Chimera (5 page)

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

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

“That’s the end of your story?”

Dunyazade nodded.

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

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

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

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

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

“Nonsense,” Dunyazade said crossly. “I’ve seen all that.”

“Seeing’s not feeling.”

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

“What a lucky fellow! You don’t love me then, little wife?”

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

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

“I don’t believe you.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dunyazade wept.

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

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

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

Dunyazade moved her head indifferently.

“More tightly. Careful with that razor!”

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

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

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

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

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

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