Thief of Baghdad (7 page)

“While you feed me, Karim,” the crippled brother said. “You talk. It is you the noble Jinni wishes to try.”

Karim pushed his dish farther away. He said: “There were four of us; a mother, a father, Malek and I. A good Arabian family. My father was a date merchant. Some day Malek would be a date merchant, too, and later so would I. I was five then, and Malek seven. Ghamal became Grand Vizier, and the taxes were raised . . . Were you Jinni of Baghdad then?”

“Yes,” I said softly. “I was Jinni of Baghdad.” The sorrow and the pain in his voice moved me; I lost my taste for the coffee.

“The taxes were raised, and my father paid them. He was a poor man, but what could he do? Ghamal raised the taxes a second time, and a third, and now my father could not pay them. So he was taken to the Sultan’s Mills, and there he soon died. He was a merchant, not a laborer at hard tasks.”

“Karim,” Malek said softly.

But the younger brother didn’t hear him. “My mother paid the taxes, and then they were raised again, and then she was taken away. I do not know where they took her; women do not go to the Sultan’s Mills.”

“Sultan’s Mills,” Malek said scornfully. “Ghamal’s Mills. The Grand Vizier’s Mills. The Sultan sees precious little of the money those mills make.”

“I’ll have done,” Karim said. “It is a story told many times in Baghdad, since Ghamal came to power. The tax collectors, came back. Our father was gone, our mother was gone, but perhaps there was a little money left. They tried to make Malek tell where it was.”

Karim looked briefly at Malek’s crutch, leaning against the side of the foodstall, and then he looked down at his plate. He pushed a fragment of
cuouftah
around, but he didn’t lift it to his mouth. “That is all there is to tell,” he said.

Malek said: “There is a little more. My brother, my good, five-year-old brother, took me away. He hid me in the brush on the banks of the Tigris, where the lions come to drink. He nursed me. He saved my life. But he was just a five-year-old boy, not a physician. He could not mend my leg.”

I sighed. “And so he feeds the poor of Baghdad from the purse of Ghamal.”

“The poor of one street of Baghdad,” Karim said. “It would take a regiment of thieves working night and day to feed all the hungry in our city.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I am but one jinni. Abdir the Foolish is—foolish. It has taken all my time to keep him from getting Baghdad into war, to keep us from being ruled by the Persians or the Syrians, to keep the Samarrans from declaring their town the capital of Iraq and their sheik the Sultan of all the country.”

“You are but one jinni,” Karim said politely. He forced a laugh. “All that was nearly fifteen years ago; soon I will be twenty. Forget my all-too-common story, and enjoy your coffee.” He clapped his hands for the stall-keeper to bring me hot.

Malek said: “I think I have an idea why the jinni wishes to try you, Karim.”

I shot him a warning look, and shook my head. When I got an answering gleam from his eyes, I knew he’d keep silence. In his way, he was as good a boy as his brother.

Things were progressing. My business here was finished; I dematerialized. I hovered long enough to hear the boys trying to explain my disappearance to the stall-keeper, and then, feeling better, more cheerful, I flew gently toward the Sultan’s palace.

5

F
ull night hovered over Baghdad, and so did I. It was warm, and many of my people, now that the winter rains were over, were sleeping on their roofs. Some of them, of course, were not sleeping. Baghdadians are very fond of what the Lady Mariam and her handmaiden called
that.

I gained a couple of hundred feet of altitude, and lowered my embarrassment. There was no hurry about getting to the palace. I had a good deal to think about. Malek and Karim had a point: what was the use of running a city wisely, keeping it out of war, while the greater part of the inhabitants went hungry?

Not starving. Very few people starved in Baghdad under the rule of Abdir the Foolish. But between starving and having to swallow the kind of trash that Ghamal’s men had been throwing to the fellaheen that day, a man with a sensitive palate might prefer to starve.

That was frivolous thinking, and I scolded myself for it. The hunger of Baghdadians was not a suitable subject for the humor of the Jinni of Baghdad. I rose another thousand feet and then dived suddenly to clear my head. When I leveled off, I was right above the palace. Avoiding the roof of the Princess’s suite, I went on in to the grand hall.

Those two great dunces, Abdir the Foolish and Osman the Sturdy, were going through some kind of idiot’s ceremony. They had lined up facing each other with their chamberlains a little behind them, and the rest of their court ranged in back of the chamberlains.

