Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights (36 page)

And it was from this chair that he issued the following challenge to his female adversary:
Aasmaan Peri, Queen Skyfairy of Mount Qâf, or whatever you call yourself now, you, Dunia of this debased lower world, you who show yourself to be more in love with this pathetic globe, and your own half-breed rodents within it, than with your own kind, O trivial daughter of a far greater father, watch me now. I killed your father. Now I will eat your children.

He asked Hugo Casterbridge if he had any last words. The composer replied, It’s a terrible thing when one speaks metaphorically and the metaphor turns into a literal truth. When I said that the gods men invented had arisen to destroy them, I was being largely figurative. It is unexpected, and almost gratifying, to discover I was being more accurate than I thought.

I am not a god, said Zabardast the Sorcerer. You can’t imagine God. You can barely imagine me, but I am the one who is going to eat you alive.

Certainly I could not have imagined a cannibal god, said Casterbridge. That is … disappointing.

Enough, said Zabardast, opening his great mouth wide, and swallowing Casterbridge’s head in a single gulp. And after that the arms, the legs, the torso. The crowd that had gathered screamed and ran away.

Now Zabardast for once raised his voice and roared.
Where are you?
he bellowed though his mouth was full, and bits of Casterbridge fell from his lips as he spoke.
Dunia, where are you hiding? Don’t you care that I just ate your son?

She was silent, and nowhere to be found.

Then something very unexpected happened. Zabardast the Sorcerer put his hands to his ears and began to shriek uncontrollably. The fleeing crowd stopped and turned to look. Nobody could hear anything, though the dogs of Lucena began to bark agitatedly. On the giant chair the Grand Ifrit writhed in agony and cried out as if a hot arrow were piercing his eardrums and scalding through his brain, and all of a sudden he lost control of his human shape, exploded into a fireball, burned the great chair of Lucena to the ground, and then his fire went out, and he was gone.

Now there was a boiling in the heavens and a wormhole opened and Dunia and Omar the Ayyar descended from the skies.

When I worked out how the poison spell worked, how to use the dark arts and compress the murderous occult formulae, how to sharpen its barbs and spear it to its goal, Dunia murmured to Omar, it was too late to save my father. But it was in time to kill his murderer and avenge his death.

It was one thing to seize tracts of the earth and declare a kingdom. It was another thing entirely to rule it. The dark jinn, fractious, inattentive, vain and cruel as they were, feared but also hated, found in a short time—even before the thousandth day arrived—that their vision of colonizing the earth and enslaving its peoples was a half-baked loaf, which they possessed neither the efficiency nor the culinary skill to cook properly. The only gift of power they possessed was the gift of force. It wasn’t enough.

Even in those violent and amoral times, no tyranny was ever absolute; no resistance was ever absolutely crushed. And now that three of the four Grand Ifrits were gone, the grand project began to come apart at speed.

We say again: more than one thousand years have passed since these events occurred, so many of the details of the collapse of the imperial project of the dark jinn are lost, or so inexact that it would be inappropriate to include them here. We can assert with some degree of confidence that the recovery was swift, indicating both the resilience of human society and the shallowness of the control of the jinn over their “conquests.” Some scholars compare this period to the later stages of the rule of the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb in India. The last of the six Grand Mughals did indeed extend the empire’s rule all the way to the southernmost tip of India, but the conquest was a sort of illusion, because as his armies returned to his northern capital, so the “conquered” lands of the south reasserted their independence. Whether or not this analogy is accepted by all, it is certainly the case that after the fall of Shining Ruby, Ra’im Blood-Drinker and Zabardast the Sorcerer, their enchantments failed all over the world, men and women returned to their senses, order and civility were everywhere restored, economies began to function, crops to be harvested, factory wheels to turn. There were jobs again and money regained its value.

Many, including the present authors, trace the beginnings of the so-called “death of the gods” back to this period, ten centuries ago. Others prefer other, later origin points. It seems to us self-evident, however, that the use of religion as a justification for repression, horror, tyranny, and even barbarism, a phenomenon which undoubtedly predated the War of the Worlds but was certainly a significant aspect of that conflict, led in the end to the terminal disillusion of the human race with the idea of faith. It has now been so long since anyone was gulled by the fantasies of those antique, defunct belief systems that the point may seem academic; after all, for at least five hundred years, such places of worship as survived the Dissolution have taken on new functions, as hotels, casinos, apartment blocks, transportation termini, exhibition halls, and shopping malls. We hold, however, that it remains a point worth making.

