Sindbad, The Thirteenth Voyage

by R. A. Lafferty

  “I always know what eclipses are scheduled on my own world,” Spy Alexander said. “But I don't know them for Gaea-Earth. Do your astronomers know whether there is an eclipse scheduled?”

  “Our astronomers all skipped before we knew what they were up to,” the official said. “They remarked, with that hazy look in their eyes that all astronomers have, ‘Our luck has stretched too far already’. So now I turn to you spies. If there isn't an eclipse tomorrow before noon, the bunch of you will hang. Nobody ever got a more just deal than that. You, Alexander! You, Essindibad! You, Grand-Dame Tumblehome! You, Golden Tom-Cat! You, Ali ben Raad the Son of Thunder! And probably you, Azraq-Qamar the Blue Moon. We really should have a seventh one to hang with you. There will be seven hanging gibbets, so we will be hanging people in lots of seven for the celebration. But we won't hang any of your bunch if there is an eclipse tomorrow. We'll likely just give each of you the ritual thirty-nine lashes with the scourge-whips and then release you with a lecture of the perils of being a spy.”

  “I have a little book ‘How to Predict an Eclipse’ at home,” Ali ben Raad the Son of Thunder said. “It was the come-on offering of the ‘Science-for-Boys Book of the Month Club’ offering. But I don't have it with me in this time and place, and I don't think the predictive data are all available.”

  “Will a partial eclipse do it?” I asked.

  “It must be a very substantial eclipse, Essindibad,” the official said. “Oh, anything over ninety percent will probably do. Spies have the reputation of being able to think very fast when they’re in dire peril. Little Spies, you’re in dire peril now.”

  “What is the totem-bird of the new Caliph Al-Amin?” my good-wife asked the official.

  “The wild Mud-Goose, sometimes called the Two-River Goose.”

  “Perfect, perfect, oh, oh, perfect!” my good-wife gushed.

  “Al-Amin is a sort of Wild Goose himself,” the official said. “Well, I must get back to work. I must get back to the revels. Here is a whirligig noisemaker for each of you. Just whirl them around your heads and they'll make noises.”

  The official left us then. We didn't seem to be under too tight restraint. We wandered pretty much where we would. We feasted on roast camel hump and on Persian walnuts. We ate millet bread and sesame cake. We drank the new drink ‘Coffee’ from Kurdistan.

  “What was the bit about it being ‘Perfect, perfect, oh, oh, perfect’ that the Wild Mud-Goose is the totem bird of the new Caliph Al-Amin?” I asked my wife.

  “Sindie, who is the Emperor of all the Wild Mud-Geese in the world?”

  “It's the Mud-Goose that's a million times bigger than any other mud-goose in the world,” I explained with my unfailing patience. “It's the mud-goose that takes elephants in a single bite. It's the ‘Great Speckled Bird’ itself, the Roc.”

  “And what did the Roc say to you at the close of your second Voyage-Adventure, Sindie?”

  “He said, ‘If I can ever do you a favor, Essindibad, just let me know.’ That's what he said.”

  “Sindie, another name for the Mud-Goose is the ‘Courier Bird’. It delivers quickly and at great distance any message that is entrusted to it, and it always finds the person to whom the message is addressed. Surely a Courier Bird would be able to take a message to its own Emperor. Write a message to the Roc, Sindie, and I'll go out and look for a Wild Mud-Goose.”

  “What will I write to the Roc?”

  “Maybe you'll think of something, Sindie,”

  Oh, the lights of that party night! Greek fire poured out of buckets to run along the ground like snakes! Babylonian Lanterns full of burning naphtha! Gopherwood torches! Whale-Oil Lamps!

  Oh, the sounds of the party night! The singing of the Coelo-Syria Slave Girls! The booming of the rhinoceros-skin drums from the Sudan! The squawking of a Wild Mud-Goose that had just come in with my good-wife and that seemed to be an extraordinarily good friend of hers! The squeaking of the gazelle-skin boots of the ‘River-Boat Dancers’! The rattling of Mongolian firecrackers! The ringing of the bronze hammers of the carpenters building the seven hanging gibbets!

  Mamun The Great Is Riding

  “Mamun the Great is Riding!” The rumor ran like rats in the walls all through the Baghdad Mirage.

