While they were speaking the captain of the Khan’s guard came with his men-at-arms, and posted them about the place. Then, while they were taking their measures to completely surround the inclosure that the woman might by no means break through, she said to her husband,—
“The only remedy that remains is that thou wait quietly for the space of a year, and in the meantime I will arrange a stratagem. Then on the fifteenth day of the month Pushja[2], I will go up on to the edge of a mountain with the Khan. But thou, meantime, make to thyself a garment of magpie’s feathers, then come and dance before us, in it; and I will invent some plan for escaping with thee.”
Thus she advised him. And the soldiers came and took her to the Khan; the husband making no resistance, even as she had counselled him.
Also, he let a year pass according to her word; but being alone, and in distress for the loss of his wife, he neglected his work and his business, and came to poverty. Then bethought he him of the word of the White Serpent-king, saying, “There shall come a season when thou shalt be in poverty.” So he took out his Mirjalaktschi, and touched it with the mother-o’pearl-wand, and it gave him all manner of food, and he lived in abundance. Then he set snares, and caught magpies, exceeding many, and made to himself a covering out of their feathers, and practised himself in dancing grotesque dances.
On the fifteenth day of the month Pushja, the Khanin arranged to go with the Khan to visit the mountain. On the same day the husband came there also, dressed even as she had directed him, in a costume made of magpie’s feathers. Having first attracted the attention of the Khan by his extraordinary appearance, he began dancing and performing ludicrous antics.
The Khan, who was by this time tired of the songs of the foreign minstrel, nor had found any to replace the gold frog and the parrot, observed him with great attention. But the Khanin seeing how exact and expert her husband was in following out her advice for recovering her, felt quite happy as she had never done before since she was taken from him; and to encourage him to go on dancing she laughed loud and merrily.
The Khan was astonished, when he saw her laugh thus, and he said, “Although for a whole year past I have devised every variety of means to endeavour to make thee at least bear some appearance of cheerfulness, it has profited nothing; for thou hast sat and mourned all the day long, nor has any thing had power to divert thee. Yet now that this man, who is more like a monster than a man, has come and made all these ridiculous contortions, at this thou hast laughed!”
And she, having fixed in her own mind the part she had to play, continued laughing, as she answered him,—
“All this year, even as thou sayest, thou hast laboured to make me laugh; and now that I have laughed, it would seem almost that it pleaseth thee not.”
And the Khan hasted to make answer, “Nay, for in that thou hast laughed thou hast given me pleasure; but in that it was at a diversion which another prepared for thee, and not I, this is what pleased me not. I would that thou hadst laughed at a sport devised for thee by me.”