Castle in the Air Page 12

  “Take us to Kingsbury,” puffed Abdullah.

  “Make those fellows lose us,” the soldier said at the same moment.

  They glared at each other as they ran.

  “Make up your minds,” said the genie. He folded his arms and streamed contemptuously out behind them. “It’s all one to me what you choose to waste another wish on. Just let me remind you that it will be your last one for two days.”

  “I’m not leaving Midnight,” said the soldier.

  “If we are… waste a wish,” panted Abdullah, “then should… usefully… foolish fortune hunter… forward our… quest… Kingsbury.”

  “Then you can go without me,” said the soldier.

  “The horsemen are only fifty feet away,” remarked the genie.

  They looked over their shoulders and discovered this was quite true. Abdullah hurriedly gave in. “Then make them unable to see us,” he panted.

  “Have us unseen until Midnight finds us,” added the soldier. “I know she will. She’s that clever.”

  Abdullah had a glimpse of an evil grin spreading on the genie’s smoky face and of smoky arms making certain gestures.

  There followed a wet and gluey strangeness. The world suddenly distorted around Abdullah and grew vast and blue and green and out of focus. He crawled, in a slow and toilsome crouch, among what seemed to be giant bluebells, placing each huge and warty hand with extreme care because, for some reason, he could not look downward— only up and across. It was such hard work that he wanted to stop and crouch where he was, but the ground was shaking most terribly. He could feel some gigantic creatures galloping toward him, so he crawled on frantically. Even so, he barely got out of their way in time. A huge hoof, as big as a round tower, with metal underneath it, came smashing down just beside him as he crawled. Abdullah was so frightened by it that he froze and could not move. He could tell that the enormous creatures had stopped, too, quite close. There were loud, annoyed sounds that he could not hear properly. These went on for some time. Then the smashing of hooves began again, and went on for some time, too, trampling this way and that, always rather near, until, after what seemed most of the day, the creatures seemed to give up looking for him and went crashing and squelching away.

  Chapter 13

  In which Abdullah challenges Fate.

  Abdullah crouched for a while longer, but when the creatures did not come back, he began crawling again, in a vague, vain way, hoping to discover what had happened to him. He knew something had happened, but he did not seem to have much of a brain to think with.

  While he crawled, the rain stopped. He was rather sad about that, since it was wonderfully refreshing to the skin. On the other hand— A fly circled in a shaft of sunlight and came to sit on a bluebell leaf nearby. Abdullah promptly shot out a long tongue, whipped up that fly, and swallowed it. Very nice! he thought. Then he thought: But flies are unclean! More troubled than ever, he crawled around another bluebell clump.

  And there was another one just like himself.

  It was brown and squat and warty, and its yellow eyes were at the top of its head. As soon as it saw him, it opened its wide, lipless mouth in a bray of horror and began to swell up. Abdullah did not wait to see more. He turned and crawled off as fast as his distorted legs could take him. He knew what he was now. He was a toad. The malicious genie had fixed things so that he would be a toad until Midnight found him. When she did, he was fairly sure she would eat him.

  He crawled under the nearest overarching bluebell leaves and hid…

  About an hour later the bluebell leaves parted to let through a monster black paw. It seemed interested in Abdullah. It kept its claws sheathed and patted at him. Abdullah was so horrified that he tried to hop away backward.

  Whereupon he found himself lying on his back among the bluebells.

  He blinked up at the trees first, trying to adjust to the way he suddenly had thoughts in his head again. Some of those thoughts were unpleasant ones, about two bandits crawling beside an oasis pool in the shape of toads and about eating a fly and being nearly trodden on by a horse. Then he looked around and found the soldier crouching nearby, looking as bewildered as Abdullah felt. His pack was beside him, and beyond that, Whippersnapper was making determined efforts to climb out of the soldier’s hat. The genie bottle stood smugly beside the hat.

  The genie was outside the bottle in a small wisp like the flame of a spirit lamp, with his smoky arms propped on the neck of the bottle. “Enjoy yourselves?” he asked jeeringly. “I got you there, didn’t I? That’ll teach you to pester me for extra wishes!”

  Midnight had been extremely alarmed by their sudden transformation. She was in a small angry arch, spitting at both of them.

  The soldier stretched out his hand to her and made soothing noises. “You frighten Midnight again like that,” he told the genie, “and I’ll break your bottle!”

  “You said that before,” retorted the genie, “and you couldn’t, worse luck. The bottle’s enchanted.”

  “Then I’ll make sure his next wish is that you turn into a toad,” the soldier said, jerking his thumb at Abdullah.

  The genie shot Abdullah a wary look at this. Abdullah said nothing, but he saw it was a good idea and might keep the genie in order. He sighed. One way and another, he just could not seem to stop wasting wishes.

