Princess of Dhagabad, The (34 page)

“Mother!” the princess bursts out, forgetting
her duties with the gift of the Halabean prince, “can I marry
Prince Said? I have never seen anything so beautiful!”

“You cannot choose a husband by his gifts,
princess,” the sultaness says firmly, “it has to be someone you can
spend your life with.”

“Look how handsome Prince Said is,” the
princess insists, forgetting how long it took the State Council of
Dhagabad to reach a decision about her future husband. “He looks
like a real warrior and the ruler of his people!”

“But, princess—” the sultaness hesitates for
a moment and finally names what she believes to be the real reason
for the impossibility of this marriage “—Halaby has a very small
army. It is a mountain land and it has no border with Dhagabad. On
the other hand, the union of Dhagabad and Veridue would be
practically invincible. Besides,” she says, concluding her
strategic speech, “the best minds in all of Dhagabad came to the
decision about your suitor, and it is not our place to discuss
it!”

“What if prince Amir is ugly, mother?” the
princess asks, giving up.

“We are not giving you away as a concubine.”
The sultaness shrugs her shoulders at the ridiculous thought,
having by now completely convinced herself that prince Amir is the
perfect match for her daughter. “If you don’t like him, you won’t
have to see him at all.”

Another sigh runs through the crowd when the
white feather bends to the side, and the Halabean banner slowly and
sadly moves to the palace gate.

“The Caliph of Megina, Abu Alim Agabei!” is
the next to be announced.

A fat, cheery little man with an enormous
mustache bursts forth in a complicated series of bows before the
balcony, and the princess again brings the scarf to her face to
hide her smile.

“Caliph Agabei puts beauty before all virtues
and dance before all arts. The caliph brings before the princess a
perfect creation of the gods that combines these two virtues. This
dancing girl is beautiful as houri and as skillful as the ancient
goddesses of dance.”

Again the slaves pull off the cover, this
time to reveal a woman’s slim dark body, clad with well-designed
negligence in narrow strips of soft fabric.

In her movements, the dancer resembles a
snake. Her body shifts so smoothly that the spectators sink into a
kind of trance. Sharp sounds of the zither frame the softness of
the dance, just as a hard metal setting can frame the deep soft
glow of a gemstone. Only with the final sharp chord does the
dancing girl stand still before the balcony, so the princess can
take a close look at her. At first she appears very young—a tender
childlike face with huge eyes and a full mouth, an unusually thin
yet strong boyish figure, black hair scattered in many braids along
her back, and dark skin like that of a Ghullian slave girl. But as
she looks more closely, the princess seems to see in the girl’s
eyes and in her flowing grace, a strange quality that resembles the
ancient murals of the Dance of the Great Goddess entombed inside
the pyramid in the desert land of Aeth. Shivering at the mixture of
scorn and impassiveness this goddess of dance bears on her face,
the princess comes to her senses and hurriedly shakes her head to
reject the marriage proposal of the cheery lover of arts from
Megina. Even then, as the procession from Megina moves away,
throwing back glances full of polite disappointment, something in
the eyes of the caliph and his dancer slave makes her uneasy and
she is relieved at the sound of the next announcement:

“Prince Amir of Veridue!”

The princess sits up straight. Whatever her
future husband is like, he should see her as a majestic and
beautiful daughter of a sultan, not as a little girl frightened by
a strange, fat, cheery little man. She slowly raises her eyes to
look at her chosen suitor, and, fixing her gaze upon him, she
forgets for a moment the palace plaza, the crowd, the fancy speech
of the master of ceremonies…

Prince Amir looks exactly as she imagined a
perfect prince should look. She sees a handsome, stately young man,
just a little bit older than herself, surrounded by a magnificent
glow, the very essence of majesty and ease of manner characteristic
of a born ruler. His rich garments embroidered with gold and a
saber in a gem-set scabbard at his side enhance his aura of
nobility. The direct gaze of his dark eyes is set right on the
princess, bearing the winning expression of admiration with which a
conqueror looks at a beautiful city he has just taken. It seems to
the princess that prince Amir has no doubt that the princess likes
him more than any other suitor, and that if she rejects him it
would be done not because of his personal qualities, but only
because of matters of state. The princess feels so affected by his
confidence that she is ready to give in completely, overwhelmed
with her admiration for his looks and manners. She blushes deeply
under his gaze.

The prince turns to his suite and she regains
her senses, able to hear once again the words directed at the
balcony.

“Prince Amir brings before the
princess…”

After all the treasures that have been
offered to her, the gifts of prince Amir don’t seem so
special—three boxes of old craftsmanship filled with black, pink,
and white sea pearls. As far as she remembers from her geography
lessons, Veridue has access to the sea, making it especially
advantageous for Dhagabad and Veridue to join forces. It would have
been strange for her if she had known then that she herself would
become the means to achieving this union. She slides her eyes with
indifference over the rest of the Veriduan gifts: a precious
necklace, in which the sparkle of large diamonds is carefully
matched by the smooth shine of pearls, amazingly round and even,
somewhat resembling peas in the pod; and, of course, books—ancient
volumes bound in gold-carved wood, with age-yellowed pages. The
first book is called
How to Overcome a Djinn
and the
princess feels uneasy. How would Hasan live with her in a country
where people dislike djinns so much?

