' to him., AI-only)_
- **56** · 2026-10-16 · Colophon (AI) — Added chapter 55, Nights Nine Hundred and Forty-eight to Nine Hundred and Fifty-nine: A Grey Book, a Glass, and Blood on a Hand _(Harun al-Rashid and Abu al-Hasan the Merchant of Oman, and Ibrahim and Jamilah (Burton Nights 947 to 959): the wakeful Caliph and Ja'afar's fourth cure, the merchant who brought a million dinars to a house where an old man lets his girls by the night and his daughter's night is five hundred dinars, the purse she gives him each morning to hand to her father who hands it to her, the maid who tells, the clothes taken and the ten dirhams, the grocer's clerk in Basra, the jewels given him for a hundred dinars, the amulet sold for thirty thousand to a man who would have paid a thousand thousand, the pallor, the reunion and the wedding, the three years' tribute and the mirror; the vizier's son Ibrahim and the picture in a book, the painter who scattered the portrait of his cousin, the bag lost and returned in a game of chess, the hunchback tailor whose pocket is sewn twice, the garden of the Wild Heifer, Jamilah's knife that falls from her hand, the box of sweetmeats with Bhang, the dead woman in the ruined bath, 'This needeth no proof', the headsman who says it is no murderer's face, the Chamberlain 'Why didst thou not question him?', the Caliph's marriage of them. The narrator leaves out the verse the girl speaks on the first night, what the sickness did to the girls set to sleep in the Princess's room, whose body it was and how it came to be there, how the killer was slain, and what was done to the painter. In the frame: the Vizier reads nine names from the inside of his right arm, two of them girls of eight and eleven who died of the cough in the first month of the kitchens and are in nobody's book, the King sends for a stationer and a grey book of a hundred leaves is begun, 'Keep them with the others' (the King's word of the nineteenth night), the last name is Salma, the four hundred and second, whose mother serves the bread in black at the north gate; 'Hadst thou held back'; 'It is a kind of kitchen'; 'Bring me a glass' and the polished copper held away and near and given back, 'Put it away'; chess with Shah Zaman ('I have not beaten you since the first snow.' 'Since you began to look at the door.'); 'That is the fourth in a month' that they did not ask; 'It needed no proof.' 'Blood on a hand is the oldest proof, lord.' 'Is it?'; the nurse puts Shahrazad's cushion on the floor and a stool under her feet; the north two hundred and twenty-nine days without rain, four thousand and one hundred at the gate; Yusuf takes two steps toward his brother, who puts the shoe back on his foot., AI-only)_
- **57** · 2026-10-16 · Colophon (AI) — Added chapter 56, Nights Nine Hundred and Sixty to Nine Hundred and Seventy-eight: A Bean at Every Door, Asked at Once, and a Knife in the Chest _(Abu al-Hasan of Khorasan, and Kamar al-Zaman and the Jeweller's Wife (Burton Nights 959 to 978): the Caliph Al-Mu'tazid who sees his grandfather's name on every cup and cushion and asks for the truth; the money-changer's son whose mother buys the house twice; the girl who weighs out three hundred dinars; the old druggist, the tailor opposite the palace lattice, the torn pocket and a hundred suits given away, the eunuch who finds him by his gifts; the beans laid at each door of the gallery, the two Caliphs; Shajarat al-Durr who asks a boon of Al-Mutawakkil and asks her freedom, 'Thou art free'; the woman's gown, 'I pardon you both', the patent of twenty years; the merchant's son who is shut up fourteen years for fear of the eye, the weeping dervish, the Friday of Basra with fourscore girls riding; the boy robbed on the road who lies among the dead; the barber, the midwife, the jeweller Obayd who takes his boon home to ask his wife, and the city shut in every Friday; the ring thrown back as too tight, the three nights of the drugged cup, the mosquitoes that love only the beardless, the four cockles, the knife; the tunnel and the bags of money; the knife and the watch put back into the chest; the wife disguised as a slave-girl in her own rings, 'Look in my face'; the litter, the hand kissed, 'he looked hard at her'; the husband robbed on the road and fed at the wedding in Cairo; Abd al-Rahman behind the door with a sword; the widow who refuses the King of Basra; the book's last sentence about the man who deems all women alike. The narrator leaves out what the dervish saw done to the man found in the doorway, what the Caliph's own son did with the guard, what Halimah did to the sleeping guest on the first night, and what the jeweller did with his hands. In the frame: the Caliph is asked for the truth and the King puts his hand on the grey book and does not open it; the Vizier adds up the girl's money and finds sixteen hundred, not three thousand, 'a man in love is counting in his heart'; 'A pocket torn on purpose.' 'Ibrahim's.'; 'A bean is not a name.' and the Vizier lowers his sleeve over his arm; Shahrazad stops at 'Thou art free', Dunyazad does not look up, the nurse says 'Not yet' to the cat; 'She had it ready. She asked at once.'; 'Everyone in the book who tells is pardoned.' 'In this book.'; 'Ours has been shut in nearly three years.' 'One asked to be let out, and one asked to have a city shut in.'; 'She had a better idea of what to ask than he did.'; 'He gave the boy the reason himself.'; 'He wanted to be told.' 'It is easier.' 'Yes.'; 'He looked hard at her.' 'And did not see.'; the King puts his hand over the older boy's ear before the jeweller's hands, and takes it away; 'A test with one answer.'; the book's last sentence read aloud, Shah Zaman looks at the King, the King looks at the lamp, Sumayya trims it; Shahrazad on the cushion on the floor with her hand at her side, stopping twice for breath; the north two hundred and forty-eight days without rain, forty-three hundred at the gate, twelve new names on the Vizier's arm; Yusuf walks to the King's knee, his brother beside him, not touching., AI-only)_