  “This may be the shortest Caliph-Reign on record,” Citizen-Spy Heifritz spoke with throaty excitement. “Mamun rides like the hot desert wind itself, two hundred, three hundred miles a day if he can get horses. And even wild horses come to his whistle.”

  Citizen-Spy Heifritz was in our company again. Maybe he believed that the arena of action was now around us since we were the ones whose necks were in the nooses if there was no eclipse this morning. And the water clocks showed that it was already technically morning.

  “If we put in a bad word for you, Heifritz, we can likely get you included in our group,” my Grand-Dame Tumblehome guyed that guy. “They like to hang them in sevens, you know. And so far they have selected only six of us. But is it certain that Mamun the Great will destroy his brother Al-Amin? Al-Amin killed nine swordsman sparring partners in a row during the night just past. He is a lightning-like swordsman.”

  “Tis said that the younger brother Mamun the Great is himself a fair swordsman,” Citizen-Spy Heifritz argued. “Mamun is the luckier in everything. And ‘tis said that Mamun will only go for a sure thing. And he's sure that he can kill his brother and become Caliph in his place.”

  “But they have ruled jointly for many years and have not fought,” the Golden Tom-Cat stated.

  “They have ruled jointly, at a distance,” said Madam Jingo the Spy of whom the rest of us knew very little. “Al-Amin has been on the Christian Frontier, strengthening the Damascus region and getting ready to besiege Constantinople the Great. And Mamun the Great has been in Central Asia at the Capital of the Caliphate, the City Merv, which has mirage aspects almost equal to those of Baghdad here. Mamun has been seeking to enlarge the Caliphate all the way to China. There can be two royal Master Generals battling for the Caliphate on opposite frontiers, but there can be only one Caliph. Harun Al-Rashid, a much less important person than either of his sons, has been that Caliph in name. And in this case that has made all the difference.”

  We spies were probably not much smarter than other people, but each of us had several added dimensions that more common people lacked. Without exception, we had lived on more worlds than one, and had lived in more centuries (both past and future) than the one we were in. We had all lived under more names than one   —   “and, like the God of the Christians, we are each more persons than one,” the Spy Irene of Cos said. This might seem like a little thing, but such multiplicity of person does give one breadth and scope.

  “I'm not sure that I welcome another ‘Installation of a Caliph’ tomorrow even if we all survive the Installation today,” continued Irene of Cos, an indifferent spy and a great beauty, which latter attribute may be a defect in a spy. “Another day stuffing on roast camel hump, another day chewing that millet bread, another day watching ten thousand little fat dancing girls shuffle around to the beat of rhinoceros-skin drums, another day drinking that new ‘coffee’ from Kurdistan which looks like and tastes like muddy water (at least we had wine when we were still Christians), another eclipse to come up with even if by some giant-winged miracle we come up with one today. Gah!”

  “Oddly enough, there will be a total eclipse tomorrow,” said the Master Spy Qabda the Fist, a Turk. “But an eclipse tomorrow will not help the situation today when seven spies or consorts will be hanged if the sun is not eclipsed. Ali ben Raad, Son of Thunder and fuzz-faced boy who is still beardless, you are a close friend of Harun Al-Rashid the boy-Caliph. It really seems as if each of you could pick more interesting friends. But cannot you get him to shift the hanging of several spy-types to some other types? A thing like this gets all of us in the necks.”

  “I don't think so, Fist, no,” the Son of Thunder said. “Harun says that eclipses are important and that the identiti
es of those who are hanged are less important. He says that it does not matter whether even a hundred of his personal friends are hanged, since everyone in the Caliphate is his friend if they ever come to know him, and since he has the talent for making all the friends he wants. He says that there must be eclipses on three successive days: today, for the installation of his first son as Caliph; tomorrow, for the installation of his second son as Caliph, following the death of his first son; and after-morrow, for his own (Harun Al-Rashid's) bloody death by mob murder. He says that all the rituals must be fulfilled, and that we should be proud of being hanged at such celebrations, rather than fearful.”

