Castle in

the Air

Diana Wynne Jones

i

ii

iii Copyright ©1990 by Diana Wynne Jones

First published in Great Britain in 1990 by Methuen Children's

Books.

First published in the United States in 1991 by Greenwillow Books.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized
in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including
photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval
system, without permission in writing from the Publisher, Greenwillow
Books, a division of William Morrow & Company, Inc., 105 Madison Avenue,
New York, NY 10016.

Printed in the United States of America

First American Edition 10 987654321

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Jones, Diana Wynne.

Castle in the air / by Diana Wynne Jones, p. cm.

Summary: Having long indulged himself in daydreams more exciting than
his mundane life as a carpet merchant, Abdullah unexpectedly purchases a
magic carpet and his life changes dramatically as his daydreams come
true and dangerous adventures become daily fare.

ISBN 0-688-09686-7

[1. Fantasy.] I. Title. PZ7.J684Cau 1991 [Fie]-dc20 90-30266 CIP AC

iv Contents

1: In which Abdullah buys a carpet 1

2: In which Abdullah is mistaken for a young lady 11

3: In which Flower-in-the-Night discovers several important facts 19

4: Which concerns marriage and prophecy 28

5: Which tells how Flower-in-the-Night's

father wished to raise Abdullah above

all others in the land 39
6: Which shows how Abdullah went from the frying pan into the fire 48

7: Which introduces the genie 57

8: In which Abdullah's dreams continue to come true 65

9: In which Abdullah encounters an old soldier 72

10: Which tells of violence and bloodshed 79

11: In which a wild animal causes Abdullah to waste a wish 88

v 12: In which the law catches up with Abdullah and the soldier 96

105

13: In which Abdullah challenges Fate r

d 14: Which tells how the magic carpet reappears

15: In which the travelers arrive at Kingsbur/

16: In which strange things befallMidnight and Whippersnapper 232

17: In which Abdullah at last reaches the castle in the air 243

é

A18: Which is rather full of princesses w

19: In which a soldier, a cook, and a carpet seller all state their
price 263

20: In which a djinn's life is found and then hidden 275

21: In which the castle comes down to eartf1

vi Castle in

the Air

vii

1

In which

Abdullah buys

a carpet

Far to the south of the land of Ingary, in the Sultanates of Rashpuht, a
young carpet merchant called Abdullah lived in the city of Zanzib. As
merchants go, he was not rich. His father had been disappointed in him,
and when he died, he had only left Abdullah just enough money to buy and
stock a modest booth in the northwest corner of the Bazaar. The rest of
his father's money, and the large carpet emporium in the center of the
Bazaar, had all gone to the relatives of his father's first wife.

Abdullah had never been told why his father was disappointed in him. A
prophecy made at Abdullah's birth had something to do with it. But
Abdullah had never bothered to find out more. Instead, from a very early
age, he had simply made up daydreams about it. In his daydreams, he was
really the long-lost son of a great prince, which meant, of course, that
his father was not really his father. It was a complete castle in the
air, and Abdullah knew it was. Everyone told him he inherited his
father's looks. When he looked in a mirror, he saw a decidedly handsome
young man, in a thin, hawk- faced way, and knew he looked very like the
portrait of his father as a young man, always allowing for the fact that
his father wore a

2

flourishing mustache, whereas Abdullah was still scraping together the
six hairs on his upper lip and hoping they would multiply soon.

Unfortunately, as everyone also agreed, Abdullah had inherited his
character from his mother-his father's second wife-who had been a dreamy
and timorous woman and a great disappointment to everyone. This did not
bother Abdullah particularly. The life of a carpet merchant holds few
opportunities for bravery, and he was, on the whole, content with it.
The booth he had bought, though small, turned out to be rather well
placed. It was not far from the West Quarter, where the rich people
lived in their big houses surrounded by beautiful gardens. Better still,
it was the first part of the Bazaar the carpet makers came to when they
came into Zanzib from the desert to the north. Both the rich people and
the carpet makers were usually seeking the bigger shops in the center of
the Bazaar, but a surprisingly large number of them were ready to pause
at the booth of a young carpet merchant when that young merchant rushed
out into their paths and offered them bargains and discounts with most
profuse politeness.

In this way, Abdullah was quite often able to buy best-quality carpets
before anyone else saw them, and sell them at a profit, too. In between
buying and selling he could sit in his booth and continue with his
daydream, which suited him very well. In fact, almost the only trouble
in his life came from his father's first wife's relations, who would
keep visiting him once a month in order to point out his failings.

"But you're not saving any of your profits!" cried Abdullah's father's
first wife's brother's son, Hakim (whom Abdullah detested), one fateful
day.

Abdullah explained that when he made a profit, his custom was to use
that money to buy a better carpet. Thus, although all his money was
bound up in his stock, it was getting to be better and better stock. He
had enough to live on. And as he told his father's relatives, he had no
need of more since he was not married.

"Well, you should be married!" cried Abdullah's father's first wife's
sister, Fatima (whom Abdullah detested even more than Hakim). "I've said
it once, and I'll say it again-a young man like

3

you should have at least two wives by now!" And not content with simply
saying so, Fatima declared that this time she was going to look out for
some wives for him-an offer which made Abdullah shake in his shoes.

"And the more valuable your stock gets, the more likely you are to be
robbed, or the more you'll lose if your booth catches fire. Have you
thought of that?" nagged Abdullah's father's first wife's uncle's son,
Assif (a man whom Abdullah hated more than the first two put together).

He assured Assif that he always slept in the booth and was very careful
of the lamps. At that all three of his father's first wife's relatives
shook their heads, rut-tutted, and went away. This usually meant they
would leave him in peace for another month. Abdullah sighed with relief
and plunged straight back into his daydream.

The daydream was enormously detailed by now. In it, Abdullah was the son
of a mighty prince who lived so far to the east that his country was
unknown in Zanzib. But Abdullah had been kidnapped at the age of two by
a villainous bandit called Kabul Aqba. Kabul Aqba had a hooked nose like
the beak of a vulture and wore a gold ring clipped into one of his
nostrils. He carried a pistol with a silver- mounted stock with which he
menaced Abdullah, and there was a bloodstone in his turban which seemed
to give him more than human power. Abdullah was so frightened that he
ran away into the desert, where he was found by the man he called his
father now. The daydream took no account of the fact that Abdullah's
father had never ventured into the desert in his life; indeed, he had
often said that anyone who ventured beyond Zanzib must be mad.
Nevertheless, Abdullah could picture every nightmare inch of the dry,
thirsty, footsore journey he had made before the good carpet merchant
found him. Likewise, he could picture in great detail the palace he had
been kidnapped from, with its pillared throne room floored in green
porphyry, its women's quarters, and its kitchens, all of the utmost
richness. There were seven domes on its roof, each one covered with
beaten gold.

Lately, however, the daydream had been concentrating on the princess to
whom Abdullah had been betrothed at his birth. She

4

was as highborn as Abdullah and had grown up in his absence into a great
beauty with perfect features and huge misty dark eyes. She lived in a
palace as rich as Abdullah's own. You approached it along an avenue
lined with angelic statues and entered by way of seven marble courts,
each with a fountain in the middle more precious than the last, starting
with one made of chrysolite and ending with one of platinum studded with
emeralds.

But that day Abdullah found he was not quite satisfied with this
arrangement. It was a feeling he often had after a visit from his
father's first wife's relations. It occurred to him that a good palace
ought to have magnificent gardens. Abdullah loved gardens, though he
knew very little about them. Most of his experience had come from the
public parks of Zanzib-where the turf was somewhat trampled and the
flowers few-in which he sometimes spent his lunch hour when he could
afford to pay one-eyed Jamal to watch his booth. Jamal kept the fried
food stall next door and would, for a coin or so, tie his dog to the
front of Abdullah's booth. Abdullah was well aware that this did not
really qualify him to invent a proper garden, but since anything was
better than thinking of two wives chosen for him by Fatima, he lost
himself in waving fronds and scented walkways in the gardens of his
princess.

Or nearly. Before Abdullah was fairly started, he was interrupted by a
tall, dirty man with a dingy-looking carpet in his arms.
"You buy carpets for selling, son of a great house?" this stranger
asked, bowing briefly.

For someone trying to sell a carpet in Zanzib, where buyers and sellers
always spoke to one another in the most formal and flowery way, this
man's manner was shockingly abrupt. Abdullah was annoyed anyway because
his dream garden was falling to pieces at this interruption from real
life. He answered curtly. "That is so, O king of the desert. You wish to
trade with this miserable merchant?"

"Not trade-sell, O master of a stack of mats," the stranger corrected him.

Mats! thought Abdullah. This was an insult. One of the carpets on
display in front of Abdullah's booth was a rare floral tufted one from
Ingary-or Ochinstan, as that land was called in Zanzib-and

5

there were at least two inside, from Inhico and Farqtan, which the
Sultan himself would not have disdained for one of the smaller rooms of
his palace. But of course, Abdullah could not say this. The manners of
Zanzib did not let you praise yourself. Instead, he bowed a coldly
shallow bow. "It is possible that my low and squalid establishment might
provide that which you seek, O pearl of wanderers," he said, and cast
his eye critically over the stranger's dirty desert robe, the corroded
stud in the side of the man's nose, and his tattered headcloth as he
said it.

"It is worse than squalid, mighty seller of floor coverings," the
stranger agreed. He flapped one end of his dingy carpet toward Jamal,
who was frying squid just then in clouds of blue, fishy smoke. "Does not
the honorable activity of your neighbor penetrate your wares," he asked,
"even to a lasting aroma of octopus?"

Abdullah seethed with such rage inside that he was forced to rub his
hands together slavishly to hide it. People were not supposed to mention
this sort of thing. And a slight smell of squid might even improve that
thing the stranger wanted to sell, he thought, eyeing the drab and
threadbare rug in the man's arms. "Your humble servant takes care to
fumigate the interior of his booth with lavish perfumes, O prince of
wisdom," he said. "Perhaps the heroic sensitivity of the prince's nose
will nevertheless allow him to show this beggarly trader his merchandise?"

"Of course, it does, O lily among mackerel," the stranger retorted. "Why
else should I stand here?"

Abdullah reluctantly parted the curtains and ushered the man inside his
booth. There he turned up the lamp which hung from the center pole but,
upon sniffing, decided that he was not going to waste incense on this
person. The interior smelled quite strongly enough of yesterday's
scents. "What magnificence have you to unroll before my unworthy eyes?"
he asked dubiously.

"This, buyer of bargains!" the man said, and with a deft thrust of one
arm, he caused the carpet to unroll across the floor.

Abdullah could do this, too. A carpet merchant learned these things. He
was not impressed. He stuck his hands in his sleeves in a primly servile
attitude and surveyed the merchandise. The carpet
6

was not large. Unrolled, it was even dingier than he had thought-
although the pattern was unusual, or it would have been if most of it
had not been worn away. What was left was dirty, and its edges were frayed.

"Alas, this poor salesman can only stretch to three copper coins for
this most ornamental of rugs," he observed. "It is the limit of my
slender purse. Times are hard, O captain of many camels. Is the price
acceptable in any way?"

"I'll take FIVE HUNDRED," said the stranger.

"What?" said Abdullah.

"GOLD coins," added the stranger.

"The king of all desert bandits is surely pleased to jest?" said
Abdullah. "Or maybe, having found my small booth lacking in anything but
the smell of frying squid, he wishes to leave and try a richer merchant?"

"Not particularly," said the stranger. "Although I will leave if you are
not interested, O neighbor of kippers. It is, of course, a magic carpet."

Abdullah had heard that one before. He bowed over his tucked- up hands.
"Many and various are the virtues said to reside in carpets," he agreed.
"Which one does the poet of the sands claim for this? Does it welcome a
man home to his tent? Does it bring peace to the hearth? Or maybe," he
said, poking the frayed edge suggestively with one toe, "it is said
never to wear out?"

"It flies," said the stranger. "It flies wherever the owner commands, O
smallest of small minds."

Abdullah looked up into the man's somber face, where the desert had
entrenched deep lines down each cheek. A sneer made those lines deeper
still. Abdullah found he disliked this person almost as much as he
disliked his father's first wife's uncle's son. "You must convince this
unbeliever," he said. "If the carpet can be put through its paces, O
monarch of mendacity, then some bargain might be struck."

"Willingly," said the tall man, and stepped upon the carpet.

At this moment one of the regular upsets happened at the fried food
stall next door. Probably some street boys had tried to steal

7

some squid. At any rate, Jamal's dog burst out barking; various people,
Jamal included, began yelling, and both sounds were nearly drowned by
the clash of saucepans and the hissing of hot fat.

Cheating was a way of life in Zanzib. Abdullah did not allow his
attention to be distracted for one instant from the stranger and his
carpet. It was quite possible the man had bribed Jamal to cause a
distraction. He had mentioned Jamal rather often, as if Jamal were on
his mind. Abdullah kept his eyes sternly on the tall figure of the man
and particularly on the dirty feet planted on the carpet. But he spared
a corner of one eye for the man's face, and he saw the man's lips move.
His alert ears even caught the words too feet upward despite the din
from next door. And he looked even more carefully when the carpet rose
smoothly from the floor and hovered about level with Abdullah's knees,
so that the stranger's tattered headgear was not quite brushing the roof
of the booth. Abdullah looked for rods underneath. He searched for wires
that might have been deftly hooked to the roof. He took hold of the lamp
and tipped it about, so that its light played both over and under the
carpet.

The stranger stood with his arms folded and the sneer entrenched on his
face while Abdullah performed these tests. "See?" he said. "Is the most
desperate of doubters now convinced? Am I standing in the air, or am I
not?" He had to shout. The noise was still deafening from next door.

Abdullah was forced to admit that the carpet did appear to be up in the
air without any means of support that he could find. "Very nearly," he
shouted back. "The next part of the demonstration is for you to dismount
and for me to ride that carpet."

The man frowned. "Why so? What have your other senses to add to the
evidence of your eyes, O dragon of dubiety?"

"It could be a one-man carpet," Abdullah bawled, "as some dogs are."
Jamal's dog was still bellowing away outside, so it was natural to think
of this. Jamal's dog bit anyone who touched it except Jamal.

The stranger sighed. "Down," he said, and the carpet sank gently to the
floor. The stranger stepped off and bowed Abdullah toward it. "It is
yours to test, O sheikh of shrewdness."

8

With considerable excitement, Abdullah stepped onto the carpet. "Go up
two feet," he said to it-or, rather, yelled. It sounded as if the
constables of the City Watch had arrived at Jamal's stall now. They were
clashing weapons and bawling to be told what had happened.

And the carpet obeyed Abdullah. It rose two feet in a smooth surge which
left Abdullah's stomach behind it. He sat down rather hastily. The
carpet was perfectly comfortable to sit on. It felt like a very tight
hammock. "This woefully sluggish intellect is becoming convinced," he
confessed to the stranger. "What was your price again, O paragon of
generosity? Two hundred silver?"

"Five hundred GOLD," said the stranger. "Tell the carpet to descend, and
we will discuss the matter."

Abdullah told the carpet, "Down, and land on the floor," and it did so,
thus removing a slight nagging doubt in Abdullah's mind that the
stranger had said something extra when Abdullah first stepped on it
which had been drowned in the din from next door. He bounced to his
feet, and the bargaining commenced. "The utmost of my purse is one
hundred and fifty gold," he explained, "and that is when I shake it out
and feel all around the seams."

"Then you must fetch out your other purse or even feel under your
mattress," the stranger rejoined. "For the limit of my generosity is
four hundred and ninety-five gold, and I would not sell at all but for
the most pressing need."
"I might squeeze another forty-five gold from the sole of my left shoe,"
Abdullah replied. "That I keep for emergencies, and it is my pitiful all."

"Examine your right shoe," the stranger answered. "Four- fifty."

And so it went on. An hour later the stranger departed from the booth
with 210 gold pieces, leaving Abdullah the delighted owner of what
seemed to be a genuine-if threadbare-magic carpet. He was still
mistrustful. He did not believe that anyone, even a desert wanderer with
few needs, would part with a real flying carpet-albeit nearly worn
out-for less than 400 gold pieces. It was too useful-

9

better than a camel, because it did not need to eat-and a good camel
cost at least 450 in gold.

There had to be a catch. And there was one trick Abdullah had heard of.
It was usually worked with horses or dogs. A man would come and sell a
trusting farmer or hunter a truly superb animal for a surprisingly small
price, saying that it was all that stood between himself and starvation.
The delighted farmer (or hunter) would put the horse in a stall (or the
dog in a kennel) for the night. In the morning it would be gone, being
trained to slip its halter (or collar) and return to its owner in the
night. It seemed to Abdullah that a suitably obedient carpet could be
trained to do the same. So, before he left his booth, he very carefully
wrapped the magic carpet around one of the poles that supported the roof
and bound it there, around and around, with a whole reel of twine, which
he then tied to one of the iron stakes at the base of the wall.

"I think you'll find it hard to escape from that," he told it, and went
out to discover what had been going on at the food stall.

The stall was quiet now, and tidy. Jamal was sitting on its counter,
mournfully hugging his dog.

"What happened?" asked Abdullah.

"Some thieving boys spilled all my squid," Jamal said. "My whole day's
stock down in the dirt, lost, gone!"

Abdullah was so pleased with his bargain that he gave Jamal two silver
pieces to buy more squid. Jamal wept with gratitude and embraced
Abdullah. His dog not only failed to bite Abdullah; it licked his hand.
Abdullah smiled. Life was good. He went off whistling to find a good
supper while the dog guarded his booth.

When the evening was staining the sky red behind the domes and minarets
of Zanzib, Abdullah came back, still whistling, full of plans to sell
the carpet to the Sultan himself for a very large price indeed. He found
the carpet exactly where he had left it. Or would it be better to
approach the Grand Vizier, he wondered while he was washing, and suggest
that the Vizier might wish to make the Sultan a present of it? That way
he could ask for even more money. At the thought of how valuable that
made the carpet, the story of

10

the horse trained to slip its halter began to nag at him again. As he
got into his nightshirt, Abdullah began to visualize the carpet
wriggling free. It was old and pliable. It was probably very well
trained. It could certainly slither out from behind the twine. Even if
it did not, he knew the idea would keep him awake all night.

In the end, he carefully cut the twine away and spread the carpet on top
of the pile of his most valuable rugs, which he always used as a bed.
Then he put on his nightcap-which was necessary, because the cold winds
blew off the desert and filled the booth with drafts-spread his blanket
over him, blew out his lamp, and slept.

11

2

In which

Abdullah is

mistaken for

a young lady

He woke to find himself lying on a bank, with the carpet still
underneath him, in a garden more beautiful than any he had imagined.

Abdullah was convinced that this was a dream. Here was the garden he had
been trying to imagine when the stranger so rudely interrupted him. Here
the moon was nearly full and riding high above, casting light as white
as paint on a hundred small fragrant flowers in the grass around him.
Round yellow lamps hung in the trees, dispelling the dense black shadows
from the moon. Abdullah thought this was a very pleasing idea. By the
two lights, white and yellow, he could see an arcade of creepers
supported on elegant pillars, beyond the lawn where he lay, and from
somewhere behind that, hidden water was quietly trickling.

It was so cool and so heavenlike that Abdullah got up and went in search
of the hidden water, wandering down the arcade, where starry blooms
brushed his face, all white and hushed in the moonlight, and bell-like
flowers breathed out the headiest and gentlest of scents. As one does in
dreams, Abdullah fingered a great waxy lily here and detoured
deliriously there into a dell of pale

12

roses. He had never before had a dream that was anything like so beautiful.

The water, when he found it beyond some big fernlike bushes dripping
dew, was a simple marble fountain in another lawn, lit by strings of
lamps in the bushes, which made the rippling water into a marvel of gold
and silver crescents. Abdullah wandered toward it raptly.

There was only one thing needed to complete his rapture, and as in all
the best dreams, it was there. An extremely lovely girl came across the
lawn to meet him, treading softly on the damp grass with bare feet. The
gauzy garments floating around her showed her to be slender, but not
thin, just like the princess from Abdullah's daydream. When she was near
Abdullah, he saw that her face was not quite a perfect oval as the face
of his dream princess should have been, nor were her huge dark eyes at
all misty. In fact, they examined his face keenly, with evident
interest. Abdullah hastily adjusted his dream, for she was certainly
very beautiful. And when she spoke, her voice was all he could have
desired, being light and merry as the water in the fountain and the
voice of a very definite person, too.

"Are you a new kind of servant?" she said.

People always did ask strange things in dreams, Abdullah thought. "No,
masterpiece of my imagination," he said. "Know that I am really the
long-lost son of a distant prince."

"Oh," she said. "Then that may make a difference. Does that mean you're
a different kind of woman from me?"

Abdullah stared at the girl of his dreams in some perplexity. "I'm not a
woman!" he said.

"Are you sure?" she asked. "You are wearing a dress."

Abdullah looked down and discovered that, in the way of dreams, he was
wearing his nightshirt. "This is just my strange foreign garb," he said
hastily. "My true country is far from here. I assure you that I am a man."

"Oh, no," she said decidedly. "You can't be a man. You're quite the
wrong shape. Men are twice as thick as you all over, and their stomachs
come out in a fat bit that's called a belly. And they have

13

gray hair all over their faces and nothing but shiny skin on their
heads. You've got hair on your head like me and almost none on your
face." Then, as Abdullah put his hand rather indignantly to the six
hairs on his upper lip, she asked, "Or have you got bare skin under your
hat?"

"Certainly not," said Abdullah, who was proud of his thick, wavy hair.
He put his hand to his head and removed what turned out to be his
nightcap. "Look," he said.

"Ah," she said. Her lovely face was puzzled. "You have hair that's
almost as nice as mine. I don't understand."

"I'm not sure I do, either," said Abdullah. "Could it be that you have
not seen very many men?"

"Of course not," she said. "Don't be silly. I've only seen my father!
But I've seen quite a lot of him, so I do know."

"But don't you ever go out at all?" Abdullah asked helplessly.

She laughed. "Yes, I'm out now. This is my night garden. My father had
it made so that I wouldn't ruin my looks going out in the sun."

"I mean, out into the town, to see all the people," Abdullah explained.

"Well, no, not yet," she admitted. As if that bothered her a little, she
twirled away from him and went to sit on the edge of the fountain.
Turning to look up at him, she said, "My father tells me I might be able
to go out and see the town sometimes after I'm married-if my husband
allows me to-but it won't be this town. My father's arranging for me to
marry a prince from Ochinstan. Until then I have to stay inside these
walls, of course."

Abdullah had heard that some of the very rich people in Zanzib kept
their daughters-and even their wives, too-almost like prisoners inside
their grand houses. He had many times wished someone would keep his
father's first wife's sister, Fatima, that way. But now, in this dream,
it seemed to him that this custom was entirely unreasonable and not fair
to this lovely girl at all. Fancy not knowing what a normal young man
looked like!

"Pardon my asking, but is the Prince from Ochinstan perhaps old and a
little ugly?" he said.

14

"Well," she said, evidently not quite sure, "my father says he's in his
prime, just as my father is himself. But I believe the problem lies in
the brutal nature of men. If another man saw me before the Prince did,
my father says he would instantly fall in love with me and carry me off,
which would ruin all my father's plans, naturally. He says most men are
great beasts. Are you a beast?"

"Not in the least," said Abdullah.

"I thought not," she said, and looked up at him with great concern. "You
do not seem to me to be a beast. This makes me quite sure that you can't
really be a man." Evidently she was one of those people who like to
cling to a theory once they have made it. After considering a moment,
she asked, "Could your family, perhaps, for reasons of their own, have
brought you up to believe a falsehood?"

Abdullah would have liked to say that the boot was on the other foot,
but since that struck him as impolite, he simply shook his head and
thought how generous of her it was to be so worried about him and how
the worry on her face only made it more beautiful-not to speak of the
way her eyes shone compassionately in the gold and silver light
reflecting from the fountain.

"Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that you are from a
distant country," she said, and patted the edge of the fountain beside
her. "Sit down and tell me all about it."

"Tell me your name first," said Abdullah.

"It's rather a silly name," she said nervously. "I'm called
Flower-in-the-Night."

It was the perfect name for the girl of his dreams, Abdullah thought. He
gazed down at her admiringly. "My name is Abdullah," he said.

"They even gave you a man's name!" Flower-in-the-Night exclaimed
indignantly. "Do sit down and tell me."

Abdullah sat on the marble curb beside her and thought that this was a
very real dream. The stone was cold. Splashes from the fountain soaked
into his nightshirt, while the sweet smell of rose water from
Flower-in-the-Night mingled most realistically with scents from the
flowers in the garden. But since it was a dream, it

15
followed that his daydreams were true here, too. So Abdullah told her
all about the palace he had lived in as a prince and how he was
kidnapped by Kabul Aqba and escaped into the desert, where the carpet
merchant found him.

Flower-in-the-Night listened with complete sympathy. "How terrifying!
How exhausting!" she said. "Could it be that your foster father was in
league with the bandits to deceive you?"

Abdullah had a growing feeling, despite the fact that he was only
dreaming, that he was getting her sympathy on false pretenses. He agreed
that his father could have been in the pay of Kabul Aqba and then
changed the subject. "Let us get back to your father and his plans," he
said. "It seems to me a little awkward that you should marry this Prince
from Ochinstan without having seen any other men to compare him with.
How are you going to know whether you love him or not?"

"You have a point," she said. "This worries me, too, sometimes."

"Then I tell you what," Abdullah said. "Suppose I come back tomorrow
night and bring you pictures of as many men as I can find? That should
give you some standard to compare the Prince with." Dream or not,
Abdullah had absolutely no doubt that he would be back tomorrow. This
would give him a proper excuse.

Flower-in-the-Night considered this offer, swaying dubiously back and
forth with her hands clasped around her knees. Abdullah could almost see
rows of fat, bald men with gray beards passing in front of her mind's eye.

"I assure you," he said, "that men come in every sort of size and shape."

"Then that would be very instructive," she agreed. "At least it would
give me an excuse to see you again. You're one of the nicest people I've
ever met."

This made Abdullah even more determined to come back tomorrow. He told
himself it would be unfair to leave her in such a state of ignorance.
"And I think the same about you," he said shyly.

At this, to his disappointment, Flower-in-the-Night got up to

16

leave. "I have to go indoors now," she said. "A first visit must last no
longer than half an hour, and I'm almost sure you've been here twice as
long as that. But now we know each other, you can stay at least two
hours next time."

"Thank you. I shall," said Abdullah.

She smiled and passed away like a dream, beyond the fountain and behind
two frondy flowering shrubs.

After that the garden, the moonlight, and the scents seemed rather tame.
Abdullah could think of nothing better to do than wander back the way he
had come. And there, on the moonlit bank, he found the carpet. He had
forgotten about it completely. But since it was there in the dream, too,
he lay down on it and fell asleep.
He woke up some hours later with blinding daylight streaming in through
the chinks in his booth. The smell of the day before yesterday's incense
hanging about in the air struck him as cheap and suffocating. In fact,
the whole booth was fusty and frowsty and cheap. And he had an earache
because his nightcap seemed to have fallen off in the night. But at
least, he found while he hunted for the nightcap, the carpet had not
made off in the night. It was still underneath him. This was the one
good thing he could see in what suddenly struck him as a thoroughly dull
and depressing life.

Here Jamal, who was still grateful for the silver pieces, shouted
outside that he had breakfast ready for both of them. Abdullah gladly
flung back the curtains of the booth. Cocks crowed in the distance. The
sky was glowing blue, and shafts of strong sunlight sliced through the
blue dust and old incense inside the booth. Even in that strong light,
Abdullah failed to discover his nightcap. And he was more depressed than
ever.

"Tell me, do you sometimes find yourself unaccountably sad on some
days?" he asked Jamal as the two of them sat cross-legged in the sun
outside to eat.

Jamal tenderly fed a piece of sugar pastry to his dog. "I would have
been sad today," he said, "but for you. I think someone paid those
wretched boys to steal. They were so thorough. And on top of

17

that, the Watch fined me. Did I say? I think I have enemies, my friend."

Though this confirmed Abdullah's suspicions of the stranger who had sold
him the carpet, it was not much help. "Maybe," he said, "you should be
more careful about whom you let your dog bite."

"Not I!" said Jamal. "I am a believer in free will. If my dog chooses to
hate the whole human race except myself, it must be free to do so."

After breakfast Abdullah looked for his nightcap again. It was simply
not there. He tried thinking carefully back to the last time he truly
remembered wearing it. That was when he had lain down to sleep the
previous night, when he was thinking of taking the carpet to the Grand
Vizier. After that came the dream. He had found he was wearing the
nightcap then. He remembered taking it off to show Flower-in-the-Night
(what a lovely name!) that he was not bald. From then on, as far as he
could recall, he had carried the nightcap in his hand until the moment
when he had sat down beside her on the edge of the fountain. After that,
when he recounted the history of his kidnapping by Kabul Aqba, he had a
clear memory of waving both hands freely as he talked, and he knew that
the nightcap had not been in either one. Things did disappear like that
in dreams, he knew, but the evidence pointed, all the same, to his
having dropped it as he sat down. Was it possible he had left it lying
on the grass beside the fountain? In which case-

Abdullah stood stock-still in the center of the booth, staring into the
rays of sunlight, which, oddly enough, no longer seemed full of squalid
motes of dust and old incense. Instead, they were pure golden slices of
heaven itself.

"It was not a dreamV said Abdullah.
Somehow his depression was clean gone. Even breathing was easier.

"It was reall" he said.

18

He went to stand thoughtfully looking down at the magic carpet. That had
been in the dream, too. In which case-

"It follows that you transported me to some rich man's garden while I
slept," he said to it. "Perhaps I spoke and ordered you to do so in my
sleep. Very likely. I was thinking of gardens. You are even more
valuable than I realized!"

19

In which

Flower-in-the-Night

discovers several

important facts

Abdullah carefully tied the carpet around the roof pole again and went
out into the Bazaar, where he sought out the booth of the most skillful
of the various artists who traded there.

After the usual opening courtesies, in which Abdullah called the artist
prince of the pencil and enchanter with chalks and the artist retorted
by calling Abdullah cream of customers and duke of discernment, Abdullah
said, "I want drawings of every size, shape, and kind of man that you
have ever seen. Draw me kings and paupers, merchants and workmen, fat
and thin, young and old, handsome and ugly, and also plain average. If
some of these are kinds of men that you have never seen, I require you
to invent them, O paragon of the paintbrush. And if your invention
fails, which I hardly think is likely, O aristocrat of artists, then all
you need do is turn your eyes outward, gaze, and copy!"

Abdullah flung out one arm to point to the teeming, rushing crowds
shopping in the Bazaar. He was moved almost to tears at the thought that
this everyday sight was something Flower-in-the-Night had never seen.

The artist drew his hand dubiously down his straggly beard.

20

"For sure, noble admirer of mankind," he said, "this I can do easily.
But could the jewel of judgment perhaps inform this humble draftsman
what these many portraits of men are needed for?"

"Why should the crown and diadem of the drawing board wish to know
this?" Abdullah asked, rather dismayed.

"Assuredly, the chieftain of customers will understand that this crooked
worm needs to know what medium to use," the artist replied. In fact, he
was simply curious about this most unusual order. "Whether I paint in
oils on wood or canvas, in pen upon paper or vellum, or even in fresco
upon a wall depends on what this pearl among patrons wishes to do with
the portraits."
"Ah, paper, please," Abdullah said hastily. He had no wish to make his
meeting with Flower-in-the-Night public. It was clear to him that her
father must be a very rich man who would certainly object to a young
carpet merchant's showing her other men besides this Prince of
Ochinstan. "The portraits are for an invalid who has never been able to
walk abroad as other men do."

"Then you are a champion of charity," said the artist, and he agreed to
draw the pictures for a surprisingly small sum. "No, no, child of
fortune, do not thank me," he said when Abdullah tried to express his
gratitude. "My reasons are three. First, I have laid by me many
portraits which I do for my own pleasure, and to charge you for those is
not honest since I would have drawn them anyway. Second, the task you
set is ten times more interesting than my usual work, which is to do
portraits of young women or their bridegrooms, or of horses and camels,
all of whom I have to make handsome, regardless of reality; or else to
paint rows of sticky children whose parents wish them to seem like
angels-again regardless of reality. And my third reason is that I think
you are mad, my most noble of customers, and to exploit you would be
unlucky."

It became known almost immediately, all over the Bazaar, that young
Abdullah, the carpet merchant, had lost his reason and would buy any
portraits that people had for sale.

This was a great nuisance to Abdullah. For the rest of that day he was
constantly being interrupted by persons arriving with long and flowery
speeches about this portrait of their grandmother which

21

only poverty would induce them to part with; or this portrait of the
Sultan's racing camel which happened to fall off the back of a cart; or
this locket containing a picture of their sister. It took Abdullah much
time to get rid of these people-and on several occasions he did actually
buy a painting or drawing if the subject was a man. That, of course,
kept people coming.

"Only today. My offer extends only until sunset today," he told the
gathering crowd at last. "Let all with a picture of a man for sale come
to me an hour before sunset and I will buy. But only then."

This left him a few hours of peace in which to experiment with the
carpet. He was wondering by now if he was right to think that his visit
to the garden had been any more than a dream. For the carpet would not
move. Abdullah had naturally tested it after breakfast by asking it to
rise up two feet again, just to prove that it still would. And it simply
lay on the floor. He tested it again when he came back from the artist's
booth, and still it just lay there.

"Perhaps I have not treated you well," he said to it. "You have remained
with me faithfully, in spite of my suspicions, and I have rewarded you
by tying you around a pole. Would you feel better if I let you lie free
on the floor, my friend? Is that it?"

He left the carpet on the floor, but it still would not fly. It might
have been any old hearthrug.

Abdullah thought again, in between the times when people were pestering
him to buy portraits. He went back to his suspicions of the stranger who
had sold him this carpet and to the enormous noise that just happened to
break out in Jamal's stall at the precise moment when the stranger
ordered the carpet to rise. He recalled that he had seen the man's lips
move both times but had not heard all that was said.

"That is if!" he cried out, smashing his fist into his palm. "A code
word needs to be spoken before it will move, which for reasons of his
own-no doubt highly sinister-this man withheld from me. The villain! And
this word I must have spoken in my sleep."

He rushed to the back of his booth and rummaged out the tattered
dictionary he had once used at school. Then, standing on the carpet, he
cried out, "Aardvark! Fly, please!"

22

Nothing happened, either then or for any word beginning with A. Doggedly
Abdullah went on to B, and when that did no good, he went on again,
through the whole dictionary. With the constant interruptions from
portrait sellers, this took him some time. Nevertheless, he reached
zymurgy in the early evening without the carpet's having so much as
twitched.

"Then it has to be a made-up word or a foreign one!" he cried out
feverishly. It was that or believe that Flower-in-the-Night was only a
dream after all. Even if she was real, his chances of getting the carpet
to take him to her seemed slimmer by the minute. He stood there uttering
every strange sound and every foreign word he could think of, and still
the carpet made no move of any kind.

Abdullah was interrupted again an hour before sundown by a large crowd
gathering outside, carrying bundles and big flat packages. The artist
had to push his way through the crowd with his portfolio of drawings.
The following hour was hectic in the extreme. Abdullah inspected
paintings, rejected portraits of aunts and mothers, and beat down huge
prices asked for bad drawings of nephews. In the course of that hour he
acquired, beside the hundred excellent drawings from the artist,
eighty-nine further pictures, lockets, drawings, and even a piece of a
wall with a face daubed on it. He also parted with almost all the money
he had left over after buying the magic carpet-if it was magic. It was
dark by the time he finally convinced the man who claimed that the oil
painting of his fourth wife's mother was enough like a man to qualify
that this was not the case and pushed him out of the booth. He was by
then too tired and wrought up to eat. He would have gone straight to bed
had not Jamal-who had been doing a roaring trade selling snacks to the
waiting crowd-arrived with tender meat on a skewer.

"I don't know what has got into you," Jamal said. "I used to think you
were normal. But mad or not, you must eat."

"There is no question of madness," Abdullah said. "I have simply decided
to go into a new line of business." But he ate the meat.

At last he was able to pile his 189 pictures onto the carpet and lie
down among them.

"Now listen to this," he told the carpet. "If by some lucky

23
chance I happen to say your command word in my sleep, you must instantly
fly with me to the night garden of Flower-in-the-Night." That seemed the
best he could do. It took him a long time to get to sleep.

He woke to the dreamy fragrance of night flowers and a hand gently
prodding him. Flower-in-the-Night was leaning over him. Abdullah saw she
was far lovelier than he had been remembering her.

"You really did bring the pictures!" she said. "You are very kind."

I did it! Abdullah thought triumphantly. "Yes," he said. "I have one
hundred and eighty-nine kinds of men here. I think this ought to give
you at least a general idea."

He helped her unhook a number of the golden lamps and put them in a ring
beside the bank. Then Abdullah showed her the pictures, holding them
under a lamp first and then leaning them up against the bank. He began
to feel like a pavement artist.

Flower-in-the-Night inspected each man as Abdullah showed him,
absolutely impartially and with great concentration. Then she picked up
a lamp and inspected the artist's drawings all over again. This pleased
Abdullah. The artist was a true professional. He had drawn men exactly
as Abdullah asked, from a heroic and kingly person evidently taken from
a statue, to the hunchback who cleaned shoes in the Bazaar, and had even
included a self-portrait halfway through.

"Yes, I see," Flower-in-the-Night said at last. "Men do vary a lot, just
as you said. My father is not at all typical, and neither are you, of
course."

"So you admit I am not a woman?" said Abdullah.

"I am forced to do so," she said. "I apologize for my error." Then she
carried the lamp along the bank, inspecting certain of the pictures a
third time.

Abdullah noticed, rather nervously, that the ones she had singled out
were the handsomest. He watched her leaning over them with a small frown
on her forehead and a curly tendril of dark hair

24

straying over the frown, looking thoroughly intent. He began to wonder
what he had started.

Flower-in-the-Night collected the pictures together and stacked them
neatly in a pile beside the bank. "It is just as I thought," she said.
"I prefer you to every single one of these. Some of these look far too
proud of themselves, and some look selfish and cruel. You are unassuming
and kind. I intend to ask my father to marry me to you, instead of to
the Prince in Ochinstan. Would you mind?"

The garden seemed to swirl around Abdullah in a blur of gold and silver
and dusky green. "I-I think that might not work," he managed to say at
last.

"Why not?" she asked. "Are you married already?"
"No, no," he said. "It is not that. The law allows a man to have as many
wives as he can afford, but-"

The frown came back to Flower-in-the-Night's forehead. "How many
husbands are women allowed?" she asked.

"Only one!" Abdullah said, rather shocked.

"That is extremely unfair," Flower-in-the-Night observed musingly. She
sat on the bank and thought. "Would you say it is possible that the
Prince in Ochinstan has some wives already?"

Abdullah watched the frown grow on her forehead and the slender fingers
of her right hand tapping almost irritably on the turf. He knew he had
indeed started something. Flower-in-the-Night was discovering that her
father had kept her ignorant of a number of important facts. "If he is a
prince," Abdullah said rather nervously, "I think it entirely possible
that he has quite a number of wives. Yes."

"Then he is being greedy," Flower-in-the-Night stated. "This takes a
weight off my mind. Why did you say that my marrying you might not work?
You mentioned yesterday that you are a prince as well."

Abdullah felt his face heating up, and he cursed himself for babbling
out his daydream to her. Though he told himself that he had had every
reason to believe he was dreaming when he told her, this did not make
him feel any better. "True. But I also told you I was lost and far from
my kingdom," he said. "As you might con

25

jecture, I am now forced to make my living by humble means. I sell
carpets in the Bazaar of Zanzib. Your father is clearly a very rich man.
This will not strike him as a fitting alliance."

Flower-in-the-Night's fingers drummed quite angrily. "You speak as if it
is my father who intends to marry you!" she said. "What is the matter? I
love you. Do you not love me?"

She looked into Abdullah's face as she said this. He looked back into
hers, into what seemed an eternity of big dark eyes. He found himself
saying, "Yes." Flower-in-the-Night smiled. Abdullah smiled. Several more
moonlit eternities went by.

"I shall come with you when you leave here," Flower-in-the- Night said.
"Since what you say about my father's attitude to you could well be
true, we must get married first and tell my father afterward. Then there
is nothing he can say."

Abdullah, who had had some experience of rich men, wished he could be
sure of that. "It may not be quite that simple," he said. "In fact, now
I think about it, I am certain our only prudent course is to leave
Zanzib. This ought to be easy, because I do happen to own a magic
carpet. There it is, up on the bank. It brought me here. Unfortunately
it needs to be activated by a magic word which I seem only able to say
in my sleep."

