Shadow Spinner (13 page)

*  *  *  

“It was just as he had remembered it,” Shahrazad said. She was still smiling, radiant. Dunyazad had left on an errand; Shahrazad had sent away her serving
women and now sat by me on a cushion on the floor.

“He hadn't remembered all of it,” she continued, “but when I told the tale, he said it was like meeting an old friend. And Badar Basim! The Sultan joked with me that I had tortured him, making him wait those several nights to relieve the itch in his mind. But he didn't hold it against me—so long as I had the name.”

I tried to imagine the Sultan . . .
joking
with Shahrazad. But I couldn't. It was too far to reach. I had watched him riding somberly in processions through the streets, and twice I had seen him striding through a courtyard in the harem. His face looked . . . hard. Dead. Like stone. And . . . with everything else I knew about him . . . Joking!

“I was worried,” I confessed, “about Princess Jauharah. Because . . . Badar Basim was in love with her, and she betrayed him.”

Shahrazad looked at me for a moment. “And you were afraid,” she asked, “that this story would give the Sultan further proof that all women betray the men they love? And he might be inclined to have me killed? Is that it?”

I nodded.

“He
knows
there are betraying women in the world, Marjan! So the tale tells him nothing new of that. And if I omitted all women like that from my tales, he would know that I was shading the truth. That I was . . . lying, in a way. About how the world is. And Jauharah is not
all
bad. She's false to Badar Basim in order to be true to her father. And besides, there's Marsinah, the kindly slave girl who saves Badar Basim. And Julnar herself, who is strong and good.”

“Yes, I see that. But—”

“Marjan. I have told him tales of good women and bad
women, strong women and weak women, shy women and bold women, clever women and stupid women, honest women and women who betray. I'm hoping that, by living inside their skins while he hears their stories, he'll understand over time that women are not all this way or that way. I'm hoping he'll look at women as he does at men—that you must judge each of us on her own merits, and not condemn us or exalt us only because we belong to a particular sex.”

I began to get a glimmering, then, of what Shahrazad had meant when she spoke of
teaching
the Sultan. And my awe of her grew. She was not simply saving her own life—saving many women's lives—by telling entertaining tales. She was . . . educating the Sultan. Enlarging his view of the world. Giving his bitter, cramped soul room to grow. Making him . . .
human
again.

“Anyway,” she went on, “you can't just go chopping off the parts of a story that you don't agree with and scrubbing the rest of it clean. You violate its spirit. You rob it of its power. You—Sister! There you are!”

Dunyazad entered the room. She smiled her dimply smile at Shahrazad, then turned and smiled at
me.
Maybe she trusted me, now that the story had gone well.

When the door had shut tight behind her, she asked, “Did you tell her?”

Sighing, Shahrazad shook her head. To me, she said, “I asked the Sultan where he had heard the tale, but he looked off into the distance and didn't answer. We were hoping we could learn the rest of it some other way. So—I'm sorry, Marjan. But—you'll have to go out again.”

“I know,” I said.

“But I don't think you'd better go out in a chest. Or come back in the same way you go out.”

I nodded fervently.

“And this time,” Dunyazad said, “I'm going, too.”

*  *  *  

You would have thought, by the way Shahrazad acted next, that Dunyazad had said she was going to jump off the highest minaret in the city. And it
was
a crazy idea. But Dunyazad was stubborn—even stubborner than Auntie Chava sometimes gets. “I forbid it,” Shahrazad kept saying. “I absolutely forbid it.”

“I have ways of getting around your forbiddings—as well you know,” Dunyazad replied.

Shahrazad sighed. “Listen to
reason,
Little Sister. If the Khatun doesn't scare you, think of this: Father has enemies. They might use you to get to him. They might—
hurt
you to punish him. And
Father
would be your enemy should he ever find out. Likely he'd marry you off to some toothless, doddering old landlord, and I'd never see you again! And think of me! If anything happened to you, I wouldn't be able to say I need to tell my little sister a story. Shahryar would have to admit that the stories are for
him.
And he might be too proud for that.”

