Scorpion Soup (8 page)

‘So be it,’ whimpered the jinn, his menacing tone now gone, ‘I will lend you my soul, so long as you promise me to return it.’

The clockmaker made a solemn guarantee and, before he knew it, a hoopoe was singing before him in a cage.

‘There it is,’ said the jinn, his strength all spent. ‘There is my soul.’

Leaving the desert, the clockmaker hastened back to his workshop, where he hung the cage on a hook, and got to work. He devised an interlocking gearing system, using hydraulics and dials, astrolabes and cogs, a mechanism that would harness the power of the jinn’s soul.

The only thing on the craftsman’s mind was preserving his throat.

On the morning of the deadline, the sultan sat perched on his throne, waiting for the clockmaker to arrive, fingertips pressed together in contemplation.

‘Perhaps he has fled, Majesty,’ said the chief minister.

‘Or has taken his own life,’ taunted another courtier.

The sultan glanced at his favourite clock, as it struck the midday hour.

At that moment, there was the sound of iron wheels moving over wood.

The clockmaker stepped cautiously into the throne room. He was holding a square cage, in which the hoopoe was chirping. Behind him was wheeled a large mechanical device covered in a silky cloth.

The sultan craned forwards, squinting to focus on the bird.

‘What is a hoopoe doing here?!’ he bellowed.

The clockmaker smiled politely.

‘It is more than a mere bird,’ he said. ‘It is the soul of a jinn, a jinn who can travel back and forwards in time.’

Jerking away the cloth, the clockmaker revealed his creation.

Elaborate in every way, the intricate and interwoven mechanism was encased in glass, so that every moving part could be clearly seen and admired.

At the front, upholstered in crushed vermilion velvet, was a grand fauteuil.

The clockmaker opened a door in the contraption, slotted the bird’s cage into position, and bowed deeply.

As he did so, the machine came to life.

The dials began to revolve, the cogs rotate, and the astrolabes flash, as they caught light from the crystal chandelier above. In the middle of it all, alarmed by the mechanism around it, the little hoopoe tweeted fitfully.

‘It is ready, Your Majesty,’ said the clockmaker, a tone of anxiety in his voice, for he had not yet had the time to test his machine.

The sultan got to his feet, and stepped over.

‘Are you certain that it works?’

The clockmaker looked at him hard, their eyes locked onto each other.

‘Indeed, Your Majesty,’ he said.

The sultan twisted the royal signet ring on his left hand round a full turn.

‘Then go back to the tenth year in the reign of the Caliph Harun ar-Rachid, to the great citadel of Baghdad, and bring me the imperial ring.’

The clockmaker took a step backwards.

He touched a finger to his Adam’s apple, at the point where he imagined the executioner’s axe would fall.

‘A great challenge, Your Majesty,’ he said coldly.

The sultan smiled at the corner of his mouth.

‘Off you go, then,’ he said.

With a deep sigh, the clockmaker stepped up into the chair, the hoopoe still tweeting against the sound of the mechanism. Adjusting the dials, he checked the pressure on a pair of gauges, and pressed a button in the middle of the instrument panel.

With the bird chirping in terror, the machine shuddered and spluttered to breaking point.

Then it vanished.

The sultan’s eyes widened; he was too shocked to speak.

Where the machine had so recently stood, was a patch of slimy blue jelly.

The sultan inspected it from a distance.

‘How dare he sully the royal Court,’ he said.

Clinging to the velvet seat, the clockmaker’s body was displaced across time, reconstituted at the last moment, as it reached the tenth year of Harun ar-Rachid’s reign. The first sound to touch his ears was the little hoopoe. He smiled.

‘Thank God it is still alive,’ he said.

The clockmaker was about to step out of the chair when a party of imperial soldiers marched up, grabbed him, and trussed him in chains. As for the machine, it was loaded onto a cart and taken away, the hoopoe chirping wildly in fright.

As the city of Baghdad slept below, the prisoner was taken to a tower in the citadel complex, with a view out over the Tigris. Beaten and bruised, he was hung up on a cell’s wall, a bucket of animal blood hurled over him for good measure.

The jailer, who doubled as a torturer and sometimes executioner as well, held up a pair of pliers and grinned a toothless grin. He was a vile and putrid example of manhood, one who derived pleasure from wielding authority.

