Princess of Dhagabad, The (21 page)

“Keep walking, princess,” Hasan whispers.
“Follow me.”

At the end of the passage, the cave opens
wide before them. A magnificent palace, with towers, balconies, and
passages connected to one another inside a single huge vault.
Looking more closely, the princess realizes the most unbelievable
thing: these buildings, passages, and walls are natural, as if this
mysterious temple was really created at the will of some ancient
gods. Myriads of torches provide carefully designed illumination
that leaves many places in deep shadow to enhance the mood of the
enormous space. The princess holds her breath in awe. She could
forever admire this magnificence, but Hasan, with a firm hand,
pulls her aside to one of the dark balconies.

“The ritual will begin any minute.” His
whisper is barely audible.

The music grows louder, echoing under the
arched stone ceiling. The princess can now see the musicians. Dark
skinned, in red ritual robes, they are standing in the shadows of
five immense columnlike stalagmites that grow out of the middle of
the floor and end with their sharp tips midway to the ceiling. The
light inside the columns is brighter than anywhere else, making the
columns look semitransparent. A carpet of leopard skins covers the
floor.

“Where are the others?” the princess
whispers.

“Those who are not part of the service are
sitting on balconies very nearby. So, if you don’t stop
talking…”

The princess wants to answer, but the words
freeze on her lips. Seven figures clad in white appear as if from
nowhere in the space in front of the columns.

“The high priests,” Hasan whispers.

The first priest is carrying a stone cup. A
blue liquid in the cup is glowing with a faint light similar to the
glow of the temple walls. The priest steps inside the ring of
columns and sets the cup on a stone pedestal. Standing behind the
cup, he turns to other priests and raises his hands.

“The release will now begin,” Hasan whispers.
“Look carefully.”

The seven white figures slowly move in a
strange dance in front of the glowing columns. Their movements are
so smooth that their bodies seem boneless, as they fold and bend to
the slow rhythm of the chant. The princess can now see that the
number of the priest-musicians is also seven and, as they chant,
they swing back and forth like tall grass in the wind.

The chant stops. At the sound of a loud
drumbeat, another white figure enters the circle to join the priest
with the cup. He dips his palms into the glowing liquid and puts
them on the second priest’s forehead. They hold still for a moment,
then the second priest, easily bending his slim body, bows down to
the cup to take a sip.

The drumbeat grows louder. The second priest
straightens up and raises his arms. Carefully stepping on the
leopard skins, he walks around the blue cup and sits, cross-legged,
to the right of the highest priest. And then, accompanied by the
drumbeat, the other six priests follow the same ritual, take their
places around the cup, and observe in silence how the highest
priest lays his hands on his own forehead and drinks the last sip
from the cup.

Chanting, the red priest musicians dance
smoothly around the motionless white figures. Censers bearers
appear from the shadows surrounding the center space, and the giant
cave gradually fills with sweet incense smoke. The princess feels
dizzy, and the figures of the white priests start swimming in front
of her eyes.

“Look!” Hasan whispers, grabbing her
hand.

The princess sits up, startled. The white
priests, sitting in meditation poses, are floating in the air,
spinning around the empty cup at the very tops of the stone
columns. Their bodies are relaxed, their eyes are closed, and their
white tunics sway to their slow circular movement. The chant and
drumbeat are rolling in waves, and the light from the torches is
pulsing to the rhythm. As the incense gathers in thick clouds
around the princess, she gradually sinks into a trance.

A bright flame suddenly bursts from the cup,
the torches go out and in the white light the circle of the priests
slowly descends to the leopard skins below. The last spark in the
cup burns down and everything sinks into darkness.

The princess feels Hasan’s strong arms lift
her from the stone floor, and he carries her up and along the
winding corridor. A fresh wind, splashes of icy water, and the
bright beams of mountain sun hit her face, returning her to her
senses.

“I must have fallen asleep, Hasan…”

“They have a reason for letting only the
initiated into the temple, princess. The incense is designed to
cloud your mind and you need to be accustomed to—”

“Does that mean I
dreamt
of the flying
priests, Hasan?”

“Why dreamt, princess? Their flight is the
most ordinary thing. The liquid in the cup released their souls and
they flew.”

“Their
souls
flew? What about their
bodies?”

“Did you see nothing, princess?”

“I saw something flying. If they were only
souls, by the way, I wouldn’t have seen them!”

“They were bodies, princess. There is nothing
impossible in flying. The Stiktian priests achieve it with the aid
of the drug in the cup. It takes much longer to learn the art of
flight without such aid.”

“Does that mean you can take a drug to learn
to fly?”

“You can, but then you will still have to
learn, and, besides, if you stop taking the drug, you’ll die.”

“Well…how long does it take to learn to fly
without the drug?”

“About sixty years, if you’re talented
enough.”

“You are always so impossible, Hasan! Sixty
is four times more than I am now! That means, if I start learning
now, I will become a flying old hag at best. No, thank you!”

“I have to admit, there’s truth in your
words, princess.”