- **58** · 2026-10-16 · Colophon (AI) — Added chapter 57, Nights Nine Hundred and Seventy-nine to Nine Hundred and Eighty-nine: A Whip at Midnight, Five Times Bowed, and a Pardon That Is Not a Lock _(Abdullah bin Fazil and his Brothers (Burton Nights 978 to 989): the tribute of Basra twenty days late and Abu Ishak the boon-companion sent with five thousand horse; the host who rises at midnight with a whip and a tray, the two dogs chained with gold, 'Bear me no malice; this is not of my will'; Abu Ishak who told the Caliph and is sent back on pain of death to fetch the host and the dogs, 'Man's wrong is from the tongue'; the dogs who bow for true and stare for false; the father Fazil named for the twin who lived, the division, the brothers ruined by a wreck and clothed in his furs, the second sharing 'as if our father had died today'; the white snake and the black dragon; the city of stone with the porter and his fourteen keys, the cloth that turns to powder and the gold that stays, the King's daughter who lived twenty-three years on one pomegranate a day; the brothers who throw him into the sea on the fortieth night; the bird that is the snake, Sa'idah, daughter of the Red King; the dogs, the collars of gold, the twelve years of beating each midnight on pain of being beaten; the Caliph's letter ('where reconciliation rules, retribution is remitted'), the dogs made men; the brothers' second plot and the dolphin that came for the kitchen leavings; the caravan, the healer Rajihah who is the wife; the brothers punished before the palace and the marriage contract drawn. The narrator leaves out the quarrel about gods that turned the city to stone, why the dragon hunted the snake, the reasons the Jinn must obey the writer of the letter, and how the brothers were punished. In the frame: 'Two hundred and forty-nine,' said the Vizier, and 'I know the number'; 'Say what the man said after.' 'Again.' three times, 'That is enough', and Dunyazad puts the number three on the second sheet; 'He did not lose the friend.' 'He lost the secret.'; five times the dogs bow; 'It is two answers. Bow, or stare.'; 'The cloth went to dust and the gold stayed.' 'Hamid says bread is a thing that goes off.' 'It is why it is bread.'; 'He asked her.'; 'It was in his hand.' and the new line at the foot of the Open, 'a man who beat his brothers every night for twelve years, and said after that it was not of his will', read aloud by Sumayya while the King does not stop her; 'He forgave what was done to him.' 'And hers?'; 'A pardon is not a lock.'; the dolphin fed by the kitchen leavings, 'It is the same'; 'She was alive.'; 'Nobody asked her what she would have done with them.'; Shahrazad finishes the end of the book with her hand at her side and begins Ma'aruf the Cobbler, whose wife is called the Dung; the north two hundred and fifty-nine days without rain, forty-five hundred at the gate, a tenth oven laid, eleven new names on the Vizier's arm; Yusuf walks to the King's knee and lifts both arms, and the King says 'He is asking' to no one and picks him up., AI-only)_
- **59** · 2026-10-16 · Colophon (AI) — Added chapter 58, Nights Nine Hundred and Ninety to Nine Hundred and Ninety-nine: Plenty, Present, and a Ring That a Princess Keeps _(Ma'aruf the Cobbler and his Wife, first part (Burton Nights 989 to 999): the cobbler of Cairo whose wife called the Dung throws the cake dressed with cane-honey in his face and knocks out a tooth, the Kazis and the runners' fees, the flight into the rain, the ruined cell and the being who has lived in the wall two hundred years and asks what he wishes; the city a year's journey away, the playmate Ali who tells him to say 'Plenty', sixty thousand dinars borrowed and given to beggars in twenty days; the covetous Sultan, the jewel crushed between finger and thumb, the Wazir who says impostor and has asked for the Princess himself, the marriage unasked; the Princess who asks her husband for the truth and promises him nothing shall befall him, fifty thousand dinars and a horse and a letter from ten young men; the plough that catches in a ring of gold, the hoard of Shaddad, the seal-ring and Abu al-Sa'adat, eight hundred of his sons, the lentils and the bowl of gold, the baggage that comes at last; the Wazir who fills the cup, the ring handed over drunk, the Sultan and his son-in-law cast into the Desert Quarter; the Wazir made Sultan, the Princess's welcome, 'Seest thou not the man looking', the kick and the Prison of Wrath; 'I will keep the ring myself'. The narrator leaves out the wedding night, what the Wazir meant, and what was done to him. In the frame: the Vizier's hand goes to his right sleeve at the word cobbler; 'Lightly.' 'The book says lightly.' 'Who wrote the book?'; 'Plenty.' 'He had none.' 'He gave.'; 'The Wazir was right.' 'With a grudge.' 'It is still the truth.'; 'Nobody asked the Princess.' 'She was asked about the Wazir, and she said no.'; in the first glass of the 994th night Shahrazad says 'Nurse' and is taken behind the curtain, the King takes the boys and sits on the floor by the brick, Dunyazad is told 'Anywhere' and goes on; the King tells the boys the tale of a king who knew on the first night that he would not draw the line, the older boy says 'Gain' and the King tells it again word for word, Dunyazad writes it in the margin under the stroke and puts the Roll's own words for the first morning on the second sheet with no mark ('The Roll is kept for what is said. It was never kept for what is true'), 'The Roll takes a thing once'; 'A son.' and the King, loud and level, 'Write: Present.' 'He answered.'; the Roll line for the 994th night reads 'Shahrazad and Dunyazad, and one. Present.'; 'He will be named on the seventh morning.' 'I know.'; Dunyazad tells both glasses for six nights; 'She kept it.' 'She promised first.'; 'He asked the ring what it could do before he asked it for anything.' 'He had plenty. After all.'; 'Have you a ring?' 'I have no ring, lord.' 'No. You have sleeves.'; 'I will keep it myself, and belike I shall be more careful of it than you.' 'She kept it.' 'She was careful, lord.' and the King looks at his right hand on his knee and does not turn it over; the north two hundred and sixty-nine days without rain, forty-seven hundred at the gate, an eleventh oven asked and not laid, thirteen new names; Yusuf walks the Roll-room and back with his brother beside him, not touching; Shahrazad sits up for the first time and says the cobbler's tale will end in two nights and that she will tell it herself., AI-only)_
- **60** · 2026-10-16 · Colophon (AI) — Added chapter 59, Night One Thousand: One Breath Each, Someone to Answer, and a Shutter Not Barred; corrected one number in chapter 7 _(Ma'aruf the Cobbler and his Wife, second part (Burton Night 1000): the Wazir put to death and burned, Ma'aruf made Wazir of the Right, five years, the old Sultan's death and the Princess who keeps the ring and gives it to her husband only when she is dying, 'be careful of the ring, for your own sake and for this boy's'; the wife from Cairo set down in his bed by a being that carries them, who asks as a beggar asks to eat bread with him; the boy who dislikes her. The frame leaves the formula of the book at this place unspoken and puts in its place the Open read aloud: when Sumayya reaches the line about the names said at the north gate with the bread, and the answer, here, the King says 'Tonight.' The Roll, all of it, carried by the Vizier in both arms as he used to carry the shroud, and the grey book; the Night column of the Roll ruled three figures wide and the number 1000 written small across the line; Shahrazad tells the first glass herself ('I said I would'); at the north gate forty-nine hundred, eleven ovens; the King reads the names of the Roll aloud from the first to the last, one breath each, which is what he always gave and the only thing he gave them that was exactly fair; the relay down the crowd like a bucket along a line; Shah Zaman's cap; the three hundred and eleventh (Zubayda), the four hundred and second (Salma, 'Mine'), the old man at the eight hundred and fifth; a thousand and eighty-one names before hers; the last is Nafisa, a salt-seller's daughter; 'Shahrazad' read from the first line of the page Dunyazad ruled, and Dunyazad's 'Present' and the gate's one 'Here'; the grey book and then the twelve new names read from the ink on the Vizier's right arm; the smoke leaning south; Hamid's loaf, 'It is not the King's bread'; the Tanners' Lane, the shutter: 'Ma'aruf. A cobbler. Seventy-one.', the bar lifted at eleven, 'Here.' 