  Adrian the Christian (with his strange entourage of birds and beasts) was a Master Historian. He used his activities as a Master Historian as a cloak to cover his activities as a Master Spy. It would seem that his being burdened with all those birds and animals would be an impediment to his going into unusual places and garnering unusual information. He says, however, that the scales tilt heavily in favor of the advantages. He has had very close rapport with his feathery and hairy friends, and their views of history often act as a corrective to his own views: they give him points-of-view that he would never have had without such associates. And even in the gathering of raw information some aspects of the menage that he travels with do work to his advantage. He has, for instance, a saw-billed macaw bird that can cut its way into all sorts of locked and warded places and can steal key documents and fly with them back to Adrian. And he has a Malayan Parrot that is a speed reader of particular discernment. It can go to interesting places, speed-read a few samples here and there, and then put its hooked nib right into the middle of the crucial information. It can speed-read all of it, memorize it, and later recite it back to Adrian (or to a recorder) by the hour.

  And Adrian didn't have to worry about uninvited guests in whatever cave he holed up in with his ‘special’ (‘special’ means ‘of various species’) family. He had a young male lion of frightening speed and power who could put the big fear into all intruders. But this sometimes ravening lion (a millennial beast if ever there was one) was as many-faceted as the other specimens in the menagerie. He would lie down with the lamb, and he would eat thistle-hay with it too. It was to him like catnip. He'd eat a lot of hay when Adrian had him on exhibition before visitors. And yet he seemed to get as much live meat in his diet as a young growing lion should eat; and some of it had been wearing shoes.

  Adrian had all the Aesopian birds and beasts, and others besides. And several of them could talk in all three of the tongues of the world, Low Latin, Koine Greek, and Arabic.

  “We do have a happy home-life together,” Adrian was wont to say (and the hyena always broke into hysterical laughter about then), “except for the hyena who suffers from guilt feelings.”

  Adrian asked us if we wanted to come with him when he interviewed the ‘Last Magi’ who had arrived before the walls of Baghdad that very morning. Some of us did go with Adrian to the interview; and we found an old man who talked entertainingly about everything.

  “There is nothing magic about me,” the old man said, “though the words ‘magic’ and ‘magi’ and ‘magus’ are etymologically connected. There have always been eight of us Magi, not three; and our names are Gaspar, Melchior, Balthasar, Larvandad, Hormisdad, Gushnasaph, Kagba, and Badadilma. I'm the last of these, Badadilma. Badadilma the Armenian. And I am also the youngest of the pack. We were born into the world to visit and authenticate instances of the births of ‘Golden Boys’, the True One, and the fraudulent ones also. There is only one true Golden Boy, and we authenticated him both as to his Birth, and also as to his Bloody Death some years later. But there are many fraudulent Golden Boys. The most persistent of the recurring Golden Boys is the Harun Manifestation. We must check out every case, because we are still waiting for the Second Birth, for the Second Coming of the Genuine Golden Boy. The Great One-And-Only Golden Boy will be born again, but he will not die again.”

  “I know the voice of that Magi very, very well,” said the Master Spy Ali ben Raad, the Son of Thunder. “But how is that possible? Who is he when he isn't being a Magi? I have heard his voice from a fresh-water ark-shell. Why should he choose an ark-shell for his habitation?”

  “We witness the deaths as well as the births of the fraudulent Golden Boys in order to catch the essential animal that escapes from the body at each of those deaths, an animal sometimes merely trivial, but more often malodorous and evil,” the Magi was continuing. “I am here to witness and authenticate the death of the fraudulent Golden Boy Harun al-Rashid; and I'll capture, if I'm able to do it, the essential animal that will escape from the last and smelliest piece of the scattered body. The generic name of this animal is ‘The Last Agony Animal’.

  “I’ve had a very long and very happy life. I am no more wise than I am magic; though my classification name ‘magi’ conveys both wisdom and magic. And yet I have picked up a few wise bits in my centuries. I have been blessed in many things. I have walked my days in the Sunlight of God, and I have been given happy judgement. I now live out my middle centuries (we Magi are quite long-lived) in the high mountains of Armenia, the land anciently named Haik. Your animals recognize me, Adrian. And I have my own entourage of birds and beasts on the mountain.

