Thief of Baghdad (16 page)

Clapping my hands, I put the trees into their full action; they began waving their branches as though they were arms. Really, I had them performing better than the Lady Jinni herself would have; I had been below Basra, when I was Jinni of the Lower Tigris, and, together with the Jinni of the Lower Euphrates, had seen octopuses.

By now the suitors were well winnowed out; those who were left stood firm until the trees reached them and grabbed a couple of suitors in their arms. One of them broke free, screaming like a woman. I let him go running and screaming after the horses, and several of his fellows followed him.

We were getting down to a mere handful of suitors now. I counted them—eight. A nice number to work with.

I had forgotten about Karim. Floating flat on my stomach, I turned my eyes up to full night vision and picked him up.

He and another boy were attacking the tree that had seized a suitor in its arms. The fight was more than uneven; the tree had a couple of dozen arms to their four. But they stood, lopping off branches with their swords, and suddenly the tree let go and dropped the half-crushed suitor on the ground.

Karim and the other brave and noble suitor stood panting, completely spent.

And what of Prince Osman? I picked him up a little to the rear of the front line of suitors, his scimitar in his hand. The blade was wet and, zooming an eye down, I found that it was wet not with tree sap, but with blood.

So I signaled two of my best trees to have at Osman the Sturdy. But he was wily; he kept other fighting suitors between him and the advancing arboreal enemies.

I counted. Five suitors left, including Prince Osman and Karim. Enough of the Living Forest.

Clapping my hands, I ordered the trees to reroot themselves and vanish, ordered night to change to day, and then signaled—I could hardly order them—the invisible servants of the Hidden Grottoes to start building the second arch. I had no idea what the Lady Jinni had told them to put behind it, but from the example of her Living Forest, it would be good.

Oh, it was! As the second gate—formed of pink and white clouds, and decorated with a magnificent blue rose made of a thunderhead—appeared and the suitors cheered its promise, I slipped through.

The Lady Jinni rejoined me there. She said, “How many left?”

“Only five. You refreshed yourself in a hurry.”

“Oh, I took on full density and had a hot bath and an oil rub. What do you think of my Smoking Plain?”

Dazzled by her reappearance, I had not yet taken the look around I’d come for. Oh, the imagination of that lady!

So far as the eye could see, the Smoking Plain stretched ahead of us. Every kind of fire and smoke was there; pools of bubbling sulphur, geysers of boiling salt water, bursting bubbles of smoking tar.

Coughing and retching in the horrid fumes, the five suitors stumbled on to the plain, Karim in the lead, Prince Osman discreetly bringing up the rear.

At once a sulphur pool exploded into a towering geyser, spewing yellow masses of smoking heat at the suitors. One of them turned and flung himself to the rear. Another stood, transfixed with horror and awe, and behind him the earth cracked and spat glowing bitumen over his shoulders and the back of his head. He fell, screaming, and then crawled away.

Osman and Karim marched forward; after a moment, a third suitor went after them; three men still undaunted.

They leaped and jumped and flung themselves to avoid the burning, steaming pools that opened up unexpectedly at their feet, at their backs, on either side of them. And then, suddenly the earth cracked and they were falling through the crack. The third suitor screamed as he disappeared.

I wiped my forehead of the sweat that was dripping there, and signaled to the Lady Jinni’s invisible servants to take the Burning Plain away and put it back in storage. Then I floated down through the crevasse that had swallowed the three suitors, and sealed the crack over my head with a wave of my hand.

The young men had landed on a pile of sand. Soft enough, but all around them a fire crackled, and outside the circle of fire sheer basalt walls rose, making the suitors three eggs roasting in the bottom of a dry cooking pot.

I don’t know where the Lady Jinni had gone to—though I don’t think she was sparing her ladylike eyes the sight of the torture—but someone caused the sign of the blue rose and the gate to appear on the basalt wall, on the east side of the cauldron.

At once Karim flung himself in that direction, through the crackling fire, straight at the glass-smooth rock. The very force of his leap caused him to hang against the rock for a moment, and in that moment, miraculously, a flowering branch grew out of the wall, and Karim’s fingers closed around it.

As he hung there, his weight seemed to peel the basalt down, until a true arch grew where the shadow of an arch had been. The rock falling away below his fingers smothered the fire, and Karim passed through the arch safely, the branch in his fingers.