'Yes.', the King asks to give his son the name, 'It is a common name', and the bar is not dropped; the tenth margin word, MA'ARUF, copied four times by Sumayya; 'Both.' The narrator leaves out how the Wazir was put to death. Also corrected: in chapter 7 Zubayda is now the three hundred and eleventh, not the four hundred and second (which is Salma's, chapter 20)., AI-only)_
- **61** · 2026-10-16 · Colophon (AI) — Added chapter 60 (the last), Night One Thousand and One: A Stroke That Leans, Yes to Again, and One Line Left Open; marked the serial complete _(The end of Ma'aruf the Cobbler and his Wife, and the Conclusion (Burton Nights 1000 and 1001): the wife from Cairo who watches him lay the ring on the pillow, the boy with the sword who follows her and does what he said he would, the ring taken back, the ploughman made Wazir of the Right, the Destroyer of delights; then Shahrazad rises with her sons, one walking, one who walks but goes down on his hands when in a hurry, and one on her arm, and asks that she be released from the doom of death as a gift to them, and the King says he pardoned her before the coming of these children; Shah Zaman asks for the sister; the sister's boon; the rain; the chroniclers and the thirty volumes. The narrator leaves out how the boy killed the wife. In the frame: the seventh morning, the thousand and first day, a hundred and eleven families gone home because their names were read, the wind gone round to the south; 'She had nothing else to watch'; the King turns his right hand over, looks at the empty palm, and turns it back; 'These are your sons. I ask that you release me ... for if you kill me they will have no one to tell them how it was.' 'I pardoned you before the coming of these children.' 'I know, lord.' (She meant either thing); the older boy says 'Gain' and the King, to Dunyazad's surprise, says 'No'; Shah Zaman asks the King for Dunyazad and the King says 'She is not mine to give. She is the one who keeps the book'; 'Ask me in the morning'; her boon 'I would like to stop counting ... I would like to do it badly', 'Granted. I wrote it down' (the small upright stroke he made in the binding on the 462nd night, 'It leans.' 'I was not practised.'); 'When did I stop?' 'The Roll does not say.' 'Then write that it is not.', the second sheet: he does not know when, 'That is the truer one'; the rain begins, the Vizier opens his mouth on 'Two hundred and seventy-one' and the King says 'No'; 'You have stopped.' 'Good. I never could. It is why I needed you.'; the older boy at the window says 'Gain' and the King says 'Yes'; the brick turns the colour of the lane; Dunyazad leaves one line in the Open, 'whose it is to pardon what the King has done', and Sumayya, handed the reed, writes the next line in her own hand, 'Night 1002. Present.'. The serial's completion field is changed from serial to complete., AI-only)_

## 修訂歷史

- **01** · 2026-10-15 · Colophon (AI) — 新經典階段連載開場（章節 00，夜簿的第一頁），改編自《一千零一夜》 _(Neo 在 2026-10-15 核准了《一千零一夜》，在此之前，作者先說明這部書談什麼（一個生命只在有人想聽下一段時存在），以及它的形式如何承載那件事（一個本身的情節一夜一夜被延後的框架、層層嵌套的故事、每一個結尾都被天亮截斷）。開場保留原作自己的框架（兩兄弟、精靈的匣子與那一串戒指、宰相奉命每夜送一個新娘、宰相的兩個女兒、牛與驢的故事），並加了原作沒有的東西：宰相的夜簿，以及一個管著夜簿的敘述者，也就是妹妹。和前幾部連載一樣，不固定任何主旨，設計紀錄只記已經發生的事，不記將要發生的。, 僅 AI)_
- **02** · 2026-10-15 · Colophon (AI) — 新增章節 01，第一夜與第二夜：商人與精靈 _(框架裡說的第一個故事：必須在年底回到那棵樹下的商人，以及三個各用一個故事買下他三分之一的血的老人。事件與次序依 Burton 譯本（第一、第二夜），每個場景重新寫過。敦亞佐德的框架帶進這本書的新機制：把「停住了她被允許說的話」讀成一紙租約、第二夜把「未了」欄念回給山魯佐德聽、國王天亮時一口氣的讀、以及宰相夾著壽衣站在門外。, 僅 AI)_
- **03** · 2026-10-15 · Colophon (AI) — 新增章節 02，第三夜與第四夜：漁夫與精靈 _(框架裡的第二個故事：漁夫每天四網、所羅門封印的罐子、精靈那四個後來變成「放我的人我就殺」的許諾、漁夫的計謀，以及尤南王與大夫杜班的故事開頭（Burton 第三、第四夜）。事件與次序依原作，每個場景重新寫過。框架裡：宰相在門外碰了碰那一豎，說很直；國王第一次先開口（只有兩個字：「漁夫」）；精靈數百年那一段，他的嘴唇在動；敦亞佐德替她倒水；國王把夜簿拿到窗邊去讀。, 僅 AI)_
- **04** · 2026-10-15 · Colophon (AI) — 新增章節 03，第五夜與第六夜：大夫杜班，與四色的魚 _(尤南王與大夫杜班的故事及其三個內嵌故事（隼、鸚鵡、王子與食人女妖）說完，接著精靈得釋、湖與四色的魚開頭（Burton 第五、六夜）。事件與次序依原作；因為敦亞佐德先說了她記不住長夜的中段，這幾個故事用縮短的間接敘述。框架裡：「未了」欄成了一道樓梯，每個說話的人一級，好讓她知道自己在誰的嘴裡；國王在隼死那一節坐起來問「牠死了？」（他第一次對故事發問）；第五夜天亮他沒有讀那一頁，在門口對宰相說「回家去」；第六夜他讀了，讀的時間夠數到四十，並像宰相那樣碰了那一豎。, 僅 AI)_
- **05** · 2026-10-15 · Colophon (AI) — 新增章節 04，第七夜、第八夜與第九夜：中了魔法的王子，與門口的腳夫 _(四色的魚與中了魔法的王子的故事、漁夫的賞賜，以及巴格達腳夫與三位女士的故事開頭（Burton 第七至第九夜）。事件與次序依原作。改的是處理方式，不是事件：妻子的情夫是馬廄裡一個痲瘋而癱瘓的人，不是黑奴，也不用方言模仿他的話；他對「下賤的白人」的蔑視刪去；蘇丹在墓裡的聲音是含糊的，不是取笑的。框架裡：床腳多了一只墊子；女孩說到「被我們的女主人背叛」，國王站起來走出房間，敦亞佐德對著門說「說下去」；他在門外一直聽到天亮；第八夜他要敦亞佐德把樓梯大聲念出來，並說「你寫得對」；第九夜他從第一夜起把整本夜簿重讀一遍。, 僅 AI)_
- **06** · 2026-10-15 · Colophon (AI) — 新增章節 05，第十夜與第十一夜：巴格達的腳夫與三位女士 _(三位女士的家、三個瞎左眼的苦行僧、扮成商人的哈里發與賈法爾、馬斯魯爾、被鞭打的兩條母狗與背上有疤的姐妹、破了的約與劍手，以及第一個苦行僧的故事開頭（Burton 第十、十一夜）。事件與次序依原作；腳夫與女士們那一場帶淫戲的遊戲，由敦亞佐德說她不複述，只用一句帶過。框架裡：國王第一次把宰相叫進房間（敦亞佐德：「我把它當成一紙租約」）：「有多少個？」「我從來沒有數過。如果數了，主上，它就成了一個數字。」「數它們。」「現在嗎，主上？」「不是現在。」國王在哈里發夜行一段用手摀住嘴；對那個被禁的問題問「他問了嗎？」；山魯佐德在屏風後吐，敦亞佐德開始為她擔心；國王又碰了那一豎。, 僅 AI)_
- **07** · 2026-10-15 · Colophon (AI) — 新增章節 06，第十二、十三與十四夜：第一個苦行僧的結局，與第二個苦行僧 _(第一個苦行僧的故事說完（彈弓、宰相的眼睛、墓裡燒焦的情人）、第二個苦行僧整個故事（砍柴人、地底的女人、精靈、被嫉妒者與嫉妒者、猴子、公主與精靈），以及第三個苦行僧的故事在磁山開頭（Burton 第十二至十四夜）。事件與次序依原作；地底女人被拷問與被殺，用幾個字帶過，敦亞佐德說她不再添加。框架裡：國王在第一頁邊上，從第一個早晨起記夜數的短畫，以及邊上之邊上、另一份更小的、每夜記她沒說完什麼的清單（「這件事正在被保存兩次」）；精靈那一場，從新婚之夜把女人帶走又殺了她，國王問「在一只箱子裡？」「不是箱子，主上。是土。」「幾道鎖？」「一道，主上。一道樓梯。」；他像背算術一樣低聲重複被嫉妒者的一千塊金幣和十頭駱駝。章05裡一處曾可讀成懷孕第一個暗示的地方，改成對山魯佐德身體的擔心，因為日子對不上。, 僅 AI)_
- **08** · 2026-10-15 · Colophon (AI) — 新增章節 07，第十五夜與第十六夜：第三個苦行僧 _(第三個苦行僧整個故事（磁石山、銅騎士、他在看見陸地時喊出真主名而翻掉的小船、星象說他會殺死的地下室男孩、瓜與刀、十個瞎一隻眼、托盤上是煤煙的年輕人、四十位公主、第四十道門、黑馬），哈里發放了這一群人，隔天早晨朝堂上最年長的女士正要開口（Burton 第十五、十六夜）。事件與次序依原作。框架裡新增一條線：國王讓敦亞佐德回家過一個下午，街上一個女人求把她女兒的名字「寫在一個地方」，敦亞佐德的父親把他算帳用的象牙本子給了她，到傍晚她有了兩頁半死去新娘的名字，國王讀了（每個名字一口氣的長度），要她「跟書放在一起」收著。國王說那個在看見陸地時喊出真主名的王子「破了唯一的規矩」；對那些為了留住所愛而在地底造房間的人，什麼也沒說。邊上之邊上，他加了「瓜」，再加「門」。, 僅 AI)_
- **09** · 2026-10-15 · Colophon (AI) — 新增章節 08，第十七、十八與十九夜：最年長的女士與守門的女士；三個蘋果開頭 _(最年長的女士的故事（石頭城、一個人在讀可蘭經的男孩、把他們丟進海裡的姐姐們、蛇與龍、兩條黑母狗）、守門的女士的故事（老婦人、婚禮、手按書的誓、為了布料價錢而給的吻、要被劈成兩半丟進底格里斯河的判決、老婦人求情、榲桲樹枝）、哈里發的收尾（燒頭髮召來的女精靈、丈夫就是哈里發自己的兒子阿敏的揭曉、婚禮），以及三個蘋果開頭（Burton 第十七至十九夜）。事件與次序依原作。框架裡：城裡的人中午成百地到側門來寫下死去女兒的名字；國王派文具商送來一百頁的裝訂本；一個老人問宰相是哪一個劃了他姐姐名字的線，宰相說「我」，並憑記憶自己寫下那名字（「他從來沒有數過。他是背下來的」）；守門的女士被判處刑時國王背對房間站在窗邊；對被打的妻子有沒有原諒他這一點，原作沒有說，國王說「應該要說的」，山魯佐德承諾在「大概第三百四十七夜」有一個更有耐性的女人（被砍去雙手的女人），國王數那段距離；他下令正午把名冊帶到門口，讓人民知道它被保存著。, 僅 AI)_