  “Every high mountain in Armenia has an ancient wooden castle on it, a castle built of gopher wood, a very little bit below the crest, at the head of the highest valley or gash in the mountain. These old castles have all been ice-locked for four or five hundred years, since the chill time returned to these high places. But my own wooden castle is unique, for it once sailed on the breast of the wide world-ocean. My gopher wood castle is the Ark itself, the Ark of Noe or Noah.

  “I will tell you this. The Ark was never simple and bare and functional. It was ornate, art-worthy, and somewhat luxurious. All the Beasts of the Earth rode on the Ark; but it also carried other passengers, such as Ritual, Ancient Liturgy, Kingliness, Holiness, and all the Prerequisites of Holiness. It carried all the high things from the Old World. The low things were light and could float on the flotsam.

  “Adrian, Master Historian as well as Master Spy, I invite you to visit me in the Holy Ark on the Holy Mountain. There is an easy way up there, going through the caves that are in the interior of the mountain, warm with remnant igneosity and protected from the high winds. You will find deep history in the old Ark; and you will also espy such evidence as spy dramas are compounded from. All the interior walls of the Ark are covered with paintings that can only be described as astonishing, incredible, inspired by the artistic genius as it was in the Morning of the World. Some of the paintings are signed by Melchisedech, the ancient of the ancients. Yes, he still lives somewhere, but I have not now heard from him for a score of years. Some were signed by Noe, and by his sons, and by one daughter-in-law whose name was ‘Increase’, and by one male slave of Shem. Yes, there were several slaves on the Ark. How else would the ambiguous and often fruitful institution of slavery have been preserved for the future world if there had been no slaves on the Ark? Scripture says that Noe went into the Ark with all his household, which included Noe's grandfather Mathusalem as well as several slaves. There were also paintings that were extraordinary even in their ineptitude: beautiful, weird, overflowing, demented, or half-witted, enchanting. These were signed by three different apes of three different sorts, two of them African and one of them Asian. Ah, if only apes could still paint like that!   —   you will exclaim when you see their work. As a matter of fact, I have an ape companion presently, and he can still paint like that. He's very good.

  “Yes, Mathusalem, the grandfather of Noe, usually accounted the oldest man who ever lived (but he was only the oldest man who ever died), he was on the Ark. And he's still there. His body is incorrupt, though somewhat dried up and mummified. He must have died before the Ark landed, or he would have been buried on land. But there is still reflex movement and reflex life in his body. He sits at a wooden table with a never fai
l pen in his hand and a large parchment before him. He still writes, but very slowly, one character or letter a year. You must watch for a week to see that his hand has moved at all. In the seven hundred years that I myself have lived in the Ark, the noble old dead man has added seven hundred characters to his ongoing ‘Secret History of the World’. The contributions that I have watched coming from his very slow pen now add up to more than two hundred very interesting words.

  “Ah, a question from the spy in the Tom-Cat mask? Oh, that is your own face and not the mask. But the mask you sometimes wear over your face is hardly to be distinguished from it? You ask about grapes. Yes, by special dispensation, grapes do grow clear to the top of my mountain; and I drink my pleasant gallon of holy wine every day. A question from the overly-beautiful Spy, Irene of Cos? No, there is not any error in the Scriptural description of my mountain as being the tallest mountain in the world. So it was tallest then in the days of the Flood; and so it has ceased to be now in these latter days. For the Himalay Mountains of Hindustan have been rising ever higher for the many centuries since that time, and now they are much taller. One of the things I miss from the old world before the Flood is Geology. Only scraps of it were brought forward in the Ark, and I believe the old geology would be a very interesting subject, if only we possessed it.

  “A question from Ali ben Raad, the boyish Son of Thunder? No, I cannot attest either for or against the legend that Magog, or some other giant, rode out the flood astraddle the ridge-roof of the Ark. Magog was an Ifrit-Giant, so he could have been any size he wished, up to a mile in height. He would hardly have drowned, for surely there were many places on Earth where the water was less than a mile in depth. He wouldn't have starved, for Ifrit-Giants can go as long as a hundred thousand years without food or drink. He may have ridden on the Ark now and then just for the fun of it, and indeed there are marks deep in the gopher-wood of the roof as though giant heels had kicked it for pleasure and fun. And yet most of the Ifrit-Giants did not survive the Flood. Only one of the ninety-nine species of them survived it, and that was a very degenerate species. Rather odd.