Osman led off. He tapped his chamberlain on the shoulder, and the booming voice said: “O Great Sultan of Baghdad, Iraq and the Oases of Delight, hear now: Though your virtues exceed those of the Moon and the Stars, I who come before you are—am—are the Great Osman of Mossul, terror—”

The chamberlain from Mossul broke off, and turned around. He and Prince Osman had a conference, whispered, and then finally Prince Osman beckoned a noble finger at a slave in his train. The slave, who looked like a Greek, came up, and there was some more whispering, then the conference broke up, and the chamberlain took up his post again.

“—and the Stars,” he said, taking it up in the middle. “I who come before you am the terror of all my enemies, the scourge of the windy deserts and the bearer of the blood of a thousand noble ancestors.”

For the moment, I stopped listening. This could go on for quite a while. Yes, the Sturdy was having his chamberlain run through his descent from our Prophet. It has been a couple of hundred years since I met anyone above the rank of street-sweeper who was not descended from our great Prophet. After all, Mohammed had an appetite for marriage as great as mine for sweetmeats, and he collected concubines like a small boy accumulates dust.

Instead, I pondered over the problem of “am” or “are.” “I who stand before you are . . .” “I who stand before you am . . .” The first one sounded better, the second one made more sense. But which was right?

Finally I decided it didn’t matter. Prince Osman the Sturdy, standing before anyone, am or are, still didn’t amount to very much. Oh, he would have done fine as a prince’s bodyguard; as the prince himself, he left a good deal to be desired, such as brains, humor and commonsense.

The Sultan’s chamberlain was now trying to out-brass the first declaimer. “I, Sultan Abdir of Baghdad, Abdir Bajazeth, Lord of Samarkand, Ruler of Iraq, Greatest of those who stand between the rivers, Great Wind of the Desert, Beloved of the Bedouins—”

Ha. The only Bedouins he was beloved of were the ones in his bodyguard, and that only on paydays. The desert people had a theory that anyone who lived in town got just what was coming to him, including Abdir the Foolish for a sultan.

I floated over the heads of the kitchen staff, crowded into an archway to see the pomp and nonsense, and found the kitchen deserted, except for one small slave boy, scrubbing away at the bottom of a great copper pot in which some careless cook had burnt the
bulghar
. I materialized behind the boy and wandered around the kitchen, sampling this and that; my flight had reawakened my appetite.

Out in the great hall the booming went on. The Sultan’s chamberlain had gotten around to the Sultan’s great-grandfather now, and was recounting the old gentleman’s various exploits.

The account wasn’t very accurate. I had been there; he was my first sultan after I came up from the Lower Tigris to relieve Father. Pretty good old sultan, he’d been, too. He would have laughed to hear how he pacified the desert, widened the Euphrates and decimated the lions between the rivers. Mostly what he had been was chess champion of Iraq and Persia, and runner-up in the All-Arab Royal Tournament.

Finally I could hear the thing coming to an end. I dematerialized and floated back to the great hall.

“—and so, I, Sultan of Baghdad, take delight in welcoming Prince Osman of Mossul to our city, jewel of the Orient, Star of Arabia, Pearl set between two rivers, and do invite Prince Osman to come forward and without fear state his business with us, Sultan of Baghdad.”

The point was not about to be reached, but it was within sight to a clear-eyed man on a high mosque. Personally, I was a little worried about that “without fear” business; it might lead Prince Osman the Sturdy to tell his chamberlains to explain that fear was impossible to the Great Osman. That would take another twist or two of the hourglass.

But apparently Prince Osman hadn’t been listening, so he let it go by. He just nodded to his chamberlain, and the flunky let fly: “O Sultan, it is our wish that our houses be united, to the glory of Islam and the enrichment of the world. May our son be your grandson! May our grandson be your ancestor! For what shall be more fitting than that the blood of two great houses shall mingle that the lines of our Prophet be rejoined?”

During the end of this, Ghamal had glided into court. No doubt he had had a guard posted to warn him when the wind started to die down. I zoomed a dematerialized ear along with him as he slithered up to his Sultan. “He’s asking for the Princess Amina’s hand, O Sultan.”