Flower-in-the-Night picked up a lamp and held it high so that she could
inspect the carpet. Abdullah watched, admiring the grace with which she
bent toward it. "It seems very old," she said. "I have read about such
carpets. The command word will probably be a fairly common word
pronounced in an old way. My reading suggests these carpets were meant
to be used quickly in an emergency, so the word will not be anything too
out of the way. Why do you not tell me carefully everything you know
about it? Between us we ought to be able to work it out."

From this Abdullah realized that Flower-in-the-Night-if you discounted
the gaps in her knowledge-was both intelligent and very well educated.
He admired her even more. He told her, as far as he knew them, every
fact about the carpet, including the uproar at Jamal's stall which had
prevented him hearing the command word.

26

Flower-in-the-Night listened and nodded at each new fact. "So," she
said, "let us leave aside the reason why someone should sell you a
proven magic carpet and yet make sure you could not use it. That is such
an odd thing to do that I feel sure we should think about it later. But
let us first think about what the carpet does. You say it came down when
you ordered it to. Did the stranger speak then?"

She had a shrewd and logical mind. Truly he had found a pearl among
women, Abdullah thought. "I am quite sure he said nothing," he said.

"Then," said Flower-in-the-Night, "the command word is onlyneeded to
start the carpet flying. After that I see two possibilities: first, that
the carpet will do as you say until it touches ground anywhere or,
second, that it will in fact obey your command until it is back at the
place where it first started-"

"That is easily proved," Abdullah said. He was dizzy with admiration for
her logic. "I think the first possibility is the correct one." He jumped
on the carpet and cried experimentally, "Up, and back to my booth!"

"No, no! Don't! Wait!" Flower-in-the-Night cried out at the same instant.

But it was too late. The carpet whipped up into the air and then away
sideways with such speed and suddenness that Abdullah was first thrown
over on his back, with all the breath knocked out of him, and then found
himself hanging half off over its frayed edge at what seemed a
terrifying height in the air. The wind of its movement took his breath
away as soon as he did manage to breathe. All he could do was to claw
frantically for a better grip on the fringe at one end. And before he
could work his way back on top of it, let alone speak, the carpet
plunged downward-leaving Abdullah's newly gained breath high in the air
above-barged its way through the curtains of the booth-half smothering
Abdullah in the process-and landed smoothly-and very finally-on the
floor inside.

Abdullah lay on his face, gasping, with dizzy memories of turrets
whirling past him against a starry sky. Everything had happened so
quickly that at first all he could think of was that the

27

distance between his booth and the night garden must be quite
surprisingly short. Then, as his breath did at last come back, he wanted
to kick himself. What a stupid thing to have done! He could at least
have waited until Flower-in-the-Night had had time to step on the
carpet, too. Now Flower-in-the-Night's own logic told him that there was
no way to get back to her but to fall asleep again and, once more, hope
he chanced to say the command word in his sleep. But as he had already
done it twice, he was fairly sure that he would. He was even more
certain that Flower-in-the-Night would work this out for herself and
wait in the garden for him. She was intelligence itself-a pearl among
women. She would expect him back in an hour or so.

After an hour of alternately blaming himself and praising
Flower-in-the-Night, Abdullah did manage to fall asleep. But alas, when
he woke he was still facedown on the carpet in the middle of his own
booth. Jamal's dog was barking outside, which was what had woken him up.

"Abdullah!" shouted the voice of his father's first wife's brother's
son. "Are you awake in there?"

Abdullah groaned. This was all he needed.

28

Which concerns

marriage and

prophecy

Abdullah could not think what Hakim was doing there. His father's first
wife's relatives usually only came near him once a month, and they had
paid that visit to him two days ago. "What do you want, Hakim?" he
shouted wearily.

"To speak to you, of course!" Hakim shouted back. "Urgently!"

"Then part the curtains and come in," said Abdullah.

Hakim inserted his plump body between the hangings. "I must say, if this
is your vaunted security, son of my aunt's husband," he said, "I don't
think much of it. Anyone could come in here and surprise you as you slept."

"The dog outside warned me you were there," Abdullah said.

"What use is that?" asked Hakim. "What would you propose to do if I
proved to be a thief? Strangle me with a carpet? No, I cannot approve
the safety of your arrangements."

"What do you wish to say to me?" asked Abdullah. "Or did you only come
here to find fault as usual?"

Hakim seated himself portentously on a pile of carpets. "You lack your
normal scrupulous politeness, cousin by marriage," he said. "If my
father's uncle's son were to hear you, he would not be pleased."

29

"I am not answerable to Assif for my behavior or for anything else!"
Abdullah snapped. He was thoroughly miserable. His soul cried out for
Flower-in-the-Night, and he could not get to her. He had no patience
with anything else.

"Then I shall not trouble you with my message," Hakim said, getting up
haughtily.
"Good!" said Abdullah. He went to the back of his booth to wash.

But it was clear that Hakim was not going away without delivering his
message. When Abdullah turned around from washing, Hakim was still
standing there. "You would do well to change clothes and visit a barber,
cousin by marriage," he told Abdullah. "At present you do not look a
suitable person to visit our emporium."

"And why should I visit there?" Abdullah asked, somewhat surprised. "You
all made it clear long ago that I am not welcome there."

"Because," said Hakim, "the prophecy made at your birth has come to
light in a box long thought to contain incense. If you care to present
yourself at the emporium in proper apparel, this box will be handed over
to you."

Abdullah had not the slightest interest in this prophecy. Nor did he see
why he had to go himself to collect it when Hakim could just as easily
have brought it with him. He was about to refuse when it occurred to him
that if he succeeded in uttering the correct word in his sleep tonight
(which he was confident he would, having done it twice before), then he
and Flower-in-the-Night would in all probability be eloping together. A
man should go to his wedding correctly clothed and washed and shaved. So
since he would be going to baths and barber anyway, he might as well
drop in and collect the silly prophecy on his way back.

"Very well," he said. "You may expect me two hours before sunset."

Hakim frowned. "Why so late?"

"Because I have things to do, cousin by marriage," Abdullah explained.
The thought of his coming elopement so overjoyed him

30

that he smiled at Hakim and bowed with extreme politeness. "Though I
lead a busy life that has little time left in it for obeying your
orders, I shall be there, never fear."

Hakim continued to frown and turned that frown on Abdullah back over his
shoulder as he left. He was obviously both displeased and suspicious.
Abdullah could not have cared less. As soon as Hakim was out of sight,
he joyfully gave Jamal half his remaining money to guard his booth for
the day. In return, he was forced to accept from the increasingly
grateful Jamal a breakfast consisting of every delicacy on Jamal's
stall. Excitement had taken away Abdullah's appetite. There was so much
food that in order not to hurt Jamal's feelings, Abdullah gave most of
it secretly to Jamal's dog; this he did warily, because the dog was a
snapper as well as a biter. The dog, however, seemed to share its
master's gratitude. It thumped its tail politely, ate everything
Abdullah offered, and then tried to lick Abdullah's face.

Abdullah dodged that piece of politeness. The dog's breath was laden
with the scent of elderly squid. He patted it gingerly on its gnarled
head, thanked Jamal, and hurried off into the Bazaar. There he invested
his remaining cash in the hire of a handcart. This cart he loaded
carefully with his best and most unusual carpets-his floral Ochinstan,
the glowing mat from Inhico, the golden Farqtans, the glorious patterned
ones from the deep desert, and the matched pair from distant Thayack-and
wheeled them along to the big booths in the center of the Bazaar where
the richest merchants traded. For all his excitement, Abdullah was being
practical. Flower-in-the-Night's father was clearly very rich. None but
the wealthiest of men could afford the dowry for marrying a prince. It
was therefore clear to Abdullah that he and Flower-in-the-Night would
have to go very far away, or her father could make things very
unpleasant for them. But it was also clear to Abdullah that
Flower-in-the-Night was used to having the best of everything. She would
not be happy roughing it. So Abdullah had to have money. He bowed before
the merchant in the richest of the rich booths and, having called him
treasure among traders and most majestic of merchants, offered him the
floral Ochinstan carpet for a truly tremendous sum.

31

The merchant had been a friend of Abdullah's father. "And why, son of
the Bazaar's most illustrious," he asked, "should you wish to part with
what is surely, by its price, the gem of your collection?"

"I am diversifying my trade," Abdullah told him. "As you may have heard,
I have been buying pictures and other forms of artwork. In order to make
room for these, I am forced to dispose of the least valuable of my
carpets. And it occurred to me that a seller of celestial weavings like
yourself might consider helping the son of his old friend by taking off
my hands this miserable flowery thing, at a bargain price."

"The contents of your booth should in future be choice indeed," the
merchant said. "Let me offer you half what you ask."

"Ah, shrewdest of shrewd men," Abdullah said. "Even a bargain costs
money. But for you I will reduce my price by two coppers."

It was a long, hot day. But by the early evening Abdullah had sold all
his best carpets for nearly twice as much as he had paid for them. He
reckoned that he now had enough ready money to keep Flower-in-the-Night
in reasonable luxury for three months or so. After that he hoped that
either something else would turn up or that the sweetness of her nature
would reconcile her to poverty. He went to the baths. He went to the
barbeir. He called at the scent maker and had himself perfumed with
oils. Then he went back to his booth and dressed in his best clothes.
These clothes, like the clothes of most merchants, had various cunning
insets, pieces of embroidery and ornamental twists of braid that were
not ornaments at all, but cleverly concealed purses for money. Abdullah
distributed his newly earned gold among these hiding places and was
ready at last. He went, not very willingly, along to his father's old
emporium. He told himself that it would pass the time between now and
his elopement.

It was a curious feeling   to go up the shallow cedar steps and enter the
place where he had spent   so much of his childhood. The smell of it, the
cedarwood and the spices   and the hairy, oily scent of carpets, was so
familiar that if he shut   his eyes, he could imagine he

32

was ten years old again, playing behind a roll of carpet while his
father bargained with a customer. But with his eyes open, Abdullah had
no such illusion. His father's first wife's sister had a regrettable
fondness for bright purple. The walls, the trellis screens, the chairs
for customers, the cashier's table, and even the cashbox had all been
painted Fatima's favorite color. Fatima came to meet him in a dress of
the same color.

"Why, Abdullah! How prompt you are and how smart you look!" she said,
and her manner said she had expected him to arrive late and in rags.

"He looks almost as if he were dressed for his wedding!" Assif said,
advancing, too, with a smile on his thin, bad-tempered face.

It was so rare to see Assif smiling that Abdullah thought for a moment
that Assif had ricked his neck and was grimacing with pain. Then Hakim
sniggered, which made Abdullah realize what Assif had just said. To his
annoyance, he found he was blushing furiously. He was forced to bow
politely in order to hide his face.

"There's no need to make the boy blush!" Fatima cried. That, of course,
made Abdullah's blush worse. "Abdullah, what is this rumor we hear that
you are suddenly planning to deal in pictures?"

"And selling the best of your stock to make room for the pictures,"
added Hakim.

Abdullah ceased to blush. He saw he had been summoned here to be
criticized. He was sure of it when Assif added reproachfully, "Our
feelings are somewhat hurt, son of my father's niece's husband, that you
did not seem to think we could oblige you by taking a few carpets off
your hands."

"Dear relatives," said Abdullah. "I could not, of course, sell you my
carpets. My aim was to make a profit, and I could hardly mulct you, whom
my father loved." He was so annoyed that he turned around to go away
again, only to find that Hakim had quietly shut and barred the doors.

"No need to stay open," Hakim said. "Let us be just family here."

"The poor boy!" said Fatima. "Never has he had more need of a family to
keep his mind in order!"

33

"Yes, indeed," said Assif. "Abdullah, some rumors in the Bazaar state
that you have gone mad. We do not like this."

"He's certainly been behaving oddly," Hakim agreed. "We don't like such
talk connected to a respectable family like ours."

This was worse than usual. Abdullah said, "There is nothing wrong with
my mind. I know just what I am doing. And my aim is to cease giving you
any chance to criticize me, probably by tomorrow. Meanwhile, Hakim told
me to come here because you have found the prophecy that was made at my
birth. Is this correct, or was it merely an excuse?" He had never been
so rude to his father's first wife's relations before, but he was angry
enough to feel they deserved it.

Oddly enough, instead of being angry with Abdullah in return, all three
of his father's first wife's relations began hurrying excitedly around
the emporium.

"Now where z's that box?" said Fatima.
"Find it, find it!" said Assif. "it is the very words of the
fortuneteller his poor father brought to the bedside of his second wife
an hour after Abdullah's birth. He must see it!"

"Written in your own father's hand," Hakim said to Abdullah. "The
greatest treasure for you."

"Here it is!" said Fatima, triumphantly pulling a carved wooden box off
a high shelf. She gave the box to Assif, who thrust it into Abdullah's
hands.

"Open it, open it!" they all three cried excitedly.

Abdullah put the box down on the purple cashier's table and sprang the
catch. The lid went back, bringing a musty smell from inside, which was
perfectly plain and empty apart from a folded yellowish paper.

"Get it out! Read it!" said Fatima in even greater excitement.

Abdullah could not see what the fuss was about, but he unfolded the
paper. It had a few lines of writing on it, brown and faded and
definitely his father's. He turned toward the hanging lamp with it. Now
that Hakim had shut the main doors, the general purpleness of the
emporium made it hard to see in there.

"He can barely see!" said Fatima.

34

Assif said, "No wonder. There's no light in here. Bring him into the
room at the back. The overhead shutters are open there."

He and Hakim took hold of Abdullah's shoulders and pushed and hustled
him toward the back of the shop. Abdullah was so busy trying to read the
pale and scribbly writing of his father that he let them push him until
he was positioned under the big overhead louvers in the living room
behind the emporium. That was better. Now he knew why his father had
been so disappointed in him. The writing said:

These are the words of the wise fortune teller:

"This son of yours will not follow you in your trade.

Two years after your death, whiile he is still a very

young man, he will be raised above all others in this

land. As fate decrees it, so I have spoken.

My son's fortune is a great disapppointment to me.

Let Fate send me other sons to follow in my trade, or

I have wasted forty gold pieces on this prophecy.

"As you see, a great future awaits you, dear boy," said Assif.

Somebody giggled.

Abdullah looked up from the paper, a little bemused. There seemed to be
a lot of scent in the air.

The giggle came again, two of it, from in front of him.

Abdullah's eyes snapped forward. He felt them bulge. Two extremely fat
young women stood in front of him. They met his bulging eyes and giggled
again, coyly. Both were dressed to kill in shiny satin and ballooning
gauze-pink on the right, yellow on the left one-and hung with more
necklaces and bracelets than seemed probable. In addition, the pink one,
who was fattest, had a pearl dangling on her forehead, just below her
carefully frizzed hair. The yellow one, who was only just not fattest,
wore a sort of amber tiara and had even frizzier hair. Both wore a very
large amount of makeup, which was, in both cases, a severe error.

As soon as they were sure Abdullah's attention was on them-

******

35

and it was; he was riveted with horror-each girl drew a veil from behind
her ample shoulders-a pink veil on the left and a yellow on the
right-and draped it chastely across her head and face. "Greetings, dear
husband!" they chorused from beneath the veils.

"What!" exclaimed Abdullah.

"We veil ourselves," said the pink one.

"Because you should not look at our faces," said the yellow one.

"Until we are married," finished the pink.

"There must be some mistake!" said Abdullah.

"Not in the least," said Fatima. "These are my niece's two nieces who
are here to marry you. Didn't you hear me say I was going to look out
for a couple of wives for you?"

The two nieces giggled again. "He's ever so handsome," said the yellow one.

After a fairly long pause, in which he swallowed hard and did his best
to control his feelings, Abdullah said politely, "Tell me, O relatives
of my father's first wife, have you known of the prophecy which was made
at my birth for a long time?"

"Ages," said Hakim. "Do you take us for fools?"

"Your dear father showed it to us," said Fatima, "at the time he made
his will."

"And naturally we are not prepared to let your great good fortune take
you away from the family," Assif explained. "We waited only for the
moment when you ceased to follow your good father's trade-this surely
being the signal for the Sultan to make you a vizier or invite you to
command his armies or maybe to elevate you in some other way. Then we
took steps to ensure that we shared in your good fortune. These two
brides of yours are closely related to all three of us. You will
naturally not neglect us as you rise. So, dear boy, it only remains for
me to introduce you to the magistrate, who, as you see, stands ready to
marry you."

Abdullah had, up to now, been unable to look away from the billowing
figures of the two nieces. Now he raised his eyes and met the cynical
look of the Justice of the Bazaar, who was just stepping

36

out from behind a screen with his Register of Marriages in his hands.
Abdullah wondered how much he was being paid.

Abdullah bowed politely to the Justice. "I am afraid this is not
possible," he said.

"Ah, I knew he would be unkind and disagreeable!" said Fatima.
"Abdullah, think of the disgrace and disappointment to these poor girls
if you refuse them now! After they've come all this way, expecting to be
married, and got all dressed up! How could you, nephew!"

"Besides, I've locked all the doors," said Hakim. "Don't think you can
get away."

"I am sorry to hurt the feelings of two such spectacular young ladies
..." Abdullah began.

The feelings of the two brides were hurt anyway. Each girl uttered a
wail. Each put her veiled face in her hands and sobbed heavily.

"This is awful!" wept the pink one.

"I knew they should have asked him first!" cried the yellow one.

Abdullah discovered that the sight of females crying-particularly such
large ones, who wobbled with it everywhere-made him feel terrible. He
knew he was an oaf and a beast. He was ashamed. The situation was not
the girls' fault. They had been used by Assif, Fatima, and Hakim, just
as Abdullah had been. But the chief reason he felt so beastly-and it
made him truly ashamed-was that he just wanted them to stop, to shut up
and stop wobbling. Otherwise he did not care two hoots for their
feelings. If he compared them with Flower-in-the-Night, he knew they
revolted him. The idea of marrying them stuck in his craw. He felt sick.
But just because they were whimpering and sniffing and flubbering in
front of him, he found himself considering that three wives were perhaps
not so many, after all. The two of them would make companions for
Flower-in-the-Night when they were all far from Zanzib and home. He
would have to explain the situation to them and load them onto the magic
carpet-

That brought Abdullah back to reason. With a bump. With the sort of bump
a magic carpet might make if loaded with two such

37

weighty females-always supposing it could even get off the ground with
them on it in the first place. They were so very fat. As for thinking
they would make companions for Flower-in-theNight-phooey! She was
intelligent, educated, and kind, as well as being beautiful (and thin).
These two had yet to show him that they had a brain cell between them.
They wanted to be married, and their crying was a way of bullying him
into it. And they giggled. He had never heard Flower-in-the-Night giggle.
Here Abdullah was somewhat amazed to discover that he, really and truly,
did love Flower-in-the-Night just as ardently as he had been telling
himself he did-or more, because he now saw he respected her. He knew he
would die without her. And if he agreed to marry these two fat nieces,
he would be without her. She would call him greedy, like the Prince in
Ochinstan.

"I am very sorry," he said above the loud sobbings. "You should really
have consulted me first about this, O relatives of my father's first
wife, O much honored and most honest Justice. It would have saved this
misunderstanding. I cannot marry yet. I have made a vow."

"What vow?" demanded everyone else, the fat brides included, and the
Justice added, "Have you registered this vow? To be legal, all vows must
be registered with a magistrate."

This was awkward. Abdullah thought rapidly. "Indeed, it is registered, O
veritable weighing scale of judgment," he said. "My father took me to a
magistrate to register the vow when he ordered me to make it. I was but
a small child at the time. Though I did not understand then, I see now
it was because of the prophecy. My father, being a prudent man, did not
wish to see his forty gold coins wasted. He made me vow that I would
never marry until Fate had placed me above all others in this land. So
you see"-Abdullah put his hands in the sleeves of his best suit and
bowed regretfully to the two fat brides-"I cannot yet marry you, twin
plums of candied sugar, but the time will come."

Everyone said, "Oh, in that case!" in various tones of discontent, and
to Abdullah's profound relief, most of them turned away from him.

38

"I always thought your father was a rather grasping man," Fatima added.

"Even from beyond the grave," Assif agreed. "We must wait for this dear
boy's elevation then."

The Justice, however, stood his ground. "And which magistrate was it,
before whom you made this vow?" he asked.

"I do not know his name," Abdullah invented, speaking with intense
regret. He was sweating. "I was a tiny child, and he appeared to me an
old man with a long white beard." That, he thought, would serve as a
description of every magistrate there ever was, including the Justice
standing before him.

"I shall have to check all records," the Justice said irritably. He
turned to Assif, Hakim, and Fatima and-rather coldly-made his formal
goodbyes.

Abdullah left with him, almost clinging to the Justice's official sash
in his hurry to get away from the emporium and the two fat brides.

39

Which tells how

Flower-in-the-Night's
father wished to

raise Abdullah

above all others

in the land

What a day!" Abdullah said to himself when he was

back inside his booth at last. "If my luck goes on this way, I will not
be surprised if I never get the carpet to move again!" Or, he thought as
he lay down on the carpet, still dressed in his best, he might get to
the night garden only to find that Flower-in-the-Night was too annoyed
at his stupidity last night to love him anymore. Or she might love him
still but have decided not to fly away with him. Or ...

It took him a while to get to sleep.

But when he woke, everything was perfect. The carpet was just gliding to
a gentle landing on the moonlit bank. So Abdullah knew he had said the
command word after all, and it was such a short while since he had said
it that he almost had a memory of what it was. But it went clean out of
his head when Flower-in-the-Night came running eagerly toward him, among
the white scented flowers and the round yellow lamps.

"You're here!" she called as she ran. "I was quite worried!"

She was not angry. Abdullah's heart sang. "Are you ready to leave?" he
called back. "Jump on beside me."

40

Flower-in-the-Night laughed delightedly-it was definitely no

;le-and came running on across the lawn. The moon seemed just then to go
behind a cloud because Abdullah saw her lit entirely by the lamps for a
moment, golden and eager, as she ran. He stood up and held out his hands
to her.

As he did so, the cloud came right down into the lamplight. And it was
not a cloud but great black leathery wings, silently beating. A pair of
equally leathery arms, with hands that had long fingernails like claws,
reached from the shadow of those fanning wings and wrapped themselves
around Flower-in-the-Night. Abdullah saw her jerk as those arms stopped
her running. She looked around and up. Whatever she saw made her scream,
one single wild, frantic scream, which was cut off when one of the
leathery arms changed position to clap its huge taloned hand over her
face. Flower-in-the- Night beat at the arm with her fists, and kicked
and struggled, but all quite uselessly. She was lifted up, a small white
figure against the huge blackness. The great wings silently beat again.
A gigantic foot, with talons like the hands, pressed the turf a yard or
so from the bank where Abdullah was still in the act of standing up, and
a leathery leg flexed mighty calf muscles as the thing-whatever it
was-sprang upright. For the merest instant Abdullah found himself
staring into a hideous leathery face with a ring through its hooked nose
and long, upslanting eyes, remote and cruel. The thing was not looking
at him. It was simply concentrating on getting itself and its captive
airborne.
The next second it was aloft. Abdullah saw it overhead for a heartbeat
longer, a mighty flying djinn dangling a tiny, pale human girl in its
arms. Then the night swallowed it up. It all had happened unbelievably
quickly.

"After it! Follow that djinn!" Abdullah ordered the carpet.

The carpet seemed to obey. It bellied up from the bank. Then, almost as
if someone had given it another command, it sank back and lay still.

"You moth-eaten doormat!" Abdullah screamed at it.

There was a shout from farther down the garden. "This way, men! That
scream came from up there!"

41

Along the arcade Abdullah glimpsed moonlight on metal helmets and-worse
still-golden lamplight on swords and crossbows. He did not wait to
explain to these people why he had screamed. He flung himself flat on
the carpet.

"Back to the booth!" he whispered to it. "Quickly! Please!"

This time the carpet obeyed, as quickly as it had the night before. It
was up off the bank in an eye blink and then hurtling sideways across a
forbiddingly high wall. Abdullah had just a glimpse of a large party of
northern mercenaries milling around in the lamplit garden before he was
speeding above the sleeping roofs and moonlit towers of Zanzib. He had
barely time to reflect that Flower-in-the- Night's father must be even
richer than he had thought-few people could afford that many hired
soldiers, and mercenaries from the north were the most expensive
kind-before the carpet planed downward and brought him smoothly in
through the curtains to the middle of his booth.

There he gave himself up to despair.

A djinn had stolen Flower-in-the-Night and the carpet had refused to
follow. He knew that was not surprising. A djinn, as everyone in Zanzib
knew, commanded enormous powers in the air and the earth. No doubt the
djinn had, as a precaution, ordered everything in the garden to stay
where it was while he carried Flower-in-the-Night away. It had probably
not even noticed the carpet, or Abdullah on it, but the carpet's lesser
magic had been forced to give way to the djinn's command. So the djinn
had stolen away Flowerin-the-Night, whom Abdullah loved more than his
own soul, just at the moment when she was about to run into his arms,
and there seemed nothing he could do.

He wept.

After that he vowed to throw away all the money hidden in his clothes.
It was useless to him now. But before he did, he gave himself over to
grief again, noisy misery at first, in which he lamented out loud and
beat his breast in the manner of Zanzib; then, as cocks crowed and
people began moving about, he fell into silent despair. There was no
point even in moving. Other people might bustle about and whistle and
clank buckets, but Abdullah was no longer

42
part of that life. He stayed crouching on the magic carpet, wishing he
were dead.

So miserable was he that it never occurred to him that he might be in
any danger himself. He paid no attention when all the noises in the
Bazaar stopped, like birds when a hunter enters a wood. He did not
really notice the heavy marching of feet or the regular clankclankclank
of mercenary armor that went with it. When someone barked "Halt!"
outside his booth, he did not even turn his head. But he did turn around
when the curtains of the booth were torn down. He was sluggishly
surprised. He blinked his swollen eyes against the powerful sunlight and
wondered vaguely what a troop of northern soldiers was doing coming in
here.

"That's him," said someone in civilian clothes, who might have been
Hakim, and then faded prudently away before Abdullah's eyes could focus
on him.

"You!" snapped the squad leader. "Out. With us."

"What?" said Abdullah.

"Fetch him," said the leader.

Abdullah was bewildered. He protested feebly when they dragged him to
his feet and twisted his arms to make him walk. He went on protesting as
they marched him at the double-clankclank, clank-clank-out of the Bazaar
and into the West Quarter. Before long he was protesting very strongly
indeed. "What is this?" he panted. "I demand ... as a citizen . . .
where we are . . . going!"

"Shut up. You'll see," they answered. They were too fit to pant.

A short while after, they ran Abdullah in under a massive gate made of
blocks of stone that glared white in the sun, into a blazing courtyard,
where they spent five minutes outside an ovenlike smithy loading
Abdullah with chains. He protested even more. "What is this for? Where
is this? I demand to know!"

"Shut up!" said the squad leader. He remarked to his second-in- command
in his barbarous northern accent, "They always winge so, these
Zanzibbeys. Got no notion of dignity."

While the squad leader was saying this, the smith-who was from Zanzib,
too-murmured to Abdullah, "The Sultan wants you.

43

I don't think much of your chances, either. Last one I chained like this
got crucified."

"But I haven't done anyth-" protested Abdullah.

"SHUT UP!" screamed the squad leader. "Finished, smith? Right. On the
double!" And they ran Abdullah off again, across the glaring yard and
into the large building beyond.

Abdullah would have said it was impossible even to walk in those chains.
They were so heavy. But it is wonderful what you can do if a party of
grim-faced soldiers is quite set on making you do it. He ran,
clank-chankle, clank-chankle, clash, until at last, with an exhausted
jingle, he arrived at the foot of a high raised seat made of cool blue
and gold tiles and piled with cushions. There the soldiers all went down
on one knee, in a distant, decorous way, as northern soldiers did to the
person who was paying them.

"Present prisoner Abdullah, m'lord Sultan," the squad leader said.

Abdullah did not kneel. He followed the customs of Zanzib and fell on
his face. Besides, he was exhausted and it was easier to fall down with
a mighty clatter than do anything else. The tiled floor was blessedly,
wonderfully cool.

"Make the son of a camel's excrement kneel," said the Sultan. "Make the
creature look us in the face." His voice was low, but it trembled with
anger.

A soldier hauled on the chains, and two others pulled on Abdullah's arms
until they had got him sort of bent on his knees. They held him that
way, and Abdullah was glad. He would have crumpled up in horror
otherwise. The man lounging on the tiled throne was fat and bald and
wore a bushy gray beard. He was slapping at a cushion, in a way that
looked idle but was really bitterly angry, with a white cotton thing
that had a tassel on top. It was this tasseled thing that made Abdullah
see what trouble he was in. The thing was his own nightcap.

"Well, dog from a muck heap," said the Sultan, "where is my daughter?"

"I have no idea," Abdullah said miserably.

44

"Do you deny," said the Sultan, dangling the nightcap as if it were a
severed head he was holding up by its hair, "do you deny that this is
your nightcap? Your name is inside it, you miserable salesman! It was
found by me-by us in person!-inside my daughter's trinket box, along
with eighty-two portraits of common persons, which had been hidden by my
daughter in eighty-two cunning places. Do you deny that you crept into
my night garden and presented my daughter with these portraits? Do you
deny that you then stole my daughter away?"

"Yes, I do deny that!" said Abdullah. "I do not deny, O most exalted
defender of the weak, the nightcap or the pictures-although I must point
out that your daughter is cleverer in hiding than you are in finding,
great wielder of wisdom, for I gave her, in fact, one hundred and seven
more pictures than you have discovered-but I have most certainly not
stolen Flower-in-the-Night away. She was snatched from before my very
eyes by a huge and hideous djinn. I have no more idea than your most
celestial self where she is now."

"A likely story!" said the Sultan. "Djinn indeed! Liar! Worm!"

"I swear that it is true!" Abdullah cried out. He was in such despair by
now that he hardly cared what he said. "Get any holy object you like,
and I will swear to the djinn on it. Have me enchanted to tell the
truth, and I will still say the same, O mighty crusher of criminals. For
it is the truth. And since I am probably far more desolated than
yourself by the loss of your daughter, great Sultan, glory of our land,
I implore you to kill me now and spare me a life of misery!"
"I will willingly have you executed," said the Sultan. "But first tell
me where she is."

"But I have told you, wonder of the world!" said Abdullah. "I do not
know where she is."

"Take him away," the Sultan said with great calmness to his kneeling
soldiers. They sprang up readily and pulled Abdullah to his feet.
"Torture the truth out of him," the Sultan added. "When we find her, you
can kill him, but have him linger until then. I

45

daresay the Prince of Ochinstan will accept her as a widow if I double
the dowry."

"You mistake, sovereign of sovereigns!" Abdullah gasped as the soldiers
clattered him across the tiles. "I have no idea where the djinn went,
and my great sorrow is that he took her before we had any chance to get
married."

"What?"   shouted the Sultan. "Bring him back!" The soldiers at once
trailed   Abdullah and his chains back to the tiled seat, where the Sultan
was now   leaning forward and glaring. "Did my clean ear become soiled by
hearing   you say you are not married to my daughter, filth?" he demanded.

"That is correct, mighty monarch," said Abdullah. "The djinn came before
we could elope."

The Sultan glared down at him in what seemed to be horror. "This is the
truth?"

"I swear," said Abdullah, "that I have not yet so much as kissed your
daughter. I had intended to seek out a magistrate as soon as we were far
from Zanzib. I know what is proper. But I also felt it proper to make
sure first that Flower-in-the-Night indeed wished to marry me. Her
decision struck me as made in ignorance, despite the hundred and
eighty-nine pictures. If you will forgive my saying so, protector of
patriots, your method of bringing up your daughter is decidedly unsound.
She took me for a woman when she first saw me."

"So," said the Sultan musingly, "when I set soldiers to catch and kill
the intruder in the garden last night, it could have been disastrous.
You fool," he said to Abdullah, "slave and mongrel who dares to
criticize! Of course I had to bring my daughter up as I did. The
prophecy made at her birth was that she would marry the first man, apart
from me, that she saw!"

Despite the chains, Abdullah straightened up. For the first time that
day he felt a twinge of hope.

The Sultan was staring down the gracefully tiled and ornamented room,
thinking. "The prophecy suited me very well," he remarked. "I had long
wished for an alliance with the countries of

46

the north, for they have better weapons than we can make here, some of
those weapons being truly sorcerous, I understand. But the princes of
Ochinstan are very hard to pin down. So all I had to do- so I
thought-was to isolate my daughter from any possibility of seeing a
man-and naturally give her the best of educations otherwise, to make
sure she could sing and dance and make herself pleasing to a prince.
Then, when my daughter was of marriageable age, I invited the Prince
here on a visit of state. He was to come here next year, when he had
finished subduing a land he has just conquered with those same excellent
weapons. And I knew that as soon as my daughter set eyes on him, the
prophecy would make sure that I had him!" His eyes turned balefully down
on Abdullah. "Then my plans are upset by an insect like you!"

"That is unfortunately true, most prudent of rulers," Abdullah admitted.
"Tell me, is this Prince of Ochinstan by any chance somewhat old and ugly?"

"I believe him to be hideous in the same northern fashion as these
mercenaries," the Sultan said, at which Abdullah sensed the soldiers,
most of whom ran to freckles and reddish hair, stiffened. "Why do you
ask, dog?"

"Because, if you will forgive further criticism of your great wisdom, O
nurturer of our nation, this seems somewhat unfair to your daughter,"
Abdullah observed. He felt the eyes of the soldiers turn to him,
wondering at his daring. Abdullah did not care. He felt he had little to
lose.

"Women do not count," said the Sultan. "Therefore, it is impossible to
be unfair to them."

"I disagree," said Abdullah, at which the soldiers stared even harder.

The Sultan glowered down at him. His powerful hands wrung the nightcap
as if it were Abdullah's neck. "Be silent, you diseased toad!" he said.
"Or you will make me forget myself and order your instant execution!"

Abdullah relaxed a little. "O absolute sword among the citizens, I
implore you to kill me now," he said. "I have transgressed and I have
sinned and I have trespassed in your night garden-"

47

"Be quiet," said the Sultan. "You know perfectly well I can't kill you
until I have found my daughter and made sure she marries you."

Abdullah relaxed further. "Your slave does not follow your reasoning, O
jewel of judgment," he protested. "I demand to die now."

The Sultan practically snarled at him. "If I have learned one thing," he
said, "from this sorry business, it is that even I, Sultan of Zanzib
though I am, cannot cheat Fate. That prophecy will get itself fulfilled
somehow, I know that. Therefore, if I wish my daughter to marry the
Prince of Ochinstan, I must first go along with the prophecy."

Abdullah relaxed almost completely. He had naturally seen this
straightaway, but he had been anxious to make sure that the Sultan had
worked it out, too. And he had. Clearly Flower-in-the-Night inherited
her logical mind from her father.

"So where is my daughter?" asked the Sultan.

"I have told you, O sun shining upon Zanzib," said Abdullah. "The djinn-"
"I do not for a moment believe in the djinn," said the Sultan. "It is
far too convenient. You must have hidden the girl somewhere. Take him
away," he said to the soldiers, "and shut him in the safest dungeon we
have. Leave the chains on him. He must have used some form of
enchantment to get into the garden, and he can probably use it to escape
unless we are careful." Abdullah was unable to avoid flinching at this.
The Sultan noticed. He smiled nastily. "Then," he said, "I want a
house-to-house search made for my daughter. She is to be brought to the
dungeon for the wedding as soon as she is found." His eyes turned
musingly back to Abdullah. "Until then," he said, "I shall entertain
myself by inventing new ways to kill you. At the moment I favor impaling
you upon a forty- foot stake and then loosing vultures to eat bits off
you. But I could change my mind if I think of something worse."

As the soldiers dragged him away, Abdullah nearly despairedagain. He
thought of the prophecy made at his own birth. A forty- foot stake would
raise him above all others in the land very nicely.

48

Which shows

how Abdullah went

from the frying pan

into the fire

They put Abdullah in a deep and smelly dungeon where the only light came
through a tiny grating high up in the ceiling-and that light was not
daylight. It probably came from a distant window at the end of a passage
on the floor above, where the grating was part of the floor.

Knowing that this was what he had to look forward to, Abdullah tried, as
the soldiers dragged him away, to fill his eyes and mind with images of
light. In the pause while the soldiers were unlocking the outside door
to the dungeons, he looked up and around. They were in a dark little
courtyard with blank walls of stone standing like cliffs all about it.
But if he tipped his head tight back, Abdullah could just see a slender
spire in the mid-distance, outlined against the rising gold of morning.
It amazed him to see that it was only an hour after dawn. Above the
spire the sky was deep blue with just one cloud standing peacefully in
it. Morning was still flushing the cloud red and gold, giving it the
look of a high-piled castle with golden windows. Golden light caught the
wings of a white bird circling the spire. Abdullah was sure this was the
last beauty he would ever see in his life. He stared backward at it as
the soldiers lugged him inside.

49

He tried to treasure this image when he was locked in the cold gray
dungeon, but it was impossible. The dungeon was another world. For a
long time he was too miserable even to notice how cramped he was in his
chains. When he did notice, he shifted and clanked about on the cold
floor, but it did not help very much.

"I have to look forward to a lifetime of this," he told himself. "Unless
someone rescues Flower-in-the-Night, of course." That did not seem
likely, since the Sultan refused to believe in the djinn.
After this he tried to stave off despair with his daydream. But somehow,
thinking of himself as a prince who had been kidnapped helped not at
all. He knew it was untrue, and he kept thinking guiltily that
Flower-in-the-Night had believed him when he told her. She must have
decided to marry him because she thought he was a prince-being a
princess herself, as he now knew. He simply could not imagine himself
ever daring to tell her the truth. For a while it seemed to him that he
deserved the worst fate the Sultan could invent for him.

Then he began thinking of Flower-in-the-Night herself. Wherever she was,
she was certainly at least as scared and miserable as he was himself.
Abdullah yearned to comfort her. He wanted to rescue her so much that he
spent some time wrenching uselessly at his chains.

"For certainly nobody else is likely to try," he muttered. "I must get
out of here!"

Then, although he was sure it was another notion as silly as his
daydream, he tried to summon the magic carpet. He visualized it lying on
the floor of his booth, and he called to it, out loud, over and over
again. He said all the magic-sounding words he could think of, hoping
one of them would be the command word.

Nothing happened. And how silly to think that it would! Abdullah
thought. Even if the carpet could hear him from the dungeon, supposing
he got the command word right at last, how could even a magic carpet
wriggle its way in here through that tiny grating? And suppose it did
wriggle in, how would that help Abdullah to get out?

50

Abdullah gave up and leaned against the wall, half dozing, half
despairing. It must now be the heat of the day, when most folk in Zanzib
took at least a short rest. Abdullah himself, when he was not visiting
one of the public parks, usually sat on a pile of his less good carpets
in the shade in front of his stall, drinking fruit juice, or wine if he
could afford it, and chatting lazily with Jamal. No longer. And this is
just my first day! he thought morbidly. I'm keeping track of the hours
now. How long before I lose track even of days?

He shut his eyes. One good thing. A house-to-house search for the
Sultan's daughter would cause at least some annoyance to Fatima, Hakim,
and Assif simply because they were known to be the only family Abdullah
had. He hoped soldiers turned the purple emporium upside down. He hoped
they slit the walls and unrolled all the carpets. He hoped they arrested-

Something landed on the floor beyond Abdullah's feet.

So they throw me some food, Abdullah thought, and I would rather starve.
He opened his eyes lazily. They shot wide of their own accord.

There, on the dungeon floor, lay the magic carpet. Upon it, peacefully
sleeping, lay Jamal's bad-tempered dog.

Abdullah stared at both of them. He could imagine how, in the heat of
midday, the dog might lie down in the shade of Abdullah's booth. He
could see that it would lie on the carpet because it was comfortable.
But how a dog-a dog-could chance to say the command word was beyond him
to understand entirely. As he stared, the dog began dreaming. Its paws
worked. Its snout wrinkled, and it snuffled, as if it had caught the
most delicious possible scent, and it uttered a faint whimper, as if
whatever it smelled in the dream were escaping from it.

"Is it possible, my friend," Abdullah said to it, "that you were
dreaming of me and of the time I gave you most of my breakfast?"

The dog, in its sleep, heard him. It uttered a loud snore and woke up.
Doglike, it wasted no time wondering how it came to be in this strange
dungeon. It sniffed and smelled Abdullah. It sprang

51

up with a delighted squeak, planted its paws among the chains on
Abdullah's chest, and enthusiastically licked his face.

