Scheherazade’s Confession
I wish I could tell you I had it all planned from the beginning. Daughter of the woman-hating King’s vizier goes and convinces her father to let her be the King’s next bride. Daddy tries to dissuade her because the King marries his women in the evening and has them beheaded in the morning. But clever and lovely, witty and quick, sweet Sherry charms the King’s candlestick. You know how it went: for a thousand nights and one night, I told him tales of adventure and romance, magic and wealth beyond measure — but always keeping just enough hidden that he’d be curious enough to let me live till tomorrow night.
They always like you more when you hold back a little.
And after a thousand and one nights of this — which is almost three full years of not knowing you’ll live to see tomorrow, mind you — he graciously decided once and for all that I could keep my head on my shoulders, thank you very much. And mind you I gave him three bouncing babies in that time, so I can only imagine what kind of bad nerves they got from all the stress I was under…
Because like I said, I wish I could tell you I had it all planned from the beginning. Wish I could tell you good ol’ Sherry’s a clear-headed, forward thinking girl who had a grand master plan and knew all the tales I’d whisper in King Shahryar’s ear right from the start. And of course when you read the book that’s exactly the story I tell: Queen Scheherazade bravely embarks to save all the young virgins of the city — and mind, with one of ’em going every day to the the headsman, virginity was becoming an even rarer commodity than it normally is — by capturing the King’s imagination with her silver-tongued tales.
And I won’t lie, I had sort of a vague idea that that’s how I’d like things to work out, but if I had it all to do over I’d just as soon have been married to the Caliph of the next kingdom over because fuck this noise. Did my nerves no good whatsoever having to come up with a nice cliffhanger for His Majesty every night for three years, let me tell you. Anxious, it was! And I was a young girl. Up till then the worst I’d had to be worried about was my tutor finding out I’d skipped out on my drills conjugating regular verbs in Farsi…
Then all of a sudden it’s, “You get a blade in the neck in the morning if you’re boring!”
So what do you do, I mean I did it one day at a time, only way I could do. Spend the night telling my tales and spending the day trying to figure out what in the name of all that’s holy I’m gonna tell him the next night! Because I sure as heck didn’t know. I mean, sometimes I’d be hit with a flash of inspiration that would give me a story I could stretch out for a long, long time — two weeks even, or maybe a whole month! Those are the big, famous stories everybody knows these days, your Aladdins or your Sinbad the Sailors.
But then there were days where nothing was coming to me, so I’d have to go into the King’s chambers, sweating and shaking, armed with nothing but a story about how one time a merchant farted in the bazaar of Baghdad. And let me tell you, those were the days I’d go in thinking, “I’m gonna die tomorrow.”
Bad for the nerves, bad for the nerves.
But then there was something horribly thrilling about it, living that way. Looking violent death in the eye every night and watching him fall in love with me. Sometimes I’d think he wasn’t so bad, really.
So maybe that’s why I did it, really, why I got daddy to let me marry him. Why we had that lovely marriage ceremony, with daddy fumbling over his words and trembling but doing his best to act oh-so-very official, with my sister Dunyazad alternating between giving me anxious looks and smug smiles about the clever plan we shared, just the two of us, and with Shahryar, curious and ironically amused, mostly just wondering what kind of freak in the sheets this woman who volunteered for the chopping block might turn out to be…
But that’s our little secret, sweeties!
So really, I wish I could tell you I had it all planned from the beginning. But that’d be too much of a lie for even a tale-teller like me to say with a straight face!