Mercy! Mercy! That Dang Nabed PERCY!

Episode 6: The Dilemma

The Dilemma

The King and Dunazad settled back and began listening in rapt attention. Scheherazade was a spell-binding story teller.

Once there was a great King in Syracuse who had a wise counselor named Archimedes. One day the King gave his Royal Goldsmith a one-pound ingot of purest gold.

“Take this ingot,” he said “and produce for me the most beautiful crown ever wrought. I'll pay you five times the value of the gold for the rendering of the crown.”

The Goldsmith bowed and withdrew delighted with his latest commission. He was a man of great artistic talent and as a craftsman, had no peer. Seeing an opportunity to profit from both ends of the transaction, he cut the ingot into four parts and took one and locked it in his strong box. He melted the other three and mixed it with parts silver and copper and poured it all into a mold. When it cooled he set the alloy chunk onto a shop table. There he weighted it until satisfied that it weighed exactly one pound, before setting it aside and beginning work on the crown.

“The man was a thief,” muttered Dunazad. “ See how he kept one of the parts for himself, substituting a baser metal?”

“Such a trick is virtually undetectable,” pointed out Shahryar, “without melting down the crown.”

“He should be suspended by his thumbs and be branded with a hot poker,” she replied in disgust.

“May I go on?" asked Scheherazade.

The Sultan motioned to continue.

And so after a year the Smith returned, giving the crown to the King. It was a magnificent piece of work and the Monarch loved it and all who saw the magnificent glitter of its rendering proclaimed its merits. One night, shortly thereafter, the king had a dream wherein an apparition appeared telling him…

“The crown is not pure gold as it appears, but has been mixed with silver and copper, making the fraud undetectable to the eye.”

“Yes and the "Fraud" pocketed one part in four,” said the King sadly shaking his head.

“He deserves to be flailed and fed to the dogs,” cried Dunazad, self-righteously.

“May I go on?" asked Scheherazade.

Shahryar so motioned.

The king was troubled that he might have been cheated, but was a fair and righteous man, so he summoned his Excelsior of the Mint. The Excelsior weighted the crown and told the King it weighed exactly one pound.

“But is it pure gold?”

The Excelsior shrugged, replying that he had no way of knowing and suggested consulting the Royal Alchemist.

The king did and the Alchemist revealed that only by melting the crown would the base metals separate and thereby reveal the purity of the gold therein. This bothered the Sovereign because the artistic rendering was a wonder to behold. Clearly this was not a good idea.

King Shahryar smiled at Scheherazade and interrupted.

“I can see where this is going. ...Around and around like a dog chasing his tail. Why not take the scoundrel to the dungeon and put him to the question? “

Scheherazade rolled her eyes.

Naturally the king did not want to risk the the torture and dismemberment of so skilled a subject, who might very well be innocent of any wrongdoing. He was on the verge of forgetting the whole matter when he suddenly realized that he had a Chief Armorer named Archimedes. Archimedes was a designer of weapons with extensive knowledge of metals and their alloys.