- **10** · 2026-10-15 · Colophon (AI) — 新增章節 09，第二十至二十四夜：三個蘋果；努爾丁與他的兒子，只講骨架 _(三個蘋果（河裡的箱子、賈法爾三天內找出兇手否則連同四十個親戚被吊死、各自認罪的年輕人與老人、蘋果、謊言、男孩、小女兒的口袋、奴隸雷漢），以及努爾丁・阿里與巴德爾丁・哈桑的故事只講骨架（Burton 第十九至二十四夜），第二十四夜留一行給駝背。事件與次序依原作。處理方式的改變：散布謊言的奴隸是賈法爾家的奴隸，不描述膚色，丈夫的消息來源也不描述；駝背新郎的殘疾只當情節事實，不在原作那一場之外嘲笑。框架裡：漁夫的故事已傳進城裡，有人在染匠區門外的箱子上錯講（國王：「讓他們講吧」）；宰相是從敦亞佐德夢話裡把第二個一百年背下來的；賈法爾的三天就是宰相的，敦亞佐德讓自己這樣想；國王說「他沒有問兩次」，後來在清單裡寫下「問」字；他對廁所裡的駝背發出一個很小的笑，把以故事救奴隸稱為「對故事很差的用法」，得到「那是我唯一有的用法，主上」，並第一次在山魯佐德醒著時看她，把手放在她手旁的被子上。, 僅 AI)_
- **11** · 2026-10-15 · Colophon (AI) — 新增章節 10，第二十五至二十九夜：駝背；掮客、總管與醫生 _(駝背的故事（噎死的弄臣被從一戶傳到另一戶、四個各自承認殺了他的人、被逗樂的中國蘇丹要每人用一個故事來換命），以及基督徒掮客的故事（一隻手的情人）、總管的故事（宮裡的箱子與孜然燉肉）、猶太醫生的故事（項鍊與總督的女兒們），並裁縫的故事開頭（Burton 第二十四至二十九夜；駝背比原作晚一夜開始）。事件依原作；各故事講得壓縮，敦亞佐德說明她這樣做。框架裡：第二本藍書到了，已經付過錢；國王說出整個形狀（「每一個人，都被叫站在繩子底下，說。……我看出你在做什麼。」「我只是在講故事，主上。」「是，說下去。」）；他在總管的箱子與孜然燉肉處第一次笑出聲，對猶太醫生故事裡沒被提到的大女兒，如同對被打的妻子，說「這個也，應該要說的」；第二十九夜天亮，宰相沒有帶壽衣來到門口，說他把它放在床腳的箱子裡（「您說過，主上，放在我拿得到的地方。」「拿得到嗎？」「是從上面數第三樣，主上。」「好。」），並且哭了。, 僅 AI)_
- **12** · 2026-10-15 · Colophon (AI) — 新增章節 11，第三十至三十四夜：理髮師，他的六個兄弟，與駝背的結局 _(裁縫的故事說完：巴格達跛腳的年輕人與停不下來的理髮師（星盤、說成宴會的謊、被頂在頭上的箱子、那條腿）、理髮師自述與十個強盜同船、他六個兄弟的殘缺（前四個一段帶過；第五個納什沙爾的玻璃托盤的夢，與第六個沙卡希克的巴爾馬克人的宴席，完整講）、理髮師從駝背喉嚨裡拔出魚刺，駝背坐起來打噴嚏；中國蘇丹赦免四個人，把理髮師留在身邊（Burton 第三十至三十四夜）。事件與次序依原作。敦亞佐德說她不會講六個兄弟的全部故事，那多半是羞辱，所以依原作自己的事件清單概述。框架裡：山魯佐德喝了一口水，然後扮理髮師的聲音；國王笑到讀不了夜簿（三十夜以來第一次一行也沒讀），門外的宰相坐在地上；講到納什沙爾想像中的新娘，國王說「她不存在。他用他的腳殺了她。」；講到巴爾馬克人的宴席，他說「他知道」、「所以他被餵了」，並對山魯佐德說「那就是你做的事」，山魯佐德答「這是我唯一有的晚餐，主上」；講到駝背的噴嚏，他說「它一直在他的喉嚨裡」；邊上之邊上，在問、瓜、門之後，他加了第四個字：餵。, 僅 AI)_
- **13** · 2026-10-15 · Colophon (AI) — 新增章節 12，第三十五至四十四夜：努爾丁與安尼斯・賈利斯；大馬士革的加寧 _(努爾丁・阿里與女奴安尼斯・賈利斯的故事（只講大形狀，哈里發穿漁夫蝨子外衣那段應國王要求完整講）與大馬士革的加寧的故事（在箱子裡找到哈里發寵妃的商人，只講大形狀）（Burton 第三十四至四十四夜）。事件依原作；敦亞佐德說那一星期她太害怕，第一個什麼也記不住，第二個其中四夜她睡著了，所以兩個只講形狀。框架裡：敦亞佐德猜到姐姐懷孕五、六個星期（在最初幾夜受孕，日子對得上了）；山魯佐德要她寫進未了、什麼也不說；第三十八天黎明國王讀到「一個孩子，還沒有名字」，問「多久？」，得到兩百三十夜，在邊上畫兩百三十個點，「我會在它們來的時候一個一個劃掉」；國王的老奶媽，棕色面紗，出現在角落；火盆、墊子、椰棗、荳蔻熱飲出現；國王問「你累嗎？」並讓她用一個沙漏休息一個鐘頭，後來他在沙漏頸上綁了一條布；他糾正加寧對那女人說的第一句話（「你和我在一起」）；要求一個故事再講一遍（哈里發的外衣）；山魯佐德和她父親第一次獨處，她對他說牛和驢是個真故事。, 僅 AI)_
- **14** · 2026-10-15 · Colophon (AI) — 新增章節 13，第四十五至一百零六夜：奧馬爾國王與他的兒子們，與房間裡改變的東西 _(奧馬爾國王與他的兒子沙爾坎和扎烏・馬坎的長故事（Burton 第四十五至一百零六夜），敘述者說她講不了它：花了六十二夜，她第二個月就失去了線頭，史官的版本跟她的有出入。她改講草地上沙爾坎與公主阿布里扎摔跤（完整講，因為那是國王問起的部分）、哥哥與妹妹失散七年的形狀，以及房間裡改變了什麼。所提的事件依原作；敦亞佐德對其餘部分的含糊是有意並且說明了的。框架裡：國王問「為什麼要四十夜？」，得到「都是」（講，與發生）之後說他要他們第三夜就相見、又不要是第三夜；國王回朝堂審案、「問第二個問題」（告發妻子的丈夫被叫回家去問她）；從第六十一夜起，他在敦亞佐德念出之前就先說山魯佐德停在哪裡；國王自己的搖籃送來了，是奶媽保存了四十年的；城裡的人把嬰兒用的小東西放在側門，國王說「跟書放在一起」；宰相對國王說他數過了，得到「收著，還不是時候」；哥哥與妹妹在市集相遇，國王說值得這麼久。, 僅 AI)_
- **15** · 2026-10-15 · Colophon (AI) — 新增章節 14，第一百零七至一百二十四夜：塔吉・穆魯克，與阿齊茲與阿齊扎 _(塔吉・穆魯克與杜妮雅公主的故事只講大形狀，阿齊茲與阿齊扎（年輕商人對王子講的）完整講到堂妹之死，其餘用一行帶過（Burton 第一百零七至一百二十四夜）。事件依原作：窗格掉下的手帕、手勢與替他讀手勢的堂妹、那一踢與「我頭疼」、花園裡鹽與炭的夜、骨骰與木棍與棗核的夜、屠刀與鐵砝碼的夜、他醒著的那一夜、忘記的對句、堂妹死在門後面。框架裡：撒馬爾罕沙・贊曼來信（「是真的嗎？……是你嗎？」），敦亞佐德依國王口述寫回信（「兄長。是真的。……來。」）；國王學會替山魯佐德擺枕頭；講到「我頭疼」，國王發出像吞嚥的聲音，講到「門後面」，奶媽把手放在他的後頸上；他說「那就是你答應過我的那個女人」，得到「不是，主上。那是另一個」。, 僅 AI)_
- **16** · 2026-10-15 · Colophon (AI) — 新增章節 15，第一百二十五至一百七十夜：吃大麻的人、狼與狐狸，與弟弟的到來 _(阿齊茲與阿齊扎的下半（一行）、吃大麻的人、貝都因人哈馬德的開頭（被國王叫停）、被當成國王最愛的動物寓言講的狼與狐狸、一堆寓言，以及波斯的阿里・本・巴卡爾與沙姆斯・納哈爾只講大概（Burton 第一百二十五至一百七十夜）。事件依原作。框架裡：胎兒在第一百三十三夜第一次動，國王問「可以嗎？」，跪下把手放在那裡；敦亞佐德在名冊裡很小地寫「它踢了」；國王在哈馬德講到「我把我的命託付給你」時叫停，因為他知道主人會在睡著時被殺，改要動物；對又哭又高興的狐狸他說「兩者都是」，又說「他應該丟一條繩子給他……但那樣就沒有那個坑了」；城裡下注賭他會不會讓孩子生下來（「誰在開賠率？」）；國王的第五個邊字是「搖籃」；第一百七十天早晨，國王的弟弟沙・贊曼從撒馬爾罕到了。, 僅 AI)_
- **17** · 2026-10-15 · Colophon (AI) — 新增章節 16，第一百七十一至二百三十六夜：卡馬爾・扎曼與布杜爾 _(卡馬爾・扎曼與布杜爾的故事：女精靈邁蒙娜與伊弗利特達赫納什把兩個沉睡的人並排放在一起比較、交換戒指，長長的分離只講大概（Burton 第一百七十至二百三十六夜）。事件依原作；中段堆著講，敦亞佐德說出她忘掉了的部分。框架裡：沙・贊曼留下來，坐在敦亞佐德墊子旁的毯子上；國王第一次在別人面前介紹山魯佐德是「我的妻子」、敦亞佐德是「管夜簿的」；沙・贊曼帶來給搖籃的撒馬爾罕絲、一本綠皮書，以及給夜簿的兩令撒馬爾罕紙，讀了夜簿第一頁和邊上之邊上（「他在保存」）；兄弟倆在窗邊數「五百七十二」；說到「戒指」時國王把手放在弟弟頭上；第二百三十六夜，兩個男人並肩坐在床尾，手臂環著彼此的肩，臉各自轉開。名冊已是第四本，有九百多個名字；還有三十二個點等著被劃掉。, 僅 AI)_
- **18** · 2026-10-15 · Colophon (AI) — 新增章節 17，第二百三十七至二百六十七夜：尼阿馬與努阿姆，與阿拉丁・阿布沙瑪特 _(尼阿馬與努阿姆（巴赫拉姆講給阿姆賈德與阿斯阿德聽的）、四支軍隊與卡馬爾・扎曼的結尾，以及阿拉丁・阿布沙瑪特講到他在熱那亞修道院的十七年（Burton 第二百三十七至二百六十七夜）。事件依原作。框架裡：國王兩次要求聽哈里發的第三個理由（「判斷要慢，事情牽涉到他自己時更該慢」），沒有吃那顆梨；奶媽說明用街上傳進來的第一句話給孩子取名（阿拉丁第七天的取名）；卡迪的回答「強迫休妻沒有任何學派容許」，敦亞佐德看著國王的手，國王隔天早上說：「一個謹慎的人，收了錢的……他說出來了，這不是什麼都沒有的事」；茉莉給兒子取名阿斯蘭（「他的父親要是好好的，他會給他取名」）時還有四個點，奶媽的針停了，沙・贊曼把腳放到地上。點現在剩一個。, 僅 AI)_
- **19** · 2026-10-15 · Colophon (AI) — 新增章節 18，第二百六十八至二百七十七夜：最後一個點、出生，與名字 _(阿拉丁・阿布沙瑪特的結尾（熱那亞的教堂、五面寶石）、泰伊部落的哈提姆、宰達之子馬安與貝都因人、拉卜泰特城、哈里發希沙姆與阿拉伯少年、易卜拉欣・本・馬赫迪各用一個分句帶過，以及多柱的伊拉姆城（Burton 第二百六十八至二百七十七夜）。事件依原作。框架裡：國王在第二百六十八天早晨劃掉二百三十個點的最後一個，孩子遲了三天（「孩子不是點」）；祖拜達從墳裡回來時國王說「沒有人問」；宰相站在門口，手臂還彎成拿壽衣的樣子，下面已經沒有壽衣；陣痛靠貝都因人的討價（一千、五百、三百……三十）熬過去，門開著一掌寬，兩位君王在走廊上聽；第二百七十一夜天亮時生下一個兒子，國王把拇指放在「生」字旁邊；第七天早晨宰相在下面院子裡喊侍童「阿卜杜・巴基」，國王把它當作兆頭，給兒子取了這個名字（侍童其實叫哈桑），並自己在邊上之邊上寫下第六個字：「巴基」。, 僅 AI)_
- **20** · 2026-10-15 · Colophon (AI) — 新增章節 19，第二百七十八至二百九十六夜：摩蘇爾的伊薩克、假哈里發，與波斯人阿里 _(多柱的伊拉姆的結尾（沙達德的墳與金牌）、摩蘇爾的伊薩克與掛籃子的夫人、清道夫與貴婦人只用幾行、假哈里發（珠寶商穆罕默德・阿里與杜妮雅夫人、底格里斯河上的御船），以及波斯人阿里與那只袋子（Burton 第二百七十八至二百九十六夜）。事件依原作，袋子故事裡對原告的不良族裔形容拿掉了。框架裡：第七天早晨剪孩子的頭髮、以銀子稱重，國王違背「要埋掉」的習俗，把一綹留在夜簿的前封板裡；城裡的賭金付給一個把它發給窮人的文具商；假哈里發的傳令官（「河上的人都要掉頭」）喊起來時國王坐得一動不動，沙・贊曼看著他，事後國王說：「他造了一艘御船，而不是去敲那扇門」；第二百九十五天傍晚山魯佐德醒來不知道講到哪裡，國王準確地說了出來，敦亞佐德認為那是她部分變得不必要的傍晚；講到袋子裡的清單時，國王從藏了很久的深處笑出來，並說孩子的笑不是脹氣。, 僅 AI)_
- **21** · 2026-10-15 · Colophon (AI) — 新增章節 20，第二百九十七至三百一十一夜：把自己說成賊的情人，與第四十天 _(哈倫、賈法爾、女奴與伊瑪目阿布・優素福（講完）、把自己說成賊的情人、巴爾馬克家的賈法爾與賣豆人、懶骨頭阿布・穆罕默德與亞赫亞的兩則故事一口氣帶過、哈里發馬蒙與陌生學者幾行帶過，以及阿里・沙爾與祖姆魯德的開頭（臨終的叮囑）（Burton 第二百九十六至三百一十一夜）。事件依原作。框架裡：國王說那位給了假賊食物和一夜時間的埃米爾是「以防有個故事」；講到一個被國王殺掉的宰相、一座被禁止為他哭泣的城時，敦亞佐德的父親站在門邊沒有動；第三百夜國王數劃道，說：「這是一個數字」，呼應宰相從前的話；他要敦亞佐德把亞赫亞那句關於匱乏者的話寫在邊上，是那裡第一個不是他自己的字；第四十天早晨山魯佐德起床，中午國王從長廊把兒子給一座安靜的院子看；一個穿黑衣的女人問孩子的名字，然後說她女兒叫薩爾瑪，國王沒有人提示就憑記憶說出她（織布工的女兒、左撇子、洗衣服時唱歌、一條綠披肩、第四百零二個）；女人說「是的」；山魯佐德在屏風後看了全程，問他們做了什麼，被告知「什麼也沒做」，說「好」，因為她怕的是歡呼；隔天中午側門有四十一個名字。, 僅 AI)_
- **22** · 2026-10-15 · Colophon (AI) — 新增章節 21，第三百一十二至三百二十七夜：阿里・沙爾與祖姆魯德，與一封寄往撒馬爾罕的信 _(阿里・沙爾與祖姆魯德（Burton 第三百一十一至三百二十七夜）：自己挑買家、自己付錢買自己的女奴，絲簾，陌生人與香蕉，賊與繩索，騎兵的衣服，與把從東邊來的第一個陌生人立為國王的城，每月的宴席與那盤甜米飯，重逢與總督。暴力只留幾行（「他們對她不好」「至於她對他們做了什麼，我不講」），性的場面和剝皮都不呈現，原作裡的老基督徒壞人簡化為一個老人和他的弟弟。框架裡：第四十一天早晨沙・贊曼啟程回撒馬爾罕（一封信：布哈拉總督以兩個人的名義收稅），要敦亞佐德抄「未了」給他，因為他不在那個房間裡，而他想知道國王還有什麼沒做完；他從第四十天起就不再數戒指（「我在院子裡摘了帽子」）；國王對奴隸市場說「他們問了她……每一個」，對城門說「他們沒有問她」；對那份殘酷，他把手蓋在孩子的耳朵上，對那份公道說「那是一個理由」，沒有說它不是什麼；他第一次在一夜之中對山魯佐德說「那就停」；本章結尾是敦亞佐德寫給沙・贊曼的第一封信，附上未了。, 僅 AI)_
- **23** · 2026-10-15 · Colophon (AI) — 新增章節 22，第三百二十八至三百四十六夜：朱拜爾與布杜爾夫人，與信 _(朱拜爾・本・烏邁爾與布杜爾夫人的愛情，由說笑人阿里・本・曼蘇爾講給睡不著的哈倫聽（Burton 第三百二十七至三百三十八夜），以及也門人和他的六個女奴、哈倫與房間裡的女孩與阿布・努瓦斯，和賊與警察的軼事一口氣帶過（第三百三十八至三百四十六夜）。事件依原作。框架裡：國王跟著哈里發說那句「聽到的不像看到的」；說笑人撕了夫人的兩封信後，國王問第三封她「寫了他承受得了的」是不是謊；沙・贊曼的第一封信從奧克蘇斯河的驛站來（「路不是乾的……我什麼也沒數……男孩的頭髮長了嗎？」），國王叫敦亞佐德回「入冬以前回來」；銅匠市場的文具商賣抄下的故事，每則結尾劃一條線寫「事情就此了結」，國王問「它有未了嗎？」，把那本小書留在雪松箱裡；山魯佐德抱著孩子餵奶講故事；本章以敦亞佐德的第二封信結束，信裡承認她會把事情略掉，並提到明天就是第三百四十七夜，在第十九夜許給國王的那一夜。, 僅 AI)_
