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japhyjunket |
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THE
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7.29.2004
The Princess and the Thief
a fairytale
Once upon a time, in the great city of Carthage, long before it's fields were made barren by the Romans to the North and long before Aenius stole Dido's heart there lived a princess whose name time forgot. Like all princesses, she lived in a great castle, filed with revelry and pomp. Her life was an exciting one and she had been taught by the best scholars from Arabia.
One night there was a festival to celebrate the summer harvest. There were spiced meats and delicate candies that smelled of jasmine and looked like peacocks. The princess danced with many suitors that night, but they all bored her. As she was about to retire to bed, a man approached her, covered in that gilt fabric for which the Persians are so well known. He asked her to dance, and not wanting to insult the man, who was clearly royalty, she obliged. As they danced, he talked of marvelous things- palaces that he had dreamed of in the night, scrolls that he had read about the nature of the earth, why the grass turned brown in certain areas and why it thrived in others. The princess was fascinated and amazed that she had finally found someone to talk to. She asked the man to come with her to a private courtyard.
By a fountain, she declared her love for him, for she was brought up not to be shy and to know what she wants when she sees it. The man looked into her eyes deeply and said, "Princess, I love you too, but I am no man of noble birth. I am a thief and I came her tonight to rob your father of his finest silver. I am a man who has slept with harem girls and left them by the side of the road. I deserted my people's army and I have swam for weeks on end in the bottomless ocean of opium dreams. What I did in those weeks, I do not remember, but this scar on my shoulder was there when I awoke. If your father's guards were to find me I would be sent to prison for life (for there was no death penalty in those days)."
The princess splashed the water of the fountain with her hands for a moment. "I don't care", she said. "I love you and there is nothing I can do about that." "Then you must come with me, leave your home and live with me in the desert as a thief as well." The princesses face turned a shade of ash. "I love you, but if I were to come to the desert and live with you as a thief and we were to fall out of love, I would blame you and return home and send my father's armies to track you down and return your head to me."
The thief rose and nodded his head in understanding. "Then you do not love me and I will go." The princess grabbed him tight and said, "No. Allow me to become a thief myself and we shall meet again in the desert and live as bandits both. As a princess, you and I can never be together, so I shall become a thief."
"I will not wait for you", said the thief, and he left, taking the princesses father's silver with him. The next morning, the princess arose to a commotion in the main hall. The silver had been discovered to be missing and the king was furious. It was his father's and his father's before him and meant more to him then he could say. The princess walked up to her father. "I have taken the silver and hid it, father. By doing this, I have declared I am no longer your daughter, as the law dictates. You must banish me." The king looked into his daughters eyes. "I do not know why you would say such a thing to me, but there is no law that will make you not my daughter, and I will not banish you." The princess narrowed her eyes. "Whether you banish me or not, I am leaving", and with that she left.
The next months were hard for the princess. Her first instinct was to run to the thief she so loved, but what good would a princess be in the desert? The thief would surely grow tired of her, so she set out to learn all the tricks of the rogue, stealing from her father's friends and skillfully evading the police. She became adept at knowing how to brush up against a merchant in such a way that they would not notice that she had nabbed their coin purse. She learned how to use a scimitar, a weapon that she had an uncanny natural skill with.
Finally, she was ready. She set off for the desert and inquired with bedoins where she could find the thief. She tracked him down to a camp of outlaws living in a harsh, sun drenched valley. Her heart pounded as she approached the thieves tent. She flung open the canvas flaps and walked into the dimly lit hovel. There she saw her thief, as handsome and dark as ever, and lying beside him naked, a beautiful girl lost in the bliss of opium. The thief looked up at the princess, though nobody would ever guess that was what she was, seeing as how she was covered in dust and wearing clothes made of padded leather. " I had heard news that you were coming here and last week, I married this girl here. I told you I would not wait."
