The One Before Scheherazade

She thinks people are going to remember her sister for a long time. The One Who Ran. The Shepherd Girl with the Pink Saree. She will not be able to remember her sister. She’ll be one of the other ones, because she is not quick-witted or as resolved. She won’t be remembered at all. She’ll become another forgotten fragment in the sordid story of the Night Queens.

She is very far from home. So far that she can’t even see the road leading to her village from her very favourable vantage point. The guards had given her a tour of the palace before bringing her to her room, leaving her to stare out of the windows while a servant was fetched to draw her a bath. It is, she thinks, likely purposeful that the king chooses to show a girl her new earthly home as Queen before she is taken from it. It is in line with his established ill humour.


She has a little balcony. She had never before been in a dwelling made of more than dirt, with more than one room. She is now as high as three or four of the dwellings back home stacked on top of each other. In the distance, past the palace wall, she can see the roofs of houses and other buildings and market stalls. Her immediate view is a rose garden, with the more mature growth right under her balcony. Younger and younger bushes stretch out, almost yet reaching the palace wall.


Right before the wall there is a little tower made of fresh white stone that rises far above the wall and that can be seen by all of the city. It is where the False Queen lies. His Highness wanted to deny his first queen a dignified death. He denied her a proper cremation and instead borrowed from the Parsis’ death ritual. She was sequestered while, day and night, a beautiful white tower was built at the edge of the grounds. Once it was done, she was slain, and her body and head were taken up the stairs and laid next to each other. Her beloved animals—her fine white tiger, her peacocks, her doves, her chital deer, her trained langurs and macaques, her svelte tamed foxes, her civets, her shy wood squirrels, and her loyal Pariah dog—were efficiently slaughtered and placed around her. He spared nothing that she loved. The vultures came, enticed not only by her body but by those of her animals as well. It was said that His Highness was so filled with spite that at night he had, on occasion, made his way up the tower stairs on his own to witness her exile from heaven.


This was the story so told over and over, from mouth to mouth, no detail spared or embellished, disseminated to every subject in the kingdom.


He has shown the Night Queens more courtesy and mercy. After they drink the poisoned sura in the morning, their bodies are burned in the Way. The rose garden is for them—their ashes are mixed in with the soil before the next wedding is even finished.


Once the new Night Queen is decided upon, the royal guard goes to collect her immediately. In the spring, a girl who was chosen was smuggled to one of the outlying pastoral villages before the royal guard came for her. His Highness had her whole family killed, then tore her out of the upturned cauldron she was hiding in, married her on the spot, killed her, and then killed most of the village for hiding her.


Since that girl, the palace guards are sent for the next Queen each morning. She is slain by breakfast the next day, and her smoke rises before the new Night Queen to-be steps inside the palace gates.


There are only two girls of note so far, of many. The Girl Who Hid. The Girl Who Threw Herself in the River. That was her sister. There are no other girls of note. From the moment the guards stood at the door, her sister had made a run for the brisk, cold mountain river they knew so well. By the time she was at the edge, she’d already managed to tie her saree around a large rock. Those who were there at the edge of the river—her cousins cleaning their clothes and her uncle watering his goats—saw her cradle the rock to her breast. They knew it was her by her unmistakable pink saree.

They said that she never looked at them and did not even turn as the guards came up behind her. Before they were arm’s length, she was gone in a graceless dive into the fast-running water. The river wrapped her in his embrace, deep, down below his waters, to his very chest. His Highness was sufficiently furious that he ordered the guards to comb the river for her, but the gods, bless them, saw it fit to deny the king that victory. Such a quick wit she was, her sister. In seconds, she chose to run from her fate in a way that would deprive the king of a body to revenge upon. Though, if she thinks on it, she is the body the king will revenge upon.


She has not seen seen the king yet. She won’t see him until their wedding, and she’ll be kept here until then. She has a bare but magnificent room. The carpets covering the floor are so red and so fine. The sun peeks in through wood lattices, illuminating the large copper bath in the room and the little bits of iridescent stones inlaid across the dressing table. The finest dress she’s ever seen hangs in the middle of the room, headless, like a spectre of the False Queen. She is still wearing her dirt-coloured dhoti. The dress before her is a vision of red and gold, the embroidery like little stories along its edges. She is afraid to touch it. She has never been allowed to touch anything so rich. And yet she’ll be wearing it soon enough.


BIANCA SAYAN lives and works in Toronto, a city that is both difficult and easy to love. She is currently happily working in civic tech. When not at work, she is trying to learn and do everything. Bianca thinks about mind uploading a lot because it would allow her to pick up new hobbies over the next couple of centuries.