Shadow Spinner (2 page)

“Have you heard,” I asked the children, “the tale of the fisherman and the jinn?”

Several solemn heads shook
no,
but the girl with the gazelle piped up, “I have! The jinn was going to kill him, but the fisherman tricked it.”

“Yes,” I said, “but did you know about the talking fish?”

She narrowed her eyes warily, shook her head.

“Well, the jinn told the fisherman to cast his net again. And it came up with four fishes in it: one white, one red, one blue, one yellow.”

“There's no such thing as a blue fish,” the girl said.

“Well yes there is because this one was. Only, they were magical fishes. Because when the fisherman sold them to the Sultan, and the Sultan gave them to his cook, and the cook began to fry them, the wall cracked open with a
boom!
And a beautiful lady came in through the crack. And then the fishes lifted up their heads and talked to her.”

I held my breath then, waiting. It is not good, when telling tales, to tell too much too soon. You must cast your net, like the fisherman in the story, then wait to see what swims in.

The children watched me, eyes wide. At last, just when I feared that I would lose them, the gazelle girl said, “What did the fish . . .
say?”

And then I knew I had them.

I spun the old tale carefully, meting out mystery upon mystery and not solving one until after the next had been posed. I spoke softly, then loudly, then softly again, so that the children crept ever nearer. Soon they were ringed all about me, touching me. I breathed in their sweet perfume. One little girl laid her head on my knee and looked straight up into my face. A boy clutched the hem of my gown as he sucked his thumb. The gazelle folded its long legs and nuzzled at my hands. And the tale took on a life of its own, as tales sometimes do, enfolding me in the world of it, opening up to show me particulars I had never seen before in all the times I had told it.

“And the sorceress lost no time, but betook herself to the shores of that lake, where she sprinkled the waters on the sand. And she spoke some words over the fish—
bal-anka balinka baloo!
And the fishes jumped up and turned into men and women and children! One of them had hair that curled just like yours,” I said to the gazelle girl, “and was wearing a silver bracelet like this one, and a gown of blue silk just like the one you re wearing . . .” I stopped, furrowed my brow at her. “Are you
certain
you've never been a fish?”

A muffled laugh sounded from outside the circle of children; I looked up sharply. My eyes met the gaze of a girl a little older than me—fourteen or fifteen, I guessed. She was dressed more simply than the women, but I knew by the drape and sheen of her yellow silk gown that the fabric was exceedingly fine. Her eyes, clear gray and almond-shaped,
were serious, even before the dimpled smile faded from her mouth.

“Go on,” she said. “Please.”

It was a request—not a demand—and yet I could tell by some quality of her voice that she was accustomed to being obliged.

Who
was
she?

I darted a look at where the other women were still bargaining with Auntie Chava. They showed no deference to this girl, nor even seemed to notice her.

Flustered, I did go on, but I was out of the tale now, fixed firmly in the
now
of the harem. I finished quickly; the children begged for more.

“Not now, little ones,” the gray-eyed girl said. “Go and play!”

They scattered like a covey of partridges and disappeared through an arched doorway, trailing echoes of talk and laughter. The gazelle hesitated, then bounded after.

Now the gray-eyed girl drew near; hastily, I clambered to my feet. She was not tall, I saw, barely taller than I. Her face was lovely—square-jawed, with a full, wide mouth and plump cheeks that dimpled when she smiled. Her hair, a thick, glossy braid, lay draped over her shoulder. But she seemed unaware of her beauty. There was no smugness about this girl, no fluttering. “Do you know other tales?” she asked.

I nodded, not trusting my voice. I knew many old tales; I collected them. I had trained myself to fix a tale in memory, so I would never forget. But. . . who
was
this girl?

“Wait here,” she said.

I stood awkwardly, watching as the girl spoke with Auntie Chava and then with another of the older women.
Suddenly, I wanted to go to Auntie Chava, to have her put her arm around me, to leave this place and go home. But the girl had said,
Wait here.