  They picked themselves and their belongings up and resumed their journey. But they went much more cautiously. They kept to the smallest lanes and footpaths they could find, and that night, instead of going to an inn, they camped in an old empty barn. Here Midnight suddenly looked alert and interested and shortly slipped away into the shadowy corners. After a while she came trotting back with a dead mouse, which she laid carefully in the soldier’s hat for Whippersnapper. Whippersnapper was not very sure what to do with it. In the end he decided it was the kind of toy you leaped on fiercely and killed. Midnight prowled off again. Abdullah heard the small sounds of her hunting most of the night.

  In spite of this, the soldier worried about feeding the cats. Next morning he wanted Abdullah to go to the nearest farm and buy milk.

  “You do it if you want it,” Abdullah said curtly.

  And somehow he found himself on the way to the farm with a can from the soldier’s pack on one side of his belt and the genie bottle bumping at the other.

  Exactly the same thing happened the next two mornings, too, with the small difference that they slept under haystacks both those nights and Abdullah bought a beautiful fresh loaf one morning and some eggs on the next. On the way back to the haystack that third morning he tried to work out just why he was feeling increasingly bad-tempered and put-upon.

  It was not just that he was stiff and tired and damp all the time. It was not just that he seemed to spend such a lot of time running errands for the soldier’s cats, though that had something to do with it. Some of it was Midnight’s fault. Abdullah knew he ought to be grateful to her for defending them from the constables. He was grateful, but he still did not get on with Midnight. She rode his shoulder disdainfully every day and contrived to make it quite clear that as far as she was concerned, Abdullah was only a sort of horse. It was a bit hard to take from a mere animal.

  Abdullah brooded on this and other matters all that day, while he tramped country lanes with Midnight draped elegantly around his neck and the soldier trudging cheerfully ahead. It was not that he did not like cats. He was used to them now. Sometimes he found Whippersnapper almost as sweet as the soldier did. No, his bad humor had much more to do with the way the soldier and the genie between them kept contriving to postpone his search for Flower-in-the-Night. If he was not careful, Abdullah could see himself tramping country lanes for the rest of his life, without ever getting to Kingsbury at all. And when he did get there, he still had to locate a wizard. No, it would not do.

  That night they found the remains of a stone tower to camp in. This was much better than a haystack. They could light a fire and eat hot food from the soldier’s packets and Abdul
lah could get warm and dry at last. His spirits rose.

  The soldier was cheerful, too. He sat leaning against the stone wall with Whippersnapper asleep in his hat beside him and gazed out at the sunset. “I’ve been thinking,” he said. “You get a wish from your misty blue friend tomorrow, don’t you? You know the most practical wish you could make? You should wish for that magic carpet back. Then we could really get on.”

  “It would be just as easy to wish ourselves straight to Kingsbury, intelligent infantryman,” Abdullah pointed out—a little sullenly, if the truth be told.

  “Ah, yes, but I’ve got that genie’s measure now, and I know he’d mess that wish up if he possibly could,” the soldier said. “My point is, you know how to work that carpet, and you could get us there with much less trouble and a wish in hand for emergencies.”

  This was sound sense. Nevertheless, Abdullah only grunted. This was because the way the soldier put his advice had made Abdullah suddenly see things a whole new way. Of course, the soldier had got the genie’s measure. The soldier was like that. He was an expert in getting other people to do what he wanted. The only creature that could make the soldier do something he did not want was Midnight, and Midnight did things she did not want only when Whippersnapper wanted something. That put the kitten right at the top of the pecking order. A kitten! thought Abdullah. And since the soldier had the genie’s measure, and the genie was very definitely on top of Abdullah, that put Abdullah right down at the bottom. No wonder he had been feeling so put-upon! It did not make him feel any better to realize that things had been exactly the same way with his father’s first wife’s relations.

  So Abdullah only grunted, which in Zanzib would have counted as shocking rudeness, but the soldier was quite unaware of it. He pointed cheerfully at the sky. “Lovely sunset again. Look, there’s another castle.”

  The soldier was right. There was a glory of yellow lakes in the sky, and islands and promontories, and one long indigo headland of cloud with a frowning square cloud like a fortress on it. “It is not the same as the other castle,” Abdullah said. He felt it was time he asserted himself.

  “Of course not. You never get the same cloud twice,” said the soldier.

  Abdullah contrived to be the first one awake the next morning. Dawn was still flaring across the sky when he sprang up, seized the genie bottle, and took it some distance away from the ruins where their camp was. “Genie,” he said. “Appear.”

  A flutter of steam appeared at the mouth of the bottle, grudging and ghostly. “What’s this?” it said. “Where’s all the talk about jewels and flowers and so forth?”

  “You told me you did not like it. I have discontinued it,” said Abdullah. “I have now become a realist. The wish I want to make is in accordance with my new outlook.”

  “Ah,” said the wisp of genie. “You’re going to ask for the magic carpet back.”

