Wizard's Castle: Omnibus

by Диана Уинн Джонс

  “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 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 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 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 dream!” said Abdullah.

  Somehow his depression was clean gone. Even breathing was easier.

  “It was real!” he said.

  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!”

  Chapter 3: 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 courte
sies, 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. “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 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 it!” 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!”

  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 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 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?”