Why the Fish Laughed

One day a queen was walking through the market when she stopped at a fish-seller’s stall. Among the catch lay one especially large and silvery fish, and as the queen leaned in to look at it, the fish opened its mouth and laughed. Right out loud. A laughing fish.

The queen was so startled, and so unsettled, that she went straight home to the king. “A fish laughed at me in the market today,” she said. “And I shall not rest until I know why.”

The king did not think it a small thing either. He summoned his chief minister, his wazir, and set him a hard task. “Find out why the fish laughed,” he said. “You have six weeks. If you cannot give me the answer, you will lose your high office.”

The poor wazir had not the faintest idea where to begin. He went to every scholar, every astrologer, every learned man in the land, and not one of them could tell him why on earth a fish would laugh. The weeks slid past, and the wazir grew greyer with worry by the day.

Now, the wazir had a son, and the young man, seeing his father so troubled, set out to help. On his journey he stopped one evening at a farmer’s cottage and asked for a night’s shelter. The farmer welcomed him, and it was the farmer’s daughter, a quick, watchful girl, who served him his supper and noticed how heavy his heart was. So he told her the whole strange story of the laughing fish.

The girl thought for only a moment. “That is not so very hard,” she said. “A fish laughs at what is absurd. Go and tell the king this. The fish laughed because it knew a secret that not one of all his wise men could see. Somewhere in the palace, in the women’s quarters where no man is permitted, a stranger is hiding in disguise, someone who means the king harm. The fish found it so absurd that a simple fish should know what the whole clever court did not, that it could not help but laugh.”

The wazir’s son carried the answer back to the palace. The king ordered the women’s quarters quietly searched, and there, exactly as the girl had said, a stranger was discovered hidden in disguise, who had crept in meaning mischief. The danger was undone, the wazir kept his office, and the whole court was left to marvel.

For the riddle that had defeated every learned man in the kingdom had been untangled, in a single moment, by a sharp-eyed farmer’s daughter who had never worn a fine robe in her life.