And there was a weird weeping in the afternoon olive groves of the great botanical gardens of Baghdad Mirage when we came to that place on the east bank of the Tigris river. Those five hundred olive groves were really the heart of the botanical gardens.
This weeping seemed to come from anywhere and everywhere. It was shattering, it was desolating. It was such crying as may be heard in seventh hell.
“Pay it no mind at all,” said a green bird who lived in the gardens. “It is a boy king who died here anciently. And what does a boy king have to cry about? We laugh and jibe at his wailing voice which we cannot locate however much we fly about in search of it.”
But the eyes of the bird were a-shine with tears and not with laughter or jibing.
We were in the middle of wonders and prodigies wherever we turned. Like all cities built by magic, Baghdad was the seventh city on its site. The magic must grow out of real roots. The seven cities of this sequence were: Babel whose tower had come within two hundred feet of reaching Heaven; Gade: Babylon the Great; Burj Aqarquf; Seleucia; Cispon the Great; and now Baghdad the Great.
Baghdad of the Thousand Gates was certainly a great city inside its great walls. But the greatness of Baghdad overflowed from the royal, classic, central core of the tall-towered palaces and pagodas, and the joyous gardens and groves, to the one thousand suburbs outside the one thousand gates. Each suburb had an ongoing fair, a stupendous circus that performed night and day forever, and a grand bazaar of whichever of the one thousand great trades or traffics of Baghdad pertained to that suburb. The circuit of the suburbs was a seven-hour camel ride, a three hour-tram ride, or a two-hour taxi ride. In one hundred of the thousand suburbs the bazaar was a slave-market, each one of them featuring choice slaves from one of the realms of Gaea-Earth or from one of three dozen other worlds.
In each of the suburbs there were from fifty to two hundred theatres, and twice that many night clubs. And within the gates of Baghdad itself (in which were allowed no bazaars, fairs, or circuses, save only the Grand Bazaar and the Grand Fair and the Grand Circus), within Baghdad itself were to be found both the highest and the lowest of entertainments and diversions.
In Central Baghdad there were thousands of roof-gardens of the nobility and other opulent people, each with its fountain and its festoons of Babylonian Lanterns. There were numerous clavichord-bars and supper clubs of the middle rich, and there were the at-home salons with their dazzling chatter and queerly nostalgic artiness.
And then there were the low dives. There were the low dives even in the most altitudinous parts of the city, those of the daredevil roof-climbers and tower-scalers, of the turret-freaks and of the steeplejack beggars. And there were also the strange meeting-places of the winged juveniles. Almost every old noble family had a younger member who was winged and who was therefore declared ignoble and an outcast. But these skiey outcasts assembled with other young outcasts (because of the laws, few of the lawless ones lived to be very old) and rioted and reveled. And who would go up there and get them on their crowns and ledges?
And then there were the low dives indeed, in the cellars and cisterns and sewers of Baghdad, and in the sub-cellars and the sub-sewers. We heard rumors that these lowest of low places were often frequented by the Caliph Harun Al-Rashid who said that he was ruler of low places and people as well as the high.
Much of the magic of Baghdad had solidified in the approximately fifty years since it had been built. The realization of the precariousness of the place broke through only now and then when one would see breaks and gaps in the pavements and lawns, and would see great depths and even blue skies below one. But generally it was quite solid and substantial. In another fifty years, people would forget that the construction had been magical rather than material.
It's true that there were anachronisms and anomalies all over the place to betoken its magical origin: the trams, the taxis, the railroads, they did not belong here yet. And these were gradually breaking down for lack of unmagical spare parts. For these anachronisms, the Creating Caliph had surely drawn on other of his childhoods, on Camiroi, on Astrobe, on Dahae, on Kentauron Mikron especially. What made the Kentauron Mikron case special to us was that we (my Dame and I) had known the Caliph during his Kentauron childhood.
The Boy-Caliph had always felt that if he made something by magic in one place and time he should as easily make it in another. But he couldn't, not as easily, not as substantially, not unless the roots of the thing were to be found in the other case also.
