Queen Lab and Julnar of the Sea
Dear reader, you will forgive me if I relate to you a more polished version of the tale which I stammered through long ago for Amina and her companions.
I was far less practiced then in the art of story craft, and it is a difficult task to spin a narrative about a side character in someone else’s life, especially when they are a villain of such little note, only one obstacle among many to be surmounted by heroes of breathtaking beauty and bravery.
For we have a great deal of those tales: youthful pretty princes who are lost at sea, stolen away, betrayed and forced to battle their way back to their homeland.
Well . . . perhaps battle is a bit much, for many of these frankly dull boys are handed girls, riches, and thrones like the monsoon dumps rain.
I find them uninspired in comparison to stories of crafty women, conniving merchants, and of course .
. . daring pirates. It is additionally frustrating to catch only glimpses of more interesting characters in their verses: a fiercely defensive sea princess, a brooding monster once worshipped in antiquity, entire legal courts of mysterious djinn.
Here and gone in a flash, mere stepping stones for a royal brat’s uninspired ascent to glory.
Badr Basim is, in my opinion, among the worst. A gorgeous idiot, the son of a marid princess and a supposed king of Khorasan, it is in his misadventure that we have our sole glimpse of Queen Lab.
She would come at the end of his story, when Badr needed his mother, Julnar, to save him, and Lab is described as all such villainous women are: lusty for blood and bedsport, her only delight the despoiling of men whom she captured from the sea, enjoyed and pampered for a month, and then transfigured into livestock when she was sated.
It was such livestock that was said to warn Badr Basim, attempting to kick him back into the sea when he climbed upon a pearly shore, shipwrecked due to his own incompetence.
They are said to have numbered over ten thousand: goats and swine, sheep and cattle.
Badr dodged their hooves and bellows to ascend to a white city, shining like a pearl.
A city of magicians, where he is taken in by a kindly merchant named Abdallah who warns him to stay hidden for the place is ruled by a tyrannical queen—the aforementioned Lab.
The animals moaning at the beach were her victims, former lovers she transformed into beasts when they finally tired her.
Avoid her, my son, Abdallah pleads, and I will protect you.
Badr Basim does not do this. For you see, Queen Lab is apparently quite the charmer.
Her face is more captivating than the moon, her inviting curves like a graceful willow, her teasing voice an enchantment.
When she spots Badr, she invites him to her palace, promising a fretful Abdallah that she shall not harm a hair upon the young man’s head.
And oh, what a palace! Its walls are plated with gold, its tables encrusted with precious metals.
Seated on a sapphire throne, one of Lab’s lovely thighs over his own, Badr enjoys delicacies served upon crystal platters, serenaded by handmaidens strumming lutes and singing as sweetly as nightingales.
They make love in a bed of rich brocades and satin mattresses until the sun rises, then he spends the day in baths of marble and rare fragrance, gifted robes of honor worth thousands of dinars.
It is thus for a full month before Badr fears that Queen Lab is growing tired of him, taking sport as a bird with other avian lovers (dear readers, I beg: do not ask me to elaborate on the role that bird sex and adultery play in this story—one can only come upon the phrase “spreading of feathers” twice before banishing it from this scribe’s mind).
Learning she intends to transform him into a beast by way of ensorcelled porridge, Abdallah saves him by making a magical porridge of his own and teaching Badr to conceal a jar of it up his sleeve.
The trick is successful and instead of Badr being transformed, it is he who turns Queen Lab into a mule.
He is successful for perhaps three days before an extremely obvious ruse by Queen Lab’s mother catches him out.
Lab is saved and turned right, and the two vengeful sorceresses transform Badr into a bird (for the second time in the story!) and he is caged and set upon a shelf to be starved and forgotten until his own mother, Julnar, finally steps away from the reins of governance she’s been obliged to take up in her son’s absence, saves him in a great war of fire and brimstone that kills all in the White City save Abdallah, and returns him to his throne.
The ingrate marries his love, another clever sea princess he does not deserve, and lives untroubled until Death, the Destroyer of Delights and Separator of Companions, calls.
So much for Badr Basim. But what of Queen Lab?
Could she truly have been brought to destruction by such a turn of events?
Was she so foolhardy, bewitched by a handsome youth, to have fallen for so easy a trick?
She, who ruled a city of magicians for centuries?
Or was she more cunning than the tale—told to glorify Badr Basim—would have it appear?
Certainly when I first stuttered through this story for Amina and her companions, we wondered so, for the tale of the lusty, reckless witch did not match the clever, devious enchantress that the peris so feared.
And though I will not spoil this adventure just yet, promising to tell my nakhudha’s stories as they unraveled, my own travels and research have unearthed a great many echoes of similarly skilled sorceresses across creation.
A magician with flashing golden eyes in the Mediterranean who transforms men into swine, a mermaid sultana north of Aceh who seduces and eats sailors, a Babylonian witch capable of seducing angels into revealing hidden names, and a lonely goddess upon a drowning island in the Gulf of the Ganges who turns castaways into spiders and forces them to weave her wings, which disintegrate each time she tries to fly away.
Are they all different? For there are indeed a great many capable, cunning women that the world would prefer to remember as witches.
Or was there a particular sorceress, with roots older than civilization, who roamed and quietly weaved her own tale, forgotten and disabused when necessary to keep her nets and belly full . . .