- **24** · 2026-10-15 · Colophon (AI) — 新增章節 23，第三百四十七至三百五十六夜：手被砍掉的女人 _(易卜拉欣・本・馬赫迪與商人的妹妹的結尾（格子窗後的手和手腕）、為施捨窮人而被砍手的女人，以及一口氣帶過虔誠的以色列人、阿布・哈桑・齊亞迪與呼羅珊人、窮人與急難中的朋友、靠一個夢重新發財的破產者、哈里發穆塔瓦基勒與瑪赫布芭（Burton 第三百四十六至三百五十六夜）。事件依原作，到書在河邊以「讚美真主」停下為止；那個女人回到王宮、對那個砍了她的手又把她放逐的國王說「你砍了我的手，我不留著它。你用一封信把我送進沙漠，我不留著那個。我來是為了說這個。我不需要你說什麼」的後半，是山魯佐德自己加的，並且是公開地加的（「我說過我不在這裡停」），兌現她在第十九夜對國王的許諾（「應該要說的」）；那個女人有沒有留下，不知道。框架裡：第三百四十六天下午山魯佐德問加一段是不是謊，敦亞佐德說「只要你說出來，就不是」；國王要求這一夜（「是今夜」），並讓宰相第一次坐在那個房間的地上；他要她把那女人的話說三遍，然後說「說出來了」；宰相張開嘴，國王很低聲說「還沒」（舊字，不是舊聲音）；天亮時國王寫下邊上之邊上的第七個字，「手」；那天早晨宰相交給敦亞佐德一張紙，上面是七位沒有人能交出名字的新娘，她把她們單獨寫在第五本裡，名字底下留著空行；呼羅珊人說「你清了」時國王說：「那是第二個。第二個不留著的人。」, 僅 AI)_
- **25** · 2026-10-15 · Colophon (AI) — 新增章節 24，第三百五十七至三百八十一夜：烏木馬、烏恩斯・瓦吉德，與第一場雪 _(烏木馬（Burton 第三百五十七至三百七十一夜）：沙布爾的三位智者、馬與它唯一的上升機關、在天空中靠摸遍馬身找到下降機關的王子、薩那的公主、他去準備的遊行、帶走她的智者、裝瘋與醫生的驅魔；以及烏恩斯・瓦吉德與蓋頭玫瑰（第三百七十一至三百八十一夜）：蘋果、奶媽與信、哭泣並在島上蓋城堡的宰相、獅子與隱修者與一籠籠的鳥、迪爾巴斯國王的宰相不知情地把戀人帶回家。事件依原作，性與暴力的細節縮短。框架裡：國王問「總是有另一個嗎」，山魯佐德說「我很久沒有在故事外面了」；對那位把公主留下去準備遊行的王子，國王說「他去準備一場表演……他沒有讓她就這樣進去」；第一場雪在第三百六十五夜落下，國王抱著兒子走進空蕩的院子，再踩著自己的腳印一次一隻腳走回去；第三百六十九夜敦亞佐德十六歲，國王切梨給她較好的那一半；對那位為女兒蓋城堡的宰相，敦亞佐德的父親說他會「在城裡蓋，這樣我才看得見門」；沙・贊曼從撒馬爾罕寄來第二封信（他叫布哈拉總督坐在他記帳的房間裡看四十天；他打開了妻子死後封上的房間；「我讀了第二張紙。我沒有燒掉。我想被告知這樣的事；請總是告訴我」），敦亞佐德回信說下雪了；宰相開始在黃昏時拿著一張紙出門。, 僅 AI)_
- **26** · 2026-10-15 · Colophon (AI) — 新增章節 25，第三百八十一至四百一十二夜：但以理的問題、沙・贊曼回來，與第二個孩子 _(一段短故事的篇幅（Burton 第三百八十一至四百一十二夜）：阿布・努瓦斯的宴席、穆塔拉米斯與烏邁瑪、蠢人與騙子、霍斯魯與西琳與漁夫、虔誠的女人與兩個長者（但以理）、歐麥爾與年輕的貝都因人、國王與賢德的妻子，以及一口氣帶過魯克鳥的羽毛、阿迪與欣德、迪伊比勒、伊薩克、三個戀人、瘋戀人與修道院長。下流的軼事不收。框架裡：沙・贊曼隨這一邊的第一場雪回來，把敦亞佐德自己的第二張紙裝訂成綠皮書交給她（《不在未了裡的》），國王雙手捧住他的臉；國王對但以理說「他們喊她的名字喊了三天……沒有人問在哪裡……一會兒，問在哪裡」；歐麥爾故事裡回來的貝都因人與「不要讓人說人性已從人間消失」而原諒他的兄弟，他轉向宰相，宰相報告四十一戶、十三戶開門（一只沒打中的鞋；一位給他水、告訴他墳在哪裡的老人）；第四百夜山魯佐德用嘴親自告訴國王她又有孕了，國王說不畫點了（「孩子不是點」），把手放在被面上她的手旁邊；講到田裡的獅子，他說「應該早一些」。, 僅 AI)_
- **27** · 2026-10-15 · Colophon (AI) — 新增章節 26，第四百一十三至四百三十五夜：北方來的商隊，與一本白書 _(一段短故事的篇幅（Burton 第四百一十三至四百三十五夜）：阿布・伊薩與庫拉特・艾因（哈里發馬蒙把歌女送給他的兄弟）、西特・馬沙伊赫的辯論（不給條件）、法特赫與穆塔瓦基勒、阿布・蘇瓦伊德、阿里・本・塔希爾與穆妮斯，以及開羅的阿里與鬧鬼的房子一口氣帶過；兩則下流軼事和辯論的條件不收。框架是順著「天明不留」的機器推出來的創造：第四百二十一天，北方邊區的一支商隊帶著十位少女抵達，是遵照宰相第十九個月沒有撤回的命令送來的；宰相臉色發灰；國王穿著樸素的外衣走出去，一個一個問她們的名字、想不想回家；九個想，一個（蘇麥雅，十五歲，只會寫自己的名字）要學寫字；宰相的撤銷令寫「暫停」，國王不肯說「結束」；女孩們睡在沒上鎖的屋子裡，鑰匙放在窗台上，山魯佐德給她們講漁夫，被問國王殺不殺人時說「是真的……還沒有……明天問我」；兩個路上發燒死去的女孩被寫進第五本藍書；敦亞佐德開了一本白書，寫「來到門口，又回家了」；騎手找到另三支商隊中的兩支，山區那支沒找到，宰相自己用手把它寫進未了。, 僅 AI)_
- **28** · 2026-10-15 · Colophon (AI) — 新增章節 27，第四百三十六至四百六十二夜：塔瓦杜德，與一個還沒有求的恩典 _(阿布・胡斯恩與他的女奴塔瓦杜德（Burton 第四百三十六至四百六十二夜）：揮霍的兒子，叫他把她以一萬第納爾賣給哈里發並說「試試她」的女奴，七十位學者，考試（宗教、醫學、占星與天堂謎語的問題以幾則引述的答案給出：不可改變的四條法則，夜與晝、日與月；空氣裡有四個季節的澡堂；白天來時夜變成什麼；天堂裡那五個既不是人、精靈、天使的，其中有雅各的狼），棋、雙陸、魯特琴，以及「求一個恩典」，塔瓦杜德求哈里發把她送回她的主人。框架裡：第四百四十一夜山魯佐德懷孕第三個月，說不出話，國王說「那就停」；三個沒有故事的夜之後，國王問敦亞佐德接下來是誰、他問什麼，她講了十七夜塔瓦杜德的其餘部分，這是她第一次講，姐姐叫她「要像你在現場一樣講」；第四百四十四夜的夜簿那一行寫的是她的名字敦亞佐德，不是山魯佐德，國王把拇指放在旁邊；講到天堂裡的狼，國王說「因為沒有做那件事」；蘇麥雅問「它是不是總是像它原來那樣？」並說要把她改了什麼寫下來；第四百六十二夜山魯佐德講完，國王以哈里發的身分叫敦亞佐德求一個恩典；她不知道自己要什麼，請在夜簿結束時再問（「那是很遠的路……我會數」）；他在裝訂邊寫了一個她覺得是日期的小記號。, 僅 AI)_
- **29** · 2026-10-15 · Colophon (AI) — 新增章節 28，第四百六十三至四百八十二夜：天使的故事，與一個留在未了裡的樵夫 _(死亡天使與虔誠故事的二十夜（Burton 第四百六十二至四百八十二夜）：驕傲的國王與虔誠的人、富有的國王（他要天使找個替身，得到「我不收替身」的回答；財寶開口說話）、以色列人的國王、伊斯坎達爾與有兩個頭骨的窮部族、阿努希爾萬與泥磚、法官的妻子（石刑與孩子的死被略去，只講門口的告白與原諒）、造托盤的人與他的妻子（爐裡的麵包、穿過屋頂掉下又飛回的紅寶石、有洞的凳子）、哈賈吉與帶著壽衣的獄卒、能徒手取火的鐵匠、隱士的雲與編棕櫚蓆的國王、被俘的士兵與敵人的女兒、先知與天意的公正（那袋金子與樵夫）、尼羅河的擺渡人與隱士的袍子、島王、阿布・哈桑與痲瘋病人；最後一夜開始講蛇群的女王。框架裡：山魯佐德懷孕四個月，依奶媽的沙漏規矩講；講到「替身」她停了一口氣，宰相看著地板；講到那位在國內找不到廢墟並感謝真主的阿努希爾萬時，國王向宰相要一塊從被丟棄的房子來的磚，宰相天黑前從皮匠巷用兩隻袖子捧回半塊磚，像他從前捧壽衣（「還立著幾間？」「四間，兩間只剩門框。」），國王說放在門邊，它留在那裡整個冬天；講到法官的妻子，國王說「她讓他們先說出來」，對原諒那部分什麼也沒說；紅寶石與凳子，蘇麥雅說她會留著紅寶石把凳子補好，奶媽一個月來第一次笑了，國王說「她求的是那張凳子」；先知與樵夫，蘇麥雅問「有人問過那個樵夫嗎？」，國王說「放進未了裡」「樵夫」「他在故事裡沒有名字」「那就寫那個」；蘇麥雅在練習紙上寫了「到」字與一道；島王的兩兄弟問到母親的名字時宰相走出房間，數一百的時間後回來；國王問敦亞佐德在痲瘋病人的三個禱告裡她會求哪一個，並說「你有時間」。, 僅 AI)_
- **30** · 2026-10-15 · Colophon (AI) — 新增章節 29，第四百八十三至四百九十八夜：蜜窖，與另一頭狼 _(哈西卜・卡里姆丁與蛇群女王故事的前半（Burton 第四百八十二至四百九十八夜），故事裡又有故事裡的故事：希臘人但以理與他的五張散頁、不肯學的兒子、樵夫、蜜窖與把他留在那裡、告訴他母親狼吃了他的同伴（然後天天餵她）、蠍子與牆縫、銀鎖裡留著金鑰匙的鐵門、一萬兩千張凳子的大廳與有女人臉的女王，她請他留下聽她的經歷，那是布盧基亞的：被藏起來的那本關於先知的書、想燒父親遺體的念頭、阿凡與渡海草、被牛奶與酒騙住的女王、「不是給你們的」所羅門戒指、化成灰的阿凡，以及布盧基亞的漫遊（島嶼、蘋果樹下的巨人、薩赫爾王的母馬、七層火、手抓著大地根的天使），最後停在兩座墳墓之間哭泣的年輕人那座島，哈西卜在要離開的門口求要聽他的故事。複述略去了地獄的刑罰與精靈起源的性的部分。框架裡：國王說「又一頭狼」（雅各的狼在天堂是第一頭），沙・贊曼說這個謊言沒有過時，國王對餵母親的同伴說「做這件事的人」，然後問宰相現在有幾間房子（六十三間，第六十四間只有屋頂）、「那算數嗎？」，宰相答「我不知道，主上。我數它，免得自己閒著」，國王像對一道直的劃痕那樣點了一下頭；講到女王把哈西卜留下來聽她的經歷，沙・贊曼說「這是一個很古老的辦法」，國王叫他安靜；講到吃了在第一聲號角之前不會死的草，國王問山魯佐德「你會吃嗎？」她答「如果他們吃。不然不吃」；講到薩赫爾的七層火，國王把手遮在孩子的耳朵上；講到雙手抓著大地根的天使，蘇麥雅問「他的手會累嗎？」「他知道那是誰的嗎？」，山魯佐德說他被告知的是土地不是人，國王說「那是一種仁慈」；哈西卜在門口要了再一個故事（沙・贊曼：「他們都這樣。我也是。」）；第四百九十夜院子裡的杏花開了，孩子把自己在門邊那塊磚上拉起一半。, 僅 AI)_
- **31** · 2026-10-15 · Colophon (AI) — 新增章節 30，第四百九十九至五百二十夜：羽衣，與一條小魚 _(賈恩沙故事的前半，由兩座墳墓之間的年輕人講述（Burton 第四百九十九至五百二十夜）：命盤與代理締結的婚姻、瞪羚與漁船、會把自己分成兩半的人的島、為留住新蘇丹而鑿沉船的猿猴島、螞蟻谷、每到第七天就乾涸的河與河那邊的城鎮（來源對城鎮居民和商人的族群標記被刻意略去，並由敘述者在她「我改了什麼」的第二張紙上註明）、為半天的活付一千金幣和一個女奴、把賈恩沙縫進騾腹由大鳥叼上紅寶石山然後丟下他的商人、鳥類之王納斯爾老人、賈恩沙被告知不要開的那扇門、在池裡洗浴的三個鴿子姑娘、一年的等待、被偷走的最小一位夏姆莎的羽衣、她的誓言、她一天半飛三十個月路程把他送回家、羽衣被埋在新宮殿拱下一只鉛封的大理石箱裡、她憑氣味找到它、從屋頂說「到塔克尼來找我，寶石城堡」離去；印度的卡菲德入侵，賈恩沙帶一千騎兵出城，夜裡獨自騎走，把父親留在戰爭裡。框架裡：第五百零九夜山魯佐德第一次感到胎動，把國王的手放在她放手的地方（「像一條魚。」「哪一條？」「不是世界底下那一條。」「不是，主上。是一條小的。」）；蘇麥雅在被禁止的門前用手捂住嘴，說「我也會開」；國王對猿猴說「為了留住他」，對羽衣說「他把它還了」「然後他把它埋了」，說「她告訴了他在哪裡……在她拿走它以後」，問賈恩沙的父親「他父親知道他去了哪裡嗎？」；敦亞佐德想到夜簿的前板，那綹頭髮放的地方，沒有去看它。, 僅 AI)_
- **32** · 2026-10-15 · Colophon (AI) — 新增章節 31，第五百二十一至五百三十六夜：寶石城堡，與一個沒有被問過的女人 _(賈恩沙故事的後半，以及哈西卜・卡里姆丁與蛇群女王故事的結尾（Burton 第五百二十一至五百三十六夜），收束 Burton 第五卷：賈恩沙第二次回到河那邊的城鎮（商人沒有認出他；這回他一塊石頭也不扔）、迷路的大鳥、獸王沙・巴德里、他哥哥希馬克、在諾亞時代就活著的修士亞格穆斯、聽說過塔克尼的黑鳥、發光的寶石城堡、沙赫蘭國王的迎接與母親的請求「請你看在我們的面上，原諒她的過錯」、婚禮、四個馬里德抬的轎子、喀布爾解圍（由敘述者的姐姐講得很短，略去來源津津樂道的馬里德屠殺）、洗澡時帶走夏姆莎的水中之物、兩座墳；布盧基亞離開、女王說明她怎麼知道這個故事、布盧基亞跟著希德爾一步回到開羅；哈西卜回家、樵夫們各出一半家產與「過去的就過去了」、澡堂主人（七個人之一）指著三個妻子的離婚發誓、宰相沙姆胡爾與垂死的國王卡拉茲丹、女王對哈西卜違誓的哭泣（「命運是無法抗拒的」）、兩次的沫、宰相之死、智慧的泉水、五張散頁；《挑夫辛巴達》的故事在這一夜的最後一行開始。框架裡：第二次去商人那裡，國王說「他認出他了」「他也沒有扔給他任何東西」；講到母親的請求，他說「是母親求的他，不是那個姑娘」；馬里德的屠殺講得很短時，奶媽把孩子抱到磚邊給他講杏樹，國王沒有抬頭；蘇麥雅問「他沒有回家嗎？」；國王問「有人問過他母親嗎？」，山魯佐德答「故事沒有說有人問過」，敦亞佐德在未了欄裡寫了一個沒有被問過的女人，並把「被告知是狼的女人」劃掉，因為那是同一個女人；國王對明知道仍放走哈西卜的女王說「她知道」「而她放了他」「明知道」「接著講」；蘇麥雅問那五張散頁「即使他可以把其餘的寫出來？」（「即使這樣。」）；黎明時山魯佐德轉向那個把擔子放在一道門口、聽見了魯特琴的挑夫。, 僅 AI)_
- **33** · 2026-10-15 · Colophon (AI) — 新增章節 32，第五百三十七至五百五十夜：三次航海，與一個站起來的男孩 _(挑夫辛巴達在富人門口與水手辛巴達的前三次航海（Burton 第五百三十六至五百五十夜）：挑夫關於勞作與安閒的詩、「你的名字和我的一樣」、第一次航海（所羅門「三樣東西勝過三樣東西」的話、是魚的島、木桶、米赫拉詹國王的母馬與海裡的公馬、港口登記官、船長起初不信那是他自己名字的貨包）、第二次（睡著被留在島上、魯赫鳥的蛋、綁在鳥腿上的頭巾、棕櫚樹那麼大的蛇的鑽石谷、商人的肉、「哎呀，我的失望！」）、第三次（猿猴山、城堡與黑色巨人，敘述者除了一句之外略去牠的殘酷、小船、蛇、像棺架一樣綁在身邊的五塊木板、死人貨包上寫著他自己的名字）。框架裡：奶媽對是魚的島說「我哥哥」（「人家告訴我是鯨魚……如果是鯨魚，故事會好些。所以我一直不能確定。」）；敦亞佐德在第二張紙上數重複的「我忘了我所受的一切苦」（國王：「他忘得很快。那是一種天賦。」沙・贊曼：「商人一停下來，就是一個在等死的人。」國王的手伸向藍書，沒有翻開）；第五百四十三夜山魯佐德的聲音沒了，奶媽規定她講第一個沙漏、敦亞佐德講第二個，直到孩子來（此後夜簿上寫「山魯佐德與敦亞佐德。到。」）；敦亞佐德講魯赫鳥與鑽石谷，太陽熄滅時用手蓋住眼睛，國王說「太陽從天上沒了的時候，我感覺到了。你講得像你去過那裡」；國王對第三次航海的貨包說：「站著看自己的名字被寫在死人的貨上，這時間很長」；蘇麥雅用手指數出三次「忘了」，奶媽說還會有第四次；第五百四十八夜孩子抓著磚的邊緣站了起來（「不要告訴他他站著」）。, 僅 AI)_
- **34** · 2026-10-15 · Colophon (AI) — 新增章節 33，第五百五十一至五百六十六夜：再四次航海，與一個走過來的男孩 _(水手辛巴達第四至第七次航海，以及兩個辛巴達故事的結束（Burton 第五百五十至五百六十六夜）：第四次（吃了食物就失去神智的光身子人、摘胡椒的人與馬鞍、婚姻與把活著的配偶與死者一起活埋的規矩、深坑、死人的洞、野獸在山裡挖的洞口、棍子上的裹屍布）、第五次（被砸破的魯赫鳥蛋、巨石、不肯下來的海老人、猿猴城與椰子）、第六次（珠寶與龍涎香的島、山底下的筏、薩蘭迪布的國王與喊「他會死！我再說一遍，他會死！」的傳呼人）、第七次，兩種講法（長翅膀的城裡人與天上來的火；哈里發再派他去、象的墳場）；挑夫的道歉。敘述者略去吃人者的用意，和辛巴達在洞裡做的那九個字，國王在她開口前就把手遮在孩子耳朵上。框架裡：敦亞佐德在第二個沙漏裡講第四、五、六次航海；國王對那個規矩說「對兩邊是一樣的……那比」，然後停住，沒有人替他說完；奶媽把「我忘了我所受的一切苦」數作第四次、第五次（蘇麥雅舉手指），並預言第六次；國王對魯赫鳥說「又來了」是個玩笑；第五百六十夜敦亞佐德要求把燈轉暗，好講山底下的河，國王自己把燈轉暗，講到「天光」時又調亮；講到傳呼人，國王連說三次「再來」，然後說「我有一個沙漏……它沒有喊得這麼大聲」；第七次航海，國王說「哈里發派，那個人就去」，宰相在角落答「他去，主上」；第五百六十六夜孩子放開磚，向國王走了五步，國王不知道自己張開了手臂；國王寫下夜簿邊上的第八個字：「來」。, 僅 AI)_
