Authors: Richard Wormser
Time to see what Ghamal had in mind for Osman.
7
T
hey were in the Prince’s tent, sitting on leather-covered cushions and sipping grape juice. I didn’t test the juice to see if it had begun to turn; when I find a good Moslem drinking wine, I am supposed to report it to the Seal of Suleyman, and it has always seemed to me that the Great Prophet was thinking of something else when he forbade our people to drink wine until they get to Paradise.
Ghamal was thanking Prince Osman for his help in the capture of Karim.
Osman the Sturdy waved the thanks away. “It was nothing. My men grow rusty for lack of action.” He smiled, a smile I wouldn’t care to have aimed at me. “They’d have had exercise today if you had let me summon them! I’d have captured Bagdad, and the girl with it, and had done with this nonsense of waiting and scheming like rats in a palace wall.”
Personally I have never encountered scheming rats, but he made his point clear enough.
Ghamal bowed, and locked his hands together in front of him. “Your might and prowess are well known, O Prince. But a taken princess is small comfort for a warrior’s couch.”
Prince Osman shrugged. “There are dancing girls and concubines to make up that sort of loss, Vizier. But I am third from the throne of Mossul. If I’m to be a sultan, Baghdad is my chance.”
Ghamal nodded. “Again, O Prince, a captured city is small joy to rule over. Take Baghdad with the Sultan’s consent, and live in peace and plenty.”
Prince Osman came to the point. “How?”
Ghamal smiled. If Prince Osman’s smile was bloodcurdling, Ghamal’s was greasy as a Syrian undershirt. “By marrying the Princess Amina. My Sultan Abdir has promised Baghdad to her husband.”
“You saw today,” Prince Osman said. “The girl will have none of me. She is a fool, Vizier.”
“But fair. But shapely. And with Baghdad for a dowry.”
Prince Osman said: “All right. I’ll whistle out my troops; and with a scimitar point at her father’s throat and another at her own, she’ll tell the imam that she takes me for her husband; and we’ll have done with this palace fiddle-faddling.”
Whatever ladies he finally married, they’d see little of him, and that was plain; he was the horse-racing, gazelle-hunting type of husband. Maybe that would be a dispensation for his wives.
Ghamal said: “There are easier ways; and as I said, more pleasant results.”
The Grand Vizier was flirting with dismemberment; Prince Osman was restive. His strong fingers played with the pearl-studded hilt of his sword. “Speak!”
Ghamal could see it was time to stop toying with the noble temper. He reached under his robe and brought out a little crystal vial. “This in her coffee,” he said. “And the lady loves you for all of eternity.”
“A long time,” Prince Osman said. He reached out and took the little bottle. “A love potion?”
Ghamal nodded smugly.
“I’ve heard of such,” Prince Osman said. “But never seen it. You’re sure?”
“All four of my wives were gotten that way,” Ghamal said, “and twenty-two—no, twenty-three other ladies. Proud ladies, noble ladies, but after a few drops of that, glad to serve as concubines in my harem.”
“You must really be bleeding the Sultan, to maintain that large a harem.”
“I do my best,” Ghamal said, and then, remembering that he was talking to the next Sultan of Baghdad, he looked a little sick.
But Prince Osman didn’t seem to notice. He turned the vial this way and that, to make it catch the light. It shone like a monstrous diamond. “We’ll try it,” he said, “and if it doesn’t work, my soldiers are still there.” He laughed. “Eternal devotion, eh? Doesn’t it get to be a nuisance, O Vizier?”
Ghamal said: “When it does, a few drops to another maiden relieves the monotony. Keep the bottle, O Prince; there is a vat of the stuff in my house.”
Prince Osman was still playing with the vial, making it sparkle. “You’re an unusual fellow, O Vizier,” he said idly. “Do you have many of these playthings around?”
“Playthings, O noble Prince?”
“As I say, I am third from the throne of Mossul. It will be nice to be Sultan of Baghdad; but it would be nicer still to combine the ancient lands of Baghdad and Mossul under one throne—and one Grand Vizier. Eh?”
“I shall consult my privy alchemist, O Prince.”
“Do so, do so . . . Ho, captain of the guard!”
At the Prince’s sudden shout, Ghamal leaped away from him in fright. An experienced jinni could tell that the unholy alliance between these two would be shortlived; in less than a year one would poison, stab or strangle the other. But not everybody is fortunate enough to have a jinni’s lofty point of view.
