Thief of Baghdad (5 page)

“Your head, Abdoul. You still have your head. And the reason you still have your head is—because I am a kindly, soft-hearted vizier. Don’t cause me to regret the fact!”

Broken-hearted, broken all over, Abdoul muttered: “O Grand Vizier,” and stepped back into the shadows.

Beside me somebody chuckled. Startled, I looked around. It was Karim. I don’t know where he came from; that thief moved around the royal palace as though he paid rent there. I looked down. Yes, I was invisible at the moment. I decided to try something.

First I materialized a hand, with which I poked him. When he turned, I materialized the other hand, both feet, and my turban and forehead, nothing more.

He looked a little surprised. But he was polite; he lost all interest in the scene down in the grand hall, and gave me his full attention. I took my time appearing to him as the old man that was my favorite guise. I would produce my nose, and at the same time vanish my right hand; produce a leg, and take away the turban. Finally I was there, complete, offering him a piece of my candy.

He popped the
rahat lakhoum
into his mouth, and smiled his thanks. He said: “You’re a jinni, aren’t you?”

“Well, what do you think I am? The Sultan’s pet camel?”

“I didn’t know the Sultan had a pet camel,” Karim said. “What in the name of Suleyman would anyone make a pet out of a camel for?”

This conversation was hardly going the way I wanted it to. On the other hand, the boy had invoked the name of Suleyman, which was good; Suleyman is the ruler of all jinns. Showed the lad had education and manners.

“Do you always act so calm when a jinni appears to you?”

“I don’t know,” Karim said. “You’re the first jinni who ever did. Do I get three wishes?”

“Certainly not.”

Karim glanced down at the floor of the great hall. Abdir the Foolish and Osman the Sturdy had produced more gifts, and were exchanging them. Ghamal was looking over the palace guards, returned from their search, no doubt trying to pick out a candidate for Chief Guard. Considering the fate of their last two chiefs, the guards were not too anxious for the job.

Then the boy turned back to me. “I always thought I’d get three wishes.”

“Once,” I said, “that happened.” I drew myself up to my full height. “Once a fool jinni got into a bottle, and had to give three wishes to the man who let him out. And ever since, a decent, hard-working jinni can’t appear in public without that three-wish thing getting started.”

“I see. How did he get into the bottle, anyway?”

“He never said. And we were too polite to ask him, the rest of us jinns.”

There was rustling and giggling in the harem proper. It was possible that the girls were about to come out on the spying gallery again. Karim took a careless look toward an embrasure. “If we have to hide, that would be a good place— But then, you can just become invisible, can’t you? Handy, if a man’s going to spend much time in the Sultan’s harem . . . You said something about the rest of you jinns. Many about?”

“I am the only, the one and only, Jinni of Baghdad.”

Karim nodded. “Sounds like a good job . . .” Then he frowned. “But, say, I thought that bottle thing, you know, the three wishes, that happened in Baghdad? What was the chap’s name, Aladdin? Yes, I’m sure it was Baghdad.”

Among the attributes of a potential sultan, I suppose a good memory belongs. But I wished his had been a little faulty. I dropped my head. “My father,” I said. “I was Jinni of the Lower Tigris, then. Now, he’s Jinni of Samarra, and I’m here.”

“Samarra’s a dump of a place.”

“So father thinks.”

He reached out, patted my arm briefly, and said: “Well, my father was a donkey thief. We’re what we make ourselves, man or jinni.” Not profound, but it comforted me.

I said, “If you had three wishes . . . No, no, I’m not in a position to promise. Just curiosity.”

He pulled his lower lip thoughtfully. I held my breath. If he said something about a million piasters of gold, four wives and eternal life, I’d have to start looking elsewhere.

But, though he was a happy lad most of the time, now he looked sad. He said finally: “To live in a city where no one is poor.”

“One.”

He nodded. “One. But I’m not sure I want it, now that I’ve said it. The pursuit of money is enjoyable, after all.”

“Then, how about to live in a city where no one is poor, but no one is as rich as he’d like to be?”

Karim said: “You’re a very clever jinni. I suppose all, well, most jinns are. Now, for two . . .” He thought some more. “Now for two. To keep my health, to be a healthy young man, and then a healthy middle-aged man, and then a healthy old man.”