Abdullah laughed and rolled his head to keep his nose out of the dog's
squiddy breath. He was quite as delighted as the dog was. "So you were
dreaming of me!" he said. "My friend, I shall arrange for you to have a
bowl of squid daily. You have saved my life and possibly
Flower-in-the-Night's, too!"

As soon as the dog's rapture had abated a little, Abdullah began rolling
and working himself along the floor in his chains, until he was lying,
propped on one elbow, on top of the carpet. He gave a great sigh. Now he
was safe. "Come along," he said to the dog. "Get on the carpet, too."

But the dog had found the scent of what was certainly a rat in the
corner of the dungeon. It was pursuing the smell with excited snorts. At
each snort Abdullah felt the carpet quiver beneath him. It gave him the
answer he needed.

"Come along," he said to the dog. "If I leave you here, they will find
you when they come to feed me or question me, and they will assume I
have turned myself into a dog. Then my fate will be yours. You have
brought me the carpet and revealed me its secret, and I cannot see you
stuck on a forty-foot stake."

The dog had its nose rammed into the corner. It was not attending.
Abdullah heard, unmistakable even through the thick walls of the
dungeon, the tramp of feet and the rattle of keys. Someone was coming.
He gave up persuading the dog. He lay flat on the carpet.

"Here, boy!" he said. "Come and lick my face!"

The dog understood that. It left the corner, jumped on Abdullah's chest,
and proceeded to obey him.

"Carpet," Abdullah whispered from under the busy tongue. "To the Bazaar,
but do not land. Hover beside Jamal's stall."

The carpet rose and rushed sideways-which was just as well. Keys were
unlocking the dungeon door. Abdullah was not any too sure how the carpet
left the dungeon because the dog was still licking his face and he was
forced to keep his eyes shut. He felt a

52

dank shadow pass across him-perhaps that was when they melted through
the wall-and then bright sunlight. The dog lifted its head into the
sunlight, puzzled. Abdullah squinted sideways across his chains and saw
a high wall rear in front of them and then fall below as the carpet rose
smoothly over it. Then came a succession of towers and roofs, quite
familiar to Abdullah though he had only seen them by night before. And
after that the carpet went planing down toward the outer edge of the
Bazaar. For the palace of the Sultan was indeed only five minutes' walk
from Abdullah's booth.

Jamal's stall came into view, and beside it, Abdullah's own wrecked
booth, with carpets flung all over the walkway. Obviously soldiers had
searched there for Flower-in-the-Night. Jamal was dozing, with his head
on his arms, between a big simmering pot of squid and a charcoal grill
with skewered meat smoking on it. He raised his head, and his one eye
stared as the carpet came to hang in the air in front of him.

"Down, boy!" Abdullah said. "Jamal, call your dog."

Jamal was clearly very scared. It is no fun keeping the stall next door
to anyone a sultan wishes to impale on a stake. He seemed speechless.
Since the dog was taking no notice, either, Abdullah struggled into
sitting position, clanking, rattling, and sweating. This tipped the dog
off. It jumped nimbly to the stall counter, where Jamal absently seized
it in his arms.

"What do you want me to do?" he asked, eyeing the chains. "Shall I fetch
a blacksmith?"

Abdullah was touched at this proof of Jamal's friendship. But sitting up
had given him a view down the walkway between the stalls. He could see
the soles of running feet down there and flyinggarments. It seemed that
one boothkeeper was on his way to fetch the Watch, though there was
something about the running figure that reminded Abdullah rather
strongly of Assif. "No," he said. "There's no time." Clanking, he
wriggled his left leg over the edge of the carpet. "Do this for me
instead. Put your hand on the embroidery above my left boot."

53

Jamal obediently stretched out a brawny arm and, very gingerly, touched
the embroidery. "Is it a spell?" he asked nervously.

"No," said Abdullah. "It's a hidden purse. Put your hand in and take the
money out of it."

Jamal was puzzled, but his fingers groped, found the way into the purse,
and came out as a fistful of gold. "There's a fortune here," he said.
"Will this buy your freedom?"

"No," said Abdullah. "Yours. They'll be after you and your dog for
helping me. Take the gold and the dog and get out. Leave Zanzib. Go
north to the barbarous places, where you can hide."

"North!" said Jamal. "But whatever can I do in the north?"

"Buy everything you need and set up a Rashpuhti restaurant," said
Abdullah. "There's enough gold to do it, and you're an excellent cook.
You could make your fortune there."

"Really?" said Jamal, staring from Abdullah to his handful of money.
"You really think I could?"
Abdullah had been keeping a wary eye on the walkway. Now he saw the
space fill, not with the Watch but with northern mercenaries, and they
were running. "Only if you go now," he said.

Jamal caught the clank-clank of running soldiers. He leaned out to look
and make sure. Then he whistled to his dog and was gone, so swiftly and
quietly that Abdullah could only admire. Jamal had even spared time to
move the meat off the grill so that it would not burn. All the soldiers
were going to find here was a caldron of half- boiled squid.

Abdullah whispered to the carpet. "To the desert. Fast!"

The carpet was off at once, with its usual sideways rush. Abdullah
thought he certainly would have been thrown off it but for the weight of
his chains, which caused the carpet to bulge downward in the center,
rather like a hammock. And speed was necessary. The soldiers shouted
behind him. There were some loud bangs. For a few instants two bullets
and a crossbow bolt carved the blue sky beside the carpet and then fell
behind. The carpet hurtled on, across roofs, over walls, beside towers,
and then skimming palm trees and market gardens. Finally it shot forth
into hot

54

gray emptiness, shimmering white and yellow under a huge bowl of sky,
where Abdullah's chains began to grow uncomfortably warm.

The rushing of air stopped. Abdullah raised his head and saw Zanzib as a
surprisingly small clump of towers on the horizon. The carpet sailed
slowly past a person riding a camel, who turned his well-veiled face to
watch. It began to sink toward the sand. At this the person on the camel
turned his camel, too, and urged it into a trot after the carpet.
Abdullah could almost see him thinking gleefully that here was his
chance to get his hands on a genuine, working magic carpet, and its
owner in chains and in no position to resist him.

"Up, up!" he almost shrieked at the carpet. "Fly north!"

The carpet lumbered up into the air again. Annoyance and reluctance
breathed from every thread of it. It turned in a heavy half circle and
sailed gently northward at walking pace. The person on the camel cut
across the middle of the half circle and came on at a gallop. Since the
carpet was only about nine feet in the air, it was a sitting target for
someone on a galloping camel.

Abdullah saw it was time for some quick talking. "Beware!" he shouted at
the camel rider. "Zanzib has cast me out in chains for fear I spread
this plague I have!" The rider was not quite fooled. He reined in his
camel and followed at a more cautious pace, while he wrestled a tent
pole out of his baggage. Clearly he intended to tip Abdullah off the
carpet with it. Abdullah turned his attention hastily to the carpet. "O
most excellent of carpets," he said, "O brightest- colored and most
delicately woven, whose lovely textile is so cunningly enhanced with
magic, I fear I have not treated you hitherto with proper respect. I
have snapped commands and even shouted at you, where I now see that your
gentle nature requires only the mildest of requests. Forgive, oh, forgive!"

The carpet appreciated this. It stretched tighter in the air and put on
a bit of speed.
"And dog that I am," continued Abdullah, "I have caused you to labor in
the heat of the desert, weighted most dreadfully with my

55

chains. O best and most elegant of carpets, I think now only of you and
how best I might rid you of this great weight. If you were to fly at a
gentle speed-say, only a little faster than a camel might gallop-to the
nearest spot in the desert northward where I can find someone to remove
these chains, would this be agreeable to your amiable and aristocratic
nature?"

He seemed to have struck the right note. A sort of smug pridefulness
exuded from the carpet now. It rose a foot or so, changed direction
slightly, and moved forward at a purposeful seventy miles an hour.
Abdullah clung to its edge and peered backward at the frustrated camel
rider, who was soon dwindling to a dot in the desert behind.

"O most noble of artifacts, you are a sultan among carpets, and I am
your miserable slave!" he said shamelessly.

The carpet liked this so much that it went even faster.

Ten minutes later it surged over a sand dune and came to an abrupt stop
just below the summit on the other side. Slanting. Abdullah was rolled
helplessly off in a cloud of sand. And he went on rolling, clattering,
jingling, bounding, raising more sand, and then-after desperate
efforts-tobogganing feetfirst in a groove of sand, down to the very edge
of a small muddy pool in an oasis. A number of ragged people who were
crouching over something at the edge of this pool sprang up and
scattered as Abdullah plowed in among them. Abdullah's feet caught the
thing they were crouching over and shot it back into the pool. One man
shouted indignantly and went splashing into the water to rescue it. The
rest drew sabers and knives-and in one case a long pistol-and surrounded
Abdullah threateningly.

"Cut his throat," said one.

Abdullah blinked sand out of his eyes and thought he had seldom seen a
more villainous crew of men. They all had scarred faces, shifty eyes,
bad teeth, and unpleasant expressions. The man with the pistol was the
most unpleasant of the lot. He wore a sort of earring through one side
of his large hooked nose and a very bushy

56

mustache. His headcloth was pinned up at one side with a flashy red
stone in a gold brooch.

"Where have you sprung from?" this man said. He kicked Abdullah.
"Explain yourself."

All of them, including the man who was wading out of the pool with some
kind of bottle, looked at Abdullah with expressions that said his
explanation had better be good. Or else.

57

Which introduces the genie
Abdullah blinked more sand out of his eyes and stared earnestly at the
man with the pistol. The man really was theabsolute image of the
villainous bandit of his daydream. It must be one of those coincidences.

"I beg your pardon a hundred times, gentlemen of the desert," he said
with great politeness, "for intruding on you in this manner, but am I
addressing the most noble and world-famous bandit, the matchless Kabul
Aqba?"

The other villainous men around him seemed astonished. Abdullah
distinctly heard one say, "How did he know that?" But the man with the
pistol simply sneered. It was something his face was particularly well
designed to do. "I am indeed he," he said. "Famous, am I?"

It was one of those coincidences, Abdullah thought. Well, at least he
knew where he was now. "Alas, wanderers in the wilderness," he said, "I
am, like your noble selves, one who is outcast and oppressed. I have
sworn revenge on all Rashpuht. I came here expressly to join with you
and add the strength of my mind and my arm to yours."

58

"Did you indeed?" said Kabul Aqba. "And how did you get here? By
dropping from the sky, chains and all?"

"By magic," Abdullah said modestly. He thought it was the thing most
likely to impress these people. "I did indeed drop from the sky, noblest
of nomads."

Unfortunately they did not seem impressed. Most of them laughed. Kabul
Aqba, with a nod, sent two of them up the sand dune to examine
Abdullah's point of arrival. "So you can work magic?" he said. "Do these
chains you wear have anything to do with that?"

"Certainly," said Abdullah. "Such a mighty magician am I that the Sultan
of Zanzib himself loaded me with chains for very fear of what I could
do. Only strike these chains apart and undo these handcuffs and you will
see great things." Out of the corner of his eye he saw the two men
returning, carrying the carpet between them. He hoped very much that
this was a good thing to happen. "Iron, as you know, inhibits a magician
in the use of magic," he said earnestly. "Feel free to strike it off me
and see a new life open before you."

The rest of the bandits looked at him dubiously. "We haven't got a cold
chisel," said one. "Or a mallet."

Kabul Aqba turned to the two men with the carpet. "There was only this,"
they reported. "No sign of anything to ride. No tracks."

At this the chief bandit stroked his mustache. Abdullah found himself
wondering if it ever got tangled with his nose ring. "Hmm," he said.
"Then I'll lay odds it's a magic carpet. I'll have it here." He turned
sneeringly to Abdullah. "Sorry to disappoint you, magician," he said,
"but since you delivered yourself so conveniently in chains, I'm going
to leave you that way and take charge of your carpet, just to prevent
accidents. If you really want to join us, you can make yourself useful
first."

Somewhat to his surprise, Abdullah found he was far more angry than
frightened. Perhaps it was that he had exhausted all his fear that
morning in front of the Sultan. Or perhaps it was just because he ached
all over. He was sore and scraped from sliding down

59

the sand dune, and one of his ankle bands was chafing brutally. "But I
have told you," he said haughtily, "that I shall be no use to you until
my chains are off."

"It is not magic we want from you. It is knowledge," said Kabul Aqba. He
beckoned to the man who had gone wading into the pool. "Tell us what
manner of thing this is," he said, "and we may let your legs loose as a
reward."

The man who had been in the pool squatted down and held out a smoky blue
bottle with a rounded belly. Abdullah levered himself to his elbows and
looked at it resentfully. It seemed to be new. There was a clean new
cork showing through the smoky glass of the neck, which had been sealed
over with a stamped lead seal, again new-looking. It looked like a
bottle of perfume that had lost its label. "It's quite light," said the
squatting man, shaking the bottle about, "and it neither rattles nor
sloshes."

Abdullah.thought of a way he could use this to get himself unchained.
"It's a genie bottle," he said. "Know, denizens of the desert, that it
could be very dangerous. Do but take these chains from me, and I will
control the genie within and make sure he obeys your every wish.
Otherwise I think no man should touch it."

The man holding the bottle dropped it nervously, but Kabul Aqba only
laughed and picked it up. "It looks more like something good to drink,"
he said. He tossed the flask to another man. "Open it." The man laid
down his saber and got out a large knife, with which he hacked at the
lead seal.

Abdullah saw his chance of getting unchained going. Worse, he was about
to be exposed as a fraud. "It is really extremely dangerous, O rubies
among robbers," he protested. "Once you have broken the seal, do not on
any account draw the cork." As he spoke, the man peeled the seal away
and dropped it on the sand. He began prying the cork out, while another
man held the bottle steady for him. "If you must draw the cork,"
Abdullah babbled, "at least tap on the bottle the correct and mystical
number of times and make the genie inside swear-"

The cork came out. Pop. A thin mauvish vapor came smoking

60

out of the neck of the flask. Abdullah hoped the thing was full of
poison. But the vapor almost instantly thickened to a cloud that came
rushing out of the bottle like a kettle boiling bluish mauve steam. This
steam shaped itself into a face-large and angry and blue-and arms, and a
wisp of body connected to the bottle, and went on rushing forth until it
was easily ten feet tall.

"I made a vow!" the face howled, in a large, windy roar. "The one who
lets me out shall suffer. Therel" The misty arms gestured.

The two men holding the cork and the bottle seemed to wink out of
existence. Cork and bottle both fell to the ground, forcing the genie to
billow sideways from the neck of the bottle. From the midst of his blue
vapor, two large toads came crawling and seemed to gaze around in
bewilderment. The genie came slowly and vaporously upright, hovering
above the bottle with his smoky arms folded and a look of utter hatred
on his misty face.

By this time everyone had run away except for Abdullah and Kabul Aqba,
Abdullah because he could barely move in his chains and Kabul Aqba
because he was clearly unexpectedly brave. The genie glowered at the two
of them.

"I am the slave of the bottle," he said. "Much as I hate and detest the
whole arrangement, I have to tell you that he who owns me is allowed one
wish every day and I am forced to grant it." And he added menacingly,
"What is your wish?"

"I wish-" began Abdullah.

Kabul Aqba quickly rammed his hand across Abdullah's mouth. "I am the
one wishing," he said. "Get that quite clear, genie!"

"I hear," said the genie. "What wish?"

"One moment," said Kabul Aqba. He put his face close to Abdullah's ear.
His breath smelled even worse than his hand, although neither, Abdullah
had to admit, was a patch on Jamal's dog. "Well, magician," the bandit
whispered, "you've proved you know what you're talking about. Advise me
what to wish and I'll make you a free man and an honored member of my
band. But if you try to make a wish yourself, I kill you. Understand?"
He put the muzzle of

61

his pistol to Abdullah's head and let go of his mouth. "What shall I wish?"

"Well," said Abdullah, "the wisest and kindest wish would be to wish
your two toads turned back into men."

Kabul Aqba spared a surprised glance for the two toads. They were
crawling uncertainly along the muddy edge of the pool, obviously
wondering whether they could swim or not. "A waste of a wish," he said.
"Think again."

Abdullah racked his brain for what might please a bandit chief most.
"You could ask for limitless wealth, of course," he said, "but you would
then need to carry your money, so perhaps you should first wish for a
team of sturdy camels. And you would need to defend this treasure.
Perhaps your first wish should be for a supply of the famous weapons of
the north, or-"

"But which?" demanded Kabul Aqba. "Hurry. The genie is becoming impatient."

This was true. The genie was not exactly tapping his foot, since he had
no feet to tap, but there was something about his looming, lowering blue
face that suggested there would be two more toads by the pool if he had
to wait much longer.

A very short burst of thought was enough to convince Abdullah that his
situation, despite the chains, would be very much worse if he became a
toad. "Why not wish for a feast?" he said lamely.
"That's better!" said Kabul Aqba. He clapped Abdullah on the shoulder
and sprang up jovially. "I wish for a most lavish feast," he said.

The genie bowed, rather like a candle flame bending in a draft. "Done,"
he said sourly. "And much good may it do you." And he poured himself
carefully back into his bottle again.

It was a very lavish feast. It arrived almost at once, with a dull
whoomping noise, on a long table with a striped awning above it for
shade, and with it arrived liveried slaves to serve it. The rest of the
bandits rather quickly got over their fear and came racing back to
lounge on cushions and eat delicate food from golden dishes and to shout
at the slaves for more, more, more! The servants were, Ab

62

dullah found when he got a chance to talk to some of them, the slaves of
the Sultan of Zanzib himself, and the feast should have been the Sultan's.

This news made Abdullah feel just a little better. He spent the feast
still in chains, hitched up against a handy palm tree. Though he had not
expected anything better from Kabul Aqba, it was still hard. At least
Kabul Aqba remembered him from time to time and, with a lordly wave of
his hand, sent a slave over with a golden dish or a jug of wine.

For there was plenty. Every so often there was another muffled whoomp
and a fresh course would arrive, carried by more bewildered slaves, or
there would be what looked like the pick of the Sultan's wine cellar
loaded onto a jeweled trolley, or an astonished group of musicians.
Whenever Kabul Aqba sent a new slave over to Abdullah, Abdullah found
that slave only too ready to answer questions.

"In truth, noble captive of a desert king," one told him, "the Sultan
was most enraged when the first and second courses so mysteriously
disappeared. On the third course, which is this roast peacock that I
carry, he placed a guard of mercenaries to escort us from the kitchen,
but we were snatched from beside them, even at the very door of the
banquet hall, and instantly found ourselves in this oasis instead."

The Sultan, Abdullah thought, must be getting hungrier and hungrier.

Later a troupe of dancing girls appeared, snatched in the same way. That
must have enraged the Sultan even more. These dancers made Abdullah
melancholy. He thought of Flower-in-the-Night, who was twice as
beautiful as any of them, and tears came into his eyes. As the jollity
around the table grew, the two toads sat in the shallow edge of the
pond, hooting mournfully. No doubt they felt at least as bad about
things as Abdullah did.

The moment night fell, the slaves, the musicians, and the dancing girls
all vanished, though what was left of the food and wine stayed. The
bandits by then had glutted themselves and then

63

sated themselves again after that. Most of them fell asleep where they
sat. But to Abdullah's dismay, Kabul Aqba got up-a little unsteadily-and
collected the genie bottle from under the table. He made sure it was
corked. Then he staggered over to the magic carpet and lay down on it
with the bottle in his hand. He fell asleep almost at once.

Abdullah sat against the palm tree in increasing anxiety. If the genie
had returned the stolen slaves to the palace in Zanzib-and it seemed
likely that he had-then someone was going to ask them angry questions.
They would all tell the same story of being forced to serve a band of
robbers, while a well-dressed young man in chains sat and watched from a
palm tree. The Sultan would put two and two together. He was no fool.
Even now a troop of soldiers could be setting out on fast racing camels
to hunt the desert for a certain small oasis.

But that was not the greatest of Abdullah's worries. He watched the
sleeping Kabul Aqba in even greater anxiety. He was about to lose the
magic carpet and, of course, an extremely useful genie with it.

Sure enough, after about half an hour Kabul Aqba rolled over on to his
back and his mouth came open. As no doubt Jamal's dog had done, as
Abdullah himself must have done-but surely not so very loudly?-Kabul
Aqba uttered an enormous rasping snore. The carpet quivered. Abdullah
saw it clearly in the light of the rising moon rise a foot or so from
the ground, where it hung and waited. Abdullah conjectured that it was
busy interpreting whatever dream Kabul Aqba was having just then. What a
bandit chief might dream about Abdullah had no idea, but the carpet
knew. It soared into the air and began to fly.

Abdullah looked up as it glided over the palm fronds above him and had
one last try at influencing it. "O most unfortunate carpet!" he called
out softly. "I would have treated you so much more kindly!"

Maybe the carpet heard him. Or maybe it was an accident. But something
roundish and faintly glimmering rolled off the edge of

64 64

the carpet and dropped with a light thunk on the sand a few feet from
Abdullah. It was the génie bottle. Abdullah reached out, as quickly as
he could without too much rattling and jingling of his chains, and
dragged the bottle into hiding between his back and the palm tree. Then
he sat and waited for morning, feeling decidedly more hopeful.

65

In which

Abdullah's dreams continue to come true

The moment the sun flushed the sand dunes with white-rosy light,
Abdullah wrenched the cork out of the genie's bottle. The vapor steamed
forth, became a jet, and rushed upward into the blue-mauve shape of the
genie, who looked, if possible, angrier than ever. "I said one wish a
day!" the windy voice announced.

"Yes, well, this is a new day, O mauve magnificence, and I am your new
owner," said Abdullah. "And this wish is simple. I wish these chains of
mine gone."

"Hardly worth wasting a wish on," the genie said contemptuously, and
dwindled rapidly away inside the bottle again. Abdullah was just about
to protest that though this wish might seem trivial to a genie, being
without chains was important to him when he found himself able to move
freely, without rattling. He looked down and found the chains had vanished.

He put the cork carefully back in the bottle and stood up. He was
horribly stiff. Before he could move at all, he had to make himself
think of fleet camels with soldiers on them speeding toward this oasis
and then of what would happen if the sleeping bandits woke to find him
standing there without his chains. That got him moving.

66

He hobbled like an old man toward the banquet table. There, very careful
not to disturb the various bandits who were asleep with their faces on
the cloth, he collected food and wrapped it in a napkin. He took a flask
of wine and tied it and the genie bottle to his belt with two more
napkins. He took a last napkin to cover his head in case he got
sunstroke-travelers had told him this was a real danger in the
desert-and then he set off, as swiftly as he could limp, out of the
oasis and due north.

The stiffness wore off as he walked. Walking became almost pleasant
then, and for the first half of the morning Abdullah strode out with a
will, thinking of Flower-in-the-Night and eating succulent meat pies and
swigging from the wine flask as he walked. The second half of the
morning was not so good. The sun swung overhead. The sky became glaring
white, and everything shimmered. Abdullah started to wish that he had
poured the wine away and filled the flask at the muddy pond instead.
Wine did nothing for thirst except make it worse. He wet the napkin with
wine and laid it over the back of his neck, where it kept drying out far
too quickly. By midday he thought he was dying. The desert swayed about
before his eyes, and the glare hurt. He felt like a sort of human cinder.

"It seems that Fate has decreed that I live through my entire daydream
in reality!" he croaked.

Up till then he had thought he had imagined his escape from the
villainous Kabul Aqba in masterly detail, but now he knew he had never
even conceived of how horrible it was to stagger in blaring heat, with
sweat running into his eyes. He had not imagined the way the sand
somehow got into everything, including his mouth. Nor had his daydream
allowed for the difficulty of steering by the sun when the sun was right
overhead. The tiny puddle of shadow around his feet gave him no guide to
direction. He had to keep looking behind to check that his line of
footprints was straight. This worried him because it wasted time.

In the end, wasted time or not, he was forced to stop and rest,
squatting in a dip in the sands where there was a small piece of shade.
He still felt like a piece of meat laid out on Jamal's charcoal grill.
He soaked the napkin in wine and spread it over his head and

67

then watched it drip red blobs on his best clothes. The only thing that
convinced him he was not going to die was that prophecy about
Flower-in-the-Night. If Fate had decreed that she was to marry him, then
he had to survive because he had not yet married her. After that he
thought of the prophecy about himself, written down by his father. It
could have more than one meaning. In fact, it could already have come
true, for had he not risen above everyone in the land by flying on the
magic carpet? Or perhaps it did refer to a forty- foot stake.
This notion forced Abdullah to get up and walk again.

The afternoon was worse still. Abdullah was young and fit, but the life
of a carpet merchant does not include long walks. He ached from his
heels to the top of his head-not forgetting his toes, which seemed to
have worn raw. In addition, one of his boots turned out to rub where the
money pocket was. His legs were so tired he could hardly move them. But
he knew he had to put the horizon between himself and the oasis before
the bandits started looking for him or the line of fleet camels
appeared. Since he was not sure how far it was to the horizon, he
slogged on.

By evening all that kept him going was the knowledge that he would be
seeing Flower-in-the-Night tomorrow. That was to be his next wish to the
genie. Apart from that, he vowed to give up drinking wine and swore
never to look at a grain of sand again.

When night fell, he toppled into a sandbank and slept.

At dawn his teeth were chattering and he was anxiously wondering about
frostbite. The desert was as cold by night as it was hot by day. Still,
Abdullah knew his troubles were almost over. He sat on the warmer side
of the sandbank, looking east into the golden flush of dawn, and
refreshed himself with the last of his food and afinal swig of the
hateful wine. His teeth stopped chattering, though his mouth tasted as
if it belonged to Jamal's dog.

Now. Smiling in anticipation, Abdullah eased the cork out of the genie's
bottle.

Out gushed the mauve smoke and rolled upward into the genie's unfriendly
form. "What are you grinning about?" asked the windy voice.

68

"My wish, O amethyst among génies, of color more beautiful than pansies
. . ." Abdullah replied. "May violets scent your breath. I wish you to
transport me to the side of my bride-to-be, Flower-in-the-Night."

"Oh, do you?" The genie folded his smoky arms and turned himself to look
in all directions. This, to Abdullah's fascination, turned the part of
him that was joined to the bottle into a neat corkscrew shape. "Where is
this young woman?" the genie said irritably when he was facing Abdullah
again. "I can't seem to locate her."

"She was carried off by a djinn from her night garden in the Sultan's
palace in Zanzib," Abdullah explained.

"That accounts for it," said the genie. "I can't grant your wish. She's
nowhere on earth."

"Then she must be in the realm of the djinns," Abdullah said anxiously.
"Surely you, O purple prince among génies, must know that realm like the
back of your hand."

"That shows how little you know," the genie said. "A genie confined to a
bottle is debarred from any of the spirit realms. If that's where your
girl is, I can't take you there. I advise you to put the cork back in my
bottle and be on your way. There's quite a large troop of camels coming
up from the south."
Abdullah sprang to the top of the sandbank. Sure enough, there was the
line of fleet camels he had been dreading, speeding toward him with
smooth waltzing strides. Though distance made them visible only as
indigo shadows just then, he could tell from the outlines that the
riders were armed to the teeth.

"See?" said the genie, bellying upward to the same height as Abdullah.
"They might miss finding you, but I doubt it." The idea clearly gave him
pleasure.

"You must grant me a different wish, quickly," said Abdullah.

"Oh, no," said the genie. "One wish a day. You've already made one."

"Certainly I did, O splendor of lilac vapors," Abdullah agreed with the
speed of desperation, "but that was a wish you were unable to grant. And
the terms, as I clearly heard when you first stated

69

them, were that you were forced to grant your owner one wish a day. This
you have not yet done."

"Heaven preserve me!" the genie said disgustedly. "The young man is a
coffee shop lawyer."

"Naturally I am!" said Abdullah with some heat. "I am a citizen of
Zanzib, where every child learns to guard its rights, for it is certain
that no one else will guard them. And I claim you have not yet granted
me a wish today."

"A quibble," the genie said, swaying gracefully opposite him with folded
arms. "One wish has been made."

"But not granted," said Abdullah.

"It is not my fault if you choose to ask for things which are
impossible," said the genie. "There are a million beautiful girls I can
take you to, instead. You can have a mermaid if you fancy green hair. Or
can't you swim?"

The speeding line of camels was now a good deal nearer. Abdullah said
hurriedly, "Think, O puce pearl of magic, and soften your heart. Those
soldiers approaching us will certainly seize your bottle from me when
they reach us. If they take you back to the Sultan, he will force you to
do mighty deeds daily, bringing him armies and weapons and conquering
his enemies for him, most exhaustingly. If they keep you for
themselves-and they might, for not all soldiers are quite honest-you
will be passed from hand to hand and be made to grant many wishes each
day, one for each of the squad. In either case, you will be working far
harder than you will work for me, who want only one small thing."

"What eloquence!" said the genie. "Though you have a point. But have you
thought, on the other hand, what opportunities the Sultan or his
soldiers will give me to work havoc?"

"Havoc?" asked Abdullah, with his eyes anxiously on the speeding camels.

"I never said my wishes were supposed to do anyone any good," said the
genie. "In fact, I swore that they would always do as much harm as
possible. Those bandits, for instance, are now all

70

on their way to prison or worse, for stealing the Sultan's feast. The
soldiers found them late last night."

"You are causing worse havoc with me for not granting me a wish!" said
Abdullah. "And unlike the bandits, I do not deserve it."

"Regard yourself as unlucky," said the genie. "This will make two of us.
1 don't deserve to be shut in this bottle, either."

The riders were now near enough to see Abdullah. He could hear shouts in
the distance and see weapons being unslung. "Give me tomorrow's wish,
then," he said urgently.

"That might be the solution," the genie agreed, rather to Abdullah's
surprise. "What wish then?"

"Transport me to the nearest person who can help me find
Flower-in-the-Night," said Abdullah, and he bounded down the sandbank
and picked the bottle up. "Quickly," he added to the genie, now
billowing above him.

The genie seemed a little puzzled. "This is odd," he said. "My powers of
divination are usually excellent, but I can't make head or tail of this."

A bullet plowed into the sand not too far away. Abdullah ran, carrying
the genie like a vast streaming mauve candle flame. "Just take me to
that person!" he screamed.

"I suppose I'd better," said the genie. "Maybe you can make some sense
out of it."

The earth seemed to spin past under Abdullah's running feet. Shortly he
seemed to be taking vast loping strides across lands that were whirling
forward to meet him. Though the combined speed of his own feet and the
turning world made everything into a blur, except for the genie
streaming placidly out of the bottle in his hand, Abdullah knew that the
speeding camels were left behind in instants. He smiled and loped on,
almost as placid as the genie, rejoicing in the cool wind. He seemed to
lope for a long time. Then it all stopped.

Abdullah stood in the middle of a country road, getting his breath. This
new place took a certain amount of getting used to. It was cool, only as
warm as Zanzib in springtime, and the light was different. Though the
sun was shining brightly from a blue sky, it

71

put out a light that was lower and bluer than Abdullah was used to. This
may have been because there were so many very leafy trees lining the
road and casting shifting green shade over everything. Or it may have
been due to the green, green grass growing on the verges. Abdullah let
his eyes adjust and then looked around for the person who was supposed
to help him find Flower-in-the-Night.

All he could see was what seemed to be an inn on a bend in the road, set
back among the trees. It struck Abdullah as a wretched place. It was
made of wood and white-painted plaster, like the poorest of poor
dwellings in Zanzib, and its owners only seemed able to afford a roof
made of tightly packed grass. Someone had tried to beautify the place by
planting red and yellow flowers by the road. The inn sign, which was
swinging on a post planted among the flowers, was a bad artist's effort
to paint a lion.

Abdullah looked down at the genie's bottle, intending to put the cork
back into it now he had arrived. He was annoyed to find he seemed to
have dropped the cork, either in the desert or on the journey. Oh, well,
he thought. He held the bottle up to his face. "Where is the person who
can help me find Flower-in-the-Night?" he asked.

A wisp of steam smoked from the bottle, looking much bluer in the light
of this strange land. "Asleep on a bench in front of the Red Lion," the
wisp said irritably, and withdrew back into the bottle. The genie's
hollow voice came from inside it. "He appeals to me. He shines with
dishonesty."

72

In which

Abdullah encounters an old soldier

Abdullah walked toward the inn. When he got closer, he saw that there
was indeed a man dozing on one of the wooden settles that had been
placed outside the inn. There were tables there, too, suggesting that
the place also served food. Abdullah slid into a settle behind one of
the tables and looked dubiously across at the sleeping man.

He looked like an outright ruffian. Even in Zanzib, or among the
bandits, Abdullah had never seen such dishonest lines as there were on
this man's tanned face. A big pack on the ground beside him made
Abdullah think at first that he might be a tinker-except that he was
clean-shaven. The only other men Abdullah had seen without beards or
mustaches were the Sultan's northern mercenaries. It was possible this
man was a mercenary soldier. His clothes did look like the broken-down
remains of some kind of uniform, and he wore his hair in a single
pigtail down his back in the way the Sultan's men did. This was a
fashion the men of Zanzib found quite disgusting, for it was rumored
that the pigtail was never undone or washed. Looking at this man's
pigtail, draped over the back of the settle where he slept, Abdullah
could believe this. Neither it nor anything else about the man was
clean. All the same, he looked

73

strong and healthy, although he was not young. His hair under its dirt
seemed to be iron gray.

Abdullah hesitated to wake the fellow. He did not look trustworthy. And
the genie had openly admitted that he granted wishes in a way that would
cause havoc. This man may lead me -to Flowerin-the-Night, Abdullah
mused, but he will certainly rob me on the way.

While he hesitated, a woman in an apron came to the inn doorway, perhaps
to see if there were customers outside. Her clothes made her into a
plump hourglass shape which Abdullah found very foreign and displeasing.
"Oh!" she said, when she saw Abdullah. "Were you waiting to be served,
sir? You should have banged on the table. That's what they all do around
here. What'll you have?"

She spoke in the same barbarous accent as the northern mercenaries. From
it Abdullah concluded that he was now in whatever country those men came
from. He smiled at her. "What are youoffering, O jewel of the wayside?"
he asked her.

Evidently no one had ever called the woman a jewel before. She blushed
and simpered and twisted her apron. "Well, there's bread and cheese
now," she said. "But dinner's doing. If you care to wait half an hour,
sir, you can have a good game pie with vegetables from our kitchen garden."

Abdullah thought this sounded perfect, far better than he would have
expected from any inn with a grass roof. "Then I would most gladly wait
half an hour, O flower among hostesses," he said.

She gave him another simper. "And perhaps a drink while you wait, sir?"

"Certainly," said Abdullah, who was still very thirsty from the desert.
"Could I trouble you for a glass of sherbet-or, failing that, the juice
of any fruit?"

She looked worried. "Oh, sir, I-we don't go in much for fruit juice, and
I never heard of the other stuff. How about a nice mug of beer?"

"What is beer?" Abdullah asked cautiously.

This flummoxed the woman. "I-well, I-it's, er-"

The man on the other bench roused himself and yawned. "Beer

74

is the only proper drink for a man," he said. "Wonderful stuff."
Abdullah turned to look at him again. He found himself staring into a
pair of round limpid blue eyes, as honest as the day is long. There was
not a trace of dishonesty in the brown face now it was awake. "Brewed
from barley and hops," added the man. "While you're here, landlady, I'll
have a pint of it myself."

The landlady's expression changed completely. "I've told you already,"
she said, "that I want to see the color of your money before I serve you
with anything."

The man was not offended. His blue eyes met Abdullah's ruefully. Then he
sighed and picked up a long white clay pipe from the settle beside him,
which he proceeded to fill and light.

"Shall it be beer then, sir?" the landlady said, returning to her simper
for Abdullah.

"If you would, lady of lavish hospitality," he said. "Bring me some, and
also bring a fitting quantity for this gentleman here."

"Very well, sir," she said, and with a strongly disapproving look at the
pigtailed man, she went back indoors.

"I call that very kind of you," the man said to Abdullah. "Come far,
have you?"

"A fair way from the south, worshipful wanderer," Abdullah answered
cautiously. He had not forgotten how dishonest the fellow had looked in
his sleep.

"From foreign parts, eh? I thought you must be, to get a sunburn like
that," the man observed. Abdullah was fairly sure the fellow was fishing
for information, to see if he was worth robbing. He was therefore quite
surprised when the man seemed to give up asking questions. "I'm not from
these parts either, you know," he said, puffing large clouds of smoke
from his barbarous pipe. "I'm from Strangia myself. Old soldier. Turned
loose on the world with a bounty after Ingary beat us in the war. As you
saw, there's still a lot of prejudice here in Ingary about this uniform
of mine."

He said this into the face of the landlady as she came back with two
glasses of frothing brownish liquid. She did not speak to him. She just
banged one glass down in front of him before she put the

75

other carefully and politely in front of Abdullah. "Dinner in half an
hour, sir," she said as she went away.

"Cheers," said the soldier, lifting his glass. He drank deeply.

Abdullah was grateful to this old soldier. Thanks to him, he now knew he
was in a country called Ingary. So he said, "Cheers," in return as he
dubiously lifted his own glass. It seemed to him likely that the stuff
in it had come from the bladder of a camel. When he sniffed it, the
smell did nothing to dispel that impression. Only the fact that he was
still horribly thirsty led him to try it at all. He took a careful
mouthful. Well, it was wet.

"Wonderful, isn't it?" said the old soldier.

"It is most interesting, O captain of warriors," Abdullah said, trying
not to shudder.

"Funny you should call me captain," said the soldier. "I wasn't, of
course. Never made it higher than corporal. Saw a lot of fighting,
though, and I did have hopes of promotion, but the enemy were all over
us before I got my chance. Terrible battle it was, you know. We were
still on the march. No one expected the enemy to get there so soon. I
mean, it's all over now, and there's no point in crying over spilled
milk; but I'll tell you straight the Ingarians didn't fight fair. Had a
couple of wizards making sure they won. I mean, what can an ordinary
soldier like me do against magic? Nothing. Like me to show you a plan of
how the battle went?"

Abdullah understood just where the genie's malice lay now. This man who
was supposed to help him was quite obviously a thundering bore. "I know
absolutely nothing of military matters, O most valiant strategist," he
said firmly.

"No matter," the soldier said cheerfully. "You can take it from me we
were absolutely routed. We ran. Ingary conquered us. Overran the whole
country. Our royal family, bless them, had to run, too, so they put the
King of Ingary's brother on the throne. There was some talk of making
this prince legal by having him marry our Princess Beatrice; but she'd
run with the rest of her family-long life to her!-and she couldn't be
found. Mind you, the new prince

76

wasn't all bad. Gave all the Strangian army a bounty before he turned us
loose. Like to know what I'm doing with my money?"

"If you wish to tell me, bravest of veterans," Abdullah said, smothering
a yawn.

"I'm seeing Ingary," said the soldier. "Thought I'd take a walk through
the country that conquered us. Find out what it's like before I settle
down. It's a fair sum, my bounty. I can pay my way as long as I'm careful."

"My felicitations," Abdullah said.

"They paid half of it in gold," said the soldier.

"Indeed," said Abdullah.

It was a great relief to him that a few local customers arrived just
then. They were farming people mostly, wearing mucky breeches and
outlandish smocks that reminded Abdullah of his own nightshirt, along
with great clumping boots. Very cheerful they were, talking loudly of
the hay crop-which they said was doing nicely-and bashing on the tables
for beer. The landlady and a little twinkling landlord, too, were kept
very busy running in and out with trays of glasses because, from then
on, more and more people kept arriving. And-Abdullah did not know
whether to be more relieved, or annoyed, or amused-the soldier instantly
lost interest in Abdullah and began to talk earnestly to the new
arrivals. They did not seem to find him boring at all. Nor did it seem
to worry them that he had been an enemy soldier. One of them bought him
more beer at once. As more and more people arrived, he became ever more
popular. Beer glasses lined up beside him. Dinner was ordered for him
before long, while out of the crowd that surrounded the soldier,
Abdullah kept hearing things like "Great battle. . . . Your wizards gave
them the advantage, see . . . our cavalry . . . folded up our left wing
. . . overran us on the hill . . . we infantry forced to run . . . went
on running like rabbits . . . not a bad sort . . . rounded us up and
paid us a bounty. ..."

