Castle in the Air Read online

  “Then you must fetch out your other purse or even feel under your mattress,” the stranger rejoined. “For the limit of my generosity is four hundred and ninety-five gold, and I would not sell at all but for the most pressing need.”

  “I might squeeze another forty-five gold from the sole of my left shoe,” Abdullah replied. “That I keep for emergencies, and it is my pitiful all.”

  “Examine your right shoe,” the stranger answered. “Four-fifty.”

  And so it went on. An hour later the stranger departed from the booth with 210 gold pieces, leaving Abdullah the delighted owner of what seemed to be a genuine—if threadbare—magic carpet. He was still mistrustful. He did not believe that anyone, even a desert wanderer with few needs, would part with a real flying carpet—albeit nearly worn out—for less than 400 gold pieces. It was too useful—better than a camel, because it did not need to eat—and a good camel cost at least 450 in gold.

  There had to be a catch. And there was one trick Abdullah had heard of. It was usually worked with horses or dogs. A man would come and sell a trusting farmer or hunter a truly superb animal for a surprisingly small price, saying that it was all that stood between himself and starvation. The delighted farmer (or hunter) would put the horse in a stall (or the dog in a kennel) for the night. In the morning it would be gone, being trained to slip its halter (or collar) and return to its owner in the night. It seemed to Abdullah that a suitably obedient carpet could be trained to do the same. So, before he left his booth, he very carefully wrapped the magic carpet around one of the poles that supported the roof and bound it there, around and around, with a whole reel of twine, which he then tied to one of the iron stakes at the base of the wall.

  “I think you’ll find it hard to escape from that,” he told it, and went out to discover what had been going on at the food stall.

  The stall was quiet now, and tidy. Jamal was sitting on its counter, mournfully hugging his dog.

  “What happened?” asked Abdullah.

  “Some thieving boys spilled all my squid,” Jamal said. “My whole day’s stock down in the dirt, lost, gone!”

  Abdullah was so pleased with his bargain that he gave Jamal two silver pieces to buy more squid. Jamal wept with gratitude and embraced Abdullah. His dog not only failed to bite Abdullah; it licked his hand. Abdullah smiled. Life was good. He went off whistling to find a good supper while the dog guarded his booth.

  When the evening was staining the sky red behind the domes and minarets of Zanzib, Abdullah came back, still whistling, full of plans to sell the carpet to the Sultan himself for a very large price indeed. He found the carpet exactly where he had left it. Or would it be better to approach the Grand Vizier, he wondered while he was washing, and suggest that the Vizier might wish to make the Sultan a present of it? That way he could ask for even more money. At the thought of how valuable that made the carpet, the story of the horse trained to slip its halter began to nag at him again. As he got into his nightshirt, Abdullah began to visualize the carpet wriggling free. It was old and pliable. It was probably very well trained. It could certainly slither out from behind the twine. Even if it did not, he knew the idea would keep him awake all night.

  In the end, he carefully cut the twine away and spread the carpet on top of the pile of his most valuable rugs, which he always used as a bed. Then he put on his nightcap—which was necessary, because the cold winds blew off the desert and filled the booth with drafts— spread his blanket over him, blew out his lamp, and slept.

  Chapter 2

  In which Abdullah is mistaken for a young lady.

  He woke to find himself lying on a bank, with the carpet still underneath him, in a garden more beautiful than any he had imagined.

  Abdullah was convinced that this was a dream. Here was the garden he had been trying to imagine when the stranger so rudely interrupted him. Here the moon was nearly full and riding high above, casting light as white as paint on a hundred small fragrant flowers in the grass around him. Round yellow lamps hung in the trees, dispelling the dense black shadows from the moon. Abdullah thought this was a very pleasing idea. By the two lights, white and yellow, he could see an arcade of creepers supported on elegant pillars, beyond the lawn where he lay, and from somewhere behind that, hidden water was quietly trickling.

  It was so cool and so heavenlike that Abdullah got up and went in search of the hidden water, wandering down the arcade, where starry blooms brushed his face, all white and hushed in the moonlight, and bell-like flowers breathed out the headiest and gentlest of scents. As one does in dreams, Abdullah fingered a great waxy lily here and detoured deliriously there into a dell of pale roses. He had never before had a dream that was anything like so beautiful.

  The water, when he found it beyond some big fernlike bushes dripping dew, was a simple marble fountain in another lawn, lit by strings of lamps in the bushes, which made the rippling water into a marvel of gold and silver crescents. Abdullah wandered toward it raptly.

  There was only one thing needed to complete his rapture, and as in all the best dreams, it was there. An extremely lovely girl came across the lawn to meet him, treading softly on the damp grass with bare feet. The gauzy garments floating around her showed her to be slender, but not thin, just like the princess from Abdullah’s daydream. When she was near Abdullah, he saw that her face was not quite a perfect oval as the face of his dream princess should have been, nor were her huge dark eyes at all misty. In fact, they examined his face keenly, with evident interest. Abdullah hastily adjusted his dream, for she was certainly very beautiful. And when she spoke, her voice was all he could have desired, being light and merry as the water in the fountain and the voice of a very definite person, too.

