A person wearing the mask of a Golden Tom-Cat came into the Club Nimr. Masks might only be worn in Baghdad Mirage after the official fall of night. But after dark it was Maskers’ Night every night all night. I knew this man in the cat mask as a minor spy; I knew him from his cat-like walk. But he had never been known as the Golden Tom-Cat, though Citizen Heifritz had called somebody that. The man in the cat-mask did have with him a large, golden (or tortoise-colored) tom-cat. The man rubbed the cat's lips with alum, and the cat moved his mouth and throat as if mouthing words. Then either the man ventriloquized for the cat, or the cat itself uttered the words:
“The Boy-Caliph told you to ask the Golden Tom-Cat where the Caliph might be found this night,” the cat said, or the man ventriloquized.
“All right, man or cat, I ask it. Where is the Caliph to be found this night?” I inquired of the two of them.
The cat then rubbed the man's lips with alum, and the man moved his mouth or throat as though mouthing words. And either the man spoke or the cat ventriloquized for him:
“Come and see,” the man's voice seemed to say, but I noted that the cat's throat was vocalizing.
My Dame and I then followed the cat and the man out of the Club Nimr. I had the strong feeling that the cat was the master and that the man was bedazzled and under the cat's control. We went up walls, and up still taller walls.
“It is the Imtihan,” the cat said (it was clearly the cat talking this time, and the man's voice was no way involved), “it is the test, the examination, the initiation rite. Whoever would enter the Caliph's inner circle must go where the Caliph goes and climb where the Caliph climbs. And he climbs better than a squirrel or a cat. He climbs like a divine boy.”
Up steep roofs and still steeper roofs we went (and the slates of Baghdad were proverbially slippery) and onto balconies and balustrades that were more ornament than substance. We came to the very pinnacle of the city (the only light was star-light now) that seemed to be and was within two feet of the local sky. We started over the wall, the highest point of the walls of Baghdad Mirage, but the stones were very slick from the night mist and from the brass-and-gold chasing set into them.
The cat slipped, screamed (but in the moment of its scream, something passed from the cat to the man), and fell. And fell, and fell, turning over and over in the ever darker lower air. It hit and echoed and broke apart on the stones five hundred feet below us.
“You have lost your totem,” my Grand-Dame told the cat-man, “and you have lost the meaningful half of your voice. What will you do now?”
“Oh, I'll audition cats until I get another good one, super-intelligent and vocal. That was his ninth-life,” said the Man in the Cat Mask. “But I have not lost the meaningful half of my voice. I’ve taken it back into myself. I am often tormented by assassins, so in tricky situations I bide a while in my cat and let the killers riddle my body if they are canny enough to catch us. And then I go back into my body and make such repairs as are necessary. I would have fallen to my death there if I had been in my proper body. But the cat fell instead, and as he fell I leapt from his body into my own. As you see, I no longer wear a mask. This is my own face you see now.”
“It's very little we can see you at all in this dark of night,” my Dame said. “But your face looks very much like the mask you had.”
“Very like, yes. For I am the Golden Tom-Cat, and now that totem cat is gone forever. I can only hope the next one is as good. And now we go to meet, in his aura of gladness, a Boy-Man who has only seven lives and is now on the seventh of them.”
The slippery stones overhung somewhat here at the highest point of these walls, so it was much worse than going down merely sheer walls.
“But we can find the Boy-Caliph only if we go down here,” the Golden Tom-Cat said. “The charm won't work in any other place. Oh, the depth below us! Oh, the mortal slipperiness of the stones! Will you lead the way, Master Mariner Sindbad? I'm suddenly overtaken by a deathly fear on this horrifying height.”
“So am I,” I palpitated. “Oh Saint Periculosus, Patron of Pinnacles and their dangers, sustain us now! I am also overtaken by the deadly fear on this horrifying height.”
“Oh, I'll lead the way down,” my Good Dame offered cheerfully. “For a slippery descent like this, I just believe that we had better take it head-first.”
