Castle in the Air Read online

  Here Abdullah was somewhat amazed to discover that he, really and truly, did love Flower-in-the-Night just as ardently as he had been telling himself he did—or more, because he now saw he respected her. He knew he would die without her. And if he agreed to marry these two fat nieces, he would be without her. She would call him greedy, like the Prince in Ochinstan.

  “I am very sorry,” he said above the loud sobbings. “You should really have consulted me first about this, O relatives of my father’s first wife, O much honored and most honest Justice. It would have saved this misunderstanding. I cannot marry yet. I have made a vow.”

  “What vow?” demanded everyone else, the fat brides included, and the Justice added, “Have you registered this vow? To be legal, all vows must be registered with a magistrate.”

  This was awkward. Abdullah thought rapidly. “Indeed, it is registered, O veritable weighing scale of judgment,” he said. “My father took me to a magistrate to register the vow when he ordered me to make it. I was but a small child at the time. Though I did not understand then, I see now it was because of the prophecy. My father, being a prudent man, did not wish to see his forty gold coins wasted. He made me vow that I would never marry until Fate had placed me above all others in this land. So you see”—Abdullah put his hands in the sleeves of his best suit and bowed regretfully to the two fat brides—“I cannot yet marry you, twin plums of candied sugar, but the time will come.”

  Everyone said, “Oh, in that case!” in various tones of discontent, and to Abdullah’s profound relief, most of them turned away from him.

  “I always thought your father was a rather grasping man,” Fatima added.

  “Even from beyond the grave,” Assif agreed. “We must wait for this dear boy’s elevation then.”

  The Justice, however, stood his ground. “And which magistrate was it, before whom you made this vow?” he asked.

  “I do not know his name,” Abdullah invented, speaking with intense regret. He was sweating. “I was a tiny child, and he appeared to me an old man with a long white beard.” That, he thought, would serve as a description of every magistrate there ever was, including the Justice standing before him.

  “I shall have to check all records,” the Justice said irritably. He turned to Assif, Hakim, and Fatima and—rather coldly—made his formal good-byes.

  Abdullah left with him, almost clinging to the Justice’s official sash in his hurry to get away from the emporium and the two fat brides.

  Chapter 5

  Which tells how Flower-in-the-Night’s father wished to raise Abdullah above all others in the land.

  “What a day!” Abdullah said to himself when he was back inside his booth at last. “If my luck goes on this way, I will not be surprised if I never get the carpet to move again!” Or, he thought as he lay down on the carpet, still dressed in his best, he might get to the night garden only to find that Flower-in-the-Night was too annoyed at his stupidity last night to love him anymore. Or she might love him still but have decided not to fly away with him. Or…

  It took him a while to get to sleep.

  But when he woke, everything was perfect. The carpet was just gliding to a gentle landing on the moonlit bank. So Abdullah knew he had said the command word after all, and it was such a short while since he had said it that he almost had a memory of what it was. But it went clean out of his head when Flower-in-the-Night came running eagerly toward him, among the white scented flowers and the round yellow lamps.

  “You’re here!” she called as she ran. “I was quite worried!”

  She was not angry. Abdullah’s heart sang. “Are you ready to leave?” he called back. “Jump on beside me.”

  Flower-in-the-Night laughed delightedly—it was definitely no giggle—and came running on across the lawn. The moon seemed just then to go behind a cloud because Abdullah saw her lit entirely by the lamps for a moment, golden and eager, as she ran. He stood up and held out his hands to her.

  As he did so, the cloud came right down into the lamplight. And it was not a cloud but great black leathery wings, silently beating. A pair of equally leathery arms, with hands that had long fingernails like claws, reached from the shadow of those fanning wings and wrapped themselves around Flower-in-the-Night. Abdullah saw her jerk as those arms stopped her running. She looked around and up. Whatever she saw made her scream, one single wild, frantic scream, which was cut off when one of the leathery arms changed position to clap its huge taloned hand over her face. Flower-in-the-Night beat at the arm with her fists, and kicked and struggled, but all quite uselessly. She was lifted up, a small white figure against the huge blackness. The great wings silently beat again. A gigantic foot, with talons like the hands, pressed the turf a yard or so from the bank where Abdullah was still in the act of standing up, and a leathery leg flexed mighty calf muscles as the thing—whatever it was—sprang upright. For the merest instant Abdullah found himself staring into a hideous leathery face with a ring through its hooked nose and long, upslanting eyes, remote and cruel. The thing was not looking at him. It was simply concentrating on getting itself and its captive airborne.

  The next second it was aloft. Abdullah saw it overhead for a heartbeat longer, a mighty flying djinn dangling a tiny, pale human girl in its arms. Then the night swallowed it up. It all had happened unbelievably quickly.

  “After it! Follow that djinn!” Abdullah ordered the carpet.

  The carpet seemed to obey. It bellied up from the bank. Then, almost as if someone had given it another command, it sank back and lay still.

  “You moth-eaten doormat!” Abdullah screamed at it.