  “Are you a new kind of servant?” she said.

  People always did ask strange things in dreams, Abdullah thought. “No, masterpiece of my imagination,” he said. “Know that I am really the long-lost son of a distant prince.”

  “Oh,” she said. “Then that may make a difference. Does that mean you’re a different kind of woman from me?”

  Abdullah stared at the girl of his dreams in some perplexity. “I’m not a woman!” he said.

  “Are you sure?” she asked. “You are wearing a dress.”

  Abdullah looked down and discovered that, in the way of dreams, he was wearing his nightshirt. “This is just my strange foreign garb,” he said hastily. “My true country is far from here. I assure you that I am a man.”

  “Oh, no,” she said decidedly. “You can’t be a man. You’re quite the wrong shape. Men are twice as thick as you all over, and their stomachs come out in a fat bit that’s called a belly. And they have gray hair all over their faces and nothing but shiny skin on their heads. You’ve got hair on your head like me and almost none on your face.” Then, as Abdullah put his hand rather indignantly to the six hairs on his upper lip, she asked, “Or have you got bare skin under your hat?”

  “Certainly not,” said Abdullah, who was proud of his thick, wavy hair. He put his hand to his head and removed what turned out to be his nightcap. “Look,” he said.

  “Ah,” she said. Her lovely face was puzzled. “You have hair that’s almost as nice as mine. I don’t understand.”

  “I’m not sure I do, either,” said Abdullah. “Could it be that you have not seen very many men?”

  “Of course not,” she said. “Don’t be silly. I’ve only seen my father! But I’ve seen quite a lot of him, so I do know.”

  “But don’t you ever go out at all?” Abdullah asked helplessly.

  She laughed. “Yes, I’m out now. This is my night garden. My father had it made so that I wouldn’t ruin my looks going out in the sun.”

  “I mean, out into the town, to see all the people,” Abdullah explained.

  “Well, no, not yet,” she admitted. As if that bothered her a little, she twirled away from him and went to sit on the edge of the fountain. Turning to look up at him, she said, “My father tells me I might be able to go ou
t and see the town sometimes after I’m married—if my husband allows me to—but it won’t be this town. My father’s arranging for me to marry a prince from Ochinstan. Until then I have to stay inside these walls, of course.”

  Abdullah had heard that some of the very rich people in Zanzib kept their daughters—and even their wives, too—almost like prisoners inside their grand houses. He had many times wished someone would keep his father’s first wife’s sister, Fatima, that way. But now, in this dream, it seemed to him that this custom was entirely unreasonable and not fair to this lovely girl at all. Fancy not knowing what a normal young man looked like!

  “Pardon my asking, but is the Prince from Ochinstan perhaps old and a little ugly?” he said.

  “Well,” she said, evidently not quite sure, “my father says he’s in his prime, just as my father is himself. But I believe the problem lies in the brutal nature of men. If another man saw me before the Prince did, my father says he would instantly fall in love with me and carry me off, which would ruin all my father’s plans, naturally. He says most men are great beasts. Are you a beast?”

  “Not in the least,” said Abdullah.

  “I thought not,” she said, and looked up at him with great concern. “You do not seem to me to be a beast. This makes me quite sure that you can’t really be a man.” Evidently she was one of those people who like to cling to a theory once they have made it. After considering a moment, she asked, “Could your family, perhaps, for reasons of their own, have brought you up to believe a falsehood?”

  Abdullah would have liked to say that the boot was on the other foot, but since that struck him as impolite, he simply shook his head and thought how generous of her it was to be so worried about him and how the worry on her face only made it more beautiful—not to speak of the way her eyes shone compassionately in the gold and silver light reflecting from the fountain.

  “Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that you are from a distant country,” she said, and patted the edge of the fountain beside her. “Sit down and tell me all about it.”

  “Tell me your name first,” said Abdullah.

  “It’s rather a silly name,” she said nervously. “I’m called Flower-in-the-Night.”

  It was the perfect name for the girl of his dreams, Abdullah thought. He gazed down at her admiringly. “My name is Abdullah,” he said.

  “They even gave you a man’s name!” Flower-in-the-Night exclaimed indignantly. “Do sit down and tell me.”

  Abdullah sat on the marble curb beside her and thought that this was a very real dream. The stone was cold. Splashes from the fountain soaked into his nightshirt while the sweet smell of rose water from Flower-in-the-Night mingled most realistically with scents from the flowers in the garden. But since it was a dream, it followed that his daydreams were true here, too. So Abdullah told her all about the palace he had lived in as a prince and how he was kidnapped by Kabul Aqba and escaped into the desert, where the carpet merchant found him.

  Flower-in-the-Night listened with complete sympathy. “How terrifying! How exhausting!” she said. “Could it be that your foster father was in league with the bandits to deceive you?”

