The Dragon and the Djinn Page 18

  "Brian," he said in a low voice, "I'll be glad to be out of here."

  "And I also," answered Brian. "In God's name, I will be glad to be in Tripoli."

  They were in Tripoli, four days later, but where in Tripoli was another question.

  "Do you suppose the damn fellow really knows the way?" growled Brian.

  "The shipmaster said he did," answered Jim.

  Brian grunted. What Jim had just said was of course no answer at all. Jim sympathized, but he had nothing more to offer his friend in the way of reassurance. The trading ship that had brought them down from Cyprus to the port of Tripoli on what would be the coast of Lebanon—if the future of this medieval world followed the same pattern as the twentieth-century world from which Jim had come—had carried as master a villainous-looking fellow, who, however, had not overcharged them for the trip, according to what Brian's friends in Cyprus had assured them. Whether this meant he was honest in everything else, however, might be doubtful.

  He was a lank-haired, shifty-eyed individual with a drooping gray-black mustache in a narrow olive-colored face; with the ample stomach of a glutton and the skinny arms and legs of a miser. He had hired the local man who was leading them to their destination, as well as the other two that were coming along behind and carrying their possessions. In their innocence, neither Brian nor Jim had any idea whether the price he had negotiated with these three was an overcharge or not; but they could not do without direction and porters, so they had no choice but to pay it.

  But their guide had led them now through a completely bewildering maze of streets and alleyways so narrow in some places they literally had to turn sideways to get between buildings, the ground underfoot all but carpeted with human and animal wastes, particularly in the smaller streets. In addition, Jim—like Brian—was fully armored and weaponed, with a travel cloak over everything else, the hood of which concealed the knap-sacklike bag in which Hob rode; and Brian was similarly armed, armored and clothed. All this in a climate that was showing a warmer spring than they were used to in England. They were hot and thirsty, and their tempers were beginning to wear thin.

  It did seem as if the home of a local magician, to which their guide was supposedly leading them, could hardly be this much of a distance in a medieval town, which while crawling with population like an anthill, was also crammed tightly into as small a space as could be practical. On the other hand, thought Jim, the maze of streets could have deluded them with the notion they had walked farther than they thought

  "Yet another corner!" said Brian sharply. "That's enough! I'm going to confront the fellow. Here, you, come back here!"

  The guide stopped, turned and met them halfway as they came up.

  "Oh, master," he said, "thou shinest before my eyes like a flower beloved of Allah, and thy sweetness perfumes the air. In what way can I oblige thee?"

  "Enough of that chatter," snapped Brian. "When do we get to the magician's house? How much farther is it? Answer me, fellow, and if your answer is not a good one, on your head be it!"

  He put his hand on his sword hilt.

  "Great lords and masters!" said the guide. "May I be blinded and cast down into the seventh hell, if we are not upon the place right now. It is but three doors down."

  "You're sure?" snapped Brian.

  "It is as I've said," said the guide. "In Allah's name, it is but three doors down."

  "It had best be so," said Brian.

  The man turned and ran ahead a short distance through the dim alleyway they were traversing, and stopped beside what seemed to be a solid wall.

  "It is here, my lords and masters!" he called. "This is the place!"

  "Let's go look," said Jim. He and Brian slogged forward, and there was indeed a slight indentation in the wooden wall beside which the guide had stopped; and in that indentation was a door that probably once had been painted green, but there was very little of that color left to it now.

  "Lo, I have done what was promised. Pay me and those two who carry your wealth, and let us go," said the guide.

  "Wait a minute," said Jim, as Brian reached up under his chain mail shirt for his purse. "Let's get them to answer that door and find out if we actually are at the right place, first. Then we'll pay you."

  "Your wish is my command, O mighty one!" said the guide. Turning, he began to hammer on the door. He hammered for some little time, but there was no sound from within nor anything to signify he had been heard. He turned and looked hopelessly at Jim and Brian, shrugging his shoulders; but Brian was scowling now, and he quickly turned back to the door and began hammering on it again.

  "Open!" he cried in a piercing, high-pitched voice. "Open, in the name of Allah, the beneficent, the all-hospitable. Two great men, beloved of Allah, the sultan and our Bey, here in Tripoli, are come to visit with Abu al-Qusayr."

