The Shaving of Shagpat - George Meredith (bookreader TXT) 📗

art thou dreaming of a fair youth that was the bliss of thy bosom night and day, night and day? The Vizier shall die!”

One morning, and it was a year from the day she had become Queen of Mashalleed, Bhanavar sprang up quickly from the side of the King; and he was gazing on her in amazement and loathing. She flew to her chamber, chasing forth her women, and ran to a mirror. Therein she saw three lines that were on her brow, lines of age, and at the corners of her mouth and about her throat a slackness of skin, the skin no longer its soft rosy white, but withered brown as leaves of the forest. She shrieked, and fell back in a swoon of horror. When she recovered, she ran to the mirror again, and it was the same sight. And she rose from swooning a third time, and still she beheld the visage of a hag; nothing of beauty there save the hair and the brilliant eyes. Then summoned she the serpents in a circle, and the number of them was that of the days in the year: and she bared her wrist and seized one, a gray-silver with sapphire spots, and hissed at him till he hissed, and foam whitened the lips of each. Thereupon she cried:

“Treble-tongue and throat of hell,
What is come upon me, tell!”

And the Serpent replied,

“Jewel Queen! beauty’s price!
’Tis the time for sacrifice!”

She grasped another, one of leaden colour, with yellow bars and silver crescents, and cried:

“Treble-tongue and throat of fire,
Name the creature ye require!”

And the Serpent replied:

“Ruby lip! poison tooth!
We are hungry for a youth.”

She grasped another that writhed in her fingers like liquid emerald, and cried:

“Treble-tongue and throat of glue!
How to know the one that’s due?”

And the Serpent replied:

“Breast of snow! baleful bliss!
He that wooing wins a kiss.”

She clutched one at her elbow, a hairy serpent with yellow languid eyes in flame-sockets and livid-lustrous length⁠—a disease to look on, and cried:

“Treble-tongue and throat of gall!
There’s a youth beneath the pall.”

And the Serpent replied:

“Brilliant eye! bloody tear!
He has fed us for a year.”

She squeezed that hairy serpent till her finger-points whitened in his neck, and he dropped lifelessly, crying:

“Treble-tongues and things of mud!
Sprang my beauty from his blood?”

And the Serpents rose erect, replying:

“Yearly one of us must die;
Yearly for us dieth one;
Else the Queen an ugly lie
Lives till all our lives be done!”

Bhanavar stood up, and hurried them to Karatis. When she was alone she fell toward the floor, repeating, “ ’Tis the Curse!” Suddenly she thought, “Yet another year my beauty shall be nourished by my vengeance, yet another! And, O Vizier, the kiss shall be thine, the kiss of doom; for I have doomed thee ere now. Thou, thou shalt restore me to my beauty: that only love I now my Prince is lost.”

So she veiled her face in the close veil of the virtuous, and despatched Ukleet, whom she exalted in the palace of the King, to the Vizier; and Ukleet stood before Aswarak, and said, “O Vizier, my mistress truly is longing for you with excessive longing, and in what she now undergoeth is forgotten an evil done by you to her; and she bids you come and concert with her a scheme deliberately as to the getting rid of this tyrant who is an affliction to her, and her life is lessened by him.”

The Vizier was deceived by his passion, and he chuckled and exclaimed, “My very dream! and to mind me of her, then, she sent the serpents! Wullahy, in the matter of women, wait! For, as the poet declareth:

“ ‘ ’Tis vanity our souls for such to vex;
Patience is a harvest of the sex.’

“And they fret themselves not overlong for husbands that are gone, these young beauties. I know them. Tell the Queen of Serpents I am even hers to the sole of my foot.”

So it was understood between them that the Vizier should be at the gate of the garden of the palace that night, disguised; and the Vizier rejoiced, thinking, “If she have not the Jewel with her, it shall go ill with me, and I foiled this time!”

Ukleet then proceeded to the house of Boolp the broker, fronting the gutted ruins where Bhanavar had been happy in her innocence with Almeryl, the mountain prince, her husband. Boolp was engaged haggling with a slave-merchant the price of a fair slave, and Ukleet said to him, “Yet awhile delay, O Boolp, ere you expend a fraction of treasure, for truly a mighty bargain of jewels is waiting for you at the palace of my lord the King. So come thither with all your moneybags of gold and silver, and your securities, and your bonds and dues in writing, for ’tis the favourite of the King requireth you to complete a bargain with her, and the price of her jewels is the price of a kingdom.”

Said Boolp, “Hearing is compliance in such a case.”

And Ukleet continued, “What a fortune is yours, O Boolp! truly the tide of fortune setteth into your lap. Fail not, wullahy! to come with all you possess, or if you have not enough when she requireth it to complete the bargain, my mistress will break off with you. I know not if she intend even other game for you, O lucky one!”

Boolp hitched his girdle and shrugged, saying, “ ’Tis she will fail, I wot⁠—she, in having therewith to complete the bargain between us. Wa! wa!⁠—there! I’ve done this before now. Wullahy! if she have not enough of her rubies and pearls to outweigh me and my gold, go to, Boolp will school her! What says the poet?⁠—

“ ‘Earth and ocean search, East, West, and North, to the South,
None will match the bright rubies and pearls of her mouth.’

“Aha! what? O Ukleet! And he says:

“ ‘The lovely ones a bargain made
With me, and I