This post does not exist. Because I am not on the internet.

[sophia_sol]

I disengage briefly from my thesis to bring you this message:

If the internet does not contain Kamar/Budoor/Hayat OT3 fic I will be very disappoint. I WILL BE CHECKING, INTERNETS.

Okay, back to reading the Thousand and One Nights with a ~proper academic~ brain. I wasn't here!

Comments

[seekingferret]

No idea, but I wrote Scheherazade in this year's NaNo.

The important thing I want you to know about Scheherazade at that dinner, before I launch into a more standard biographical sketch, is that she was the one who suggested the discussion topic for that night, and she who carried much of the discussion. When eating is the topic of conversation, the odds are good that she will be an instigator. She is a passionate gourmand, a dogmatic oenophile, and she really likes food, too. I've always suspected it had to do with her imprisonment to the King, but I'm an open-minded narrator and I
wouldn't want you as an open-minded reader to rule out the possibility that she formed her attachment to food at an earlier or later point in time. Food is such an important part of our lives that it's constantly having an impact on it. Who can say what will make a person a gourmand and another an indifferent eater? Perhaps it was a meal her mother made her when she was a young child that turned on that switch in her brain and made her realize that food can be an occasion instead of mere sustenance. Perhaps it wasn't until long after her
victory over the King that she had the experience that changed her. Maybe she watched the Food Network and realized that she'd been living life the wrong way all the time.

That's all I wanted to say in prologue. Now I'll go more straightforwardly in order, from beginning to end. As straightforwardly as possible, at any rate. Scheherazade was born a thousand and one times, created by a thousand and one authors. She has told a thousand and one stories a thousand and one times. She has, therefore, no clear beginning, as such. She is in some sense a quantum storyteller, of a class that the ancient world had many (Have you heard that old joke about Homer? A scholar published a book proving that Homer didn't actually write the Iliad or Odyssey. Instead, they were written by another blind bard of the same name.). Our modern world, with its misguided notions of copyright and authorial intent, has crowded out the quantum storyteller of yore. Few remain, and the few that still abide must struggle for an audience worthy of their tales.

But if we look closer at Scheherazade, of course, if we act as active observers in her world, we can collapse her quantum waveform and force her to appear at some single point that might actually be an average of many points, depending on how you interpret the Schrodinger equation. And we zero in on a single beginning for Scheherazade- the day she is married to Shahryar, the Persian King. That is not when her story begins, but it's when the storytellers usually chose to begin it, and that is close enough for most practical purposes.

Shahryar is an evil man (In her hotter moods, Scheherazade would say that `evil man' is a redundancy, and I confess I am not surprised by this rage when I consider what he did to her.). He feels such deep rage toward womankind that he forces woman after woman into a marriage that is no more than arbitrary imprisonment, then executes them after a single night of consummation.

Scheherazade is the last of the woman to meet this fate, for she is no common woman. She is a storyteller, and millenia of soothsayers warning of the power of story to master the sword have yet to make men learn just how much they have to fear from a storyteller. She tells Shahryar an open-ended story and declines to conclude it unless he stays her execution. When she lives to speak another day, she delivers the ending, then opens up another open-ended story. By kicking the deadline (literally) can down the line indefinitely, she is able to delay her doom. Night after night, stories save her life.

And in that duration, think of her life. She is Queen of the Persian empire. During the day, she is waited upon by a thousand and one servants, who provide her with every pleasure she can imagine. Sometimes she invents things just so she can ask for them, combinations of food that require servants to be dispatched to the four corners of the Earth, for a bite of food that will occupy her attention for seconds. Those seconds aren't what's important. What's important is that any night, she may fail to engage the King her husband with the night's story and he will fail to grant her a stay of execution. That omnipresent threat lies like a Sword above her head. So she is determined to seek not merely pleasure, but memorable pleasure. Pleasures that she will be able to carry proudly into death, should it come to seek her any any moment. When the executioner's sword stands inches from her neck, she wants to recall the flavor of lion meat on her tongue, or the carefree joy of leaping from a castle wall onto a thousand and one pillows waiting to catch her. Or the salty and smoky taste of camel jerky from the nomadic caravan she visits in man's garb. During the days she courts a thousand and one dangers that could kill her in an instant, because whether she likes it or not she'll be facing the same kinds of dangers at nighttime. It is a life that would give a heart attack to the most insensitive of thrill-seekers.

But the important thing is that she survives it. She survives danger after danger until she becomes bored with the idea of danger, even as she falls in love with it again and again. Her husband's threat becomes an indistinguishable part of the danger, and she is both in love with and bored of his threat as she goes through a thousand and one nights of open-ended stories and increasingly tender sexual consummation. She falls in love with her executioner as he falls in love with her, and when she runs out of stories, the story isn't over. Except that that's where the storytellers usually end the story, because they lack the imagination to tell what comes after happily ever after. (Which is a compelling proof that Homer didn't write the Odyssey, isn't it? What kind of insane writer tells you that after the absurd success of the Trojan Horse comes Circe and Scylla and Sirens?)

I'm not sure if I'm an incompetent storyteller or just too fatally honest, because I'm about to tell you what comes next. History turns a blind eye to Scheherazade after her thousand and one tales and the collapsed superposition dissolves away. She becomes the quantum storyteller again, lives a thousand and one lives in the voice of a thousand and one storytellers, but none of them truly know her. They don't speak to her but instead they speak to each other. Burton and Rimsky-Korsakov and Galland and countless others tell her story as a way of exchanging ideas between authors and slowly Scheherazade is crowded out of her own story.



(It goes on from there, but it's long, hell, it's novel-length, and this is the part that's all about Scheherazade)

[sophia_sol]

Ooh, I really like that! It's very compelling.

[seekingferret]

Thank you. I'm now reconsidering whether I want to drawerfic the thing or attempt another pass at it. It is a very broken piece of writing, but I did a surprising number of things right, I find on rereading it.