Okay, so let's do a quick recap. King kills his cheating wife, marries a new girl every day and kills her the next morning to make sure she doesn't cheat on him, Vizier's daughter comes up with a plan to stop him and starts telling him stories. Got it? Good.
So, when we last left, the King and Scheherazade had just consummated their marriage (with her sister in attendance, lest we forget), and Dunzayad asked Scheherazade to start the story mill. The King agrees, and off we go. he first story is:
The Tale of the Trader and the Jinni
A merchant is sitting down having his lunch, and throws away the date pits when he's done. An Ifrit (a type of jinni) shows up and says that by throwing the date pits, the merchant killed the ifrit's son. Man, that's one weak jinni. Either that, or the merchant's name was Randy al-Johnson. Anyway, the ifrit is pissed and lets the trader know that he's a dead man. This doesn't sit well with the merchant, who protests that it was an accident. That doesn't work out for him, but the ifrit gives him permission to go home and clear up his debts and arrange things, and he'll return in the new year to get sliced in half. And he actually does it. He settles his affairs and heads back to the same place and waits for the ifrit to show up.
While he's waiting (and feeling pretty miserable), an old Shaykh (sheik, old man) shows up and sits with him, wanting to see what happens to him. A second shaykh shows up, then a third. The trader tells them his story, and they hang around until the ifrit shows up. They bargain with him, offering the ifrit wondrous stories in exchange for the trader's life. See, that's not really a good deal. Your kid dies (granted, he wasn't in good shape to be taken out by a date pit), and instead of slicing and dicing the guy responsible, you swap stories.
Anyway, the ifrit takes the deal, and we get our first instance of a nested story. This is a recurring theme in this collection; telling a story within a story within a story stretches things out. Anyway, we now get to read:
The First Shaykh's Story.
So, the first old man has a gazelle with him, who happens to be his own cousin (and wife; that was a thing back then). She wasn't giving him an heir, so he shacked up with a concubine (also a big thing back then) and had a son by her. When the kid was fifteen, the cousin/wife turned the concubine and the son into cows, and convinced her husband that the woman was dead and the kid had run away. She also gets him to sacrifice the older cow, and then demands he sacrifice the calf as well. He refuses, and she threatens him with divorce and such. So, he takes the knife to the calf's throat--
And Scheherazade stops there. Right in the middle of the nested story. Well, that's how she stayed alive, right? Anyway we segue right into the second Night, where the old man with the gazelle tells how his herdsman's daughter had some magic in her and saw that the calf was really his son. So, the old man gets her to change the calf back to a kid. She agrees, on condition that she gets to marry the kid and thus inherit the old man's possessions, and that she can bewitch the cousin/wife as well. It's all good by him, and the ifrit is impressed enough by the story so he'll only kill two-thirds of the trader. Yes, his life is still in danger, but we'll get to that.
The second old man says that his story is even better, and thus we get:
The Second Shaykh's Story.
He's got a couple of dogs with him, who are also his own brothers. He was a successful and hard-working merchant, while they were...not. They squandered their inheritance, then asked the older brother to help them out. He shared what he had with them, and they blew that, too, mostly on traveling abroad while big brother kept on working and making more money. Finally they convince him to join them on their excursions, since they've got nothing left again. They meet a rag-infested maiden who convinces the older brother to marry her. He starts paying more attention to her than his brothers, which makes them all jealous, so they throw their meal ticket and his new wife off the boat and into the ocean.
Well, it turns out that he married an ifrit of his own, and she rescues him and lets him know that she's going to do bad things to his treacherous brothers. He convinces her not to kill them, so she brings him back home, where two dogs are waiting for him. She lets him know who they really are, and that they'll be like that for a decade to teach them not to throw jinnis into the ocean. That was almost ten years ago, so he's on his way to break the curse. This story impresses the murderous ifrit as well, so the Trader is two-thirds saved. And to finish his succor from ifrit-related death, we get:
The Third Shaykh's Story.
This guy's got a mule, and sure enough, it's his wife. I could make a comment, but my own wife might perchance read this, and that would not end well. Anyway, the shaykh comes home after a year abroad and finds wifey in the arms of a black slave. That is a really common thread in these stories, by the way. I like how he uses weird terms to describe what they're doing, like 'playing the close-buttock game.' Yeah, that's subtle.
