What play is this? for the thing is dead in me long since:
Will all the reviving rain
Of heaven bring me back my Prince?
But I, when I weep, when I weep,
Blood will I weep!
And when I weep,
Sons for fathers shall weep;
Mothers for sons shall weep;
Wives for husbands shall weep!
Earth shall complain of floods red and deep,
When I weep!
Upon that she ran up a secret passage to her chamber and rubbed the
Jewel, and called the serpents, to delight her soul with the sight of her
power, and rolled and sported madly among them, clutching them by the
necks till their thin little red tongues hung out, and their eyes were as
discoloured blisters of venom. Then she arose, and her arms and neck and
lips were glazed with the slime of the serpents, and she flung off her
robes to the close-fitting silken inner vest looped across her bosom with
pearls, and whirled in a mazy dance-measure among them, and sang
melancholy melodies, making them delirious, fascinating them; and they
followed her round and round, in twines and twists and curves, with
arched heads and stiffened tails; and the chamber swam like an undulating
sea of shifting sapphire lit by the moon of midnight. Not before the moon
of midnight was in the sky ceased Bhanavar sporting with the serpents,
and she sank to sleep exhausted in their midst.
Such was the occupation of the Queen of Mashalleed when he came not to
her. The women and slaves of the palace dreaded her, and the King himself
was her very slave.
Meanwhile the plot of her unforgivingness against Aswarak ripened: and
the Vizier beholding the bride he had lost Queen of Mashalleed his
master, it was as she conceived, that his heart was eaten with jealousy
and fierce rage. Bhanavar as she came across him spake mildly, and gave
him gentle looks, sad glances, suffering not his fires to abate, the
torment of his love to cool. Each night he awoke with a serpent in his
bed; the beam of her beauty was as the constant bite of a serpent,
poisoning his blood, and he deluded his soul with the belief that
Bhanavar loved him notwithstanding, and that she was seized forcibly from
him by the King. 'Otherwise,' thought he, 'why loosed she not a serpent
from the host to strangle me even as yonder black slaves?' Bhanavar knew
the mind of Aswarak, and considered, 'The King is cunning and weak, a
slave to his desires, and in the bondage of the jewel, my beauty. The
Vizier is unscrupulous, a hatcher of intrigues; but that he dreads me and
hopes a favour of me, he would have wrought against me ere now. 'Tis then
a combat 'twixt him and me. O my soul, 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 money-bags 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.'