There was a king in old Persia named Shahryar. He ruled for a long time and people called him a good king. Then one day he was betrayed by the person closest to him.
This book does not dwell on that day. What matters is what the king did afterwards. He decided to stop trusting people altogether.
The King Who Gives No Second Day
He began taking a new bride every day. And he gave none of them a second day. Rather than trust and be betrayed again, he would allow no time in which to trust.
One by one the houses of that country lost their daughters. People hated it and said nothing. Crossing the king meant dying. Families started leaving the city with their daughters.
The man who carried out this order was the vizier. Finding the brides was his work. He became the man who knocked on other people’s doors every morning. He had two daughters of his own.
The Vizier’s Elder Daughter
The elder was called Shahrazad. She had read a great deal. She knew the histories of kings and the poems of the old poets by heart, and tales from many countries.
One day she asks her father to send her to the king. He is appalled and tries to talk her out of it. He tells her an old tale about an ox and a donkey. Its point is that trouble comes to whoever will not stay quiet.
Shahrazad does not give way. If she succeeds, she says, the daughters of the city live, and if she fails she is where they all are anyway. In the end her father takes her to the king. The man who knocked on every other door ends by knocking on his own.
Taking Her Sister
Before she goes, Shahrazad calls her sister Dunyazad. And she asks her for one thing. Late in the night, she says, ask me for a story.
This is the design of the whole book. Shahrazad never offers the king a story. She makes it a place where her sister asks and she answers, rather than one where the king wants and she supplies. She is not going to be the one making a request.
That night Dunyazad asks her sister for a story. Shahrazad asks the king’s leave and begins. It is about a merchant who eats dates on the road and throws the stones away.
Stopping in the Middle
Dawn comes at the point where the story is at its worst. Shahrazad closes her mouth. That is as far as it goes tonight, she says.
The king wants the rest of it. He decides to put the matter off, just for today. That day buys the next, and the next buys another. A thousand nights are strung together that way.
What she has is not a sword or an army. It is one position: the person who knows the next story. The other forty-four chapters of this series are the tales that came out of that position.
Today, The Power to Stop Someone
The power to change a person and the power to stop a person are not the same. What Shahrazad did on that first night was not to persuade the king. She stopped him, for one day.
We usually count only the first kind as power. If words do not change somebody, we think nothing was done. But changing anyone mostly begins after they have stopped. Nothing reaches a person who has not stopped.
The frightening part of this story is somewhere else. She has to pick the thread up again every single night. Stopping him once does not settle it. What starts here is the story of a person who did that a thousand times.
In the next chapter we find out where that merchant’s date stone landed. It was somewhere nobody could see.