Story Week 6: Scheherazade and the Sultan

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Listen children and I will tell you the tale of an evil Sultan, his valiant vizier, and the vizier's brave and beautiful daughters.

Once upon a time, in the Persian lands of old, there lived a Sultan who developed an unceasing hatred for all womankind. His wife had shown herself to be faithless, so the Sultan believed that a woman's beauty hid the soul of a viper. He sought to vent his fury and quench his thirst for vengeance on all the women of the land.

Every night the hateful Sultan would marry a different woman. The following morning, the villainous Sultan ordered his long suffering vizier to put that poor woman to death. The vizier was frightened by the power of the Sultan, but he could not follow an order so vile. Every day the vizier would pretend to strangle an innocent woman, then help her to escape the palace.

The compassionate vizier had two daughters, identical twins named Scheherazade and Dinarzade. These daughters who were fair of face, fierce, and fearless helped their father to hide and protect the sinless women. Some of these women escaped the malevolent Sultan carrying a seed that was planted on their wedding night. When the first of these seeds ripened into a bouncing baby boy, the vizier's daughters went to their father with a plan.

The tormented vizier did no like this plan of his daughters' making, but he eventually agreed. Scheherazade was to marry the Sultan, but she was not to die. The divine and daring Scheherazade distracted the Sultan with a series of stories while her sister poisoned his food. Finally, the land was free of the depredations of the wicked Sultan. The Sultan's previously hidden son, a chubby baby who was quick to laugh, was placed on the throne. The courageous vizier and his plucky daughters acted as regents for the cheerful cherub. They raised the boy to rule with kindness, fairness, and grace. The kingdom rejoiced.


Author's Note: In the framework story for Arabian Nights, Scheherazade spends 1,001 nights telling stories to Sultan Schahriar. As in my story, he begins marrying a new woman each night and killing her the next day after having his unfaithful wife killed. Scheherazade is the daughter of the grand vizier, the man who is forced to murder the women each day. Scheherezade convinces her father to marry her to the Sultan. Each night she begins telling her story, which is mostly a series of "nested" stories. She stops each morning, without having finished the story, and the Sultan allows her to live so that she can complete it. Over the course of the 1,001 nights, he falls in love with her and decides to not have her put to death. That story felt like it was too happy of an end for a Sultan that had killed countless women. So, I chose for Scheherazade and her sister to kill him. Also, I didn't want the women to die unnecessarily, so had the vizier and his daughters helping them to escape and hiding them. It was likely that at least one of these saved women would end up being pregnant. I thought that the birth of one of these children would provide a catalyst to the Sultan's comeuppance and an heir to replace him.


Bibliography: "Scheherezade," The Arabian Nights' Entertainments by Andrew Lang. Web Source.