Once upon a time there lived a storyteller, a descendant of the ancient tradition of bards who kept and told stories about days gone by at the court of a certain king.
This storyteller was rightfully proud of his origins and the breadth of his repertoire, and the wisdom that was present in his tales, which were used as stories about the past, and for understanding what is happening in the present, and also as an analogy for the world of the senses and the world that lies beyond the visible.
However, there were naturally other experts at court. Military and courtiers, advisors and ambassadors; there were engineers who knew how to build and destroy, people of religion and teachers - in general, people of all sorts and professions, and each considered himself superior to all others.
One day there was an argument between them about this, and the only agreement they could come to was that of all of them, the storyteller was the least important, the least useful, and without any appreciable skill. Following this, those gathered decided to begin a campaign to reduce the number of useless people around the king, and the storyteller was just the right person to start. Each of them thought to himself: “If we can get rid of him, we can prove that all the courtiers, one by one, are eating their bread in vain, and then I will become the king’s only adviser!”
And so a delegation of courtiers came to the storyteller and said:
“We have been chosen by all the significant people of the kingdom who enter His Majesty to announce to you our decision: of all the courtiers, you are the most unnecessary.” You do not fight to confirm the glory of our kingdom and expand His Majesty's dominions. You do not hold court in order to maintain peace in the kingdom. You do not preserve the purity of the souls of His Majesty's subjects, like people of religion. You don’t even have the external polish of His Majesty’s drinking companions. In a word - you are simply nobody!
- O noble and venerable peacocks of wisdom and pillars of faith! - answered the storyteller. “I am far from denying anything you have accepted.” However, in view of the fact that I have a duty to speak the truth at court, even if I appear to be disloyal to His Majesty, I must make the following statement:
There is an ancient and wise story that fully confirms that storytellers are not at all useless, but on the contrary, are absolutely necessary for the power and prosperity of the empire, and if I am allowed, I will immediately tell it.
The delegation was not averse to listening to his story, but at that moment the King called everyone into the throne room and demanded an explanation of what was happening. When he heard what you had just heard, he told the storyteller to begin his story without missing a single detail.
- Oh, Peacock of Peace! - he began. - O Fountain of Wisdom! Great Monarch, Shadow of Allah on Earth! Know that once upon a time, in distant times, there lived a king like Your Majesty, as powerful as you, who owned many lands, loved by his subjects and terrified by his enemies. That king had three daughters, beautiful as the moon. One day all three went for a walk in the forest and disappeared.
All searches have led to nothing. After long days of despair, the king sent out heralds shouting on all roads: “In the name of the King! Listen, and don't say you haven't heard! Anyone who finds His Majesty’s daughters and returns them to the palace of our gracious and wise monarch will be able to marry whichever one of them he wishes!”
But week after week passed, month after month, and still there was no news: as if the earth had opened up and swallowed up the princesses.
Then, when hope had completely dried up, the king called his courtiers: all military, clergy and secular persons, judges and knights and addressed them:
- Honorable teachers of faith and law! Lions and tigers of all-destroying armies! Oh, tireless punishers of the unworthy and lords of merchants and artisans! Let my order be known to you. You will choose two or three from among you who will go in search of the missing princesses and will not return until they find them. If they succeed, they will inherit the kingdom. If not, we will never see them again.
Those gathered divided into groups, which chose their representatives, who in turn chose their representatives, until finally there were two left. They were the bloodsucker commander of the invincible army, Emir Al-Jaysh, and the wisest Prime Minister, Vizier Al-Wazura.
The king gave them the last instructions, and they, touching their foreheads, hearts and eyes, muttered: “To hear is to obey!” Then they jumped into their saddles and rode off through the palace gates, accompanied by the sounds of trumpets.
They wandered and traveled, rode and walked, encountered difficulties along the way and, in a word, did everything that valor combined with insight can do. But before they could get on the trail of the missing princesses, they were captured by bandits and sold into slavery to an innkeeper, who treated the kingdom's best men like cattle, forcing them to look after the servants and animals of passing travelers.
When this sad news reached the King, he and his court were plunged into the deepest melancholy, one young storyteller, the son of a storyteller, whose ancestors, in turn, were storytellers, down to the deepest times, came to the court. He asked the king for permission to go in search of the missing princesses.
At first, the king refused him, not understanding how such a person as a storyteller could do what the best of the best could not do. But, in the end, realizing that things couldn’t get worse, he let him go in search.
The storyteller jumped on his horse and rode like an arrow towards the rising sun. After many misadventures, he arrived at the tavern where the vizier and the knight were languishing. Dressed in rags and in shackles, they humbly awaited the visitors to the tavern. Having recognized the storyteller, they began to beg him for help. And it turned out that he was able to pay a ransom for them and pay for decent clothes.
At first they were annoyed to learn that such an insignificant person had received permission from the king to join the search, and they were also upset that such a person was able to ransom them, since their arrogance returned to them before anything else. But, in the end, they agreed to continue the journey together.
