The Shaving of Shagpat · And This Is the Story of Bhanavar the Beautiful (6/9)

There was in the harem of the Vizier a mountain-girl that had been brought there in her childhood, and trained to play upon the lute and accompany her voice with the instrument. To this little damsel Bhanavar gave her heart, and would listen all day, as in a trance, to her luting, till the desire to escape from that bondage and gather tidings of Almeryl mastered her, and she persuaded one of the blacks of the harem with a bribe to procure her an interview with the porter Ukleet. So at a certain hour of the night Ukleet was introduced into the garden of the harem, and he was in the darkness of that garden a white-faced porter with knees that knocked the dread-march together; but Bhanavar strengthened his soul, and he said to her, “ ’Twas the doing of Boolp the broker: and he whispered the Vizier of thee and thy beauty, O my mistress! Surely thy punishment and this ruin is but part payment to Boolp of the price of the Jewel, the great Jewel that’s in the hands of the Vizier.”

Then she questioned him: “And Almeryl, the Prince, my husband, what of him?”

Ukleet was dumb, and Bhanavar asked to hear no more. Surely she was at the gates of pale spirits within an hour of her interview with Ukleet, and there was no blessedness for her save in death, the stiffer of ills, the drug that is infallible. As is said:

“Dark is that last stage of sorrow

Which from Death alone can borrow

Comfort:⁠—”

Bhanavar would have died then, but in a certain pause of her fever the Vizier stood by her. She looked at him long as she lay, and the life in her large eyes was ebbing away slowly; but there seemed presently a check, as an eddy comes in the stream, and the light of intelligence flowed like a reviving fire into her eyes, and her heart quickened with desire of life while she looked on the Vizier. So she passed the pitch of that fever, and bloomed anew in her beauty, and cherished it, for she had a purpose.

Now, there was rejoicing in the harem of the Vizier Aswarak when Bhanavar arose from the couch; and the Vizier exulted, thinking, “I have tamed this wild beauty, or she had reached death in that extremity.” So he allowed Bhanavar greater freedom and indulgences, and Bhanavar feigned to give her soul to the pleasures women delight in, and the Vizier buried her in gems and trinkets and costly raiment, robes of exquisite silks, the choicest of Samarkand and China; and he permitted her to make purchases among certain of the warehouses of the city and the shops of the tradesmen, jewellers and others, so that she went about as she would, but for the slaves that attended her and the overseer of the harem. This continued, and Aswarak became urgent with her, and to remove suspicion from him she named a day from that period when she would be his. Meantime she contrived to see Ukleet the porter frequently, and within a week of her engagement with the Vizier she gazed from a lattice-window of the harem, and beheld in the garden, by the beams of the moon, Ukleet, and he was looking as on the watch for her. So she sent to him the little mountain-girl she loved, but Ukleet would tell her nothing; then went she herself, greeting him graciously, for his service was other than that of self-seeking.

Ukleet said, “O Lady, mistress of hearts, moon of the tides of will! ’tis certain I was thy slave from the hour I beheld thee first, and of the Prince, thy husband; Allah rest his soul! Now these be my tidings. Wullahy! the King is one maddened with the reports I’ve spread about of thy beauty, yea! raging. And I have a friend in his palace, even an under-cook, acute in the interpreting of wishes. There was he always gabbling of thy case, O my Princess, till the head-cook seized hold on it, and so it went to the chamberlain, thence to the chief of the eunuchs, and from him in a natural course, to the King. Now from the King the tracking of this tale went to the under-cook down again, and from him to me. So was I summoned to the King, and the King discoursed with me⁠—I with him, in fair fluency; he in ejaculations of desire to have sight of thee, I in expatiation on that he would see when he had his desire. Now in this have I not done thee a service, O sovereign of fancies?”

Bhanavar mused and said, “On the after-morrow I pass through the city to make a selection of goods, and I shall pass at noon by the great mosque, on my way to the shop of Ebn Roulchook, the King’s jeweller, beyond the meat-market. Of a surety, I know not how my lord the King may see me.”

Said the porter, “ ’Tis enough! on my head be it.” And he went from her, singing the song:

“How little a thing serves Fortune’s turn

When she’s intent on doing!

How easily the world may burn

When kings come out a-wooing!”

Now, ere she set forth on the after-morrow to make her purchases, Bhanavar sent word to the Vizier Aswarak that she would see him, and he came to her drunken with alacrity, for he augured favourably that her reluctance was melting toward him: so she said, “O my master, my time of mourning is at an end, and I would look well before thee, even as one worthy of being thy bride; so bestow on me, I pray thee, for my wearing that day, the jewels that be in thy treasury, the brightest and clearest of them, and the largest.”