After a moment Osman strolled after him.

And the third suitor? He lay on the ground, his back stabbed with Prince Osman’s knife.

This was too much. It is not fair or right to interfere with another’s jinning, but my lady was going too far. I knelt, healed the suitor’s wound with a touch of my finger, filled his pockets with a moderate amount of gold, and left him to regain consciousness.

My Lady Jinni joined me as I floated through the arch after Karim and Prince Osman.

We were in a little glade of grass and a bubbling stream, fruit trees and almonds. A place of respite between trials, very decent of the Lady Jinni. But other things weren’t.

The two suitors had passed on. I materialized completely, and after a moment, so did my Lady Jinni. Kneeling, I drank from the stream, plucked a handful of nectarines and sat down.

“There’s no hurry,” she said. “They are undergoing the test by drowning, and you’ve surely seen that before?”

“With octopuses?”

“What is an octopus?”

You know, that isn’t an easy question. I mean, you can describe the eight arms and the beak, you can tell about the sucking plates, but the over-all effect is hard to transmit to anyone.

Still, I did my best, and when I was through, the Lady Jinni was thoughtful. “There are octopuses—octopi?—now. I just sent a thought to my crystal hawk, who is running the underwater testing.” She put out her hand and patted mine. “Abu, you haven’t told me what a good job I’m doing. It’s because of you. There isn’t another jinni in the world I’d go to so much trouble for.”

“Oh, they’re wonderful tests,” I said. “And on the whole, fairly conducted. The young men who have turned back have done so because of weaknesses inside themselves; all, perhaps, but the last one, and I don’t want a sultan who doesn’t remember to look over his shoulder when someone like Osman is behind him. But—”

She trailed her fingers through the icy water of the spring, took a bite of a nectarine, and offered me the rest of the fruit. For once, I refused food, and from such lovely hands. I said: “My Lady, you are favoring Osman. Why? Because he is burly and strong? Because you fancy his looks? Because he is of noble birth?”

She drew in her breath; the skin alongside her nostrils got white with anger. “If I were to tell the Chief Jinni—”

“I know, I know,” I said. “I’m in your territory, and I’m risking demotion and exile and Allah knows what by criticizing you. And I’m risking your disfavor, which means much to me. But this is the most important thing I’ve done in a hundred years. If you rig it so I get Osman for a sultan, Baghdad may fall. And next to you, I love Baghdad more than anything in the world.”

She smiled. “You’re a wily jinni,” she said. “Angry as you are, you don’t forget to throw a few amorous compliments into your complaints. Just a moment.” She turned and spoke to someone I couldn’t see. “All right. Take the sea back to the Grottoes and give them the precipice.” She turned back to me. “That was my crystal hawk,” she said. “Both young men came out of the sea all right. For once, Osman had to fight; I sent him a personal octopus. I do hope I got it right; your description was rather vague, dear Abu.”

“You are evading my questions.”

“Oh, that. You don’t trap an Osman with fire and thunder and living trees. He’s too shrewd. Not wise, or really brave, but shrewd. The truth is, Abu Hastin, the Hairy Jinni of Mossul asked me to examine Osman for him.”

“I thought there was a Hairy Jinni in Mossul these days.”

She fed me another nectarine. This time I ate it. “Yes,” she said, “and you know how they are, always up to some bad. He wanted a human he could use for evil, and, you know, I think Osman is going to turn out just the thing.”

“But if you let him come out even with Karim, what about my problem? I still won’t have a clear-cut husband for Amina and a sultan for Baghdad. I almost think you think more of this Hairy Jinni than—”

Again she put her hand across my mouth to stop me. Unfortunately, I had materialized a beard and it was at the moment full of nectarine juice. She wiped her hand on the grass. “The next test, O Abu, is one I do not think Prince Osman will pass. It is especially designed to try young men of his type. Of course,” she added, “it may trap your precious Karim, too. Shall we see?”

13

W
hen we caught up with them, Karim and Prince Osman were both below the precipice.

I knew that precipice well, and the Great Roc that flies over it; my father had had much to do with it the time he got himself into a bottle, and a sailor named Sinbad got him out again.

