Thief of Baghdad (4 page)

The end of the gauze kept fluttering over Karim-as-Osman’s outstretched hands. But every time he thought he had caught it, it would flutter away from his fingers.

That girl had the most wonderful muscular control I have ever seen in all my seven hundred and sixty-two years and three moons. I couldn’t look away, though I knew I should.

Now she was moving away from Karim, still bent backward, still fluttering the red gauze. Karim half rose to follow her, and then sank back on the
leewan
again. I knew what he was thinking: that he had come there to steal jewels, not jades.

Likewise, I was there for conjuring, and not for concupiscence, to get unnecessarily fancy.

The cymbals gave a last tinkle and crash, the Circassian girl threw her piece of red gauze to Karim, and the girls ran off.

Karim sat fingering the cloth as though it had fallen from Paradise. Perhaps it had.

The Lady Amina said softly: “I would like to take that length of bazaar-goods and wrap it around his neck, and twist it until his eyeballs popped out!”

Down below a juggler had apppeared. He started off the way jugglers always do, with three balls, but he had two girls behind him, ready to hand him all sorts of things, scimitars and extra balls and plates and daggers.

Karim sighed, and seemed to settle back on the
leewan.
But I could see how tense his muscles were; playtime was over and he was about to go to work. I wondered if the juggling troupe were confederates, and then decided not; they had the ugly, fleshy look of Syrians about them.

Now that the cymbals were silent, Abdir the Foolish had eyes only for the juggler. Karim dexterously removed Abdir’s great ring, the symbol of his sultanship.

One of the ladies-in-waiting wasn’t interested in juggling so much as she was in young men. She said: “Great shades of the Prophet, I thought I saw the Prince— Oh, I couldn’t have.”

Karim needed help. He didn’t know about this gallery full of man-hungry girls who weren’t going to be misdirected by any juggler, especially one who already had two girls and a Syrian face. I had better help Karim.

Dematerialized as I was, it was easy. I floated down the gallery to where the serving maids were. Two of them were pressed against the screen, close together. I pinched one of them, where it would do the most good. It was a pleasure. Almost too much of a pleasure, in my lonely state, but it was well within the limits of my jinnship acivities.

Perfect. The pinched girl turned and said: “Safiya, that was mean!” and slapped Safiya’s face.

Safiya yelped: “Hafsa, you are a pig-eating she-pariah,” and pulled Hafsa’s hair.

In a moment, the whole gallery was in an uproar. The girls were already excited by the show down below, and by the arrival of what they thought of as their future master, Osman.

Princess Amina had to clap her hands twice to get order. By that time her eunuchs had arrived, and she ordered them to clear the gallery. “Prince Osman will hear you in a minute,” she said, “and I’ll be dishonored.”

Down below, Karim-as-Osman had stood up, as though stretching, and was gently drifting through the crowd of spellbound courtiers. He was growing richer by the moment.

Timing is important in these things. In a few minutes Karim would need another distraction, much greater than the juggler, to help him get out of there.

So I teleported back past the inner gate. The Prince Osman was struggling against his bonds, but not getting very far in his efforts. Except for that one granny knot, Karim was almost as good a ropeman as I, and I had once been Jinni of the Lower Tigris Sailors.

Going behind a pillar, I materialized as a young street urchin. Then I came out and strolled past Prince Osman, whistling gaily.

He called my attention by beating his head on the ground, a hard way to start a conversation.

I allowed myself to hear him and went over there.

He was trussed up as nicely as a guinea hen on its way to market; all the knots had held, including the one on his gag. But by jerking his neck around and rolling his eyes, he tried to tell me that he wanted me to untie him. I acted stupid for a little while, but Karim would need help soon, so I untied Osman’s gag.

At once he started abusing me; I should have been quicker, I should have been sooner, I was too clumsy, and I certainly should have brought a knife to cut his bonds instead of fumbling around with my misbegotten monkey’s paws.

This one wasn’t going to marry the Princess Amina; he wasn’t going to gain the Sultanate of Baghdad; and furthermore, the next time we all got together at Mount Kaf, I was going to place certain thoughts in the ear of the Jinni of Mossul, Osman’s home town. The Prince Osman was going to have a very interesting time in the next few months, what with invisible spirits upsetting his water ewer, and unspeakable insects choosing his dinner to expire in.