But the decision is already made for her, and
she solemnly bows her head in acceptance. The white ostrich feather
leans forward, opening wide before the expectant crowd. The
fanfares sound, and the herald announces:

“Hail, Prince Amir of Veridue, the chosen
suitor of the princess of Dhagabad!”

The yelling of the crowd sweeps across the
balcony. Prince Amir walks up the stairs as the sultan and the
sultaness rise to meet him. Two slave girls help the princess up
from her pillows and, as a token of their engagement, the prince
puts the Veriduan necklace around her neck.

The rest of the ceremony reaches the princess
through a growing numbness—more speeches and gestures, the shouting
of the crowd, voices, hands embracing her, polite congratulations
from the splendid young men of Prince Amir’s suite. Automatically
answering everyone, the princess cannot wait to leave the balcony,
to retreat to the safety of her chambers, to recover, and to
prepare herself for the ceremonial feast. Although she has known
since early morning that she would be engaged to Prince Amir, she
cannot get rid of the feeling that just now something in her life
has come to an end.

You will never be able to forget your end—the
page of an open book on the desk in front of you shining with a
faint, mysterious glow that indicates the presence of the greatest
secrets of magic. The flame of a single candle quivers and fades
before the sacred glow of the book. You are carefully reading the
complicated array of symbols—a magic language of the highest level.
You can clearly see the end of the page in front of you and you
know that it is the end of the book; but still you raise your hand
to turn the glowing page, hoping for more knowledge. With every
word you read you reconsider every aspect of your existence. You
know that you have already passed through every possible stage of
dependence, attachment, affection, disdain, and indifference, and
there is nothing more to separate you from eternity. And yet you
want more. You search with your hungry mind for new knowledge yet
undiscovered as you finish the last words of the book in front of
you…

Shafts of lightning strike you from all
sides, piercing your body with terrible pain. They meet somewhere
in the center of your being, then fly apart in waves of
energy—turning your body to ashes, leaving only a pile of dust in
the place where you have just been. You feel every moment of your
burning, torturing every bit of your body that no longer exists,
but you don’t die. Burning with an unearthly flame, you keep
seeing, as if looking from afar, the open book, the lifeless candle
on the desk, the pile of ashes that was your body just now—ashes
that rise with the blasts of wind coming out of nowhere, slowly
curling into a bigger, more substantial shape, resembling…

A molded bronze bottle.

You see the mouth of the bottle moving
straight at you; you see darkness itself gaping at you from the
depths of this newly created container. You see yourself,
surrounded by bronze walls that crowd and press you much too
tightly for your mighty spirit. You see your room filled with books
fall apart around you into endless dunes. You feel yourself
burning, feel the shafts of lightning inside your mortal body. You
look with terror as the wind hurls hot sand at you; and you feel
the sand go through your body as through thin air, making you
writhe in pain with every grain of its fiery-hot surface…trying in
vain to find a place to hide from the deadly crimson light coming
straight at you from the merciless sun.

You realize with terrifying finality that you
have learned all there is to know of the world, that your physical
existence has ended, that the prophecies of the Dimeshqian
labyrinth and the Agritian scroll have turned out to be true, and
that you are not a wizard or mage anymore, but an all-powerful
spirit that since time immemorial has been known by a strange,
mysterious, gently ringing name—djinn…

Chapter 21. Crimson Flash

The desert surrounds her, and yet she can
hear tinkling of water, the singing of birds, the rustling of giant
leaves; she can smell the sweet aroma of exotic flowers. She is
walking toward the temple; her feet are not sinking into the
sand.

The cool shade of the temple covers her.
Walking up the wide rough steps, she feels drawn inevitably into
the soft semidarkness of the columned gallery hiding the entrance.
If she were to look behind her, she would see a magnificent garden
surrounding the temple; but she cannot draw her eyes away from the
transparent blackness where she can guess the outline of an arched
gateway and heavy doors standing ajar. She smiles, remembering how,
in the past, she could not make it into the temple. She easily
steps inside.

The light that streams into the temple from
high, arched windows falls upon the center of the great hall—its
walls invisible behind rows of columns on three sides. She is
standing between two columns under the low roof of the gallery,
gazing into the half-lighted expanse under the huge dome, trying to
see him. But he is nowhere. Looking ahead, she sees a dusty sunbeam
falling on a bronze bottle, standing on a carpet beside a prayer
niche. And then music starts, barely audible, floating upward into
the heights of the great dome.

She feels she must go deeper into the hall to
the bottle, but an invisible wall prevents her from stepping into
the hall. As she helplessly rushes back and forth between the
columns, trying to find an entrance, she sees the bottle starting
to open like a giant flower, turning into a massive bronze cup.
Soft light pours out of the cup toward her; she must at any cost
catch this light in her palms; but it scatters before reaching her.
Gathering all her strength, she throws herself against the
invisible wall.