Thief of Baghdad (9 page)

She was worth facing. If she had any flaws, they wouldn’t have shown in the moonlight; if she had any glories of figure, face or complexion, they showed to their best. And—ah, my lonely jinnish heart—she had plenty.

She was much too good for Karim; at his age almost any passable girl will do. And I suppose, at her age, any passable young man would do. I wasn’t sure of that; it was the sort of thing I’d have to consult a lady jinni about. Which was just what I wanted to do; I mean, consult a lady jinni.

Karim crept slowly toward the Lady Amina, slowly and reverently, like a hadji approaching Mecca. Considering the trouble she had gone to, he could have hurried a little; or maybe she enjoyed the slow approach. Another point to consult on, if I ever get to the Rocky Sands.

Of course, he was too much blinded by something or other to notice how her heart was beating, though the place where it showed was certainly not one of the places he overlooked.

Then, slowly, softly, he lifted her face cloth.

Satisfied with what he saw, apparently, he kissed it. But softly, but gently.

Was this a true descendant of our Prophet, whose wives were only outnumbered by his concubines?

Maybe it was, because when he got through kissing Princess Amina’s mouth, he moved a bit lower, and started nibbling gently on the section of bosom she had so considerately exposed for him.

Princess Amina decided to wake up.

The scream she gave would have alerted any eunuchs or palace guards who happened to be within six inches of her mouth, and who had particularly good hearing.

Then her instincts got the better of her and she threw her arms around his neck. This pressed him harder against her bosom for a minute, but he did a wriggle, and found her mouth with his.

Things were likely to get embarrassing for a lonely jinni; I thought of floating elsewhere, but I am a demon for duty, and my duty was here; Baghdad tradition has it that a princess must be virginal on her marriage day, and an interruption—or an imam—seemed about the only way of assuring that.

Thinking of imams made me think of the eggplant dish called
imam bayeldi,
the swooning priest, as prepared at a certain foodstall in the city, where a Turkish cook stayed open all night in the hot weather.

And thinking of food made me miss the Lady Jinni of the Rocky Sands a little less. So I risked another look at the doting couple.

Not too bad. Reverence—and youth—had caused them to break off before the inevitable and disastrous occurred. Karim was sitting on his heels, about a foot away from the Princess Amina, and she was sitting up against the pillows. The only thing that connected them was her arm; he was nibbling her fingers now; I suppose kissing would be a more polite term.

Think of it! Her bosom was heaving delightfully, her face cloth was off, showing her lovely lips, and he was working on her fingers! I thanked Suleyman for every one of my seven hundred and sixty-two years, and what they had taught me.

When Karim got tired of that, he just sat back and looked at her.

She put her hand to her neck, and felt the chrysoprase necklace.

Karim laughed. “Your jewels are safe, my Princess. I did not come here to steal.”

I held my breath. If she said anything about him stealing her heart, I was going to have to materialize long enough to throw up.

But she said: “They were a gift. Take them, O Karim,” and slid the chain of paper-thin baguettes off her neck, and held them out to him. In the moonlight they gleamed black instead of green.

He waved them off. “O Princess, I have come to bring you something, not to take.” He fumbled in his girdle and held a ring out to her. I couldn’t see what it was, except there were no stones to catch the moonlight.

She took it, held it between two slim fingertips, stared at it. “It’s very nice,” she said, in a sort of uncertain squeak. “Where did you steal it?”

“It wasn’t stolen,” Karim said. “And it isn’t very nice. It’s only copper with a thin gold wash. Lebanese work, worth about ten
kabiks,”
he added, the professional jewel thief coming to the top for the moment. Then he remembered he wasn’t sizing up the ring to steal it; he was giving it to a girl. “It was my mother’s,” he said.

Tears sparkled on her eyelashes; very becoming. She slid the ring on her finger. He put the chrysoprase back on her neck. She leaned forward to help him, and, of course, they kissed again.

Even if you are seven hundred and sixty-two years old, a three-minute kiss can seem interminable, when other people are doing the kissing and you are alone. I almost coughed to stop them.

Then he went back to the finger business, kissing the ring he had given her. I wondered if it really had been his mother’s; the family history, as related by Malek, didn’t indicate the existence of even that cheap ring.

He noticed something, in all his turmoil. “The Great Ring is gone, O Princess.”