  There still was no response, but Brian growled and the man kept up his pounding and his cries. Finally, there was the noise of bolts being drawn and bars being lifted, and the door opened to reveal a tall, stately-looking man in a rich, heavy robe of red. He was silver-haired and upright. He glared down at the guide.

  "Dog of the wharf," he said. "Why do you clamor at this door? Do you not know what you risk by disturbing the mind of Abu al-Qusayr?"

  "Forgive me, O gracious one!" said the guide. "But with me are two great men, lords among the Franks and nasranies of the north, who are directed here by friends of Abu al-Qusayr. Not for a king's ransom would I disturb so all-wise and powerful a man. But I think that these with me are expected by him."

  The silver-haired man in the red robe directed his glance at Jim and Brian.

  "Your names, sirs?" he asked, with a surprising change of speech to a courtly, even European manner.

  "I am Sir Brian Neville-Smythe," said Brian. "With me is the Mage, Baron Sir James Eckert de Malencontri, whom your master is expecting."

  "I must not claim the title of Mage, however," said Jim hurriedly, for the eyebrows of the silver-haired man had climbed up on his forehead on hearing that title. "I am a magician of relatively low rank; apprentice, however, to the Mage S. Carolinus, who has said that I would find friendship and direction from Abu al-Qusayr, as a fellow member of the Magician's Kingdom."

  The man in the doorway relaxed.

  "You are expected, sir," he said—again with more of a European way of speaking than that of one of the locals. Jim wondered if his invisible translator was carrying him over what essentially was a switch from one language to another. Looking past Jim and Brian now, this man beckoned the two luggage-carriers forward and pointed just inside the doorway.

  "Leave your burdens there," he said. "They will be taken care of."

  "My pay! Our pay!" cried the guide. "O munificent masters, we have not yet been paid!"

  Jim produced a silver coin and passed it to the guide.

  "But it was to be a gold dinar," wailed the guide.

  "That's not what the shipmaster told us," said Jim.

  "It was to be gold! It was to be gold—" clamored the guide.

  "Cease thy clamor," snapped the man in the red robe, "and get thee hence happily with what thou hast, lest devils and scorpions follow thee to thy grave!"

  Ignoring the guide and the bearers, he turned once more to Jim and Brian.

  "Enter, messires," he said. He stood aside to let them come through the doorway in the narrow space left between himself and their luggage. Then he closed the door behind them upon the sound of lamentations and protests from both the guides and the carriers. "Five drachmas would have been ample. You have been robbed, messires, but there is little help for it, I know, in a city like this, where you are not known and you do not know its ways. Come, Sir Brian, Sir James, Sir James, my master is indeed expecting you. Follow me."

  He led them down the short, dim-lit and narrow corridor toward a farther door, from which several other men, obviously lesser servants, ran in, ducked past them and ran on to the outer door. Jim heard the sound of the bolts being driven ho
me and the heavy bar being lifted back into place. They stepped through the inner door.

  Suddenly, it was as if they had stepped back into a palace out of the Arabian Nights.

  Chapter Sixteen

  They had entered a large room with a lofty, white dome-shaped ceiling and one wall that was not a wall but spaced pillars, showing either an open corridor or a balcony beyond them. Entrances, both high and wide, in the other two walls ahead, opened on further rooms beyond, giving glimpses of similar high ceilings and stone walls.

  The stone itself was beautifully fitted, and jutted out to make a gallery on the wall to Jim's left, its floor some fifteen feet up. Shielding the gallery was a screen of worked stone, with intricately curved, small apertures piercing every part of it, so that it was in effect a screen of wrought stone to hide anyone who might be standing behind it and looking down. A few pieces of furniture, mainly hassocks, cushions and low tables, were lined up against the walls of the room, leaving the center of it completely open, increasing the appearance of its size—an appearance that was reinforced by the light-colored stone of the walls. Bright daylight seemed to be flooding in, not only through the pillars, but from other, hidden parts of the room, either by clever architecture or magic, so that the whole place seemed to float in mid-air.