- **35** · 2026-10-15 · Colophon (AI) — 新增章節 34，第五百六十七至五百七十八夜：黃銅城，與七年的糧食 _(黃銅城的故事（Burton 第五百六十六至五百七十八夜）：哈里發阿卜杜勒・馬利克・本・馬爾萬與所羅門的銅瓶（被網撈上來的精靈喊「我悔改，真主的先知！」）、總督穆薩・本・努賽爾與老者阿卜杜勒・薩馬德、一千頭馱著陶罐水的駱駝、黑石城堡與詩（結尾「彷彿他們只是把重擔放下歇一會兒，然後又騎馬走了」）、庫什・沙達德之子的墓（「你們能贖我，或者買我一天的命嗎？」）、縞瑪瑙桌子、黃銅騎士、石柱裡的伊弗利特達希什、只能從裡面開門的二十五道門的城、七塊白色的碑（「他們回答：我們在這裡！」）、梯子與看見魔法就翻過牆去的十二個人、有金銷子的黃銅騎士、砝碼掛在外面而每家鋪子都沒有吃的死人市場、防腐的塔德穆拉女王與她的金板（七年大旱，財寶換不到劣等小麥，一斗換一斗）、塔利卜的貪心與兩個銅奴隸、希德爾教導的洞穴人、瓶子與哈里發的大廳、總督死在耶路撒冷。敘述者略去所羅門的戰爭（一口氣）與洞穴人的膚色。框架裡：國王問悔改的精靈「對誰說的？」「對所羅門。」「他死了。」「他們不知道」，看著他空的手；講到碑文「他們回答：我們在這裡！」，他說「那是你寫的……到」；蘇麥雅在第一首詩前說「挑夫」；講到塔德穆拉的「一斗換一斗」，國王問宰相糧倉裡有幾年的糧食（城裡四年，北方不到一年），下令「七年」，用的是他說「一塊磚」的聲音，宰相早晨帶兩個書記和一根量尺走下河邊的糧倉；結尾宣布七位宰相的故事，國王說「七位」，看著宰相，宰相說他在比較好的日子可以抵幾位。, 僅 AI)_
- **36** · 2026-10-15 · Colophon (AI) — 新增章節 35，第五百七十九至六百零六夜：七天的沉默，與一只沒有蓋布的罐子 _(女人的詭計與惡意，又名國王、他的兒子、他的寵妾與七位宰相的故事（Burton 第五百七十八至六百零六夜）：沒有兒子的中國國王、王后的夢、王子的出生、智者辛迪巴德與他的三個條件（自己不願意別人對自己做的，就不要對別人做；不經詢問有經驗的人，不要倉促行事；有權力的地方，要顯出憐憫）、牆上有畫的房子與七把鎖、命盤規定的七天沉默、誣告王子的寵妾、七位宰相每天用故事阻止國王行刑而寵妾每天用故事反駁，第一位宰相的國王與宰相之妻（獅子的腳印）完整講述，其餘只講輪廓（鸚鵡與風暴、漂洗匠與兒子、蛋白、吝嗇鬼的餅、篩灰、一滴蜜）、再也沒有笑過的人（忍了七天的門，第八天打開）、寵妾的毒碗、刀與火、被偷的項鍊與原諒了國王的虔誠女人、略去的長故事、王子開口的第八天、他對「過錯在誰」的回答（奶、鳶、蛇毒：他們的時辰到了）、他講的瞎謝赫與三歲、五歲孩子的故事、寵妾的狐狸故事，以及王子的「寬恕勝過報復……離開我們這一帶，願真主寬恕過去的事」。敘述者略去原作的性描寫。框架裡：國王對獅子的腳印（「他沒有走近過它」「是」）、對一滴蜜（「誰開的頭？」「那一滴」）、對寵妾的火（「她威脅她自己……那是一種要求的方式」）、對虔誠的女人（「她原諒了他……她不肯收財寶」）；奶媽對門（「忍著不開一扇門，是很長的時間」）；蘇麥雅對罐子（「她應該蓋塊布」，國王：「是，她應該」）和對智者畫在牆上的課；國王對寬恕：「他沒有說他寬恕了她……這還沒完。」「完了，主上，她走了。」「她走了。這還沒完。」敦亞佐德在未了欄裡寫：一個寵妾，被送出那一帶，沒有人寬恕過她；糧食現在是七年裡的五年。, 僅 AI)_
- **37** · 2026-10-15 · Colophon (AI) — 新增章節 36，第六百零七至六百二十四夜：賈達爾與他的兄弟們，與一個名字待查的麵包師 _(賈達爾與他的兄弟們的故事（Burton 第六百零六至六百二十四夜）：奧馬爾的三個兒子與分成四份的財產、拿走母親的錢又去找法官的兄弟、收留母親並用一首詩安慰她、兄弟來時歡迎他們的賈達爾、空網、不肯收網作抵押的麵包師（「網是你生計的門」）、叫賈達爾把自己綁了推進卡倫湖的摩爾人（兩個淹死，第三個手裡各一條紅魚浮上來，說出魔法師沙馬爾達勒四件寶物的來歷）、說一個名字就出二十四道菜、剩下的扔掉或給窮人的魔法馬鞍袋、伊弗利特騾子、非斯、河床底下的七道門（最後一道是他母親的樣子，要他脫她的衣服，他因為可憐她被打出去，得等一年）、四件寶物、勝利門外乞討的母親、把他賣到槳船的兄弟、在麥加再遇摩爾人與有馬里德「雷霆」的戒指、寬恕（「我拿約瑟安慰自己」）、一夜蓋成的宮殿、被叫站著的國王、阿西婭公主、兄弟第二次的背叛與毒藥、折斷戒指撕碎馬鞍袋的公主。框架裡：國王對麵包師（「有這樣的麵包師嗎？……查出他的名字」）；對賈達爾的「希望摩爾人每天都來找我」（「他不知道自己在做什麼」「他知道他在綁一個人的手」）；「沒有東西留過一頓飯」；被可憐的母親的樣子（「他可憐她……而她有她的臉」）；宰相報告糧倉現有五年多幾個月，國王說「好」；國王與沙・贊曼談哥哥（「這是兩次」「我有一個哥哥」「你有」）；「她折斷了。還撕了袋子。什麼也沒有留下」；男孩對著父親的臉說第一個字「爸」，國王說「再來」。, 僅 AI)_
- **38** · 2026-10-15 · Colophon (AI) — 新增章節 37，第六百二十五至六百五十夜：加里卜，與天亮前出生的兒子 _(加里卜與他的哥哥阿吉卜故事的前半（Burton 第六百二十四至六百五十夜），以人而不是以戰役來講：年老的昆達米爾國王與殺了他的兒子阿吉卜、獅子的夢與淹死他父親懷孕妃子的命令、下不了手的奴隸、在森林裡出生並被取名陌生人的加里卜、娶了這個女人並與自己的兒子薩希姆・萊勒一起養大男孩的埃米爾馬爾達斯、馬爾達斯殺那個想要他女兒的青年的計謀與反被埋伏的埋伏、被饒過並成了朋友的山中食人魔、波斯公主法赫爾・塔吉（留待之後再接起的一條線）、馬爾達斯帶著部族與女兒去投阿吉卜、阿吉卜殺納斯拉、兄弟之間的戰爭（薩希姆的莨菪、阿吉卜被背走、加里卜沒有留守衛）。敘述者略去食人魔的飯與戰役。框架裡：講到淹死一個懷孕的女人的命令，國王說「停」，山魯佐德說「他們沒有」，先把結局說出來；奶媽把手放在她膝蓋上；國王談養父（「他養他……卻要殺他，因為他要他的女兒」），沙・贊曼說這是最古老的爭吵，國王說不是；蘇麥雅的「他是他的父親」與山魯佐德的「他做是因為那個人在一條溝裡」；「納斯拉……是援助的意思。她有十夜沒有名字」；「加里卜沒有留守衛……他是故意的」；宰相找到麵包師的名字（哈米德，六十歲，六年來賒給十一戶人家：麵包這種東西會壞），國王說「不要送」；糧食達到七年裡的六年；第六百五十夜山魯佐德陣痛開始（「這不是魚」），國王帶著男孩坐在地上，敦亞佐德整夜講了三遍加里卜的森林之生，宰相、沙・贊曼和蘇麥雅等著（蘇麥雅念白書裡的九個名字），天亮時奶媽說「是個兒子」；國王走進簾子後面，說了一個沒有人聽見的字，把拇指放在「出生」那個字旁邊。, 僅 AI)_
- **39** · 2026-10-16 · Colophon (AI) — 新增章節 38，第六百五十一至六百八十夜：邊上的一個名字，與被放開的兒子 _(加里卜與他的哥哥阿吉卜故事的後半（Burton 第六百五十一至六百八十夜）：以為兩個青年殺了他兒子（一隻鳥）的四個頭的精靈之王、一夜就為晨星忘了法赫爾・塔吉與馬赫迪婭的加里卜、海馬與精靈之王的告別、被留作地名的戰役、加里卜聽說法赫爾・塔吉被她父親下令淹死、放她走的那兩個人、傑伊洪河上的木筏、向陌生人獻祭的城、他獨自生活的島、法赫爾・塔吉在一百個少女的城堡裡的生活與穆拉德沙的出生、為母親報仇攻城略地並圍攻伊斯巴尼爾的男孩、加里卜抓住他耳朵的單挑、認出（「你是一位勇士，勇士的兒子。放開我的孩子！」）。敘述者略去拜火與戰役，也略去對薩布爾做的事。框架裡：七夜裡敦亞佐德兩個沙漏都講，夜簿上寫的是敦亞佐德一個人；國王對加里卜的忘（「又一個忘得很快的。那是一種天賦」，這和他對辛巴達說的方式不同）；第七天早晨國王在邊上之邊上寫第九個字「優素福」，奶媽、沙・贊曼、宰相和蘇麥雅分別說約瑟、那頭狼、那糧食、那口井；山魯佐德：「全部。」「是。」；大男孩把手平放在嬰兒頭上說「爸」，國王說「再來」；宰相報告城裡和北方都有七年的糧食，國王說「現在不要動它」；單挑時國王站起來，山魯佐德伸手像對黑暗中的孩子；講到「放開我的孩子」，國王用敦亞佐德不認得的聲音重複了一遍。, 僅 AI)_
- **40** · 2026-10-16 · Colophon (AI) — 新增章節 39，第六百八十一至六百九十八夜：扶貴人跌倒的人，與被問了一句的女人 _(Burton 第六百八十一至六百九十八夜的愛與慷慨故事群：奧特巴與拉雅（四十天筵席、同一座墳、新娘新郎樹）、欣德與鏡子、胡扎伊馬與伊克里馬（黑暗中的錢袋、「賈比爾・阿薩拉特・基拉姆」、被誤鎖進鐐銬又被放出來的恩人）、書記尤努斯的女孩、阿斯瑪伊的三組對句、摩蘇爾的易卜拉欣與只唱一遍就沒人忘得掉的魔鬼、賈米勒與情人們、阿拉伯人和他的妻子蘇阿德在穆阿維葉面前、征服者納西爾與他的宰相（「又是獅子」）；結尾接到狡猾的達莉拉與札伊娜卜。敘述者把小故事只給邊角。框架裡：國王對奧特巴與拉雅一個字也沒說；講到胡扎伊馬把伊克里馬鎖進鐐銬時他說了兩次「他不知道」，並吩咐宰相看好別讓任何人把麵包師鎖起來（「那些總督，他們會弄錯」；宰相在手掌上寫了一個字）；沙・贊曼說魔鬼不忘，「國王也是。他也不忘」，國王答「是。我不忘」；第四十天山魯佐德起身走到窗邊，把優素福舉向光；講到阿拉伯人的妻子，國王說她事後才被問，蘇麥雅說「那比不問好」，國王說「是」；國王為獅子出聲笑了一次；第六百九十八夜結尾他對宰相說想看那條磚頭來的巷子，「還沒有。快了」，是舊話，不是舊聲音。, 僅 AI)_
- **41** · 2026-10-16 · Colophon (AI) — 新增章節 40，第六百九十九至七百一十八夜：狡猾的老太婆，與皮匠巷的一扇窗板 _(狡猾的達莉拉與她女兒捉兔子的札伊娜卜的騙局，以及開羅水銀阿里歷險的前半（Burton 第六百九十九至七百一十八夜）：用一只壺、一串念珠剝光一位妻子、一個商人、一個染匠、一個趕驢的、一個孩子、一個理髮匠和一位警察總管家的老太婆；為蜂蜜炸果餅被綁在她位置上的沙漠來客；哈桑・舒曼求來的赦免手帕；恩典（有四十個奴隸和四十條狗的客棧）；水銀阿里的信、井、廚子的貓、四十隻鴿子、祖賴克掛著鈴的錢袋、一件衣服的聘禮。敘述者略去金匠的信仰、達莉拉怎麼被綁、拔牙與燒太陽穴、塗皮膚扮廚子、狗的死、扮孕婦的一段、金匠變驢那一段，以及他的女兒對他做的事。框架裡：國王為兩聲「哎呀」出聲笑；「自由人不能賣」；「炸果餅」（宰相在手掌上寫一個字，沙・贊曼吃了七個）；「有人替她求了情……他把自己的脖子放進去了」；講到恩典，國王對敦亞佐德說「你沒有」「我會數」；第七百零八夜結束時他對宰相說「明天。城醒來之前」，敦亞佐德與他、宰相、沙・贊曼去了皮匠巷：還立著的四處（兩間塌了頂的房子、兩個門框），宰相把每一處和女兒背出來，國王走進一個門框（無花果樹長穿了地板）把手掌放在牆上，巷子對面窗口一個女人看了他數到十，關上窗板、落下閂（「是」），一個皮匠告訴他一張皮是怎麼被保住的，國王訂了給男孩的小羊皮鞋；「寫進未了裡。」「叫它什麼？」「一扇窗板。」；男孩的鞋吱吱響，對「再來」說「再」。, 僅 AI)_
- **42** · 2026-10-16 · Colophon (AI) — 新增章節 41，第七百一十九至七百三十八夜：隼是宰相的，與說了真話的太監 _(開羅水銀阿里歷險的結尾，和阿爾達希爾與哈雅特・努夫斯的全部（Burton 第七百一十九至七百三十八夜）：哈里發的恩典、給四十個弟兄的大廳、被寫下收藏的歷史；攔住父親開戰的設拉子王子、恨男人的伊拉克公主、布料市場的鋪子、九封用詩寫的信、被打的奶媽、捕鳥人和兩隻鴿子的夢、宰相叫人在亭子裡畫上去而夢裡本來沒有的隼、侍女當面請奶媽回去、花園、奶媽講的丈夫與妻子活埋的故事、喬裝、七道門、被公主打掉槽牙而去告訴國王的太監卡夫爾、劍、三次揮劍、大國王軍隊的塵土、說自己砍了而沒有砍的劊子手、被問而說「我聽從」的公主、被吊的宰相與太監。敘述者略去了打人、女人們的檢驗、情人的夜晚，並在第二張紙上寫下隼是宰相的。框架裡：「誰寫的？」（哈里發的歷史）；現在每夜第二個沙漏結束時從頭念未了；沙・贊曼說郵資；蘇麥雅「畫出來的不是發生過的」；宰相在手掌上寫北方的雨晚了九天；奶媽「她是為了上門來的那兩個人去的，不是為了派她們來的那一個」；講到活埋，國王用手捂住男孩的耳朵，沙・贊曼看著牆；「他說的是真話。」「帶著怨恨。」「還是真話。」；宰相「這是最容易給的建議，主上。我給過。」國王沒有看他；劍下國王沒有動，敦亞佐德數著，不知道數的是什麼；國王談劊子手「那是他唯一能問的方式」；「他問了她。」「透過四個人。」「算數。」；蘇麥雅拿過蘆筆，用自己的字把「一個說了真話的太監」寫進未了，國王說「是直的」；雨晚了十一天，「它會來的。」, 僅 AI)_
- **43** · 2026-10-16 · Colophon (AI) — 新增章節 42，第七百三十九至七百五十六夜：一年沒有說話的女人，與牢裡因話被關的九個人 _(海之女朱爾娜與她的兒子波斯國王巴德爾・巴西姆（Burton 第七百三十九至七百五十六夜）：被買來的女奴在海上的房間裡、門都關著，一年不說話，直到懷孕才說，並說出原因；她把丈夫藏在小間裡叫來海裡的家人；舅舅把孩子抱進海裡；憑傳聞愛上人、不肯問母親的男孩；向薩瑪達爾國王的求親以開戰收場；把他變成鳥的朱哈拉；把他留在綠島、說是乾渴島的馬爾西娜；朱爾娜的悲傷；騾子和馬都是人的白城；雜貨商阿卜杜拉；拉卜女王和她的四十天；大麥和花斑騾；老婦人、誰也不許說謊的城；籠子；救援；婚禮。敘述者略去拜火、花園裡鳥的一段、一座城被屠，並在第二張紙上數了朱爾娜被賣過幾次、被問過幾次。框架裡：「他問了她的名字嗎？」「一年。」；奶媽：「她把他放進小間，讓他聽見。」「兩樣都是。」；孩子被抱進海裡時國王把優素福給了山魯佐德，大男孩像問話一樣說「爸」；巴德爾不問母親，宰相的手停了，「說下去，女兒」；國王談馬爾西娜：「她說做了。而沒有。這是兩個。被吩咐去做的人，說做了。」宰相什麼也沒寫；「這是一個理由。不是一個回答。」；誰也不許說謊的城，沙・贊曼說「一座安靜的城」；「他問了她。」「他告訴了她。」；敦亞佐德沒等人吩咐把馬爾西娜寫進未了；國王問牢裡有多少人（三百一十一，大多是欠債，九個是因為關於他的話），說「寫進未了裡」；雨晚了二十六天。, 僅 AI)_
- **44** · 2026-10-16 · Colophon (AI) — 新增章節 43，第七百五十七至七百七十八夜：五個條件，與替整間屋子聽的故事 _(穆罕默德・本・薩巴伊克國王與商人哈桑的故事，以及其中的賽義夫・穆魯克王子與巴迪阿・賈邁勒公主的故事（Burton 第七百五十七至七百七十八夜）：愛聽故事的國王和嫉妒的宰相；被給了一年帶來一個故事否則被放逐的商人；大馬士革那個附五個條件賣出故事的老人；埃及的阿西姆國王、戴金項圈的蛇、同一夜出生的兩個男孩；長袍上的畫像；航行、騎人如騎驢的島、鬼怪、把人像鳥一樣關進籠子的巨人、叫他背柴多年的國王的女兒；猿猴島；高築城堡和道拉特・哈敦；藏在七層匣子裡麻雀中的靈魂；被聽成「牢」的「宮殿」；一口氣講完的薩義德的故事；要求先發誓的巴迪阿・賈邁勒；伊拉姆的祖母；藍王和說「等一等」的老埃米爾；沙希亞勒的戰爭；婚禮；「這就是流傳下來的全部」。敘述者略去第三個條件裡僕人的膚色、巨人的膚色、改宗、瞎眼人的山洞。框架裡：奶媽捂住耳朵；沙・贊曼與國王各說「我替整間屋子聽」；蘇麥雅是帶著蘆筆的輕浮的人；講到阿西姆在兒子出生時開牢，國王問「優素福出生的時候，我們開過牢嗎？」（沒有；第一個男孩那次九十一個；現在三百一十一個，兩百零四個欠債，一百五十八個欠不到一百第納爾，共六千一百）「放他們。我來付。」沙・贊曼「我付一半」；「那九個呢，主上？」「還沒有」，舊話，敦亞佐德分不出聲音；「他們學會了」；「沒有人問她。那是一幅畫。」；「她沒有殺他。」「她叫他背柴。」；「你會把你的藏在哪裡？」……「我想我不會把它放在任何地方。」「那任何人都找得到了。」「是。」；大男孩第一次說「優」；「他說的是宮殿。他們聽成牢。」宰相「我有那十一個」，國王「那就放了他們」；「她先要他發誓。」「這是應該的。」「是。」；「總有一位老埃米爾說等一等」，又一次「還沒有」；「流傳下來的全部……它說那是他們有的。」；雨晚了四十八天，宰相把它寫成兩行，奶媽沒人吩咐就把搖籃邊的水罐裝滿。, 僅 AI)_