He couldn't do all his magics here on Gaea-Earth because this world wasn't ready for them. But with many of them he sure did come close. The Baghdad-Constantinople Railroad is an example of this. Part of it came out of the Caliph's childhood on Astrobe, and part of it from his later childhood on Kentauron Mikron. There had been some wonderful trains in that day before yesterday era on Kentauron Mikron (every world goes through an era of wonderful trains), but Gaea-Earth was not ready for them yet.
This railroad, the pride of the Boy-Caliph, did run from Baghdad almost to Constantinople, so a friendly citizen of Baghdad told us. But the Christians of Constantinople would not allow it across the Straits from Asia Minor to their City. For many years now the train had run from Almost-Constantinople to Baghdad, and all its coaches were always full of important people, and all its baggage cars were always crammed with boxes and bales and trunks and shipping crates. This railroad fooled all the common people of the lands that it traversed, and some of them even bought tickets for it and genuinely traveled on it from one station to another. It fooled the camels and it fooled the horses. If one of the locomotives struck an animal of either of those species the locomotive would mangle it and probably kill it. But not a mule. A mule is unbelieving in almost all matters, and the mules of the country around there did not believe in the Baghdad-Constantinople Railroad. The mules would graze between the tracks of the railroad, and they would stand their ground if a train came. And when the moment of impact arrived, the mules and the train would pass right through each other with no harm done to anybody.
The citizen of Baghdad told us that in his opinion the Boy-Caliph did not completely believe in this one of his own creations. But it was a magnificent thing as it came hooting and clanging along its tracks, all in gala colors and classic shapes, and filled with truly gala people.
So also it was with the tram-cars. My Dame and I took a ride on one of them. It was a fast ride, pleasant, clean; and it got us from one station to another. But it wasn't real.
The walls are said to have been eighty-seven feet in thickness and three hundred and fifty feet in height. They were drawn around the city in the form of an exact square, each side of which was fifteen miles in length, all built of brick cemented together with bitumen. On every side of this great square there were twenty-five gates’ (possibly this should have been ‘two-hundred-and-fifty gates’) ‘which were all made of solid brass. From these twenty-five gates the same number of streets ran in lines parallel to the gates on the opposite side of the wall, thus forming fifty streets each fifteen miles long, and one hundred and fifty feet broad. Around these squares stood the houses… high and beautified, towards the streets with all kinds of ornaments. The space within the middle of each square was vacant ground laid out in beautiful gardens.
— Compendium of History. Kerney.
— and, lo, it was lofty, strongly fortified, rising high into the air, impenetrable; the height of its walls was eighty cubits, and it had five and twenty gates, none of which would open but by means of some artifice… such was the beauty of construction and architecture of the city… It is named the City of Brass.
— “The City of Brass,” The Arabian Nights.
I am a Master Spy by trade, and I am a Master Mariner as cover for my spying, and also as a means of livelihood. But spying is my life and it is the love of my life. I spy always in the service of my world Kentauron Mikron. I know another spy when I meet one, and I have met one within the last half hour. ‘Citizen
of Baghdad’ seems to be his code name, but plainly he is not of the City of Baghdad. I do not believe he is of Gaea-Earth. He is from one of the other four of the five worlds, Astrobe, Camiroi, Dahae, or my own Kentauron Mikron. And I should have known him before, unless it is that he is the secret ‘Spy who is behind the Spies’ on one of these worlds. He is not the spy who is behind my own spying for Kentauron Mikron. He is very pleasant and likeable; but all around him there are warning songs: ‘Here there be traps’.
“Your Arabic is quite good,” I told Citizen, “but it is Arabic learned from a learning machine. You will have every one of the thirty-three thousand words that are necessary, and your pronunciation and diction are elegant. But you will not know the word for the rare ‘Yemen Cowbird’, nor the word for the Merv Thistle which is really a rare variety of tumbleweed and no thistle at all, nor the word for the three-year-old black-winged female locust, nor for the Samaritan bed-bug. I will guess that you are not from Gaea-Earth at all. I will guess that you are from Dahae World.”