  "If you will follow me, messires," said the red-robed man; and led them off through one of the farther entrances which were rectangular to about six feet off the ground, and then swelled into an onion-shaped arch with a sharp upward point in the center.

  They followed him, through rooms that were almost identical with the first they had seen. Carpets, with indecipherable figuring upon them, were everywhere. Occasionally they caught sight of men, dressed in loose green blouses and trousers, passing through the corner of a room—from doorway to doorway—in the same rooms they traversed.

  Now that he stopped to think of it, Jim remembered that the servants that had run to rebar the door had also been dressed in green. The red-robed man paid no attention to these, however, so Jim and Brian also ignored them; and they went for some distance, always flooded by the remarkable daylight that seemed to penetrate into every room, even those that had walls on four sides and no visible form of lighting otherwise.

  At last, they came to a small closed door, a rectangular door, not unlike the two by which they had entered from the street; but this door was of highly polished, dark, rich wood, with a handgrip in its outer side that seemed to be of shining silver.

  Red-robe stopped before it, and Jim and Brian necessarily stopped with him. The silver-haired man spoke to the door.

  "Master," he said, "Sir James Eckert, the Dragon Knight, is come. He is with me now, outside your door, with a companion, Sir Brian Neville-Smythe. What is your will, O my master?"

  "They may come in," said a deep, quiet voice from beyond the door. "You may go, Majid."

  "At once, my master," said Majid. He turned to Jim and Brian. "Abu al-Qusayr bids you enter."

  He stood aside from the door, which opened softly and apparently of its own power. Looking through the entrance, Jim saw a smaller room than they had encountered so far, still high-ceilinged, but completely windowless, with all four of the walls windowless, but bright with the same ever-present daylight.

  Against a far wall, a square-shouldered man sat cross-legged on a thick, white cushion, with a round table of black wood before him. On the table was a bowl apparently filled with clear water; and beside this stood some pieces of silver apparatus, very intricately fitted together and with jointed parts that were probably movable, but which now stood still.

  The man, himself, behind the table, had a wispy white beard on a firm chin. He looked to be of something more than middle age, but his actual age was anyone's guess. He was a strong-looking man, sitting straight-backed, dressed in a long robe that covered his legs and feet completely in his present cross-legged position—a robe of the same color of red as that Carolinus habitually wore, a softer red than Majid's robe. His brow was lofty, his eyes dark and his face square and suntanned beneath a straight nose and a straight mouth.

  He gave the impression of being utterly reliable, utterly to be trusted. The sort of person who is like a glimpse of land to someone helplessly adrift in a storm-torn sea.

  Jim and Brian advanced into the room, and the door closed almost noiselessly behind them. Curiously, in spite of the warmth that seemed to emanate from the man himself, the air in here was cooler and strangely fresh. The man gestured toward other pillows against the wall, and three of these slipped out in front of his table, apparently on their own power.

  "Sit down, Jim, and you too, Brian," he said. He smiled. "I see Majid didn't realize there were three of you."

  "Three of us, sir?" said Brian, a little sharply as, more easily than Jim, he dropped into a cross-legged position on one of the pillows before the desk.

  "You forget your little friend, whom Jim is carrying, Brian," said Abu al-Qusayr. He turned to the already seated Jim. "Come out, little one. Don't be afraid."

  Jim felt a stirring in the small hidden knapsack on his back, and Hob climbed out onto his shoulder. He stood erect, holding onto Jim's neck, his feet on Jim's shoulder and looking at the bearded magician.

  "Come," said Abu al-Qusayr, patting the table top in front of him. "Come and sit here, little friend."

  To Jim's surprise, Hob leaped absolutely fearlessly forward onto the table top and sat down cross-legged on the spot indicated, staring interestedly up at Abu al-Qusayr, who examined him in return.

  "You are a Natural," said Abu al-Qusayr. "What I believe is called a hobgoblin, back in the place you come from. Isn't that right?"

  "Oh, yes," said Hob confidently. "Actually, I'm also Hob-One de Malencontri—but nobody but m'lord Jim and m'lady Angela can call me that. Maybe you can call me that. Do you suppose?"