Meanwhile, the landlady came to Abdullah with a steaming tray and more
beer without being asked. He was still so thirsty he was almost glad of
the beer. And the dinner struck him as quite as delicious as the
Sultan's feast. For a while he was so busy attending to it

77

that he lost track of the soldier. When he next looked, the soldier was
leaning forward over his own empty plate, blue eyes shining with earnest
enthusiasm, while he moved glasses and plates about on the table to show
his country listeners exactly where everything was in the Battle of
Strangia. After a while he ran out of glasses, forks, and plates. Since
he had already used the salt and the pepper for the King of Strangia and
his general, he had nothing left to use for the King of Ingary and his
brother or for their wizards. But the soldier did not let this bother
him. He opened a pouch at his belt and took out two gold coins and a
number of silver ones, which he rang down on the table to stand for the
King of Ingary, his wizards, and his generals.

Abdullah could not help thinking this was extraordinarily silly of him.
The two gold pieces caused quite a bit of comment. Four loutish-looking
young men at a nearby table turned around on their settles and began to
be extremely interested. But the soldier was deep into explaining the
battle and quite unaware of it.

Finally, most of the folk around the soldier got up to go back to their
work. The soldier got up with them, slung his pack on his shoulder, put
on his head the dirty soldier's hat which was tucked into the top flap
of his pack, and asked the way to the nearest town. While everyone was
loudly explaining the way to the soldier, Abdullah tried to catch the
landlady in order to pay his own bill. She was a little slow in coming.
By the time she was ready, the soldier was out of sight around the bend
in the road. Abdullah was not sorry. Whatever help the genie thought
this man could give, Abdullah felt he could do without it. He was glad
that Fate and he seemed to see eye to eye for once.

Not being a fool like the soldier, Abdullah paid his bill with his
smallest silver coin. Even that seemed to be big money in these parts.
The landlady took it indoors in order to get change. While he was
waiting for her to come back, Abdullah could not help overhearing the
four loutish young men. They were holding a swift and significant
discussion.

"If we nip up the old bridle path," one said, "we can catch him in the
wood at the top of the hill."

78

"Hide in the bushes," agreed the second, "on both sides of the road, so
we come at him two ways."

"Split the money four ways," insisted the third. "He's got more gold
than he showed, that's certain."

"We make sure he's dead first," said the fourth. "We don't want him
telling tales."

And "Right!" and "Right" and "Right then," the other three said, and
they got up and left as the landlady came hurrying to Abdullah with a
double handful of copper coins.

"I do hope this is the right change, sir. We don't get much southern
silver here, and I had to ask my husband how much it was worth. He says
it's one hundred of our coppers, and you owed us five, so-"

"Bless you, O cream of caterers and brewer of celestial beer," Abdullah
said hurriedly, and gave her one handful of the coins back instead of
the nice long chat she was obviously meaning to have with him. Leaving
her staring, he set off as swiftly as he was able after the soldier. The
man might be a barefaced sponger and a thundering bore, but this did not
mean he deserved to be ambushed and murdered for his gold.

79

Which tells

of violence
and bloodshed

Abdullah found he could not go very fast. In the cooler climate of
Ingary, he had stiffened abominably while he satstill, and his legs
ached from walking all the day before. The money container in his left
boot proved to have made a very severe blister on his left foot. He was
limping before he had walked a hundred yards. Still, he was concerned
enough about the soldier to keep up the best pace he could. He limped
past a number of cottages with grass roofs and then out beyond the
village, where the road was more open. There he could see the soldier in
the distance ahead, sauntering along toward a point where the road
climbed a hill covered with the dense leafy trees that seemed to grow in
these parts. That would be where the loutish young men were setting
their ambush. Abdullah tried to limp faster.

An irritable blue wisp came out of the bottle bouncing at his waist.
"Must you bump so?" it said.

"Yes," panted Abdullah. "The man you chose to help me needs my help
instead."

"Huh!" said the genie. "I understand you now. Nothing will stop you
taking a romantic view of life. You'll be wanting shining armor for your
next wish."

80

The soldier was sauntering quite slowly. Abdullah closed the gap between
them and entered the wood not far behind. But the road here wound back
and forth among the trees to make an easier climb, so that Abdullah lost
sight of the soldier from then on, until he limped around a final corner
and saw him only a few yardsahead. That happened to be the very moment
when the louts chose to make their attack.

Two of them sprang from one side of the road upon the soldier's back.
The two who jumped from the other side rushed him from in front. There
was a moment or so of horrid drubbing and struggling. Abdullah hastened
to help, though he hastened somewhat hesitantly because he had never hit
anyone in his life.

While he approached, a whole set of miracles seemed to happen. The two
fellows on the soldier's back went sailing away in opposite directions,
to either side of the road, where one of them hit his head on a tree and
did not trouble anyone again, while the other collapsed in a sprawl. Of
the two facing the soldier, one received almost at once an interesting
injury, which he doubled up to contemplate. The other, to Abdullah's
considerable astonishment, rose into the air and actually, for a brief
instant, became draped over the branch of a tree. From there he fell
with a crash and went to sleep in the road.

At this point, the doubled-up young man undoubled himself and went for
the soldier with a long, narrow knife. The soldier seized the wrist of
the hand that held the knife. There was a moment of grunting deadlock,
which Abdullah found he had every faith would soon be resolved in favor
of the soldier. He was just thinking that his concern about this soldier
had been completely unnecessary, when the fellow sprawled in the road
behind the soldier suddenly unsprawled himself and lunged at the
soldier's back with another long, thin knife.
Quickly Abdullah did what was needful. He stepped up and clouted the
young man over the head with the genie bottle. "Ouch!" cried the genie.
And the fellow dropped like a fallen oak tree.

At the sound the soldier swung around from apparently tying knots in the
other young man. Abdullah stepped back hurriedly. He

81

did not like the speed with which the soldier turned or the way he held
his hands, with the fingers tightly together, like two blunt but
murderous weapons.

"I heard them planning to kill you, valiant veteran," he explained
quickly, "and hurried to warn or help."

He found the soldier's eyes fixed on his, very blue but no longer at all
innocent. In fact, they were eyes that would have counted as shrewd even
in the Bazaar at Zanzib. They seemed to sum Abdullah up in every
possible way. Luckily they seemed satisfied with what they saw. The
soldier said, "Thanks, then," and turned to kick the head of the young
man he had been tying into knots. He stopped moving, too, making the
full set.

"Perhaps," suggested Abdullah, "we should report this to a constable."

"What for?" asked the soldier. He bent down and, to Abdullah's slight
surprise, made a swift and expert search of the pockets of the young man
whose head he had just kicked. The result of the search was quite a
large handful of coppers, which the soldier stowed in his own pouch,
looking satisfied. "Rotten knife, though," he said, snapping it in two.
"Since you're here, why don't you search the one you clobbered, while I
do the other two? Yours looks worth a silver or so."

"You mean," Abdullah said doubtfully, "that the custom of this country
permits us to rob the robbers?"

"It's no custom I ever heard of," the soldier said calmly, "but it's
what I aim to do all the same. Why do you think I was so careful to
flash my gold about at the inn? There's always a bad'un or so who thinks
a stupid old soldier worth mugging. Nearly all of them carry cash."

He stepped across the road and began to search the young man who had
fallen out of the tree. After hesitating a moment, Abdullah bent to the
unpleasing task of searching the one he had felled with the bottle. He
found himself revising his opinion of this soldier. Apart from anything
else, a man who could confidently take on four attackers at once was
someone who was better as a friend than an enemy. And the pockets of the
unconscious youth did indeed con

82

tain three pieces of silver. There was also the knife. Abdullah tried
breaking it on the road as the soldier had done with the other knife.

"Ah, no," said the soldier. "That one's a good knife. You hang on to it."

"Truthfully I have had no experience," Abdullah said, holding it out to
the soldier. "I am a man of peace."
"Then you won't get far in Ingary," said the soldier. "Keep it, and use
it for cutting your meat if you'd rather. I've got six more knives
better than that in my pack, all off different ruffians. Keep the
silver, too-though from the way you didn't get interested when I talked
of my gold, I guess you're quite well off, aren't you?"

Truly a shrewd and observant man, Abdullah thought, pocketing the
silver. "I am not so well off that I could not do with more," he said
prudently. Then, feeling that he was entering properly into the spirit
of things, he removed the young man's bootlaces and used them to tie the
genie bottle more securely to his belt. The young man stirred and
groaned as he did so.

"Waking up. We'd best be off," said the soldier. "They'll twist it
around to we attacked them when they wake up. And seeing this is their
village and we're both foreigners, they're the ones who'll get believed.
I'm going to cut off across the hills. If you'll take my advice, you'll
do likewise."

"I would, most gentle fighting man, feel honored if I could accompany
you," Abdullah said.

"I don't mind," said the soldier. "It'll make a change to have company I
don't have to lie to." He picked up his pack and his hat-both of which
he seemed to have had time to stow tidily behind a tree before the
fighting began-and led the way into the woods.

They climbed steadily among the trees for some time. The soldier made
Abdullah feel woefully unfit. He strode as lightly and easily as if the
way were downhill. Abdullah limped after. His left foot felt raw.

At length the soldier stopped and waited for him in an upland dell.
"That fancy boot hurting you?" he asked. "Sit on that rock and take it
off." He unslung his pack as he spoke. "I've got some kind of

83

unusual first-aid kit in here," he said. "Picked it up on the
battlefield, I think. Found it somewhere in Strangia, anyway."

Abdullah sat down and wrestled off his boot. The relief it gave him to
have it off was quickly canceled when he looked at his foot. It was raw.
The soldier grunted and slapped some kind of white dressing on it, which
clung without needing to be tied on. Abdullah yelped. Then blissful
coolness spread from the dressing. "Is this some kind of magic?" he asked.

"Probably," the soldier said. "I think those Ingary wizards gave these
packs to their whole army. Put the boot on. You'll be able to walk now.
We've got to be far away before those boys' dads start looking for us on
horseback."

Abdullah trod cautiously into his boot. The dressing must have been
magic. His foot seemed as good as new. He was almost able to keep up
with the soldier-which was just as well, for the soldier marched onward
and upward until Abdullah felt they had gone as far as he had walked in
the desert yesterday. From time to time Abdullah could not help glancing
nervously behind in case horses were now pursuing them. He told himself
it made a change from camels, although it would be nice not to have
someone chasing him for once. Thinking about it, he saw that even in the
Bazaar his father's first wife's relatives had been pursuing him ever
since his father died. He was annoyed with himself for not having seen
this before.

Meanwhile, they had climbed so high that the wood was giving way to wiry
shrubs among rocks. As evening drew on, they were walking simply among
rocks, somewhere near the top of a range of mountains, where only a few
small, strong-smelling bushes grew, clinging to crevices. This was
another sort of desert, Abdullah thought, while the soldier led the way
along a narrow sort of ravine between high rocks. It did not look like a
place where there was any chance of finding supper.

Some way along the ravine the soldier stopped and took off his pack.
"Take care of this for a moment," he said. "There looks to be a cave of
sorts up the cliff this side. I'll pop up and see if it's a good place
to spend the night."

84

There did seem to be a dark opening in the rocks some way above their
heads when Abdullah wearily looked up. He did not fancy sleeping in it.
It looked cold and hard. But it was probablybetter than just lying down
on the rock, he thought, as he ruefully watched the soldier swing easily
up the cliff and arrive at the hole.

There was a noise like a mad metal pulley wheel.

Abdullah saw the soldier reel back from the cave with one hand clapped
to his face and almost fall backward down the cliff. He saved himself
somehow and came sliding and cursing down the rocks in a storm of rubble.

"Wild animal in there!" he gasped. "Let's move on." He was bleeding
quite badly from eight long scratches. Four of them started on his
forehead, crossed his hand, and went on down his cheek to his chin. The
other four had torn his sleeve open and scored his arm from wrist to
elbow. It looked as if he had got his hand to his face only just in time
to avoid losing an eye. He was so shaken that Abdullah had to pick up
his hat and his pack and guide him on down the ravine-which he did
rather hurriedly. Any animal that could get the better of this soldier
was an animal Abdullah did not want to meet.

The ravine ended after another hundred yards. And it ended in the
perfect camping place. They were now on the other side of themountains
with a wide view over the lands beyond, all golden and green and hazy in
the westering sun. The ravine stopped in a broad floor of rock sloping
gently up to what was almost another cave, where the rocks above hung
over the slanting floor. Better still, there was a small stony stream
babbling down the mountain just beyond.

Perfect though this was, Abdullah had no wish to stop anywhere so near
that wild animal in the cave. But the soldier insisted. The scratches
were hurting him. He threw himself down on the sloping rock and fetched
out some kind of salve from the wizardly first-aid kit. "Light a fire,"
he said as he smeared the stuff on his wounds. "Wild animals are scared
of fire."

Abdullah gave in and scrambled about, tearing up strong-smelling shrubs
to burn. An eagle or something had nested in the crags

85
above long ago. The old nest gave Abdullah armloads of twigs and quite a
few dry branches, so that he soon had quite a stack of firewood. When
the soldier had finished smearing himself with the salve, he brought out
a tinderbox and lit a small fire halfway down the sloping rock. It
crackled and leaped most cheerfully. The smoke, smelling rather like the
incense Abdullah used to burn in his booth, drifted out from the end of
the ravine and spread against the beginnings of a glorious sunset. If
this really scared the beast in the cave off, Abdullah thought, it would
be almost perfect here. Only almost perfect, because of course, there
was nothing to eat for miles. Abdullah sighed.

The soldier produced a metal can from his pack. "Like to fill that with
water? Unless," he said, eyeing the genie bottle tied to Abdullah's
belt, "you've got something stronger in that flask of yours."

"Alas, no," Abdullah said. "It is merely an heirloom-rare fogged glass
from Singispat-which I carry for sentimental reasons." He had no
intention of letting someone as dishonest as the soldier know about the
genie.

"Pity," said the soldier. "Fetch us water then, and I'll get on with
cooking us some supper."

This made the place almost nearly perfect. Abdullah went leaping down to
the stream with a will. When he came back, he found the soldier had
brought out a saucepan and was emptying packets of dried meat and dried
peas into it. He added the water and a couple of mysterious cubes and
set it to boil on the fire. In a remarkably short time it had turned
into a thick stew. And smelled delicious.

"More wizard's stuff?" Abdullah asked as the soldier shared half the
stew onto a tin plate and passed it to him.

"I think so," said the soldier. "I picked it up off the battlefield." He
took the saucepan to eat from himself and found a couple of spoons. They
sat eating companionably with the fire crackling between them, while the
sky turned slowly pink and crimson and gold, and the lands below became
blue. "Not used to roughing it, are you?" the soldier remarked. "Good
clothes, fancy boots, you

86

have, but they've seen a bit of wear and tear lately by the looks of
them. And by your talk and your sunburn, you come from quite a way south
of Ingary, don't you?"

"All that is true, O most acutely observant campaigner," Abdullah said
cagily. "And of you all I know is that you come from Strangia and are
most oddly proceeding through this land, encouraging persons to rob you
by flourishing the coins of your bounty-"

"Bounty be damned!" the soldier interrupted angrily. "Not one penny did
I get from either Strangia or Ingary! I sweated my guts out in those
wars-we all did-and at the end of it they say, 'Right, lads, that's it,
it's peacetime now!' and turn us all out to starve. So I say to myself,
'Right indeed! Someone owes me for all the work I've done, and I reckon
it's the folk of Ingary! They were the ones who brought wizards in and
cheated their way to victory!' So I set off to earn my bounty off them,
the way you saw me doing it today. You may call it a scam if you like,
but you saw me; you judge me. I only take money off those who up and try
to rob me!"

"Indeed, the word scam never crossed my lips, virtuous veteran,"
Abdullah said sincerely. "I call it most ingenious, and a plan that few
but you could succeed in."

The soldier seemed soothed by this. He stared ruminatively out at the
blue distance below. "All that down there," he said, "that's Kingsbury
Plain. That should yield me a mort of gold. Do you know, when I started
out from Strangia, all I had was a silver threepenny bit and a brass
button I used to pretend was a sovereign?"

"Then your profit has been great," said Abdullah.

"And it'll be greater yet," the soldier promised. He set the saucepan
neatly aside and fished two apples out of his pack. He gave one to
Abdullah and ate the other himself, lying stretched on his back, staring
out at the slowly darkening land. Abdullah assumed he was calculating
the gold he would earn from it. He was surprised when the soldier said,
"I always did love the evening camp. Take a look at that sunset now.
Glorious!"

It was indeed glorious. Clouds had come up from the south and had spread
like a ruby landscape across the sky. Abdullah saw ranges of purple
mountains flushed wine red in one part; a smoking

87

orange rift like the heart of a volcano; a calm rosy lake. Out beyond,
laid against an infinity of gold-blue sky-sea, were islands, reefs,
bays, and promontories. It was as if they were looking at the seacoast
of heaven or the land that looks westward to Paradise.

"And that cloud there," the soldier said, pointing. "Doesn't that one
look just like a castle?"

It did. It stood on a high headland above a sky-lagoon, a marvel of
slender gold, ruby, and indigo turrets. A glimpse of golden sky through
the tallest tower was like a window. It reminded Abdullah poignantly of
the cloud he had seen above the Sultan's palace while he was being
dragged off to the dungeon. Though it was not in the least the same
shape, it brought back his sorrows to him so forcefully that he cried out.

"O Flower-in-the-Night, where are you?"

88

In which

a wild animal

causes Abdullah

to waste a wish

The soldier turned on his elbow and stared at Abdullah. "What's that
supposed to mean?" "Nothing," said Abdullah, "except that my life has
been full of disappointments."

"Tell," said the soldier. "Unburden. I told you about me, after all."
"You would never believe me," said Abdullah. "My sorrows surpass even
yours, most murderous musketeer."

"Try me," said the soldier.

Somehow it was not hard to tell, what with the sunset and the misery
that sunset brought surging up in Abdullah. So, as the castle slowly
spread and dissolved into sandbars in the sky-lagoon and the whole
sunset faded gently to purple, to brown, and finally to three dark red
streaks like the healing claw marks on the soldier's face, Abdullah told
the soldier his story. Or at any rate, he told the gist of it. He did
not, of course, tell anything so personal as his own daydreams or the
uncomfortable way they had of coming true lately, and he was very
careful to say nothing at all about the genie. He did not trust the
soldier not to take the bottle and vanish with it during the night, and
he was helped in this editing of the facts by a

89

strong suspicion that the soldier had not told his whole story, either.
The end of the story was quite difficult to tell with the genie left
out, but Abdullah thought he managed rather well. He gave the impression
he had escaped from his chains and from the bandits more or less by
willpower alone, and then that he had walked all the way north to Ingary.

"Hmm," said the soldier when Abdullah had done. Musingly he put more
spicy bushes on the fire, which was now the only light left. "Quite a
life. But I must say it makes up for a good deal, being fated to marry a
princess. It's something I always had a fancy to do myself-marry a nice
quiet princess with a bit of a kingdom and a kindly nature. Bit of a
daydream of mine, really."

Abdullah found he had a splendid idea. "It is quite possible you can,"
he said quietly. "The day I met you I was granted a dream-a vision-in
which a smoky angel the color of lavender came to me and pointed you out
to me, O cleverest of crusaders, as you slept on a bench outside an inn.
He said that you could aid me powerfully in finding Flower-in-the-Night.
And if you did, said the angel, your reward would be that you would
marry another princess yourself." This was-or would be-almost perfectly
true, Abdullah told himself. He had only to make the correct wish to the
genie tomorrow. Or rather, the day after tomorrow, he reminded himself,
since the genie had forced him to use tomorrow's wish today. "Will you
help me?" he asked, watching the soldier's firelit face rather
anxiously. "For this great reward."

The soldier seemed neither eager nor dismayed. He considered. "Not sure
quite what I could do to help," he said at last. "I'm not an expert on
djinns, for a start. We don't seem to get them this far north. You'd
need to ask some of these damn Ingary wizards what djinns do with
princesses when they steal them. The wizards would know. I could help
you squeeze the facts out of one, if you like. It would be a pleasure.
But as for a princess, they don't grow on trees, you know. The nearest
one must be the King of Ingary's daughter, way off in Kingsbury. If
she's what your smoky angel friend had in mind, then I guess you and
me'd better walk down that way and

90

see. The king's tame wizards mostly live down that way, too, so they
tell me, so it seems to fit in. That idea suit you?"

"Excellently well, military friend of my bosom!" said Abdullah.

"Then that's settled, but I don't promise anything, mind," said the
soldier. He fetched two blankets out of his pack and suggested that they
build up the fire and settle down to sleep.

Abdullah unhitched the genie bottle from his belt and put it carefully
on the smooth rock beside him on the other side from the soldier. Then
he wrapped himself in the blanket and settled down for what proved to be
rather a disturbed night. The rock was hard. And though he was nothing
like as cold as he had been yesterday night in the desert, the damper
air of Ingary made him shiver just as much. In addition, the moment he
closed his eyes he found he became obsessed with the wild beast in the
cave up the ravine. He kept imagining he could hear it prowling around
the camp. Once or twice he opened his eyes and even thought he saw
something moving just beyond the light from the fire. He sat up each
time and threw more wood on the fire, whereupon the flames flared up and
showed him that nothing was there. It was a long time before he fell
properly asleep. When he did, he had a hellish dream.

He dreamed that around dawn a djinn came and sat on his chest. He opened
his eyes to tell it to go away and found it was not a djinn at all, but
the beast from the cave. It stood with its two vast front paws planted
on his chest, glaring down at him with eyes that were like bluish lamps
in the velvety blackness of its coat. As far as Abdullah could tell, it
was a demon in the form of a huge black panther.

He sat up with a yell.

Naturally nothing was there. Dawn was just breaking. The fire was a
cherry smudge in the grayness of everything, and the soldier was a
darker gray hump, snoring gently on the other side of the fire. Behind
him the lower lands were white with mist. Wearily Abdullah put another
bush on the fire and fell asleep again.

He was woken by the windy roaring of the genie.

"Stop this thing! Get it OFF me!"

Abdullah leaped up. The soldier leaped up. It was broad

91

daylight. There was no mistaking what they both saw. A small black cat
was crouching by the genie bottle, just beside the place where
Abdullah's head had been. The cat was either very curious or convinced
there was food in the bottle, for it had its nose delicately but firmly
in the neck of the flask. Around its neat black head the genie was
gushing out in ten or twelve distorted blue wisps, and the wisps kept
turning into hands or faces and then turning back to smoke again.

"Help me!" he yelled in chorus. "It's trying to eat me or something!"

The cat ignored the genie entirely. It just went on behaving as if there
were a most enticing smell in the bottle.

In Zanzib everyone hated cats. People thought of them as very little
better than the rats and mice they ate. If a cat came near you, you
kicked it, and you drowned any kittens you could lay hands on.
Accordingly Abdullah ran at the cat, aiming a flying kick at it as
heran. "Shoo!" he yelled. "Scat!"

The cat jumped. Somehow it avoided Abdullah's lashing foot and fled to
the top of the overhanging rock, where it spat at him and glared. It was
not deaf then, Abdullah thought, staring up into its eyes. They were
bluish. So that was what had sat on him in the night! He picked up a
stone and drew back his arm to throw it.

"Don't do that!" said the soldier. "Poor little animal!"

The cat did not wait for Abdullah to throw the stone. It shot out of
sight. "There is nothing poor about that beast," he said. "You must
realize, gentle gunman, that the creature nearly took your eye out last
night."

"I know," the soldier said mildly. "It was only defending itself,poor
thing. Is that a genie in that flask of yours? Your smoky blue friend?"

A traveler with a carpet for sale had once told Abdullah that most
people in the north were unaccountably sentimental about animals.
Abdullah shrugged and turned sourly to the genie bottle, where the genie
had vanished without a word of thanks. This would have to happen! Now he
would have to watch the bottle like a hawk. "Yes," he said.

92

"I thought it might be," said the soldier. "I've heard tell of genies.
Come and look at this, will you?" He stooped and picked up his hat, very
carefully, smiling in a strange, tender way.

There seemed definitely to be something wrong with the soldier this
morning, as if his brains had softened in the night. Abdullah wondered
if it was those scratches, although they had almost vanished by now.
Abdullah went over to him anxiously.

Instantly the cat was standing on the overhanging rock again, making
that iron pulley noise, anger and worry in every line of its small black
body. Abdullah ignored it and looked into the soldier's hat. Round blue
eyes stared at him out of its greasy interior. A little pink mouth
hissed defiance as the tiny black kitten inside scrambled to the back of
the hat, whipping its minute bottle brush of a tail for balance.

"Isn't it sweet?" the soldier said besottedly.

Abdullah glanced at the wauling cat on top of the rock. He froze, and
looked again carefully. The thing was huge. A mighty black panther stood
there, baring its big white fangs at him.

"These animals must belong to a witch, courageous companion," he said
shakily.

"If they did, then the witch must be dead or something," the soldier
said. "You saw them. They were living wild in that cave. That mother cat
must have carried her kitten all the way here in the night. Marvelous,
isn't it? She must have known we'd help her!" He looked up at the huge
beast snarling on the rock and did not seem to notice the size of it.
"Come on down, sweet thing!" he said wheedlingly. "You know we won't
hurt you or your kitten."
The mother beast launched herself from the rock. Abdullah gave a
strangled scream, dodged, and sat down heavily. The great black body
hurtled past above him-and to his surprise, the soldier started to
laugh. Abdullah looked up indignantly to find that the beast had become
a small black cat again, and was most affectionately walking about on
the soldier's broad shoulder and rubbing herself on his face.

"Oh, you're a wonder, little Midnight!" The soldier chuckled.

93

"You know I'll take care of your Whippersnapper for you, don't you?
That's right. You purr!"

Abdullah got up disgustedly and turned his back on this love feast. The
saucepan had been cleaned out very thoroughly in the night. The tin
plate was burnished. He went and washed both, meaningly, in the stream,
hoping the soldier would soon forget these dangerous magical beasts and
begin thinking about breakfast.

But when the soldier finally put the hat down and tenderly plucked the
mother cat off his shoulder, it was breakfast for cats that he thought
about. "They'll need milk," he said, "and a nice plate of fresh fish.
Get that genie of yours to fetch them some."

A jet of blue-mauve spurted from the neck of the bottle and spread into
a sketch of the genie's irritated face. "Oh, no," said the genie. "One
wish a day is all I give, and he had today's wish yesterday. Go and fish
in the stream."

The soldier advanced on the genie angrily. "There won't be any fish this
high in the mountain," he said. "And that little Midnight is starving,
and she's got her kitten to feed."

"Too bad!" said the genie. "And don't you try to threaten me, soldier.
Men have become toads for less."

The soldier was certainly a brave man-or a very foolish one, Abdullah
thought. "You do that to me, and I'll break your bottle, whatever shape
I'm in!" he shouted. "I'm not wanting a wish formyself."

"I prefer people to be selfish," the genie retorted. "So you want to be
a toad?"

Further blue smoke gushed out of the bottle and formed into arms making
gestures that Abdullah was afraid he recognized. "No, no, stop, I
implore you, O sapphire among spirits!" he said hastily. "Let the
soldier alone, and consent, as a great favor, to grant me another wish a
day in advance, that the animals might be fed."

"Do you want to be a toad, too?" the genie inquired.

"If it is written in the prophecy that Flower-in-the-Night shall marry a
toad, then make me a toad," Abdullah said piously. "But first fetch milk
and fish, great genie."

94

The genie swirled moodily. "Bother the prophecy! I can't go against
that. All right. You can have your wish, provided you leave me in peace
for the next two days."

Abdullah sighed. It was a dreadful waste of a wish. "Very well."

A crock of milk and an oval plate with a salmon on it plunked down on
the rock by his feet. The genie gave Abdullah a look of huge dislike and
sucked himself back inside the bottle.

"Great work!" said the soldier, and proceeded to make a large pother
over poaching salmon in milk and making sure there were no bones the cat
might choke on.

The cat, Abdullah noticed, had all this while been peacefully licking at
her kitten in the hat. She did not seem to know the genie was there. But
she knew about the salmon all right. As soon as it started cooking, she
left her kitten and wound herself around the soldier, thin and urgent
and mewing. "Soon, soon, my black darling!" the soldier said.

Abdullah could only suppose that the cat's magic and the genie's were so
different that they were unable to perceive each other. The one good
thing he could see about the situation was that there was plenty of
salmon and milk for the two humans as well. While the cat daintily
guzzled, and her kitten lapped, and sneezed, and did his amateur best to
drink salmon-flavored milk, the soldier and Abdullah feasted on porridge
made with milk and roast salmon steak.

After such a breakfast Abdullah felt kinder toward the whole world. He
told himself that the genie could not have made a better choice of
companion for him than this soldier. The genie was not so bad. And he
would surely be seeing Flower-in-the-Night soon now. He was thinking
that the Sultan and Kabul Aqba were not such bad fellows either when he
discovered, to his outrage, that the soldier intended to take the cat
and her kitten along with them to Kingsbury.

"But, most benevolent bombardier and considerate cuirassier," he
protested, "what will become of your scheme to earn your bounty? You
cannot rob robbers with a kitten in your hat!"

95

"I reckon I won't need to do any of that now you've promised me a
princess," the soldier answered calmly. "And no one could leave Midnight
and Whippersnapper to starve on this mountain. That's cruel!"

Abdullah knew he had lost this argument. He sourly tied the genie bottle
to his belt and vowed never to promise the soldier anything else. The
soldier repacked his pack, scattered the fire, and gently picked up his
hat with the kitten in it. He set off downhill beside the stream,
whistling to Midnight as if she were a dog.

Midnight, however, had other ideas. As Abdullah set off after the
soldier, she stood in his way, staring meaningly up at him. Abdullah
took no notice and tried to edge past her. And she was promptly huge
again. A black panther, if possible even larger than before, was barring
his way and snarling. He stopped, frankly terrified. And the beast
leaped at him. He was too frightened even to scream. He shut his eyes
and waited to have his throat torn out. So much for Fate and prophecies!

A softness touched his throat instead. Small, firm feet hit his
shoulder, and another set of such feet pricked his chest. Abdullah
opened his eyes to find that Midnight was back to cat size and clinging
to the front of his jacket. The green-blue eyes looking up into his
said, "Carry me. Or else."

"Very well, formidable feline," Abdullah said. "But take care not to
snag any more of the embroidery on this jacket. This was once my best
suit. And please remember that I carry you under strong protest. I do
not love cats."

Midnight calmly scrambled her way to Abdullah's shoulder, where she sat
smugly balancing while Abdullah plodded and slithered his way down the
mountain for the rest of that day.

96

In which

the law catches up with Abdullah and the soldier

By evening Abdullah was almost used to Midnight. Unlike Jamal's dog, she
smelled extremely clean, and she was clearly an excellent mother. The
only times she dismounted from Abdullah were to feed her kitten. If it
had not been for her alarming habit of turning huge at him when he
annoyed her, Abdullah felt he could come to tolerate her in time. The
kitten, he conceded, was charming. It played with the end of the
soldier's pigtail and tried to chase butterflies-in a wobbly way-when
they stopped for lunch. The rest of the day it spent in the front of the
soldier's jacket, peeping eagerly forth at the grass and the trees and
at the fern-lined waterfalls they passed on their way to the plains. But
Abdullah was entirely disgusted at the fuss the soldier made about his
new pets when they stopped for the night. They decided to stay in the
inn they came to in the first valley, and here the soldier decreed that
his cats were to have the best of everything. The innkeeper and his wife
shared Abdullah's opinion. They were lumpish folk who had, it seemed,
been put in a bad mood anyway by the mysterious theft of a crock of milk
and a whole salmon that morning. They ran about with dour disapproval,
fetching just the right shape of basket and a soft pillow to put in it.
They

97

hurried grimly with cream and chicken liver and fish. They grudgingly
produced certain herbs which, the soldier declared, prevented canker in
the ears. They stormily sent out for other herbs which were supposed to
cure a cat of worms. But they were downright incredulous when they were
asked to heat water for a bath because the soldier suspected that
Whippersnapper had picked up a flea.

Abdullah found himself forced to negotiate. "O prince and princess of
publicans," he said, "bear with the eccentricity of my excellent friend.
When he says a bath, he means, of course, a bath for himself and for me.
We are both somewhat travel-stained and would welcome clean hot
water-for which we will, of course, pay whatever extra is necessary."

"What? Me? Bath?" the soldier said when the innkeeper and his wife had
stumped off to put big kettles to boil.

"Yes. You," said Abdullah. "Or you and your cats and I part company this
very evening. The dog of my friend Jamal in Zanzib was scarcely less
ripe to the nose than you, O unwashed warrior, and Whippersnapper, fleas
or not, is a good deal cleaner."

"But what about my princess and your sultan's daughter if you leave?"
asked the soldier.

"I shall think of something," said Abdullah. "But I should prefer it if
you got into a bath and, if you wish, took Whippersnapper into it with
you. That was my aim in asking for it."

"It weakens you-having baths," the soldier said dubiously. "But I
suppose I could wash Midnight as well while I'm at it."

"Pray use both cats as sponges if it pleases you, infatuated
infantryman," Abdullah said, and went off to revel in his own bath. In
Zanzib people bathed a lot because the climate was so hot. Abdullah was
used to visiting the public baths at least every other day, and he was
missing that. Even Jamal went to the baths once a week, and it was
rumored that he took his dog into the water with him. The soldier,
Abdullah thought, becoming soothed by the hot water, was really no more
besotted with his cats than Jamal was with his dog. He hoped that Jamal
and his dog had managed to escape and, if they had, that they were not
at this moment suffering hardships in the desert.

98

The soldier did not appear any weaker for his bath, although his skin
had turned a much paler brown. Midnight, it seemed, had fled at the mere
sight of water, but Whippersnapper, so the soldier claimed, had loved
every moment. "He played with the soap bubbles!" he said dotingly.

"I hope you think you're worth all this trouble," Abdullah said to
Midnight as she sat on his bed delicately cleaning herself after her
cream and chicken. Midnight turned and gave him a round-eyed scornful
look-of course she was worth it!-before she went back to the serious
business of washing her ears.

The bill, next morning, was enormous. Most of the extra charge was for
hot water, but cushions, baskets, and herbs figured quite largely on the
list, too. Abdullah paid, shuddering, and anxiously inquired how far it
was to Kingsbury.

Six days, he was told, if a person went on foot.

Six days! Abdullah nearly groaned aloud. Six days at this rate of
expense, and he would barely be able to afford to keep Flower-intheNight
in the state of direst poverty when he found her. And he had to look
forward to six days of the soldier's making this sort of fuss about the
cats, before they could collar a wizard and even start trying to find
her. No, Abdullah thought. His next wish to the genie would be to have
them all transported to Kingsbury. That meant he I'llwould only have to
endure two more days.

Comforted by this thought, Abdullah strode off down the road with
Midnight serenely riding his shoulders and the genie bottle bobbing at
his side. The sun shone. The greenness of the countryside was a pleasure
to him after the desert. Abdullah even began to appreciate the houses
with their grass roofs. They had delightful rambling gardens and many of
them had roses or other flowers trained around their doors. The soldier
told him that grass roofs were the custom here. It was called thatch,
and it did, the soldier assured him, keep out the rain, though Abdullah
found this very hard to believe.

Before long Abdullah was deep in another daydream, of himself and
Flower-in-the-Night living in a cottage with a grass roof and roses
around the door. He would make her such a garden that it

99

would be the envy of all for miles around. He began to plan the garden.

Unfortunately, toward the end of the morning, his daydream was
interrupted by increasing spots of rain. Midnight hated it. She
complained loudly in Abdullah's ear.

"Button her in your jacket," said the soldier.

"Not I, adorer of animals," Abdullah said. "She loves me no more than I
love her. She would doubtless seize the chance to make grooves in my
chest."

The soldier handed his hat to Abdullah with Whippersnapper in it,
carefully covered with an unclean handkerchief, and buttoned Midnight
into his own jacket. They went on for half a mile. By then the rain was
pouring down.

The genie draped a ragged blue wisp over the side of his bottle. "Can't
you do something about all this water that's getting in on me?"

Whippersnapper was saying much the same at the top of his small, squeaky
voice. Abdullah pushed wet hair out of his eyes and felt harassed.

"We'll have to find somewhere to shelter," said the soldier.

Luckily there was an inn around the next corner but one. They squelched
thankfully into its taproom, where Abdullah was pleased to discover that
its grass roof was keeping the rain out very well.

Here the soldier, in the way Abdullah was getting used to, demanded a
private parlor with a fire, so that the cats could be comfortable, and
lunch for all four of the party. Abdullah, in the way that he was also
getting used to, wondered how much the bill would be this time, although
he had to admit the fire was very welcome. He stood in front of it and
dripped, with a glass of beer-in this particular inn the beer tasted as
if it had come from a camel that was rather unwell-while they waited for
lunch. Midnight washed the kitten dry, then herself. The soldier
stretched his boots to the fire and let them steam, while the genie
bottle stood in the hearth and also steamed faintly. Even the genie did
not complain.

They heard horses outside. This was not unusual. Most people in Ingary
traveled on horseback if they could. Nor was it surprising

100

that the riders seemed to be stopping at the inn. They must be wet, too.
Abdullah was just thinking that he should firmly have asked the genie to
provide horses instead of milk and salmon yesterday when he heard the
horsemen shouting at the innkeeper outside the parlor window.
"Two men-a Strangian soldier and a dark chap in a fancy suit-wanted for
assault and robbery-have you seen them?"

Before the riders had finished shouting, the soldier was over by the
parlor window, with his back to the wall so that he could look sideways
through the window without being seen, and somehow he had his pack in
one hand and his hat in the other.

"Four of them," he said. "They're constables, by the uniform."

All Abdullah could think to do was stand gaping in dismay, thinking that
this was what came of fussing for cat baskets and bathwater and giving
innkeepers reason to remember you. And demanding private parlors, he
thought, as he heard the voice of this innkeeper in the distance saying
smarmily that yes, indeed, both fellows were here, in the small parlor.

The soldier held out his hat to Abdullah. "Put Whippersnapper in here.
Then pick up Midnight and be ready to get out of the window as soon as
they come into the inn."

Whippersnapper had chosen that moment to go exploring under an oak
settle. Abdullah dived after him. As he backed out on his knees with the
kitten squirming in his hand, he could hear distant boots clumping into
the taproom. The soldier was undoing the latch on the window. Abdullah
dropped Whippersnapper into his outstretched hat and turned around for
Midnight. And saw the genie bottle warming on the hearth. Midnight was
up on a high shelf across the room. This was hopeless. The boots were
now much nearer, tramping toward the parlor door. The soldier was
banging at the window, which seemed to be stuck.

Abdullah snatched up the genie bottle. "Come here, Midnight!" he said,
and ran toward the window, where he collided with the soldier backing away.

"Stand clear," said the soldier. "Thing's stuck. Have to kick it."

As Abdullah staggered aside, the parlor door was flung open

101

and three large men in uniform plunged into the room. At the same
instant the soldier's boot met the window frame with a bang. The
casement burst open, and the soldier went scrambling out over the sill.
The three men shouted. Two made for the window, and one dived for
Abdullah. Abdullah overturned the oak settle in front of all of them and
then sprinted for the window, where he hurdled the sill out into the
drenching rain without pausing to think.

Then he remembered Midnight. He turned back.

She was huge again, larger than he had ever seen her, looming like a
great black shadow in the space below the window, with her immense white
fangs bared at the three men. They were falling over one another to get
away backward through the door. Abdullah turned and ran after the
soldier, gratefully. He was pelting toward the far corner of the inn.
The fourth constable, who was outside holding the horses, started to run
after them, then realized that this was stupid and ran back to the
horses, which scattered away from him as he ran at them. As Abdullah
bounded after the soldier through a sopping kitchen garden, he could
hear the shouting of all four constables as they tried to catch their
horses.
The soldier was an expert at escapes. He found a way from the vegetable
garden into an orchard and from there a gate into a wide field, all
without wasting an instant. A wood stood across the field in the
distance like a promise of safety, veiled in rain.

"Did you get Midnight?" gasped the soldier as they trotted through the
soaking grass of the field.

"No," said Abdullah. He had no breath to explain.

"What?" exclaimed the soldier. He stopped and swung around.

At that moment the four horses, each with a constable in the saddle,
came jumping over the orchard hedge into the field. The soldier swore
violently. He and Abdullah both sprinted for the wood. By the time they
reached its bushy outskirts, the horsemen were well over halfway across
the field. Abdullah and the soldier crashed through the bushes and
leaped onward into open woodland, where, to Abdullah's amazement, the
ground was thick with thousands upon thousands of bright blue flowers,
growing like a carpet into far blue distance.

102

"What . . . these flowers?" he panted.

"Bluebells," said the soldier. "If you've lost Midnight, I'll kill you."

"I haven't. She'll find us. She grew. Told you. Magic," Abdullah gasped.