She started; she sat up straight. “Yes, Karim. The weirdest thing in the history of all Baghdad. I was wearing the Ring, I was using its power to keep from going to the great hall where my father wanted me to—where my father wanted me, and then the Ring came off my finger, and by itself, floated down the stairs, and onto the hand of my father.”

Karim cried: “Shades of the Lady Fatima! That’s a strange thing!” And then he frowned. “I think I know—yes, it must have been . . .”

“What, my darling thief?”

“There’s a jinni about,” Karim said. “He appeared to me, in the Street of the Tanners. It must have been he that took the Ring away from you.”

She frowned. “But why, Karim? If he appeared to you, if he is friendly to you?”

Karim was thinking. It wasn’t the best thing he did, but if everything went right, he’d have a wise wife and a wise brother to do his thinking for him. He asked: “Why did your father want you in the great hall?”

The Lady Amina dropped her eyes.

Karim asked sternly: “Was Osman there?”

Class will show. She corrected him. “Prince Osman.”

Karim’s voice was fierce. “Prince Osman of Mossul and the ninety-seven dung heaps of Damascus, if it sounds better to your ears! Was he there?”

Amina’s voice was low as a turtledove’s: “Yes.”

“And he was there to be betrothed to you, and inherit the Sultanate?”

“Yes.”

Karim stood up. He looked tough and fierce in the moonlight; all thief and no lover. “You are to marry another man, and yet allow me to dally with you in the moonlight, on a roof?” What did it matter where, or in what lighting?

Amina said: “I’m not betrothed. Something happened, something—it was your jinni, Karim. Your good jinni!”

“I doubt it,” Karim said. “I imagine jinns, like everyone else, are on the side of the rich. And this one didn’t seem to be much of a jinni, anyway.”

Oh, that ingrate, that brat, that— Before he was through, I would march him through the droppings of all the caravans of all the northern deserts!

I had meant to allow them most of the night to talk, to explore, to make love—short of the disastrous stage. But not now. Oh, no, not now. This was the end of their night of courtship and dalliance, right now.

Floating over toward the stairs going down to the harem, I selected a good, big oil jar; it was there for the harem girls to use if the sun on the roof got too strong for their skin. It was no trouble for a jinni of my athletic ability to tip it over; it rolled once, spilling oil on the terrace, and then crashed down the stairs.

Oil cascaded, floating shards of pottery and a few knickknacks the serving maidens had left on the stairs. The whole thing cascaded down the stairs like the water down the cataracts of the Nile; and, despite the oil, there was plenty of noise.

Four eunuchs started up the stairs before the oil reached the bottom; four good, fat eunuchs with their scimitars in their hands. Of course, they slipped and slid, tumbled and fell; their fat bottoms made plopping noises, and their dropped scimitars made clashing noises, and they piled up at the foot of the stairs. But you can’t keep a good eunuch down; they grabbed up their blades and went up again, though more slowly and cautiously.

The noise I had made called the eunuchs, the noise they made warned Karim. He left his lady fair with one of those mongoose leaps of his, and dived for the parapet, like a fisherman leaving a sinking dhow.

But all the racket had aroused the palace guards. As Karim stuck his head over the parapet, he almost got an arrow in his teeth. He leaped back, and almost spitted himself on the point of a eunuch’s scimitar.

What a leaper that lad was! He went right over the head of the eunuch, the scimitar going after him, harmlessly. Behind the fat harem-guard, Karim turned back and threw an arm around the ox-neck of the eunuch, strangled him down, grabbed his scimitar, and took off along the roof, the other two men after him at a brisk waddle.

He’d have gotten away, but Ghamal—that Vizier never slept—came up one of the unoiled stairways to the roof of the palace proper, and as Karim vaulted the wall that gave the harem terrace its privacy, he came down right in the middle of a covey of guards.

But he disarmed one of them, scimitar against sword, tripped another, and made a dive for the parapet. Floating above him, I saw that the clashing of the blades and the shouting of the guards had aroused a good bunch of my restless Baghdadians from their sleep. Somebody shouted: “It is Karim!” and eager arms were thrust up to break his fall.

So over he went, into the great courtyard, where he could mingle with the rest of the fellaheen and so be safe.