“Very good.”

There was another stirring behind the curtains. He said: “O Jinni, number three will have to wait. I have an overwhelming urge to see the Lady Amina; I hear she is the most beautiful of princesses.”

“The penalty for being caught in the Sultan’s women’s quarters is death.”

He flipped a hand up in the air. “Oh, I’m seldom caught, Jinni.” And with that he slipped through the arch, and was gone.

He was holding up very well. He was no fool, but he made me laugh. I wanted to laugh with the Sultan of Baghdad, not
at
him. Karim would do for that. So I dematerialized, and followed him into the harem.

It took me a minute or two to find him. I found the Princess Amina first; she was in the courtroom of her quarters, eating
torchis,
our Baghdadian pickles, and
cuouftah,
our minced meat. The sight made my invisible throat tighten from my hunger. I cannot get any satisfaction out of my food when I am invisible; I have to have a body when I eat.

Next I tried the bathing room. The Princess’s tub was there, copper with silver storks inlaid all over it. But no Karim.

I found him at last, pressed behind the arras of the Princess’s bedchamber. He was pretty well hidden; and if he wasn’t, it wasn’t my job to tell him. I lay, invisibly, on the bed, and rested. I had had a very full day, and besides, I had gotten little sleep at Mount Kaf, what with courting the Lady Jinni of the Rocky Sands
and
listening to her tell me what was wrong with the way I ran Baghdad.

So I was justified if I fell asleep. I woke up when the Princess’s maidens and her ladies—and one of their pet monkeys—came into the bedchamber.

What woke me up was the monkey, who saw me plainly, though I was invisible. Jinns are always having trouble with animals, whose eyes are not at all like those of people; they see us when they shouldn’t, and disregard us when we are trying to make them do something.

I floated up to the ceiling, away from the monkey, who wanted to play with my beard, an indignity I suffer from no one except the Lady Jinni of— I had to stop thinking about her. She was there and I was here.

The handmaidens, as I had seen out on the spying gallery, were an unruly lot. The Lady Amina was too young and too sweet to discipline them, and since Abdir the Foolish had given up keeping wives and concubines, there was no older woman with authority to keep them in line.

They were chattering worse than the monkey, who was now lying where I had been on the bed, gazing up at me on the ceiling, and making faces.

One of the girls said that she had heard Karim was in the palace.

The Lady Mariam, Princess Amina’s companion, wasn’t giggling, for once. “If the man we thought was Prince Osman is Karim, he’s very handsome.”

The handmaiden giggled. “He’s stolen the Ring of the Prophet, they say.” She looked up at the ceiling, straight at me. “That means that everyone in the sultanate has to do anything he tells them to.”

Behind the arras, Karim looked at his hand. The Sultan’s great ring was there, all right.

“I wouldn’t mind,” the handmaiden said. “I wouldn’t mind a bit.” She giggled again.

The girls were bustling around, supposedly getting the room ready for the Lady Amina. Lady Mariam said: “Stop thinking about
that
and get the bed made.”

The handmaiden said: “O Lady Mariam, what
that
am I thinking about?”

Mariam said: “The
that
that you’re always thinking about. Hand me that pillow.”

The handmaiden picked up the pillow, but instead of handing it over, she hugged it to her. “Sometimes I think about eating,” she said with dignity.

“Fine, fine. Go tell the Princess Amina her chamber is prepared.” Mariam snatched the pillow away from the handmaiden, gave her a slap across her gauze-covered bottom to start her, and put the pillow in its place at the head of the bed.

I floated down to get a closer look at Karim. He was sweating huge drops. The Lady Mariam’s face was covered, but the handmaidens—and they were fair as the great city could provide—were enjoying the privacy of the harem by going with their faces unveiled. I suffered with the young man; the temptation must have been terrible.

Of course, invisible as I so often was, I could look on an unveiled face whenever I felt like it. It wasn’t such a novelty to me.

The handmaidens were leading the Lady Amina into her chamber now. One of them brought forward a stool of our wonderful Baghdad red leather, hand polished for a hundred hours with Morocco cork.

The Princess sat down, and two handmaidens knelt to remove her pearl-ornamented slippers.

Lady Amina paid no attention to them. She sighed. The Lady Mariam was evidently privileged over the other ladies. She said: “Amina, I know why you are sighing, and you mustn’t.”