The soldier had never seen this trick of Midnight's. He did not believe
Abdullah. "Run faster," he said. "We'll have to circle back and collect
her."

They rushed forward, crunching bluebells, suffused with the strange wild
scent of them. Abdullah could have believed, but for the gray, pouring
rain and the shouts of the constables, that he was running over the
floor of heaven. He was rapidly back in his daydream. When he made his
garden for the cottage he would share with Flower-in-the-Night, he would
have bluebells in it by the thousand, like these. But this did not blind
him to the fact that they were leaving a trampled trail of broken white
stems and snapped-off flowers as they ran. Nor did it deafen him to the
cracking of twigs as the constables shoved their horses into the wood
behind them.

"This is hopeless!" said the soldier. "Get that genie of yours to make
the constables lose us."

"Point out . . . sapphire of soldiers ... no wish . . . day after
tomorrow," Abdullah panted.

"He can give you one in advance again," said the soldier.

Blue steam fluttered angrily from the bottle in Abdullah's hand. "I gave
you your last wish only on condition you left me alone," said the genie.
"All I ask is to be left to sorrow alone in my bottle. And do you let
me? No. At the first sign of trouble, you start wailing for extra
wishes. Doesn't anyone consider me around here?"

"Emergency ... O hyacinth . . . bluebell among bottled spirits,"
Abdullah puffed. "Transport us ... far off-"

"Oh, no, you don't!" said the soldier. "You don't wish us far off
without Midnight. Have him make us invisible until we find her."

"Blue jade of génies-" gasped Abdullah.

"If there's one thing I hate," interrupted the genie, bellying forth in
a lavender cloud, "more than this rain and being pestered

103

for wishes in advance all the time, it's being coaxed for wishes in
flowery language. If you want a wish, talk straight."

"Take us to Kingsbury," puffed Abdullah.

"Make those fellows lose us," the soldier said at the same moment.

They glared at each other as they ran.

"Make up your minds," said the genie. He folded his arms and streamed
contemptuously out behind them. "It's all one to me what you choose to
waste another wish on. Just let me remind you that it will be your last
one for two days."

"I'm not leaving Midnight," said the soldier.

"If we are ... waste a wish," panted Abdullah, "then should . . .
usefully . . . foolish fortune hunter . . . forward our . . . quest . .
. Kingsbury."

"Then you can go without me," said the soldier.

"The horsemen are only fifty feet away," remarked the genie.

They looked over their shoulders and discovered this was quite true.
Abdullah hurriedly gave in. "Then make them unable to see us," he panted.

"Have us unseen until Midnight finds us," added the soldier. "I know she
will. She's that clever."

Abdullah had a glimpse of an evil grin spreading on the genie's smoky
face and of smoky arms making certain gestures.

There followed a wet and gluey strangeness. The world suddenly distorted
around Abdullah and grew vast and blue and green and out of focus. He
crawled, in a slow and toilsome crouch, among what seemed to be giant
bluebells, placing each huge and warty hand with extreme care because,
for some reason, he could not look downward-only up and across. It was
such hard work that he wanted to stop and crouch where he was, but the
ground was shaking most terribly. He could feel some gigantic creatures
galloping toward him, so he crawled on frantically. Even so, he barely
got out of their way in time. A huge hoof, as big as a round tower, with
metal underneath it, came smashing down just beside him as he crawled.
Abdullah was so frightened by it that he froze and could

104

not move. He could tell that the enormous creatures had stopped, too,
quite close. There were loud, annoyed sounds that he could not hear
properly. These went on for some time. Then the smashing of hooves began
again, and went on for some time, too, trampling this way and that,
always rather near, until, after what seemed most of the day, the
creatures seemed to give up looking for him and went crashing and
squelching away.

105

In which

Abdullah

challenges Fate

Abdullah crouched for a while longer, but when the creatures did not
come back, he began crawling again, in a vague, vain way, hoping to
discover what had happened to him. He knew something had happened, but
he did not seem to have much of a brain to think with.

While he crawled, the rain stopped. He was rather sad about that, since
it was wonderfully refreshing to the skin. On the other hand- A fly
circled in a shaft of sunlight and came to sit on a bluebell leaf
nearby. Abdullah promptly shot out a long tongue, whipped up that fly,
and swallowed it. Very nice! he thought. Then he thought: But flies are
unclean! More troubled than ever, he crawled around another bluebell clump.

And there was another one just like himself.

It was brown and squat and warty, and its yellow eyes were at the top of
its head. As soon as it saw him, it opened its wide, lipless mouth in a
bray of horror and began to swell up. Abdullah did not wait to see more.
He turned and crawled off as fast as his distorted legs could take him.
He knew what he was now. He was a toad. The malicious genie had fixed
things so that he would be a toad

106

until Midnight found him. When she did, he was fairly sure she would eat
him.

He crawled under the nearest overarching bluebell leaves and hid

About an hour later the bluebell leaves parted to let through a monster
black paw. It seemed interested in Abdullah. It kept its claws sheathed
and patted at him. Abdullah was so horrified that he tried to hop away
backward.

Whereupon he found himself lying on his back among the bluebells.

He blinked up at the trees first, trying to adjust to the way he
suddenly had thoughts in his head again. Some of those thoughts were
unpleasant ones, about two bandits crawling beside an oasis pool in the
shape of toads and about eating a fly and being nearly trodden on by a
horse. Then he looked around and found the soldier crouching nearby,
looking as bewildered as Abdullah felt. His pack was beside him, and
beyond that, Whippersnapper was making determined efforts to climb out
of the soldier's hat. The genie bottle stood smugly beside the hat.

The genie was outside the bottle in a small wisp like the flame of a
spirit lamp, with his smoky arms propped on the neck of the bottle.
"Enjoy yourselves?" he asked jeeringly. "I got you there, didn't I?
That'll teach you to pester me for extra wishes!"

Midnight had been extremely alarmed by their sudden transformation. She
was in a small angry arch, spitting at both of them.

The soldier stretched out his hand to her and made soothing noises. "You
frighten Midnight again like that," he told the genie, "and I'll break
your bottle!"

"You said that before," retorted the genie, "and you couldn't, worse
luck. The bottle's enchanted."

"Then I'll make sure his next wish is that you turn into a toad," the
soldier said, jerking his thumb at Abdullah.

The genie shot Abdullah a wary look at this. Abdullah said nothing, but
he saw it was a good idea and might keep the genie in order. He sighed.
One way and another, he just could not seem to stop wasting wishes.

107

They picked themselves and their belongings up and resumed their
journey. But they went much more cautiously. They kept to the smallest
lanes and footpaths they could find, and that night, instead of going to
an inn, they camped in an old empty barn. Here Midnight suddenly looked
alert and interested and shortly slipped away into the shadowy corners.
After a while she came trotting back with a dead mouse, which she laid
carefully in the soldier's hat for Whippersnapper. Whippersnapper was
not very sure what to do with it. In the end he decided it was the kind
of toy you leaped on fiercely and killed. Midnight prowled off again.
Abdullah heard the small sounds of her hunting most of the night.

In spite of this, the soldier worried about feeding the cats. Next
morning he wanted Abdullah to go to the nearest farm and buy milk.

"You do it if you want it," Abdullah said curtly.

And somehow he found himself on the way to the farm with a can from the
soldier's pack on one side of his belt and the genie bottle bumping at
the other.

Exactly the same thing happened the next two mornings, too, with the
small difference that they slept under haystacks both those nights and
Abdullah bought a beautiful fresh loaf one morning and some eggs on the
next. On the way back to the haystack that third morning he tried to
work out just why he was feeling increasingly bad-tempered and put-upon.

It was not just that he was stiff and tired and damp all the time. It
was not just that he seemed to spend such a lot of time running errands
for the soldier's cats, though that had something to do with it. Some of
it was Midnight's fault. Abdullah knew he ought to be grateful to her
for defending them from the constables. He was grateful, but he still
did not get on with Midnight. She rode his shoulder disdainfully every
day and contrived to make it quite clear that as far as she was
concerned, Abdullah was only a sort of horse. It was a bit hard to take
from a mere animal.

Abdullah brooded on this and other matters all that day, while he
tramped country lanes with Midnight draped elegantly around his neck and
the soldier trudging cheerfully ahead. It was not that

108

he did not like cats. He was used to them now. Sometimes he
foundWhippersnapper almost as sweet as the soldier did. No, his bad
humor had much more to do with the way the soldier and the genie between
them kept contriving to postpone his search for Flower-in-the-Night. If
he was not careful, Abdullah could see himself tramping country lanes
for the rest of his life, without ever getting to Kingsbury at all. And
when he did get there, he still had to locate a wizard. No, it would not
do.

That night they found the remains of a stone tower to camp in. This was
much better than a haystack. They could light a fire and eat hot food
from the soldier's packets and Abdullah could get warm and dry at last.
His spirits rose.

The soldier was cheerful, too. He sat leaning against the stone wall
with Whippersnapper asleep in his hat beside him and gazed out at the
sunset. "I've been thinking," he said. "You get a wish from your misty
blue friend tomorrow, don't you? You know the most practical wish you
could make? You should wish for that magic carpet back. Then we could
really get on."

"It would be just as easy to wish ourselves straight to Kingsbury,
intelligent infantryman," Abdullah pointed out-a little sullenly, if the
truth be told.

"Ah, yes, but I've got that genie's measure now, and I know he'd mess
that wish up if he possibly could," the soldier said. "My point is, you
know how to work that carpet, and you could get us there with much less
trouble and a wish in hand for emergencies."

This was sound sense. Nevertheless, Abdullah only grunted. This was
because the way the soldier put his advice had made Abdullah suddenly
see things a whole new way. Of course, the soldier had got the genie's
measure. The soldier was like that. He was an expert in getting other
people to do what he wanted. The only creature that could make the
soldier do something he did not want was Midnight, and Midnight did
things she did not want only when Whippersnapper wanted something. That
put the kitten right at the top of the pecking order. A kitten! thought
Abdullah. And since the soldier had the genie's measure, and the genie
was very definitely on top of Abdullah, that put Abdullah right down at
the bottom. No

109

wonder he had been feeling so put-upon! It did not make him feel any
better to realize that things had been exactly the same way with his
father's first wife's relations.

So Abdullah only grunted, which in Zanzib would have counted as shocking
rudeness, but the soldier was quite unaware of it. He pointed cheerfully
at the sky. "Lovely sunset again. Look, there's another castle."

The soldier was right. There was a glory of yellow lakes in the sky, and
islands and promontories, and one long indigo headland of cloud with a
frowning square cloud like a fortress on it. "It is not the same as the
other castle," Abdullah said. He felt it was time he asserted himself.

"Of course not. You never get the same cloud twice," said the soldier.

Abdullah contrived to be the first one awake the next morning. Dawn was
still flaring across the sky when he sprang up, seized the genie bottle,
and took it some distance away from the ruins where their camp was.
"Genie," he said. "Appear."

A flutter of steam appeared at the mouth of the bottle, grudging and
ghostly. "What's this?" it said. "Where's all the talk about jewels and
flowers and so forth?"

"You told me you did not like it. I have discontinued it," said
Abdullah. "I have now become a realist. The wish I want to make is in
accordance with my new outlook."

"Ah," said the wisp of genie. "You're going to ask for the magic carpet
back."

"Not at all," said Abdullah. This so surprised the genie that he rose
right out of the bottle and regarded Abdullah with wide eyes, which in
the dawnlight looked solid and shiny and almost like human eyes. "I
shall explain," said Abdullah. "Thus. Fate is clearly determined to
delay my search for Flower-in-the-Night. This is in spite of the fact
that Fate has also decreed that I shall marry her. Any attempt I make to
go against Fate causes you to make sure that my wish does no good to
anyone and usually also ensures that I get pursued by persons on camels
or horses. Or else the soldier causes me to waste a wish. Since I am
tired both of your malice and of the

110

soldier's; so continually getting his own   way, I have decided to
challenge Fate instead. I intend to waste   every wish deliberately from
now on.. Fate will then be forced to take   a hand, or else the prophecy
concerning Flower-in-the-Night will never   be fulfilled."

"Yoiu're being childish," said the genie. "Or heroic. Or possibly mad."

"No>-realistic," said Abdullah. "Furthermore, I shall challenge you by
vvasting the wishes in a way that might do good somewhere to sometone."

The genie looked decidedly sarcastic at this. "And what is your wish
today? Homes for orphans? Sight for the blind? Or do you simply Vivant
all the money in the world taken away from the rich and given to the poor?"

"I was thinking," said Abdullah, "that I might wish that those two
bandits whom you transformed into toads should be restored to their own
shape."

A lcook of malicious glee spread over the genie's face. "You might do
worse. I could grant you that one with pleasure."

"What is the drawback to that wish?" asked Abdullah.

"Oh, not much," said the genie. "Simply that the Sultan's soldiers are
camped in that oasis at the moment. The Sultan is convinced that you are
still somewhere in the desert. His men are quartering the entire region
for you, but I'm sure they will spare a moment for two bandits, if only
to show the Sultan how zealous they are."

Abdlullah considered this. "And who else is in the desert who might bee
in danger from the Sultan's search?"

The genie looked sideways at him. "You are anxious to waste a wish,
aren't you? Nobody much there except a few carpet weavers and a prophet
or so-and Jamal and his dog, of course."

"Ah," said Abdullah. "Then I waste this wish on Jamal and his dog. I
wish that Jamal and his dog both be instantly transported to a life of
ease and prosperity as-let me see-yes, as palace cook and guard dog in
the nearest royal palace apart from Zanzib."

"You make it very difficult," the genie said pathetically, "for that
wish to go wrong."

111

"Such was my aim," said Abdullah. "If I could discover how to make none
of your wishes go wrong, it would be a great relief."

"There is one wish you could make to do that," said the genie.

He sounded rather wistful, from which Abdullah realized what he meant.
The genie wanted to be free of the enchantment that bound him to the
bottle. It would be easy enough to waste a wish that way, Abdullah
reflected, but only if he could count on the genie's being grateful
enough to help him find Flower-in-the-Night afterward. With this genie,
that was most unlikely. And if he freed the genie, then he would have to
give up challenging Fate. "I shall think about that wish for later," he
said. "My wish today is for Jamal and his dog. Are they now safe?"

"Yes," the genie said sulkily. From the look on his smoky face as it
vanished inside the bottle, Abdullah had an uneasy feeling that he had
somehow contrived to make this wish go wrong, too, but of course, there
was no way to tell.

Abdullah turned around to find the soldier watching him. He had no idea
how much the soldier had overheard, but he got ready for an argument.

But all the soldier said was "Don't quite follow your logic in all
that," before suggesting that they walk on until they found a farm where
they could buy breakfast.

Abdullah shouldered Midnight again, and they trudged off. All that day
they wandered deep lanes again. Though there was no sign of any
constables, they did not seem to be getting any nearer to Kingsbury. In
fact, when the soldier inquired from a man digging a ditch how far it
was to Kingsbury, he was told it was four days' walk.

Fate! thought Abdullah.

The next morning he went around to the other side of the haystack where
they had slept and wished that the two toads in the oasis should now
become men.

The genie was very annoyed. "You heard me say that the first person who
opened my bottle would become a toad! Do you want me to undo my good work?"
"Yes," said Abdullah.

112

"Regardless of the fact that the Sultan's men are still there and will
certainly hang them?" asked the genie.

"I think," said Abdullah, remembering his experiences as a toad, "that
they would rather be men even so."

"Oh, very well then!" the genie said angrily. "You realize my revenge is
in ruins, don't you? But what do you care? I'm just a daily wish in a
bottle to you!"

113

Which tells how the magic

carpet reappeared

Once again Abdullah turned around to find the soldier watching him, but
this time the soldier said nothing at all. Abdullah was fairly sure he
was simply biding his time.

That day, as they trudged onward, the ground climbed. The lush green
lanes gave way to sandy tracks bordered with bushes that were dry and
spiny. The soldier remarked cheerfully that they seemed to be getting
somewhere different at last. Abdullah only grunted. He was determined
not to give the soldier an opening.

By nightfall they were high on an open heath, looking over a new stretch
of the plain. A faint pimple on the horizon was, the soldier said, still
very cheerful, certainly Kingsbury. As they settled down to camp, he
invited Abdullah, even more cheerfully, to see how charmingly
Whippersnapper was playing with the buckles on his pack.

"Doubtless," said Abdullah. "It charms me even less than a lump on the
skyline that may be Kingsbury."

There was another huge red sunset. While they ate supper, the soldier
pointed it out to Abdullah and drew his attention to a large red
castle-shaped cloud. "Isn't that beautiful?" he said.

"It is only a cloud," said Abdullah. "It has no artistic merit."

114

"Friend," said the soldier, "I think you are letting that genie get to
you."

"How so?" said Abdullah.

The soldier pointed with his spoon to the distant dark hummock against
the sunset. "See there?" he said. "Kingsbury. Now, I have a hunch, and I
think you do, too, that things are going to start moving when we get
there. But we don't seem to get there. Don't think I can't see your
point of view: You're a young fellow, disappointed in love, impatient;
naturally you think Fate's against you. Take it from me, Fate doesn't
care either way most of the time. The genie's not on anyone's side any
more than Fate is."
"How do you make that out?" asked Abdullah.

"Because he hates everyone," said the soldier. "Maybe it's his
nature-though I daresay being shut in a bottle doesn't help any. But
don't forget that whatever his feelings, he's always got to grant you a
wish. Why make it hard for yourself just to spite the genie? Why not
make the most useful wish you can, get what you want out of it, and put
up with whatever he does to send it wrong? I've been thinking this
through, and it seems to me that whatever that genie does to send it
wrong, your best wish is still to ask for that magic carpet back."

While the soldier was speaking, Midnight-to Abdullah's great
surprise-climbed to Abdullah's knees and rubbed herself against his
face, purring. Abdullah had to admit he was flattered. He had been
letting Midnight get to him as well as the genie and the soldier-not to
speak of Fate. "If I wish for the carpet," he said, "I am prepared to
bet that the misfortunes the genie sends with it will far outweigh its
usefulness."

"You bet, do you?" said the soldier. "I never resist a bet. Bet you a
gold piece the carpet will be more use than trouble."

"Done," said Abdullah. "And now you have your own way again. It
perplexes me, my friend, that you never rose to command that army of
yours."

"Me, too," said the soldier. "I'd have made a good general."

Next morning they woke into a thick mist. Everywhere was white and wet,
and it was impossible to see beyond the nearest

115

bushes. Midnight coiled against Abdullah, shivering. The genie's bottle,
when Abdullah put it down in front of them, had a distinctly sulky look.

"Come out," said Abdullah. "I need to make a wish."

"I can grant it quite as well from in here," the genie retorted
hollowly. "I don't like this damp."

"Very well," said Abdullah. "I wish for my magic carpet back again."

"Done," said the genie. "And let that teach you to make silly bets!"

For a while Abdullah looked up and around expectantly, but nothing
seemed to happen. Then Midnight sprang to her feet. Whippersnapper's
face came out of the soldier's pack, ears cocked sideways to the south.
When Abdullah gazed that way, he thought he could just hear a slight
whispering, which could have been the wind or something moving through
the mist. Shortly the mist swirled-and swirled harder. The gray oblong
of the carpet slid into sight overhead and glided to the ground beside
Abdullah.

It had a passenger. Curled up on the carpet, peacefully asleep, was a
villainous man with a large mustache. His beak of a nose was pressed
into the carpet, but Abdullah could just see the gold ring in it, half
hidden by the mustache and a dirty drape of headcloth. One of the man's
hands clutched a silver-mounted pistol. There was no question that this
was Kabul Aqba again.

"I think I win the bet," Abdullah murmured.

Even that murmur-or maybe the chilliness of the mist-set the bandit
stirring and muttering fretfully. The soldier put his finger to his lips
and shook his head. Abdullah nodded. If he had been on his own, he would
have been wondering what on earth to do now, but with the soldier there
he felt almost equal to Kabul Aqba. As quietly as he could, he made a
gentle snoring noise and whispered to the carpet, "Come out from
underneath that man and hover in front of me."

Ripples ran down the edge of the carpet. Abdullah could see it was
trying to obey. It gave a strong wriggle, but Kabul Aqba's weight was
evidently just too much to allow it to slide out from

116

under him. So it tried another way. It rose an inch into the air, and
before Abdullah realized what it intended to do, it had darted out from
under the sleeping bandit.

"No!" said Abdullah, but he said it too late. Kabul Aqba thumped down on
to the ground and woke. He sat up, waving his pistol and howling in a
strange language.

In an alert, leisurely sort of way, the soldier picked up the hovering
carpet and wrapped it around Kabul Aqba's head. "Get his pistol," he
said, holding the struggling bandit in both brawny arms.

Abdullah plunged to one knee and grasped the strong hand waving the
pistol. It was a very strong hand. Abdullah could do nothing about
taking the pistol away. He could only hang on and go crashing to and fro
as the hand tried to shake him off. Beside him the soldier was also
crashing to and fro. Kabul Aqba seemed quite amazingly strong. Abdullah,
as he was battered about, tried to take hold of one of the bandit's
fingers and uncurl it from around the pistol. But at this Kabul Aqba
roared and rose upward, and Abdullah was flung off backward with the
carpet somehow wrapped around him instead of around Kabul Aqba. The
soldier hung on. He hung on even though Kabul Aqba went on rising
upward, roaring now like the sky falling, and the soldier from gripping
him around the arms went to gripping him around the waist and then
around the top of the legs. Kabul Aqba shouted as if his voice were the
thunder itself and rose up bigger yet, until both his legs were too big
to hold at once, and the soldier slid down until he was grimly clutching
one of them, just below its vast knee. That leg tried to kick the
soldier loose and failed. Whereupon Kabul Aqba spread enormous leathery
wings and tried to fly away. But the soldier, though he slid downward
again, hung on still.

Abdullah saw all this while he was struggling out from under the carpet.
He also caught a glimpse of Midnight standing protectively over
Whippersnapper, larger even than she had been when she faced the
constables. But not large enough. What stood there now was one of the
mightiest of mighty djinns. Half of him was lost upward in the mist,
which he was beating into swirling smoke with

117

his wings, unable to fly because the soldier was anchoring one of his
enormous taloned feet to the ground.

"Explain yourself, mightiest of mighty ones!" Abdullah shouted up into
the mist. "By the Seven Great Seals, I conjure you to cease your
struggling and explain!"

The djinn stopped roaring and halted the violent fanning of his wings.
"You conjure me, do you, mortal?" the great sullen voice came down.

"I do indeed," said Abdullah. "Say what you were doing with my carpet
and in the form of that most ignoble of nomads. You have wronged me at
least twice!"

"Very well," said the djinn. He began ponderously to kneel down.

"You can let go now," Abdullah said to the soldier, who, not knowing the
laws that governed djinns, was still hanging on to the vast foot. "He
has to stay and answer me now."

Warily the soldier let go and mopped sweat from his face. He did not
seem reassured when the djinn simply folded his wings and knelt. This
was not surprising, because the djinn was high as a house even kneeling,
and the face coming into view through the mist was hideous. Abdullah had
another glimpse of Midnight, now normal size again, scurrying for the
bushes with Whippersnapper dangling from her mouth. But the face of the
djinn took up most of his attention. He had seen that blank brown glare
and the gold ring through that hooked nose-albeit briefly-before, when
Flower-intheNight was carried off from the garden.

"Correction," Abdullah said. "You have wronged me three times."

"Oh, more than that," the djinn rumbled blandly. "So many times that I
have lost count."

At this Abdullah found himself angrily folding his arms. "Explain."

"Willingly," said the djinn. "I was indeed hoping to be asked by
someone, although I had supposed the questions most likely to come from
the Duke of Farqtan or the three rival princes of Thayack,

118

rather than frrom you. But none of the rest has proved determined
enough-which surprises me somewhat, because you were certainly never my
maim irons in the fire, either of you. Know then that I am one of the
grreatest of the host of Good Djinns, and my name is Hasruel."

"I didn't know there were any good djinns," said the soldier.

"Oh, theire are, innocent northerner," Abdullah told him. "I have heard
thus one's name spoken in terms that place him nearly as high as the
angels."

The djinni frowned-an unpleasant sight. "Misinformed merchant," he
rurmbled. "I am higher than some angels. Know that some two hundred
angels of the lesser air are mine to command. They serve as guards to
the entrance of my castle."

Abdullah kept his arms folded and tapped with his foot. "This being the
case;," he said, "explain why you have seen fit to behave toward me in a
manner so far from angelic."

"The blame is not mine, mortal," said the djinn. "Need spurred me on.
Understand all, and forgive. Know that my mother, the Great Spirit
Dazrah, in an moment of oversight allowed herself to be ravished by a
djinn of the Host of Evil some twenty years ago. She then gave birtlh to
my brother Dalzel, who-since Good and Evil do not breed welU
together-proved weak and white and undersized. My mother could not
tolerate Dalzel and gave him to me to bring up. I lavished every care
upon him as he grew. So you can imagine my horror and sorrow when he
proved to inherit the nature of his Evil sire. His fiirst act, when he
came of age, was to steal my life and hide it, thereby making me his
slave."

"Come again?" said the soldier. "You mean you're dead?"

"Not at alll," said Hasruel. "We djinns are not as you mortals, ignorant
man.. We can die only if one small portion of us is destroyed. For this
reason all djinns prudently remove that small part from our persons and
hide it. As I did. But when I instructed Dalzel how to hide hiis own
life, I lovingly and rashly told him where my life was hiddem. And he
instantly took my life into his power, forcing me to do This bidding or
die."

119

"Now we come to it," said Abdullah. "His bidding was to steal
Flower-in-the-Night. "

"Correction," said Hasruel. "My brother inherits a grandeur of mind from
his mother, great Dazrah. He ordered me to steal every princess in the
world. A moment's thought will show you the sense in this. My brother is
of an age to marry, but he is of a birth so mixed that no female among
djinns will countenance him. He is forced to resort to mortal women. But
since he is a djinn, naturally only those females of the highest blood
will serve."

"My heart bleeds for your brother," remarked Abdullah. "Could he not be
satisfied with less than all?"

"Why should he be?" asked Hasruel. "He commands my power now. He gave
the matter careful thought. And seeing clearly that his princesses would
not be able to walk on air as we djinns do, he first ordered me to steal
a certain moving castle belonging to a wizard in this land of Ingary in
which to house his brides, and then he ordered me to commence stealing
princesses. This I am now engaged in doing. But naturally at the same
time I am laying plans of my own. For each princess that I take, I
arrange to leave behind at least one injured lover or disappointed
prince, who might be persuaded to attempt to rescue her. In order to do
this, the lover will have to challenge my brother and wrest from him the
secret hiding place of my life."

"And is this where I come in, mighty machinator?" Abdullah asked coldly.
"I am part of your plans to regain your life, am I?"

"Just barely," answered the djinn. "My hopes were more upon the heirs of
Alberia or the Prince of Peichstan, but both these young men have thrown
themselves into hunting instead. Indeed, all of them have shown
remarkable lack of spirit, including the King of High Norland, who is
merely attempting to catalog his books on his own, without his
daughter's help, and even he was a likelier chance than you. You were,
you might say, an outside bet of mine. The prophecy at your birth was
highly ambiguous, after all. I confess to selling you that magic carpet
almost purely out of amusement-"

"You did!" Abdullah exclaimed.

120

"Yes-amusement at the number and nature of the daydreams proceeding from
your booth," said Hasruel. Abdullah, despite the cold of the mist, found
his face was heating up. "Then," continued Hasruel, "when you surprised
me by escaping from the Sultan of Zanzib, it amused me to take on your
character of Kabul Aqba and to force you to live out some of your
daydreams. I usually try to make appropriate adventures befall each
suitor."

Despite his embarrassment, Abdullah could have sworn that the djinn's
great gold-brown eyes slanted toward the soldier here. "And how many
disappointed princes have you so far put in motion, O subtle and jesting
djinn?" he asked.

"Very nearly thirty," Hasruel said, "but as I said, most of them are not
in motion at all. This strikes me as strange, for their birth and
qualifications are all far better than yours. However, I console myself
with the thought that there are still one hundred and thirty- two
princesses left to steal."

"I think you might have to be satisfied with me," Abdullah said. "Low as
my birth is, Fate seems to want it so. I am in a position to assure you
of this, since I have recently challenged Fate on this very point."

The djinn smiled-a sight as unpleasant as his frown-and nodded. "This I
know," he said. "This is the reason I have stooped to appear before you.
Two of my servant angels returned to me yesterday, having just been
hanged in the shape of men. Neither was wholly pleased by this, and both
claimed it was your doing."

Abdullah bowed. "Doubtless when they consider, they will find it
preferable to being immortal toads," he said. "Now tell me one last
thing, O thoughtful thief of princesses. Say where Flower-intheNight,
not to speak of your brother Dalzel, may be found."

The djinn's smile broadened, making it even more unpleasant, for this
revealed a number of extremely long fangs. He pointed upward with a vast
spiked thumb. "Why, earthbound adventurer, they are, naturally, in the
castle you have been seeing in the sunset these last few days," he said.
"It used, as I said, to belong to a wizard of this land. You will not
find it easy to get there, and if you

121

do, you will do well to remember that I am my brother's slave and forced
to act against you."

"Understood," said Abdullah.

The djinn planted his enormous taloned hands on the ground and began to
lever himself up. "I must also observe," he said, "that the carpet is
under orders not to follow me. May I depart now?"
"No, wait!" cried the soldier. Abdullah, at the same moment, remembered
one thing he had forgotten and asked, "And what of the genie?" but the
soldier's voice was louder and drowned Abdullah's. "WAIT, you monsterl
Is that castle hanging around in the sky here for any particular reason,
monster?"

Hasruel smiled again and paused, balanced on one huge knee. "How
perceptive of you, soldier. Indeed, yes. The castle is here because I am
preparing to steal the daughter of the King of Ingary, Princess Valeria."

"My princess!" said the soldier.

Hasruel's smile became a laugh. He threw back his head and bellowed into
the mist. "I doubt it, soldier! Oh, I doubt it! This princess is only
four years old. But though she is of little use to you, I trust that you
are going to be of great use to me. I regard both you and your friend
from Zanzib as well-placed pawns on my chessboard."

"How do you mean?" the soldier asked indignantly.

"Because the two of you are going to help me steal her!" said the djinn,
and sprang away upward into the mist in a whirl of wings, laughing hugely.

122

In which

the travelers

arrive at

Kingsbury

"If you ask me," said the soldier, moodily dumping his pack on the magic
carpet, "that creature is as bad as his brother-if he has a brother,
that is."

"Oh, he has a brother. Djinns do not lie," said Abdullah. "But they are
always prone to see themselves as superior to mortals, even the good
djinns. And Hasruel's name ¿s on the Lists of the Good."

"You could have fooled me!" said the soldier. "Where's Midnight got to?
She must have been frightened to death." He made such a pother over
hunting for Midnight in the bushes that Abdullah did not try to explain
any more of the lore concerning djinns, which every child in Zanzib
learned at school. Besides, he feared the soldier was right. Hasruel
might have taken the Seven Vows that made him one of the Host of the
Good, but his brother had given him the perfect excuse to break all
seven of them. Good or not, Hasruel was clearly enjoying himself hugely.

Abdullah picked up the genie bottle and put it on the carpet. It
promptly fell on its side and rolled off. "No, no!" the genie cried out
from inside. "I'm not going on that! Why do you think I fell off it
before? I hate heights!"

"Oh, don't you start!" said the soldier. He had Midnight

123
wrapped around one arm, kicking and scratching and biting, and
demonstrating in every way she could that cats and flying carpets do not
mix. This in itself was enough to make anyone irritable, but Abdullah
suspected that most of the soldier's ill humor had to do with the fact
that Princess Valeria was only four years old. The soldier had been
thinking of himself as engaged to Princess Valeria. Now, not
unnaturally, he was feeling a fool.

Abdullah seized the genie bottle, very firmly, and settled himself on
the carpet. Tactfully he said nothing about their bet although it was
fairly clear to him that he had won it hands down. True, they had the
carpet back, but since it was forbidden to follow the djinn, it was no
use at all for rescuing Flower-in-the-Night.

After a prolonged struggle the soldier got himself and his hat and
Midnight and Whippersnapper more or less securely on the carpet, too.
"Give your orders," he said. His brown face was flushed.

Abdullah snored. The carpet rose a gentle foot in the air, whereupon
Midnight howled and struggled and the genie bottle shook in his hands.
"O elegant tapestry of enchantment," Abdullah said, "O carpet compiled
of most complex cantrips, I pray you to move at a sedate speed toward
Kingsbury, but to exercise the great wisdom woven into your fabric to
make sure that we are not seen by anyone on the way."

Obediently the carpet climbed through the mist, upward and south. The
soldier clamped Midnight in his arms. A hoarse and trembling voice said
from the bottle, "Do you have to flatter it so disgustingly?"

"This carpet," said Abdullah, "unlike you, is of an ensorcellment so
pure and excellent that it will listen only to the finest of language.
It is at heart a poet among carpets."

A certain smugness spread through the pile of the carpet. It held its
tattered edges proudly straight and sailed sweetly forward into the
golden sunlight above the mist. A small blue jet came out of the bottle
and disappeared again with a yip of panic. "Well, I wouldn't do it!"
said the genie.

At first it was easy for the carpet not to be seen. It simply flew above
the mist, which lay below them white and solid as milk. But

124

as the sun climbed, golden-green fields began to appear shimmeringly
through it, then white roads and occasional houses. Whippersnapper was
frankly fascinated. He stood at the edge staring downward and looked so
likely to tip off headfirst that the soldier kept one hand strongly
around his small, bushy tail.

This was just as well. The carpet banked away toward a line of trees
that followed a river. Midnight dug all her claws in, and Abdullah only
just saved the soldier's pack.

The soldier looked a little seasick. "Do we have to be this careful not
to be seen?" he asked as they went gliding beside the trees like a tramp
lurking in a hedge.

"I think so," said Abdullah. "In my experience, to see this eagle among
carpets is to wish to steal it." And he told the soldier about the
person on the camel.

The soldier agreed that Abdullah had a point. "It's just that it's going
to slow us down," he said. "My feeling is that we ought to get to
Kingsbury and warn the King that there's a djinn after his daughter.
Kings give big rewards for that kind of information." Clearly, now he
had been forced to give up the idea of marrying Princess Valeria, the
soldier was thinking of other ways of making his fortune.

"We shall do that, never fear," said Abdullah, and once again did not
mention their bet.

It took most of that day to reach Kingsbury. The carpet followed rivers,
slid from wood to forest, and only put on speed where the land below was
empty. When, in the late afternoon, they reached the city, a wide
cluster of towers inside high walls that was easily three times the size
of Zanzib, if not larger, Abdullah directed the carpet to find a good
inn near the King's palace and to set them down somewhere where no one
would suspect how they had traveled.

The carpet obeyed by sliding over the great walls like a snake. After
that it kept to the roofs, following the shape of each roof the way a
flounder follows the sea bottom. Abdullah and the soldier and the cats,
too, stared down and around in wonder. The streets, wide or narrow, were
choked with richly dressed people and expen

125

sive carriages. Every house seemed to Abdullah like a palace. He saw
towers, domes, rich carvings, golden cupolas, and marble courts the
Sultan of Zanzib would have been glad to call his own. The poorer
houses-if you could call such richness poor-were decorated with painted
patterns quite exquisitely. As for the shops, the wealth and quantity of
the wares they had for sale made Abdullah realize that the Bazaar at
Zanzib was really shabby and second-rate. No wonder the Sultan had been
so anxious for an alliance with the Prince of Ingary!

The inn the carpet found for them, near the great marble buildings at
the center of Kingsbury, had been plastered by a master in raised
designs of fruit, which had then been painted in the most glowing colors
with much gold leaf. The carpet landed gently on the sloping roof of the
inn stables, hiding them cunningly beside a gold spire with a gilded
weathercock on the top. They sat and looked around at all this
magnificence while they waited for the yard below to be empty. There
were two servants down there, cleaning a gilded carriage, gossiping as
they worked.

Most of what they said was about the landlord of this inn, who was
clearly a man who loved money. But when they had finished complaining
how little they were paid, one man said, "Any news of that Strangian
soldier who robbed all those people up north? Someone told me he was
heading this way."

To this the other replied, "He's sure to make for Kingsbury. They all
do. But they're watching for him at the city gates. He won't get far."

The soldier's eyes met Abdullah's.

Abdullah murmured, "Do you have a change of clothes?"
The soldier nodded and dug furiously in his pack. Shortly he produced
two peasant-style shirts with smocked embroidery on the chests and
backs. Abdullah wondered how he had come by those.

"Clothesline," murmured the soldier, bringing out a clothes brush and
his razor. There, on the roof, he changed into one of the shirts and did
his best to brush his trousers without making a noise. The noisiest part
was when he was trying to shave without anything

126

but the razor. The two servants kept glancing toward the dry scratching
from the roof.

"Must be a bird," said one.

Abdullah put the second shirt on over his jacket, which was by now
looking like anything but his best one. He was rather hot like that, but
there was no way he could remove the money hidden in his jacket without
letting the soldier see how much he had. He brushed his hair with the
clothes brush, smoothed his mustache-it now felt as if there were at
least twelve hairs there-and then brushed his trousers with the clothes
brush, too. When he was done, the soldier passed Abdullah the razor and
silently stretched out his pigtail.

"A great sacrifice, but a wise one, I think, my friend," Abdullah
murmured. He sawed the pigtail off and hid it in the golden weathercock.
This made quite a transformation. The soldier now looked like a
bushy-headed prosperous farmer. Abdullah hoped he would pass for the
farmer's young brother himself.

While they were doing this, the two servants finished cleaning the
carriage and began pushing it into the coach house. As they passed under
the roof where the carpet was, one of them asked, "And what do you think
of this story that someone's trying to steal the Princess?"

"Well, I think it's true," the other one said, "if that's what you're
asking. They say the Royal Wizard risked a lot to send a warning, poor
fellow, and he's not the kind to take a risk for nothing."

The soldier's eyes met Abdullah's again. His mouth formed a hearty curse.

"Never mind," Abdullah murmured. "There are other ways to earn a reward."

They waited until the servants had gone back across the yard and into
the inn. Then Abdullah requested the carpet to land in the yard. It
glided obediently down. Abdullah picked the carpet up and wrapped the
genie bottle inside it, while the soldier carried his pack and both
cats. They went into the inn trying hard to look dull and respectable.

127

The landlord met them there. Warned by what the servants had said,
Abdullah met the landlord with a gold piece casually between his finger
and thumb. The landlord looked at that. His flinty eyes stared at the
gold piece so fixedly that Abdullah doubted if he even saw their faces.
Abdullah was extremely polite. So was the landlord. He showed them to a
nice spacious room on the second floor. He agreed to send up supper and
provide baths.
"And the cats will need-" the soldier began.

Abdullah kicked the soldier's ankle, hard. "And that will be all, O lion
among landlords," he said. "Although, most helpful of hosts, if your
active and vigilant staff could provide a basket, a cushion, and a dish
of salmon, the powerful witch to whom we are to deliver tomorrow this
pair of exceptionally gifted cats will undoubtedly reward whoever brings
these things most bountifully."

"I'll see what I can do, sir," the landlord said. Abdullah carelessly
tossed him the gold piece. The man bowed deeply and backed out of the
room, leaving Abdullah feeling decidedly pleased with himself.

"There's no need to look so smug!" the soldier said angrily. "What are
we supposed to do now? I'm a wanted man here, and the King seems to know
all about the djinn."

It was a pleasant feeling to Abdullah to find that he was in command of
events instead of the soldier. "Ah, but does the King know that there is
a castle full of stolen princesses hovering overhead to receive his
daughter?" he said. "You are forgetting, my friend, that the King cannot
have had the advantage of speaking personally to the djinn. We might
make use of this fact."

"How?" demanded the soldier. "Can you think of a way to stop that djinn
stealing the child? Or a way to get to the castle, for that matter!"

"No, but it seems to me that a wizard might know these things," said
Abdullah. "I think we should modify the idea you had earlier. Instead of
finding one of this King's wizards and strangling him, we might inquire
which wizard is the best and pay him a fee for his help."

"All right, but you'll have to do that," said the soldier. "Any

128

wizard worth his salt would spot me for a Strangian at once and call the
constables before I could move."

The landlord brought the food for the cats himself. He hurried in with a
bowl of cream, a carefully boned salmon, and a dish of whitebait. He was
followed by his wife, a woman as flinty-eyed as himself, carrying a soft
rush basket and an embroidered cushion. Abdullah tried not to look smug
again. "Generous thanks, most illustrious of innkeepers," he said. "I
will tell the witch of your great care."