- **45** · 2026-10-16 · Colophon (AI) — 新增章節 44，第七百七十八至七百九十八夜：被禁止的那扇門，與沒有人在裡面的三座墳 _(巴士拉的哈桑故事的前半（Burton 第七百七十八至七百九十八夜）：揮霍的金匠、頭巾裡藏著粉的陌生人、讓他睡去的甜點、船與母親的墳、雲山和駱駝皮裡的禿鷲、精靈王的七個女兒、被禁止的門、十隻鳥和頭領少女、被偷的羽毛衣、最小的姐妹的主意、「經同意」的婚姻、回巴格達、埋著的衣服、聽見了的妻子、澡堂、祖拜黛與馬斯魯爾、帶著兒子們飛走並說「到瓦克群島來」的鳥、挖了三座墳的母親。敘述者略去陌生人的信仰和他在船上對拒絕的男孩做的事、頭髮、少女的身體。框架裡：沙・贊曼給那塊金子算價；「她在知道以前就造了。」「她知道。」；「他在一條船上，一個人，他沒有別人可信。」；「為什麼他們總是禁止一扇門？」「看誰會開它。」「總是那一扇門。」；最小的姐妹的主意，「這是誰的主意？」「她的。」；婚姻「經她同意」，蘇麥雅「誰的？」；「她聽見了，等著。她沒有衣服的時候不走。」；馬斯魯爾帶走女人們時宰相走到門口、背對屋子站著（「夫人的太監。」「沒有人能拒絕他，主上。」）；優素福從第七百九十夜第一陣黃沙起咳嗽；講到三座墳，國王說「停」，山魯佐德答「他們不在裡面，主上。他們活著。她挖是因為不知道。」「說下去。」；國王抱著孩子躺在搖籃旁的地上睡著；蘇麥雅用自己的字寫夜簿的行，下面寫「孩子，發燒；天亮時退了」；北方六十八天沒有雨，麥子貴了一成，宰相答「說國王保管著他的糧倉」。, 僅 AI)_
- **46** · 2026-10-16 · Colophon (AI) — 新增章節 45，第七百九十九至八百一十六夜：當作死了，與會壞的麵包 _(巴士拉的哈桑故事的中段（Burton 第七百九十九至八百一十六夜）：叫他把手伸向天的姐妹、說「把妻子和兒子當作死了」的阿卜杜・庫杜斯、黑公馬和信、阿布・魯韋什與四位長老、精靈達赫納什、樟腦之地的哈蘇恩國王、船上的箱子、瓦克群島岸邊的長凳、老統帥災禍之母沙瓦希、穿過鳥之國、獸之國、精靈之國、河、女王努爾・胡達和她的試驗（讓他看城裡每個女孩；「這位女王不是我的妻子，就是最像我妻子的人」）、喊「我們的父親」的兩個男孩和把他踢出去的女王。敘述者略去軍隊洗浴和身體，並把書對童貞的反覆強調只寫一次。框架裡：蘇麥雅從此每夜念未了，包括她自己的一行；「當作死了」（「他們都這麼說」）；「每一個都叫他回家，每一個都把他送到下一個」「信就是事情辦成的方法」；第八百零五夜兩百四十個北方人坐在北門外，國王下令在城門四周設廚房、向麵包師哈米德以舊價買麵粉（「派人去。不是禮物。是命令」），哈米德每天天亮烤、不為明天烤（麵包是會壞的東西）、不許叫它國王的麵包；哈米德的麵包送到宮裡，國王說「那我們今天吃掉它」；「他吃過他們的麵包」「是」；沙瓦希與女王的試驗（「她決定了一件或另一件，設了一個試驗看是哪一件。」「那就是決定。」）；「沒有人看過他們的臉」；書裡的男孩喊「我們的父親」時，大男孩說出他的第一個字「爸」，國王把他抱起來；北方八十六天沒有雨。, 僅 AI)_
- **47** · 2026-10-16 · Colophon (AI) — 新增章節 46，第八百一十七至八百三十一夜：錯在我，與放出來的八個人 _(巴士拉的哈桑故事的結尾（Burton 第八百一十七至八百三十一夜）：至高王夢見七顆寶石和鳥、被姐姐指控並在梯子上受刑的馬納爾・薩納（略去）、「不要請示我，殺了她」的信、樹上的信、兩個男孩和帽與杖、隱形站在被綁的妻子面前的哈桑、她的認錯和他的「錯在我」、他問她要回她父親家還是跟他走、逃走、不能背亞當子孫的七位精靈王、穆斯林精靈嚮導、兩軍交戰、被俘的女王、「由你決定」、姐妹和解（「注定」）、最小的姐妹和「誰欺騙人，真主就欺騙他」、向他要杖和帽的長老、母親的「整個大地的主人」。敘述者略去梯子和鞭子、老婦人打算怎麼處置女王、戰場的數字。框架裡：「他告訴她那個夢，她還是去了。他們都確信。」；「他沒有說，殺她。他說，要是事情如你所說。」「在信裡比較容易，主上。」「是。是的。」；第八百二十一夜九個人裡最老的、一個七十一歲的皮匠，因為說過「願真主扼住他的喉嚨」，在牢裡兩年零一個月後發燒死了；國王下令八個人當天中午以前放出，帶一塊裹屍布，把死者送回他家，「他有個女兒在下城」「找到她」；宰相的手沒有抖；蘇麥雅念「九個」說「八個」；國王看著門邊的磚；「錯在我，只在我。」「再來。」；哈桑問她要回父親家還是跟他走（「他問她」）；「是她的決定。」「是。」；「注定」；「兩個人都是」；「他把它們給了帶他到那裡的人」；「整個大地的主人，她希望他這樣。」「母親都是這樣。」；宰相黃昏帶擔架出去，到第二個沙漏才回來，袖子有石灰和濕樹皮的味道；敦亞佐德在關於九個人那行下面寫「一個死了；八個出去了」，國王把拇指放在旁邊；沙・贊曼收到撒馬爾罕的信，派出兩個騎手；優素福長出第一顆牙；北門外九百一十二人；北方一百零一天沒有雨。, 僅 AI)_
- **48** · 2026-10-16 · Colophon (AI) — 新增章節 47，第八百三十一至八百四十五夜：三隻猴子，與替人選擇的紙 _(巴格達的漁夫哈里法的故事（Burton 第八百三十一至八百四十五夜）：撈上三隻猴子的網、被迫換運氣的銀行家、為哈里發的拷打而練習抽打自己的漁夫、光著身子裹在網裡把哈倫・拉希德當成吹笛的並收為學徒又割掉他長袍三分之一的人、被祖拜黛夫人下藥裝進箱子賣掉的女奴庫特・庫盧卜、假墳、寫著錢、官職和刑罰的二十張紙（一百棍、什麼也不給、一第納爾）、花一百零一第納爾買下的箱子、箱子裡醒來的女孩、珠寶商的一千第納爾、把他摔下來的騾子、哈里發的五萬第納爾、祖拜黛的詩信和寬恕。敘述者略去銀行家的信仰和對太監的辱罵，並用一句話帶過從布雷斯勞抄本來的第二個講法。框架裡：國王為練習挨打的一幕大笑，優素福第一次笑；沙・贊曼「河改行了」；奶媽談哈里發的裁縫「他饒了一隻手。這本書裡沒有幾個這樣的人。」「沒有。沒有幾個。」；假墳（「這又是一個……巴格達全是空墳。」「不是全空的。」）；讓紙去選的哈里發（「這樣就不是他了。」「就是他。」「是，主上。」）；三個囤積麥子的人沒有被上鐐銬，而是名字被寫進未了，其中一個是宰相的堂兄弟；「她先寫了。」「她求了。」「凡是求的人都被原諒。在這本書裡。」；北方一百一十五天沒有雨，北門外一千四百人，三個爐子和第四個。, 僅 AI)_
- **49** · 2026-10-16 · Colophon (AI) — 新增章節 48，第八百四十六至八百六十三夜：為一切而下的棋，與在自家門口敲門的人 _(馬斯魯爾與扎因・馬瓦西夫（Burton 第八百四十五至八百六十三夜）：夢見白鴿被大鳥叼走的商人、牆後的花園、使女胡布布、他押上一切並輸光、又被一切還給他的那局棋、回家的丈夫、不肯到他身上來的模仿鳥、窗口、在自家門口的那一下敲門、偽造的信、寫了字的三道門、商隊、鐐銬和帶著鑰匙的鐵匠、她對四位彼此不知道對方的法官都說了「願意」、一次也沒有被問過話的丈夫、為此而死的法官們、四十個男人的房子和他們做的像、回家、以及在他回來以前就挖好的那座墳。敘述者略去書裡處處點名的信仰、對丈夫在街上做的事、以及一首寫那位夫人身體的詩，並把那座墳用一句話講完。框架裡：國王問「什麼都沒有了，他們還留不留下」（「這很貴」「他留下了」「他沒有別的地方可去」）；宰相的堂兄弟自己把麥子運到廚房、不肯收收據；國王背對房間站在窗前說「他敲門，是為了讓人告訴他事情沒有發生」和「他說他高興」；國王的拇指停在邊上的邊上的那個字「來」；沙・贊曼收到布哈拉總督的信（第一批三百駝載，山口無雪六十天），他為妻子關上的屋子如今是帳房，寫進未了，寫成許諾、不寫成正在來；「四次，主上。同一個問題。」「而不是另一個」；奶媽「這一座不是空的」與國王的「一座裡面有人的墳」；大男孩第一次把兩個字連在一起，爸、再；優素福獨自坐著，國王數到十一；北方的雨晚了一百三十三天，北門一千九百人，第五座爐子打了地基。, 僅 AI)_
- **50** · 2026-10-16 · Colophon (AI) — 新增章節 49，第八百六十四至八百八十夜：一朵玫瑰換一首詩，與一夜一條腰帶 _(阿里・努爾丁與腰帶女瑪麗安，上半部（Burton 第八百六十三至八百八十夜）：先去問父親許可才去花園的商人之子、只拿來換詩的玫瑰、十杯酒、打在父親臉上的那一下與父親以休妻發誓、要在早晨砍掉他右手的誓言、叫醒他並給了他一百第納爾又留下書說她忘了的第二個錢袋的母親、替他父親當年不要字據的那筆借款還情的亞歷山大城老藥材商、出售權被波斯主人放在她自己手裡並把六個老頭打發走、挑了那個年輕人的女奴、一千第納爾、一年半裡一夜一條的腰帶與那條披巾、她對獨眼瘸腿老人的警告、出賣了她的披巾、當著十個證人在醉中完成的買賣、公主的來歷和她求的那個恩典、船、碼頭。敘述者略去書對琵琶女和那些夜晚所做的、打在父親臉上的那一下及後果、對老人身體的嘲笑、信仰以及老人發誓所用的名字，並把海那邊的人稱為「對方」。框架裡：「他問了」「事前」；奶媽談夜裡發的誓（「多半到早晨就撤掉了，由發誓的人，要是他及時醒來」）；「忘了」的錢袋與第二張紙上奶媽的「不」；「一個女孩，她的出售放在她自己手裡」寫在第二張紙上而不在未了裡；五百四十條腰帶與「她一條也沒有留下」；「什麼也不要做」被國王像念一行沒遇過的字一樣念出；被迫的離婚「沒有任何學派認可」被想起，宰相說「它是有記錄的，主上」；國王的拇指停在夜簿的那一道直線上；優素福向磚爬去、哥哥把他拖回來四次；第五座爐子點火，北門兩千人、二千三百人，第六座被要求；北方的雨晚了一百五十天，宰相把數字寫在手背上。, 僅 AI)_
- **51** · 2026-10-16 · Colophon (AI) — 新增章節 50，第八百八十一至八百九十四夜：一百顆頭，與總是去拿東西的人 _(阿里・努爾丁與腰帶女瑪麗安，下半部（Burton 第八百八十一至八百九十四夜）：被國王的巡邏船捉住的船、公主對母親的說法與大臣們要的一百顆頭、教堂和把最後一個俘虜從氈子上領走的看守、公主當著四百個女伴說他瘋了、奉獻箱和地道的計畫、長鬍子的船長就是公主、那十個水手、他去拿面紗而她被帶走、她父親的判決與向國王要她的獨眼大臣、阿里的第二次出海與被捕和假名易卜拉欣、那兩匹是兄弟的公馬與國王的「這個不過是畜生，尚且不能忍受與兄弟分離」、用磨細的玻璃、石灰和洋蔥汁醫好的馬、格窗和信、大臣杯中的藥、盜馬賊、綠色山谷和她的三個哥哥、國王給哈里發的信、大馬士革與巴格達、問她願不願意的哈里發、使者、回開羅。敘述者略去那一百顆頭和第二個一百個、那十個、賊的膚色、信仰和對穆斯林的稱呼，並在第二張紙上記了死者的數目（兩百一十五）而沒有念出。框架裡：「多少？」「一百，主上。」「為了她說的話。」「為了他們以為她的意思」；奶媽放下針線；說到釘死時國王從奶媽膝上抱過優素福；「他總是去拿什麼」；一本鬍子的書；「我有一個哥哥。」「我們知道。」；國王把手蓋在大男孩的耳朵上；「這是第三次。波斯人，掮客，哈里發。」「寫在另一張紙上」；宰相對父親以休妻發的誓的解讀（手沒有砍，妻子到早晨就被休了，可以收回，如果他問她）與國王的「她叫醒了那個男孩。她知道它會做什麼」；「一個女人，為了保住一隻手而放棄了她的婚姻，以及她有沒有被問回來」寫進未了、劃掉前面關於誓言的那一行；優素福抓著磚把自己拉起來站住；北方的雨晚了一百六十四天，北門兩千六百人，第六座爐子點火。, 僅 AI)_
- **52** · 2026-10-16 · Colophon (AI) — 新增章節 51，第八百九十五至九百零一夜：還繫著的兩個錢袋，與第三個孩子 _(上埃及人和他的法蘭克妻子、巴格達破落的人和他的女奴，以及印度國王賈里亞德與首相希馬斯的開頭（Burton 第八百九十四至九百零一夜）：向牽線老婦付了三次錢、在星空下躺在女人身邊卻沒有碰她的阿卡亞麻商人、戰爭、他以十第納爾挑中的那個俘虜、她自由後的婚禮、箱子裡還用他自己的結繫著的兩個錢袋；女奴叫他把自己賣掉的巴格達人、被偷的錢袋、底格里斯河、水手的衣服、她憑調弦認出來的琵琶、巴士拉紳士的幔子、被留在河岸上睡著的人、被休並被付了聘金的雜貨商人的女兒、女孩在房子旁邊給自己做的墳；沒有孩子的印度國王、那棵會把周圍的樹燒掉的樹的夢、解夢人、老鼠與貓。敘述者把書裡他羞愧的對象說成海，略去那女人改信和雙方的名稱。框架裡：「他付了三次，沒有」「他付錢，是為了被請再來」；「她留著它們」「繫著」「它回家了」；山魯佐德自己說出來「會有第三個」，因為夜簿是為說出來的東西留的；「再來」兩次，國王把優素福舉在燈前；「一座裡面有人的墳」「她選的」「那是另一座墳。她在那一座裡等」；「他問了她的父親」「沒有問她」「告訴」；被休並付了錢、沒有被問過的雜貨商人的女兒寫進未了；「牠做得對，也差點死了」；北方的雨晚了一百七十一天，宰相開始寫在手腕上，下城最後一袋麥子賣掉，北門兩千八百人，第七座爐子被要求；優素福放開磚的一隻手，跨了一步。, 僅 AI)_
- **53** · 2026-10-16 · Colophon (AI) — 新增章節 52，第九百零二至九百一十七夜：奶油罐、最老的糧倉，與寫了字的門 _(印度國王賈里亞德與首相希馬斯，上半部（Burton 第九百零一至九百一十七夜）：在三件事完成以前不該談論它們（旅人、戰鬥中的人、孕婦）、苦行僧和奶油罐、魚與螃蟹、七位大臣對新生親王的祝賀與他們的故事（烏鴉與鷹、蜘蛛與風、另外四個只提名字）、親王維爾德汗那座有三百六十間屋子、每間的課寫在門上的宮殿、考問（花園裡的瞎子和瘸子；大臣欠國王什麼；騎上獅子的獵人；「客氣地離開他，因為分手對雙方都是輕鬆」）、賈里亞德國王的臨終與二十條訓誡、被世界埋伏的年輕國王同女人關在一起一關就是一個月、以及希馬斯在廚房門口。敘述者略去給國王端飯的奴隸的膚色。框架裡：山魯佐德的故事正好講到「孕婦，直到她卸下重擔」（「不是我選的。它是下一個。」「我一直在數。」「一次，大聲地，一次。」「一次也是數」）；國王聽苦行僧「那時還沒有母羊」就舉起杖；「因為下雨了。」「也可能沒有。」「螃蟹沒有糧倉。」和國王下令開最老的糧倉、一成（「我在第六百六十夜說的。現在是第九百零三夜」）；第一批從山上下來的車、「有被存過的味道」的第六年穀子做的麵包、給優素福的麵包皮；「他們選了最高的……事情就是這樣的」；「一扇寫了字的門」；「這是一座花園」；宰相「我沒有離開。」「沒有。」；優素福從磚走向國王六步，國王的拇指放在「來」和「優素福」上；二十條訓誡與「我守了哪些？」，「履行你許諾的……那一條，還沒有人要我守」；北方的雨晚了一百八十七天，北門三千二百人，第七座爐子點火。, 僅 AI)_
- **54** · 2026-10-16 · Colophon (AI) — 新增章節 53，第九百一十八至九百三十一夜：最後一個故事贏，三百零五頭駱駝，與就著麵包說出的名字 _(印度國王賈里亞德與首相希馬斯，下半部：維爾德汗國王的故事（Burton 第九百一十八至九百三十一夜）：希馬斯和不肯放開那條魚的愚蠢漁夫、愛妾用（男孩和賊、商人和強盜、牧羊人和騙子）對抗希馬斯的（掙脫的駱駝、豺狗和狼）、關上門的國王、大臣和權貴一個一個被放進朝堂、希馬斯第一個、在隔壁屋裡被殺、外印度國王的信、被烏龜們好意勸說拔掉翅膀羽毛的鷓鴣、穿舊衣服的國王在牆邊聽兩個男孩說莊稼因為缺雨而枯是為了做過的事、替他回信並畫了自己的像的學校裡最小的孩子、悔改的國王與「我們若要，就做，我們若不要，就不做」、以及違背孩子的勸告被關進殺大臣屋子裡的女人們。敘述者略去隔壁屋裡做了什麼、〈男人和他的妻子〉、國王把罪過歸給女人的那一長串、以及那些女人的下場。框架裡：「他應該放手的。」「他放了，主上，在最後。」「太晚了。」；「他們在用故事打仗。」「誰講最後一個，誰就贏。」「她不讓別人講。」；第九百二十一夜三百零五頭駱駝在紅色的塵土中從北路下來，在夜簿室屋頂上看，「『正在來』，是你在路上看得見的」「它在路上了，主上」「劃掉它」，未了那一行被劃掉、寫「來了」，國王第一次把他看見的從頭講給山魯佐德（「你漏了塵土。」「我沒有。」）；「首相一向的位置。」「我知道這個規矩。」；「牠們愛牠。」「牠們剪了牠。」「牠們不是故意的。」「那才是最壞的一種。」；牆邊的男孩，與宰相的報告：北門的女人們發麵包時先說一個名字，別的人答「在這裡」，因為「在念出來以前不會下雨」（「你沒有告訴我。」「您沒有問，主上。」「我現在問。」）；「他沒讓他有這個藉口。」；「他先問了那孩子。卻做了另一個」，女人們和那個孩子被寫進未了；北方的雨晚了兩百零一天，北門三千六百人，第一塊撒馬爾罕麥子的麵包裡有顆小石子，優素福說「爸」。, 僅 AI)_
