On an island country called Khalidan there was a prince, Qamar al-Zaman. His father raised the question of marriage with him more than once. Each time the prince said he had no wish for it.
The king would not give way, and neither would the prince. After some years of the same words, the king shut his son in an old tower. He was to stay there until he changed his mind.
Around the same time the same thing was happening very far away. A princess called Budur was shut in a room for refusing to marry. Neither knew of the other, or even the name of the other’s country.
The Jinniya Out of the Well
In the yard of that tower there was an old well. A jinniya named Maimuna lived down in it. Coming out at night, Maimuna saw the sleeping prince. She had never seen anyone made like that, she thought.
Up in the air, Maimuna met a jinni called Dahnash. Dahnash had just that moment flown in from a country very far off. There was nobody as beautiful as the princess he had seen there, he said. Maimuna brought up the one she had just been looking at.
The two of them began arguing on the spot. Since talk was not going to end it, they settled on a method. Dahnash would fetch that princess and lay her beside the prince.
Two Sleepers Side by Side
That night Budur was carried out of her own room asleep. The two of them were laid out side by side in the same place. The jinn looked a long while and still could not settle it. Another jinni, passing, offered a way.
Wake them one at a time, he said. Whichever of them is more shaken by the sight of the other is the lesser. The two jinn agreed to do it that way.
Qamar al-Zaman woke first. Looking at the person lying beside him, he was taken on the spot. Shake her as he might, she would not wake. He drew the ring off her hand and put it on his own.
Then Budur woke. Looking at the person beside her, the same thing happened to her. She could not wake him either. She drew the ring off his hand and put it on her own.
In the end the two jinn settled nothing. They carried Budur back to her own country and went their separate ways. What one night would be worth to two human beings was no concern of theirs.
Only the Ring
In the morning each of them woke in their own place. They asked where the person from the night had gone, and nobody could answer. The prince said there had been someone beside him, and was told it was a dream. The princess said the same and got the same answer.
The same thing was going on in two countries. Both of them pushed food away and would not leave the room. People decided they had fallen ill, or lost their minds. The princess’s father sent for one person after another who claimed to cure her.
All the two of them had was a single ring on one finger. On that one thing they could say it had not been a dream. And not one person asked them where the ring had come from.
The One Who Went Looking
Budur had a foster brother called Marzawan. He was the one person who took her at her word. If the person she saw exists somewhere, he thought, then he can be found. He left the country by that road.
After months of going about he came to Khalidan. There he heard the story of a prince shut in a tower. Seeing the ring on the prince’s hand, he knew he had been right.
Marzawan takes the prince and sets off for Budur’s country. Where the two of them meet again, the story does not linger. The kings of both countries gave their blessing. That is how the two who had been shut in came out.
Today, A Feeling Somebody Else Made
That the two of them came to know each other is not anything they did. The ones awake that night were the jinn. Who they would see and when they would wake was decided by those two. The pair of them passed through a turn of their own lives asleep.
Even so, what came after was theirs. With nobody believing them, they did not let go of what they had seen. Marzawan took the road because the princess kept saying it. Somebody else starting a thing does not make everything after it theirs.
But there is something in this chapter that comes before all of that. It is the place where two fathers shut their children up. A son and a daughter who would not marry were put in a tower and a room. The jinn came exactly because the two of them were sleeping alone.
At the end the ones who locked them up give their blessing and are glad. There is no passage in which anyone says sorry for the locking up. The story ends with that place left empty.
The next chapter has someone standing in a market with a price on her. She chooses for herself who is going to buy her.