  Abdullah had a growing feeling, despite the fact that he was only dreaming, that he was getting her sympathy on false pretenses. He agreed that his father could have been in the pay of Kabul Aqba and then changed the subject. “Let us get back to your father and his plans,” he said. “It seems to me a little awkward that you should marry this Prince from Ochinstan without having seen any other men to compare him with. How are you going to know whether you love him or not?”

  “You have a point,” she said. “This worries me, too, sometimes.”

  “Then I tell you what,” Abdullah said. “Suppose I come back tomorrow night and bring you pictures of as many men as I can find? That should give you some standard to compare the Prince with.” Dream or not, Abdullah had absolutely no doubt that he would be back tomorrow. This would give him a proper excuse.

  Flower-in-the-Night considered this offer, swaying dubiously back and forth with her hands clasped around her knees. Abdullah could almost see rows of fat, bald men with gray beards passing in front of her mind’s eye.

  “I assure you,” he said, “that men come in every sort of size and shape.”

  “Then that would be very instructive,” she agreed. “At least it would give me an excuse to see you again. You’re one of the nicest people I’ve ever met.”

  This made Abdullah even more determined to come back tomorrow. He told himself it would be unfair to leave her in such a state of ignorance. “And I think the same about you,” he said shyly.

  At this, to his disappointment, Flower-in-the-Night got up to leave. “I have to go indoors now,” she said. “A first visit must last no longer than half an hour, and I’m almost sure you’ve been here twice as long as that. But now we know each other, you can stay at least two hours next time.”

  “Thank you. I shall,” said Abdullah.

  She smiled and passed away like a dream, beyond the fountain and behind two frondy flowering shrubs.

  After that the garden, the moonlight, and the scents seemed rather tame. Abdullah could think of nothing better to do than wander back the way he had come. And there, on the moonlit bank, he found the carpet. He had forgotten about it completely. But since it was there in the dream, too, he lay down on it and fell asleep.

  He woke up some hours later with blinding daylight streaming in through the chinks in his booth. The smell of the day before yesterday’s incense hanging about in the air struck him as cheap and suffocating. In fact, the whole booth was fusty and frowsty and cheap. And he had an earache because his nightcap seemed to have fallen off in the night. But at least, he found while he hunted for the nightcap, the carpet had not made off in the night. It was still underneath him. This was the one good thing he could see in what suddenly struck him as a thoroughly dull and depressing life.

  Here Jamal, who was still grateful for the silver pieces, shouted outside that he had breakfast ready for both of them. Abdullah gladly flung back the curtains of the booth. Cocks crowed in the distance. The sky was glowing blue, and shafts of strong sunlight sliced through the blue dust and old incense inside the booth. Even in that strong light, Abdullah failed to discover his nightcap. And he was more depressed than ever.

  “Tell me, do you sometimes find yourself unaccountably sad on some days?” he asked Jamal as the two of them sat cross-legged in the sun outside to eat.

  Jamal tenderly fed a piece of sugar pastry to his dog. “I would have been sad today,” he said, “but for you. I think someone paid those wretched boys to steal. They were so thorough. And on top of that, the Watch fined me. Did I say? I think I have enemies, my friend.”

  Though this confirmed Abdullah’s suspicions of the stranger who had sold him the carpet, it was not much help. “Maybe,” he said, “you should be more careful about whom you let your dog bite.”

  “Not I!” said Jamal. “I am a believer in free will. If my dog chooses to hate the whole human race except myself, it must be free to do so.”

  After breakfast Abdullah looked for his nightcap again. It was simply not there. He tried thinking carefully back to the last time he truly remembered wearing it. That was when he had lain down to sleep the previous night, when he was thinking of taking the carpet to the Grand Vizier. After that came the dream. He had found he was wearing the nightcap then. He remembered taking it off to show Flower-in-the-Night (what a lovely name!) that he was not bald. From then on, as far as he could recall, he had carried the nightcap in his hand until the moment when he had sat down beside her on the edge of the fountain. After that, when he recounted the history of his kidnapping by Kabul Aqba, he had a clear memory of waving both hands freely as he talked, and he knew that the nightcap had not been in either one. Things did disappear like that in dreams, he knew, but the evidence pointed, all the same, to his having dropped it as he sat down. Was it possible he had left it lying
on the grass beside the fountain? In which case—

  Abdullah stood stock-still in the center of the booth, staring into the rays of sunlight, which, oddly enough, no longer seemed full of squalid motes of dust and old incense. Instead, they were pure golden slices of heaven itself.

  “It was not a dream!” said Abdullah.

  Somehow his depression was clean gone. Even breathing was easier.

  “It was real!” he said.

  He went to stand thoughtfully looking down at the magic carpet. That had been in the dream, too. In which case—

  “It follows that you transported me to some rich man’s garden while I slept,” he said to it. “Perhaps I spoke and ordered you to do so in my sleep. Very likely. I was thinking of gardens. You are even more valuable than I realized!”

  Chapter 3