Scorpion Soup

by Tahir Shah

  Da Shun sensed something happening, something extraordinary.

  Where his shoulders had been, wings were growing.

  Great powerful golden wings.

  ‘Take to the wind and fly!’ cried the magician. ‘But beware. The wings will melt away as soon as you reach the floating kingdom.’

  Clenching his leg muscles, Da Shun thrust himself into the air.

  He flapped and he flapped, and was soon soaring high against the cobalt sky. Looking down, he spotted the sorcerer, no more than a pinhead far below. As he flapped, the skyline in the clouds came into sharp focus. Capping it was a night sky, a panoply of stars gleaming like grains of salt tossed across a dark shroud.

  Da Shun rose high above the city walls, arcing to the east. But, as he turned, the golden wings seemed to lose their might.

  All of a sudden, they broke apart, and Da Shun began to fall.

  He fell, and fell, and fell, plunging down into the dark.

  Fortunately for him, a deep mosaic pool in the palace grounds broke his fall. Before he knew it, Da Shun was being rescued from the water by a dozen maidens. Taking him to the guest quarters, they begged him to be at ease.

  ‘May I be presented to my host?’ Da Shun asked over and over.

  The reply was always the same:

  ‘In time perhaps but, alas, our queen has left on a journey, from which we await her return.’

  As Da Shun was reclining in great comfort, Fu Sheng was hacking his way through the red jungle of Salanaque.

  A blind merchant had sold him a fragment of information at a distant caravanserai: that a unicorn was kept prisoner by a blue troll, a troll who lived where the red jungle bordered the eternal sea.

  The merchant had declared that the troll, the most fearful of creatures, could frighten a man to death, by turning its face inside out.

  Chopping his way through the jungle, Fu Sheng gained no more than a few inches a day. Each night as he slept, the undergrowth ahead doubled in its thickness, making progress impossible.

  His strength sapped by leeches and sores, the knight vowed not to yield until he had presented the crone with a unicorn’s tear.

  At last, one day, Fu Sheng noticed a breach in the radiant red light ahead. Chopping with his razor-sharp sword, he reached an expanse of empty land. In the middle of it stood a plain wooden shack.

  Striding up to its door, Fu Sheng knocked hard with his fist.

  The door swung inwards slowly.

  A teal-blue creature was standing in its frame. He had short blue horns, a hairy blue brow, and a face so wart-ridden and foul that it sent a pang of raw fear down Fu Sheng’s spine.

  ‘I am on a quest for a unicorn’s tear,’ said the knight.

  The blue troll took half a step backwards and turned his face inside out.

  As a reflex to a sight so offensive, Fu Sheng whipped out his blade and separated the troll’s head from its shoulders.

  Instantly, the plain wooden shack disappeared.

  Where it had stood, a palace rose from out of the ground, its crenellated walls and towers fashioned from the whitest marble. All around, the forest melted away, and was replaced by a pristine city.

  As Fu Sheng stood before the palace, wide-eyed in amazement, the troll’s bluish blood not yet wiped from his blade, a drawbridge lowered.

  Under the portcullis rode a pair of royal guards.

  ‘Please come with us!’ one of them called out.

  ‘The queen awaits you,’ said the other.

  Confused, and blathering questions, the knight was led into a vast reception hall. Illuminated by coloured crystal chandeliers, the room was carpeted in rose petals, and decorated with exquisite paintings of unicorns.

  All of a sudden came the delicate sound of hooves on stone.

  Fu Sheng turned, and found himself gazing at a sight more lovely than any other he had ever imagined.

  A beautiful princess was riding towards him on a silvery-white unicorn. Her hair was tied back with peonies, her dress white lace. Smoothing a hand down the creature’s mane, she slipped easily off the animal’s back.

  ‘I am Queen Amberin,’ she said in a kindly voice. ‘And I have been returned to my kingdom as a consequence of your actions. It has been floating among the clouds, waiting for this day.’

  ‘The blue troll…’ stammered Fu Sheng.

  ‘Yes… he placed a spell on me from which I could only be freed by a blade wielded by the heart and not by the mind.’

  ‘So odious was he,’ said the knight, ‘that I slayed him before I could think.’

  ‘And that is what saved me,’ said Queen Amberin.

  She smiled.