“You guess wrong,” said ‘Citizen of Baghdad’. “Your own Arabic is good, and it is also learned from a learning machine. Your pronunciation and diction are excellent, but I would not say that they are elegant. Linguistically you and I are alike as two bugs in one skahhulihtau. You would not know the word for the Lesser Sandpiper; nor for the peculiar cramp of the left gluteus muscle that dromedary-riders, but not camel-riders, suffer; nor for the second flow of rosin from the seven-year-old sandalwood tree; nor for Axel's Rock viper; nor for the ankle-rash that afflicts those who carelessly walk through patches of three-penny wold before the fourteenth day of younya; nor for the lint that gathers in the navels of persons who wear undershirts made from the dog-flax plant, a lint quite different from any other navel lint; nor for the snub of line that a sailor cuts from the short end (but not from the long end) of a rope; nor for the female O'malley's Louse that has littered thrice. I will guess that you are from Kentauron Mikron and I will be guessing right.”
He had guessed my planet right, of course. And yet it gave me peculiar pleasure to give him all eight of the words which he had said I wouldn't know. After that we were friends: but that didn't mean that we'd hesitate to spill each other's blood if the game we were playing called for it.
“And now will you and your wife The Grand-Dame Tumblehome come and have lunch with me at the Club Haz,” this ‘Citizen of Baghdad’ asked me. I was thunderstruck. How had he known the name of my wife? Was it possible that he also knew who I was?
“Certainly we will,” said my wife the Grand-Dame. “Certainly we will, Heifritz, if you will first stop by the Club Nimr with us for drinks. The Ruddy Ralphs are rather good there.”
We had been in Baghdad less than an hour, so the Club Nimr was the only drinking club in which we had yet acquired membership.
“There is only one Prize Pearl or Extraordinary Case in this region that could have attracted both the Master-Spy-cum-Wife and Master Mariner of Kentauron Mariner, and the Great Master Spy and Master Litterateur Myself of whatever world I come from, as well as nine lesser and inferior but well-known spies,” so said the ‘Citizen of Baghdad’ as we were drinking Ruddy Ralphs with him in the Club Nimr in the waning hours of the afternoon. (We had not gone to the Club Haz or anywhere to lunch.) “The question is,” the ‘Citizen’ went on, “why now? Why now fifty years after he is born?”
“How did you know that this guy's name was Heifritz?” I asked my wife in a low voice.
“He just looks as if his name should be Heifritz,” she said. “Is it?”
And then she spoke to the Citizen Heifritz of Baghdad: “Perhaps there has been some change in the status of the Harun. Has there?”
“None recently that I know of,” said Citizen Heifritz. “When the forever young Harun came to the throne in the year 164 of the Moslem calendar, he wielded power for only three days, and it was a near disaster. Then his two sons (as you know, Harun is precocious; he sired Al-Amin when he was six years old and Mamun the Great when he was seven), his two sons told him they were taking the power into their own hands, and that he Harun must remain in Baghdad and enjoy his pleasures and treasures, and reign not at all. They declared the Capital of the Realms to be Merv in Central Asia, and Baghdad to be an ‘Innocuous Ornament’ and the home of the ‘Innocuous Caliph-Emeritus Harun Al-Rashid’. The two sons, of course, always seemed much older than their boyish father. But the three day reign of Harun Al-Rashid was twenty-seven years ago. Since then nothing has changed, certainly not the appearance of the Boy Harun. Why have you two and myself and nine lesser or inferior spies all come here this year?”
“Why are you so sure that the other nine spies are lesser or inferior spies?” my wife the Grand-Dame asked him. “And which one do you believe is the most inferior of all of them?”
“I could have spoken of myself and the ten lesser or inferior spies, Grand-Dame,” the Citizen Heifritz said. “Of himself, Essindibad here is not of the first rank; nor are you, Grand-Dame. But together you seem to have an added dimension. Considering you two as one entity, I place you under the heading ‘Reserved Judgement’. And, as to the other nine, I rate them thus:
“First: Alexander of Astrobe, my own kinsman. Him I would trust five-eighths of the way to hell. I'd trust no other person that far.
“Second: Cato of Camaroi, a twit, but a smart twit.
“Third: Adrian the Christian, and his entourage of birds and beasts.
“Fourth: Madam Jingo of whom I know little.
“Fifth: Ali ben Raad of whom I know nothing.