Out at the gates, Prince Osman’s Mossul soldiers were turning out in great numbers. Up on the roof, Ghamal was beating the big alarm gong with the back of his sword.

Prince Osman himself came charging across the courtyard, riding bareback on a plunging white stallion. That prince was a real Arabian soldier, though not material for the sultan of my city.

He’d been eating: half a
kaark
was still between his teeth. He spat it out, and shouted to Ghamal: “Do you need help?”

Ghamal did, and he had brains enough to know it. He shouted back: “The Thief is in that crowd!”

Osman of Mossul twisted his stallion around and raised his sturdy voice: “Mossul! To me, Mossul!” Remember the Thief, Karim, had tricked Prince Osman into being tied up. He’d probably robbed the Prince of his jewels while he had him trussed, too; what thief wouldn’t?

Under Osman the Sturdy, the Mossulmen were better troops than those of Abdir the Foolish. They swarmed across that courtyard like pariahs to a trash pile of garbage.

Prince Osman sat his horse with the skill of a Bedouin, and shouted: “Surround those people!” and it was done before a single citizen could escape. Then the Prince called up to Ghamal: “Come down, O Grand Vizier, and identify the Thief!”

Ghamal yelled back: “With celerity and pleasure, O Prince,” and disappeared from the parapet.

I had meant to punish Karim for his remarks about me, but not this much. I took a dive into the crowd myself, and materialized as the old man I had been when I took coffee with Karim and Malek. I materialized an Egyptian fez and a hadji’s robe, while I was about it, and wriggled through the fellaheen to Karim.

“Here,” I said. “Put these on!”

Karim looked at them. “I am neither an Egyptian nor a pilgrim,” he said.

“To escape from this a wise man would pass as a Syrian camel-herder,” I said. “There is no other escape.”

The palace guards were bringing up torches to use to look at the people. In their flickering, flaring light, Karim stared at me. “It’s the Jinni,” he said. “What are you doing here?”

“Getting ready to disappear before these Mossul cattle seize my body,” I said. “And if I could, I’d vanish you, too.”

The Mossulmen were letting the people out, one at a time, while Ghamal and his guards stared at each one. “Hurry,” I said. “My plans for you don’t include a term in the Sultan’s Mills.”

Just as cool and calm as though he had brains, Karim said: “Your plans for me? Don’t you have better things to do than follow a poor thief around?”

If his brother had been there, everything would have been all right. But Karim had the cockiness of a strong youth. I said: “This is no time for chattering. Put on the fez and the cloak.”

He stared at me. “You are almighty concerned, O Jinni. Almost guilty-sounding. Say, then! Was it you who upset the oil jar on the roof?”

Which proves that just when you think someone is stupid, he turns out to be smarter than you are. I said again: “This is no time for chattering!”

“Then it was you, O Jinni! Spying on me. Spying on me and the Lady Amina!” His Arabian skin got red as a desert sunset.

But, really, I’d seen nothing to blush about. And if I had, in the course of seven hundred years a jinni gets used to anything. I remember in the days of Sultan Ali-ben-Mahal the Potent—

“Your interests are my interests, Karim!”

“When I go thieving, yes. Or eating with my brother at a coffee stall. When I go wooing, my interests are my own, and I’ll thank you to go jinning elsewhere.”

Like foolish women on a riverbank, we had pounded our dirty wash till it had holes in it. Karim never got a chance to tell me what he thought of my spying; I never got a chance to explain to him that jinning takes one where it must; because at that moment a Mossul cavalryman shoved a spear at Karim and said: “Next, O sweepings of a Baghdad bazaar!”

Karim had no choice but to go forward toward the gap in the wall of soldiers that surrounded us. And then Ghamal and his guards were yelling: “It is the Thief, it is Karim the Thief,” and it was certainly time for me to dematerialize before somebody thought to ask who had been with Karim.

I remained floating overhead till I was sure that Karim was going to the Sultan’s Mills, rather than to the block of the beheader. I was pretty sure he would; Ghamal made money out of the Mills, and got nothing but personal satisfaction out of seeing debodied heads.

Then I let it go. Karim was safe enough where he was going; I wouldn’t have to worry about the Princess Amina’s virginity for a while. I could get Karim out whenever I wanted to and, in the meantime, the lessons in humility he would learn in the Mills might teach him to treat people with respect, especially people seven hundred and forty years older than he.