"That's all right, sir," the landlady said. "We know how to respect
those that use magic, here in Kingsbury."

Abdullah went from smug to mortified. He saw he should have pretended to
be a wizard himself. He relieved his feelings by saying, "That cushion
is stuffed only with peacock feathers, I hope? The witch is most
particular."

"Yes, sir," said the landlady. "I know all about that."

The soldier coughed. Abdullah gave up. He said grandly, "As well as the
cats, my friend and I have been entrusted with a message for a wizard.
We would prefer to deliver it to the Royal Wizard, but we heard rumors
on the way that he has met with some sort of misfortune."
"That's right," said the landlord, pushing his wife aside. "One of the
Royal Wizards has disappeared, sir, but fortunately there are two. I can
direct you to the other one-Royal Wizard Suliman-if you want, sir." He
looked meaningly at Abdullah's hands.

Abdullah sighed and fetched out his largest silver piece. That seemed to
be the right amount. The landlord gave him very careful directions and
took the silver piece, promising baths and supper shortly. The baths,
when they came, were hot, and the supper was good. Abdullah was glad.
While the soldier was bathing himself andWhippersnapper, Abdullah
transferred his wealth from his jacket to his money belt, which made him
feel much better. The soldier must have felt better, too. He sat after
supper with his feet up on a table, smoking that long clay pipe of his.
Cheerfully he untied the bootlace from the neck of the genie bottle and
dangled it for Whippersnapper to play with.

129

"There's no doubt about it," he said. "Money talks in this town. Are you
going to talk to the Royal Wizard this evening? The sooner, the better,
to my mind."

Abdullah agreed. "I wonder what his fee will be," he said.

"Big," said the soldier. "Unless you can work it that you're doing him a
favor by telling him what the djinn said. All the same," he went on
thoughtfully, whisking the bootlace out of Whippersnapper's pouncing
paws, "I reckon you shouldn't tell him about the genie or the carpet if
you can help it. These magical gentlemen love magical items the way this
innkeeper loves gold. You don't want him asking for those for his fee.
Why don't you leave them here when you go? I'll look after them for you."

Abdullah hesitated. It seemed sound sense. Yet he did not trust the
soldier.

"By the way," said the soldier, "I owe you a gold piece."

"You do?" said Abdullah. "Then this is the most surprising news I have
had since Flower-in-the-Night told me I was a woman!"

"That bet of ours," said the soldier. "The carpet brought the djinn, and
he's even bigger trouble than the genie usually manages. You win. Here."
He tossed a gold piece across the room at Abdullah.

Abdullah caught it, pocketed it, and laughed. The soldier was honest,
after his own fashion. Full of thoughts of being soon on the trail of
Flower-in-the-Night, Abdullah went cheerfully downstairs, where the
landlady caught him and told him all over again how to get to Wizard
Suliman's house. Abdullah was so cheerful that he parted with another
silver piece almost without a pang.

The house was not far from the inn, but it was in the Old Quarter, which
meant that the way was mostly through confusing small alleys and hidden
courts. It was twilight now, with one or two large liquid stars already
in the dark blue sky above the domes and towers, but Kingsbury was well
lit by big silver globes of light, floating overhead like moons.

Abdullah was looking up at them, wondering if they were magical devices,
when he happened to notice a black four-legged shadow stealing along the
roofs beside him. It could have been any

130

black cat out for a hunt on the tiles, but Abdullah knew it was
Midnight. There was no mistaking the way she moved. At first, when she
vanished into the deep black shadow of a gable, he supposed she was
after a roosting pigeon to make another unsuitable meal for
Whippersnapper. But she reappeared again when he was halfway down the
next alley, creeping along a parapet above him, and he began to think
she was following him. When he went through a narrow court with trees in
tubs down the center and he saw her jump across the sky, from one gutter
to another, in order to get into that court, too, he knew she was
certainly following him. He had no idea why. He kept an eye out for her
as he went down the next two alleys, but he saw her only once, on an
arch over a doorway. When he turned into the cobbled court where the
Royal Wizard's house was, there was no sign of her. Abdullah shrugged
and went to the door of the house.

It was a handsome narrow house with diamond-paned windows and interwoven
magic signs painted on its old irregular walls. There were tall spires
of yellow flame burning in brass stands on either side of the front
door. Abdullah seized the knocker, which was a leering face with a ring
in its mouth, and boldly knocked.

The door was opened by a manservant with a long, dour face. "I'm afraid
the wizard is extremely busy, sir," he said. "He is receiving no clients
until further notice." And he started to shut the door.

"No wait, faithful footman and loveliest of lackeys!" Abdullah
protested. "What I have to say concerns no less than a threat to the
King's daughter!"

"The wizard knows all about that, sir," said the man, and went on
shutting the door.

Abdullah deftly put his foot in the space. "You must hear me, most
sapient servant," he began. "I come-"

Behind the manservant a young woman's voice said, "Just a moment,
Manfred. I know this is important." The door swung open again.

Abdullah gaped as the servant vanished from the doorway and reappeared
some way back in the hall inside. His place at the door was taken by an
extremely lovely young woman with dark curls and

131

a vivid face. Abdullah saw enough of her in one glance to realize that
in her foreign northern way, she was as beautiful as Flower-intheNight,
but after that he felt bound to look modestly away from her. She was
very obviously going to have a baby. Ladies in Zanzib did not show
themselves in this interesting condition. Abdullah scarcely knew where
to look.

"I'm the wizard's wife, Lettie Suliman," this young woman said. "What
did you come about?"

Abdullah bowed. It helped to keep his eyes on the doorstep. "O fruitful
moon of lovely Kingsbury," he said, "know that I am Abdullah, son of
Abdullah, carpet merchant from distant Zanzib, with news that your
husband will wish to hear. Tell him, O splendor of a sorcerous house,
that this morning I spoke with the mighty djinn Hasruel concerning the
King's most precious daughter."

Lettie Suliman was clearly not at all used to the manners of Zanzib.
"Good heavens!" she said. "I mean, how politel And you're speaking the
exact truth, aren't you? I think you ought to talk to Ben at once.
Please come in."

She backed away from the doorway to give Abdullah room to enter.
Abdullah, still with his eyes modestly lowered, stepped forward into the
house. As soon as he did, something landed on his back. Then it took off
again with a heavy rip of claws and went sailing over his head to land
with a thump on Lettie's prominent front. A noise like a metal pulley
filled the air.

"Midnight!" Abdullah said crossly, staggering forward.

"Sophie!" screamed Lettie, staggering backward with the cat in her arms.
"Oh, Sophie, I've been worried sickl Manfred, get Ben at once. I don't
care what he's doing. This is urgentl"

132

In which

strange things

befall Midnight and

Whippersnapper

There was a great deal of confusion and rushing about. Two other
servants appeared, followed by first one and then a second young man in
long blue gowns, who seemed to be the wizard's apprentices. All these
people ran about, while Lettie ran back and forth in the hall with
Midnight in her arms, screaming orders. In the midst of it all, Abdullah
found Manfred showing him to a seat and solemnly giving him a glass of
wine. Since this seemed what he was expected to do, Abdullah sat down
and sipped the wine, rather bemused by the confusion.

Just as he was thinking it was going to go on forever, it all stopped. A
tall, commanding man in a black robe had appeared from somewhere. "What
on earth is going on?" said this man.

Since this summed up Abdullah's feelings entirely, he found himself
rather taking to this man. He had faded red hair and a tired, craggy
face. The black robe made Abdullah certain that this must be Wizard
Suliman; he would have looked like a wizard whatever he was wearing.
Abdullah rose from his chair and bowed. The wizard shot him a look of
craggy mystification and turned to Lettie.

133

"He's from Zanzib, Ben," said Lettie, "and he knows something about the
threat to the Princess. And he brought Sophie with him. She's a catl
Look! Ben, you've got to change her back at once\"

Lettie was one of those ladies who look lovelier the more distraught
they get. Abdullah was not surprised when Wizard Suliman took her gently
by the elbows and said, "Yes, of course, my love," and followed that by
kissing her forehead. It made Abdullah wonder miserably whether he would
ever have a chance to kiss Flowerin-the-Night like that, or to add, as
the wizard added, "Calm down-remember the baby." After this the wizard
said over his shoulder, "And can't someone shut the front door? Half
Kingsbury must know what's happened by now."

This endeared the wizard to Abdullah more than ever. The one thing that
had prevented him getting up and shutting the door was a fear that it
might be the custom here to leave your front door open in a crisis. He
bowed again and found the wizard swinging around to face him.

"And what has happened, young man?" asked the wizard. "How did you know
this cat was my wife's sister?"

Abdullah was somewhat taken aback by this question. He explained-several
times-that he had had no idea Midnight was human, let alone that she was
the Royal Wizard's sister-in-law, but he was not at all sure that anyone
listened. They all seemed so glad to see Midnight that they simply
assumed that Abdullah had brought her to the house out of pure
friendship. Far from demanding a large fee, Wizard Suliman seemed to
think that he owed Abdullah something, and when Abdullah protested that
this was not so, he said, "Well, come along and see her changed back,
anyway."

He said this in such a friendly and trusting way that Abdullah warmed to
him even more and let himself be swept along with everyone else to a
large room that seemed to be at the back of the house-except that
Abdullah had a feeling that it was somehow somewhere else entirely. The
floor and the walls sloped in a way that was not usual.

Abdullah had never seen any working wizardry before. He

134

gazed around with interest, for the room was crowded with intricate
magical devices. Nearest to him were filigree shapes with delicate
smokes wreathing about them. Beside that, large and peculiar candles
stood inside complicated signs, and beyond those were strange images
made of wet clay. Farther off he saw a fountain of five jets that fell
in odd geometric patterns and that half hid many much odder things,
crowded into the distance beyond.

"No room to work in here," Wizard Suliman said, sweeping through. "These
should hold by themselves while we set up in the next room. Hurry, all
of you."

Everyone whirled on into a smaller room beyond, which was empty apart
from some round mirrors hanging on the walls. Here Lettie set Midnight
carefully down on a blue-green stone in the middle, where she sat
seriously washing the inside of her front legs and looking totally
unconcerned, while everyone else, including Lettie and the servants,
worked away feverishly at building a sort of tent around her out of long
silver rods.

Abdullah stood prudently against the wall, watching. By now he was
rather regretting assuring the wizard that he owed him nothing. He
should have taken the opportunity to ask how to reach the castle in the
sky. But he reckoned that since nobody seemed to have listened to him
then, it was better to wait until things calmed down. Meanwhile, the
silver rods grew into a pattern of skeletal silver stars, and Abdullah
watched the bustle, somewhat confused at the way the scene was reflected
in all the mirrors, small and busy and bulging. The mirrors bent as
oddly as the walls and floors did.

At length Wizard Suliman clapped his large, bony hands. "Right," he
said. "Lettie can help me here. The rest of you get to the other room
and make sure the wards for the Princess stay in place."

The apprentices and the servants hurried away. Wizard Suliman spread his
arms. Abdullah intended to watch closely and remember clearly what
happened. But somehow, as soon as the magic working started, he was not
at all sure what was going on. He knew

135

things were happening, but they did not seem to happen. It was like
listening to music when you were tone-deaf. Every so often Wizard
Suliman uttered a deep, strange word that blurred the room and the
inside of Abdullah's head with it, which made it even harder to see what
was happening. But most of Abdullah's difficulty came from the mirrors
on the walls. They kept showing small, round pictures that looked like
reflections but were not-or not quite. Every time one of the mirrors
caught Abdullah's eye, it showed the framework of rods glowing with
silvery light in a new pattern-a star, a triangle, a hexagon, or some
other symbol angular and secret-while the real rods in front of him did
not glow at all. Once or twice a mirror showed Wizard Suliman with his
arms spread when, in the room, his arms were by his sides. Several times
a mirror showed Lettie standing still with her hands clasped, looking
vividly nervous. But each time Abdullah looked at the real Lettie, she
was moving about, making strange gestures and perfectly calm. Midnight
never appeared in the mirrors at all. Her small black shape in the
middle of the rods was oddly hard to see in reality, too.

Then all the rods suddenly glowed misty silver and the space inside
filled with a haze. The wizard spoke a final deep word and stepped back.

"Confound it!" said someone inside the rods. "I can't smell you at all
now!"

This made the wizard grin and Lettie laugh outright. Abdullah looked for
the person who was amusing them so and was forced to look away almost at
once. The young woman crouching inside the framework, understandably
enough, had no clothes on at all. The glimpse he caught, told him that
the young woman was as fair as Lettie was dark but otherwise quite like
her. Lettie ran to the side of the room and came back with a wizardly
green gown. When Abdullah dared to look, the young woman was wearing the
gown like a dressing gown, and Lettie was trying to hug her and help her
out of the framework at the same time.

"Oh, Sophiel What happened?" she kept saying.

"One moment," gasped Sophie. She seemed to have difficulty

136

balancing on two feet at first, but she hugged Lettie and then staggered
to the wizard and hugged him, too. "It feels so odd without a tail!" she
said. "But thanks awfully, Ben." Then she advanced on Abdullah, walking
rather more easily now. Abdullah backed against the wall, afraid she was
going to hug him, too, but all Sophie said was "You must have wondered
why I was following you. The truth is, I always get lost in Kingsbury."

"I am happy to have been of service, most charming of changelings,"
Abdullah said rather stiffly. He was not sure he was going to get on
with Sophie any more than he had got on with Midnight. She struck him as
uncomfortably strong-minded for a young woman-almost as bad as his
father's first wife's sister, Fatima.

Lettie was still demanding to know what had turned Sophie into a cat,
and Wizard Suliman was saying anxiously, "Sophie, does this mean that
Howl's wandering about as an animal, too?"

"No, no," Sophie said, and suddenly looked desperately anxious. "I've no
idea where Howl is. He was the one who turned me into a cat, you see."

"What? Your own husband turned you into a cat!" Lettie exclaimed. "Is
this another of your quarrels, then?"

"Yes, but it was all perfectly reasonable," said Sophie. "It was when
someone stole the moving castle, you see. We only had about half a day's
notice, and that was only because Howl happened to be working on a
divining spell for the King. It showed something very powerful stealing
the castle and then stealing Princess Valeria. Howl said he'd warn the
King at once. Did he?"

"He certainly did," said Wizard Suliman. "The Princess is guarded every
second. I invoked demons and set up wards in the next room. Whatever
being is threatening her has no chance of getting through."

"Thank goodness!" said Sophie. "That's a weight off my mind. It's a
djinn, did you know?"

"Even a djinn couldn't get through," said Wizard Suliman. "But what did
Howl do?"

"He swore," said Sophie. "In Welsh. Then he sent Michael and

137

the new apprentice away. He wanted to send me away, too. But I said if
he and Calcifer were staying, then so was I, and couldn't he put a spell
on me that would simply make the djinn not notice I was there? And we
argued about that-"

Lettie chuckled. "Now, why doesn't that surprise me?" she said.

Sophie's face became somewhat pink, and she put her head up defiantly.
"Well, Howl would keep saying I'd be safest right out of the way in
Wales with his sister, and he knows I don't get on with her, and I kept
saying I'd be more use if I could be in the castle without the thief
noticing. Anyway"-she put her face in her hands-"I'm afraid we were
still arguing when the djinn came. There was an enormous noise, and
everything went dark and confused. I remember Howl shouting the words of
the cat spell-he had to gabble them in a hurry-and then yelling to
Calcifer-"

"Calcifer's their fire demon," Lettie explained politely to Abdullah.
"-yelling to Calcifer to get out and save himself because the djinn was
too strong for either of them," Sophie went on. "Then the castle came
off from on top of me like the lid off a cheese dish. Next thing I knew,
I was a cat in the mountains north of Kingsbury."

Lettie and the Royal Wizard exchanged puzzled looks over Sophie's bent
head. "Why those mountains?" Wizard Suliman wondered. "The castle wasn't
anywhere near there."

"No, it was in four places at once," Sophie said. "I think I was thrown
somewhere midway between. It could have been worse. There were plenty of
mice and birds to eat."

Lettie's lovely face twisted in disgust. "Sophie!" she exclaimed. "Mice!"

"Why not? That's what cats eat," Sophie said, lifting her head defiantly
again. "Mice are delicious. But I'm not so fond of birds. The feathers
choke you. But"-she gulped and put her head in her hands again-"but it
happened at a rather bad time for Mor

138

gan was born about a week after that, and of course, he was a kitten-"

This caused Lettie, if possible, even more consternation than the
thought of her sister eating mice. She burst into tears and flung her
arms around Sophie. "Oh, Sophie! What did you do!"

"What cats always do, of course," Sophie said. "Fed him and washed him a
lot. Don't worry, Lettie. I left him with Abdullah's friend the soldier.
That man would kill anyone who harmed his kitten. But," she said to
Wizard Suliman, "I think I ought to fetch Morgan now so that you can
turn him back, too."

Wizard Suliman was looking almost as distraught as Lettie. "I wish I'd
known!" he said. "If he was born a cat as part of the same spell, he may
be changed back already. We'd better find out." He strode to one of the
round mirrors and made circular gestures with both hands.

The mirroi-all the mirrors-at once seemed to be reflecting the room at
the inn, each from a different viewpoint, as if they were hanging on the
wall there. Abdullah stared from one to the other and was as alarmed at
what he saw as the other three were. The magic carpet hid, for some
reason, been unrolled upon the floor. On it lay a plump, naked pink
baby. Young as this baby was, Abdullah could see he had a personality as
strong as Sophie's. And he was asserting that personality. His legs and
arms were punching the air, his face was contorted with fury, and his
mouth was a square, angry hole. Though the pictures in the mirrors were
silent, it was clear that Morgan was being very noisy indeed.

"Who is that man?" said Wizard Suliman. "I've seen him before."

"A Strangian soldier, worker of wonders," Abdullah said helplessly.

"Then he must remind me of someone I know," said the wizard.

The soldier was standing beside the screaming baby, looking horrified
and useless. Perhaps he was hoping the genie would do something. At any
rate, he had the genie bottle in one hand. But the
139

genie was hanging out of the bottle in several spouts of distracted blue
smoke, each spout a face with its hand over its ears, as helpless as the
soldier.

"Oh, the poor darling child!" said Lettie.

"The poor blessed soldier, you mean," said Sophie. "Morgan's furious.
He's never been anything but a kitten, and kittens can do so much more
than babies can. He's angry because he can't walk. Ben, do you think you
can-"

The rest of Sophie's question was drowned in a noise like a giant piece
of silk tearing. The room shook. Wizard Suliman exclaimed something and
made for the door-and then had to dodge hastily. A whole crowd of
screaming, wailing somethings swept through the wall beside the door,
swooped across the room, and vanished through the opposite wall. They
were going too fast to be seen clearly, but none of them seemed to be
human. Abdullah had a blurred glimpse of multiple clawed legs, of
something streaming along on no legs at all, of beings with one wild eye
and of others with many eyes in clusters. He saw fanged heads, flowing
tongues, flaming tails. One, moving swiftest of all, was a rolling ball
of mud.

Then they were gone. The door was thrown open by an agitated apprentice.
"Sir, sir! The wards are down! We couldn't hold-"

Wizard Suliman seized the young man's arm and hurried him back into the
next room, calling over his shoulder, "I'll be back when I can! The
Princess is in danger!"

Abdullah looked to see what was happening to the soldier and the baby,
but the round mirrors now showed nothing but his own anxious face, and
Sophie's and Lettie's, all staring upward into them.

"Drat!" said Sophie. "Lettie, can you work them?"

"No. They're Ben's special thing," said Lettie.

Abdullah thought of the carpet unrolled and the genie bottle in the
soldier's hand. "Then in that case, O pair of twinned pearls," he said,
"most lovely ladies, I will, with your permission, hasten

140

back to the inn before too many complaints are made about the noise."

Sophie and Lettie replied in chorus that they were coming, too. Abdullah
could scarcely blame them, but he came precious near it in the next few
minutes. Lettie, it seemed, was not up to hurrying through the streets
in her interesting condition. As the three of them rushed through the
jumble and chaos of broken spells in the next room, Wizard Suliman
spared a second from frantically setting up new things in the ruins to
order Manfred to get the carriage out. While Manfred raced off to do
that, Lettie took Sophie upstairs to get her some proper clothes.

Abdullah was left pacing the hall. To everyone's credit, he only waited
there less than five minutes, but during that time he tried the front
door at least ten times, only to find there was a spell holding it shut.
He thought he would go mad. It seemed like a century before Sophie and
Lettie came downstairs, both in elegant going-out clothes, and Manfred
opened the front door to show a small open carriage drawn by a nice bay
gelding, waiting outside on the cobbles. Abdullah wanted to take a
flying leap into that carriage and whip up that gelding. But of course,
that was not polite. He had to wait while Manfred helped the ladies up
into it and then climbed to the driver's seat. The carriage set off
smartly clattering across the cobbles while Abdullah was still squeezing
himself into the seat beside Sophie, but even that was not quick enough
for him. He could hardly bear to think of what the soldier might be doing.

"I hope Ben can get some wards back on the Princess soon," Lettie said
anxiously as they rolled spankingly across an open square.

The words were scarcely out of her mouth when there came a hurried
volley of explosions, like very mismanaged fireworks. A bell began to
ring somewhere, dismal and hasty-gong-gong-gong.

"What's all that?" asked Sophie, and then answered her own question by
pointing and crying out, "Oh, confound it! Look, look, look!"

Abdullah craned around to where she pointed. He was in time

141

to see a black spread of wings blotting out the stars above the nearest
domes and towers. Below, from the tops of several towers, came little
flashes and a number of bangs as the soldiers there fired at those
wings. Abdullah could have told them that that kind of thing was no use
at all against a djinn. The wings wheeled imperturbably and circled
upward and then vanished into the dark blue of the night sky.

"Your friend the djinn," Sophie said. "I think we distracted Ben at a
crucial moment."

"The djinn intended that you should, O former feline," Abdullah said.
"If you recollect, he remarked as he was leaving that he expected one of
us to help him steal the Princess."

Other bells around the city had joined in ringing the alarm now. People
ran into the streets and stared upward. The carriage jingled on through
an increasing clamor and was forced to go more and more slowly as more
people gathered in the streets. Everyone seemed to know exactly what had
happened. "The Princess is gone!" Abdullah heard. "A devil has stolen
Princess Valeria!" Most people seemed awed and frightened, but one or
two were saying, "That Royal Wizard ought to be hanged! What's he paid
for?"

"Oh, dear!" said Lettie. "The King won't believe for a moment how hard
Ben's been working to stop this from happening!"

"Don't worry," said Sophie. "As soon as we've fetched Morgan, I'll go
and tell the King. I'm good at telling the King things."

Abdullah believed her. He sat and jittered with impatience.

After what seemed another century but was probably only five minutes,
the carriage pushed its way into the crowded innyard. It was full of
people all staring upward. "Saw its wings," he heard a man saying. "It
was a monstrous bird with the Princess clutched in its talons."
The carriage stopped. Abdullah could give way to his impatience at last.
He sprang down, shouting, "Clear the way, clear the way, O people! Here
are two witches on important business!" By repeated shouting and
pushing, he managed to get Sophie and Let

142

tie to the inn door and shove them inside. Lettie was very embarrassed.

"I wish you wouldn't say that!" she said. "Ben doesn't like people to
know I'm a witch."

"He will have no time to think of it just now," Abdullah said. He pushed
the two of them past the staring landlord and to the stairs. "Here are
the witches I spoke to you about, most heavenly host," he told the man.
"They are anxious about their cats." He leaped up the stairs. He
overtook Lettie, then Sophie, and raced on up the next flight. He flung
open the door of the room. "Do nothing rash-" he began, and then stopped
as he realized there was complete silence inside.

The room was empty.

143

In which

Abdullah

at last reaches

the castle in the air

There was a cushion in a basket among the remains of supper on the
table. There was a rumpled dent in one of the beds and a cloud of
tobacco smoke above it, as if the soldier had been lying there smoking
until very recently. The window was closed. Abdullah rushed toward it,
intending to fling it open and look out-for no real reason except that
it was all he could think of-and found himself tripping over a saucer
full of cream. The saucer overturned, slewing thick yellow-white cream
in a long streak across the magic carpet.

Abdullah stood staring down at it. At least the carpet was still there.
What did that mean? There was no sign of the soldier and certainly no
sign of a noisy baby anywhere in the room. Nor, he realized, turning his
eyes rapidly toward every place he could think of, was there any sign of
the genie bottle.

"Oh, no!" Sophie said, arriving at the door. "Where is he? He can't have
gone far if the carpet's still here."

Abdullah wished he could be so certain of that. "Without desiring to
alarm you, mother of a most mobile baby," he said, "I have to observe
that the genie appears to be missing also."

144

A small vague frown creased the skin of Sophie's forehead. "What genie?"

While Abdullah was remembering that as Midnight, Sophie had always
seemed quite unaware that the genie existed, Lettie arrived in the room,
too, panting, with one hand pressed to her side. "What's the matter?"
she gasped.

"They're not here," said Sophie. "I suppose the soldier must have taken
Morgan to the landlady. She must know about babies."

With a feeling of grasping at straws, Abdullah said, "I will go and
see." It was always just possible that Sophie was right, he thought as
he sped down the first flight of stairs. It was what most men would do
faced with a screaming baby suddenly-always supposing that man did not
have a genie bottle in his hand.

The lower flight of stairs was full of people coming up, men wearing
tramping boots and some kind of uniform. The landlord was leading them
upward, saying, "On the second floor, gentlemen. Your description fits
the Strangian if he had cut off his pigtail, and the younger fellow is
obviously the accomplice you speak of."

Abdullah turned and ran back upstairs on tiptoe, two stairs at a time.

"There is general disaster, most bewitching pair of women!" he gasped to
Sophie and Lettie. "The landlord-a perfidious publican-is bringing
constables to arrest myself and the soldier. Now what can we do?"

It was time for a strong-minded woman to take charge. Abdullah was quite
glad that Sophie was one. She acted at once. She shut the door and shot
its bolt. "Lend me your handkerchief," she said to Lettie, and when
Lettie passed it over, Sophie knelt and mopped the cream off the magic
carpet with it. "You come over here," she told Abdullah. "Get on this
carpet with me, and tell it to take us to wherever Morgan is. You stay
here, Lettie, and hold the constables up. I don't think the carpet would
carry you."

"Fine," said Lettie. "I want to get back to Ben before the King starts
blaming him, anyway. But I'll give that landlord a piece of my mind
first. It'll be good practice for the King." As strong-minded as

145

her sister, she squared her shoulders and stuck out her elbows in a way
that promised a bad time for the landlord and the constables as well.

Abdullah was glad about Lettie, too. He crouched on the carpet and
snored gently. The carpet quivered. It was a reluctant quiver. "O
fabulous fabric, carbuncle and chrysolite among carpets," Abdullah said,
"this miserable clumsy churl apologizes profoundly for spilling cream
upon your priceless surface-"

Heavy knocking came at the door. "Open, in the King's name!" bellowed
someone outside.

There was no time to flatter the carpet any further. "Carpet, I implore
you," Abdullah whispered, "transport myself and this lady to the place
where the soldier has taken the baby."

The carpet shook itself irritably, but it obeyed. It shot forward in its
usual way, straight through the closed window. Abdullah was alert enough
this time actually to see the glass and the dark frame of the window for
an instant, like the surface of water, as they passed through it and
then soared above the silver globes that lit the street. But he doubted
if Sophie was. She clutched Abdullah's arm with both hands, and he
rather thought her eyes were shut.

"I hate heights!" she said. "It had better not be far."

"This excellent carpet will carry us with all possible speed, worshipful
witch," Abdullah said, trying to reassure her and the carpet together.
He was not sure it worked with either of them. Sophie continued to cling
painfully to his arm, uttering little, short gasps of panic, while the
carpet, having made one brisk, giddy sweep just above the towers and
lights of Kingsbury, swung dizzily around what seemed to be the domes of
the palace and began on another circuit of the city.

"What is it doing?" gasped Sophie. Evidently her eyes were not quite shut.

"Peace, most serene sorceress," Abdullah reassured her. "It does but
circle to gain height as birds do." Privately he was sure the carpet had
lost the trail. But as the lights and domes of Kingsbury went by
underneath for the third time, he saw he had accidentally guessed right.
They were now several hundred feet higher. On the

146

fourth circuit, which was wider than the third-though quite as
giddy-Kingsbury was a little jeweled cluster of lights far, far below.

Sophie's head bobbed as she took a downward peep. Her grip on Abdullah
became even tighter, if that was possible. "Oh, goodness and awfulness!"
she said. "We're still going up! I do believe that wretched soldier has
taken Morgan after the djinn!"

They were now so high that Abdullah feared she was right. "He no doubt
wished to rescue the Princess," he said, "in hope of a large reward."

"He had no business to take my baby along, too!" Sophie declared. "Just
wait till I see him! But how did he do it without the carpet?"

"He must have ordered the genie to follow the djinn, O moon of
motherhood," Abdullah explained.

To that Sophie said again, "What genie?"

"I assure you, sharpest of sorcerous minds, that I owned a genie as well
as this carpet, though you never appeared to see it," Abdullah said.

"Then I take your word for it," said Sophie. "Keep talking. Talk-or I
shall look down, and if I look down, I know I'll fall off!"

Since she was still clinging mightily to Abdullah's arm, he knew that if
she fell, then so would he. Kingsbury was now a bright, hazy dot,
appearing on this side and then on that, as the carpet continued to
spiral upward. The rest of Ingary was laid out around it like a huge
dark blue dish. The thought of plunging all that way down made Abdullah
almost as frightened as Sophie. He began hastily to tell her all his
adventures, how he had met Flower-in-the-Night, how the Sultan had put
him in prison, how the genie had been fished out of the oasis pool by
Kabul Aqba's men-who were really angels-and how hard it was to make a
wish that the genie's malice did not spoil.
By this time he could see the desert as a pale sea south of Ingary,
though they were so high that it was quite hard to make out anything
below. "I see now that the soldier agreed I had won that bet in order to
convince me of his honesty," Abdullah said ruefully.

147

"I think he always meant to steal the genie and probably the carpet, too."

Sophie was interested. Her grip on his arm relaxed slightly, to
Abdullah's great relief. "You can't blame that genie for hating
everyone," she said. "Think how you felt shut in that dungeon."

"But the soldier-" said Abdullah.

"Is another matter!" Sophie declared. "Just wait till I get my hands on
him! I can't abide people who go soft over animals and then cheat every
human they come across! But to get back to this genie you say you had,
it looks as if the djinn meant you to have it. Do you think it was part
of his scheme to have disappointed lovers help him get the better of his
brother?"

"I believe so," said Abdullah.

"Then, when we get to the cloud castle, if that's where we're going,"
Sophie said, "we might be able to count on other disappointed lovers
arriving to help."

"Maybe," Abdullah said cautiously. "But I recollect, most curious of
cats, that you were fleeing to the bushes while the djinn spoke, and the
djinn expected only myself."

Nevertheless, he looked upward. It was growing chilly now, and the stars
seemed uncomfortably close. There was a sort of silveriness to the dark
blue of the sky which suggested moonlight trying to break through from
somewhere. It was very beautiful. Abdullah's heart swelled with the
thought that he might be, at last, on the way to rescue
Flower-in-the-Night.

Unfortunately Sophie looked up, too. Her grip on his arm tightened.
"Talk," she said. "I'm terrified."

"Then you must talk, too, courageous caster of spells," said Abdullah.
"Close your eyes and tell me of the Prince of Ochinstan, to whom
Flower-in-the-Night was betrothed."

"I don't think she could have been," Sophie said, almost babbling. She
was truly terrified. "The King's son is only a baby. Of course, there's
the King's brother, Prince Justin, but he was supposed to be marrying
Princess Beatrice of Strangia-except that she refused to hear of it and
ran away. Do you think the djinn's got her? I think your Sultan was just
after some of the weapons our wizards

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have been making here-and he wouldn't have got them. They don't let the
mercenaries take them south when they go. In fact, Howl says they
shouldn't even send mercenaries. Howl . . ." Her voice faded. Her hands
on Abdullah's arm shook. "Talk!" she croaked.
It was getting hard to breathe. "I barely can, strong-handed
Sultana,"Abdullah gasped. "I think the air is thin here. Can you not
make some witchly weaving that might help us to breathe?"

"Probably not. You keep calling me a witch, but I'm really quite new to
it," Sophie protested. "You saw. When I was a cat, all I could do was
get larger." But she let go of Abdullah for a moment in order to make
short, jerky gestures overhead. "Really, air!" she said. "This is
disgraceful! You are going to have to let us breathe a bit better than
this or we won't last out. Gather around and let us breathe you!" She
clutched Abdullah again. "Is that any better?"

There really did seem to be more air now, though it was colder than
ever. Abdullah was surprised, because Sophie's method of casting a spell
struck him as most unwitchlike-in fact, it was not much different from
his own way of persuading the carpet to move-but he had to admit that it
worked. "Yes. Many thanks, speaker of spells."

"Talk!" said Sophie.

They were so high that the world below was out of sight. Abdullah had no
trouble understanding Sophie's terror. The carpet was sailing through
dark emptiness, up and up, and Abdullah knew that if he had been alone,
he might have been screaming. "You talk, mighty mistress of magics," he
quavered. "Tell me of this Wizard Howl of yours."

Sophie's teeth chattered, but she said proudly, "He's the best wizard in
Ingary or anywhere else. If he'd only had time, he would have defeated
that djinn. And he's sly and selfish and vain as a peacock and cowardly,
and you can't pin him down to anything."

"Indeed?" asked Abdullah. "Strange that you should speak so proudly such
a list of vices, most loving of ladies."

149

"What do you mean, vices?" Sophie asked angrily. "I was just describing
Howl. He comes from another world entirely, you know, called Wales, and
I refuse to believe he's dead-ooh!"

She ended in a moan as the carpet plunged upward into what had seemed to
be a gauzy veil of cloud. Inside the cloud the gauziness proved to be
flakes of ice, which peppered them in slivers and chunks and rounds like
a hailstorm. They were both gasping as the carpet burst upward out of
it. Then they both gasped again, in wonder.

They were in a new country, which was bathed in moonlight- moonlight
that had the golden tinge of a harvest moon to it. But when Abdullah
spared an instant to look for the moon, he could not see if anywhere.
The light seemed to come from the silver-blue sky itself, studded with
great limpid golden stars. But he could only spare that one glance. The
carpet had come out beside a hazy, transparent sea and was laboring
alongside soft rollers breaking on cloudy rocks. Regardless of the fact
that they could see through each wave as if it were gold-green silk, its
water was wet and threatened to overwhelm the carpet. The air was warm.
And the carpet, not to speak of their own clothes and hair, was loaded
with piles of melting ice. Sophie and Abdullah, for the first few
minutes, were entirely occupied in sweeping ice over the edges of the
carpet into the translucent ocean, where it sank through into the sky
beneath and vanished.
When the carpet bobbed up lighter and they had a chance to look around,
they gasped again. For here were the islands and promontories and bays
of dim gold that Abdullah had seen in the sunset, spreading out from
beside them into the far silver distance, where they lay hushed and
still and enchanted like a vista of Paradise itself. The pellucid waves
broke on the cloud shore with only the faintest of whispers, which
seemed to add to the silence.

It seemed wrong to speak in such a place. Sophie nudged Abdullah and
pointed. There, on the nearest cloudy headland, stood a castle, a mass
of proud, soaring towers with dim silvery windows showing in them. It
was made of cloud. As they looked, several of the taller towers streamed
sideways and shredded out of existence,

150

while others shrank and broadened. Under their eyes, it grew like a blot
into a massive frowning fortress and then began to change again. But it
was still there and still a castle, and it seemed to be the place where
the carpet was taking them.

The carpet was going at a swift walking pace, but gently, keeping to the
shoreline as if it were not at all anxious to be seen. There were cloudy
bushes beyond the waves, tinged red and silver like the aftermath of
sunset. The carpet lurked in the cover of these, just as it had lurked
behind trees in Kingsbury Plain, while it circled the bay to come to the
promontory.

As it went, there were new vistas of golden seas, where far-off smoky
shapes moved that could have been ships or may have been cloudy
creatures on business of their own. Still in utter, whispering silence,
the carpet crept out onto the headland, where there were no more bushes.
Here it slunk close to the cloudy ground, much as it had followed the
shapes of the roofs in Kingsbury. Abdullah did not blame it. Ahead of
them, the castle was changing again, stretching out until it had become
a mighty pavilion. As the carpet entered thelong avenue leading to its
gates, domes were rising and bulging, and it had protruded a dim gold
minaret as if it were watching them coming.

The avenue was lined with cloudy shapes, which also seemed to watch them
coming. The shapes grew out of the cloud-ground in the way that one
often sees a tuft of cloud curl upward out of the main mass. But unlike
the castle, they did not change shape. Each one ramped proudly upward,
somewhat in the shape of a sea horse or the knights in a game of chess,
except that their faces were blanker and flatter than the faces of
horses and surrounded by curling tendrils that were neither cloud nor hair.

Sophie looked at each one as they passed it with increasing disfavor. "I
don't think much of his taste in statues," she said.

"Oh, hush, most outspoken lady!" Abdullah whispered. "These are no
statues, but the two hundred attendant angels spoken of by the djinn!"

The sound of their voices attracted the attention of the nearest

151

cloudy shape. It stirred mistily, opened a pair of immense moonstone
eyes, and bent to survey the carpet as it slunk past it.
"Don't you dare try to stop us!" Sophie said to it. "We're only coming
to get my baby."

The huge eyes blinked. Evidently the angel was not used to being spoken
to so sharply. Cloudy white wings began to spread from its sides.

Hastily Abdullah stood up on the carpet and bowed. "Greetings, most
noble messenger of the heavens," he said. "What the lady says so bluntly
is the truth. Pray forgive her. She is from the north. But she, like me,
comes in peace. The djinns are minding her child, and we do but come to
collect him and render them our most humble and devout thanks."

This seemed to placate the angel. Its wings melted back into its cloudy
sides, and though its strange head turned to watch them as the carpet
slunk on, it did not try to stop them. But by now the angel across the
way had its eyes open, too, and the two next were turned to stare as
well. Abdullah did not dare sit down again. He braced his feet for
balance and bowed to each pair of angels as they came to it. This was
not easy to do. The carpet knew how dangerous the angels could be as
well as Abdullah did, and it was moving faster and faster.

Even Sophie realized that a little politeness would help. She nodded to
each angel as they whipped past. "Evening," she said. "Lovely sunset
today. Evening." She had not time for more because the carpet was fairly
scuttling up the last stretch of avenue. When it reached the castle
gates, which were shut, it dived through like a rat up a drainpipe.
Abdullah and Sophie were suffused with foggy damp and then out into calm
goldish light. They found they were in a garden. Here the carpet fell to
the floor, limp as a dishrag, where it stayed. It had little shivers
running through the length of it, as a carpet might that was shaking
with fear, or panting with effort, or both.

Since the ground in the garden was solid and did not seem to be made of
cloud, Sophie and Abdullah cautiously stepped onto it.

152

It was firm turf, growing silver-green grass. In the distance, among
formal hedges, a marble fountain played. Sophie looked at this, and
looked around, and began to frown.

Abdullah stooped and   considerately rolled the carpet up, patting it and
speaking soothingly.   "Bravely done, most daring of damasks," he told it.
"There, there. Never   fear. I will not allow any djinn, however mighty,
to harm so much as a   thread of your treasured fabric or a fringe from
your border."

"You sound like that soldier making a fuss of Morgan when he was
Whippersnapper," Sophie said. "The castle's over there."

They set off toward it, Sophie staring alertly around and uttering one
or two snorts, Abdullah with the carpet tenderly over his shoulder. He
patted it from time to time and felt the quivers die out of it as they
went. They walked for some time, for the garden, although it was not
made of cloud, changed and enlarged around them. The hedges became
artistic banks of pale pink flowers, and the fountain, which they could
see clearly in the distance all the time, now appeared to be crystal or
possibly chrysolite. A few steps more, and everything was in jeweled
pots, and frondy, with creepers trained up lacquered pillars. Sophie's
snorts became louder. The fountain, as far as they could tell, was of
silver inset with sapphires.

"That djinn has taken liberties with a person's castle," Sophie said.
"Unless I'm entirely turned around, this used to be our bathroom."

Abdullah felt his face heat up. Sophie's bathroom or not, these were the
gardens out of his daydreams. Hasruel was mocking him, as he had mocked
Abdullah all along. When the fountain ahead turned to gold, glinting
wine dark with rubies, Abdullah became as annoyed as Sophie was.

