Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights (27 page)

He sickened for his home lost both in space and time. Home too was now estranged, and needed to be fixed. Blue Yasmeen and Sister Allbee, Oliver Oldcastle and the Lady Philosopher, had been left hanging in a stairwell at The Bagdad-without-an-
h
, in suspended animation, and that picture needed to start moving again. Two of those four he cared about and two were foes but all four deserved a cure, deserved to be unstranged, as did the city, the country and the whole world of men. This Fairyland of curved palaces defended by sheets of lightning, this fable of love-sick jinn, dying kings and magic boxes unspooling their stories in the tricky hands of spies, this was not for him. He was a denizen of the lower world and had had enough of fabulous heights.

As for us, looking back at him, seeing him as if from a great distance, held there in a motionless tableau of three figures, lost in fantasy: it is hard for us too to see him clearly there amidst the cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces. We too need him back on earth, himself and his new beloved, fairy though she be. Their love story, and this was, even if only briefly, their love story, only makes sense to us here below. There, above, it’s an airiness, as insubstantial as a dream. Their true love story, the one that has meaning for us and weight, comes wrapped up in a war. For our future places too, in that past time, had been made strange, and we know, we who come after and reflect, that we could not be who we are or lead the lives we live had these two not fallen back to earth to make things right, or as right as things can ever be, if indeed our time is right, as we say it is, if it be not simply a different kind of wrong.

And by this time the Chinese box was peeling crazily, and as each layer fell away a new voice told a new tale, none of the tales finished because the box inevitably found a new story inside each unfinished one, until it seemed that digression was the true principle of the universe, that the only real subject was the way the subject kept changing, and how could anyone live in a crazy situation in which nothing remained the same for five minutes and no narrative was ever driven through to its conclusion, there could be no meaning in such an environment, only absurdity, the unmeaningness that was the only sort of meaning anyone could hold on to. So here at one moment was the tale of the city whose people stopped believing in money, they went right on believing in God and country because those stories made sense but these scraps of paper and plastic cards were obviously valueless; and at the next moment inside that story there began (but did not end) the story of Mr. X who woke up one day and began, for no reason at all, to speak a new language that nobody understood, and the language began to change his character, he had always been a sullen fellow but the less comprehensible his words were, the more voluble he became, gesticulating and laughing, so that people liked him a lot better than they did when they had followed what he was saying; and just as that was getting interesting another layer peeled off and the story changed again,

and we, remembering, see in our minds’ eyes the tableau unfreeze, a starburst of parrots exploding from the palace balcony at the marble courtyard’s edge, the scent of white lilies on the breeze rippling the princess’s garments, and somewhere in the distance the sweet mourning of a wooden flute. We see her jerk away from Mr. Geronimo while pointing at the Chinese box unspooling on its table, and then fall to the floor with her hands over her ears and Omar the spy, too, falling, his body jerked by strong spasms, while Geronimo Manezes hears nothing, feels nothing, sees only the jinn and the jinnia in convulsions on the palace floor, and this is where, according to our histories, he showed the presence of mind on which the future hinged, our future as well as his own, snatching up the Chinese box and running with it to the balcony overlooking the slopes of Qâf and throwing the lethal object with all his strength into the high empty air.

After a moment Dunia and Omar recovered and rose from the floor. Thank you, she said to Mr. Geronimo. You saved our lives and we are in your debt.

The jinn can be formal at such moments. It is their way. Do a service for a jinni or jinnia and he or she owes you service in return. In these matters, even with lovers, the behavior of the jinn is scrupulously correct. Dunia and Omar may even have bowed to Geronimo Manezes, for that would be the correct ritualistic gesture, but on this subject the records are silent. If they had, he, being the strong silent type, would have been embarrassed by their display.

I know what the spell is now, she said. Let’s go quickly to my father and I will try to undo it.

No sooner had the words left her lips than they heard the loud noise.

At the last moment of his life the lord of Qâf opened his eyes and in his final delirium demanded to see a book that had never been written, and after that immediately began to recite its invisible contents as if he were reading it aloud. It was an account of the posthumous quarrel between the philosophers Ghazali and Ibn Rushd, reignited long after their deaths by the revivifying actions of the jinn Zumurrud and Shahpal’s own daughter, the Princess Aasmaan Peri, a.k.a. Skyfairy, Dunia, and the Lightning Princess. Zumurrud the powerful giant who had awakened Ghazali in his grave was Shahpal’s enemy and far beyond his reach, but the knowledge that his daughter too had meddled with matters of life and death, which he acquired from the words magically emanating from his own mouth, caused the old monarch in his terminal moments to utter a roar of disapproval so magnificent that the tapestries in his bedchamber fell from the walls and a crack appeared in the marble floor that ran like a wriggling snake all the way from his bedside to the princess’s feet and told her that the end had come. She flew to her father along the length of the crack as fast as she could go, leaving Geronimo Manezes far behind, and by the time he reached the royal bedchamber she was screaming the counter-spell as loudly as she could into her father’s ear, but it was too late.

The master of Mount Qâf had left Peristan forever. The Simurgh rose up from its place on the king’s bedpost and burst into flames. The courtiers in the chamber of death, not one of whom had ever seen the death of any jinn before, let alone the passing of their king, fell into attitudes of mourning, and there was undoubtedly much rending of garments and tearing of hair, but in spite of their careful attention to their dutiful ululations and chest beatings they did not fail to mention to their new queen that it was Shahpal’s discovery of her misdeed that had finally broken his heart. She had raised a spirit from the grave, an action far beyond the permitted boundaries of jinn activity, and while it proved her to be a jinnia of rare and formidable power it was also profoundly sinful, and the knowledge of her grievous sin had been the last straw that ended Shahpal’s life. So his death was somewhat her fault, the courtiers obsequiously wanted her to know, while of course bowing, genuflecting, pressing their foreheads to the floor, and giving her all the honor due to their new monarch, yes, they murmured, and the proof of her responsibility was the crack in the floor which had sped without pause for reflection towards her guilty feet.