The wife happens to have magic as well (it seems like everyone does in old Arabia), and turns the shaykh into a dog. I can just picture the three men arguing afterwards: "Oh yeah? Well, my wife turned me into a dog, not my brothers!" Anyway, he runs out of the house and ends up at a butcher shop, hoping for a snack. He's adapting quickly to his new circumstances. When the butcher's daughter sees him, surprise! She's a witch, too, and recognizes that he's a human in dog form, and fixes him. In gratitude, he asks her to turn the tables on his wife, so she gives him a potion that will do the trick. And that ends the third shakyh's story, and the ifrit gives up his quest for vengeance on the trader. And...that's the end of the second night.
That's not much of a cliffhanger, really. She should have stopped it just before the jinni says he'll let the guy live. I mean, it's not like it was in much doubt, but still. The King could have just said, 'alright, good story, now report to the headsman tomorrow morning at nine o'clock sharp.' But no, she starts the third night and wraps up the story in three sentences. Then she immediately starts another story:
The Fisherman and the Jinni.
I should mention that I'm on night twelve now, and this story isn't done yet. But there are some more nesting stories within it, which is why it's taking so long. I'm actually reading one Night per night, and I've stuck to it so far.
Anyway, this Fisherman goes down to the ocean four times a day, every day, to draw out his catch. Today he tries three times and gets nothing but garbage (no tires or rubber boots, though). Actually, he first gets a dead mule (ew), then a pitcher of sand and mud, and finally a net full of potsherds and broken glass. He keeps reciting despairing poetry after each attempt, too. It's really bad stuff, but Burton keeps it coming.
So, on the fourth attempt at the net, he can't even pull it out of the water. So, after reciting some more lines, he dives in and pulls out a big copper jar shaped like a cucumber. Now, everyone knows what happens when you open containers in an Arabian Nights, story, right? I mean, it's right there in the story's title. Sure enough, a jinni comes out. Another Ifrit, actually. And this one's stuck in that jar a long, long time. As on, King Sulayman (aka Solomon, Son of David and King of Israel) is the guy who put him there. So, as a reward for freeing him, the ifrit is going to kill the unlucky fisherman, because he's been in there so long that he just wants to blow off some steam and get revenge for his many centuries of imprisonment. Appeals to the ifrit's common sense accomplish nothing, so the fisherman tries to the ifrit into climbing back into the jar to prove that he would actually fit in there. Seriously, Daffy Duck wouldn't have fallen for that one. But before we find out if the ifrit is more clever than a Looney Tunes character, Scheherazade calls it a night, and lives to tell another tale.
On the fourth night, we find out that yes, the ifrit is dumber than Elmer Fudd as he climbs back into the jar to prove that he fits. And the fisherman stops it right back up, and suddenly the ifrit wants to be all reasonable and humble. Too little, too late. No longer trusting the ifrit, the fisherman takes the opportunity to tell:
The Tale of the Wazir and the Sage Duban.
So, this is a tale of a far-off king who rules in what we would call the Byzantine Empire. But he got really sick, and nobody could cure his leprosy. No one, that is, until the physician Duban comes along and puts together a remedy that actually works: He puts the medicine into a hollow cricket bat (or something like that). Duban tells the king to play a game with the bat, and the medicine soaks through the bat into his skin and cures him. Well, science is weird sometimes. The cure works, and the king is suitably grateful to the sage Duban, offering him all kinds of goodies.
Well, this doesn't sit well with the king's vizier, who convinces him that Duban is a spy and an assassin who could just as easily kill him with the hollow bat concept by putting poison inside it. The king's not having any of it, and tells the vizier that he reminds the king of King Sindibad. Before we can find out who that is and what he did, Scheherazade ends her story, convincing the king to keep the stories going the next night.
And I'm going to stop there for now, because that's quite a bit of storytelling. My quick thoughts: these genies are a mixed bag at best, ranging from so-weak-that-a-date-pit-kills-them to a genie in a bottle to a gorgeous maiden who turns ungrateful brothers into dogs, and there are a lot of witches running around who can a) turn people into animals, and b) recognize when someone else has done so. In six stories, we've seen three genies and four witches. Only one case of interracial adultery, so Burton's off to a slow start. I'm sure he'll make up for it later. In fact, I already know he will. But that tale will have to wait for another night.
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