My wife the Grand-Dame started down the five hundred foot, overhung, slippery wall head-first, and I and the Golden Tom-Cat followed her the same way.
Al-Amin Is Riding
The worst of our afflictions on the way down were the geier or Night Buzzards. They ripped us with their filthy saber-like beaks, then went for our eyes and our thumbs and our great toes (of course we were unshod now, and we used our big toes for gripping). But we descended in spite of them. I noticed that the Golden Tom-Cat had the suction areas on the soles of his feet, as did my Dame and myself. I had never even known that my wife had them. I myself had always been ashamed of having them and had kept them always covered, though I only suspected what they were for. That meant that the Golden Tom-Cat was not from Gaea but from one of the other Five Worlds. This mutation of the suction-sole had never appeared on Gaea (so my briefing and that of my Ship had told me), but it is mentioned (always as a rarity, though now I suspected that it was not as rare as all that) on the other four worlds. Or else the Tom-Cat was from some far world so obscure that the mutation was not listed for it. But we would have fallen to our deaths on the downward climb except for this mutation, and our mutation to our educated big toes.
The second worst affliction on our way down were the vultures who are known as the ‘Maw-of-Hell Birds’. These talking birds taunted us with their silly but infuriating rimes such as:
“Fall forever in a well,
Know its bottom is in Hell,”
and they also came at our eyes with their shorter but no less sharp beaks. I am always uncomfortable with talking birds.
And when we were still a hundred feet from what we thought was the bottom of the wall, we three peeled off it like heavy globs of slime and dropped like lead plummets into a well indeed that had been uncovered outside the wall. And then down and down into the murky water we went, powered by the fearful impetus of our fall.
“Deeper and deeper!” my Good Dame called to the other two of us in her ringing voice. I hadn't known that she could call out so clearly under water. It isn't a common human trait. “Deeper and deeper until we find the passage,” she called. “There is always a passage right at the bottom of an ensorcelled well.”
Red, goggle-eyed fish rolled their big eyes at us, and glowing devil squids fanged us as we went past them. But the devil-squid did provide us with light down there, and without it we'd have been totally lost. But we did find the mouth of the passage, and we entered it. Then we swam (our lungs bursting, of course, but all spies are trained for long underwater swims) through more and yet more murky water for a hundred yards. It was then that we picked up hope, just as our prospects seemed to turn hopeless, with our own weariness and the apparent endlessness of the passage.
A sort of quick-hearted joy began to overcome our fear and gloom. Something happy was ahead of us. Wherever the passage led, there would be happiness at the end of it.
We came to an iron door in our swimming. The Golden Tom-Cat rapped on it in code, and it opened to let us enter a lock. Here we became quite excited and gleeful as the water drained away from us.
“But who are we kidding?” I asked. “No human could have made that climb down the wall nor that swim through the passage.”
“It's possible that there are no longer any unadulterated human persons left anywhere,” the Golden Tom-Cat said. I saw now by the light in the lock that his own flesh-face or flesh-mask was indeed more the face of a cat than of a man. He at least was not unadulteratedly human.
The inner wall of the lock opened and we went through it and into a dim, purple-lighted room. Our excitement and delight grew. The room was full of people, perhaps th
ousands of them, but we cared for only one of them. Harun was there (in this incarnation his name was Harun Al-Rashid).
Harun gripped my hands in friendship when I came to him. I howled with pleasurable pain, and the Boy-Caliph howled with laughter. He had always been proud of the strength of his hands. Like Hercules, he had while still in his cradle strangled with his hands huge snakes that were sent to kill him. He had not changed at all. Well, I hadn't known him at first when he was the boy who rented the camels to us, but he always had this trick of being unrecognized when he wished it. He was first of all a trickster. But I surely knew him now.
Fifty years old? Harun? No, there is something wrong with that chronology. There is always something wrong with a Harun chronology. He was about eleven years old. There was also something wrong with the immediate local topography, as was always the case in any room in which Harun presided.