“But I have an idea!”

“Of course you have an idea! You always have ideas! And sometimes you even have good ones. But this is reckless, Sister! It's madness! Marjan, tell her she's mad.”

“Um,” I said. I couldn't say
that.
“It would be . . . easier . . . with just me.”

“No—no, wait!” Dunyazad said. “My plan calls for two, and there's no one else to do it. Here's what I want to do. You know how Princess Budur dressed up as a man and no one knew?”

“Princess Budur! Dunya, Princess Budur is not real.
She's a girl in a
tale!
People in tales do all kinds of crazy things. They turn into birds and donkeys. They fly on toy horses and get into shipwrecks. That doesn't mean
you
should do them.”

“But, Sister, you're the one who taught me that there is truth below the surfaces of tales. That we can learn courage from them. That they can teach us how to live our lives.”

“Don't go twisting my words around! This is crazy and you know it. I forbid it.”

“So
you're
the only one who gets to be brave and heroic. Brave Shahrazad. The savior of all the women. And I have to be meek and obedient. Little meek Dunya. Isn't she lucky to have such a brave, heroic older sister!”

Shahrazad struggled to hold back a smile, then gave up and, laughing, said, “No one ever called
you
meek, Sister.”

An answering, dimpled smile flickered across Dun-yazad's face. “Well, maybe not. But if we don't do this, the Sultan will be angry and chop off your head, and I won't be far behind. Preserving
you
will save me.”

“Not if you get yourself killed first. I forbid it.”

“Sister, I am doing this! With your permission or without. So what do you plan to do about it? Send for Father to marry me off to a toothless old landlord—”

“I'm tempted!”

“—or help us, so we won't get caught?”

T
here were many wrinkles that had to be pressed out of Dunyazad's plan.

One was the part about dressing up as boys. Dunyazad had fallen in love with the idea, but it didn't make sense. “Girls can get along in the outside world just as well as boys,” she said. “Princess Budur proved that when she dressed up as her husband and nobody knew the difference. She even
ruled
and nobody knew.”

“I'm glad you were listening,” Shahrazad said, “but her situation does not apply to you. In the first place, she's a made-up person. In the second place, you need to be as covered up as possible, which means veiled, which means dressed as a woman, not a man.”

Eventually, Dunyazad saw reason and gave up the idea. I was glad. I didn't want to go traipsing through the city unveiled.

Another wrinkle was those footsteps
I'd
heard that morning on my way to see Shahrazad. “You're certain you're being followed?” she asked.

“I
think
so,” I said.

“Do you know who?”

“I didn't see but. . . I think it may be Soraya.”

Dunyazad jumped up, pushed open the door, and went out. She returned in a moment. “It
is
Soraya. When she saw me, she fled down the stairs and ducked into a room.”

“Hmm.” Shahrazad bit her lip, looked thoughtful. “We'll have to do something about that.”

Yet another wrinkle was the part about
both
of us leaving the harem. Dunyazad was even more in love with this idea than with the dressing-as-a-boy idea. But Shahrazad wouldn't allow it until we came to the next wrinkle.

Which was: How could we make sure that this would be the last time either of us had to leave the harem? Once had been bad enough. But
twice.
Far more dangerous, because now the Khatun was suspicious. This next time
had
to be the last.

“How much more of the story was left?” Shahrazad asked. “Did he say?”

“He said . . .” I tried to remember. “Something like . . . 'There is
much
left to hear.'”

“More than he could tell you in a morning? In a day?”

“I don't know,” I said. “I guess I should have asked.”

Shahrazad rocked on her cushion, hugging a small satin pillow. “That makes it hard.”

For a moment, no one spoke. Not even Dunyazad had an idea.

Then I thought of Zaynab and her pigeons. They
were trained to return messages to the palace. If the storyteller had some palace pigeons, he could send back bits of story.