  “Not at all,” said Abdullah. This so surprised the genie that he rose right out of the bottle and regarded Abdullah with wide eyes, which in the dawnlight looked solid and shiny and almost like human eyes. “I shall explain,” said Abdullah. “Thus. Fate is clearly determined to delay my search for Flower-in-the-Night. This is in spite of the fact that Fate has also decreed that I shall marry her. Any attempt I make to go against Fate causes you to make sure that my wish does no good to anyone and usually also ensures that I get pursued by persons on camels or horses. Or else the soldier causes me to waste a wish. Since I am tired both of your malice and of the soldier’s so continually getting his own way, I have decided to challenge Fate instead. I intend to waste every wish deliberately from now on. Fate will then be forced to take a hand, or else the prophecy concerning Flower-in-the-Night will never be fulfilled.”

  “You’re being childish,” said the genie. “Or heroic. Or possibly mad.”

  “No—realistic,” said Abdullah. “Furthermore, I shall challenge you by wasting the wishes in a way that might do good somewhere to someone.”

  The genie looked decidedly sarcastic at this. “And what is your wish today? Homes for orphans? Sight for the blind? Or do you simply want all the money in the world taken away from the rich and given to the poor?”

  “I was thinking,” said Abdullah, “that I might wish that those two bandits whom you transformed into toads should be restored to their own shape.”

  A look of malicious glee spread over the genie’s face. “You might do worse. I could grant you that one with pleasure.”

  “What is the drawback to that wish?” asked Abdullah.

  “Oh, not much,” said the genie. “Simply that the Sultan’s soldiers are camped in that oasis at the moment. The Sultan is convinced that you are still somewhere in the desert. His men are quartering the entire region for you, but I’m sure they will spare a moment for two bandits, if only to show the Sultan how zealous they are.”

  Abdullah considered this. “And who else is in the desert who might be in danger from the Sultan’s search?”

  The genie looked sideways at him. “You are anxious to waste a wish, aren’t you? Nobody much there except a few carpet weavers and a prophet or so—and Jamal and his dog, of course.”

  “Ah,” said Abdullah. “Then I waste this wish on Jamal and his dog. I wish that Jamal and his dog both be instantly transported to a life of ease and prosperity as—let me see—yes, as palace cook and guard dog in the nearest royal palace apart from Zanzib.”

  “You make it very difficult,” the genie said pathetically, “for that wish to go wrong.”

  “Such was my aim,” said Abdullah. “If I could discover how to make none of your wishes go wrong, it would be a great relief.”

  “There is one wish you could make to do that,” said the genie.

  He sounded rather wistful, from which Abdullah realized what he meant. The genie wanted to be free of the enchantment that bound him to the bottle. It would be easy enough to waste a wish that way, Abdullah reflected, but only if he could count on the genie’s being grateful enough to help him find Flower-in-the-Night afterward. With this genie, that was most unlikely. And if he freed the genie, then he would have to give up challenging Fate. “I shall think about that wish for later,” he said. “My wish today is for Jamal and his dog. Are they now safe?”

  “Yes,” the genie said sulkily. From the look on his smoky face as it vanished inside the bottle, Abdullah had an uneasy feeling that he had somehow contrived to make this wish go wrong, too, but of course, there was no way to tell.

  Abdullah turned around to find the soldier watching him. He had no idea how much the soldier had overheard, but he got ready for an argument.

  But all the soldier said was “Don’t quite follow your logic in all that,” before suggesting that they walk on until they found a farm where they could buy breakfast.

  Abdullah shouldered Midnight again, and they trudged off. All that day they wandered deep lanes again. Though there was no sign of any constables, they did not seem to be getting any nearer to Kingsbury. In fact, when the soldier inquired from a man digging a ditch how far it was to Kingsbury, he was told it was four days’ walk.

  Fate! thought Abdullah.

  The next morning he went around to the other side of the haystack where they had slept and wished that the two toads in the oasis should now become men.

  The genie was very annoyed. “You heard me say that the first person who opened my bottle would become a toad! Do you want me to undo my good work?”

  “Yes,” said Abdullah.

  “Regardless of the fact that the Sultan’s men are still there and will certainly hang them?” asked the genie.

  “I think,” said Abdullah, remembering his experiences as a toad, “that they would rather be men even so.”

  “Oh, very well then!” the genie said angrily. “You realize my revenge is in ruins, don’t you? But what do you care? I’m just a daily wish in a bottle to you!”

  Chapter 14

  Which tells how the magic carpet reappeared.

  Once
again Abdullah turned around to find the soldier watching him, but this time the soldier said nothing at all. Abdullah was fairly sure he was simply biding his time. That day, as they trudged onward, the ground climbed. The lush green lanes gave way to sandy tracks bordered with bushes that were dry and spiny. The soldier remarked cheerfully that they seemed to be getting somewhere different at last. Abdullah only grunted. He was determined not to give the soldier an opening.

  By nightfall they were high on an open heath, looking over a new stretch of the plain. A faint pimple on the horizon was, the soldier said, still very cheerful, certainly Kingsbury. As they settled down to camp, he invited Abdullah, even more cheerfully, to see how charmingly Whippersnapper was playing with the buckles on his pack.

  “Doubtless,” said Abdullah. “It charms me even less than a lump on the skyline that may be Kingsbury.”