"This is not the way a garden should be, even if we disregard the
confusing changes," he said angrily. "A garden should be
natural-seeming, with wild sections, including a large area of bluebells."

153

"Quite right," said Sophie. "Look at that fountain now! What a way to
treat a bathroom!"

The fountain was platinum, with emeralds. "Ridiculously flashy!" said
Abdullah. "When I design my garden-"

He was interrupted by a child's screaming. Both of them began to run.

154

Which is

rather full

of princesses

The child's screams rose. There was no doubt about the direction. As
Sophie and Abdullah ran that way, along a pillared cloister, Sophie
panted, "It's not Morgan; it's an older child!"

Abdullah thought she was right. He could hear words in the screams,
although he could not pick out what they were. And surely Morgan, even
howling his loudest, did not possess big enough lungs to make this kind
of noise. After getting almost too loud to bear, the screams became
grating sobs. Those sank to a steady, nagging "Wah-wah-wah!" and just as
that sound became truly intolerable, the child raised his or her voice
into hysterical screams again.

Sophie and Abdullah followed the noise to the end of the cloister and
out into a huge cloudy hall. There they stopped prudently behind a
pillar, and Sophie said, "Our main room. They must have blown it up like
a balloon!"

It was a very big hall. The screaming child was in the middle of it. She
was about four years old, with fair curls and wearing a white
nightdress. Her face was red, her mouth was a black square, and she was
alternately throwing herself down on the green porphyry

155

floor and standing up in order to throw herself down again. If ever
there was a child in a temper, it was this one. The echoes in the huge
hall yelled with it.
"It's Princess Valeria," Sophie murmured to Abdullah. "I thought it
might be."

Hovering over the howling princess was the huge dark shape of Hasruel.
Another djinn, much smaller and paler, was dodging about behind him. "Do
something!" this small djinn shouted. Only the fact that he had a voice
like silver trumpets made him audible. "She's driving me insane!"

Hasruel bent his great visage down to Valeria's screaming face. "Little
princess," he boomingly cooed, "stop crying. You will not be hurt."

Princess Valeria's answer was first to stand up and scream in Hasruel's
face, then to throw herself flat on the floor and roll and kick there.
"Wah-wah-iüaW" she vociferated. "I want home! I want my dad! I want my
nurse! I want my Uncle Ju-ustin! WaaaAH!"

"Little princess!" Hasruel cooed desperately.

"Don't just coo at her!" trumpeted the other djinn, who was clearly
Dalzel. "Work some magic! Sweet dreams, a spell of silence, a thousand
teddies, a ton of toffee! Anything!"

Hasruel turned around on his brother. His spread wings fanned agitated
gales, which flapped Valeria's hair and fluttered her nightdress. Sophie
and Abdullah had to cling to the pillar, or the force of the wind would
have blown them backward. But it made no difference to Princess
Valeria's tantrum. If anything, she screamed harder.

"I have tried all that, brother of mine!" Hasruel boomed.

Princess Valeria was now producing steady yells of "MOTHER! MOTHER!
THEY'RE BEING HORRID TO ME!"

Hasruel had to raise his voice to a perfect thunder. "Don't you know,"
he thundered, "that there is almost no magic that will stop a child in
this kind of temper?"

Dalzel clapped his pale hands across his ears-pointed ears, with a look
of fungus to them. "Well, I can't stand it!" he shrilled. "Put her to
sleep for a hundred years!"

156

Hasruel nodded. He turned back to Princess Valeria as she screamed and
thrashed upon the floor and spread his huge hand above her.

"Oh, dear!" said Sophie to Abdullah. "Do something!"

Since Abdullah had no idea what to do, and since he privately felt that
anything that stopped this horrible noise was a good idea, he did
nothing but edge uncertainly away from the pillar. And fortunately,
before Hasruel's magic had any noticeable effect on Princess Valeria, a
crowd of other people arrived. A loud, rather rasping voice cut through
the din.

"What is all this noise about?"

Both djinns started backward. The new arrivals were all female, and they
all looked extremely displeased; but when you had said that, you seemed
to have said the only two things they had in common. They stood in a
row, thirty or so of them, glaring accusingly at the two djinns, and
they were tall, short, stout, skinny, young and old, and of every color
the human race produces. Abdullah's eyes scudded along the row in
amazement. These must be the kidnapped princesses. That was the third
thing they had in common. They ranged from a tiny, frail, yellow
princess nearest to him, to an elderly, bent princess in the
mid-distance. And they were wearing every possible kind of clothing,
from a ball dress to tweeds.

The one who had called out was a solidly built middle-sized princess
standing slightly in front of the rest. She was wearing riding clothes.
Her face, besides being tanned and a little lined from outdoor activity,
was downright and sensible. She looked at the two djinns with utter
contempt. "Of all the ridiculous things!" she said. "Two great powerful
creatures like you, and you can't even stop a child crying!" And she
stepped up to Valeria and gave her a sharp slap on her thrashing behind.
"Shut up!"

It worked. Valeria had never been slapped in her life before. She rolled
over and sat up as if she had been shot. She stared at the downright
princess out of astonished, swollen eyes. "You hit me!"

"And I shall hit you again if you ask for it," said the downright princess.

157

"I shall scream," said Valeria. Her mouth went square again. She drew a
deep breath.

"No, you won't," said the downright princess. She picked Valeria up and
bundled her briskly into the arms of the two princesses behind her.
They, and several more, closed around Valeria in a huddle, making
soothing noises. From the midst of the huddle Valeria began screaming
again, but in a way that was not quite convinced. The downright princess
put her hands on her hips and turned contemptuously to the djinns.

"See?" she said. "All you need is a bit of firmness and some kindness,
but neither of you can be expected to understand that!"

Dalzel stepped toward her. Now that he was not so anguished, Abdullah
saw with surprise that Dalzel was beautiful. Apart from his fungoid ears
and taloned feet, he could have been a tall, angelic man. Golden curls
grew on his head, and his wings, though small and stunted-looking, were
golden, too. His very red mouth spread into a sweet smile. Altogether he
had an unearthly beauty that matched the strange cloud kingdom where he
lived. "Pray take the child away," he said, "and comfort her, O Princess
Beatrice, most excellent of my wives."

Downright Princess Beatrice was gesturing to the other princesses to
take Valeria away anyway, but she turned back sharply at this. "I've
told you, my lad," she said, "that none of us is any wife of yours. You
can call us that until you're blue in the face, but it won't make the
slightest difference. We are not your wives, and we never will be!"

"Exactly!" said most of the other princesses, in a firm but ragged
chorus. All of them, except for one, turned and swept away, taking the
sobbing Princess Valeria with them.

Sophie's face was lit with a delighted smile. She whispered, "It looks
as if the princesses are holding their own!"

Abdullah could not attend to her. The remaining princess was
Flower-in-the-Night. She was, as always, twice as beautiful as he
remembered her, looking very sweet and grave, with her great dark eyes
fixed seriously on Dalzel. She bowed politely. Abdullah's

158

senses sang at the sight of her. The cloudy pillars around him seemed to
sway in and out of existence. His heart pounded for joy. She was safe!
She was here! She was speaking to Dalzel.

"Forgive me, great djinn, if I remain to ask you a question," she said,
and her voice, even more than Abdullah remembered it, was melodious and
merry as a cool fountain.

To Abdullah's outrage, Dalzel reacted with what seemed to be horror.
"Oh, not you again!" he trumpeted, at which Hasruel, standing like a
dark column in the background, folded his arms and grinned maliciously.

"Yes, it is I, stern stealer of the daughters of sultans,"
Flower-in-the-Night said with her head bowed politely. "I am here merely
to ask what thing it was which started the child crying."

"How should I know?" Dalzel demanded. "You're always asking me questions
I can't answer! Why are you asking this one?"

"Because," Flower-in-the-Night answered, "O robber of the offspring of
rulers, the easiest way to calm the child is to deal with the cause of
her temper. This I know from my own childhood, for I was much given to
tantrums myself."

Surely not! Abdullah thought. She is lying for a purpose. No nature as
sweet as hers could ever have screamed for anything! Yet, as he was
outraged to see, Dalzel had no difficulty believing this.

"I'll bet you were!" Dalzel said.

"So what was the cause, bereaver of the brave?" Flower-in-the- Night
persisted. "Was it that she wishes to be back in her own palace or to
have her own particular doll, or was she simply frightened by your face
or-"

"I'm not sending her back if that's what you're aiming for," Dalzel
interrupted. "She's one of my wives now."

"Then I adjure you to find out what set her off screaming, raptor of the
righteous," Flower-in-the-Night said politely, "for without that
knowledge, even thirty princesses may not silence her." Indeed, Princess
Valeria's voice was rising again in the distance-"wah-wa/z-WAH!"-as she
spoke. "I speak from experience," Flower-in-the-Night observed. "I once
screamed night and day, for a

159

whole week, until my voice was gone, because I had grown out of my
favorite shoes."

Abdullah could see Flower-in-the-Night was telling the exact truth. He
tried to believe it, but try as he might, he just could not imagine his
lovely Flower-in-the-Night lying on the floor, kicking and screaming.

Dalzel again had no difficulty at all. He shuddered and turned angrily
to Hasruel. "Think, can't you? You brought her in. You must have noticed
what set her off."

Hasruel's great brown visage crumpled helplessly. "Brother mine, I
brought her in through the kitchen, for she was silent and white with
fear, and I thought maybe a sweetmeat would make her happy. But she
threw the sweetmeats at the cook's dog and remained silent. Her cries
only began, as you know, after I placed her among the other princesses,
and her screams only when you had her brought-"

Flower-in-the-Night raised a finger. "Ah!" she said.

Both djinns turned to her.

"I have it," she said. "It must be the cook's dog. It is often an animal
with children. She is used to being given all she wants, and she wants
the dog. Instruct your cook, king of kidnappers, to bring his animal to
our quarters, and the noise will cease, this I promise you."

"Very well," said Dalzel. "Do it!" he trumpeted at Hasruel.

Flower-in-the-Night bowed. "I thank you," she said, and turned and
walked gracefully away.

Sophie shook Abdullah's arm. "Let's follow her."

Abdullah did not move or reply. He stared after Flower-in-the- Night,
hardly able to believe he was really seeing her and equally unable to
believe that Dalzel did not fall at her feet and adore her. He had to
admit that this was a relief, but all the same-

"She's yours, is she?" Sophie said after one look at his face. Abdullah
nodded raptly. "Then you've got good taste," said Sophie. "Now come on
before they notice us!"

They edged behind the pillars in the direction Flower-in-the

160

Night had gone, keeping a wary eye on the huge hall as they went. In the
far distance Dalzel was moodily settling into an enormous throne at the
top of a flight of steps. When Hasruel returned from wherever the
kitchens were, Dalzel motioned him to kneel by the throne. Neither
looked their way. Sophie and Abdullah tiptoed to an archway where a
curtain was still swaying after Flower-in-the- Night had lifted it to go
through. They pushed the curtain aside and followed.

There was a large, well-lit room beyond, confusingly full of princesses.
From somewhere in the midst of them Princess Valeria sobbed, "I want to
go home now!"

"Hush, dear. You shall soon," someone answered.

Princess Beatrice's voice said, "You cried beautifully, Valeria. We're
all proud of you. But do stop crying now, there's a good girl."
"Can't!" sobbed Valeria. "I'm in the habit."

Sophie was staring around the room in growing outrage. "This is our
broom cupboard!" she said. "Really!"

Abdullah could not attend to her because Flower-in-the-Night was quite
near, softly calling, "Beatrice!"

Princess Beatrice heard and plunged out of the crowd. "Don't tell me,"
she said. "You did it. Good. Those djinns don't know what hits them when
you get after them, Flower. Then things are coming along beautifully if
that man agrees-" At this point she noticedSophie and Abdullah. "Where
did you two spring from?" she said.

Flower-in-the-Night whirled around. For a moment, when she saw Abdullah,
there was everything in her face he could have wished for: recognition,
delight, love, and pride. "I knew you'd come to rescue me!" said her big
dark eyes. Then, to his hurt and perplexity, it all went. Her face
became smooth and polite. She bowed courteously. "This is Prince
Abdullah from Zanzib," she said, "but I am not acquainted with the lady."

Flower-in-the-Night's behavior shook Abdullah from his daze. It must be
jealousy of Sophie, he thought. He, too, bowed and made haste to
explain. "This lady, O pearls in many a king's diadems, is wife to the
Royal Wizard Howl and comes here in search of her child."

161

Princess Beatrice turned her keen, weathered face to Sophie. "Oh, it's
your baby!" she said. "Howl with you, by any chance?"

"No," Sophie said miserably. "I hoped he'd be here."

"Not a trace of him, I'm afraid," said Princess Beatrice. "Pity. He'd be
useful even if he did help conquer my country. But we've got your baby.
Come this way."

Princess Beatrice led the way to the back of the room, past the group of
princesses trying to comfort Valeria. Since Flower-in-the- Night went
with her, Abdullah followed. To his increasing distress,
Flower-in-the-Night was now barely looking at him, only inclining her
head politely at each princess they passed. "The Princess of Alberia,"
she said formally. "The Princess of Farqtan. The Lady Heiress of
Thayack. This is the Princess of Peichstan, and beside her the Paragon
of Inhico. Beyond her, you see the Damoiselle of Dorimynde."

So if it was not jealousy, what was it? Abdullah wondered unhappily.

There was a wide bench at the back of the room with cushions on it. "My
oddments shelf!" Sophie growled. There were three princesses sitting on
the bench: the elderly princess Abdullah had noticed before, a lumpish
princess swaddled in a coat, and the tiny yellow princess perched in the
middle between them. The tiny princess's twiglike arms were wrapped
around the chubby pink body of Morgan.

"She is, as far as we can pronounce it, High Princess of Tsapfan,"
Flower-in-the-Night said formally. "On her right is the Princess of High
Norland. On her left the Jharine of Jham."

The tiny High Princess of Tsapfan looked like a child with a doll too
big for her, but in the most expert and experienced way, she was giving
Morgan a feed from a large baby bottle.

"He's fine with her," said Princess Beatrice. "Good thing for her.
Stopped her moping. She says she's had fourteen babies of her own."

The tiny princess glanced up with a shy smile. "Boyth, all," she said,
in a small, lisping voice.

Morgan's toes and hands were curling and uncurling. He

162

looked the picture of a satisfied baby. Sophie gazed for a moment.
"Where did she get that bottle?" she asked, as if she were afraid it
might be poisoned.

The tiny princess looked up again. She smiled and spared a minute finger
to point.

"Doesn't speak our language very well," Princess Beatrice explained.
"But that genie seemed to understand her."

The princess's twiglike finger was pointing to the floor by the bench,
where, below her small, dangling feet, stood a familiar blue- mauve
bottle. Abdullah dived for it. The lumpish Jharine of Jham dived for it
at the same moment, with an unexpectedly big, strong hand.

"Stop it!" the genie howled from inside as they tussled for it. "I'm not
coming out! Those djinns will kill me this time for sure!"

Abdullah took hold of the bottle in both hands and jerked. The jerk
caused the swaddling coat to fall away from the Jharine. Abdullah found
himself looking into wide blue eyes in a lined face inside a bush of
grizzled hair. The face wrinkled innocently as the old soldier gave him
a sheepish smile and let go of the genie bottle.

"You!" Abdullah said disgustedly.

"Loyal subject of mine," Princess Beatrice explained. "Turned up to
rescue me. Rather awkward, actually. We had to disguise him."

Sophie swept Abdullah and Princess Beatrice aside. "Let me get at him!"
she said.

163

In which

a soldier, a cook,

and a carpet seller

all state

their price

There was a brief time of noise so loud that it drowned Princess Valeria
completely. Most of it came from Sophie, who started with mild words
like thief and liar and worked up to screaming accusations at the
soldier of crimes Abdullah had never heard of and perhaps even the
soldier had never thought to commit. Listening, Abdullah thought the
metal pulley noise Sophie used to make as Midnight was actually nicer
than the noise she was making now. But some of the noise came from the
soldier, who had one knee up and both hands in front of his face and was
bellowing, louder and louder, "Midnight-I mean, madam! Let me explain,
Midnight-er-madam!"

To this Princess Beatrice kept adding raspingly, "No, let me explain!"

And various princesses added to the clamor by crying out, "Oh, please be
quiet or the djinns will hear!"

Abdullah tried to stop Sophie by shaking imploringly at her arm. But
probably nothing would have stopped her had not Morgan taken his mouth
from the bottle, gazed around in distress, and

164

started to cry, too. Sophie shut her mouth with a snap then and then
opened it to say, "All right, then. Explain."

In the comparative quiet the tiny princess hushed Morgan, and he went
back to feeding again.

"I didn't mean to bring the baby," said the soldier.

"What?" said Sophie. "You were going to desert my-"

"No, no," said the soldier. "I told the genie to put him where someone
would look after him and take me after the Princess of Ingary. I won't
deny I was after a reward." He appealed to Abdullah. "But you know what
that genie's like, don't you? Next thing I knew, we were both here."

Abdullah held the genie bottle up and looked at it. "He got his wish,"
the genie said sulkily from inside.

"And the infant was yelling blue murder," said Princess Beatrice.
"Dalzel sent Hasruel to find out what the noise was, and all I could
think of to say was that Princess Valeria was having a tantrum. Then, of
course, we had to get Valeria to scream. That was when Flower here
started to make plans."

She turned to Flower-in-the-Night, who was obviously thinking of
something else-and that something else had nothing to do with Abdullah,
Abdullah noted dismally. She was staring across the room. "Beatrice, I
think the cook is here with the dog," she said.

"Oh, good!" said Beatrice. "Come along, all of you." She strode toward
the middle of the room.

A man in a tall chef's hat was standing there. He was a seamed and hoary
fellow with only one eye. His dog was pressed close to his legs,
growling at any princess who came near. This probably expressed the way
the cook was feeling, too. He looked thoroughly suspicious of everything.

"Jamal!" shouted Abdullah. Then he held the genie bottle up and looked
at it again.

"Well, it was the nearest palace that wasn't Zanzib," the genie protested.
Abdullah was so delighted to see his old friend safe that he did not
argue with the genie. He barged past ten princesses, entirely forgetting
his manners, and seized Jamal by the hand. "My friend!"

165

Jamal's one eye stared. A tear came out of it as he wrung Abdullah's
hand hard in return. "You are safe!" he said. Jamal's dog bounced to its
hind legs and planted its front paws on Abdullah's stomach, panting
lovingly. A familiar squiddy breath filled the air.

And Valeria promptly began screaming again. "I don't want that doggy! He
SMELLS!"

"Oh, hush!" said at least six princesses. "Pretend, dear. We need the
man's help."

"I ... DON'T . . . WANT-" yelled Princess Valeria.

Sophie tore herself away from where she was leaning critically over the
tiny princess and marched down upon Valeria. "Stop it, Valeria," she
said. "You remember me, don't you?"

It was clear Valeria did. She rushed at Sophie and wrapped her arms
around her legs, where she burst into much more genuine tears. "Sophie,
Sophie, Sophie! Take me home!"

Sophie sat down on the floor and hugged her. "There, there. Of course,
we'll take you home. We've just got to arrange it first. It's very odd,"
she remarked to the surrounding princesses. "I feel quite expert with
Valeria, but I'm scared stiff of dropping Morgan."

"You'll learn," said the elderly Princess of High Norland, sitting
stiffly down beside her. "I'm told they all do."

Flower-in-the-Night stepped to the center of the room. "My friends," she
said, "and all three kind gentlemen, we must now put our heads together
to discuss the plight in which we find ourselves and make plans for our
early release. First, however, it would be prudent to put a spell of
silence upon the doorway. It would not do for our kidnappers to
overhear." Her eyes, in the most thoughtful and neutral way, went to the
genie bottle in Abdullah's hand.

"No!" said the genie. "Try to make me do anything and you're all toads!"

"I'll do it," said Sophie. She scrambled up with Valeria still clinging
to her skirts and went over to the doorway, where she took hold of a
handful of the curtain there. "Now, you're not the kind of cloth to let
any sound through, are you?" she remarked to the curtain. "I suggest you
have a word with the walls and make that quite

166

clear. Tell them no one's going to be able to hear a word we say inside
this room."

A murmur of relief and approval came from most of the princesses at
this. But Flower-in-the-Night said, "My pardon for being critical,
skillful sorceress, but I think the djinns should be able to hear
something or else they will become suspicious."

The tiny princess from Tsapfan wandered up with Morgan looking huge in
her arms. Carefully she passed the baby to Sophie. Sophie looked
terrified and held Morgan as if he were a bomb about to blow up. This
seemed to displease Morgan. He waved his arms. While the tiny princess
was laying both small hands on the curtain, several looks of utter
distaste chased themselves across his face. "Burp!" he remarked.

Sophie jumped and all but dropped Morgan. "Heavens!" she said. "I'd no
idea they did that!"

Valeria laughed heartily. "My brother does-all the time."

The tiny princess made gestures to show that she had now dealt with
Flower-in-the-Night's objection. Everyone listened closely. In the
distance somewhere they could now hear the pleasant ringing hum of
princesses chatting together. There was even an occasional yell that
sounded like Valeria.

"Most perfect," said Flower-in-the-Night. She smiled warmly at the tiny
princess, and Abdullah wished she would only smile like that at him.
"Now if every person could sit down, we can lay some plans to escape."

Everyone obeyed in his or her own way. Jamal squatted with his dog in
his arms, looking suspicious. Sophie sat on the floor with Morgan
clumsily in her arms and Valeria leaning against her. Valeria was quite
happy now. Abdullah sat cross-legged beside Jamal. The soldier came and
sat about two places away, whereupon Abdullah took tight hold of the
genie bottle and gripped the carpet over his shoulder with the other hand.

"That girl Flower-in-the-Night is a real marvel," Princess Beatrice
remarked as she sat herself between Abdullah and the soldier. "She came
here knowing nothing unless she'd read it out of a book. And she learns
all the time. Took her two days to get the measure of

167

Dalzel; wretched djinn's scared stiff of her now. Before she arrived,
all I'd managed was to make it clear to the creature that we weren't
going to be his wives. But she thinks big. Had her mind on escaping
right from the start. She's been plotting all along to get that cook in
to help. Now she's done it. Look at her! Looks fit to rule an empire,
doesn't she?"

Abdullah nodded sadly and watched Flower-in-the-Night as she stood
waiting for everyone to get settled. She was still wearing the gauzy
clothes she had been wearing when Hasruel snatched her from the night
garden. She was still as slim, as graceful, and as beautiful. Her
clothes were now crushed and a little tattered. Abdullah had no doubt
that every crease, every three-cornered tear, and every hanging thread
meant some new thing that Flower-in-the-Night had learned. Fit to rule
an empire indeed! he thought. If he compared Flower-in-the-Night with
Sophie, who had displeased him for being so strong-minded, he knew
Flower-in-the-Night had twice Sophie's strength of mind. And as far as
Abdullah was concerned, this only made Flower-in-the-Night more
excellent. What made him wretched was the way she carefully and politely
avoided singling him out in any way. And he wished he knew why.

"The problem we face," Flower-in-the-Night was saying when Abdullah
started to attend, "is that we are in a place where it does no good
simply to get out. If we could sneak out of the castle without the
djinns' becoming aware of it or the angels of Hasruel's preventing us,
we should only sink through the clouds and fall heavily to earth, which
is a very long way below. Even if we can overcome those difficulties in
some way"-here her eyes turned to the bottle in Abdullah's hand and,
thoughtfully, to the carpet over his shoulder, but not, alas, to
Abdullah himself-"there seems nothing to stop Dalzel from sending his
brother to bring us all back. Therefore, the essence of any plan we make
has to be the defeat of Dalzel. We know that his chief power derives
from the fact that he has stolen the life of his brother Hasruel, so
that Hasruel must obey him or die. So it follows that in order to
escape, we must find Hasruel's life and restore it to him. Noble ladies,
excellent gentlemen, and esteemed dog, I invite your ideas on this matter."

168

Excellently put, O flower of my desire! Abdullah thought sadly as
Flower-in-the-Night gracefully sat down.

"But we still don't know where Hasruel's life can be!" bleatedthe fat
Princess of Farqtan.

"Exactly," said Princess Beatrice. "Only Dalzel knows that."

"But the beastly creature's always dropping hints," complained the blond
princess from Thayack.

"To let us know how clever he is!" the dark-skinned Princess of Alberia
said bitterly.

Sophie looked up. "What hints?" she said.

There was a confused clamor as at least twenty princesses all tried to
tell Sophie at once. Abdullah was straining his ears to catch at least
one of the hints and Flower-in-the-Night was getting up to restore order
when the soldier said loudly, "Oh, shut up, the lot of you!"

This caused complete silence. The eyes of every single princess turned
to him in freezing royal outrage.

The soldier found this very amusing. "Hoity-toity!" he said. "Look at me
how you please, ladies. But while you do, think whether I ever agreed to
help you escape. I did not. Why should I? Dalzel never did me any harm."

"That," said the elderly Princess of High Norland, "is because he's not
found you yet, my good man. Do you wish to wait and see what happens
when he does?"

"I'll risk it," said the soldier. "On the other hand, I might help-and I
reckon you won't get too far if I don't-provided one of you can make it
worth my while."

Flower-in-the-Night, poised on her knees ready to stand, said with
beautiful haughtiness, "Worth your while in what way, menial mercenary?
All of us have fathers who are very rich. Rewards will shower on you
once they have us back. Do you wish to be assured of a certain sum from
each? That can be arranged."

"And I wouldn't say no," said the soldier. "But that's not what I meant,
my pretty. When I started on this caper, I was promised I'd get a
princess of my own out of it. That's what I want-a princess to marry.
One of you ought to be able to accommodate me. And if you

169

can't or won't, then you can count me out and I'll be off to make my
peace with Dalzel. He can hire me to guard you."

This caused a silence, if possible more frozen, outraged, and royal than
before, until Flower-in-the-Night pulled herself together and rose to
her feet again. "My friends," she said, "we all need the help of this
man-if only for his ruthless, low cunning. What we do not want is to
have a beast like him set over us to guard us. Therefore, I vote that he
be allowed to choose a wife from among us. Who disagrees?"

It was clear that every other princess disagreed mightily. Further
freezing looks were turned on the soldier, who grinned and said, "If I
go to Dalzel and offer myself to guard you, rest assured you'll never
get away. I'm up to every trick. Isn't that true?" he asked Abdullah.

"It is true, most cunning corporal," Abdullah said.

There was a small murmuring from the tiny princess. "She says she's
married already-those fourteen children, you know," said the elderly
princess, who seemed to understand the murmur.

"Then let all who are as yet unmarried please raise their hands," said
Flower-in-the-Night, and most determinedly, raised her own.

Waveringly, reluctantly, two-thirds of the other princesses put their
hands up, also. The soldier's head turned slowly as he looked around
them, and the look on his face reminded Abdullah of Sophie when, as
Midnight, she was about to feast on salmon and cream. Abdullah's heart
stood still as the man's blue eyes traveled from princess to princess.
It was obvious he would choose Flower-in-the- Night. Her beauty stood
out like a lily in the moonlight.

"You," said the soldier at last, and pointed. To Abdullah's astonished
relief, he was pointing at Princess Beatrice.

Princess Beatrice was equally astonished. "Me?" she said.

"Yes, you," said the soldier. "I've always fancied a nice bossy,
downright princess like you. Fact that you're a Strangian, too, makes it
ideal."

Princess Beatrice's face had become a bright beety red. It did not
improve her looks. "But-but-" she said, and then pulled her

170

self together. "My good soldier, I'll have you know I'm supposed tobe
marrying Prince Justin of Ingary."

"Then you'll just have to tell him you're spoken for," said the soldier.
"Politics, wasn't it? It seems to me you'll be glad to get out of it."

"Well, I-" began Princess Beatrice. To Abdullah's surprise, there were
tears in her eyes, and she had to start again. "You don't mean it!" she
said. "I'm not good-looking or any of those things."

"That suits me," said the soldier, "down to the ground. What would I do
with a flimsy, pretty little princess? I can see you'd back me up
whatever scam I got up to-and I bet you can darn socks, too."

"Believe it or not, I can darn," said Princess Beatrice. "And mend
boots. You really mean it?"

"Yes," said the soldier.

The two of them had swung around to face each other, and it was clear
that both were entirely in earnest. And the rest of the princesses had
somehow forgotten to be frozen and royal. Every one of them was leaning
forward to watch with a tender, approving smile. There was the same
smile on Flower-in-the-Night's face as she said, "Now may we continue
our discussion, if no one else objects?"

"Me. I do," said Jamal. "I object."

All the princesses groaned. Jamal's face was almost as red as Princess
Beatrice's, and his one eye was screwed up; but the soldier's example
had made him bold.

"Lovely ladies," he said, "we are frightened, me and my dog. Until we
got snatched away up here to do your cooking for you, we were on the run
in the desert with the Sultan's camels at our heels. We don't want to be
sent back to that. But if all you perfect princesses get away from here,
what do we do? Djinns don't eat the kind of food I can cook. Meaning no
disrespect to anyone, if I help you to get away, my dog and I are out of
a job. It's as simple as that."

"Oh, dear," said Flower-in-the-Night, and seemed not to know what else
to say.

"Such a shame. He's a very good cook," remarked a plump

171

princess in a loose red gown, who was probably the Paragon of Inhico.

"He certainly is!" said the elderly Princess of High Norland. "I shudder
to remember the food those djinns kept stealing for us until he came."
She turned to Jamal. "My grandfather once had a cook from Rashpuht," she
said, "and until you got here, I'd never tasted anything like that man's
fried squid! And yours is even better. You help us to escape, my man,
and I'll employ you like a shot, dog and all. But," she added as a grin
brightened on Jamal's leathery face, "please remember that my old father
only rules a very small principality. You'll get board and lodging, but
I can't afford a big wage."

The grin remained broadly fixed on Jamal's features. "My great, great
lady," he said, "it is not wages I want, only safety. For this I will
cook you food fit for angels."

"Hmm," said the elderly princess. "I'm not at all sure what those angels
eat, but that's settled then. Does either of you other two want anything
before you'll help?"

Everyone looked at Sophie.
"Not really," Sophie said rather sadly. "I've got Morgan, and since Howl
doesn't seem to be here, there's nothing else I need. I'll help you,
anyway."

Everyone looked at Abdullah then.

He rose to his feet and bowed. "O moons of many monarchs' eyes," he
said, "far be it from one as unworthy as me to impose any kind of
condition for my help on such as you. Help freely given is best, as the
books tell us." He had got this far in his magnificent and generous
speech when he realized it was all nonsense. There was something he did
want-very much indeed. He hastily changed his tack. "And freely given my
help will be," he said, "as free as air blows or rain bedews the
flowers. I will work myself to extinction for your noble sakes and crave
only in return one small boon, most simply granted-"

"Get on with it, young man!" said the Princess of High Norland. "What do
you want?"

"Five minutes' talk in private with Flower-in-the-Night," Abdullah
admitted.

172

Everyone looked at Flower-in-the-Night. Her head went up, rather
dangerously.

"Come off it, Flower!" said Princess Beatrice. "Five minutes won't kill
you!"

Flower-in-the-Night seemed fairly clear that it might kill her. She
said, like a princess going to her execution, "Very well," and, with a
more than usually freezing look in the direction of Abdullah, she asked,
"Now?"

"Or sooner, dove of my desire," he said, bowing firmly.

Flower-in-the-Night nodded frigidly and stalked away to the side of the
room, looking positively martyred. "Here," she said as Abdullah followed
her.

He bowed again, even more firmly. "I said, in private, O starry subject
of my sighs," he pointed out.

Flower-in-the-Night irritably twitched aside one of the curtains hanging
beside her. "They can probably still hear," she said coldly, beckoning
him after her.

"But not see, princess of my passion," Abdullah said, edging behind the
curtain.

He found himself in a tiny alcove. Sophie's voice came to him clearly.
"That's the loose brick where I used to hide money. I hope they have
room." Whatever the place once had been, it now seemed to be the
princesses' wardrobe. There was a riding jacket hanging behind
Flower-in-the-Night as she folded her arms and faced Abdullah. Cloaks,
coats, and a hooped petticoat that evidently went under the loose red
garment worn by the Paragon of Inhico dangled around Abdullah as he
faced Flower-in-the-Night. Still, Abdullah reflected, it was not much
smaller or more crowded than his own booth in Zanzib, and that was
usually private enough.

"What did you want to say?" Flower-in-the-Night asked freezingly.

"To ask the reason for this very coldness!" Abdullah answered heatedly.
"What have I done that you will barely look at me and barely speak? Have
I not come here, expressly to rescue you? Have I not, alone of all the
disappointed lovers, braved every peril in order to reach this castle?
Have I not gone through the most strenuous

173

adventures, allowing your father to threaten me, the soldier to cheat
me, and the genie to mock me, solely in order to bring you my aid? What
more do I have to do? Or should I conclude that you have fallen in love
with Dalzel?"

"Dalzel!" exclaimed Flower-in-the-Night. "Now you insult me! Now you add
insult to injury! Now I see Beatrice was right and you do indeed not
love me!"

"Beatrice!" thundered Abdullah. "What has she to say how I feel?"

Flower-in-the-Night hung her head a little, although she looked more
sulky than ashamed. There was a dead silence. In fact, the silence was
so very dead that Abdullah realized that the sixty ears of all the other
thirty princesses-no, sixty-eight ears, if you counted Sophie, the
soldier, Jamal, and his dog and assumed Morgan was asleep-anyway, that
all these ears were at that moment focused entirely upon what he and
Flower-in-the-Night were saying.

"Talk among yourselves!" he shouted.

The silence became uneasy. It was broken by the elderly princess saying,
"The most distressing thing about being up here above the clouds is that
there is no weather to make conversation out of."

Abdullah waited until this statement was followed by a reluctant hum of
other voices and then turned back to Flower-in-the- Night. "Well? What
did Princess Beatrice say?"

Flower-in-the-Night raised her head haughtily. "She said that portraits
of other men and pretty speeches were all very well, but she couldn't
help noticing you'd never made the slightest attempt to kiss me."

"Impertinent woman!" said Abdullah. "When I first saw you, I assumed you
were a dream. I assumed you would only melt."

"But," said Flower-in-the-Night, "the second time you saw me, you seemed
quite sure I was real."

"Certainly," said Abdullah, "but then it would have been unfair because,
if you recall, you had then seen no other living men but your father and
myself."

"Beatrice," said Flower-in-the-Night, "says that men who do nothing but
make fine speeches make very poor husbands."

174
"Bother Princess Beatrice!" said Abdullah. "What do you think?"

"I think," said Flower-in-the-Night, "I think I want to know why you
found me too unattractive to be worth kissing."

"I DIDN'T find you unattractive!" bawled Abdullah. Then he remembered
the sixty-eight ears beyoncí the curtain and added in a fierce whisper,
"If you must know, I-I had never in my life kissed a young lady, and you
are far too beautiful for me to want to get it wrong!"

A small smile, heralded by a deep dimple, stole across
Flowerin-the-Night's mouth. "And how many young ladies have you kissed
by now?"

"None!" groaned Abdullah. "I am still a total amateur!"

"So am I," admitted Flower-in-the-Night. "Though at least I know enough
not to mistake you for a woman now. That was very stupid!"

She gave a gurgle of laughter. Abdullah gave another gurgle. In no time
at all, both of them were laughing heartily, until Abdullah gasped, "I
think we should practice!"

After that there was silence from behind the curtain. This silence went
on so long that all the princesses ran out of small talk, except
Princess Beatrice, who seemed to have a lot to say to the soldier. At
length Sophie called out, "Are you two finished?"

"Certainly," Flower-in-the-Night and Abdullah called out. "Absolutely!"

"Then let's make some plans," said Sophie.

Plans were no problem at all to Abdullah in the state of mind he was in
just then. He came out from behind the curtain holding
Flower-in-the-Night's hand, and if the castle had chanced to vanish at
that moment, he knew he could have walked on the clouds beneath or,
failing that, on air. As it was, he walked across what seemed a very
unworthy marble floor and simply took charge.

175

In which a djinn's life

is found and then hidden

Ten minutes later Abdullah said, "There, most eminent and intelligent
persons, are our plans laid. It only remains for the genie-"

Purple smoke poured from the bottle and trailed in agitated waves along
the marble floor. "You do not use me!" cried the genie. "I said toads,
and I mean toads! Hasruel put me in this bottle, don't you understand?
If I do anything against him, he'll put me somewhere even worse!"

Sophie looked up and frowned at the smoke. "There really is a genie!"

"But I merely require your powers of divination to tell me where
Hasruel's life is hidden," Abdullah explained. "I am not asking for a
wish."
"No!" howled the mauve smoke.

Flower-in-the-Night picked the bottle up and balanced it on her knee.
Smoke flowed downward in puffs and seemed to try to seep into the cracks
in the marble floor. "It stands to reason," Flower-in-the-Night said,
"that since every man we asked to help has had his price, then the genie
has his price, also. It must be a male character

176

istic. Genie, if you agree to help Abdullah in this, I will promise you
what logic assures me is the correct reward."

Grudgingly the mauve smoke began to seep backward toward the bottle
again. "Oh, very well," said the genie.

Two minutes after this the charmed curtain in the doorway to the
princesses' room was swept aside, and everyone streamed out into the
great hall, clamoring for Dalzel's attention and dragging Abdullah in
their midst, a helpless prisoner.

"Dalzel! Dalzel!" clamored the thirty princesses. "Is this the way you
guard us? You ought to be ashamed of yourself!"

Dalzel looked up. He was leaning over the side of his great throne to
play chess with Hasruel. He blanched a bit at what he saw and signed to
his brother to remove the chess set. Fortunately the crowd of princesses
was too thick for him to notice Sophie and the Jharine of Jham huddled
in the midst of it, though his lovely eyes did fall on Jamal and narrow
with astonishment. "What is it now?" he said.

"A man in our room!" screamed the princesses. "A terrible, awful man!"

"What man?" trumpeted Dalzel. "What man would dare?"

"This one!" shrieked the princesses. Abdullah was dragged forward
between Princess Beatrice and the Princess of Alberia, most shamefully
clothed in almost, nothing but the hooped petticoat that had hung behind
the curtain. This petticoat was an essential part of the plan. Two of
the things underneath it were the genie's bottle and the magic carpet.
Abdullah was glad he had taken these precautions when Dalzel glared at
him. He had not known before that a djinn's eyes could actually flame.
Dalzel's eyes were like two bluish furnaces.

Hasruel's behavior made Abdullah even more uncomfortable. A mean grin
spread over Hasruel's huge features, and he said, "Ah! You again!" Then
he folded his great arms and looked very sarcastic indeed.

"How did this fellow get in here?" Dalzel demanded in his trumpet voice.

Before anyone could answer, Flower-in-the-Night performed

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her part in the plan by bursting out from among the other princesses and
throwing herself gracefully down on the steps of the throne. "Have
mercy, great djinn!" she cried out. "He only came to rescue me!"

Dalzel laughed contemptuously. "Then the fellow's a fool. I shall throw
him straight back to earth."
"Do that, great djinn, and I shall never leave you in peace!"
Flower-in-the-Night declared.

She was not acting. She really meant it. Dalzel knew she did. A shiver
ran through his narrow, pale body, and his gold-taloned fingers gripped
the arms of the throne. But his eyes still flamed with rage. "I shall do
what I want!" he trumpeted.

"Then desire to be merciful!" cried Flower-in-the-Night. "Give him at
least a chance!"

"Be quiet, woman!" trumpeted Dalzel. "I haven't decided yet. I want to
know how he managed to get in here first."

"Disguised as the cook's dog, of course," said Princess Beatrice.

"And quite naked when he turned into a man!" said the Princess of Alberia.

"Shocking business," said Princess Beatrice. "We had to put him in the
Paragon's petticoat."

"Bring him closer," commanded Dalzel.

Princess Beatrice and her assistant lugged Abdullah toward the steps of
the throne, Abdullah walking with little mincing steps that he hoped the
djinns would put down to the petticoat. The reason, in fact, was that
the third thing under the petticoat was Jamal's dog. It was gripped
rather firmly between Abdullah's knees in case it escaped. This part of
the plan made it necessary to be minus one dog, and none of the
princesses had trusted Dalzel not to send Hasruel looking for it and
prove that everyone was lying.

Dalzel glared down at Abdullah, and Abdullah hoped very much that Dalzel
truly had almost no powers of his own. Hasruel had called his brother
weak. But it occurred to Abdullah that even a weak djinn was several
times stronger than a man. "You came here as a dog?" Dalzel trumpeted.
"How?"