“Ah!” Shahrazad said, when I told her what I was thinking. She turned to Dunyazad; they exchanged a long, meaningful look. And I felt. . . cut out of the conversation. The way I had been before, when they planned how I would get out in the chest.

“Well. We don't have to decide right now,” Shahrazad said. “Come back tomorrow morning, and we'll talk again. And, Marjan—don't tell
anyone!”

*  *  *  

Soon after I left, I heard footfalls behind me again. When I turned to look, I saw the corner of a green robe vanish behind a tall urn. Soraya.

This was unbearable! I paused for a moment to think.

I could try to lose her. But even if I succeeded, what would I do then? Hide from her all day?

I could try to ignore her, but that would be hard.

I wondered . . . what would she do if I went up on the roof to see Zaynab?

I would find out!

I took a roundabout route to the spiral kitchen stairs, half hoping that Soraya would give up and leave me alone. But she didn't. I could hear a faint swishing behind me, and sometimes the hurried padding of bare feet on tile. When I came out on the roof, I looked back down at the steps. The whole top spiral was empty. But I had a feeling Soraya was lower down, lurking around a bend. Still, she would have nowhere to hide on the roof. She would just have to lurk.

I spent all morning up on the roof terrace with Zaynab.
She showed me how to take care of the pigeons—how to feed them, how to clear a clouded eye or mend a cut foot. She taught me how to act around the pigeons, to acknowledge them with a look when you came near. They expected it of you, she said. It was only polite. She said they could tell what kind of a mood you were in—if you were happy, or sick, or mad. She showed me how to roll up the message paper—tightly!—and how to slip it into the tiny wooden capsule and fasten it to a pigeons leg. You had to do it just right. Make it not so tight that it would cut off the bird's blood flow, but snug enough so that it wouldn't fall off. Gently, gently, Zaynab said. And afterward, she let me throw one of her birds into the air.

There was something calming about Zaynab, about her pavilion high above the palace, about the burbling of her birds. She had a name for each one, and she treated them with a tenderness that made me think, for some reason, of my mother. Words came easier now between us, and her humming seemed happy—not nervous and strange.

I longed to confide in her, to tell her about the storyteller and my idea about the pigeons. But Shahrazad had told me not to. So I didn't.

We ate after noon prayers—cheese and raisins and fresh bread that Zaynab cooked over a brazier. Several birds still perched on her shoulders, but she didn't have to wash anything this time. There was a stack of clean cups and bowls on a wooden shelf. And the floor had been scrubbed as well.

Just as we were finishing our meal, the young eunuch with the soft face came and summoned Zaynab to Shahrazad.

He must be the one, I thought.

Zaynab said that I could stay, but I didn't. I went down to my room for a nap. I didn't see Soraya. But just before I slipped off to sleep, I thought I heard, outside my room, the clinking of game tiles on the floor.

*  *  *  

The next morning, Shahrazad summoned me again, just as she had done the day before. When I entered her chamber, I heard pigeons cooing and, looking about, saw two slender bird baskets in a corner of the room. I could see through the wicker that there were three levels inside, with birds on every one.

Shahrazad told me the new plan. There were still a lot of
ifs'
s and uncertainties to it. The parts that happened inside the harem seemed clear and plausible—at least, the parts that she told me. Someone was helping us, and she wouldn't say who.

But the outside-the-harem parts were full of foggy patches and outright mistakes. “A thousand pardons,” I said. “There are
many
carpet merchants in the bazaar. We'll need to know which one.” And, “The merchants don't transport oil in ceramic jars. They use leather ones, because they're lighter.” I told Shahrazad that silver dirhams and copper fils were better than gold dinars—less conspicuous. I asked for veils that were not so fine. “And Dunyazad needs to take off her rings. All of them. We want her to look poor.” But I could still wear my silver-and-garnet comb, I told myself, because it would be covered.