The Boy and the Deyus (1)

Summary
From Drower’s collection of Iraqi folktales.

Text
In a modern Iraqi folktale a dying Sultan orders that when he is dead, the three sons must watch his tomb for three nights after seven days’ mourning, as he has enemies who, though they may not injure him while he is living, may seek to do so when he is dead. He fears that they will steal his body and throw it outside. Lady Drower in her commentary refers to the Gilgamesh Epic, tablet 12, where Enkidu tells about the fate of the spirits which once tenanted the desecrated body will have no rest (p. 302).

Only the youngest son keeps the commandment of his father and spends the three nights in vigil at his tomb: “He scraped a little hole in the ground beside the tomb, and covered it with thorn so that no one would see him, and there he hid. In the middle of the night the moonlit sky was darkened. He looked and saw a black cloud, descending. It came nearer, and he saw that it was a black deyu, seated on a coal-black mare … while he was bending to lift the dead body … the boy … struck with his sword at deyu’s neck … the deyu’s head fell from his body at a single stroke. Then the lad took his sword, and cut out the lips, the eyes and the nose, put them in his handkerchief and tied them up.” He entrusts deyu’s arms and mare into his old nurse’s keeping. In the following two nights, the same happens to a red deyu and a white deyu. Lady Drower comments: “The sequence of colour of the deyus is also significant, and recalls the coloured stages of the Sumerian ziggurat. Here the colours possibly symbolize the evil spirits of the underworld, earth and air” (p. 302).

The neighbouring Sultan had three beautiful daughters, whom he proposed to marry. To test the skill of the suitors, he had dug a hole in the ground, forty cubits deep and forty cubits wide, in which he would place them, and the man who could discover a means of getting her out should marry them. The youngest son steals all three of them, using his mares he took away from the deyus which approached his father’s tomb. He gives two older daughters to his brothers, but the youngest daughter is stolen from him by a deyu: “the sky was suddenly darkened, and a deyu appeared, who, seizing the bride, threw her upon his shoulder and flew away with her into the air.”

The youngest prince sets out to search for his lost bride. He says to his sister: “I took a bride, and as they were bringing her to me from the hammam a deyu came and carried her off. Now I have gone to seek her, for no matter where she may be, I must get her back!” She cried, “O my brother, if you are going into the deyus’ country harm may befall you!” His sister’s husband is a darwish, who gives him for his journey seven pairs of shoes made of iron. “He wandered and wandered till the first pair were worn out, and when the seventh pair was all but worn through he came to a strange country, and entered the town in which the Sultan of the place lived. …

He passed along the road, and saw an old woman with a kindly face sitting by the door. She was very old, but he stopped to speak with her and wish her peace, and asked her, ‘Do you wish for a guest?’” (cf. Šiduri). He hears a noise of merry-making. Said she: “The Sultan is served by a deyu whose devotee he is, and this deyu brought him a beautiful girl as a bride seven months ago.” The old lady was wet-nurse to the royal family and brings the lad into harem in women’s clothes. He speaks to her in the tongue of her country. To prince’s question ‘How shall we escape?’, she replies: “There is a way. Go to the sea-shore this night and you will see a sea-mare come out of the sea to eat the spring grass. Seize her and halter her, and bring her to the palace below my window. I will break the window and we will both fly away on her back.”

Then “out of the sea there came a mare, with wings on her back. He seized her and bridled her … the mare rose into the air, and so they flew (cf. kusarikku). … when the prince and his bride arrived in their country they found his brothers in black clothes, for they had begun to mourn him as dead. When the princes saw them, they were overjoyed”, saying “Praise God, you and your wife are back in safety! Now we will finish the wedding!” And they made a great feast, and made merry. Finally he kills the wicked deyu with white deyu’s own sword.

Source (list of abbreviations)
Iraqi folktales

Bibliography

Amar Annus

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