The Legacy of Grazia dei Rossi Read Online Free

great difference between those of us who are educated in this saray and those educated outside the palace derives from our familiarity with a fine style. Besides, this old story contains many words in Persian and Arabic for you to learn.”
    No boy likes to be ordered about by a girl, especially by a girl younger than him. It was humiliating. “She’s more bossy than an old lala ,” Danilo complained to his father.
    But he had played enough games to know when he was outclassed. So he agreed to his tutor’s choice with good grace, and in the space of a few months, the princess managed to lead him through the adventures of “Aladdin and His Magic Lamp,” “Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves,” and “Sinbad the Seaman.” As Danilo read each tale aloud, the princess corrected his pronunciation. By the time they were ready to take on the less popular, longer tales, Danilo had become as much the captive of Scheherazade as the husband who had a habit of marrying virgins and murdering them the morning after the wedding. In the end, like thousands of readers before him, the boy was unable to resist the magic, the adventures, the disasters, and the jokes that had kept Scheherazade alive over centuries.
    It was a few days after they began to read “The Tale of the Porter and the Three Ladies of Baghdad” that their tutorial took a sudden turn. In this story, the porter is picked up in the marketplace by an honorable woman who wears shoes bordered with gold and spends money like water. When the porter is invited to accompany her home, he doesn’t hesitate to accept, not for a moment.
    The lady leads him through a gate made of two leaves of ebony inlaid with plates of red gold and into an elegant salon. There he is introduced to a second lady — a model of beauty, loveliness, brilliance, symmetry, and perfect grace. In Saida’s text, the woman’s forehead is flower white, her cheeks ruddy-bright like the anemone, and her eyebrows shaped as is the crescent moon which begins Ramadan. These details, which the princess relished, left Danilo cold. Who cares? he thought to himself.
    But the porter in the story is dazzled. After some wining and dining and dancing and laughing, the porter, now drunk, begins to carry on with both women: kissing, toying, biting, handling, groping, fingering.
    As Danilo read he became intrigued in spite of himself. And he was more than a little put out when Saida announced in her pedantic little way that it was time to stop for the day. He found himself pleading to read just one more page. She acceded. He read on.
    Now one of the ladies is stuffing a dainty morsel into the porter’s mouth, and the other slaps him and cuffs his cheeks. This porter is in paradise. It is as if he is sitting in the seventh sphere among the houris of heaven.
    Just then, as tended to happen in Scheherazade’s stories, a visitor knocked at the gate. It was the Caliph of Baghdad, Harun al-Rashid, gone forth into the night from his palace to see and hear what new things are stirring in his kingdom.
    Harun al-Rashid . The name echoed in Danilo’s memory. In his head he heard it spoken in the soft musical timbre of his mother’s voice. He had heard his mother, Grazia the Scribe, speak the name Harun.
    “Why do you stop reading?” the princess asked.
    “Because I have heard of Harun al-Rashid. More than once.”
    “You have read the story of my ancestor before?”
    “No. But the name Harun al-Rashid comes from a poem my mother used to read aloud to Madonna Isabella D’Este and her ladies in Rome. The story is all about the Emperor Charlemagne and his paladins. It is called Orlando Furioso. ”
    She was noticeably unimpressed. “And what has this French emperor to do with my ancestor Harun al-Rashid?” she inquired.
    “Harun was a Saracen,” Danilo explained politely. “He was an enemy of the Christian emperor.”
    “Harun was a great caliph.” She drew herself up proudly. “He was the fifth son of Abbas, brother of