One Thousand and One Nights Read Free Page B

if what you had suffered was but a minor injury, when it takes centuries to recover from cuckoldry,” said Shahrayar.
    “My King, I fear that if I tell you, you will suffer greater devastation and desolation than my own,” said Shahzaman.
    Shahrayar pressed him. “How, brother, could that be? Now I must insist that I hear your explanation.”
    “I witnessed your misfortune with my own eyes,” said Shahzaman. “The day that you set out on the hunt, I looked out upon the garden to enjoy the beauty of your estate and saw the palace gate open and your wife emerge with her twenty slave girls in train, ten white and ten black. As I watched, they disrobed, and the ten black girls were men in disguise, and as I stood hidden they fell upon one another and began to make love. Your wifecalled out the name ‘Mas’ud’ and another black slave appeared, jumping over the wall, and leaping upon your wife, in your own garden …”
    “In my garden?”
    “Yes, beneath my window. They must all have thought that I had accompanied you on the hunt. And so, as I watched your own misfortune unfold, I told myself that my brother was King of all the world, and yet this had happened, even to him. What he had suffered was far worse. I had been betrayed by my wife, but I alone knew of the indignity I had suffered, whereas my poor brother was betrayed even by his concubines, in broad daylight and in his own palace garden. And so in no time at all I began to eat and drink again and forgot my strife and sorrow.”
    Shahrayar was overcome by fury and there was murder in his eyes. “I will not, I cannot, believe one word of what I have heard, until I have seen it with my own eyes,” he stammered.
    When Shahzaman saw his brother’s rage, he said, “If you cannot believe in your misfortune unless you have witnessed it for yourself, why don’t you announce that you intend to go on another hunting trip tomorrow? Then you and I will sneak back to my quarters in disguise under the cover of darkness and you shall see for yourself everything that I have described.”
    Shahrayar agreed with his brother’s plan and ordered his Vizier to arrange a hunting trip with his brother. The news of the journey spread through the palace like wildfire and with the beat of tambourines, the blowing of trumpets and great commotion, the hunting party departed. As they’d planned, the two Kings snuck back, disguised, to Shahzaman’s quarters.
    Shahrayar tossed and turned on his bed all night long, as if it was made of burning coals. When day broke, he lay listening to the chirrup of birds and water tumbling from the fountain,which he heard each morning, and couldn’t help thinking that his brother had hallucinated and imagined it all. But then he heard the gate open, and he hurried with Shahzaman to the window.
    Shahrayar’s wife appeared, followed by twenty slave girls, ten white, ten black, exactly as Shahzaman had described. The entourage strolled in the garden under the trees and stopped beneath Shahzaman’s window. As the two Kings watched, they undressed, revealing the ten black slave men, who immediately paired up with the girls, embracing and kissing them. Shahrayar’s wife again called “Mas’ud, Mas’ud!” and a solid, heavily built black slave jumped from the tree to the ground, saying, “What do you want, you slut? Allow me to present Sa’ad al-Din Mas’ud.” He pointed to his prick and Shahrayar’s wife giggled and fell on her back and opened her thighs, ready for him.
    As Mas’ud began to make love to her, the ten black slaves mounted the girls.
    Shahrayar almost cried out, like a lion fatally wounded by an arrow to the eye. Quick as a bolt of lightning, he reached the garden with his sword in his hand, thirsty for revenge. All of a sudden the moans of pleasure and ecstasy in the garden became screams and yelps, piercing cries and wails, as Shahrayar cut off his wife’s and Mas’ud’s head, in one stroke. And then, like an insane