Auntie Chava glanced at me and said something to the girl. Their voices were soft; I couldn't hear. Then the girl came back.

“Come with me,” she said.

I stood rooted. I looked beseechingly back at Auntie Chava, who nodded as if to reassure me.

“Come,” the girl said.

I looked again at Auntie Chava; she made a shooing motion with her hand.

The girl hastened across the courtyard and disappeared through an archway. I had to move fast to catch up, struggling to hide my limp. Auntie Chava wouldn't have . . .
sold
me, would she? Fear rose up within me.
Once a woman enters these gates, she never comes out alive.

“Where are we going?” I said to the girl's back.

The girl didn't slow a bit. She had a powerful stride. Though Auntie Chava said that harem women lounged on cushions all day drinking sharbats, I doubted
this
one did.

“Where are we
going?” I
asked again, louder.

“To see my sister,” the girl said over her shoulder.

“Your . . . sister?”

“Yes! My sister . . . Shahrazad.”

O
f course I knew that Shahrazad had a sister. Everyone knew that. On the night she married the Sultan, Shahrazad had asked if she could tell one last story to her younger sister before dawn, before he killed Shahrazad. The Sultan said yes, and so, a little while before dawn, they sent for the sister. The Sultan listened as Shahrazad told the story. When Shahrazad saw that daybreak was approaching, she broke off her story in the middle of an exciting part, and the Sultan let her live until the next night so he could hear how things turned out.

But on the second night, the same thing happened: they sent for her sister, Shahrazad left off spinning her story at another exciting part, and the Sultan let her live again.

And it had gone on that way for more than two and a half years. During that time, Shahrazad had given the Sultan three sons—one just this past week. Now everyone in the city breathed easier. People no longer hid their daughters or sent them away with Abu Muslem, the famous outlaw who helped women escape. Shahrazad had stopped the killings.

So I
had
heard of Dunyazad, Shahrazad's sister. But somehow I had never thought about her very much.

Until now.

The main thing I kept thinking about her now was, I
wish that shed slow down.
She kept disappearing behind screens and walls and archways, and I had to run to keep from losing her. She skirted a deserted open courtyard where ruby-throated birds perched in fragrant trees, then she crossed a stream that gurgled between banks of vivid blue tile. She opened a hidden paneled door and climbed into a dim, musty-smelling passageway that wound this way and that. Through tiny windows I could glimpse other empty rooms and courtyards, each decorated with tilework and carvings and gold. We came out at a marble colonnade near a wide flight of green-glazed steps; Dunyazad bounded up, then strode across a high balcony that overlooked a courtyard below. Reaching into a cranny of a carved wooden screen, she released a hidden latch, opened it, then plunged down the narrow stairway beyond.

And all the while I saw not a single living soul. There was a hushed, eerie feeling to this place. All those sofas with no one to sit on them. All that beauty with no one to
see. Beyond the echoes of our footsteps, I could almost hear the whispered voices of the women who had lived here before the Sultans purge.

All gone now. All slain.

I followed Dunyazad down the stairs to a hallway floored in gray marble. She ducked into a small draped cubicle and seemed to have vanished entirely until I heard a rattling sound and pulled the drape aside. Through a beaded curtain, I glimpsed a ripple of yellow silk; I hastened after it into a courtyard.

My foot was hurting now; it does when I go far or fast. But worse than the pain was the mounting fear that I would be lost. I could wander through this labyrinth and not find my way out for days. Weeks, maybe. I would have to drink the water in the pools. I would have to catch the fish that darted within them, eat them raw. Or maybe they would lift up their heads and talk to me, tell me how . . .

Stop spinning shadows!
I told myself sternly.
Look to your own survival!

“Here.” Dunyazad was climbing a flight of stairs to a high-arched doorway off an alabaster-tiled corridor. She disappeared within; I heard a voice, a greeting.