When he was free, he ran off toward the palace at once, without either thanking me or giving me a little baksheesh.

There was nothing for me to do but dematerialize and float along ahead of him as he ran across the courtyard. From time to time I placed a rock or a pile of camel dung in his way to trip him up. There wasn’t all that hurry about going to Karim’s aid; I felt that I could count on that young man’s own resourcefulness.

But eventually I allowed Osman—though he was dirty as well as disheveled by now—to burst into the grand hall.

Things were still reasonably calm. The courtiers were all pretending they didn’t hear the squabble going on up in the women’s gallery, and the fellaheen were all frankly listening and speculating on who was doing the squabbling. The high squeaking of the eunuchs could be distinctly heard over the fighting of the girls. Someday somebody is going to invent a better way of running a harem than with eunuchs.

As I looked around, one thing was noticeable; the nobility were just about as jewel-less as the mob, for once. I couldn’t see Karim anywhere.

And then I realized that he hadn’t needed my help at all. Pinching the handmaiden—a pleasure—and loosing Prince Osman—no pleasure—hadn’t been necessary. Karim had worked out his own getaway, before the sherifs even noticed that they were de-gemmed.

More and more I was convinced that this young man was a more than possible candidate for the sultanate. Of course, even after I decided he was probable, I would have to test him, but that could come later. A series of tests was beginning to form in my jinnish mind, and it was going to be a pleasure.

Meanwhile, I had better find Karim; I had some more observing to do. Was he compassionate? Did he have the qualities of a popular leader?

I was going to be a very busy jinni for a while.

Prince Osman, heavily decorated with camel dung, chose that moment to step across the line that separated the fellaheen from the sherifeen. At once Abdoul clapped his hands, and two lesser palace guards seized the burly, if filthy, prince.

He’d get out of that all right; all they had to do was send for his royal entourage to identify him. With two brains like Abdir the Foolish and Ghamal the Sturdy, that ought to be worked out in about a half an hour. It was time to fly elsewhere.

3

T
he Street of the Tanners looked quiet and normal. It smelled like the Street of the Tanners, which is never good.

Camel skins, ass skins, the skins of Persian lambs and of wild animals from the north were all on display, beautifully tanned as only our Baghdad tanners know how to work. Hung from ropes around the tanners’ stalls, they made a fresh and brave display in the little breeze that had sprung up from the Bosk of the Dates.

But, unfortunately, before a tanner can hand a skin up for display, he must prepare it. And so, at the back of each stall were the tanning vats, where the skins of all the animals of the world lay soaking in solutions that rotted the hair away and softened the leather, and also rotted the inner surface of my nostrils away, and softened my brain.

Karim must indeed be a man of the people to have chosen the Street of the Tanners to live in.

Going behind a display of Indian zebu hides, I materialized as a beggar lad, a young fakir. In this guise nobody noticed me except an occasional tanner, when I got too near his stock of hides.

A man beating thin a square of lambskin had a good-natured face. I sidled up. “O noble tanner of worthwhile leather, have you seen Karim?”

He looked up, saw I was of a penniless appearance and looked back at his work again, grunting: “Not since morning, denizen of a million gutters.” My Baghdadians are among the most polite of Arabs.

“O worthy maker of world-shaking stinks, do you know where I could find him?”

This moved the tanner to poetry. “In the chamber of the finely jointed women, in the pockets of the silken-robed rich, in the saddle bags of the camels of the sherifeen, that is where you find Karim,” he said. He began beating time to his litany. “Smooth as the finest of Samarra kid are the ways of Karim! O, fast as the shadow of Death is the going of Karim! Look for him where the rich keep their ladies, thinking them safe; expect to find him in the coffers of the caliphs, where the guards peer like hawks; Karim, O Karim, O Karim.”

It was obvious that he’d armed himself for his work with a good dose of hashish, the heart-lifter of Arabia. Dropping a couple of quiet years off my appearance, so she wouldn’t think I was a possible customer, I next tried a street girl. “O houri of a thousand beauties, I seek Karim.”

