Scorpion Soup (7 page)

Again, the king smiled.

He clicked his fingers and a salver was borne through the throne room at chest height. Upon it was the purse filled with gold sovereigns.

‘You have earned these,’ he said. ‘But now you are mine, you will be my Court storyteller. Can you tell stories? I hope so for your sake. Fail me and I’ll have your tongue cut out!’

Pawing his fingers through the coins, the miser nodded.

‘Oh yes, Your Majesty, I can relate the strangest tales ever told.’

‘Well, don’t dilly-dally,’ said the king, ‘tell me one now.’

But the miser had already begun:

Four wizened old witches were clustered around their cauldron one night under the stars. Behind them was a sheering rock cliff face, impenetrable and bleak. And a short distance ahead was a chasm filled with thunder clouds and rain.

One of the hags was stirring the brew with a dead man’s hand, the others tossing in ingredients for the spell.

‘Blood from a murdered child,’ said one.

‘Pickled eye of an ostrich,’ croaked another.

‘Egg of an albino crocodile,’ hissed a third.

The hand stirred seven times to the right, then seven to the left.

After a long span of silence, the first witch raised the hand in the air.

‘It is ready,’ she said. ‘But who will be the first to taste?’

Each of the witches jostled forwards. But the one who was stirring thrust the dead man’s hand deep into the piping hot brew.

Holding its cupped palm to her mouth, she drank.

No sooner had the potion touched her lips, than the witch collapsed.

‘She is dead!’ cackled one.

‘
Hah
!’ hooted the next.

But the third fell silent. She jabbed a finger at the ground.

‘
L-l-l-l-look
!’ she stammered.

The witches peered down at their sister’s body.

Its appearance began to change.

The layers of skin were peeling slowly back and vanishing. The blood vessels became visible first, then the muscles, the tendons and the nerves. As each of them fell away, the jawline and the skull were exposed, and a gleaming white skeleton beneath.

Her sisters gasped in both horror and delight.

‘She is being reborn,’ said one.

‘Purity,’ said the next.

‘And when she is pure she will have pure sight.’

Only when every trace of flesh had disappeared, did the skeleton begin to move. Sitting upright, the torso scratched a hand to its face, and the legs struggled to stand.

As it did so, the three sisters sat motionless, the cauldron’s fire giving glow to their rapt expressions.

Very slowly, the witch skeleton stood upright, as if hampered by the loss of muscle and flesh. She examined her arm, the empty eye sockets scanning the lengths of bone from elbow to wrist, before moving on to the hand. Then, glancing around her, she recognised her sisters, who looked both hopeful and timid.

‘The potion has worked, my sisters,’ said the skeleton witch. ‘I am ready to open the door.’

Turning, she strode fitfully to the sheering cliff face and held out her arms.

‘Mountain! O mountain,’ she cried, ‘I command you to open your sacred sanctuary and welcome me in!’

A minute passed. Then another.

And, gradually, a grand doorway was revealed, a portico above it adorned with supernatural symbols. The skeleton witch clapped her hands together three times and the door opened.

Beyond it lay a passage, lit by fiery torches.

The witch stepped forwards across the threshold. As she did so, the door closed shut and the doorway itself disappeared.

Squatting around the cauldron outside, the other witches looked on as their skeleton sister vanished. With their impure sight, they had not seen the doorway, or what lay beyond it.

Inside the mountain, the skeleton witch paced through the low tunnel, the torch flames throwing shadows over her bones. Eventually she arrived at a staircase carved from the granite, the steps covered in a sea of tarantulas.

She descended the stairs, the bones of her feet crushing the spiders as she took the steps one by one.

The stairway ended in a sheering wall of carved lapis lazuli. The witch skeleton clapped her hands together once again, the stone barrier shattered, revealing a gigantic cavern – illuminated by phosphorescent fires.

A boiling stream ran through the middle of the cavern, its waters yellow and sulphurous. Around its edge there were hundreds of large turquoise urns, all of them adorned with Chinese characters, each one brimming with the ingredients for supernatural spells.

And, at the centre of the cavern, was a golden basin filled with squirming black scorpions. Beside it was a pitcher. Without haste, the skeleton witch filled the pitcher from the stream, and filled the basin, boiling the scorpions alive.