  "I suppose I could," said Abu al-Qusayr. "But it's a long, rather formal name. I'd rather just call you Hob too, if you don't mind"

  "I don't mind if you do it," said Hob confidentially.

  "Good," said Abu al-Qusayr. "How did you happen to come along with m'lord Jim and Sir Brian?"

  "I came so I could hurry back and tell m'lady Angela if m'lord gets into any trouble at all," said Hob. "She'd like to know. She worries about him."

  "I can understand that," said Abu al-Qusayr. He looked at Jim.

  "With all due respect," said Jim, "don't you suppose you could be asking me those questions?"

  "I could, of course." Abu al-Qusayr stroked his small white beard. "But I was curious. I wanted a little conversation with your Hob. I'd never met his form of Natural before. Are you gentlemen quite comfortable? You may be a little overdressed for this climate."

  "Why, damme," said Brian, almost wonderingly, "I was a little more than comfortably warm on the way here, but this house of yours is very airy, cool and pleasant. I'm quite at ease, now."

  "And the pillows," said Abu al-Qusayr. "Can you manage to sit on them comfortably? I know you people from northern Europe are not used to sitting in this position."

  "We do it a fair amount, when out away from home or any other lodging," said Brian. "We'll sit like this around a fire of nights when we're far from any lodging. I find no discomfort in it."

  Brian, to Jim's ears, was beginning to sound almost as trusting as Hob had, toward this magician. Abu al-Qusayr seemed out to charm them all. Jim waited, a little grimly, for the force of that persuasion to be tried on him.

  "As for you, Jim," said Abu al-Qusayr, with no attempt at all to put him at his ease, but speaking as if they had been old friends from the start, "trouble follows you like bees after a man smeared with honey. Have you been aware of a small brown dog around you, since you left the European shore?"

  "You mean Kelb? The Djinni? He's already approached me about getting my protection," Jim said. "It seems his master was another, very powerful Djinni, who's angry with him for having escaped from a lake of fire into which the other Djinni had him thrown."

>   He heard his own voice coming out warmly and confidentially.

  I'm already falling into the same sort of soft trap that this man got Hob and Brian into, he told himself. He stiffened his back and deliberately spoke coldly. "I told him I'd think about it. He's been hanging around me, but I haven't had any trouble with him."

  "Well," said Abu al-Qusayr, "he's perfectly right to be afraid. Sakhr al-Jinni is one of the most powerful of the Djinn. You, yourself, should be careful of him, also. I would counsel you to have little to do with this Kelb."

  "I wasn't planning to," said Jim.

  "Good," said Abu al-Qusayr. "You're ranked as a C magickian, now, I believe?"

  "Yes," said Jim, feeling a twinge of embarrassment, and becoming angry with himself almost immediately for feeling anything at all. Why, he asked himself, should it matter to him what rank this bunch of magicians chose to consider he should hold?

  "I don't think a Djinni like Kelb should give a C-rank magickian any great problems," said Abu al-Qusayr. "But you want to avoid anything that might lead you into getting mixed up with Sakhr al-Jinni. It's true he's only a Natural, but he's one of the very powerful Naturals, and one of the most vindictive."

  "I was planning on avoiding him," said Jim.

  "I thought you would," said Abu al-Qusayr. "Still, no harm in mentioning it. But there's something else I unfortunately have to mention to you. Carolinus just passed word to me that he'd gotten notice of another complaint filed against you by a separate kingdom. The Grand Demon accuses you of impersonating a demon. Would you care to tell me your side of that matter?"

  Jim told him.

  "I see," said Abu al-Qusayr, when he was done. "Excuse me a moment, then—"

  He bent over the bowl of water or whatever it was on the table in front of him and stared into it. While Jim, Brian and Hob sat silently waiting—Jim with an uneasy feeling in his stomach—there was silence in the room. Finally Abu al-Qusayr lifted his gaze from the bowl of water.

  "Much more cheap and convenient, you know," he said to Jim, "doing your scrying in a clear bowl of water. You don't have to have a glass globe, as you northerners do. Everyone to his own taste, of course. Well, I would say that you'd have no trouble answering that accusation. I'll have to disqualify myself as one of your judges, of course—"