The Mossul captain who answered Prince Osman’s shout was a big fellow, broad in the shoulders, bowed in the legs, with long, drooping mustaches and no beard. A scimitar-shaped gold pin fastened his turban in front, his only ornament. He bowed to his Prince.
“A dancing girl here,” Prince Osman said.
“At once, O Prince.”
“Go—no wait. You’d like one too, my Vizier?”
Ghamal said: “No thanks, O Prince.”
“Of course, of course, you have obligations at home, you told me. One dancing girl then, captain.”
The captain saluted and left. I floated over to a spare pillow, and rested on it; it’s tiring to stay in midair for very long, unless you’re traveling some place.
It wasn’t more than a minute before the burly soldier was back. He held the flap of the tent back, and a girl strode in, walking with the long, lithe stride of a trained dancer. A nugget of pure gold winked in her navel; I wondered how she held it there. She bowed deep to the Prince. “Your Noble Highness wishes to be entertained?”
Prince Osman frowned on the captain of his bodyguard. “This is the girl Lydya that I bought from the Emir of Cairo! I want a wild dancing girl, recently captured!”
The captain didn’t quail before the royal frown. I suspected that he wasn’t too happy with this chamberlainish job; he looked better suited to lead a troop of fighting Bedouins. “Your Highness has only to command,” he said. “Come, Lydya.”
The girl glared at the three men, and started for the tent flap. Prince Osman said: “Hold, then. Captain, when are you off duty?”
“At the next turning of the glass, O Prince.”
“Lydya, no use your wasting the night. Go to the captain’s tent and await him. I, Prince Osman of Mossul, command it.”
Lydya suddenly and quietly winked at the captain. Then she bowed deep, her gold nugget winking in the lamplight. “The royal command is always my wish, O Prince. Though I’ll be poor company, crying the night through from being deprived of your princely grace, O Noble Highness!”
Osman the Sturdy preened himself, and said: “Console her as best you can, captain.”
“To hear the royal voice is to obey, O Prince.” And the captain followed the girl out of the tent. I suspected that if it ever came to war between Mossul and Baghdad, the captain of the royal bodyguard would be amenable to words whispered in his ear; and I was glad again that I had not allowed Osman to become sultan. A man who couldn’t command loyalty from his own bodyguard could never rule my tumultuous city.
When the captain came back the next time, he was followed by two tall Bedouin troopers. He needed them; the girl between them was a mountain Berber, with eyes like blue ice and hair yellow as saffroned rice. She weighed a quarter of the bulk of the men holding her, but they were just barely succeeding in keeping her from escaping.
One of them had a long tear in his uniform cloak, and the other had a scratch running from his right eye, across his nose, and down to his mouth.
Prince Osman said: “You could have bathed her, captain.”
The captain asked quietly: “How?”
His prince said: “I see your point . . . Well, Vizier, here we test your potion.” He looked around, saw a cup of Turkish coffee—cold—and poured a few drops from the vial. “Enough, Ghamal?”
“Ample, Your Highness.”
“Captain, get behind the mountain cat, and hold her mouth open.”
The captain looked unhappy—he was saving his strength for other things—but he obeyed the princely command. The troopers held her arms, the captain locked one brawny arm around her throat, and used the fingers of his other hand to press her cheeks in till her mouth opened. But when the Prince approached, she swung at him with her feet; the Grand Vizier Ghamal got the undignified job of holding her ankles.
The Prince poured the doctored coffee into her mouth and then pinched her lips and nose shut with his fingers. She had to swallow.
The blue ice turned to blue fire; her muscles relaxed. After a moment, Prince Osman signaled to his men to let her go. They did, but one of the troopers kept his hand on his sword hilt, I noticed.
The girl moved forward like a roe deer on spring grass. She raised her graceful—though filthy—arms. Slowly her hands came down and rested on the Prince’s face, slowly her fine fingers caressed his cheeks. Then the rest of her moved in on him, hips first, then knees and bosom until all of her was pressed against him, gently undulating.
It was enough to make an Arabian jinni blush. It did.
Prince Osman unwound her hands, which were now around his neck. “Go!” he commanded. He pointed to a Persian rug hung from the ceiling of the tent to make an inner room. “There is water in there, oil, myrrh to anoint yourself with. Go! You are not fit to entertain a prince as you now are.”