“Sixth: Rex Romae of whom there is nothing to know.
“Seventh: Irene of Cos, a beauty, ‘tis said, a defect in a spy.
“Eighth: Qabda or The Fist. A Turk.
“Ninth: The Golden Tom-Cat. Goofy, but lucky.
“That's the bunch of them, probably the best bunch of spies ever working on one single case. All of them will surely rate among the top spies of the universe. Yet only myself am truly distinguished, and only your duad can even win the classification of ‘Reserved Judgement’.”
I was astonished. I had never even heard of three of those spies, and I carried in my head all the names and pseudonyms and identifying characteristics of the top twenty-thousand spies in the universe. Some of these that Heifritz had named would hardly rate among the top five-hundred; and I did not know Citizen Heifritz at all.
“You do not know me at all, Sindbad?” Citizen Heifritz asked me with an elevation of his remarkable eyebrows. “No, of course I do not read your mind. I use a trick that you taught me when I studied under you. You taught me a person, taken aback by an untoward turn of events, will often silently vocalize his thoughts for a moment as if to try to verify them and get them under better control. And you also taught me to read mouth and throat to interpret such sub-vocalizations. You were a good teacher, within your limitations, but you never did teach me how to read mouth and throat for unsounded speech in the total dark. I had to teach that to myself. No, of course you don't remember me. You taught me that the perfect spy was one who could extract all the information that a man or group possessed, and then pass on, leaving no memory of himself behind. And so I did. I extracted all that you knew, and then I left; and I pulled in the hole after me. For I am the perfect spy, and you are not.”
“You are Lawrence Hockfriedrich,” I said then, “and you were from Dahae World. You were in a class of one hundred students that I instructed for the Kentauron Foreign Office. The attrition through failure in such classes is very high, usually about seventy percent. And you, Lawrence Hockfriedrich, were of the failed seventy percent of that particular class. The only subject in which you excelled, as I recall, was ‘New Choledochokystoi for Old’, or ‘How Much Gall Should a Spy Be Able to Carry?’ ”
‘New Gall Bladders for Old’, yes, I loved that, Sindbad. You were always there with the classy title. And I myself renewed my capacity for sheer gall when I was in your class. I was a little bit timid before tha
t. And I am not necessarily from Dahae World just because my application for your class showed me coming from there. You took only students from the ‘Five Worlds’ as I recall. The Kentauron Foreign Office had it set up for those only. I already had some ‘Intimations of Gall’ when I came to you. I needed gall to claim that I came from one of the five worlds and to forge the papers to prove it. Considering where I really come from it took a lot of gall to claim to be a civilized ‘Five Worlder’. Well, tootle! The action has now gone elsewhere, and I will go where it is. Don't you wish you could sense these changes in the ‘Arena of Action’ as well as one of your former students can?”
Citizen Heifritz, who had been only an indifferent spy (except for his gall) when he was quite young, had apparently gained something in competence now that he was quite middleaged. Whether Citizen Heifritz suddenly went where the action now really was I do not know. But he was suddenly gone. I had taught him the ‘Quick Decamp’ long ago, but he had added a variation that I hadn't taught him. I wonder how he did it?
There was a thunderous ring of bronze-brass that reverberated the whole bedrock that Baghdad reposed upon and also the thin electrum-metal that composed the echoing sky overhead. This low sky was part of the ‘mirage illusion’ of Baghdad. The rolling booming thunder was, I knew, one of the thousand gates closing down, slamming down firmly. It was the Royal Gate closing, and the jolting thunder of it signaled the Fall of Night. Commoners and small nobles might still come and go by the other nine hundred and ninety-nine gates all night long; but Higher Royalty could only use the Royal Gate, and it was closed.
Or they could go the murderous way over the steep roofs and down the outside of the deadly walls like madman-acrobats. Or they could go through the cellars and sewers and under the walls to the night amusements of the thousand suburbs. They could go through those cellars and sewers if they knew their way through the Master Maze. But it would be a fatal loss of dignity for any really royal person (and eminent off-world persons equated themselves with the royal persons of Baghdad) to use the commoner gates.
Sindbad, The Thirteenth Voyage Page 3