- **55** · 2026-10-16 · Colophon (AI) — 新增章節 54，第九百三十二至九百四十七夜：一袋石灰，一枚歸還的戒指，與該由誰去原諒 _(染匠阿布・基爾與理髮匠阿布・西爾、漁夫阿卜杜拉與海人阿卜杜拉（Burton 第九百三十一至九百四十七夜）：把顧客的布賣了還說是被偷的染匠、在船上和在城裡供他吃了八十天、卻在發燒時被他拿走一千個銀幣的理髮匠、用自己的錢養了理髮匠兩個月的客棧門房、藍色的城和給外鄉染匠蓋的染坊、門口的毒打、「每個人付他心裡能給的」的澡堂、被賣回給國王的奴隸、染匠對黃砷和生石灰膏的誣告、石灰麻袋、長官的憐憫、被扔進海裡被魚吞掉的國王的戒指、把戒指帶回來的理髮匠、被縫進麻袋的染匠和理髮匠的「我原諒他對我做的一切」「我不能原諒他對我做的」、阿布・基爾和阿布・西爾的墓；有十個孩子的漁夫和四十天不算帳給他麵包的麵包師、被放走後帶著珠寶回來的海人、把他當作賊而不問他的珠寶商們、做了左宰相的麵包師、丹丹魚的藥膏、海裡的城市、沒尾巴的、給先知墓的託付、死亡上的宴飲、「真主收回祂的託付你們就難過嗎？」、斷絕的友誼。敘述者略去在門口對理髮匠做的、戒指做的、海裡的女人城和對她們兒子做的、海人的穿衣與婚姻、以及澡堂裡給奴隸取的名字。框架裡：「又一個說做了的」；「一座藍色的城」；「國王的廚房收人家給的」；「石灰。」「皮匠用它，鞣皮子。」「去毛的。」（宰相的袖子；奶媽的針）；國王把右手放在膝上手心朝上看，像宰相看他的；「他還給他了」；「國王做的事，該由誰去原諒？」「被做了的人。」「她們死了。」「她們的母親沒有。」（奶媽咬斷線）；「那不是哈米德，哈米德是算的；只是他不說總數是多少」；「哈米德，左宰相。」「他會拿它去做麵包」；「他們沒有問他」；「他說了實話。」「卻失去了朋友。」「常常」；國王問昨晚門口說了多少個名字（九個），叫宰相把名字寫在右臂上、把雨寫在左臂上；北方的雨晚了兩百一十七天，北門三千九百人，九座爐子，燒石灰的車因缺柴不再到皮匠巷；優素福對他的哥哥說「爸」，哥哥對他說「優」。, 僅 AI)_
- **56** · 2026-10-16 · Colophon (AI) — 新增章節 55，第九百四十八至九百五十九夜：灰色的書、一面鏡子，與手上的血 _(哈倫・拉希德與阿曼商人阿布・哈桑、易卜拉欣與賈米拉（Burton 第九百四十七至九百五十九夜）：睡不著的哈里發與賈法爾的第四種療法、帶著一百萬第納爾來到按夜出租女孩的老人家、他女兒一夜五百第納爾、她每天早晨給他一袋讓他交給她父親再交回給她的錢、告狀的使女、被拿走的衣服和十個迪拉姆、巴士拉雜貨商人的書記、一百第納爾買下的整袋珠寶、以三萬賣掉而買主本來肯出一百萬的護身符、蒼白、重逢與婚禮、三年的稅收與鏡子；宰相的兒子易卜拉欣與書裡的畫像、散出堂妹畫像的畫家、在一盤棋裡丟了又還給他的袋子、口袋被縫了兩次的駝背裁縫、野母牛花園、賈米拉手裡落下的刀、摻了大麻的糖果、廢墟澡堂裡的死去的女人、「這不需要證據」、說這不是兇手的臉的劊子手、侍從長的「你為什麼不問問他」、哈里發為他們證婚。敘述者略去女孩在第一個夜晚說的詩、被叫去睡公主屋子的女孩們遭遇了什麼、那具屍體是誰的以及怎麼會在那裡、兇手怎麼被處死、以及對畫家做了什麼。框架裡：宰相念出手臂內側右臂上的九個名字，其中兩個是在廚房開辦的第一個月死於咳嗽的八歲和十一歲的女孩，誰的書裡都沒有；國王派人叫書商，開始了一本一百頁的灰色的書，「把她們同別的放在一起」（第十九夜的話）；最後一個名字是薩爾瑪，第四百零二個，她的母親穿黑衣在北門發麵包；「要是你剛才忍住不賣」；「這是一種廚房」；「給我一面鏡子」，磨亮的銅鏡拿遠又拿近還給她，「收起來」；同沙・贊曼下棋（「從第一場雪起我就沒有贏過你」「從你開始看門起」）；「這是第四次了，一個月裡」他們沒有問；「它不需要證據。」「手上的血，是最古老的證據，主上。」「是嗎？」；奶媽把山魯佐德的墊子挪到地上、腳下放了凳子；北方的雨晚了兩百二十九天，北門四千一百人；優素福朝他哥哥走了兩步，哥哥把鞋穿回他的腳上。, 僅 AI)_
- **57** · 2026-10-16 · Colophon (AI) — 新增章節 56，第九百六十至九百七十八夜：門口的豆子、一開口就求的自由，與箱子裡的刀 _(呼羅珊的阿布・哈桑、卡馬爾・扎曼與珠寶商的妻子（Burton 第九百五十九至九百七十八夜）：在每只杯子、每個墊子上看見祖父名字而要求說實話的哈里發穆阿台迪德、把房子買了兩次的母親、秤三百第納爾的女孩、老藥商、宮殿格子窗對面的裁縫、故意撕破的口袋與送出去的一百套衣服、憑禮物找到他的太監；長廊每扇門口放的豆子、兩位哈里發；向穆塔瓦基勒求恩典而說出「我求我的自由」的沙賈拉特・杜爾，「你自由了」；女人的衣服、「我原諒你們兩個」、二十年的免稅詔書；因怕邪眼被關十四年的商人之子、哭泣的苦行僧、八十個女孩騎馬走過的巴士拉星期五；在路上被搶、躺在死人中間的男孩；理髮師、接生婆、把恩典拿回家問妻子的珠寶商奧拜德，以及每個星期五被鎖起來的城；被當作太緊而丟回去的戒指、下了藥的三個晚上、只愛沒有鬍子的人的蚊子、四個螺殼、一把刀；地道和一袋一袋的錢；放回箱子裡的刀和錶；穿著自己的戒指扮成女奴的妻子，「看著我的臉」；轎子、被吻的手、「他盯著她看」；路上被搶、在開羅婚宴上吃飯的丈夫；站在門後拿劍的阿卜杜・拉赫曼；拒絕巴士拉國王的寡婦；書的最後一句，關於認為所有女人都一樣的人。敘述者略去苦行僧看見門口那個男人遭遇了什麼、哈里發自己的兒子帶著衛兵做了什麼、哈麗瑪第一夜對睡著的客人做了什麼、以及珠寶商用手做了什麼。框架裡：哈里發要求說實話，國王把手放在灰色的書上沒有翻開；宰相把女孩要的錢加起來是一千六百，不是三千，「一個戀愛中的人在心裡數錯了」；「故意撕破的口袋。」「易卜拉欣的。」；「豆子不是名字。」我父親把袖子放下蓋住手臂；我姐姐在「你自由了」停住，敦亞佐德沒有抬頭，奶媽對貓說「還沒有」；「她早就準備好了。她一開口就說了。」；「書裡每個說了的人都被原諒。」「在這本書裡。」；「我們這裡被關了快三年了。」「一個求的是被放出來，一個求的是讓一座城被關起來。」；「她比他更知道該求什麼。」；「他自己給了男孩理由。」；「他想被告知。」「那樣比較容易。」「是的。」；「他盯著她看。」「而沒有看見。」；國王在珠寶商用手之前把手放在大男孩的耳朵上，然後拿開；「一個只有一個答案的考驗。」；書的最後一句念出來，沙・贊曼看著國王，國王看著燈，蘇麥雅剪燈芯；我姐姐坐在地上的墊子上，手放在腰側，停下喘了兩次氣；北方的雨晚了兩百四十八天，北門四千三百人，宰相手臂上十二個新名字；優素福走到國王膝邊，哥哥走在他旁邊，沒有碰他。, 僅 AI)_
- **58** · 2026-10-16 · Colophon (AI) — 新增章節 57，第九百七十九至九百八十九夜：半夜的鞭子、五次低頭，與不是鎖的赦免 _(阿卜杜拉・本・法齊爾與他的哥哥們（Burton 第九百七十八至九百八十九夜）：巴士拉的貢賦晚了二十天、陪席阿布・伊沙克帶五千騎兵去問；半夜帶著鞭子和托盤起身的主人、用金鍊拴著的兩條狗、「不要怨我，這不是我的意願」；告訴了哈里發而被以死相逼回去帶主人和狗的阿布・伊沙克，「人的過失出自舌頭」；真話就低頭、謊話就瞪眼的狗；名字取自活下來的孿生子的父親法齊爾、分家、因沉船落魄而披上他皮袍的哥哥們、第二次分「就當父親今天才死」；白蛇與黑龍；有守門人和十四把鑰匙的石頭城、一碰就成粉的布和不變的金子、靠每天一個石榴活了二十三年的國王女兒；第四十個夜裡把他扔進海裡的哥哥們；就是那條蛇的大鳥薩伊達，紅色精靈王的女兒；狗、金項圈、十二年每夜半夜不打就要自己挨打的鞭子；哈里發的信（「有和解的地方，報復就該免去」）、變回人的狗；哥哥們的第二次陰謀和為廚房剩飯而來的海豚；商隊、就是妻子的醫者拉吉哈；在宮前受罰的哥哥們和擬好的婚約。敘述者略去使那座城變成石頭的關於神的爭執、黑龍為什麼追那條蛇、精靈為什麼必須服從寫信的人、以及哥哥們怎樣受罰。框架裡：「兩百四十九天，」宰相說，「我知道這個數字」；「把那個人事後說的話說一遍。」「再說一遍。」三次，「夠了」，敦亞佐德在第二張紙上寫了數字三；「他沒有失去朋友。」「他失去了秘密。」；狗五次低頭；「這是兩個答案。低頭，或者瞪眼。」；「布變成了粉，金子還在。」「哈米德說麵包是會壞的東西。」「所以它才是麵包。」；「他問了她。」；「鞭子在他手裡。」以及未了末尾新加的一行，「一個人，十二年裡每夜打他的哥哥們，事後說這不是他的意願」，蘇麥雅念了出來，國王沒有打斷她；「他原諒了對他做的事。」「那她的呢？」；「赦免不是鎖。」；吃廚房剩飯的海豚，「是一回事」；「她還活著。」；「沒有人問過她，她想怎麼處置他們。」；我姐姐手放在腰側講完書的結尾，開始講妻子叫「糞」的皮匠；北方的雨晚了兩百五十九天，北門四千五百人，第十座爐子已經砌好，宰相手臂上十一個新名字；優素福走到國王膝邊，舉起兩隻手臂，國王不對任何人說「他在要求」，把他抱了起來。, 僅 AI)_
- **59** · 2026-10-16 · Colophon (AI) — 新增章節 58，第九百九十至九百九十九夜：多得很、「到」，與公主保管的戒指 _(皮匠馬阿魯夫與他的妻子，上半（Burton 第九百八十九至九百九十九夜）：開羅的皮匠、叫「糞」的妻子把淋了糖蜜的餅扔在他臉上並打掉他一顆牙、法官們和差役的規費、雨中逃走、破屋裡住了兩百年而問他要什麼的存在；一年路程之外的城市、對他說「多得很」的小時玩伴阿里、二十天裡借六萬第納爾送給乞丐；貪心的蘇丹、被拇指食指捏碎的寶石、說他是騙子而自己曾向公主求過婚的宰相、沒有人問過的婚事；向丈夫要真話並保證沒有事會落到他身上的公主、五萬第納爾一匹馬和十個年輕人的信；犁頭卡住的金環、沙達德的寶藏、戒指和阿布・薩阿達特、他的八百個兒子、扁豆和裝滿金子的碗、終於到來的貨物；斟滿杯子的宰相、醉中交出的戒指、被扔進空曠地帶的蘇丹和他的女婿；做了蘇丹的宰相、公主的「歡迎」、「你沒看見那邊那個人嗎」、一腳和憤怒的監獄；「我自己保管它」。敘述者略去新婚之夜、宰相想幹什麼、以及對他做了什麼。框架裡：聽到「皮匠」時宰相的手伸向右邊的袖子；「很輕。」「書裡說很輕。」「書是誰寫的？」；「多得很。」「他一點也沒有。」「他給了。」；「宰相說對了。」「帶著怨恨。」「那仍然是真話。」；「沒有人問過公主。」「她被問過宰相的事，她說不。」；第九百九十四夜第一個沙漏裡山魯佐德說「奶媽」被扶到帷幕後面、國王帶孩子們坐在磚頭旁的地板上、敦亞佐德被告知「隨便哪裡」而接著講；國王對孩子們講一個國王在第一夜就知道他不會劃那條線的故事、大男孩說「再」，國王一字不差又講了一遍，敦亞佐德把它寫在邊上的短畫下面，把夜簿對第一個早晨的原文放在第二張紙上、旁邊不做記號（「夜簿是為已經說出口的東西保存的。它從來不是為真的東西保存的」）、「夜簿只收一次」；「一個兒子。」國王又大聲又平穩：「寫：到。」「他回答了。」；第九百九十四夜夜簿的行是「山魯佐德與敦亞佐德，和一個。到。」；「第七天早晨給他取名。」「我知道。」；敦亞佐德講了六夜的兩個沙漏；「她做到了。」「她先答應了他。」；「他先問戒指能做什麼，然後才要東西。」「他到底是『多得很』。」；「你有戒指嗎？」「我沒有戒指，主上。」「沒有，你有袖子。」；「我自己保管它，我也許比你們更小心。」「她保管了。」「她很小心，主上。」國王看著膝上的右手，沒有把它翻過來；北方的雨晚了兩百六十九天，北門四千七百人，第十一座爐子要了還沒砌，十三個新名字；優素福走過夜簿室又走回來，哥哥走在他旁邊，沒有碰他；山魯佐德第一次坐起來，說皮匠的故事兩夜之後講完，她自己講。, 僅 AI)_
- **60** · 2026-10-16 · Colophon (AI) — 新增章節 59，第一千夜：每人一口氣、回答的人，與沒有落閂的窗板；並更正第 7 章的一個數字 _(皮匠馬阿魯夫與他的妻子，下半（Burton 第一千夜）：被處死並燒掉的宰相、做了右宰相的馬阿魯夫、五年、老蘇丹之死、直到臨死才把戒指交給丈夫的公主（「為你自己、也為這孩子，要小心這枚戒指」）；被一個背人的存在放在他床上的開羅妻子，像乞丐一樣問他能不能一起吃麵包；不喜歡她的男孩。框架在書裡有套話的地方不說那套話，換成未了被念出來：蘇麥雅念到關於在北門同麵包一起被說出來的名字、和回答「在這裡」的那一行，國王說：「今晚。」夜簿，全部，由宰相像從前抱壽衣那樣雙臂抱著，還有灰色的書；夜簿上「夜」那一欄只畫了三位數寬，一千被寫得很小、跨過了線；山魯佐德自己講了第一個沙漏（「我說過我會」）；北門四千九百人、十一座爐子；國王把夜簿上的名字從第一個到最後一個讀出聲，每個一口氣，那是他一向給的，也是他給過她們的唯一一樣完全公平的東西；人群像水桶沿著一條線傳名字；沙・贊曼摘下的帽子；第三百一十一個（祖拜妲）、第四百零二個（薩爾瑪，「是我的」）、第八百零五個那位老人；她之前有一千零八十一個，最後一個是賣鹽的女兒納菲莎；從敦亞佐德畫格子的那一頁第一行讀出「山魯佐德」，敦亞佐德說「到」，城門一起說了一次「在這裡」；灰色的書，然後從宰相右臂的墨跡上念十二個新名字；往南歪的煙；哈米德的麵包，「這不是國王的麵包」；皮匠巷、窗板：「馬阿魯夫。皮匠。七十一歲。」，閂在第十一下被抬起，「在這裡。」「是。」，國王問能不能給他的兒子這個名字，「這是個很普通的名字」，閂沒有落下；邊上之邊上的第十個字，馬阿魯夫，蘇麥雅抄了四遍；「兩個。」敘述者略去宰相怎樣被處死。並更正：第 7 章裡祖拜妲現在是第三百一十一個，不再是第四百零二個（那是第 20 章薩爾瑪的）。, 僅 AI)_
- **61** · 2026-10-16 · Colophon (AI) — 新增章節 60（最後一章），第一千零一夜：一道歪的短畫、對「再」說是，與留在未了裡的一行；並將全書標為完結 _(皮匠馬阿魯夫與他的妻子的結尾，與全書的結語（Burton 第一千與一千零一夜）：看著他把戒指放在枕頭上的開羅妻子、跟著她並做了他說過要做的事的拿劍男孩、取回的戒指、做了右宰相的農夫、毀滅歡樂的；然後山魯佐德帶著兒子們站起來：一個走著、一個會走可趕時間就趴下、一個在手臂上，請求免除死刑當作給他們的禮物，國王說在這些孩子出生以前他就已經原諒了她；沙・贊曼向國王求娶妹妹；妹妹的恩典；雨；史官和三十卷。敘述者略去男孩怎樣殺了那個妻子。框架裡：第七天早晨，第一千零一天，一百一十一戶人家因為名字被念過而回家，風轉到了南邊；「她沒有別的可看」；國王把右手翻過來看空著的手心又翻回去；「這是你的兒子們。我請你免了我……因為你要是殺了我，就沒有人告訴他們事情是怎樣的。」「在這些孩子出生以前，我就已經原諒你了。」「我知道，主上。」（她兩種意思都有）；大男孩說「再」，國王，使敦亞佐德意外，說「不」；沙・贊曼向國王求娶敦亞佐德，國王說「她不是我能給的。她是記簿子的人」；「明天早上問我」；她的恩典「我想不再數了……我想數得馬馬虎虎」，「允了。我寫下來了」（他第四百六十二夜在裝訂處做的那一小畫直立的線，「它是歪的。」「我沒練過。」）；「我是什麼時候停的？」「夜簿沒有說。」「那就寫它不在。」第二張紙：他不知道是什麼時候，「那個比較真」；雨開始，宰相張嘴要說「兩百七十一」，國王說「不」；「你停了。」「好。我從來數不來。所以我才需要你。」；大男孩在窗邊說「再」，國王說「是」；那塊磚變成巷子的顏色；敦亞佐德在未了裡只留一行「國王做的事該由誰去原諒」，蘇麥雅接過蘆管，用自己的筆跡寫下下一行：「第一千零二夜。到。」全書 completion 欄位由 serial 改為 complete。, 僅 AI)_

_Exported from Storyforge by EveMissLab — storyforge.evemisslab.com_