The Complete Compleat Enchanter

by L. Sprague deCamp

  “You just leave that to me.” Shea grinned. “I’ll give you a hint, though; I know something about magic.”

  Medoro touched both sets of fingertips to his temples, and said: “There is no god but God, and it is written that none shall die before the appointed hour. Speak, and I will obey as though I were your Mammeluke.”

  “Will Roger come here if you ask him?”

  “Nay, he would rather whip my slave from his door.”

  “Then we’ll have to go to him. Do you know where he hangs out?”

  “It is even so.”

  “Okay. But we won’t do it just yet. I’m merely laying out the program. How much authority do you have around here?”

  “O Sheikh, under Lord Dardinell I am captain of fourscore men.”

  Shea though it would go hard with a Saracen army if it had to rely on captains like this languishing ladykiller to lead it, but just now he was too busy to pursue that question. “Can you bring them here, three or four at a time?”

  “Hearing and obedience,” said Medoro, who salaamed and began to get up.

  Shea, who did not altogether like the scared look that persisted in Medoro’s eyes, said: “Hold it; let’s have just one to start with. We can try out the magic on him to make sure it works.”

  Medoro reseated himself and clapped his hands. “Bid Tarico al-Malik enter and stay not, on the value of his head,” he told the servant. Picking up the lute, he began to strum chords, the jewels in his bracelets flashing in the light of the Greek lamp that had been brought in with dinner.

  “Lend me one of those bracelets, will you?” asked Shea. When the guardsman came in, Shea had Medoro order him to sit down and relax, then placed the lamp before the soldier. As the young Saracen continued to pick the lute, Shea dangled the bracelet before the soldier’s eyes, twirling it this way and that, meanwhile repeating in a low voice as much as he could remember of the sleeping-spell Astolph had used on him.

  Either as magic or as hypnotism the method was a little unorthodox; it seemed to work nevertheless. The man’s eyes went blank, and he would have tumbled over if he had not been leaning against the wall of the tent.

  Presently Shea said: “Can you hear me?”

  “Aye.”

  “You will obey my commands.”

  “As the commands of a father.”

  “The Amir wants to surprise the camp. Discipline needs tightening up. Do you understand?”

  “It is as my lord says.”

  “As soon as the evening prayer is over, you will draw your sword and run through the camp, cutting tent ropes.”

  “To hear is to obey.”

  “You will cut all the tent ropes you can, no matter what anyone says to you.”

  “To hear is to obey,” repeated the soldier.

  “You well forget all about this order till the time for action comes.”

  “To hear is to obey.”

  “And you will forget who gave you this order.”

  “To hear is to obey.”

  “Wake up!”

  The man blinked and came out of it, wiggling as though his foot had gone to sleep. As he stood up, Shea asked; “What were your orders?”

  “To watch well the door of Lord Dardinell’s tent tonight. But as my head lives, Lord Medoro has given me none others.”

  “He forgot. You were to send in four more men. Isn’t that right, Medoro?”

  “It is as has been spoken,” said Medoro languidly.

  The man shifted his feet. “There was—”

  “Nothing else,” said Shea firmly. He looked at Medoro, who laid down his lute and stared back.

  “Verily, Sheikh Harr,” said the latter, “this is as though the prophets were again on earth. Will he assuredly cut the tent ropes as you commanded?”

  “If he doesn’t, I’ll put a spell on him to make him eat his own head,” said Shea, who had decided that he could count on all the cooperation the twerp was capable of giving. “Listen, when those others come in, keep it up with that Oriental swing, will you? I think it has something to do with putting them under.”

  Twelve

  When the last of the fourscore guards had been given his orders, Shea felt tired. Medoro, placing a delicately formed hand over his mouth, said: “Surely we have now done so much that the darkness of Eblis must fall on the camp, and we can easily seize the damsel and make off with her. I am wearied, though somewhat comforted by the excellence of your plan. Let us sleep and await the deliverance of Allah.”