Omar the Ayyar defended her and pointed to her risking of her own life to discover the nature of the poisonous spell embedded in the Chinese box and her rush to the king’s bedside to save his life, and of course everyone agreed that yes, that had been heroic, but their eyes were shifty and the awkwardness of their bodies showed their lack of conviction, because after all, the king was dead, so she had failed, that was the bottom line, she had failed in this as well. And as the word of the king’s death rustled outwards from the deathbed into the avenues and gullies of Qâf, as it was bruited up and down the slopes of the mountain kingdom, the whisper of her guilt attached itself to the news, never, of course, causing any to express the slightest doubt regarding her claim to the succession, but the whispers tarnished her nonetheless, the whispers like vocal mud, and the mud sticking, as mud always does; and as the crowds of her subjects who had loved her father almost as much as she had gathered outside the palace walls, she could hear with her powerful jinnia hearing the sound, mixed up in the keening sobs of her people, of a small but significant number, we must regretfully admit, of boos.

She was calm. She neither weakened nor wept. What she felt about her father’s last moments she kept to herself and showed to no one. From a balcony of the palace she addressed the people of Qâf. In her cupped palms were the gathered ashes of the Simurgh and as she blew them out into the crowd they gathered themselves into the shape of the mighty bird and burst back into squawking magnificent life. With the magic bird on her shoulder and the Simurgh Crown on her head, she commanded their respect and the whispers ceased. She made her vow to her people. Death had entered Peristan, and death would have death. She would not rest until her father’s killers were no more. Zumurrud Shah and his cohorts, Zabardast, Ra’im Blood-Drinker and Shining Ruby, would be removed forever from the Two Worlds. Thus the War of the Worlds would end and peace return above and below.

This, she swore. Then she screamed.

Geronimo Manezes felt the scream as a hammer blow to the head and passed out cold. It had been many millennia since anyone in either of the Two Worlds had heard the scream of the Skyfairy. It was so loud that it filled the entire jinn world with sound and penetrated also into the world below where Zumurrud and his three cohorts heard it and understood that it was a declaration of war. Death had come into the jinn world and before the war was over more of the jinn would die.

She returned to her father’s bedside and for a long time she found it impossible to leave. She sat on the floor beside him and talked. Geronimo Manezes, having recovered consciousness but with his ears unstoppably ringing, sat down on a brocaded chair a little way away with his eyes closed, nursing the worst headache of his life, still shaken, still groggy, and became unconscious again, falling into a deep sleep filled with dreams of death and thunder. While he slept the dead king’s daughter told her father all her secret thoughts, the ones he never had time to listen to while he was alive, and she had the impression that she had his full attention for the first time. The courtiers melted away and Omar the Ayyar stood guard in the doorway of the room of death and Mr. Geronimo slept. Dunia spoke and spoke, words of love, anger and regret, and when she had finished pouring out her heart she told the dead king about her plan for revenge, and the dead king did not attempt to dissuade her, not only because he was dead but also because the jinn are like that, they do not believe in turning the other cheek, if they are wronged they get even.

Zumurrud and Zabardast and their followers knew that Dunia would come after them, they would have been expecting her assault even before she screamed, but that did not deter her in the least from making it. They had underestimated her because of her femaleness, she knew that, and she would teach them a harsh lesson, she would give them much more than they bargained for. Over and over she promised her father that he would be avenged until finally he believed her and at that point his body did what the bodies of the jinn do on those rare occasions when they die, they lose their corporeal form and a flame rises into the air and goes out. After that the bed was empty but she could see the impression of his body in the sheet he had been lying on, and his favorite old slippers were there on the floor next to the bed, lying there expectantly, as if he might come back into the room at any moment and put them on.

(In the days that followed Dunia told Mr. Geronimo that her father appeared to her often, during the periods of hiatus which are the jinn equivalent of sleep, and that during these appearances he was curious about her, interested in everything she was doing, warm in his manner and loving in his embraces; that, in short, her relationship with him after his death was a big improvement on the way things had been during his lifetime. I still have him, she told Geronimo Manezes, and this version of him is better than the one I had before.)

When she stood up at last she was different again, no longer a princess or even a daughter but a dark queen terrible in anger, golden eyed and trailing clouds of smoke from her head instead of hair. Geronimo Manezes, waking up in his armchair, understood that this was what his life had always had in store for him, the uncertainty of being, the bewilderment of change—he dozed off in one reality and woke up in another. The illusion of Ella Elfenbein’s return had both unnerved and overjoyed him and it had been easy to sink towards belief in it but his portage to Peristan had fatally undermined that and now the sight of the Queen of Qâf revealed in angry beauty finished off Ella’s ghost. And in Dunia too, Skyfairy the Lightning Queen, there was a change of heart. She had seen Ibn Rushd reborn in Geronimo but the truth was that she was leaving the old philosopher behind at last, recognizing that that antique love had turned to dust and its reincarnation, while pleasing, could not rekindle the old fire, or only momentarily. She had clung to him for a moment but now there was work to do and she knew how she would try to do it.

You, she said to Geronimo Manezes, not as a lover might address her lover but as an imperious matriarch, a grandmother with hair growing out of a mole on her chin, for example, might address a junior member of her dynasty. Yes. Let’s start with you.

He was a boy in shorts shuffling his feet before his grandmother and answering her in a scolded mumble. I can’t hear you, she said. Speak up.

I’m hungry, he said. Is it possible to eat first, please.