“Could it be any other way, Hasan? Listen,
can you make me invisible to you?”

“Why would I do that, princess?”

“Well, I would very much like to take a swim
in this lake.”

You feel a new awakening to life, listening
to her merry laughter and the splashing of the cold water behind
you—as if her very presence, her joy at simple pleasures, her
hunger for knowledge, somehow give you back a part of your physical
existence. It’s as if being close to her you regain the ability to
feel that which you both neglected and cherished, that which you
have kept as the greatest of treasures and pushed away as a useless
toy long outgrown—the joy of physical existence, the taste of the
air you breathe, the cool freshness of the mountain waters, the
hard roughness of rocks warmed by the sun, the wondering at what
tomorrow will bring, and the pleasant anxiety of expectation.

Joy of life…that which comprises the life of
the young princess, the temporary mistress of your destiny who,
against logic, against the power of will, takes over more and more
space in your eternal mind. You realize that her wonder and
amazement at the sight of the Stiktian temple almost passed over to
you, making you, together with her, shiver with anticipation of the
Cult of Release—shiver in a long-forgotten way, highly improper
for a spirit.

Listening to the splashes and her screams of
joy—not having had the nerve to make her invisible in consideration
of unexpected danger—but keeping your promise not to turn your head
under any circumstances, ready to come to her rescue at any moment,
you gradually absorb yourself in thoughts of your existence.

Being a spirit, you are able to feel your
presence simultaneously in all the corners of the world. There are
no more distant forgotten places in your memory; you know
everything and remember everything you know at the same time with
the same clarity. This special faculty, which substitutes for all
physical perception, allows you to know everything that is
happening at this very moment in every corner of every kingdom,
city, town, and village. Depriving you of perception in the usual
sense, this power allows you at the same time to experience reality
in a new way. In taking the princess to the ancient Stiktian temple
that you haven’t visited for thousands of years, ever since the day
of your own initiation, you knew that the temple was not destroyed,
that it still stood as it was, and that there would be a ritual
performed there today. You knew it with the same certainty as you
know that today there is a big birthday celebration in Avallahaim,
where the young crown prince, Musa Jafar, has turned fifteen, as
you also know that the elderly sultan of Baskary has received as a
present today a new slave girl from Megina, as you know that there
will be an eclipse in Veridue in a week, and that the Veriduan
court sages haven’t been able to predict it yet…

You remember how at first this endless
knowledge felt like an enormous burden, making you despair at your
helplessness before it. How later you slowly started to come to
terms with your new life, enclosing yourself in new dimensions of
indifference to the earthly existence that rejected you, an
all-powerful, powerless slave. But now, serving the young princess
of Dhagabad, you start to feel a new awakening to an old interest,
to the pleasure of your endless knowledge that can be used, if for
nothing else, to teach the mysteries of the world to this small
human creature who is ready to absorb like a sponge everything your
powers can give her. Unwittingly, you feel your closeness to her,
the seamless unity between her eager interest, her irrepressible
curiosity, and your own—the curiosity you have believed long lost
to the ages…

You see in her the quintessence of that which
made you a djinn. And yet, remembering your life before the
terrible transformation, you cannot find in her those little things
which, as you now know, doomed you to your destiny even before you
realized how inevitable it was. Even then, you were already marked
by the higher signs that ruled over your destiny. You hardly had
time to choose the path of knowledge when, without even realizing
it, you had already doomed yourself to walking this path to its
end. Only now have you acquired the ability to judge the signs that
mark the future. Looking at your young mistress, the princess of
the fair city of Dhagabad, you cannot see in her any of those fatal
signs. As if she, in the naïveté of her purity, can touch the
highest mysteries without danger of being drawn into them. As if
her childish curiosity gives her the right to walk unmarked along
the way, which was so painful to the many sages and wizards gone
before. And, being close to her, you seem to gain this ability to
free yourself, at least for a while, from the burden of your power,
an equal partner in her games, like a carefree newborn child.

You hear the splashes behind your back
approaching the shore, the
crick-crack
of the pebbles on the
beach, a short laugh. You feel her mischievous pleasure in the
danger that you, in spite of your solemn oath, may turn your head
any minute and see her; and, at the same time, her calm certainty
that you would never do something like that. Sitting with your back
to her, you perceive her every movement better than any mortal
standing right in front of her would have—her nubile nakedness, the
sharp angles of her slim body that hasn’t yet acquired the fullness
of a grown woman, how she stands, wet after her swim, drying off in
the cool gentle mountain breeze, her downy skin covered with tiny
goosebumps. How she takes the comb out of her hair, letting her
heavy wet tresses fall in cascades almost to the ground, as she
glances cautiously at your turned back. How she squeezes the water
out of her hair, pulls it up again into some kind of an
arrangement, and how she now dresses herself, collecting her
garments scattered all over the pebbly beach. And how, finally, she
takes a few tentative steps in your direction, hurriedly looking
over her outfit for faults she would surely not want you to see,
and shyly calls out:

“
Hasan!”

Chapter 12. Dreams