When they had cooked sufficiently, she cupped her bony hands together, and quaffed a few drops of the scorpion soup.

Instantly, the witch’s skeleton was overlaid with arteries and veins, with muscles, tissue, and skin. But, rather than being haggard and old as she had so recently been, she was restored to the radiance of her youth. Her skin was pink and fresh, her eyes bright green, her long hair blonde and vibrant.

Examining her delicate features in the soup’s oily surface, the witch grinned.

‘Now I am ready,’ she said.

Moving sleekly through the cavern, she stopped at a stone slab at the east end of the floor. There was dried blood on the sides, as if someone had at one time scrabbled desperately to open it.

Leaning down, the witch blew very softly, and the stone crumbled into dust.

Beneath, in another cavern, was a library – a vast and imposing library – thousands and thousands of books. Each was devoted to the dark arts, each one bound in identical blue morocco leather, all covered in dust.

The witch climbed down a cedar ladder until she reached the parquet floor, and began hunting the volume she had come for.

‘What are you searching for?’ said a voice.

The witch looked around.

‘Who… who’s there?’

‘I am the library,’ the voice replied. ‘Tell me the book you wish for, and I will give it to you.’

‘A talking library?’ hissed the witch.

‘But, of course,’ said the shelves.

‘The spell to travel in time,’ said the witch. ‘I want it! Give it to me at once!’

A warm wind ripped through the chamber, and when it had gone, an over-sized tome was sitting squarely on the central table.

‘Page six hundred and nine,’ said the voice.

The witch pulled back the cover and thumbed her way through the book.

‘Six hundred…’ she said aloud… ‘and nine.’

Squinting to read the uneven print, she scanned the page.

‘This is no spell,’ she said gruffly.

‘Of course it is,’ said the library. ‘You must read it to activate its power.’

And so the witch took a deep breath, and read:

There was a family of Persian clockmakers whose work was patronised by the rich, and whose expertise reached the attention of the sultan himself. Obsessed with mechanical devices, the ruler ordered for the artisan to be brought before him.

The clockmaker was brought to the rose garden in which the sultan was reclining on a spacious divan.

‘I shall make for you a clock with many faces, Your Imperialness,’ he said obsequiously. ‘I will design it to show the time in every realm, with the hemispheres and the planets as well – each of them revolving around Your Excellency’s own shadow.’

The sultan touched a hand to his chin. He liked people grovelling, and so did not speak until he was sure there was no more fawning to come. Then he said:

‘I have an entire wing of the palace filled with clocks! I have big clocks and small clocks, clocks fashioned from gold and silver, from ivory and the rarest of wood. I have clocks that chime, and others that play dainty tunes. I have clocks that open up to reveal yet more clocks, and have clocks that tell the time in ways you yourself have never imagined to be possible!’

The clockmaker glanced at the gravel beneath his feet. He didn’t want to say it, but it seemed as though the sultan had enough clocks already. Just as he was about to say something suitably fawning, the sultan beckoned him closer.

Apprehensively, the clockmaker approached the royal divan.

‘I do not want a clock,’ said the sultan.

‘Ah,’ intoned the clockmaker.

‘No, no,’ the sultan said. ‘Not a clock… but a
chair
. I want a chair instead.’

The clockmaker frowned.

‘Then, I shall find a great carpenter, Your Specialness,’ he whispered.

The sultan held up a finger.

‘A chair,’ he went on, ‘that is powered by clockwork, and that can travel through time.’

‘Through…’

‘
Time
. A chair that can travel through time.’

‘But… but… but, Your Magnificence,’ squirmed the clockmaker.

The sultan brushed him away with his hand.

‘Fail me,’ he said with almost no interest, ‘and every member of your family shall be hunted out and slain, and their bones boiled down!’

The next thing he knew, the clockmaker was in his workshop with a royal command, and with a problem the size of the sultan’s ego itself.

‘How will I ever make a clockwork chair that can travel through time?’ he asked his assistant. ‘I have a single month to complete the task. Disappoint the sultan, and he’ll swipe off my head, and that’s just the start.’

The clockmaker’s assistant sighed.

