“...He loves me. He loves me not. He loves me. He loves me not. Yarn over. Knit two together. He loves me...”

That was how she spent her days in the sultan's palace.

In her darkest moments she wondered if the sultan would ever love her as she loved him, as she had loved him ever since she was a little girl. She remembered so clearly how she had walked along the corridor with her father, the grand vizier, and saw the old sultan's young, handsome son coming from the gardens, laughint with a pretty dark-haired girl. Later they married, Shahryar and that girl, but Scheherazade never forgot his smile. It had touched her heart so that when her father had been given the task of finding a new wife for the sultan each day, she forced her father to give her hand in marriage to Shahryar. She thought that she could heal his broken heart with her love, could prove to him that not every woman wanted to hurt him.

It was a hard task, although she had gotten further than anyone believed in the beginning. Even so, there were nights when she felt cold wind blow from the balcony, caressing her white neck with freezing kisses. Kisses of death, she thought then. Would it feel the same when the executor's axe fell?

That was when she started knitting lace. She wanted something comforting around her neck, something that felt lovely and made her feel beautiful. A mix of cashmere and silk was ust the thing she needed. She couldn't resist adding a border with beads on it; it was a bit girlish, but why should you deny yourself a bit of sparkle if you never knew whether you saw the next day?

A storyteller's shawl, Shahryar called it. You look lovely in it, he had said. And she thought she heard affection in his voice when he said those words. So every night when he came to her, she wrapped the shawl around her shoulders, let the lace rest on her forehead, and the cold fear could not reach her. She was wrapped in her dreams, in her hope, and most of all, she was wrapped in the warmth that shone from his eyes when he looked at her.

Shahryar

“And so the ensorcelled prince...” Scheherazade continued her story from the night before. Marrying a knitter, sultan Shahryar thought, had not been a bad idea at all.

After the very first night of their marriage, he realised her stories were so exciting that he could not sentence her to death. Not yet, anyway. But he was worried. What would Scheherazade do during the day? After all, his first wife had betrayed him. Being a busy man with a great kingdom to rule, Shahryar did not have time to keep an eye upon his wife. He told the servants Scheherazade was to be kept in her rooms, but hte sultan knew from painful experience that in the end, women always found the way to do what they wanted.

He was quite surprised when he understood what Scheherazade's favourite activity was. She never tried to smuggle men into her rooms. Or wine. Instead, the woman smuggled yarn. Really thin yarns, to be accurate. Every night when he visited his wife, there seemed to be more yarn than he remembered. And in different places. In drawers, vases, behind the curtains. Once, he had sat on a pillow that was stuffed with yarn. If he ever found all her hiding places, he suspected there would be enough yardage in her stash to encircle the whole kingdom with yarn.

But it didn't really matter. Shahryar sighed and wrinkled his toes in his handknit socks. In fact, the only time during these 567 nights of their marriage that Scheherazade had been caught in a secret act was the night when she hid his slippers while he was asleep and filled his drawers with handknit socks.

He had asked why she loved knitting so much. Scheherazade smiled a bit sadly and said that she needed something to do while she thought of new stories for the next night. Lace, preferably. Something mindless enough so she could think what should happen to the hero, but interesting enough to pass the long day before her husband would come to her. Lace was her passion. Shahryar had heard the servants whisper that it was odd to knit something so time-consuming, when poor Scheherazade never knew if she would see the next morning. Maybe it gave her hope. As all knitters know, there is always time for the next row...

His favourite of all Scheherazade's knits was the shawl. Storyteller's shawl, he had named it. It was a rectangular shawl of midnight blue, with tinges of deep purple, almost black. The motifs were taken from the palace decorations, and it pleased him. It showed that Scheherazade loved their home as much as he did. She had designed the shawl with great care.

When Scheherazade started a new story each night, she laid the shawl gently on her head and let the rest wrap around her shoulders. Shadows in the room grew longer, their colours imitating the soothing blue of the shawl. The little beads on the edging sparkled in the candlelight, surrounding her sweet face. When sultan Shahryar listened to her gentle, soft voice and saw how her beautiful, black hair shone through the luscious shawl, he thought he could not let her die.