The Vizier Aswarak replied, and he was one in great satisfaction of soul, “All that I have are thine. Wullahy! and one, a marvel, that I bought of Boolp the broker, that had it from an African merchant.” So he commanded the box wherein he had deposited the Jewel to be brought to him there in the chamber of Bhanavar, and took forth the Serpent Jewel between his forefinger and thumb, and laughed at the eager eyes of Bhanavar when she beheld it, saying, “ ’Tis thine! thy bridal gift the day I possess thee.”

Bhanavar trembled at the sight of the Jewel, and its redness was to her as the blood of Zurvan and Almeryl. She stretched her hand out for it and cried, “This day, O my lord, make it mine.”

So the Vizier said, “Nay, what I have spoken will I keep to; it has cost me much.”

Bhanavar looked at him, and uttered in a soft tone, “Truly it has cost thee much.”

Then she exclaimed, as in play, “See me, how I look by its beam.” And in her guile she snatched the Jewel from him, and held it to her brow. Then Aswarak started from her and feared her, for the red light of the Jewel glowed, and darkened the chamber with its beam, darkening all save the lustre that was on the visage of Bhanavar. He shouted, “What’s this! Art thou a sorceress?”

She removed the Jewel, and ceased glaring on him, and said, “Nothing but thy poor slave!”

Then he coaxed her to give him the Jewel, and she would not; he commanded her peremptorily, and she hesitated; so he grasped her tightened hand, and his face loured with wrath; yet she withheld the Jewel from him laughing; and he was stirred to extreme wrath, and drew from his girdle the naked scimitar, and menaced her with it. And he looked mighty; but she dreaded him little, and stood her full height before him, daring him, and she was as the tigress defending a cub from a wilder beast. Now when he was about to call in the armed slaves of the palace, she said, “I warn thee, Vizier Aswarak! tempt me not to match them that serve me with them that serve thee.”

He ground his teeth in fury, crying, “A conspiracy! and in the harem! Now, thou traitress! the logic of the lash shall be tried upon thee.” And he roared, “Ho! ye without there! ho!”

But ere the slaves had entered Bhanavar rubbed the Jewel on her bosom, muttering, “I have forborne till now! Now will I have a sacrifice, though I be it.” And rubbing the Jewel, she sang,

“Hither! hither!

Come to your Queen;

Come through the grey wall,

Come through the green!”

There was heard a noise like the noise of a wind coming down a narrow gorge above falling waters, a hissing and a rushing of wings, and behold! Bhanavar was circled by rings and rings of serpent-folds that glowed round her, twisted each in each, with the fierceness of fire, she like a flame rising up white in the midst of them. The black slaves, when they had lifted the curtain of the harem-chamber, shrieked to see her, and Aswarak crouched at her feet with the aspect of an angry beast carved in stone. Then Bhanavar loosed on either of the slaves a serpent, saying, “What these have seen they shall not say.” And while the sweat dropped heavily from the forehead of Aswarak, she stepped out of the circle of serpents, singing,

“Over! over!

Hie to the lake!

Sleep with the left eye,

Keep the right awake.”

Then the serpents spread with a great whirr, and flew through the high window and the walls as they had come, and she said to the Vizier, “What now? Fearest thou? I have spared thee, thou that madest me desolate! and thy slaves are a sacrifice for thee. Now this I ask: Where lies my beloved, the Prince my husband? Speak nothing of him, save the place of his burial!”

So he told her, “In the burial-ground of the great prison.”

She rolled her eyes on the Vizier darkly, exclaiming, “Even where the felons lie entombed, he lieth!” And she began to pant, pale with what she had done, and leaned to the floor, and called,

“Yellow stripe, with freckle red,

Coil and curl, and watch by my head.”

And a serpent with yellow stripes and red freckles came like a javelin down to her, and coiled and curled round her head, and she slept an hour. When she arose the Vizier was yet there, sitting with folded knees. So she sped the serpent to the Lake Karatis, and called her women to her, and went to an inner room, and drew an outer robe and a vest over that she had on, and passed the Vizier, and said, “Art thou not rejoiced in thy bride, O Aswarak? ’Twas a wondrous clemency, hers! Now but four more days and thou claimest her. Say nothing of what thou hast seen, or thou wilt shortly see nothing further to say, my master.”

So she left the Vizier sitting still in that chamber, and mounted a mule, attended by slaves on foot before and behind her, and passed through the streets till she came to the shop of Ebn Roulchook. The King was in disguise at the extremity of the shop, and while she examined this and that of the precious stones, Bhanavar for a moment made bare the beauty of her face, and love’s fires took fast hold of the King, and he cried, “I marvel not at the eloquence of the porter.”