The girl slowly unwound herself from around him. She bowed, deeper than any courtier. “To hear the words is to die rather than disobey them,” she said. Her Arabic had a Berber accent, but it was understandable. “I go. But hasten after me, O princely lover, lest I die from longing.” And she undulated toward the hanging rug.
Prince Osman waved the three soldiers out of the tent. Then he picked up the vial again; he’d had to lay it down to choke the girl into swallowing her potion. He looked at the vial a good, long time; then he looked at Ghamal. Then, almost absent-mindedly, he started stripping the jeweled rings off his fingers. He collected them all in one hand, walked over to Ghamal, and dumped the rings into the Grand Vizier’s greedily spread palms. “Go, Ghamal,” he said, “we’ll talk again tomorrow.”
Ghamal bowed and left. I left, too, but not before changing the liquid in the vial to something else, something I materialized out of my wicked memory. I’d never made any before, but the Jinni of Karachi had taught me how, a couple of hundred years before. I have a very good memory.
8
I
n the morning—after I had materialized long enough to eat a dish of lentils and eggs in the bazaar—I floated out to the Sultan’s Mills to see how Karim was making out.
Not well. As I drifted through the high iron bars that made a cage of the Mills and the surrounding land, I could hear whips cracking and men groaning. It occurred to me that I had been a little harsh in letting Karim go to the Mills just because he had spoken disrespectfully of me and refused to take my advice about donning the pilgrim’s robes . . .
I found him on top of an oil press. A dozen prisoners were pushing the big upper stone of the press around by shoving their bodies against the arm of a long sweep; Karim, because of his amazing agility, had been selected to dance on the olives as they went down into the press. It was a job allowing no rest and it was a job that offered great danger; it would be easy to feed that monstrous press a toe instead of an olive.
Above all, standing on a platform that did not revolve with the rest of the press, were two overseers with long whips. But I noticed with satisfaction that they hardly glanced at my boy, Karim; he was a man who would do his hard and difficult labor without whipping.
A bell rang, announcing the end of the first four-hour shift of the day; there were four of these altogether, I remembered from earlier visits to the Mills; a long day for the prisoners. The overseers furled their whips, the prisoners stopped pushing the sweep, and the press slowly came to a halt. Karim dropped down from his perch, and joined the other prisoners for their ration of a few dates, a few cured olives and a draft of water.
Going behind the press, I materialized as another prisoner, ragged and dirty and hungry-looking. When I came back, Karim was sitting with his back against an oil jar, munching his dates and drinking his water out of its unglazed pot. I sat down next to him. “Next time I tell you to wear something, you’ll wear it.”
He looked at me. “Are you the Jinni? You look different.”
“I look like what I have to look like. So long as it is male.” Just to prove who I was I dematerialized my nose for a moment.
Karim said: “All right, all right, I believe you. Have some dates?”
And he offered me some of his scanty ration. I kept myself from shuddering; they were tenth-rate dates from some Syrian caravan. Instead I handed him a package of
rahat lakhoum;
I’d remembered to buy an ample supply in the bazaar.
He said: “Jinni, Jinni, your long life is likely to end if these men see that. The prisoners are starving here; they’d kill the Sultan for a piece of
rahat lakhoum.”
“This is fresh from the factory. You’d better eat it. Divided, it wouldn’t go very far.”
He nodded, and put a piece of sweetmeat in his mouth. “Good,” he said. “You don’t propose to stay here, do you, O Jinni? I thought not. So, if you’re coming back, I’d appreciate it if you’d let me know if Malek is making out all right, while I’m away. My brother’s not very practical.”
“And the Lady Amina? Don’t you want to know how she is faring?”
Munching, he nodded. “That’s right. Palaces and royal tents are as open to you as the bazaar, aren’t they? Yes, as you very well know from your spying, I am interested in the Lady Amina.”
“Interested is a mild word.”
“Spying is a very mild word for what you were doing. But I have been taught to respect old age.”
“Quite right, too.” I popped a piece of
rahat lakhoum
in my mouth and looked at him. His face was lined with the work he’d been doing, and he’d been there hardly any time at all. “You’re a strange fellow, Karim. In all my years I’ve never visited a prisoner before who didn’t ask me to get him out, first thing.”