lled on the All-powerful for aid, and ran with him into the
garden of the house, and lo! by the water side at the end of the garden a
boat full of armed soldiers with scimitars. So these fell upon them, and
bound them, and haled them into the house again, where was the dark
Vizier Aswarak, and certain officers of the night watch with a force. The
Vizier cried when he saw them, 'I accuse thee, Prince Almeryl, of being
here in the city of our lord the King, to conspire against him and his
authority.'

Almeryl faced the Vizier firmly, and replied, 'I knew not in my life I
had made an enemy; but there is one here who telleth that of me.'

The Vizier frowned, saying, 'Thou deniest this? And thou here, and thy
father at war with the sovereignty of our lord the King!'

Almeryl beheld his danger, and he said, 'Is this so?'

Then cried the Vizier, 'Hear him! is not that a fair simulation?' So he
called to the guard, 'Shackle him!' When that was done, he ordered the
house to be sacked, and the women and the slaves he divided for a spoil,
but he reserved Bhanavar to himself: and lo! twice she burst away from
them that held her to hang upon the lips of Almeryl, and twice was she
torn from him as a grape-bunch is torn from the streaming vine, and the
third time she swooned and the anguish of life left her.

Now, Bhanavar was borne to the harem of the Vizier, and for days she
suffered no morsel of food to enter her mouth, and was dying, had not the
Vizier in the cunning of his dissimulation fed her with distant glimpses
of Almeryl, to show her he yet lived. Then she thought, 'While my beloved
liveth, life is due to me'; and she ate and drank and reassumed her fair
fulness and the queenliness that was hers; but the Vizier had no love of
her, and respected her, considering in his mind, 'Time will exhaust the
fury of this tigress, and she is a fruit worth the waiting for. Wullahy!
I shall have possessed her ere the days of over-ripening.'

There was in the harem of the Vizier a mountain-girl that had been
brought there in her childhood, and trained to play upon the lute and
accompany her voice with the instrument. To this little damsel Bhanavar
gave her heart, and would listen all day, as in a trance, to her luting,
till the desire to escape from that bondage and gather tidings of Almeryl
mastered her, and she persuaded one of the blacks of the harem with a
bribe to procure her an interview with the porter Ukleet. So at a certain
h