Now, she made Ebn Roulchook bring to her a circlet of gold, with a hollow in the frontal centre, and fit into that hollow the Serpent Jewel. So, while she laughed and chatted with her women Bhanavar lifted the circlet, and made her countenance wholly bare even to the neck and the beginning slope of the bosom, and fixed the circlet to her head with the Jewel burning on her brow. Then when he beheld the glory of excelling loveliness that she was, and the splendour in her eyes under the Jewel, the King shouted and parted with his disguise, and Ebn Roulchook and the women and slaves with Bhanavar fled to the courtyard that was behind the shop, leaving Bhanavar alone with the King. Surely Bhanavar returned not to the dwelling of the Vizier.

Now, the King Mashalleed espoused Bhanavar, and she became his queen and ruled him, and her word was the dictate of the land. Then caused she the body of Almeryl, with the severed head of the Prince, to be disinterred, and entombed secretly in the palace; and she had lamps lit in the vault, and the pall spread, and the readers of the Koran to read by the tomb; and then she stole to the tomb hourly, in the day and in the night, wailing of him and her utter misery, repeating verses at the side of the tomb, and they were,

“Take me to thee!

Like the deep-rooted tree,

My life is half in earth, and draws

Thence all sweetness; oh may my being pause

Soon beside thee!

Welcome me soon!

As to the queenly moon,

Man’s homage to my beauty sets;

Yet am I a rose-shrub budding regrets:

Welcome me soon.

Soul of my soul!

Have me not half, but whole.

Dear dust, thou art my eyes, my breath!

Draw me to thee down the dark sea of death,

Soul of my soul!”

And she sang:

“Sad are they who drink life’s cup

Till they have come to the bittersweet:

Better at once to toss it up,

And trample it beneath the feet;

For venom-charged as serpents’ eggs

’Tis then, and knows not other change.

Early, early, early, have I reached the dregs

Of life, and loathe and love the bittersweet, revenge!”

Then turned she aside, and sang musingly:

“I came to his arms like the flower of the spring,

And he was my bird of the radiant wing:

He flutter’d above me a moment, and won

The bliss of my breast as a beam of the sun,

Untouch’d and untasted till then⁠—”

The voice in her throat was like a drowning creature, and she rose up, and chanted wildly:

“I weep again?

What play is this? for the thing is dead in me long since:

Will all the reviving rain

Of heaven bring me back my Prince?

But I, when I weep, when I weep,

Blood will I weep!

And when I weep,

Sons for fathers shall weep;

Mothers for sons shall weep;

Wives for husbands shall weep!

Earth shall complain of floods red and deep,

When I weep!”

Upon that she ran up a secret passage to her chamber and rubbed the Jewel, and called the serpents, to delight her soul with the sight of her power, and rolled and sported madly among them, clutching them by the necks till their thin little red tongues hung out, and their eyes were as discoloured blisters of venom. Then she arose, and her arms and neck and lips were glazed with the slime of the serpents, and she flung off her robes to the close-fitting silken inner vest looped across her bosom with pearls, and whirled in a mazy dance-measure among them, and sang melancholy melodies, making them delirious, fascinating them; and they followed her round and round, in twines and twists and curves, with arched heads and stiffened tails; and the chamber swam like an undulating sea of shifting sapphire lit by the moon of midnight. Not before the moon of midnight was in the sky ceased Bhanavar sporting with the serpents, and she sank to sleep exhausted in their midst.

Such was the occupation of the Queen of Mashalleed when he came not to her. The women and slaves of the palace dreaded her, and the King himself was her very slave.

Meanwhile the plot of her unforgivingness against Aswarak ripened: and the Vizier beholding the bride he had lost Queen of Mashalleed his master, it was as she conceived, that his heart was eaten with jealousy and fierce rage. Bhanavar as she came across him spake mildly, and gave him gentle looks, sad glances, suffering not his fires to abate, the torment of his love to cool. Each night he awoke with a serpent in his bed; the beam of her beauty was as the constant bite of a serpent, poisoning his blood, and he deluded his soul with the belief that Bhanavar loved him notwithstanding, and that she was seized forcibly from him by the King. “Otherwise,” thought he, “why loosed she not a serpent from the host to strangle me even as yonder black slaves?” Bhanavar knew the mind of Aswarak, and considered, “The King is cunning and weak, a slave to his desires, and in the bondage of the jewel, my beauty. The Vizier is unscrupulous, a hatcher of intrigues; but that he dreads me and hopes a favour of me, he would have wrought against me ere now. ’Tis then a combat ’twixt him and me. O my soul, art thou dreaming of a fair youth that was the bliss of thy bosom night and day, night and day? The Vizier shall die!”