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letter; Shahryar sent for us; still shaken, I sat at the bed-foot while he and Sherry did a combination from the latter pages of Ananga Ranga and Kama Sutra and she finished the tale of Ma’aruf the Cobbler. Then she rose as the Genie had instructed her, kissed ground, begged boon; I fetched in Ali Shar, walking by himself now, Gharib crawling, Jamilah-Melissa suckling at my milkless breast as if it were her mother’s. Sherry made her plea; Shahryar wept, hugged the children, told her he’d pardoned her long since, having found in her the refutation of all his disenchantment, and praised Allah for having appointed her the savior of her sex. Then he sent for Daddy to draft the marriage contract and for you to hear the news of Scheherazade and her stories; when you proposed to marry me, Sherry countered with Part Two of our plan (of whose Part Three I was still ignorant): that in order for her and me never to be parted, you must abandon Samarkand and live with us, sharing your brother’s throne and passing yours to our father in reparation for his three-years’ anguish. I found you handsomer than Shahryar and more terrifying, and begged my sister to say what lay ahead for me.
    “‘Why, a fine wedding-feast, silly Doony!’ she teased. ‘The eunuchs will perfume our Hammam-bath with rose-and willow-flower water, musk-pods, eagle-wood, ambergris; we’ll wash and clip our hair; they’ll dress me like the sun and you the moon, and we’ll dance in seven different dresses to excite our bridegrooms. By the end of the wine and music they’ll scarcely be able to contain their desire; each of us will kiss the other three good night, twelve good-nights in all, and our husbands will hurry us off toward our separate bridal-chambers—’
    “ ‘O Sherry!’
    “ ‘ Then ,’ she went on, no tease in her voice now, ‘on the very threshold of their pleasures I’ll stop, kiss ground, and say to my lord and master: “O King of the Sun and the Moon and the Rising Tide, et cetera, thanks for marrying me at last after sleeping with me for a thousand and one nights and begetting three children on me and listening while I amused you with proverbs and parables, chronicles and pleasantries, quips and jests and admonitory instances, stories and anecdotes, dialogues and histories and elegies and satires and Allah alone knows what else! Thanks too for giving my precious little sister to your brute of a brother, and the kingdom of Samarkand to our father, whose own gratitude we’ll hope may partially restore his sanity! And thanks above all for kindly ceasing to rape and murder a virgin every night, and for persuading Shah Zaman to cease also! I have no right to ask anything further of you at all, but should be overjoyed to serve your sexual and other interests humbly until the day you tire of me and either have me killed or put me by for other, younger women—and indeed I am prepared to do just that, as Dunyazade surely is also for Shah Zaman. Yet in view of your boundless magnanimity Q.E.D., I make bold to ask a final favor.” If we’re lucky, Shahryar will be so mad to get me into bed that he’ll say “Name it”—whereupon I point out to him that a happy occasion is about to bring to pass what a thousand ill ones didn’t, your separation from me till morning. Knowing my husband, I expect he’ll propose a little something à quatre, at which I’ll blush appropriately and declare that I’m resigned after all to the notion of losing you for a few hours, and wish merely thirty minutes or so of private conversation with you before you and your bridegroom retire, to tell you a few things that every virgin bride should know. “What on earth is there in that line that she hasn’t seen us do a hundred times?” your delicate brother-in-law will inquire. “Seeing isn’t doing,” I’ll reply: “I myself have pretty intensive sexual experience, for example, but of one man only, and would be shy as any virgin with another than