For in that room, in that purplish light (the ‘anachronistic light’ as Tyrannus Junior called it in his work ‘Optics’), the hours of the night did not follow the proper sequence and the parts of the room were not necessarily in any special spatial relationship to each other. The hours double back again and again (and very often one could hear the water boiling and bubbling backwards in the water clocks). They wandered all over the place in curious fashion. (“Wandering Hours of My Night” was playing on a gramophone that used pressed clay records; I didn't know whether the machine was anachronistic or not.) But we were in sheer delight to be most of the time in the presence of the Boy-Caliph, and to be always in the inspired presence of the hundreds of persons who were likewise seized by that delight.
There was a flashback and reminiscence to earlier boyhoods of this transcendent person. There was joyful puzzling and speculation. There were the pieces of the living legend scattered like pearls before swine on the prototypical Baghdad Carpets of the purplish room. (Boy Caliph Harun Al-Rashid had once said that he was Caliph of the Swine also, and many of his strong followers did have the swinish touch.) Oh, the old and always (and usually true) stories that were told about him!
Harun had always been proud of the strength of his hands, yes. Indeed, some of the legendary of the Boy Hercules had attached itself to the Boy Harun Al-Rashid. There were even those who said that Harun had been Hercules in an earlier manifestation. When still in his cradle, enemies had introduced ravening pythons to crush and devour him. But the Golden Boy had strangled the huge snakes to death with his hands, crushing both their bones and their flesh to pulp. Had he done this ‘crushing of the snakes’ in every one of his childhoods? We felt that he had. We felt that all his childhoods, whenever and wherever they were, were the same childhood, lived simultaneously on his own scale.
There was another theme running through the cradle days of the strong-handed Boy-King, Boy-Emperor, Boy-Messiah, Boy-Caliph. He always had a twin. The Boy-King was never jealous of the twin, but the twin was always jealous, believing that himself should be the Boy-King. So each time that it came about, Harun (in total happiness) had strangled his twin brother to death with his hands to put an end to his quibbling.
Why was everybody always so delighted with this whole business? Why, for that matter, was the mother of the twins so delighted in every case when she came onto her two sons in the cradle and found one of them black in the face and in strangled death and the other one ruddy and pealing with gleeful laughter? Oh, she was delighted in every case just because the affair was so delightful. In other cases it might seem rather sad that one infant son should kill another, but in the special case of Harun it was funny.
And there were the antics and tricks that Harun was playing constantly in that present time, in every present time, in the big room right now, trick after trick, outrageous and cruel tricks if only they weren't so funny. “Really, my love,” my Dame said to me, “there is something funny about their being so funny. Whence is this illusion of funniness that casts itself over this cruelty and sordidness?” “You are becoming philosophical again, my dear,” I chided her. “The tricks are funny because we laugh at them, and we laugh at them because they are funny.” “They are so crude,” she still protested, “and so unfair, and so — Oh, Oh, Oh, I'll die if I laugh any more. Oh it's funny, funny, funny!”
But honestly there was something dashed peculiar about them seeming so funny. There were the endless variations of the trick with the substance used for toilet-training pet birds. One drop of the substance was poured every week in the special place where the householder wished his birds to go, and thereafter they would go in that one place and no other. But now Harun poured surreptitiously not one but three drops of the magic substance on the bald pate of a nabob who was visiting him from Hindustan. One moment before this, Harun had announced that one thousand new birds were being let in and that he wanted all the people to notice their interesting behavior. And then the birds burst down; the ceiling was slid back to let them in. Oh, they were beautiful birds, and only a dozen or so of them emptied themselves on the nabob's pate in that first moment. But others followed them and others and still others. And it became funnier and funnier when we realized that three drops of it would cause the one thousand birds to use that place and no other for three weeks. Oh it was funny! And if the nabob near went mad in just three minutes of it, think how mad he would be driven in three weeks!