  There was a shout from farther down the garden. “This way, men! That scream came from up there!”

  Along the arcade Abdullah glimpsed moonlight on metal helmets and—worse still—golden lamplight on swords and crossbows. He did not wait to explain to these people why he had screamed. He flung himself flat on the carpet.

  “Back to the booth!” he whispered to it. “Quickly! Please!”

  This time the carpet obeyed, as quickly as it had the night before.

  It was up off the bank in an eye blink and then hurtling sideways across a forbiddingly high wall. Abdullah had just a glimpse of a large party of northern mercenaries milling around in the lamp-lit garden before he was speeding above the sleeping roofs and moonlit towers of Zanzib. He had barely time to reflect that Flower-in-the-Night’s father must be even richer than he had thought—few people could afford that many hired soldiers, and mercenaries from the north were the most expensive kind—before the carpet planed downward and brought him smoothly in through the curtains to the middle of his booth.

  There he gave himself up to despair.

  A djinn had stolen Flower-in-the-Night and the carpet had refused to follow. He knew that was not surprising. A djinn, as everyone in Zanzib knew, commanded enormous powers in the air and the earth. No doubt the djinn had, as a precaution, ordered everything in the garden to stay where it was while he carried Flower-in-the-Night away. It had probably not even noticed the carpet, or Abdullah on it, but the carpet’s lesser magic had been forced to give way to the djinn’s command. So the djinn had stolen away Flower-in-the-Night, whom Abdullah loved more than his own soul, just at the moment when she was about to run into his arms, and there seemed nothing he could do.

  He wept.

  After that he vowed to throw away all the money hidden in his clothes. It was useless to him now. But before he did, he gave himself over to grief again, noisy misery at first, in which he lamented out loud and beat his breast in the manner of Zanzib; then, as cocks crowed and people began moving about, he fell into silent despair. There was no point even in moving. Other people might bustle about and whistle and clank buckets, but Abdullah was no longer part of that life. He stayed crouching on the magic carpet, wishing he were dead.

  So miserable was he that it never occurred to him that he might be in any danger himself. He paid no attention when all the noises in the Bazaar stopp
ed, like birds when a hunter enters a wood. He did not really notice the heavy marching of feet or the regular clank-clank-clank of mercenary armor that went with it. When someone barked “Halt!” outside his booth, he did not even turn his head. But he did turn around when the curtains of the booth were torn down. He was sluggishly surprised. He blinked his swollen eyes against the powerful sunlight and wondered vaguely what a troop of northern soldiers was doing coming in here.

  “That’s him,” said someone in civilian clothes, who might have been Hakim, and then faded prudently away before Abdullah’s eyes could focus on him.

  “You!” snapped the squad leader. “Out. With us.”

  “What?” said Abdullah.

  “Fetch him,” said the leader.

  Abdullah was bewildered. He protested feebly when they dragged him to his feet and twisted his arms to make him walk. He went on protesting as they marched him at the double—clank-clank, clank-clank—out of the Bazaar and into the West Quarter. Before long he was protesting very strongly indeed. “What is this?” he panted. “I demand… as a citizen… where we are… going!”

  “Shut up. You’ll see,” they answered. They were too fit to pant.

  A short while after, they ran Abdullah in under a massive gate made of blocks of stone that glared white in the sun, into a blazing courtyard, where they spent five minutes outside an ovenlike smithy loading Abdullah with chains. He protested even more. “What is this for? Where is this? I demand to know!”

  “Shut up!” said the squad leader. He remarked to his second-in-command in his barbarous northern accent, “They always winge so, these Zanzibbeys. Got no notion of dignity.”

  While the squad leader was saying this, the smith—who was from Zanzib, too—murmured to Abdullah, “The Sultan wants you. I don’t think much of your chances, either. Last one I chained like this got crucified.”

  “But I haven’t done anyth— ” protested Abdullah.

  “SHUT UP!” screamed the squad leader. “Finished, smith? Right. On the double!” And they ran Abdullah off again, across the glaring yard and into the large building beyond.

  Abdullah would have said it was impossible even to walk in those chains. They were so heavy. But it is wonderful what you can do if a party of grim-faced soldiers is quite set on making you do it. He ran, clank-chankle, clank-chankle, clash, until at last, with an exhausted jingle, he arrived at the foot of a high raised seat made of cool blue and gold tiles and piled with cushions. There the soldiers all went down on one knee, in a distant, decorous way, as northern soldiers did to the person who was paying them.

  “Present prisoner Abdullah, m’lord Sultan,” the squad leader said.

  Abdullah did not kneel. He followed the customs of Zanzib and fell on his face. Besides, he was exhausted and it was easier to fall down with a mighty clatter than do anything else. The tiled floor was blessedly, wonderfully cool.

  “Make the son of a camel’s excrement kneel,” said the Sultan. “Make the creature look us in the face.” His voice was low, but it trembled with anger.