  “Nothing doing,” said Shea. “In my country we have a proverb about Allah’s helping those who help themselves, and there’s one thing we’ve got to help ourselves to right now. That’s Roger. Remember, you promised.” He stood up, put on the steel cap, buckled on the sword and stuck the sheath of the dagger through the sword belt. The mail shirt, he decided, would have to stay behind, since for the kind of work he envisaged it was important to keep down weight. Medoro sulkily imitated him.

  Outside the shadows were already stretching across the valley below the slope that held the encampment. Although Shea did not know when the hour of evening prayer was, he guessed it would be soon. That meant they must hurry if they wanted to catch Roger as part of the combined operation. Once the bruiser got loose with an uproar going on there would be no finding him.

  But Medoro only sauntered along, possessed of a perfect demon of slowness. Every now and then he stopped to give or acknowledge a greeting, and those to whom he spoke seemed all to want to start an interminable discussion of nothing.

  Shea thought these must be the most garrulous people on earth. “Listen,” he said finally, “if you don’t come along, I’ll put a spell on you that will make you challenge Roger to a duel.”

  Shea had heard of people’s teeth chattering, but this was the first time he had actually heard it. Medoro mended his pace.

  Roger, it appeared, lived in a tent of Spartan simplicity as to outline, but as big as Medoro’s. Two fierce-looking bearded men were pacing back and forth in front of it with naked scimitars.

  “We want to see Roger of Carena,” said Shea to the nearest. The other paused and joined his companion, who was examining the callers.

  The first guard said: “There are many tents in the camp. Let the lords seek another, since all are friends under Allah.” He held his sword about waist-high, just in case.

  Shea glanced over his shoulders to see the sun sinking fast. “But we’ve got to see him before the evening prayer,” he insisted, shaking off the fingers Medoro was plucking at his sleeve with. “He’s a friend of ours. We knew him in Carena.”

  “O Lord, the Prince Roger’s withers will be wrung. Yet it is written that it is better than one man should have an unhappiness, which endures only the appointed hour of God, than that two should lose their lives. Learn that if Lord Roger should be roused before the hour of evening prayer, we two should lose nothing less than our heads, for so he has sworn it by the hair of his beard.”

  “He hasn’t got one,” said Shea. Medoro, however, plucked insistently and whispered: “Now there is no help for it but we must leave this project for the other, since we are evidently not to be admitted by these two good men. Would you try steel against them and so provoke the shame of Islam?”

  “No, but there’s something else I’d try,” said Shea, whipping round on his heel. Medoro followed him dubiously until they reached the side of the tent next door. With his dagger Shea cut eight long slivers of wood from one of the tentpegs. Two of these he stuck under the brim of his helmet, so that they projected like horns, and two more he inserted under his upper lip, hanging down like tusks. Then he decorated Medoro’s wondering face likewise with the remaining four.

  That ought to do for what Doc Chalmers called the “somatic” part of the spell. As for the verbal part, how could he do better than Shakespeare, slightly modified for the occasion? Shea turned round and round on his heel, moving his hands in Chalmers’ passes and chanting in a low voice:

  “Black sp
irits and white, red spirits and gray,

  Mingle, Mingle, mingle, you that mingle may;

  Fair is foul and foul is fair;

  Change, O change the form we bear!”

  “Okay,” he said to Medoro; “come along.” They swung around the corner of the tent. The guard who had been talking to them was just facing their way. He took one look at them, gasped: “The Jann!”, dropped his sword, and ran for his life. The other guard looked also, turned a curious mottled color, screamed: “The Jann!” Falling on the ground he tried to bury his face in the grass.

  Shea lifted the flap and led the way boldly in. There was no light in the outer compartment, and it was already dim with exterior twilight, but there was no mistaking the mountain of flesh piled among the rugs. Shea started toward it, but in the darkness tripped over some small object. He pitched forward and, unable to stop himself, struck the mass of Roger in the midriff in the position of a man kneading a vast vat of dough.