And then Harun had a huge and furious she-bear let into the big room. The set-up had been whispered to almost everyone except the man on whom the joke was being played. Down in the bear dungeon, the female bear had witnessed (as she was held tightly in chains) a slave kill her three cubs with wanton cruelty. Then the slave came and rubbed his scent on her nose, and she unable to reach him with either claw or teeth. And then the scent of the slave had been transferred to a certain personage in the big room, to a man who was almost certain to respond in a comical manner when the bear came after him. And how she did come after him when she was released!
What a comic chase with the man fleeing everywhere in real fear of his life, unable to hide anywhere, with every door blocked to him by the laughing revelers. The laughter was cloud-capping, and the golden laughter of the Boy-Caliph ran through it all as the leading theme. And I have never heard anything so funny in my life as the gibbering screaming of the doomed man.
The she-bear finally caught the man and got him down and got his head in her mouth. Then she savaged it till he was quite dead, and yet he still twitched as if to get the last bit of humor out of the situation.
The she-bear stood back then and looked at all of us, around and around. She drooped her head then and prowled about looking for a way out. A bear trainer took her out through the bear door, for she might still be dangerous.
“The she-bear is ashamed,” my Dame said. “Why aren't all of us ashamed? Really, shouldn't we be getting too mature for such jokes as that? I hope the next joke isn't a mortal one.”
“Strangely enough I feel a little bit ashamed myself,” I said. “Why?”
Persons had put a donkey-head mask over the head of a rather unsophisticated slave-girl. Then they showed her herself in a bronze mirror.
“Ach!” the girl cried. “My mother always told me I'd turn into a donkey if I was so stubborn. And I left off being stubborn for fear of it until I was taken as a slave. Now I have very much to be stubborn about, and I'll continue to be stubborn, donkey or not. But I don't feel like a donkey. I still feel like a person.”
“The opinion of the best philosophers is that donkeys never feel like donkeys,” the Boy-Caliph said. “They always feel like persons. That's what makes them so stubborn. But donkey you are, stubborn girl, and you shall be ridden like a donkey.”
Ah, they rode the poor girl till she was weary, and then they rode her some more. Various men rode her and whipped her. And perhaps they rode her to death.
Oh yes, the Black Dog was there in the corner, the Black Dog that some people said was the reverse side of the soul of Harun himself. The Black Dog was a premonition of disaster. How cou
ld the Black Dog be in a corner of the room when the room had been built round specially to thwart the Black Dog and give him no place to lurk? Well, he was there, or he was marginally there.
Of course there were premonitions of disaster around Harun. There are such premonitions around all elementals. Someday the Sun will fail and sputter out. That is a cause for unease, but not for urgent or immediate unease. So it was with the Golden Boy. There would come a time when he would no more be born again. Ah, but he would be born seven times in all, and seven is such a happy and lucky number that it may really mean some transcendent number such as seventy-times seven. Even so, we do not know which of the births came first and which came later. Some of the more storied births may still be in the future; in foreshadowing legend only and not yet in solid fact. It is only the Black Dog and those of the Legion of the Black Dog who insist that the present childhood is the seventh and last.
And the two ‘Old Ones’ are another sort of ‘Premonition of Disaster’. The two Old Ones are the huge and hulking sons of Harun Al-Rashid: Al-Amin sired by Harun when he was six years old, and Mamun the Great sired by Harun when he was seven.
“Al-Amin is riding! He is riding here tonight!” the Black Dog barked in the corner of the round room.
“Oh certainly,” Harun Al-Rashid the Boy-Caliph agreed. “He will arrive, and I will make him Caliph tonight. I worry that the two of them may not rule in harmony, so I will make the eldest of them the Caliph.”
“But that is the end then, or the beginning of the breakdown,” someone protested. “If you are no longer Caliph, then what magic thing will you be?”
“I will be whatever is most lucky for me to be,” the Boy-Caliph said. “There is no limit to my luck or to my flexibility. I am the man of a thousand masks, of a thousand valid face-masks. I will be whatever happy thing I want to be.”
Sindbad, The Thirteenth Voyage Page 4