"By magic, great djinn," Abdullah said. He had intended to

178

make a detailed explanation at this point, but under the Paragon's
petticoat, a hidden struggle was developing. Jamal's dog turned out to
hate djinns even more than it hated most of the human race. It wanted to
go for Dalzel. "I disguised myself as the dog of your cook," Abdullah
began to explain. At this point Jamal's dog became so eager to go for
Dalzel that Abdullah was afraid it would get loose. He was forced to
grip his knees together tighter yet. The dog's response was a huge,
snarling growl. "Your pardon!" panted Abdullah. Sweat was standing on
his brow. "I am still so much of a dog that I cannot refrain from
growling from time to time."

Flower-in-the-Night recognized that Abdullah was having problems and
burst into lamentations. "O most noble prince! To suffer the shape of a
dog for my sake! Spare him, noble djinn! Spare him!"

"Be quiet, woman," said Dalzel. "Where is that cook? Bring him forward."
Jamal was dragged forward by the Princess of Farqtan and the Heiress of
Thayack, wringing his hands and cringing. "Honored djinn, it was nothing
to do with me, I swear!" Jamal wailed. "Do not hurt me! I never knew he
was not a real dog!" Abdullah could have sworn that Jamal was in a state
of true terror. Maybe he was, but he had the presence of mind, all the
same, to pat Abdullah on the head. "Nice dog," he said. "Good fellow."
After that he fell down and groveled on the steps of the throne in the
manner of Zanzib. "I am innocent, great one!" he blubbered. "Innocent!
Harm me not!"

The dog was soothed by its master's voice. Its growls stopped. Abdullah
was able to relax his knees a little. "I am innocent, too, O collector
of royal maidens," he said. "I came only to rescue the one I love. You
must surely feel kindly toward my devotion, since you love so many
princesses yourself!"

Dalzel rubbed his chin in a perplexed way. "Love?" he said. "No, I can't
say I understand love. I can't understand how anything could make
someone put himself in your position, mortal."

Hasruel, squatting vast and dark beside the throne, grinnedmore meanly
than ever. "What do you want me to do with the crea

179

ture, brother?" he rumbled. "Roast him? Extract his soul and make it
part of the floor? Take him apart?"

"No, no! Be merciful, great Dalzel!" Flower-in-the-Night promptly cried
out. "Give him at least a chance! If you do, I will never ask you
questions, or complain, or lecture you again. I will be meek and polite!"

Dalzel grasped his chin again and looked uncertain. Abdullah felt much
relieved. Dalzel was indeed a weak djinn-weak in character, anyway. "If
I were to give him a chance-" he began.

"If you'll take my advice, brother," Hasruel cut in, "you won't. He's
tricky, this one."

At this Flower-in-the-Night raised   another great wail and beat her
breast. Abdullah cried out through   the noise, "Let me try toguess where
you hid your brother's life, great   Dalzel. If I fail to guess, kill me.
If I guess right, let me depart in   peace."

This amused Dalzel highly. His mouth opened, showing pointed silvery
teeth, and his laughter rang around the cloudy hall like a fanfare of
trumpets. "But you'll never guess, little mortal!" he said as he
laughed. Then, as the princesses had repeatedly assured Abdullah, Dalzel
was unable to resist giving hints. "I've hidden that life so cleverly,"
he said gleefully, "that you can look at it and not see it. Hasruel
can't see it, and he is a djinn. So what hope have you? But I think for
the fun of it I will give you three guesses before I kill you. Guess
away. Where have I hidden my brother's life?"

Abdullah shot a swift look at Hasruel in case Hasruel decided to
interfere. But Hasruel was simply squatting there, looking inscrutable.
So far the plan was succeeding. It was in Hasruel's interest not to
interfere. Abdullah had been counting on that. He took a firmer grip on
the dog with his knees and hitched at the Paragon's petticoat, while he
pretended to think. What he was really doing was jogging the genie
bottle. "For my first guess, great djinn . . ." he said, and stared at
the floor as if the green porphyry might inspire him. Would the genie go
back on his word? For one scared and miserable moment Abdullah thought
that the genie had let him down as usual and that he was going to have
to risk guessing on his

180

own. Then, to his great relief, he saw a tiny tendril of purple smoke
creep out from under the Paragon's petticoat, where it lay, still and
watchful, beside Abdullah's bare foot. "My first guess is that you hid
Hasruel's life on the moon," Abdullah said.

Dalzel laughed delightedly. "Wrong! He would have found it there! No,
it's much more obvious than that, and much less obvious. Consider the
game of hunt the slipper, mortal!"

This told Abdullah that Hasruel's life was here in the castle, as most
of the princesses had thought it was. He made a great show of thinking
hard. "My second guess is that you gave it to one of the guardian angels
to keep," he said.

"Wrong again!" said Dalzel, more delighted than ever. "The angels would
have given it back straightaway. It's much cleverer than that, little
mortal. You'll never guess. It's amazing how no one can see what's under
his own nose!"

At this, in a burst of inspiration, Abdullah was sure he knew where
Hasruel's life really was. Flower-in-the-Night loved him. He was still
walking on air. His mind was inspired, and he knew. But he was mortally
afraid of making a mistake. When the time shortly came when he had to
take hold of Hasruel's life himself, he knew he would have to go
straight to it because Dalzel would give him no second chance. That was
why he needed the genie to confirm his guess. The tendril of smoke was
still lying there, near invisible, and if Abdullah had guessed, surely
the genie knew, too?

"Er . . ." Abdullah said. "Urn . . ."

The tendril of smoke crept noiselessly back inside the Paragon's
petticoat and bellied up inside, where it must have tickled the nose of
Jamal's dog. The dog sneezed.

"Atishoo!" cried Abdullah, and almost drowned the thread of the genie's
voice whispering, "It's the ring in Hasruel's nose!"

"Atishoo!" said Abdullah, and pretended to guess wrong. This was where
his plan was distinctly risky. "Your brother's life is one of your
teeth, great Dalzel."

"Wrong!" trumpeted Dalzel. "Hasruel, roast him!"

"Spare him!" wailed Flower-in-the-Night as Hasruel, with disgust and
disappointment written all over him, began to get up.

181

The princesses were ready for this moment. Ten royal hands instantly
pushed Princess Valeria out of the crowd to the steps of the throne.
"I want my doggy!" Valeria announced. This was her big moment. As Sophie
had pointed out to her, she had found thirty new aunties and three new
uncles and all of them had begged her to scream as hard as she could. No
one had ever wanted her to scream before. In addition, all the new
aunties had promised her a box of sweets if she made this a really good
tantrum. Thirty boxes. It was worth the best she could do. She made her
mouth square. She expanded her chest. She gave it everything she had. "I
WANT MY DOGGY! I DON'T WANT ABDULLAH! I WANT MY DOGGY BACK!" She hurled
herself at the throne steps, fell over Jamal, threw herself to her feet
again, and flung herself at the throne. Dalzel hastily jumped onto the
throne seat to get out of her way. "GIVE ME MY DOGGY!" Valeria bellowed.

At the same moment the tiny yellow Princess of Tsapfan gave Morgan a
shrewd nip, just in the right place. Morgan had been asleep in her tiny
arms, dreaming he was a kitten again. He woke with a jump and found he
was still a helpless baby. His fury knew no bounds. He opened his mouth,
and he roared. His feet pedaled with anger. His hands pumped. And his
roars were so lusty that had it been a competition between himself and
Valeria, Morgan might have won. As it was, the noise was unspeakable.
The echoes in the hall picked it up, doubled the screams, and rolled it
all back at the throne.

"Echo at those djinns," Sophie was saying in her conversational magical
way. "Don't just double it. Treble it."

The hall was a madhouse. Both djinns clapped their hands over their
pointed ears. Dalzel hooted, "Stop it! Stop them! Where did that baby
come from?"

To which Hasruel howled, "Women have babies, fool of a djinn! What did
you expect?"

"I WANT MY DOGGY BACK!" stated Valeria, beating the seat of the throne
with her fists.

182

Dalzel's trumpet voice fought to be heard. "Give her a doggy, Hasruel,
or I'll kill you!"

At this stage in Abdullah's plans he had confidently expected- if he had
not been killed by then-to be turned into a dog. It was what he had been
leading up to. This, he had calculated, would also have released Jamal's
dog. He had counted on the sight of not one dog but two, dashing from
beneath the Paragon's petticoat, to add to the confusion. But Hasruel
was as distracted by the screams, and the triple echoes of screams, as
his brother was. He turned this way and that, clutching his ears and
yelling with pain, the picture of a djinn at his wits' end. Finally he
folded his great wings and became a dog himself.

He was a very huge dog, something between a donkey and a bulldog, brown
and gray in patches, with a golden ring in his snub nose. This huge dog
put its gigantic forepaws on the arm of the throne and stretched an
enormous slavering tongue out toward Valeria's face. Hasruel was trying
to seem friendly. But at the sight of something so big and so ugly,
Valeria, not unnaturally, screamed harder than ever. The noise
frightened Morgan. He screamed harder, too.

Abdullah had a moment when he was quite at a loss what to do, and then
another moment when he was sure no one would hear him shout. "Soldier!"
he roared. "Hold Hasruel! Someone hold Dalzel!"

Luckily the soldier was alert. He was good at that. The Jharine of Jham
vanished in a flurry of old clothes, and the soldier leaped up the steps
of the throne. Sophie rushed after him, beckoning to the princesses. She
threw her arms around Dalzel's slender white knees, while the soldier
wrapped his brawny arms around the neck of the dog. The princesses
stampeded up the steps behind them, and most of them threw themselves on
Dalzel, too, with the air of princesses badly in need of revenge-all
except Princess Beatrice, who dragged Valeria out of the brawl and began
the difficult task of shutting her up. The tiny Princess of Tsapfan
meanwhile sat calmly on the porphyry floor, rocking Morgan back to sleep.

Abdullah tried to run toward Hasruel. But 183

move than Jamal's dog seized its chance and got away. It burst out from
under the Paragon's petticoat to see a fight in progress. It loved
fights. It also saw another dog. If anything, it hated dogs even more
than djinns or the human race. No matter what size the dog was. It sped,
snarling, to the attack. While Abdullah was still trying to kick his way
out of the Paragon's petticoat, Jamal's dog sprang for Hasruel's throat.

This was too much for Hasruel, already beset by the soldier. He became a
djinn again. He made an angry gesture. And the dog went sailing away,
end over end, to land with yelp on the other side of the hall. After
that Hasruel tried to stand up, but the soldier was on his back by then,
preventing him spreading his leathery wings. Hasruel heaved and surged.

"Hold your head down, Hasruel, I conjure you!" Abdullah shouted, kicking
free of the Paragon's petticoat at last. He leaped up the steps, wearing
nothing but his loincloth, and seized hold of Hasruel's great left ear.
At this Flower-in-the-Night understood where Hasruel's life was, and to
Abdullah's great joy, she jumped up and hung on to Hasruel's right ear.
And there they hung, raised in the air from time to time when Hasruel
got the better of the soldier, and slammed to the floor when the soldier
got the better of Hasruel, with the soldier's straining arms wrapped
around the djinn's neck just beside them and Hasruel's great snarling
face between them. From time to time Abdullah caught glimpses of Dalzel
standing on the seat of his throne under a pile of princesses. He had
spread his weak golden wings. They did not seem much use for flying
with, but he was battering at the princesses with them and shouting to
Hasruel for help.

Dalzel's trumpet shouts seemed to inspire Hasruel. He began to get the
better of the soldier. Abdullah tried to get a hand loose so that he
could reach out to the golden ring, dangling just by his shoulder, under
Hasruel's hooked nose. Abdullah freed his left hand. But his right hand
was sweating and slipping off Hasruel's ear. He
grabbed-desperately-before he slipped off.

He had reckoned without Jamal's dog. After lying dazed for most of a
minute, it stood up, angrier than ever and full of hatred

184

for djinns. It saw Hasruel and knew its enemy. Back across the hall it
raced, hackles up and snarling, past the tiny princess and Morgan, past
Princess Beatrice and Valeria, through the princesses eddying around the
throne, past the crouching figure of its master, and sprang at the
easiest piece of djinn to reach. Abdullah snatched his hand away just in
time.

Snap! went the dog's teeth. Gulp went the dog's throat. After that, a
puzzled look crossed the dog's face, and it dropped to the floor,
hiccuping uneasily. Hasruel howled with pain and sprang upright with
both hands clapped to his nose. The soldier was hurled to the floor.
Abdullah and Flower-in-the-Night were flung off to either side. Abdullah
dived for the hiccuping dog, but Jamal got there first and picked it up
tenderly.

"Poor dog, my poor dog! Better soon!" he crooned to it, and carried it
carefully away down the steps.

Abdullah dragged the dazed soldier with him and put them both in front
of Jamal. "Stop, everyone!" he shouted. "Dalzel, I conjure you to stop!
We have your brother's life!"

The struggle on the throne stilled. Dalzel stood with spread wings and
his eyes like furnaces again. "I don't believe you," he said. "Where?"

"Inside the dog," said Abdullah.

"But only until tomorrow," Jamal said soothingly, thinking only of his
hiccuping dog. "It has an irritable gut from eating too much squid. Be
thankful-"

Abdullah kicked him to shut him up. "The dog has eaten the ring in
Hasruel's nose," he said.

The dismay on Dalzel's face told him that the genie had been right. He
had guessed correctly. "Oh!" said the princesses. All eyes turned to
Hasruel, huge and bowed over, with tears in his fiery eyes and both
hands clasped to his nose. Djinn blood, which was clear and greenish,
dripped between his great horned fingers.

"I should hab dode," Hasruel said dismally. "It wad right udder by dose."

The elderly Princess of High Norland detached herself from the crowd
around the throne, felt in her sleeve, and reached up to

185

Hasruel with a small lacy handkerchief. "Here you are," she said. "No
hard feelings."

Hasruel took the handkerchief with a grateful "Thang you" and pressed it
to the torn end of his nose. The dog had not really eaten much except
the ring. Having mopped the place carefully, Hasruel knelt ponderously
down and beckoned to Abdullah up the steps of the throne. "What would
you have me do now I am good again?" he asked mournfully.

186

In which

the castle comes

down to earth

Abdullah did not need to give Hasruel's question much thought. "You must
exile your brother, mighty djinn, to a place from which he will not
return," he said.

Dalzel at once burst into melting blue tears. "It's not fair!" He wept
and stamped his foot on the throne. "Everyone's always against me! You
don't love me, Hasruel! You cheated me! You didn't even try to get rid
of those three people hanging on to you!"

Abdullah was sure Dalzel was right about that. Knowing the power a djinn
had, Abdullah was sure Hasruel could have flung the soldier, not to
speak of himself and Flower-in-the-Night, to the ends of the earth if he
had wanted to.

"It wasn't as if I was doing any harm!" Dalzel shouted. "I have a right
to get married, don't I?"

While he shouted and stamped, Hasruel murmured to Abdullah, "There is a
wandering island in the ocean to the south, which is only to be found
once in a hundred years. It has a palace and many fruit trees. May I
send my brother there?"

"And now you're going to send me away!" Dalzel screamed. "None of you
care how lonely I shall be!"

"By the way," Hasruel murmured to Abdullah, "your father's

187

first wife's relatives made a pact with the mercenaries, which allowed
them to flee from Zanzib to escape the Sultan's wrath, but they left the
two nieces behind. The Sultan has locked the unfortunate girls up, they
being the nearest of your family he could find."

"Most shocking," Abdullah said. He saw what Hasruel was driving at.
"Perhaps, mighty djinn, you might celebrate your return to goodness by
fetching the two damsels here?"

Hasruel's hideous face brightened. He raised his great clawed hand.
There was a clap of thunder, followed by some girlish squealing, and the
two fat nieces stood before the throne. It was as simple as that.
Abdullah saw that Hasruel had indeed been holding back his strength
before. Looking into the djinn's great slanting eyes- which still had
tears in the corners from the dog's attack-he saw that Hasruel knew he
knew.

"Not more princesses!" Princess Beatrice said. She was kneeling by
Valeria, looking rather harassed.

"Nothing of the sort, I assure you," said Abdullah.

The two nieces could hardly have looked less like princesses. They were
in their oldest clothes, practical pink and workaday yellow, torn and
stained from their experiences, and the hair of both had come unfrizzed.
They took one look at Dalzel stamping and weeping above them on the
throne, another look at the huge shape of Hasruel, and then a third look
at Abdullah wearing nothing but a loincloth, and they screamed. Then
each tried to hide her face in the other's plump shoulder.

"Poor girls," stated the Princess of High Norland. "Hardly royal behavior."
"Dalzel!" Abdullah shouted up at the sobbing djinn. "Beauteous Dalzel,
poacher of princesses, be peaceful a moment and look upon the gift I
have given you to take with you into exile."

Dalzel stopped in mid-sob. "Gift?"

Abdullah pointed. "Behold two brides, young and succulent and sorely in
need of a bridegroom."

Dalzel wiped luminous tears from his cheeks and surveyed the nieces in
much the same way that Abdullah's cannier customers used to inspect his
carpets. "A matching pair!" he said. "And won

188

derfully fat! Where's the catch? Are they perhaps not yours to give away?"

"No catch, shining djinn," said Abdullah. It seemed to him that, now the
girls' other relatives had deserted them, they were surely his to
dispose of. But to be on the safe side, he added, "They are yours for
the stealing, mighty Dalzel." He went up to the nieces and patted each
on her plump arm. "Ladies," he said. "Fullest moons of Zanzib, pray
forgive me that unfortunate vow which prevents me forever from enjoying
your largeness. Look up instead and behold the husband I have found you
in my place."

The heads of both nieces came up as soon as they heard the word husband.
They gazed at Dalzel. "He's ever so handsome," said the pink one.

"I like them with wings," said the yellow one. "It's different."

"Fangs are rather sexy," mused the pink one. "So are claws, provided
he's careful with them on the carpets."

Dalzel beamed wider with each remark. "I shall steal these at once," he
said. "I like them better than princesses. Why didn't I collect fat
ladies instead, Hasruel?"

A fond smile bared Hasruel's fangs. "It was your decision, brother." His
smile faded. "If you are quite ready, it is my duty to send you into
exile now."

"I don't mind so much now," Dalzel said, with his eyes still on the two
nieces.

Hasruel stretched out his hand again, slowly, regretfully, and slowly,
in three long rolls of thunder, Dalzel and the two nieces faded out of
sight. There was a slight smell of the sea and a faint noise of sea
gulls. Both Morgan and Valeria started crying again. Everyone else
sighed, Hasruel deepest of all. Abdullah realized with some surprise
that Hasruel truly loved his brother. Although it was hard to understand
how anyone could love Dalzel, Abdullah could hardly blame him. Who am I
to criticize? he thought, as Flower-in-the-Night came up and put her arm
through his.

Hasruel heaved up an even heavier sigh and sat down on the throne, which
fitted his size far better than Dalzel's, with his great

189
wings drooping sadly to either side. "There is other business," he said,
touching his nose gingerly. It seemed to be healing already.

"Yes, there certainly is!" said Sophie. She had been waiting on the
throne steps for her chance to speak. "When you stole our moving castle,
you disappeared my husband, Howl. Where is he? I want him back."

Hasruel raised his head sadly, but before he could reply, there were
alarmed noises from the princesses. Everyone at the bottom of the steps
retreated from the Paragon's petticoat. It was bulging and bellying up
and down on its hoops like a concertina. "Help!" cried the genie inside.
"Let me out! You promised!"

Flower-in-the-Night's hand leaped to her   mouth. "Oh! I clean forgot!"
she said, and darted away from Abdullah,   down the steps. She threw aside
the petticoat in a roll of purple smoke.   "I wish," she cried out, "that
you be released from your bottle, genie,   and be free forevermore!"

As usual the genie did not waste time in thanks. The bottle burst with a
resounding smack. Inside the rolls of smoke a decidedly more solid
figure climbed to its feet. Sophie gave a scream at the sight. "Oh,
bless the girl! Thank you, thank you!" She arrived in the vanishing
smoke so fast that she nearly knocked the solid man there over. He did
not seem to mind. He picked Sophie up and swung her around and around.
"Oh, why didn't I know?. Why didn't I realize?" Sophie panted,
staggering about on broken glass.

"Because that was the enchantment," Hasruel said gloomily. "If he was
known to be Wizard Howl, someone would have released him. You could not
know who he was, nor could he tell anyone."

The Royal Wizard Howl was a younger man than Wizard Suliman, and a good
deal more elegant. He was richly dressed in a suit of mauve satin,
against which his hair showed a rather improbable shade of yellow.
Abdullah stared at the wizard's light eyes in the wizard's bony face. He
had seen those eyes clearly, one early morning. He felt he should have
guessed. He felt himself altogether in an awkward position. He had used
the genie. He felt he knew the genie very well. Did that mean he also
knew the wizard? Or not?

190

For this reason, Abdullah did not join in when everyone, including the
soldier, gathered around Wizard Howl, exclaiming and congratulating him.
He watched the tiny Princess of Tsapfan walk quietly among the
exclaiming crowd and gravely put Morgan into Howl's arms.

"Thanks," said Howl. "I thought I'd better bring him along where I could
keep an eye on him," he explained to Sophie. "Sorry if I gave you a
fright." Howl seemed more used to holding babies than Sophie was. He
rocked Morgan soothingly and stared at him. Morgan stared, rather
balefully, back. "My word, he's ugly!" Howl said. "Chip off the old block."

"Howl!" said Sophie. But she did not sound angry.

"One moment," said Howl. He advanced to the steps of the throne and
looked up at Hasruel. "Look here, djinn," he said, "I've a bone to pick
with you. What do you mean by pinching my castle and shutting me up in a
bottle?"
Hasruel's eyes lit to an angry orange. "Wizard, do you imagine your
power is equal to mine?"

"No," said Howl. "I just want an explanation." Abdullah found himself
admiring the man. Knowing what a coward the genie had been, he had no
doubt that Howl was a jelly of terror inside. But he showed no sign of
it. He hoisted Morgan over his mauve silk shoulder and glared back at
Hasruel.

"Very well," said Hasruel. "My brother ordered me to steal the castle.
In this I had no choice. But Dalzel gave no orders concerning you,
except that I ensure you could not steal the castle back again. Had you
been a blameless man, I would simply have transported you to the island
where my brother is now. But I knew you had been using your wizardry to
conquer a neighboring country-"

"That's not fair!" said Howl. "The King ordered me!" He sounded for a
moment just like Dalzel, and he must have realized that he did. He
stopped. He thought. Then he said ruefully, "I daresay I could have
redirected His Majesty's mind if it had occurred to me. You're right.
But don't ever let me catch you where I can put you in a bottle, that's
all."

"That I might deserve," Hasruel agreed. "And I deserve it the

191

more as I took pains to let everyone involved meet with the most fitting
fate I could devise." His eyes slanted toward Abdullah. "Did I not?"

"Most painfully, great djinn," Abdullah agreed. "All my dreams came
true, not only the pleasant ones."

Hasruel nodded. "And now," he said, "I must leave you when I have
performed one more small, needful act." His wings rose, and his hands
gestured. Instantly he was in the midst of a swarm of strange winged
shapes. They hovered over his head and around the throne like
transparent sea horses, completely silent except for the faint whisper
of their whirling wings.

"His angels," Princess Beatrice explained to Princess Valeria.

Hasruel whispered to the winged shapes, and they departed from him as
suddenly as they had appeared, to reappear in the same swarm, whispering
around Jamal's head. Jamal backed away from them, horrified, but it did
no good. The swarm followed him. One after another, the winged shapes
went to perch on different parts of Jamal's dog. As each landed, it
shrank and disappeared among the hairs of the dog's coat, until only two
were left.

Abdullah suddenly found these two shapes hovering level with his eyes.
He ducked, but the shapes followed. Two small, cold voices spoke, in a
way that seemed for his ears alone. "After long thought," they said, "we
find we prefer this shape to that of toads. We think in the light of
eternity, and we therefore thank you." So saying, the two shapes darted
away to perch on Jamal's dog, where they, too, shrank and disappeared
into the gnarled skin of its ears.

Jamal stared at the dog in his arms. "Why am I holding a dog full of
angels?" he asked Hasruel.
"They will not harm you or your beast," said Hasruel. "They will simply
wait for the gold ring to reappear. Tomorrow, I believe you said? You
must see that I am naturally anxious to keep track of my life. When my
angels find it, they will bring it to me wherever I am." He sighed,
heavily enough to stir everyone's hair. "And I do not know where I shall
be," he said. "I shall have to find some place of exile in the far
deeps. I have been wicked. I cannot again join the ranks of the Good
Djinns."

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"Oh, come now, great djinn!" said Flower-in-the-Night. "It was taught to
me that goodness is forgiveness. Surely the Good Djinns will welcome you
back?"

Hasruel shook his great head. "Intelligent Princess, you do not
understand."

Abdullah found that he understood Hasruel very well. Perhaps his
understanding had something to do with the way he had been less than
polite to his father's first wife's relatives. "Hush, love," he said.
"Hasruel means that he enjoyed his wickedness and does not regret it."

"It is true," said Hasruel. "I had more fun these last months than I had
in many hundreds of years before that. Dalzel taught me this. Now I must
go away for fear I start having the same fun among the Good Djinns. If I
only knew where to go."

A thought seemed to strike Howl. He coughed. "Why not go to another
world?" he suggested. "There are many hundreds of other worlds, you know."

Hasruel's wings rose and beat with excitement, whirling the hair and
dresses of every princess in the hall. "There are? Where? Show me how I
may get to another world."

Howl put Morgan into Sophie's awkward arms and bounded up the steps of
the throne. What he showed Hasruel was a matter of a few strange
gestures and a nod or so. Hasruel seemed to understand perfectly. He
nodded in return. Then he rose from the throne and simply walked away,
without another word, across the hall and through the wall as if it were
so much mist. The huge hall suddenly felt empty.

"Good riddance!" said Howl.

"Did you send him to your world?" Sophie asked.

"No way!" said Howl. "They've got enough to worry about there. I sent
him in the opposite direction. I took a risk that the castle wouldn't
just disappear." He turned around slowly, staring out at the cloudy
reaches of the hall. "It's all still here," he said. "That means
Calcifer must be here somewhere. He's the one who keeps it going." He
gave out a ringing shout. "Calcifer! Where areyou?"

193

The Paragon's petticoat once more seemed to take on a life of its own.
This time it bowled away sideways on its hoops to let the magic carpet
float free of it. The carpet shook itself, in rather the same way as
Jamal's dog was now doing. Then, to everyone's surprise, it flopped to
the floor and began to unravel. Abdullah nearly cried out at the waste.
The long thread whirling free was blue and curiously bright, as if the
carpet were not made of the usual wool at all. The free thread, darting
back and forth across the carpet, rose higher and higher as it grew
longer, until it was stretched between the high cloudy ceiling and the
almost bare canvas it had been woven into. At last, with an impatient
flip, the other end tore free from the canvas and shrank upward into the
rest, where it spread in a flickering sort of way, and shrank again, and
finally spread into a new shape like an upside-down teardrop or maybe a
flame. This shape came drifting downward, steadily and purposefully.
When it was near, Abdullah could see a face on the front of it composed
of little purple or green or orange flames. Abdullah shrugged
fatalistically. It seemed that he had parted with all those gold pieces
to buy a fire demon and not a magic carpet at all.

The fire demon spoke, with a purple, flickering mouth. "Thank goodness!"
it said. "Why didn't someone call my name before? Ihurt."

"Oh, poor Calcifer!" said Sophie. "I didn't knowl"

"I'm not speaking to you," retorted the strange flame-shaped being. "You
stuck your claws into me. Nor," it said as it floated past Howl, "to
you, either. You let me in for this. It wasn't me that wanted to help
the King's army. I'm only speaking to him," it said, bobbing up beside
Abdullah's shoulder. He heard his hair frizzle gently. The flame was
hot. "He's the only person who ever tried to flatter me."

"Since when," Howl asked acidly, "have you needed flattery?"

"Since I discovered how nice it is to be told I'm nice," said Calcifer.

"But I don't think you are nice," said Howl. "Be like that, then!" He
turned his back on Calcifer with a fling of mauve satin sleeves.

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"Do you want to be a toad?" Calcifer asked. "You're not the only one who
can do toads, you know!"

Howl tapped angrily with one mauve-booted foot. "Perhaps," he said,
"your new friend might ask you to get this castle down where it belongs
then."

Abdullah felt a little sad. Howl seemed to be making it plain that he
and Abdullah did not know each other. But he took the hint. He bowed. "O
sapphire among sorcerous beings," he said, "flame of festivity and
candle among carpets, magnificent more by a hundred times in your true
form than ever you were as treasured tapestry-"

"Get on with it!" muttered Howl.

"-would you graciously consent to re-place this castle onearth?"
Abdullah finished.

"With pleasure," said Calcifer.

They all felt the castle going down. It went so fast at first that
Sophie clutched Howl's arm and a number of princesses cried out. For as
Valeria loudly said, a person's stomach got left behind in the sky. It
was possible that Calcifer was out of practice after being in the wrong
shape for so long. Whatever the reason was, the descent slowed after a
minute and became so gentle that everyone hardly noticed it. This was
just as well, because as it descended, the castle became noticeably
smaller. Everyone was jostled toward everyone else and had to fight for
room in which to balance. The walls moved inward, turning from cloudy
porphyry to plain plaster as they came. The ceiling moved down, and its
vaulting turned to large black beams, and a window appeared behind the
place where the throne had been. It was shadowy at first. Abdullah
turned toward it eagerly, hoping for one more glimpse of the transparent
sea with its sunset islands, but by the time the window was a real solid
window, there was only sky outside, flooding the cottage-sized room with
clear yellow dawn. By this time princess was crowded against princess,
Sophie was squashed in a corner, grasping Howl in one arm and Morgan
with the other, and Abdullah found himself squeezed between
Flower-in-the-Night and the soldier.

The soldier, Abdullah realized, had not said a word in a very

195

long time. In fact, he was behaving decidedly oddly. He had pulled his
borrowed veils back over his head and was sitting bowed over on a small
stool which had appeared beside the hearth as the castle shrank.

"Are you quite well?" Abdullah asked him.

"Perfectly," said the soldier. Even his voice sounded odd.

Princess Beatrice pushed her way through to him. "Oh, there you are!"
she said. "Whatever is the matter with you? Afraid I'm going to go back
on my promise now we're getting back to normal? Is that it?"

"No," said the soldier. "Or rather, yes. It'll bother you."

"It will bother me not at all!" snapped Princess Beatrice. "When I make
a promise, I keep it. Prince Justin can just go to ... whistle."

"But I am Prince Justin," said the soldier.

"What?" said Princess Beatrice.

Very slowly and sheepishly the soldier put away his veils and looked up.
It was still the same face, with the same blue eyes that were either
utterly innocent or deeply dishonest, or both, but it was a smoother and
more educated face. A different sort of soldierliness looked out of it.
"That damned djinn enchanted me, too," he said. "I remember it now. I
was waiting in a wood for the search parties to report back." He looked
rather apologetic. "We were hunting for Princess Beatrice-er, you, you
know-without much luck, and suddenly my tent blew away and there was the
djinn, squeezing himself in among the trees. 'I'm taking the Princess,'
he said. 'And since you defeated her country by unfair use of magic, you
can be one of the defeated soldiers and see how you like it.' And next
thing I knew, I was wandering about on the battlefield, thinking I was a
Strangian soldier."

"And did you hate it?" asked Princess Beatrice.

"Well," said the Prince, "it was hard. But I sort of got on with it and
picked up everything useful I could and made a few plans. I see I shall
have to do something for all those defeated soldiers. But"-a grin that
was purely that of the old soldier spread across his face- "to tell the
truth, I enjoyed myself rather a lot, wandering through

196

Ingary. I had fun being wicked. I'm like that djinn, really. It's
getting back to ruling again that's depressing me."

"Well, I can help you there," said Princess Beatrice. "I know the ropes,
after all."

"Really?" said the Prince, and he looked up at her in the same way that
as the soldier he had looked at the kitten in his hat.

Flower-in-the-Night nudged Abdullah, softly and delightedly. "The Prince
of Ochinstan!" she whispered. "No need to fear him!"

Shortly after that the castle came to earth as lightly as a feather.
Calcifer, floating against the low beams of the ceiling, announced that
he had set it down in the fields outside Kingsbury. "And I sent a
message to one of Suliman's mirrors," he said smugly.

This seemed to exasperate Howl. "So did I," he said angrily. "Take a lot
on yourself, don't you?"

"Then he got two messages," said Sophie. "What of it?"

"How stupid!" said Howl, and began to laugh. At that Calcifer sizzled
with laughter, too, and they seemed to be friends again. Thinking about
it, Abdullah could see how Howl felt. He had been bursting with anger
all the time he was a genie, and he was still bursting with anger now,
with no one except Calcifer to take it out on. Probably Calcifer felt
the same. Both of them had magic that was too powerful to risk being
angry with ordinary people.

Clearly both messages had arrived. Someone beside the window shouted,
"Look!" and everyone crowded to it to watch the gates of Kingsbury
opening to let the King's coach hasten out behind a squad of soldiers.
In fact, it was a procession. The coaches of numerous ambassadors
followed the King's, emblazoned with the arms of most of the countries
where Hasruel had collected princesses.

Howl turned toward Abdullah. "I feel I got to know you rather well," he
said. They looked at each other awkwardly. "Do you know me?" Howl asked.

Abdullah bowed. "At least as well as you know me."

"That's what I was afraid of," Howl said ruefully. "Well, then, I know I
can rely on you to do some good fast talking when it's needed. When all
those coaches get here, it may be necessary."

197

It was. It was a most confusing time, during the course of which
Abdullah grew rather hoarse. But the most confusing part, as far as
Abdullah was concerned, was that every single princess, not to speak of
Sophie, Howl, and Prince Justin, insisted on telling the King how brave
and intelligent Abdullah had been. Abdullah kept wanting to put them
right. He had not been brave-just walking on air because
Flower-in-the-Night loved him.
Prince Justin took Abdullah aside, into one of the many antechambers of
the palace. "Accept it," he said. "Nobody ever gets praised for the
right reasons. Look at me. The Strangians here are all over me because
I'm giving money to their old soldiers, and my royal brother is
delighted because I've stopped making difficulties about marrying
Princess Beatrice. Everyone thinks I'm a model prince."

"Did you object to marrying her?" asked Abdullah.

"Oh, yes," said the Prince. "I hadn't met her then, of course. The King
and I had one of our quarrels about it, and I threatened to throw him
over the palace roof. When I disappeared, he thought I'd just gone off
in a huff for a while. He hadn't even started to worry."

The King was so pleased with his brother, and with Abdullah for bringing
Valeria and his other Royal Wizard back, that he ordered a magnificent
double wedding for the next day. This added a great deal of urgency to
the confusion. Howl hurriedly made a strange simulacrum-constructed
mostly of parchment-of a King's Messenger, which was sent by magic to
the Sultan of Zanzib, to offer him transport to his daughter's wedding.
This simulacrum came back half an hour later, looking decidedly
tattered, with the news that the Sultan had a fifty-foot stake ready for
Abdullah if he ever showed his face in Zanzib again. This being so,
Sophie and Howl went and talked to the King. The King created two new
posts called Ambassadors Extraordinary for the Realm of Ingary and gave
those posts to Abdullah and Flower-in-the-Night that same evening.

The wedding of the Prince and the Ambassador made history, for Princess
Beatrice and Flower-in-the-Night had fourteen princesses each as
bridesmaids and the King himself gave the brides away. Jamal was
Abdullah's best man. As he passed Abdullah the

198

wedding ring, he reported in a whisper that the angels had departed
earlier that morning, taking Hasruel's life with them.

"And a good thing, too!" Jamal said. "Now my poor dog will stop
scratching."

Almost the only persons of note who did not attend the wedding were
Wizard Suliman and his wife. This had only indirectly to do with the
King's anger. It seemed that Lettie had spoken so strong-mindedly to the
King, when the King wished to arrest Wizard Suliman, that she had gone
into labor rather earlier than her time. Wizard Suliman was afraid to
leave her side. But on the very day of the wedding Lettie gave birth to
a daughter with no ill effects at all.

"Oh, good!" said Sophie. "I knew I was cut out to be an aunt."

The first task of the two new ambassadors was to conduct numbers of the
kidnapped princesses to their homes. Some of them, like the tiny
Princess of Tsapfan, lived so far away that their countries had barely
been heard of. The ambassadors had instructions to make trading
alliances and also to note all other strange places on the way, with a
view to later exploration. Howl had talked to the King. Now, for some
reason, all Ingary was talking about mapping the globe. Exploring
parties were being chosen and trained.
What with journeying, and pampering princesses, and arguing with foreign
kings, Abdullah was somehow always too busy to make his confession to
Flower-in-the-Night. It always seemed that there would be a more
promising moment the next day. But at last, when they were about to
arrive in far-distant Tsapfan, he realized that he could delay no longer.

He took a deep breath. He felt the color leave his face. "I am not
really a prince," he blurted out. There. It was said.

Flower-in-the-Night looked up from the map she was drawing. The shaded
lamp in the tent made her face almost more beautiful than usual. "Oh, I
know that," she said.

"What?" whispered Abdullah.

"Well, naturally, while I was in the castle in the air, I had plenty of
time to think about you," she said. "And I soon realized you were
romancing, because it was so like my daydream, only the

199

other way around. I used to dream that I was just an ordinary girl, you
see, and that my father was a carpet merchant in the Bazaar. I used to
imagine that I managed the business for him."

"You are a marvel!" said Abdullah.

"Then so are you," she said, and went back to her map.

They returned to Ingary in due time with an extra packhorse loaded with
the boxes of sweets the princesses had promised Valeria. There were
chocolates and candied oranges and coconut ices and honeyed nuts, but
the most wonderful of all were the sweets from the tiny princess-layer
upon layer of paper-thin candy that the tiny princess called Summer
Leaves. These came in a box so beautiful that Valeria used it for
jewelry when she grew older. Strangely enough, she had almost given up
screaming. The King could not understand it, but as Valeria explained to
Sophie, when thirty people all tell you you've got to scream, it rather
puts you off the whole idea.

Sophie and Howl were living-somewhat quarrelsomely, it must be
confessed, although they were said to be happiest that way-in the moving
castle again. One of its aspects was a fine mansion in the Chipping
Valley. When Abdullah and Flower-in-the- Night returned, the King gave
them land in the Chipping Valley, too, and permission to build a palace
there. The house they had built was quite modest-it even had a thatched
roof-but their gardens soon became one of the wonders of the land. It
was said that Abdullah had help in their design from at least one of the
Royal Wizards, for how else could even an Ambassador have a bluebell
wood that grew bluebells all the year around?

200

Abdullah was a young and not very prosperous carpet dealer. His father,
who had been disappointed in him, had left him only enough money to open
a modest booth in the Bazaar. When he was not selling carpets, Abdullah
spent his time daydreaming. In his dreams he was not the son of his
father, but the long-lost son of a prince. There was also a princess who
had been betrothed to him at birth. He was content with his life and his
daydreams until, one day, a stranger sold him a magic carpet.
In this stunning sequel to Howl's Moving Castle, Diana Wynne Jones has
again created a large-scale, fast-paced fantasy in which nothing and no
one are quite what they seem. There are good and bad djinns, a genie in
a bottle, wizards, witches, cats and dogs (but are they cats and dogs?),
and a mysterious floating castle filled with kidnapped princesses, as
well as two puzzling prophecies. The story speeds along with tantalizing
twists and turns until the prophecies are fulfilled, Abdullah gets his
princess, and all is resolved in a totally satisfying, breathtaking,
surprise-filled ending.

GREENWILLOW BOOKS 105 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016

JACKET PAINTING ©1991 BY JOS. A. SMITH

201

DIANA WYNNE JONES was raised inthe village of Thaxted in Essex, England.
She has been a compulsive storyteller for as long as she can remember,
enjoying most ardently those tales dealing with vintenes,1 nôDgôûïins
arïcrtnëïiKe. Ms. Jones lives in Bristol, England with her husband, a
professor of English at Bristol University. They have three sons. In
addition to her outstanding books for young readers, she is the author
of three plays for children and the editor of Hidden Turnings: A
Collection of Stories Through Time and Space.

BOOKS BY DIANA WYNNE JONES

The Ogre Downstairs

Dogsbody

Eight Days of Luke

The Lives of Christopher Chant

A Tale of Time City

Howl's Moving Castle

Archer's Goon

Warlock at the Wheel

Fire and Hemlock

Witch Week

The Homeward Bounders

Charmed Life

REINFORCED TRADE EDITION