Preparing himself for the agony of torture, the clockmaker said a prayer to the Master of all Jinn.

As he did so, the jailer stepped forward, his pliers splayed apart and ready for use.

‘Open your mouth,’ he grunted. ‘And we’ll get down to work.’

At that moment, there was the sound of leather boots rasping on stone. An officer from the royal guard had climbed the steps to the tower, and was racing down through the cell block.

Banging on the reinforced iron door, he ordered the jailer to open up.

‘Get him down at once!’ the officer shouted. ‘I have orders to take the prisoner!’

The jailer’s face fell. Lowering his trusty tool, he asked:

‘And who might have signed these orders?’

‘The Caliph Harun ar-Rachid himself!’

The clockmaker was unchained and, the next thing he knew, he was in the throne room on his knees.

Reclining on a voluminous gilded throne before him was the Caliph Harun of
A Thousand and One Nights
.

A vizier swept through the chamber, whispered in his master’s ear, and melted away into the shadows. Narrowing his eyes, the Caliph remained silent for a long while.

Eventually, in a slow and deliberate voice, he spoke:

‘I have come to understand that you were discovered with a mechanical device.’

The Caliph touched the arm of his throne in a signal. A curtain was lowered at the far end of the hall, revealing the clockmaker’s chair.

His eyes fixed in terror to the floor, its inventor cocked his head up and down in affirmation. So fearful was he, that he dared not look up at the Caliph’s hands, checking them for the signet ring.

‘Your Excellence,’ he babbled, his voice barely audible. ‘Yes, I created the machine.’

‘And what purpose does it serve?’

The clockmaker said nothing, terrified of being executed on the spot as a sorcerer.

The Caliph, master of the known universe, repeated his question, a strain of displeasure in his voice.

‘It… it… it…’ started the clockmaker, ‘is a contrivance by which the spheres of the cosmos may be breached by the frailties of Man.’

Smoothing down an eyebrow with the tip of his index finger, the Caliph walked over to the machine and inspected it studiously. His attentive gaze took in the dials and the levers, the gauges and the gears.

‘And what gives it propulsion?’ he asked.

‘A little hoopoe, Your Majesty,’ said the clockmaker.

‘A simple bird?’

The Caliph broke into a smile.

‘A bird, Highness,’ repeated the clockmaker, ‘but not a
simple
bird.’

‘And where is it, this bird?’

Getting to his feet, the clockmaker paced softly over to his machine, and leant down to where the cage had been placed. His expression went from one of fear to one of extreme alarm.

‘The hoopoe has gone!’ he cried.

Unable to witness a demonstration of the device, the Caliph clapped his hands and the clockmaker was taken away, back to the cells.

As for the machine, it was dragged to the stables and left to rust.

It happened that one of the guards entrusted with the job of hauling the machine to the Caliph’s throne room, had heard the hoopoe chirping. Taking pity on the little creature, he removed its cage, and took the bird home, where he fed it some choice little morsels of meat.

The next morning, the guard’s daughter woke before her father and, finding the bird there, she jumped up and down with delight. Eager to pick it up and caress its delicate plumage, she opened the cage door.

Instantly, the hoopoe flew from the cage, out of the open window.

Locked up in the tower, the clockmaker cursed himself for his reverse in fortune, and he damned the person who had taken the soul of Mezmiss, Master of all Jinn. He was certain that any minute now the jailer would be along to wrench out his teeth.

The hoopoe flapped its way over Baghdad, the city of gardens, palaces, and of fountains. Unable to believe its luck at being set free at last, and to have been transported to such luxuriant surroundings, the bird flew down to a large garden, and began pecking a lawn there for worms.

By chance, the garden belonged to a royal princess, the daughter of the Caliph himself. Her name was Princess Amina, and she loved nothing more than little hoopoes.

Sitting in the shade of her balcony, she spied the bird foraging about, and she gave the order for her gardener to fetch the creature and to put it in a cage.

Within an hour, the bird had been trapped in an unwieldy butterfly net, and it was hanging in a gilded cage in the princess’s bedroom. That night, the hoopoe serenaded its new owner to sleep.

And, as she slept, she had the most remarkable dream of her life.