This time, of course, the Roc had had to work hard, rescuing two burly young men. As he flapped homeward to the Hidden Grottoes, he could barely lift his wings.

Stretching away from the precipice was a lovely green field where flowers grew and the grass was a delight to a horseman’s eye. And at the end of the field was a pool, blue as Berber eyes, and a bridge with an arch over it and the sign of the blue rose on the arch.

Beyond the bridge was a palace, finer than that of the Sultan of Baghdad, and on the terrace of the palace were some of the loveliest girls a jinni ever dreamed up.

If each one of them rather resembled my Lady Jinni of the Rocky Sands, it was no wonder; after all, she had dreamed them up, and had also jinnied herself the body and face she wore. As I have said, only her eyes were natural.

No wonder that the two young men were bounding across the field like racing stallions.

“O my Lady,” I said, “I know this test well. And it is, indeed, one that will sorely strain Prince Osman . . . I’ll observe Karim, and I suppose you’ll have to keep an eye on Osman for the Hairy Jinni.”

“Yes,” she said. “He isn’t here. I don’t make just any jinni free of my country.”

I took great heart from that.

We dematerialized and separated.

The two suitors had been separated, also. Each had been taken into a hall of the palace; and there, handmaidens were smoothing Karim’s bruises with rare oils, bathing his scorched feet, anointing his scraped hands. He was a pretty battered hero, no doubt about it, but a man would be less than heroic not to take any kind of beating to get what he was now getting from whom he was getting it, if you follow me.

The loveliness of those maidens made
my
heart turn over, and I knew that they were only illusions, of course.

When Karim was bathed and combed and curried and perfumed, the girls led him gently to another chamber, and there, resting on a silken couch, was the Lady Jinni’s masterpiece.

She—I should really call her “it” since she was an illusion, but I can’t—rose and said, “I am Kadeejah. Thrice welcome, O Karim.”

A young man is a dolt. This one said: “You know my name?”

Kadeejah said: “My lips know your name. My heart knows it better.”

Just the sort of dialogue to intrigue a dolt.

She patted the couch from which she had arisen, and said: “Rest, O brave Karim, after your trials. For you have come to me through fire and water, over mountains and deserts, and my heart sings that you have arrived.”

He stretched out on the couch; though, the truth was, he didn’t look at all tired any more. Kadeejah sat on the edge of the silk and took his hand. “I have been waiting for you through an eternity,” she said, “and now that you are here, I can promise you three things.” She sounded like an embottled jinni, O my venerable father.

Karim said: “I cannot stay, O fair Kadeejah. I must continue my quest.”

She said: “Come with me,” and he went. She led him, her soft hand in his, to a little basin of gold set on a porphyry table in the center of his chamber. Her maidens had tactfully vanished.

The truth is, I had been so delightfully absorbed in looking at her that I had not noticed whether they had walked out or just been dematerialized.

She put her little fingers on the back of Karim’s neck and pressed his head forward till he was staring down into the water in the bowl.

Not a breath of air stirred. His face, and hers, were perfectly reflected. And then, between them, a third face formed; that of the Princess Amina.

“Look,” Kadeejah murmured. “Am I fairer than she?”

“No,” Karim said, “but I love the Lady Amina.”

If he didn’t watch it, the title Sturdy was about to leave Osman and attach itself to him.

“You have not heard the three things I can promise you,” Kadeejah said. “They are these: Perfect ecstasy; eternal youth; and all the riches of the Orient.”

“Yes,” Karim the Sturdy Dolt said, “but I love the Princess Amina, and so I must go on.”

“Until you find the blue rose,” Kadeejah said.

Dreamily, as though she was not aware of what she was doing, she raised her shapely hand and drew it down Karim’s face, tenderly. As her fingers trailed slowly off his chin, little beads of sweat broke out on the Thief’s forehead. He was human enough; just stalwart.

“Unendurable ecstasy,” Kadeejah murmured.

“How did you know about the blue rose?” Karim asked.

Kadeejah sighed. It was as though a princess deigned to entertain a camel-herder, and he insisted on telling her how long it took his camel to get from oasis to oasis. “I know all,” she said, a little hollowly. I had to remind myself she was only an illusion, created by the Lady Jinni; she was a very convincing job.