  A soldier hauled on the chains, and two others pulled on Abdullah’s arms until they had got him sort of bent on his knees. They held him that way, and Abdullah was glad. He would have crumpled up in horror otherwise. The man lounging on the tiled throne was fat and bald and wore a bushy gray beard. He was slapping at a cushion, in a way that looked idle but was really bitterly angry, with a white cotton thing that had a tassel on top. It was this tasseled thing that made Abdullah see what trouble he was in. The thing was his own nightcap.

  “Well, dog from a muck heap,” said the Sultan, “where is my daughter?”

  “I have no idea,” Abdullah said miserably.

  “Do you deny,” said the Sultan, dangling the nightcap as if it were a severed head he was holding up by its hair, “do you deny that this is your nightcap? Your name is inside it, you miserable salesman! It was found by me—by us in person!—inside my daughter’s trinket box, along with eighty-two portraits of common persons, which had been hidden by my daughter in eighty-two cunning places. Do you deny that you crept into my night garden and presented my daughter with these portraits? Do you deny that you then stole my daughter away?”

  “Yes, I do deny that!” said Abdullah. “I do not deny, O most exalted defender of the weak, the nightcap or the pictures—although I must point out that your daughter is cleverer in hiding than you are in finding, great wielder of wisdom, for I gave her, in fact, one hundred and seven more pictures than you have discovered—but I have most certainly not stolen Flower-in-the-Night away. She was snatched from before my very eyes by a huge and hideous djinn. I have no more idea than your most celestial self where she is now.”

  “A likely story!” said the Sultan. “Djinn indeed! Liar! Worm!”

  “I swear that it is true!” Abdullah cried out. He was in such despair by now that he hardly cared what he said. “Get any holy object you like, and I will swear to the djinn on it. Have me enchanted to tell the truth, and I will still say the same, O mighty crusher of criminals. For it is the truth. And since I am probably far more desolated than yourself by the loss of your daughter, great Sultan, glory of our land, I implore you to kill me now and spare me a life of misery!”

  “I will willingly have you executed,” said the Sultan. “But first tell me where she is.”

  “But I have told you, wonder of the world!” said Abdullah. “I do not know where she is.”

  “Take him away,” the Sultan said with great calmness to his kneeling soldiers. They sprang up readily and pulled Abdullah to his feet. “Torture the truth out of him,” the Sultan added. “When we find her, you can kill him, but have him linger until then. I daresay the Prince of Ochinstan will accept her as a widow if I double the dowry.”

  “You mistake, sovereign of sovereigns!” Abdullah gasped as the soldiers clattered him across the tiles. “I have no idea where the djinn went, and my great sorrow is that he took her before we had any chance to get married.”

  “What?” shouted the Sultan. “Bring him back!” The soldiers at once trailed Abdullah and his chains back to the tiled seat, where the Sultan was now leaning forward and glaring. “Did my clean ear become soiled by hearing you say you are not married to my daughter, filth?” he demanded.

  “That is correct, mighty monarch,” said Abdullah. “The djinn came before we could elope.”

  The Sultan glared down at him in what seemed to be horror. “This is the truth?”

  “I swear,” said Abdullah, “that I have not yet so much as kissed your daughter. I had intended to seek out a magistrate as soon as we were far from Zanzib. I know what is proper. But I also felt it proper to make sure first that Flower-in-the-Night indeed wished to marry me. Her decision struck me as made in ignorance, despite the hundred and eighty-nine pictures. If you will forgive my saying so, protector of patriots, your method of bringing up your daughter is decidedly unsound. She took me for a woman when she first saw me.”

  “So,” said the Sultan musingly, “when I set soldiers to catch and kill the intruder in the garden last night, it could have been disastrous. You fool,” he said to Abdullah, “slave and mongrel who dares to criticize! Of course I had to bring my daughter up as I did. The prophecy made at her birth was that she would marry the first man, apart from me, that she saw!”

  Despite the chains, Abdullah straightened up. For the first time that day he felt a twinge of hope.

  The Sultan was staring down the gracefully tiled and ornamented room, thinking. “The prophecy suited me very well,” he remarked. “I had long wished for an alliance with the countries of the north, for they have better weapons than we can make here, some of those weapons being truly sorcerous, I understand. But the princes of Ochinstan are very hard to pin down. So all I had to do—so I thought—was to isolate my daughter from any possibility of seeing a man—and naturally give her the best of educations otherwise, to make sure she could sing and dance and make herself pleasing to a prince. Then, when my
daughter was of marriageable age, I invited the Prince here on a visit of state. He was to come here next year, when he had finished subduing a land he has just conquered with those same excellent weapons. And I knew that as soon as my daughter set eyes on him, the prophecy would make sure that I had him!” His eyes turned balefully down on Abdullah. “Then my plans are upset by an insect like you!”

  “That is unfortunately true, most prudent of rulers,” Abdullah admitted. “Tell me, is this Prince of Ochinstan by any chance somewhat old and ugly?”

  “I believe him to be hideous in the same northern fashion as these mercenaries,” the Sultan said, at which Abdullah sensed the soldiers, most of whom ran to freckles and reddish hair, stiffened. “Why do you ask, dog?”