The princess was crestfallen. "Do you love her?", she asked. "She fulfills my personal needs", he said with a wicked smile. "You are doing this deliberately", accused the princess. The prince twirled his beard around his little finger. "Perhaps I am, but it is you, who claimed that you needed to become a thief before you could love me. Had you truly loved me, you would have left that night we stood in the courtyard and I watch you splash the water of the fountain." The princess drew her scimitar. "I do love you, I love you with all my heart, I have given up everything to come to your side." The thief laughed. "No, you gave up everything to be a thief! Be gone." The princess stood her ground. "I will not leave", she growled. "Suit yourself, then. You may sleep on that bale of hay over there, for I don't wish to see your dead body outside my tent."
The following weeks were agony for the princess. Night after night, she watched the thief make love to his beautiful, but boring wife. The thief, whose heart was not as cold as he had made it seem to be, watched the princess suffer and felt pity, but also pleasure. For months, all he could think about was her. Never in his life had he felt so complete then that night he had spent with her. He had sat alone in his tent thinking of her hands and her soft white bosom and it had driven him mad. The girl he married was beautiful to be sure, but she was not the princess.
At night, the thief slipped away from his wife and came to the princess and talked with her about all the things they loved together- the reason the pickerill bird sings only when it is to rain, the designs for a large tomb being built in Egypt that would reach to the heavens and beyond, the way tangerines tasted after being plucked. The princess was no fool. She knew that the thief still loved her, but that his pride had been hurt and so could not show what he felt. She loved him so much, though, that she did not care, and she made herself weaker and weaker so that he could feel strong again. The thief seized on this weakness and became more and more demanding. Soon, she was living beside the camels and and washing his clothes.
One night she came to him, desperate and crying, all dignity just a distant memory. "Why do you not love me?" she begged. "I have shown you how much I love you. I see now tat you are a man who wants a wife who is a slave, who will be at his beck and call and never question him. While I see that if we were equals, we would be so much stronger, I will be this for you. Why do you not love me?"
The thief was moved. "I did not fall in love with a washerwoman and a beggar. I fell in love with a princess." He left her and returned to his tent and his wife, who waited inside. That night, as the thief fucked his wife, he felt his mind wandering to the princess, though he tried with all his might to shut her out."
The thief arose in the morning and saw that the princess had failed to make him breakfast. He was furious. The laundry lay in a giant heap on the dusty ground and the camels had been loosened from their posts. The entire day, the thief could find no sign of the princess and he assumed that she had finally gotten fed up and left.
As the sun set that evening, the thief wandered up to one of the high dunes to see if he could make out any tracks heading away from camp. He felt a hand on his shoulder. He tensed. Only a master of true stealth and cunning could creep up on the thief without his noticing, and any man with those skills would surely be seeking some kind of violence or death, for the thief was a prominent thief, but a hated one as well. He looked up. In front of him, wearing the very gown she wore the night she met him, stood the princess. "You are right. I am no longer a princess and i will never truly be a thief and to think that I could ever be a washerwoman was foolishness on both our parts. What I am is the woman who loves you."
The thief's eyes melted and he reached up for the princess, taking her in his hands and pressing his lips tightly against hers. There clothes quickly fell from them and they made passionate love for hours by the desert moonlight, unaware of the cold, the sand, of anything but each other. When they had finished, many hours later, they lay together, staring up at the stars in the sky. The princess was weeping silently. "Why do you cry, my love?", asked the thief.
"All this time since I came to you, I had been in agony. Watching you with your wife, who I know is not your true love has been torture, and i know that you meant to torture me and I accepted it willingly."
"That is all passed", whispered the thief.
The princess ignored him. "Why I endured your abuse was simple. Though you hurt me again and again, I knew it was not what lay in your heart. That underneath, you were a good man." The princess moved a hand away from the thief.
"But tonight, you have betrayed your wife, who you made the most solemn vow any man can make with. You word means nothing. Marrying a woman you don't love is unfortunate, betraying her is unforgivable." With that, she drew with her free hand from out the sand her scimitar and plunged it deep with in the thief's chest, killing him as he gazed up at her. She looked down on her love's lifeless body. "I shall return home and take my rightful place as queen and my first edict shall be, all thieves who are caught shall be put to death."
This is why, in our land to this day, we see it fit to kill a man who has done nothing worse than taking another man's lifeless property.
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