The Lady Amina gave a slight start, as though her thoughts were returning from a long journey. “And of what am I thinking, dear Mariam?”

The handmaiden whom the Lady Mariam had slapped said: “My Lady Mariam is always thinking of
that,
O Princess.”

Lady Mariam said: “But not with a thief. When we thought he was the Prince Osman, he was indeed attractive. But now we know he is a thief.”

“Thief or not,” the handmaiden said, reaching out to unclasp Princess Amina’s ruby-studded girdle, “thief or not, if he wears the great Ring of the Prophet, we must all do what he says.”

“Not if he has stolen it, surely?” This was a very young handmaiden, busy taking the gold and silver pins out of Princess Amina’s hair.

Lady Mariam said: “I don’t know. What do you think, my lady?”

Princess Amina said: “The ring has never been stolen before.”

Two of the handmaidens were slowly unpinning her blouse, sliding it off her shoulders. One of them carried it away, and the other untied the band of gauze that—unnecessarily—kept the Princess Amina’s breasts at the proper, pert and fashionable angle. But when the gauze was removed, they kept that angle anyway.

Karim’s face was as wet as the Tigris in March. And, indeed, despite the prohibition about fraternizing with ordinary mortals, I felt as if our desert wind, the
samiel,
were blowing on me from all directions at once.

Dreamily, my Lady Amina stood up. The gauze that covered her lower limbs shone in the light of the many lamps. She stood docilely while the handmaidens started undoing the complicated pins and clasps. “Still,” she said, “it would be safer not to defy the Ring, stolen or not Mariam, he looked very noble when he spurned that red-haired bone-twister.”

“Ring or not,” Lady Mariam said, “she was willing to do his bidding. In fact, she was doing some strong bidding herself.”

Lady Amina didn’t laugh. Her handmaidens raised her arms for her. When some girls do this, their breasts disappear, leaving their chests as smooth as those of a young boy; when Lady Amina did it, nothing disappeared at all.

The two handmaidens had finished with the clasps and fastenings around the Princess’s soft and narrow waist. They started sliding the gauze downward over her hips.

Jinni as I am, I gulped. But at the same moment, two other maidens dropped the Princess’s nightshift over her raised arms. It floated gently downward, and concealed that which should last be revealed, before it was even hinted at.

Even so, poor Karim was shaking so that it was a wonder he was not discovered.

The maidens were putting a yellow-leather table next to the bed. They put a jug of water there, a mirror, a little night light, made of sweet-scented oil in which a wick floated, a wick of unborn camel’s hair. One by one they blew out the lamps, and retired.

Lady Mariam was the last to go. She bent over her reclining Princess, and removed her face veil. But no harm was done—Princess Amina’s back was to Karim.

The two noble ladies exchanged the kiss of friendship, and then Princess Amina was alone. Slowly she picked up her mirror, and in the flickering light, looked at herself. She sighed.

Only another woman, or a lady jinni, could tell what she was thinking; I didn’t even try to figure it out.

Karim was moving now. He took a cloth from his waist and mopped his poor, hot face. Then slowly he moved sidewise, until he was out from behind the arras. I was breathless. He was under terrible temptation; but if he gave way to it, if he used force against a princess . . .

He was directly behind the Lady Amina now, as she lay on her couch. And what he did was this: he moved his hand till the Great Ring of the Prophet was directly in line with the mirror, into which she was staring so dreamily.

She didn’t see it at first; or maybe she was already thinking of the Ring, and he who had stolen it, and was not surprised to see her dream take form in her glass. And then she realized that this was no chimera, no mirage, but a real reflection, and she started to cry out.

But Karim used his other hand to press gently on her mouth, and the cry was dead, stillborn.

“Don’t be alarmed, most lovely of princesses,” Karim said. “I mean you no harm.” With his hand still resting on her mouth, he moved around till he was at her side, looking down at her intently.

What he saw must have reassured him, because he took his hand away. “I mean you no harm,” he said again. “I only wanted to dream on your beauty.”

Reminded, she snatched up her veil and hastily covered her face.

Karim said: “Not enough gauze, not a thick enough veil. I think there isn’t enough cloth in all Baghdad to hide your beauty.”