The Story of the Ebony Horse
At a Glance
- Central figures: Prince Kamar, son of the king; the Princess of Sana’a; and the Persian sage, the horse’s inventor and eventual kidnapper.
- Setting: A kingdom in the Persian tale tradition, with journeys to the city of Sana’a and unnamed distant lands; drawn from the One Thousand and One Nights.
- The turn: The Persian sage, refused the king’s daughter in marriage, tricks the Princess of Sana’a onto the ebony horse and sends her flying away as an act of revenge.
- The outcome: Prince Kamar pursues the sage across deserts, mountains, and seas, frees the princess, reclaims the horse, and returns home; the sage is captured and punished.
- The legacy: The ebony horse - a mechanical marvel that could carry a rider anywhere in the world - passed into the prince’s possession, its dangers finally mastered.
It is told that among all the gifts brought before the king on the day of that great festival, none drew more gasps than the ebony horse. The craftsmen and astrologers and inventors of the kingdom had each come with their finest work, and each had been received with polite wonder. But when the Persian sage led his creation forward - black as lacquered night, jeweled, silent, with the proportions of a living stallion - the court went still. The sage laid his hand on its neck and told the king what it could do. Turn one lever, he said, and the horse rises. Turn the other, and it descends. Wherever in the world a man wished to go, the horse would carry him.
The king demanded proof. The sage mounted, turned the lever, and lifted off the ground as easily as smoke rising from a lamp. He circled above the palace, dipped into the clouds, and came back down as light as a leaf. The court erupted. The king offered gold, silver, estates - whatever the sage wished. The sage looked at the king’s daughter and named his price.
The king refused. But by then his son, Prince Kamar, had already fallen in love with the horse.
The Lever No One Mentioned
The prince begged until his father relented and let him try a single ride. The Persian sage agreed with a thin smile and showed him the ascending lever. He said nothing about the second one.
Kamar turned the lever and shot upward. The palace shrank beneath him; the city spread out like a carpet; the horizon curved. He pulled at the lever again, expecting to slow, and climbed faster. The wind was a roar in his ears and the cold bit through his clothes. He was lost above the clouds with no idea how to descend.
He searched the horse by feel - neck, shoulder, withers - until his fingers found a second lever, small and recessed. He pulled it. The horse tipped its nose toward the earth and fell into a long, controlled glide, passing through the cloud layer, through warm air, over an unfamiliar coast, and finally over a city whose minarets he did not recognize. He brought the horse down in a garden behind a palace wall, in the dark, and sat there catching his breath.
He had landed in Sana’a.
The Princess in the Garden
She was asleep on a couch in an open pavilion, attended by her women. Kamar did not wake her. He sat at the edge of the garden while the night passed, watching moonlight move across the tiles, and waited for morning.
When she opened her eyes and found a stranger watching her from the garden’s edge, she did not scream. She asked him, calmly, who he was and how he had entered a sealed palace. He told her. She listened to the whole account of the horse, the festival, the sage’s name, the two levers - and when he finished she looked at the black horse standing tethered to an orange tree and said nothing for a long moment.
They spent days together in that garden. He told her of his father’s kingdom; she told him of Sana’a and its king, her father. When Kamar finally said he had to go - that he would come back properly, with his father’s blessing, to ask for her hand - she believed him. He mounted the horse, worked the lever, and was gone before the palace guard had finished their morning rounds.
The Sage’s Revenge
The king received his son with enormous relief. But the Persian sage had been watching, and the sight of Kamar landing safely with the horse and walking into the palace as a hero turned his mood dark. He had been refused the princess, mocked by the court, and now stripped of his only leverage. He waited for his chance.
He found it when Kamar, distracted by preparations for his return journey to Sana’a, left the horse in a courtyard. The sage went to the Princess of Sana’a’s city by other means - by what means the tale does not say - and found the princess. He told her he was sent by Prince Kamar; that the prince waited for her at the horse. She came willingly. The sage activated the ascending lever and sent her skyward, and when she looked down and saw him below her, his face turned up with satisfaction, she understood what had been done. There was nothing to do but hold on.
The Pursuit
Kamar heard within the hour. He took nothing with him. He mounted and was in the air before the court had finished exclaiming, following the sage’s route by questioning every city he passed over - descending, asking, ascending again. Across deserts and mountain ranges and wide inland seas, the horse carried him.
He found the princess in a far land where the sage had set her down under guard, telling the local ruler she was a gift. She had not been harmed. Kamar came at night, when the guards were slow, outwitted them, and walked her back to where the horse waited in a field outside the walls. They rose together before first light and were home by afternoon.
The Persian sage was found, tried, and punished. The ebony horse came to rest in the prince’s own stables, and no one turned its levers again without the prince’s permission and the knowledge of both levers.