They rode on, not knowing where to look for the missing royal daughters, until one evening they came to a modest hut, near the door of which an old woman was mending a reed basket. The storyteller reined in his horse and they stopped to talk. Having shared her modest dinner with the woman, the storyteller, in order to entertain those present, told a story from distant days. When he finished, the woman asked what brought them to these parts.
“We are the courtiers of our king, looking for the three beautiful daughters of His Majesty, who disappeared several months ago,” they answered. “However, no matter how much we searched, no matter what difficulties we went through, we could not find a trace of them, or a word about them.
“Perhaps I can help you, especially since the story you told speaks of your wisdom, and I think that you have a chance, small, but still there.” The princesses were captured by evil genies and kept at the bottom of the local lake. They have a magical underground palace there, and getting into it is an almost impossible task for humans.
Impatiently, after spending the night at the back of the hut, all three headed towards the lake. The lake was surrounded by trees entangled in vines, and the whole place exuded something unkind.
“I will go first,” said the military leader, “since I am the strongest of you and can deal with any enemy.” The minister and the poet have nothing to do here!
He twirled his mustache in a dashing manner and began to undress. The rest began to prepare ropes from the vines, and when they were ready, the warrior girded himself with a sword, wrapped the rope around his hand and began to climb down.
- If I pull, pull me up.
He descended deeper and deeper, and the water became colder and colder, and suddenly there was a deafening sound - as if thousands of peals of thunder thundered from the depths. Fear gripped the warrior’s heart, and he began to frantically pull the rope, and he was quickly pulled out.
Then the minister volunteered to go, since he thirsted, like all administrators, for the power that marrying the royal daughter could bring him. But the same thing happened to him, and he had to be pulled out onto land.
Then the storyteller went down. The water was cold, but he forced himself to forget about it. The noise was like a thousand thunder, but he managed not to hear it.
Finally, when he decided to give up this idea, he discovered that he had gone through the spell of evil genies and found himself in a huge underwater cave.
He opened the door, and the first thing he saw was the princess sitting on the floor, and in the corner lay a sleeping genie, in the form of a snake with eighteen heads.
The storyteller grabbed a flickering sword from the wall and in one motion cut off all of the genie's heads. The princess kissed his hand and placed the chain of royal service around his neck.
-Where are your sisters? - asked the young man.
She opened the next door, and inside the next room lay the second princess, guarded by a sleeping genie in the shape of a huge skull with small feet.
The storyteller pulled a jeweled dagger from a bracket on the wall and separated the terrible skull from the legs, and the genie disappeared with a terrible groan. Then all three went into the next room, where the younger sister was guarded by a lizard with a vulture's head. Noticing that the genie was sleeping, the storyteller grabbed a garrote from the wall and strangled the reptile. The two princesses placed a crown on his head and placed a sword in his hand.
Then they hurried back to the place where a rope made of vines hung at the entrance to the cave. The storyteller handed the eldest daughter a rope and gave a signal. The princess reached the shore safely.
When the second princess was raised, the rope was lowered behind the third girl.
- Get up! - the storyteller told her, but she refused.
“You better get up, I’m afraid of betrayal.” If I go up, they might leave you here forever.
But the young man refused to go first, just like the princess. Soon those above decided that two princesses were quite enough, and went home, appropriating for themselves what belonged to their abandoned comrade.
The villains intimidated the two girls, saying that they would die if they did not reveal that they were the real heroes.
They returned to the palace and were received as winners. They told the king that the youngest princess had died in the cave, and the king announced that after observing forty days of mourning, the Emir and the Minister would become the husbands of the princesses whom they had supposedly saved.
Meanwhile, deep at the bottom of the lake, in the cave of the genies, the young man and the youngest princess realized that they were abandoned when they saw that the rope had disappeared.
They began to examine the rooms and in one of them they found a brass casket strewn with jewelry. When the princess lifted the lid, a voice came from there:
- What will be the orders? I am the spirit of this casket. Order and I will fulfill it!
The storyteller immediately asked that they, along with the box, be raised to the surface and transferred to the shore: this was done in the blink of an eye. Then he asked for a huge ship, loaded with jewelry, on the sails of which would be a coat of arms of a sword, crown and chain. Once he and the princess were on board, he ordered the ship to fly to the harbor directly in front of the royal palace.
When the king saw the ship, he thought: “This is the ship of a powerful monarch, who should be treated with respect, for he has three symbols of royal power on his coat of arms, and he must be three times more important than me.”
The king came on board and spoke to the storyteller with extraordinary respect, not recognizing him in the majestic clothes and jewelry he received from the magic casket.
But the princess, unable to contain her joy, threw herself on her father’s neck and told him the whole story. Then the villainous military leader and minister were expelled from the kingdom, and the storyteller married the princess and became king, naturally, in due time.
Translated from Russian · original on wisdomlib.ru