“Who doesn’t?” she asked, looked me over, decided I was too young a palm to bear dates, and passed on.

The street urchins, who usually know everything, didn’t know where Karim was. But they had a game, played with cubes of bone marked with various numbers, that they wanted to introduce me to; I told them I had no money, went down a quiet alley, and dematerialized.

Floating over Baghdad, breathing the clean smell of the upper atmosphere, I took thought; where would I go if I had just stripped a royal court and a visiting prince’s people of their jewels?

The first answer was, of course, as far away as possible. But this I dismissed as being frivolous and unworthy of a first-class jinni. Home was the second thought, home where my friends would let me hide, but I had already tried Karim’s home, the Street of the Tanners.

Then where?

Out of the clever depths of my seven-hundred-and-sixty-two-year-old brain—and it was a good one before it ever got all its experience—came the answer. No place. I would just stay in the palace, knowing that the guards and the janizaries, the cavalry and the customs collector would all be sent out to scatter through the city in search of the thief.

Karim was still in the palace.

But this made him clever as a jinni. The unworthy thought crossed my mind that being Jinni of Baghdad might not be a very comfortable job if the Sultan of Baghdad was as smart as I.

Drawing myself to my full materialized height—which caused me to bounce into a cloud for a moment—I dismissed the unworthy thought as though I’d never had it.

So I floated toward the palace, landed on the roof of the women’s quarters and materialized long enough to eat some of the
rahat lakhoum
I still had in my robe. I decided to be the old man again.

The sun had gone down, it was twilight, and very pleasant here on the roof of the harem. All over Baghdad cooking fires were sending their smokes up to me. Some of the women, a little ahead of their sisters, were already bubbling garlic and onion in the copper pot of oil on top of the fire. Pretty soon my good Baghdadians would be sitting down to their
arron bilruz,
their
cuouftah,
and that wonderful Baghdad
shish kebab.

My mouth watered. We had feasted at Mount Kaf, but not on the fine food of Baghdad. I had missed it.

But I had work to do. I got up from the Princess’s cushions, where I had been lying, and, for the moment, dematerialized. When my day’s work was done, I would eat, and not before. There was a food-seller in the bazaar who made a wonderful omelet with leeks. To extend the meal, I would also buy from her a dish of rice with lentils, what we call
magedra
in Baghdad.

Dematerialized, but still tasting the
rahat lakhoum
in my immaterial mouth, I floated down the stairs to the harem proper.

There, set with pearls and gold filigree, must be the Lady Amina’s door. I hesitated outside it.

Past the spying gallery, down in the great hall, there was a terrific clatter. I floated that way.

Abdoul, the newly appointed Chief Guard, had so far forgotten himself that he had ridden into the great hall on a black horse. He rode badly, having so recently been promoted to the rank of sherif.

Apparently Prince Osman had proved his identity by now; he and Abdir the Foolish were reclining on the
leewan
together. They had been talking, or at least their mouths were open.

The Grand Vizier, Ghamal, stood nearby. Now he dropped his pose of the attentive attendant, and hurried over to Abdoul. “Speak, Abdoul. And get that black monster out of here!”

Abdoul seemed too breathless to speak, and servants came to lead the horse out, sliding and slipping on the marble floor.

“Speak!” Ghamal ordered.

Abdoul said: “We—we can’t find the thief!”

“What!”

“My men—and the janizaries—and the cavalry—we’ve searched every house he could have reached, O Grand Vizier. The cavalry rode out fast, as you ordered, and threw a ring around the palace, as far as a man could run. Then we searched every house . . .” He broke off, he seemed very distressed.

“And you found?” Ghamal almost frightened me.

Suddenly Abdoul giggled. He leaned toward the Vizier’s ear. “Well, something.” He whispered.

Ghamal said: “Hm. Two men and one girl, and— Eh, you brought her here? I’ll examine her later.” Then his brows drew down. “You’ll like it in the Sultan’s Mills. Very healthy there. Plenty of work, and a minimum of food.” He turned his back.

“O Grand Vizier,” Abdoul cried.

Ghamal slowly turned back. He was a man, that one, but without compassion, without humor . . . Yes, I had added humor to the list of things required in my new sultan.