The Speaking Bird, the Singing Tree and the Golden Water

Also known as The Two Sisters Who Envied Their Younger Sister

• 5 minute read
• Ages 8-12
• Alif Laila Stories

A Sultan walking through the city at night overheard three sisters talking about what they would wish for.

The eldest wished to marry the Sultan's baker, to eat the best bread in the kingdom. The second wished to marry his cook. The youngest said she would marry the Sultan himself, and give him two sons and a daughter with hair of gold and silver, and stars on their foreheads.

The Sultan, who had been standing outside the window the whole time, married all three of them to exactly what they had asked for.

The two sisters

The elder two got what they had wished for and were not remotely satisfied, because their youngest sister was now Sultana and they were married to a baker and a cook.

So when the first child was born, they took him away in the night, put him in a basket in the canal that ran through the palace gardens, and told the Sultan the Sultana had given birth to a puppy.

They did it again the next year with the second child.

And again the year after that with the daughter.

The Sultan, who had been told three times that his wife had produced animals, finally believed it, and had her shut away.

The gardener

All three baskets were found by the same man, the intendant of the palace gardens, at the same bend in the canal.

He and his wife had no children. They took all three in, said nothing to anybody, and raised them: Bahman, Perviz and Perizade.

The children grew up in a house outside the city with horses and books and a garden, and Perizade read everything her brothers read and rode as well as they did, which the intendant thought was entirely sensible.

Then the old couple died, and the three of them lived on there alone.

The three things

An old woman came to the door one day and Perizade gave her food and showed her the house and garden.

The old woman admired all of it and then said the one thing that spoils a good house.

"It lacks three things," she said. "The speaking bird, who answers any question. The singing tree, whose every leaf makes music. And the golden water, of which one drop in a basin becomes a fountain that never empties."

"Where are they?"

"Twenty days north," said the old woman, "on a mountain. But do not send anyone."

The mountain

Bahman went first.

The old dervish at the foot of the mountain told him the rule: climb without looking back, whatever you hear behind you. Voices come, and they insult you and threaten you and call your name, and every one of them is a man who turned round, and every one of them is stone.

Bahman climbed. The voices came. He turned round.

Perviz went the following year and got further, and turned round, and there were two more stones on that mountain.

Perizade

Then Perizade went.

She listened to the dervish very carefully and asked one extra question, which her brothers had not.

"How loud are they?"

"Loud enough that you cannot think," said the dervish.

So she cut two pieces of wool and put them in her ears before she started, and she climbed the whole mountain in something close to silence, with the voices going on behind her and reaching her as nothing but noise.

At the top there was a cage with a bird in it.

"You have done what nobody has done," said the bird. "Ask."

"Where is the singing tree?"

"Behind you. Take a branch."

"Where is the golden water?"

"Below. Take a flask."

"And how do I bring my brothers back?"

"Sprinkle the water on the stones," said the bird.

She came down the mountain with a bird, a branch, a flask and two brothers, and behind her the whole hillside was standing up and stretching and going home.

The Sultan

The Sultan came to dine at their house, because he had heard about the garden.

And the speaking bird, when he was seated, answered a question nobody had asked.

It told him who the three young people at his table were, and what had been done in the night three times, and who had done it.

He went to the tower where his wife had been shut away for eighteen years and opened the door himself.