Shahrazad?

And now I stopped, uncertain.

I looked down at my coarse gown—at its faded brown color, at the stains that would not come out no matter how hard I scrubbed, at the fresh rime of dust from dragging through the streets. And I felt. . . ashamed to appear before Shahrazad. I brushed at the dust, but it was no use.

From the shadowed hallway where I stood, I could see only a narrow strip of one wall of the room beyond the
arch. Sunlight streamed in through a high mosaic of colored glass and through a carved wooden screen below.

Dunyazad reappeared in the arch. “Come! She awaits!”

Slowly, I edged through the arch . . .

And nearly tripped over a stack of books.

Books! They were everywhere—strewn all over the sofas, all over the carpeted floor. Stacks and drifts and mounds of them—some open, some shut. And scrolls! They were littered all about the books. A fortune in books and scrolls.

And there, kneeling on the floor, one finger poised upon the page of an open book. . . was Shahrazad.

I
did
know her at once, though I don't know exactly how. She was not at all the way I had imagined her. True, she was beautiful, even though she wore a robe from the baths and her long hair hung wet and uncombed down her back. Her skin was clear and glowing, her lips full, her eyebrows pleasingly arched, her lashes a thick, dark fringe. But what shocked me was her eyes. Haunted, hunted eyes. There was a look in them that dwelt somewhere in the spaces between hunger and terror.

I had seen that look before in the eyes of a thief condemned to death. But here, in the eyes of the hero of my life, it chilled me to the bone.

I moved forward, knelt, and kissed the floor before her.

“Tell her that story about the fish—the one you were telling the children,” Dunyazad said.

I swallowed.
I?
Tell a story to Shahrazad? But she was the one who had inspired
me
to tell stories. I only told stories because of her.

“Tell
her,” Dunyazad insisted.

I swallowed again, licked my lips. “A jinn told a fisherman to ... to cast his net. . . into the sea,” I began haltingly.

Shahrazad moved her hand from the page. She fixed her haunted gaze upon my face. It was difficult, with her staring so, to latch on to the tale. “The net came up with four fish in it—one white, one red, one blue, one yellow,” I said. “But when the fisherman sold them to the Sultan . . .” It was coming now, though in starts and lurches. As I went on, Shahrazad leaned toward me, seemed to devour me with her eyes. “And lifting up his robe, he showed the Sultan that he was a man only from his head to his waist, and that his feet and legs and hips were made of black marble—”

“No!”

The voice came harsh and sudden; I broke off the tale and gaped.

Shahrazad turned to her sister. “I told this story long ago. Don't you remember? It was one of the early ones.”

Dunyazad sighed. “It did sound more familiar this second time. But. . .” She turned to me. “Tell her another tale. You said you know others.”

I
did
know other tales, but they all fled my mind in the heat of Shahrazad's gaze. Fragments of stories I knew racketed about my mind—a magic lamp, a wealthy portress, a foolish weaver. I seized upon this last and began, haltingly followed the thread of the tale. But just when it was coming clear to me, Shahrazad cried, “No! I've told it!”

I tried tale after tale, dragging each one up through the tumult in my mind until I could find the shape of it. But each time Shahrazad broke in before I was well
along. Most of them she had told the Sultan before; a few she thought he wouldn't like. “He yawned when I told a story very like that one,” she said.
“Yawned!
I
musn't
tell tales that make him yawn!” And once she said something odd—something I would have questioned her about if I had dared: “He's not ready for that one yet,” she said.

I went through all my stock of old tales, the ones I tell the neighborhood children. They're not so choosy as the Sultan. They love hearing their favorites over and over. At last I remembered a tale I had heard one day from a storyteller in the bazaar—a tale of a mermaid named Julnar.

“So she swam out of the sea and rested on the shore of an island under the full moon, and a man who was passing by found her. He took her home and tried to make love to her, but she hit him on the head. So he sold her to a merchant. . .”