We return to our narrative to consider the behavior of the figure who was ostensibly and certainly in his own estimation the most powerful of all the jinn: the single surviving Grand Ifrit, the highest prince of the dark jinn, Zumurrud the Great.

Of all his jewel caves this was the best, the one he came to when he wanted comfort. To wash away his pain and grief and lift his spirits he needed to be alone with what gave him the greatest joy, and that was emeralds. Deep below the sharp harsh mountains of A. it lay, a city of emerald whose only citizen he was: Sesame the Green, more beautiful to him than any woman. Open, he commanded her, and she opened for him. Close, and she closed around him. There he rested, wrapped in a coverlet of green stone in the heart of a mountain, mourning his lost brethren, whom he had both hated and loved. That all three of them had been bested and destroyed by a jinnia was hard to credit. Yet it was true, just as it was also true that one of the most fearsome of the earthly warriors the Lightning Queen had unleashed against his own cohorts was a female, one Teresa Saca, whose thunderbolts at times rivaled those of the Queen of Qâf herself. There were times when life seemed incomprehensible. At such times the green jewels spoke to him of love, and cleared his thoughts of confusion. Come to me, my precious ones, he cried, and gathering up armfuls of the magic stones, he pressed them against his heart.

How could it be that things were suddenly going so badly? For more than nine hundred days there had been no real obstacles in the way of his grand design, and now, calamity upon calamity. He blamed his fellow dark jinn for much of the growing débâcle. They had shown themselves to be untrustworthy, even traitorous, and they had paid the price. Even the manner of Zabardast’s end had been a kind of treason, for the sorcerer jinni had known that he, Zumurrud, had planned to make an example of one of the Lightning Queen’s creatures, a certain Airagaira, who had been subdued and captured with great difficulty after his attack on the Glory Machine which Zumurrud had ordered to be built outside the city of B. Zumurrud had neutralized the thunderbolt abilities of this earlobe-less Airagaira by fastening him to a strike termination device that automatically sucked the fellow’s lightning harmlessly down into the ground. Thus fastened to a stake beside the machine he had vandalized, he was to be an example to all of the failure of resistance. Then Zabardast had upstaged the plan with his self-indulgently exhibitionist piece of saturnine cannibalism, and look how that had ended. It was impossible to trust anyone, even one’s oldest allies.

In a kind of angry stupor Zumurrud the Great tossed and turned on his emerald bed, the stones pouring over his body as he moved this way and that. Then at a certain point his foot touched something that was not stone and he reached down for it. It was a small bottle, not a fancy artifact of precious metals studded with gemstones such as might be expected to lie hidden in a jinni’s treasure cave, but a cheap affair, plain, rectangular, made of thick blue glass, and missing its cork. He picked it up and regarded it with disgust. It was his old prison. Once he had been lured inside by a mere mortal and remained captive within those blue walls for centuries until Ghazali the sage of Tus set him free. He had kept the bottle here in the heart of his treasure, buried under precious stones, as a reminder of his caged history and his humiliation, which was the cause of his rage. But as he held it in his hand he understood why it had come back to visit him at that moment.

Prison, he addressed the bottle, you emerge from the shadows like the answer to my unasked question. Curse of my past, now you will be the curse of another’s future.

He snapped his fingers. The bottle was corked again: stoppered tightly and ready for use.