  Roger awoke at once, rolling to his feet with incredible speed. “La-Allah-il’-Allah!” he cried, snatching a huge scimitar from the wall of the tent. “Ha, Jann! I have not fought Jann!” The sword curved back for a blow as Medoro cowered away.

  “Wait!” yelled Shea. The scimitar checked. “Hold a minute, will you?” said Shea. “We’re really friends. I’ll show you.” He stepped over to Medoro, pronouncing the counterspell and pulling at the chin-length tusks into which the slivers beneath Medoro’s lips had turned.

  Nothing happened. The tusks did not give. Between them Medoro still wore his foolish, frightened grin, and above, a pair of bull-like horns continued to project from neat holes in the young man’s helmet.

  Shea repeated the counterspell again, louder, feeling of his own face and head, and discovering that he was likewise festooned with horns and tusks. Again, however, nothing happened.

  Far away somewhere a voice rose in a banshee howl. That would be an inam whose alarm clock, or whatever he used for the purpose, was a little fast, calling the faithful to prayer. The others would soon follow.

  Shea faced Roger and said: “Listen, let’s talk this over. We’re Jann, all right, sent here by the big boss to fight with the best mortal fighter in the world. But we have some pretty terrible powers, you know, and we want to arrange things so you don’t have to put on a scrap at odds of more than two to one.”

  It sounded phony as hell in Shea’s own ears, but Roger let the scimitar droop and grinned beefily. “By Allah the Omnipotent! The hour of good fortune has come upon me. Surely there would be no greater pleasure than to be with two of the Jann in battle bound.”

  Roger flung himself among the rugs, half-turning his back toward Shea, who motioned frantically to Medoro to sit beside the colossus. Shea hoped Medoro would keep doing what he did best, namely talking. The twerp was probably too scared to do anything else, for he flopped beside Roger, saying: “Among our people we have a poem of the combats of the Jann. Would your lordship care to hear it? If you have a lute—”

  “O Jann, I would hear it not much more than a poem about dogs pissing on the street. Learn that at Castle Carena I acquired the taste for the despisal of poetry, since the worst of all poets came among us to visit: Medoro by name.”

  Shea caught the glance of appeal and indignation which Medoro flashed over his shoulder through his jinn makeup, but continued to stroll about the tent, out of the conversation. A large dagger with an ornate gold-hilted handle hung on the wall; he hefted it by the scabbarded blade and looked at the back of Roger’s head.

  “Know, O Lord Roger,” said the poet rapidly, “that by poetry and song alone is the world advanced. For it is the rule of the Prophet, on whose name be blessings . . .”

  A steel spike stuck up through the center of Roger’s turban, meaning that he had on some kind of helmet beneath the cloth. If Shea hit him while he wore that, the dagger hilt would merely go bong, and Roger would turn and grapple.

  Medoro was talking a perfect flood of words that made little sense.

  Shea reached down, gripped the spike firmly, and switched it forward, tumbling helmet and turban both over the big man’s face.

  “Ho!” cried Roger’s muffled voice as he reached upward.

  Thump! The dagger hilt hit his shaven poll in the medullar region. Shea was left with the helmet-and-turban combination in his left hand as the ox rolled over and down. From outside came the united squalling of the call to prayer.

  A thread of spittle ran down Medoro’s chin beside the left tusk, and his hands fluttered wildly. “There—there is no gug-grace or goodness but in Allah,” he babbled. “What thought is now to be taken for preservation?”

  “Suppose you just leave that to me while you get busy and find some extra turbans. I haven’t steered you wrong yet, have I?”

  Medoro, familiar with camp life, quickly found the turbans in the inner compartment, and they tied Roger firmly, winding him round and round with them and knotting them until he looked like a cocoon. He seemed to be breathing all right; Shea hoped his skull were not fractured. Time was getting shorter and shorter, with the show outside about to begin.

  Medoro said: “O Lord Harr, surely we shall never be able to move him hence, and what of the fearsome appearance you have put upon us?”

  “Shut up,” said Shea. “I’m thinking.”