‘The only way to accomplish this feat is to enlist the help of a jinn,’ he whispered.

‘What nonsense are you uttering?’

‘The soul of a jinn,’ the assistant explained… ‘You will need to trap a jinn and to harness his soul.’

‘Whatever for?’

‘Well,’ said his assistant, ‘as everyone knows full well, jinn can travel through the atmos, from one sphere to the next.’

‘A clockwork chair powered by means of a jinn?’

The clockmaker’s assistant sniffed.

‘Indeed, master.’

‘But how would I get my hands on a jinn?’

‘With a trap.’

‘And how would I trap myself a jinn?’

‘With a narwhale’s tusk, of course.’

There were many things unknown and misunderstood at the time in which the clockmaker lived. But one of them, thankfully, was not how to trap a jinn using a narwhale’s tusk.

An hour or two in the magicians’ market, and the clockmaker had all the equipment necessary to catch himself a jinn, and to enslave it to his cause.

Turning on his heel, he set off into the desert, where the jinn liked to spend their nights sprawled out on the cool, empty sands.

In one hand he had a basket of green chillies finely chopped and, in the other, a bowl of camphor. And strapped to his back was a narwhale’s tusk, the long twisting strand of ivory catching the last strains of evening sunlight.

A few miles from town, the clockmaker set up a camp.

He collected a little firewood and dried palm fronds, lit a fire, and threw the camphor onto the flames.

A cloud of pungent smoke billowed out over the desiccated sands, dissipating into the night.

The clockmaker waited, as he had been told to do by the jinn-catching expert in the magicians’ bazaar.

He waited and waited, and eventually fell asleep.

Just after dawn, as he made up his mind to return home, he heard a rattling sound.

It grew louder and louder, until it seemed as though each grain of sand for a thousand miles was shaking.

Boom
!
Boom
!
Boom
!

The clockmaker feared an invading army was marching towards him.

Raising a hand to his brow he scanned the horizon.

Nothing.

But the booming went on, the desert shuddering.

Peering with all his might, the clockmaker spied a dust cloud far away. It was heading towards him.

Again, he scanned the distance, squinting into the blinding light.

Eventually, he saw it. Or, rather, he saw something:

A pair of feet as big as boulders, gunmetal grey and moving one after the next.

Above them were the legs and the body, the arms and the head. Colossal, unyielding, imposing in the most debased of ways.

The clockmaker would have run, but his gut told him to hold fast. Terrified, he waited until the immense figure was looming over him. One more step and he would have been crushed into dust.

The creature, a jinn called Mezmiss, stopped an inch away.

Its shadow fell upon him – freezing and dark, it stank of death and destruction.

‘Who dares summon me, Mezmiss, Master of all Jinn?’ cried the monster.

The clockmaker stepped back, hoping to escape the fearful shadow. But, as soon as he broke free from the shade, he caught sight of the jinn’s features – and wished he had never seen them at all.

‘I am a clockmaker, your jinnship,’ he said. ‘And it was I who called you to meet me in this place.’

The monster grunted.

‘And by whose authority did you dare to summon me?’

‘On the authority of the ivory king!’ the clockmaker stammered, his neck craning back.

‘Then where is his sword, thou feeble human?’

Holding up the narwhale’s tusk, the clockmaker gritted his teeth and snarled as he had been told to do.

The ground shook as never before, as the jinn, Mezmiss, collapsed to his knees. Without wasting a moment, the clockmaker ran forwards, and threw the chillies into the monster’s eyes. And, as he was floundering in pain, the clockmaker climbed onto the creature’s head and dug his thumbs into its nostrils.

‘I am your master now!’ he declared. ‘I and only I!’

Mezmiss lowered his head in subservience.

‘So be it,’ he uttered reticently. ‘What is your wish, O human?’

Climbing down, the clockmaker held the ivory tusk up high.

‘My wish is for you to travel to another time, and to take me with you.’

The Master of all Jinn snarled his most diabolical snarl, enraged that the mortal knew of the secret formula to harness a jinn’s inner strength.

Reciting an incantation as he burned another block of camphor, the clockmaker wore the monster down, until he was no more than a grey fleshy lump of pulp.