  ‘You do not recognise me, do you?’ she whispered.

  Fu Sheng thought back through his many adventures.

  ‘I am searching for a unicorn’s tear,’ he replied, ‘and on my journey I have experienced many places and many people. Forgive me if I do not recognise you.’

  The queen smiled abundantly.

  ‘I was the crone who sent you and your duelling partner to find the tear and to bring it to me,’ she said.

  Fu Sheng drew a hand down over his face. He sighed.

  ‘Then I have failed you.’

  Again, the queen smiled. And, gently, she pulled something out from around her neck – a glass phial, hanging on a silver chain.

  ‘This is what kept me safe all these years,’ she said. ‘A unicorn’s tear.’

  ‘But why did you dispatch us to search for it, if you had it already?’ asked the knight, a tone of frustration in his voice.

  ‘Sometimes in life the most effective route is not the shortest one,’ Amberin replied. ‘Through calculations and divinations I came to understand a method by which I might be freed from the troll’s spell. It involved two brave knights crisscrossing the world on a quest – the quest for a unicorn’s tear. Only through your quest could I be certain that the conditions would be right in order for the troll to be slain as he was, by your blade.’

  ‘But what of my fellow knight, what of Da Shun?’ asked Fu Sheng.

  Queen Amberin held up a finger.

  ‘I shall reunite you both,’ she said, ‘so long as you both promise to be as brothers.’

  ‘But which of us was the winner?’ asked Fu Sheng.

  ‘Both of you, and neither of you.’

  The queen clapped her hands and a secret door slid back in the east gallery of the reception hall. Reclining the other side of it in a palatial salon was Da Shun.

  Before he and Fu Sheng were reunited, each one promised to regard the other as a brother and a friend.

  When they had done so, their swords were melted down, the metal used to make a statue. It commemorated a wise queen who saved a life and regained her kingdom at the same time.

  For many days and nights, festivities continued in the Kingdom of Salanaque.

  The queen honoured the two knights, bestowing the highest title of chivalry upon them. Having been presented with royal robes, decorations pinned to their breasts, Da Shun and Fu Sheng led a grand procession down to the quay.

  With trumpets heralding the moment, the knights took their leave of the Queen of Salanaque and her realm, and climbed aboard the royal galleon.

  They sailed for a hundred days, across oceans and seas.

  But, the night before they were hopeful of arriving home at their own kingdom, the ship was boarded by pirates. Unarmed, Fu Sheng and Da Shun were enslaved along with the crew.

  They were shackled and beaten to within a hair’s breadth of life, then cast into a cell block of the death camp at Oran.

  No man had the energy or interest to speak. For, if the jailer heard a voice he would open the door and slit the first five throats he could touch with his blade.

  And so they existed in a dark, dank realm of squalor and silence.

  But one man did have the courage to speak, albeit in a whisper.

  An old sailor, he was ragged and cheerless, and his voice sounded like stone grinding o
n stone.

  And this is what he said:

  ‘The heat more terrible than I can describe, we sailed into a small cove far to the south, a cove nestled on the coastline of far-off Senegal. We went ashore, slung hammocks in the trees, built a fire on the beach, and cooked up some langoustines.

  ‘I can taste their meat: all juicy and tender, with a hint of coconut.

  ‘That cove was idyllic, a paradise known only to one who has known the sea. Close my eyes and I can see the shadows thrown by the palm fronds in late afternoon, and can hear the sound of the birds gliding through the heat.

  ‘As the evening approached, we sat round and shared stories, stories of our travels and of our lives.

  ‘I remember it, clear as I am here with you now.

  ‘The man beside me was a Spaniard. His name was Alfonso, and he had one of those faces you could never forget: hollow features and an expression baked through from ordeal. Drawing a little on his pipe, he stooped to stoke the fire for a moment, his eyes lost in memory.

  ‘“I will tell you a tale,” he said softly. “A tale of another time, a time when I was not a sailor, but an apprentice to a master bookbinder, in Toledo. The bookbinder was the greatest craftsman of his age, from a family of ancestral binders to royalty no less. Clients would arrive at his workshop from across Spain. Sometimes they even came from France, and beyond. And it was a Frenchman, a famous writer from Troyes, with whom this tale is concerned...”’

  Finis