  “If we had but the magic carpet of Baghdad—”

  Shea snapped his fingers. “Right on the button! I knew I’d forgotten something. Here, find stuff that’ll make a small fire with a lot of smoke. Is there a feather anywhere around here? Don’t argue with me, damn it. This is important if you want to see Belphegor again.”

  When Medoro returned from the inner compartment of the tent with a few twigs and the aigrette of an ornamental turban, he found Shea already busily at work. The journeyman magician had caught a couple of the big blue flies that buzzed about in vast numbers, and looped a silken thread from Roger’s wrappings about them, attaching one end of it to the fringe of Roger’s main carpet. The flies tried to take off as he released them.

  “Put those twigs in a little pile here and light them,” Shea directed, rolling back the carpet to leave a bare space on the ground.

  While Medoro made the light with flint and steel and a tinderbox, Shea pulled the aigrette apart and began weaving it into the carpet, knotting it into the fringe. Outside something seemed to be going on. As the flame caught, shouts and the sound of running became audible.

  The twigs, aromatics, filled the tent with pungent smoke as Shea recited the spell he had been composing:

  “Be light—cough!—carpet, as the leaves you bear;

  Be light as the clouds that fly with thee.

  Soar through the skies and let us now but share

  The impulse of the strength. Let us be free

  From—cough! cough! cough! If even

  The Roc and all the Jann could fly like we

  Then were they—cough! right aërial indeed.

  To you the spirits of the sky are given

  That they may help us in our sorest need.

  Cough-cough-cough!”

  The smoke died. The carpet was beginning to wiggle, parts of it rising from the ground and settling down again with a slight whump, while the tumult outside increased. The Jinn that was Medoro rubbed smarting eyes.

  “O Sheikh Harr,” he said, “this is not the worst of poetry, though it must be admitted that you failed to accompany it with the lute. Moreover there was a foot missing from the fifth line, and the end is somewhat weak.”

  “Never mind the higher criticism, but help me get this elephant onto the carpet, will you?” said Shea.

  They rolled Roger over and wrapped him in one of the sitting carpets before depositing him on the—Shea hoped—flying one. His eyes had come open and he regarded them balefully. Where the gag allowed, the muscles of his face moved in something like prayer.

  Shea flung back the tent door and looked out. There was certainly something happening in the gathering dusk; pe
ople running in all directions with manifold shoutings. As Shea watched, a big square tent with a pennon on top, farther along the hillside, corkscrewed down into collapse.

  “Sit down and hold on,” Shea told Medoro. He himself climbed on the carpet, which seemed to be showing signs of restlessness even under Roger’s weight. Reaching to his full height, Shea swung his sword at the roof, which split to show an indigo sky from which one solemn star winked back at him. He squatted and declaimed:

  “By warp and by woof,

  High over the roof—”

  Chop! went a sword into one of the tent ropes outside. Chop! went another. “Stand, in the name of Allah!” shouted a voice.

  Shea finished:

  “Fly swiftly and surely

  To serve our behoof!”

  The tent collapsed, and the carpet swooshed up and out through the gap, its fringes flapping.

  Thirteen

  A bareheaded man and one of Shea’s rope-cutters were arguing so violently that neither noticed the carpet as it soared over their heads. Agramant’s camp was in pandemonium beneath; everywhere tents were wobbling and collapsing. Some were as large as circus tents, and great was the fall thereof. Lumpy objects moved under the enshrouding canvas, and here and there men fought. Out on one of the spurs of the hillside a tent had gone down into fire which blazed brightly in the gathering gloom, while people ran around it, trying to beat out the flames or douse them with futile small buckets of water.

  The carpet heaved and bucked, swirling this way and that. A little experiment showed Shea that he could direct its movements by pulling left, right, up, or down at the fringe of its leading edge. However, further experiment added the information that it was so very sensitive on the controls that he must be careful lest he throw them into a loop. Roger almost rolled off as the vehicle took a vicious down-curve. Medoro, though he had not eaten, seemed to be having trouble keeping whatever was in his stomach.