The Sultan was irritable; probably the burnt
bulghar
at dinner. “I know, I know. After all, she’s the only daughter I have, isn’t she? Why can’t the fellow get to the point? After all, I was brevity itself.”

“Patience, O Sultan, patience.”

“Patience? I’ve been Sultan for years and years, waiting for Amina to get old enough to get married, so I can abdicate to her husband. Should have had a son,” the Sultan said. “Don’t know why I didn’t. Wish some good jinni would come along and give me three wishes.”

There was that thing again. Just because he’d stayed up all night playing the cymbals when he should have been attending to his wives and concubines, he expected me to climb into a lamp or a bottle or some equally confining spot. Really, we jinns should get out a short scroll explaining to people what we are and what we do, and how the chances of getting the three wishes—even in Samarra—are so slim that they ought to stop wishing for them, and instead learn how to get along with jinns and help us. I’d call it: What to Do Before, When and After a Jinni Arrives.

But this was beside the point. There was a silence of chamberlains, and the Prince Osman was looking at the Sultan expectantly. Old Ghamal whispered: “Send for the Princess, O Sultan.”

The Sultan said: “What Princess?”

“The Lady Amina, O Pearl of Baghdad!”

The Sultan said: “She is?” But he got the message. He clapped his hands, and squeaked: “Let my beloved daughter the Princess Amina come forth and meet her betrothed.”

The two chamberlains exchanged professional glances. Obviously the squeak pained them; it was what came of letting amateurs do their own proclaiming. But the guards went running, curtains were drawn aside, scimitars were drawn to make an arch, and the royal musicians rendered flourishes and salutes. The Sultan crooked his finger at the cymbal player and showed him a new grip on his mallet. The cymbal player didn’t look pleased.

Then there was a great deal of nothingness. Nobody came through the arch, nobody at all. The scimitars began to waver a little. After all, it takes a stronger wrist than that of a palace guard to keep a heavy blade aloft for more than a moment or so. They should have brought in some regular troops, the Bedouins or the janizaries, if they expected to play Living Statues.

The Sultan clapped his hands and squealed some more: “Let my daughter, the Lady— Let the Princess come forth.”

Prince Osman wiped a little Mossulian sweat off his forehead. Ghamal looked worried. For the first time I realized that the Grand Vizier had already made his deal with Prince Osman. So changing from the Foolish to the Sturdy would not help my Baghdadians at all. It would still be Grand Vizier Ghamal and his mock-candy.

While the Sultan nervously cleared his throat for a third pronouncement and the guards shifted their fingers for a new grip on their scimitars, I floated up and through the stone screen to see what was keeping the Princess from appearing.

The Princess was. All her ladies-in-waiting were lined up, dressed in their best, twitching at their face cloths to make them concealing and at the same time alluring. They looked refreshed by their two- or three-hour naps.

But the Lady Amina didn’t look refreshed at all. She looked plain angry. She was in her right spot in line, and dressed as sumptuously as possible: brocade skirt, Persian silk gauze trousers, Chinese face cloth, and all the jewels and pearls of the Sultanate—except those Karim had carried off—decked about her. But she wasn’t going any place, at least not if she had her way.

The Lady Mariam was saying: “Come on, Princess Amina, clap your hands and let us get started. We’ll be here all night.”

The Lady Amina said: “You clap your hands and take my place. You go down there and get betrothed to that solid lump of Mossul bull. I am staying right here.”

The Lady Mariam gave her usual giggle. “Don’t think I wouldn’t like to. My Arabian stars, what a fine-built man he is, and a prince to boot.”

“Go boot him,” the Princess said, which was well beneath her. It’s the sort of thing a Samarran would think funny, oh, my poor exiled father.

“O Princess,” Lady Mariam said, “our duty is manifest. Your father has commanded, and he is the Sultan.”

“I wonder,” the Lady Amina said, and looked dreamily down at the Great Ring on her finger.

Karim should never have done it. He had made a woman—a girl, really—absolute ruler of Baghdad, if she pushed the privilege. But Ghamal would never go along with that. If Princess Amina tried to rule through the Ring, nothing short of civil war could result. War was the only thing I had prevented for my beloved city; and of all wars, the civil is the worst.

It was time to go jinning. Much as I hate miraculous effects and theatrical scenes, I was going to have to produce one; and as long as I had to, I decided to make it a miracle worthy of the Jinni of Baghdad.