La Incoerenza is still standing after a thousand years, a well-looked-after place of secular pilgrimage and reverence, the house restored and maintained, the gardens carefully tended in memory of the great gardener who created them long ago; it is a sight to see, like all the great battlefields of the world, Marathon, Kurukshetra, Gettysburg, the Somme. Yet the battle fought here, the terminal conflict of the War of the Worlds, was like no other ever fought on earth. It involved no armies; it was, instead, a fight to the finish between supernatural entities, so potent that it has been said of them that they contained armies within themselves. On each side stood a single titanic figure, superhuman, implacable, one male, one female, one fire, the other smoke. There were others present. The greatest of the dark jinn had brought half a dozen of his cohorts as seconds, and Dunia the Lightning Queen had summoned her most reliable soldiers too: Omar the spy, and the earthlings Teresa Saca, Jimmy Kapoor and Geronimo Manezes. Observing from the sidelines, knowing that their fate, and the fate of the earth, depended on the outcome, were the owner of the estate, the Lady Philosopher Alexandra Bliss Fariña, whose lifelong pessimism was about to be permanently validated or overthrown, depending on the outcome of the fray; her hirsute estate manager Oliver Oldcastle; and the mayor, Rosa Fast, who had been alerted by her security chief, Jimmy, a.k.a. Natraj Hero. (Little Storm was not present, it being rightly deemed too dangerous for her to be there.) Everyone who was at La Incoereneza on that night, the so-called Thousandth Night, has gone into the history books, and when their names are spoken nowadays it is with the hushed tones reserved for participants in the greatest episodes of the human story. Yet the primary combatants were inhuman.

It was arranged as once, in ancient times, duels were arranged. A challenge was issued, by Zumurrud the Great, sent at speed down the jinn communications networks, and accepted. The location was specified by Zumurrud with undisguised scorn.
That place where your fancy boy who reminds you of your dead lover now disports himself with the woman he prefers to you. I’ll crush you while he watches and decide what to do with him afterwards, when all the world is mine.
The offering and return of insults was a part of the convention of the challenge to single combat, but Dunia maintained her dignity, and the time and place were set. He’s giving you home advantage, Omar the Ayyar told her. That’s his overconfidence talking. It makes him vulnerable. I know, she said. Then it was time.

At La Incoerenza, a place of immense beauty dedicated by its creator Sanford Bliss to the idea that the world did not make sense, Dunia and Zumurrud finally came face to face to decide what kind of sense the world would make from then on. It was after sunset and moonlight lay uneasy on the great river at the foot of the estate. The flying urns on which Zumurrud and his party had arrived hovered by the sundial on the lawn like giant fretful bees. The wormhole through which they came boiled in the sky above them. Mr. Geronimo, Jimmy Kapoor and Teresa Saca moved around the edges of the great lawn, on the lookout for any dishonorable attack by the seconds of the Grand Ifrit. The two principals circled each other on the lawn, considering their first moves. Clouds ran across the sky and when the moonlight was lost and an unearthly darkness enclosed the fighters, filling their nostrils with the smell of death, Zumurrud the Great attacked. It was he who had summoned the wind and now its ferocity increased. The figures on the periphery had to take shelter for fear of being blown away, for this was a wind from hell, its purpose the annihilation of Dunia’s human form so that her smoky essence could be blown away to the four corners of the earth. But she was not so easily vanquished and held firm. Then rain joined the wind and that was her magic, a rain so heavy that it seemed as if the river itself had risen from its bed and was falling upon them, a rain whose purpose was to extinguish the fire of which the Ifrit was made. But that failed too. Neither of these warriors would be so easily broken. Their shields were more than equal to the task of deflecting these assaults.

Through the howling of the wind and the pounding of the rain Mr. Geronimo heard a woman’s voice shrieking abuse at the jinni entourage,
How would you like it if your world was devastated the way you have ruined ours?—
that was the question this voice asked over and over again, punctuated by much bad language. Mr. Geronimo realized that the screaming woman was Teresa Saca, whom Dunia had summoned to fight at their side. She seemed more than a little deranged to Geronimo Manezes. It was also unclear if her wrath was aimed only at the Grand Ifrit and his followers. It was an anger that seemed to spread like a plague, infecting everything it touched, and maybe, Mr. Geronimo thought, a part of this anger was directed at Dunia as well. It was a hate-filled shriek that if aimed at any human group of people, tarring them all with the same brush, would have been called—yes—racially prejudiced. Teresa Saca, it seemed to him, listening to her shriek into the raging elements, matching their fury with her own, crackling with electricity around the edges of her body, was bigoted against all the descended creatures of the upper world, and therefore, of course, against the jinnia within herself as well. Her hatred of the other was also a hatred of the self. She was a dangerous ally.