The Grave Robbers of Genghis Khan (12 page)
Read The Grave Robbers of Genghis Khan Online
Authors: P. B. Kerr
A LITTLE LIGHT READING
B
ored of sitting on the carpet, Philippa flicked through some of the books Nimrod had brought out from the Rakshasas Library. While these told her a great deal about the
secret
secret history of the Mongols and Dunbelchin the camel, they told her nothing about what she was really interested in, which was what Nimrod had said on Vesuvius — about the destiny of the Marid. And, after a while, she asked her uncle if he would mind her going inside the lamp and looking for a book of her own to read. She did not, however, mention her interest in discovering something more about his own words.
“No, of course I don’t mind,” said Nimrod. “I never mind when a child wants to go into a library. It’s refreshing to hear it. Most children these days seem to think books are objects that furnish a room, not things to be read.”
Philippa nodded patiently as her uncle continued speaking at her.
“You’ve been in there before as I recall, so you know about Liskeard, the bottle imp. And, more important, he’ll remember you. Bottle imps can be dangerous to those who they don’t know.”
“Yes, I remember him.”
There are the creatures of Beelzebub. There are mocking imps, and there are petty fiends. There are flibbertigibbets, which were once wont to hang about a place of execution, and there are imps that were once children. There are little demons and evil spirits, and there are bottle imps that some djinn employ to guard the lamps and bottles in which they occasionally live. Bottle imps are sometimes regarded as venomous but, strictly speaking — and there is no better way to speak to a bottle imp — this was not true of Liskeard Karswell du Crowleigh. It wasn’t that he was venomous so much that his mouth was just dangerous, because of his unpleasant taste for rotting animal flesh, which meant that his teeth and gums were covered in lethal bacteria.
“I could hardly forget him,” she said. “He’s kind of unfortunate, to say the least.”
“After Mr. Rakshasas died, I offered Liskeard three wishes as a reward for his long and faithful service,” said Nimrod. “But he declined them on the grounds that having any kind of wish would have implied a strong longing for a specific thing he did not already have, and since his life was the library and nothing but the library, he could not conceive of an alternative to that.”
“It’s a point of view,” said Philippa.
“Of course, I am, as you know, quite unable to change Liskeard’s hideous appearance,” continued Nimrod. “Many years ago, he made the mistake of trying to steal the synopados, the soul mirror, of a wicked djinn. The mirror was armed with a very powerful binding that turned him into the hideous-looking imp you’ve seen before. Since a binding made by another djinn is irreversible and since I have no idea whose mirror it was that he tried to steal, I fear he will be like that forever. Which is perhaps why he thinks it better that he remains as the bottle imp, where his frankly abhorrent appearance is an affront to no one.”
“Not just his appearance,” said Philippa. “His breath, too. Especially his breath.”
“Yes,” said Nimrod. “That’s quite right. I have hesitated to bring it up. But you might get away with this, being young. You might just mention his breath. That it smells terribly. That it could turn milk to yogurt. Or butter into cheese. Yes, why not? Offer him a toothbrush, perhaps. Some floss. Some toothpicks. Some mouthwash.”
“You want me to tell him to clean his teeth?”
“If you would, Philippa. But only if you think the moment right. It’s never easy telling someone that their breath smells like a cheesy sock. Especially when their teeth are as sharp as Liskeard’s.”
“No kidding.”
“It would make it so much more pleasant to go in there,” said Nimrod. “And to have a conversation with him, if his breath could be tolerated.”
“I’ll see what I can do. But I’m not promising anything. It’s one thing telling John he’s got bad breath. Which he does because he’s too lazy to brush his teeth. It’s something else telling a really terrifying monster that he’s got bad breath. Even if he is a librarian.”
Philippa left Moby with Axel, retrieved Mr. Rakshasas’s djinn lamp from her uncle’s Louis Choppsouis bag, and, having become a thick cloud of transubstantiated smoke, entered the lamp. The interior of every djinn lamp is much bigger on the inside than on the outside. And this one was no exception. The Rakshasas Library was enormous. But it was also a library with no discernible organization, and for anyone who had never visited the place it would have been hard to believe that it was cared for by a devoted librarian who had curated the Rakshasas Library for fifty years.