She dreamed that a stranger arrived from another time, and took her on a fabulous machine to a land where rainbow waterfalls cascaded down from the sky. And she dreamed that this stranger was the most talented and kind man in existence, but that he was languishing at that very moment in the most gruesome of cells – lost somewhere in her father’s prison.

The next morning, the princess awoke to the sound of the hoopoe singing once again. Her eyes wide with wonder, she sat bolt upright and called for her lady-in-waiting.

‘You must hurry to the cells,’ she said, ‘and search out a foreigner who is being tortured there.’

‘But how will I know him, Your Highness?’

The princess thought for a moment.

‘Take the hoopoe,’ she replied, ‘and when he sings, you would have found the prisoner I want to see. Bring them both to me – and waste not a moment!’

Just as the torturer was peering into the clockmaker’s mouth once again, there came the dainty sound of a woman’s voice at the door of the cell. Grimacing, the jailer slid back the bolts, to find the princess’s lady-in-waiting, a caged bird in her hand.

No sooner had the hoopoe’s tiny eye spotted the clockmaker, than the bird began to sing rapturously.

‘That’s him!’ exclaimed the princess’s attendant. ‘Release him. Princess Amina is awaiting him this very moment!’

With a sigh the jailer unlocked the chains a second time.

Filthy, bleeding, and reeking of fear, the clockmaker was brought to the princess’s private salon. He stood in the doorway, his shoulders hunched low, while the hoopoe’s cage was hung near to the window.

It wasn’t long before the princess stepped in from the garden.

The clockmaker found himself unable to speak, having never before been in the presence of such beauty. And the princess was silent too, her heart warmed by the gentle sensitivity of the stranger.

‘Last night, I had a dream,’ she began, explaining why she had called the clockmaker to her chambers.

The couple spent the afternoon together in conversation and laughter. They felt drawn to each other, as if nothing in the world could keep them parted.

Then, suddenly, the clockmaker put a hand to his mouth in fear.

‘How will I ever get back to my mechanism?’ he asked despondently.

Princess Amina leaned forwards and touched her fingers to his cheek.

‘I shall help you,’ she said.

But word had swept through the palace that a convict had been taken to the princess’s private apartment, news that eventually reached the ears of the Caliph himself.

Enraged that his favourite daughter should be fraternising with a common prisoner, Harun ar-Rachid ordered for the machine, the hoopoe, the clockmaker, and Princess Amina, to be brought before him at once.

Setting eyes on his machine, the clockmaker’s heart beat all the faster. The bird, the mechanism and the Caliph’s signet ring were all in the same room.

But there were armed guards in every corner.

One wrong move and he would be hacked to the floor.

‘If Your Majesty should like a demonstration of the machine,’ said the clockmaker plucking up courage to speak, ‘I would happily oblige.’

The Caliph signalled to the guard for the prisoner’s chains to be unfastened.

‘Try and escape,’ he said, ‘and you will be cut down before you can touch a finger to your nose.’

The perspiration beading into droplets on his brow, the clockmaker picked up the hoopoe’s cage and fixed it into position.

‘With the bird installed,’ he said, ‘the contrivance is ready to be used, Your Majesty. The administrator sits in the chair like this, and arranges the instruments like so. And then…’

Before he could finish his sentence, the clockmaker, the hoopoe and the machine disappeared – leaving the Caliph, his daughter and the guards in astonished silence.

Anyone with sharp eyes may have noticed that the ring on Harun’s finger vanished as well.

A moment after it had done so, there was a loud grinding sound, and the mechanism reappeared in plain sight.

Calmly seated on the velvet-covered chair, was the clockmaker. On his finger was the signet ring of Harun ar-Rachid.

In one movement, he reached forwards, took the hand of the princess, and invited her to sit beside him. She did so and, instantly, the machine vanished once again.

Back in his own time, the clockmaker presented the ring of Caliph Harun to his own sultan, but not before he was wed to the Caliph’s favourite daughter.

Then, making his way to the palace for his audience with the sultan, the clockmaker dispatched his last duty.

He opened the door of the bird cage wide, and released the hoopoe as he had promised.

The sultan was at first sceptical that the ring had indeed come from the Caliph’s hand. Striding through into his private library, he reached up and removed a golden box from a shelf. It was ornate, the edges carved with figurines, the sides inlaid with the finest mother-of-pearl.