The Princess's Angry Vein
Nights 719-738
A very familiar story, we have another prince who needs to win over a princess by sneaking into a garden. We’ve seen these since Taj al-Muluk in Night 107, maybe earlier. This one even reuses a very specific plot element: the prince learns the princess’s dream and paints the scene from her dream in the garden in such a way that it restores her faith in men (I believe it was the exact same dream in the earlier version as well).
Still, I didn’t mind going back through such familiar material. I’ve learned to appreciate the details. For example, when the princess rejects the prince’s letters, she is described very precisely: she “jumped to her feet and, wearing golden slippers studded with pearls and gems, she walked to her father’s palace with a vein standing out so angrily between her eyes that no one dared question her.” (Night 723, p. 15). It’s the vein and the slippers that make the nice touch here.
The princess here is also much nastier than other princesses. This princess is furious with her nurse when she decides that the nurse didn’t do enough to help her reject the prince: she “cursed the old woman and told the eunuchs to seize and beat here, which they did until she fainted, with blood pouring from all parts of her body. The princess then told the slave girls to remove her, and they dragged her away by the legs to the furthest part of the palace.” (Night 724, p. 19). Later, we meet “a eunuch whose molar teeth the princess had had pulled out for some reason.” (Night 734, p. 43). We are given some plausible reasons later on, but nothing definitive.
The story ends with the prince and princess married. Before the prince wins her over, his father the king asks what he would like to do with the princess’s father’s land where he had been forced to act with such humility. The prince’s father suggests he could have the princess’s father “destroyed” and he could “ravage his lands, seize his wealth and have his women raped.” (Night 737, p. 49). Fortunately, the prince says he only wants to marry the princess. His reward is over the top, even for the descriptions of virgin princesses we’ve expected to see from the Nights: he “lay with his bride and discovered her to be an unpierced pearl and a filly that no one else had ridden, a precious jewel well-guarded and a gem that had been hidden away, a fact that he passed on to her father.” (Night 738, p. 51) Metaphor overload there. And a specific touch that he brags about it to his father.