It was several minutes before Liskeard appeared in the great Reading Room. He bowed gravely to Philippa and hissed a polite greeting to a person he recognized was his new lord and master’s beloved niece.
“Good day to you, young missss,” he hissed, for, despite his neat gray suit and vaguely human ways, Liskeard Karswell du Crowleigh most resembled a monitor lizard. “I’m sorry I did not come more quickly but I was in the lower library stacks.”
“How are you, Liskeard?” asked Philippa, covering her own nose and mouth with the palm of her hand for his breath was much worse than she remembered. It was almost chemical. The little, red, forked tongue that flickered out of
his mouth from time to time ought, she thought, to have been a little red flag, warning of the danger of getting near enough to Liskeard to get a whiff of his horrible, hair-raising halitosis.
“Very well, missss.”
He smiled a hideous, malodorous smile.
“Were you looking for a particular book, young missss? Do please bear in mind that this is a wishing library. In this particular library, you only have to wish for a book and it will bring itself to you. Which is why we don’t bother organizing the books in any alphabetical or subject or author order. I just return them to their proper place when your uncle has finished using them.” He glanced at a pile of books that lay on the table. “Eventually.”
“My uncle was here earlier on,” said Philippa.
“That is correct, missss.”
She pointed at the books on the huge library table. “Are those the books he was looking at?”
“Yes. Although it isn’t my place to solicit or to receive explanations, why do you ask?”
Philippa shrugged. “Those are the ones I want to read.”
“Very well, missss.” He bowed again. “Then, since you have everything you need, I will leave you to read in peace.”
“Um, Liskeard. Before you go. I was wondering if there was anything I can do for you. Out of respect for the memory of Mr. Rakshasas.”
“I’m not quite sure I understand you, missss.”
Philippa bit her lip. It’s never easy telling someone with bad breath that they have bad breath.
“Have you ever heard of the ring of confidence, Liskeard? ”
“Is that a book, missss?”
“Er, no, it’s — well, sometimes you learn the most from books you aren’t supposed to read, and er … words you aren’t supposed to hear.”
“So I’m led to believe, missss.”
“And scientific research shows that there is a direct connection between germs in your mouth and er … unpleasant breath.”
“And this is in reference to … what, exactly?”
Philippa smiled. “Nothing. I’ll just get on with these books.”
“Very well, missss.”
Liskeard shuffled away, leaving Philippa alone in the huge, cavernous library with half of her wishing she’d thought to ask John along; it was true that he was often infuriating when she was trying to concentrate on something, nevertheless he was also comforting to have around in a place as spooky as the Rakshasas Library.
She sat down and noticed first that Nimrod had left his gold fountain pen on the table. Philippa knew it was his because it bore his initials and contained a special shade of maroon ink that sometimes her uncle joked was blood. Of course, it was always possible that the ink might have been real blood and that he wasn’t joking at all. Anything was possible where Nimrod was concerned.
She glanced down the titles on the spines of the five books on the table that Nimrod had already perused and saw that they were all about twins. Anything on the subject of
twins was always certain to stimulate her interest and she picked up the first book,
Dualistic Cosmology and the Power of the Twin
, by Professor Benito Malpensa, and, opening it, found that her uncle had already underlined the one passage that was of interest to him:
Almost every ancient society contains important myths about the power of twins. Castor and Pollux, collectively known as the Dioscouri, are perhaps the most famous. In this Greek myth, Pollux was immortal but Castor was not and when Castor died, Pollux asked Zeus to allow him to share his immortality with his brother in order that they could stay together. Zeus agreed and they were transformed into the Gemini constellation of stars.
There are many similar stories in Celtic, Hebrew, and Indian mythology.
But even now, there are still many human societies too numerous to list, in which twin children are treated as something special, as “children of the sky” and are held to possess magical powers over nature, especially over rain and the wind. It was often believed that they could summon any wind by motions of their hands, or by their breath, and that they could make fair or foul weather and could cause rain to fall by painting their faces black and then washing them, which may represent the rain dripping from the dark clouds. Some North American Indian tribes believed that they could cause rain by pulling down on the ends of spruce branches. Moreover, it was supposed that the wishes of certain twin children were always fulfilled; hence, they were often feared, because they might harm people who they hated. It is the author’s opinion that this is mere superstition, though the extent of these powers is uncertain.
Another book,
Amphion and Zethus: The Twin in Semiotics
by Gilberto Echo, was also underlined:
Twins can, it is believed, call the salmon and trout to do their bidding. Some young human twins even have the power to turn themselves into salmon; hence, in some stories they must avoid water lest they should be turned into fish. For the same reason, some twins are forbidden to catch salmon, and they may not eat or even handle the fresh fish. No less intriguing are the stories in which young human twins develop the ability to become grizzly bears. Indeed, they are sometimes called young grizzly bears. According to these stories, twins remain throughout life endowed with supernatural powers.
The third book Philippa looked at was another about the nature of twins:
Children Are from Earth, Twins Are from Jupiter
by Prasad Vilma. And once again, the following passage was heavily underlined in maroon ink:
Now when there is a drought and the prospect of famine threatens your world, and all nature, scorched and burnt up by a sun that has been shining endlessly from a cloudless sky, is panting for rain, it is certain that twins can bring down this longed-for rain on the parched earth. If a village or town has no twins, the women must cover themselves with leaves and go and pour water on the graves of twins. For this reason the grave of a twin ought always to be moist, which is why twins should be buried near a lake. If all their efforts to procure rain prove abortive, they will remember that such and such a twin was buried in a dry place on the side of a hill. “No wonder,” says the wizard in such a case, “that the sky is fiery. Take up the body of a twin and dig
him another grave on the shore of the lake.” His orders are at once obeyed, for this is supposed to be the only means of bringing down the rain.
Philippa yawned and then stretched. It was easy for her to understand why
she
was fascinated with twins. She was herself a twin. But, leaning back in her chair for a moment, she wondered why Nimrod was so interested in them, beyond the fact that he was uncle to twins. And while all of this was of mild interest, it didn’t seem really important, at least not in the context of their urgent mission to save the world from some hidden hand that might or might not have used some mysterious ancient crystals from the tomb of Genghis Khan to bring all of the world’s volcanoes simultaneously to life. Where was all of this going?
But then she picked up another book and things took on a darker hue, as if a cloud of volcanic ash had covered the blue sky in her own mind’s eye. The book was rather more ominously titled,
Romulus and Remus Revisited: A History of Child Sacrifice
, by Professor Martin Moustache. And the underlined passage in this book left Philippa feeling very disturbed:
Child sacrifice to supernatural forces and figures has been practiced throughout history. Perhaps the most famous story of child sacrifice is that of Abraham and Isaac in the book of Genesis, although, of course, God intervenes, and Isaac is spared. Almost all civilizations, without exception, have carried out child sacrifice, most notoriously the ancient Carthaginians. One burial pit in a Carthaginian archaeological site in modern Tunisia contains the
bodies of as many as twenty thousand children. The practice of child sacrifice was equally common in ancient Rome: for example, Romulus and Remus, who were the twin infant sons of the god Mars. These two survived being tossed into the River Tiber and, having been raised by wolves, founded the ancient city of Rome.
But twins have always been especially susceptible to the practice of child sacrifice. Twins were put to death by some African societies such as the Nama Hottentots of southwest Africa and the Bushmen of the Kalahari because they were considered unlucky. Twins were routinely thrown to the sharks or into volcanoes to placate their gods by the ancient Hawaiians. The Kikuyu tribe of Africa practiced the ritual killing of twins and this may also have had something to do with the two dozen volcanoes that are to be found in Kenya.
There is much evidence of child sacrifice in the pre-Columbian societies of South America. The Aztecs made frequent sacrifices of children, and more especially twins, to Xiuhtecuhtli, who was the god of volcanoes, and these unfortunate children may even have been flung into the lava-filled craters to prevent eruptions. This practice was also common among the Incas for whom special children such as twins or physically perfect children were the best children they could give Apu, who was their god of mountains and volcanoes, and Catequil, the god of thunder and lightning.