The Compleat Enchanter: The Magical Misadventures of Harold Shea

by L Sprague De Camp; Fletcher Pratt

  “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 counter-spell 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 counter-spell 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 tinder-box, 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 aerial 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; people 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.

  “Where is it?” shouted Shea.

  Medoro pointed to one of the largest tents of all, well up on the slope, with a swarm of pennons floating from its multiple peaks. Dardinell’s pavilion. Shea jerked at the fringe, and the carpet did a sweeping bank towards it.

  The pavilion was a young city in itself. Besides the main tent, a score of lesser, outlying structures were connected to it by canopies. Among them the powerful figure of Dardinell himself could be seen among a group of officers on horseback who were trying to bring order into those on foot.

  “Where’s the harem?” demanded Shea. Medoro put one hand to his tusks to hold back a gulp, and with the other pointed toward an elongated tent that sprang from one side of the main structure.

  As the carpet swooped, the sound of Shea’s voice brought a face in their direction. There was a yell, the whole group flowered with faces, and a flung javelin went past. Before more could follow they were over the tangle of lordly tents and out of range. They sailed in toward the roof of the harem tent. As they did so, Shea, controlling the carpet with his left hand and some difficulty, whipped out his sword and made a twenty-foot gash in the fabric.

  He then took the carpet around in a curve and back to the hole he had made. “Duck!” he said to Medoro. Aiming carefully, he drove for the hole, which had been widened by the tension of the ropes. One of Shea’s horns caught the edge for a moment, then ripped through. They were inside.

  They were in a room full of women, so little below that Shea could have joined hands with them by leaning over the edge. The women, however, did not seem in a mood to join hands; instead, they ran in all directions, screaming: “The Jann! The Jann!” Shea encouraged them by leaning over and gibbering a little.

  The carpet moved smoothly to the nearest partitions and then stopped, its leading edge curling where it met the cloth, and its side edges flapping like some lowly marine organism. Shea reached out and slit the camel’s hair across. The next room was a kitchen, empty save for the furniture of the trade. The next compartment held nothing but a pair of eunuchs throwing dice. These screamed in high voices, and one of them tried to crawl away under the outer edge of the tent, as Shea slit his way through the next wall.

  “Damn maze,” said Shea. The outer tumult of the camp had been dampened to a whisper by the many thicknesses of cloth. Two more partitions, both yielding empty rooms, and the coolness of the evening was once more on their faces. Shea could see a couple of soldiers afoot and a horseman running past, silhouetted against a fire further down the hill. He hastily manoeuvred the carpet around another curve and cut his way into the wall of the tent again. It was only the kitchen once more, and the whole structure of the tent seemed to be growing rickety from the repeated slashings.

  Nevertheless Shea warped his craft up to the kitchen’s one unslit wall. A gash—and they had found their goal.

  The room Lord Dardinell used for his more personal pleasures was full of precious things. Over against the wall, under a hanging out of which eddied a slow smoke of incense, priceless cushions had been piled on priceless carpets to make one of the most elaborate beds Shea had ever seen. In the midst of these cushions a bound figure writhed.

  Shea tried to bring the carpet to a halt by pulling up on his leading edge, but that only took him to the ceiling; by pulling down, but that only brought him to the floor. He considered trying to snatch the girl on the way past as a broncho-buster picks a handkerchief from the ground, but rejected the idea as too risky. One hand would be needed for the carpet, and Medoro was no help at all.

  He came around the room in another curve and recited:

  “By warp and by woof,

  In the midst of the roof,

  To save the fair lady

  Stand still and aloof.”

  The carpet halted. It was a long way to the ground, and this would be no time to sprain an ankle. However, Shea, swung over the side, let himself down to his full length by gripping the yielding fringe, and dropped. He landed in the midst of the cushions on all fours, and got to his knees.

  The figure on the bed rolled over and glared at him with furious eyes from under a disordered mop of graying hair, grunting through its gag.

  “Eeek!” shrieked Medoro from above. “ ‘Tis the Amir himself! We are surely at the last hour. There is no god but God.”

  And in fact it was indeed the Amir Agramant, Commander of the Faithful, Protector of the Poor, just and merciful Lord of Hispania, trussed, bound, and gagged with his own turban.

  “By the mass! More magic!” said Belphegor’s voice. Shea turned and saw her poised to spring at him, dagger in hand.

  “Stop!” he said. “I’m Harold. Don’t you know me?”

  “A hornèd demon the lord of Shea! Nay but—and yet the voice—”

  “Come on, you know me. This is just a gag; a magical gag. The other spook, up there on the rug, is your boyfriend Medoro. Now do you get it? We’re here to save you.”

  “Nay, ’tis assuredly some trick. Come not nigh, or man or monster, your weasand will be slit.”

  “Medoro,” called Shea. “She won’t believe we’re us. Make a poem for her, will you, chum?”

  To judge by Medoro’s expression, his muse was not the best of fettle, but he valiantly cleared his throat and began in a whining voice:

  “We are not lost to prudence, but indeed

  Stand here bewildered. What shall be our rede?

  Since none will aid us from this tent to flee,

  By spells of great Lord Harr must we be free;

  But ah! my heart is lost and passion-spent;

  To none by Allah come we trust in need.”

  “Nay, I begin to trow,” said Belphegor, her mouth losing its hard line. “This is Medoro’s veritable voice which comes from the shaping. But what is now your counsel friends?”

  “We’re going out of here on that flying carpet, the way we came in,” said Shea.

  The girl stood on tiptoe and reached. “But how to attain it?”

  “More turbans needed,” said Shea, practically. “Where would they be?”

  Belphegor leaped across the tent. “This chest—” and flung it open. Sure enough, it was filled with fine silk turban cloths, neatly folded. He linked three of them together with solid square knots and tossed one end up to Medoro, who caught it on the second try and braced himself while Belphegor swarmed up it, light as a squirrel. Then Shea took a firm grip on the lowest knot and began to climb, but he had barely cleared the ground when the turban rope went slack and he came down on his behind, the rope on his head.

  “Hey!” cried Shea, stepping on the Amir and he stumbled to his feet. He saw Medoro, his jinn-eyes shifting as he crouched at the edge of the carpet and muttered. The edge of the carpet fluttered and it shifted position a little.

  Shea would have said something else and more vigorous, but before he could get the words out, Belphegor leaned over the edge, with: “Throw up your end!” She caught it neatly, took a turn round her waist and called: “Mount, Sir Harold!”

  Shea hesitated, afraid of pulling the girl off, for though he did not doubt her strength, he weighed a hundred and sixty. But just at this moment a troop of eunuchs flung aside the curtain and came waddling into the room, pointing, yell
ing and waving scimitars at least a foot wide. He swarmed up the turban rope clumsily but effectively as a thrown dagger tumbled past him.

  “Get over and let a man run this thing!” he said to Medoro. He spoke to the carpet and they slid through the gap in the tent wall, out into the rapidly-descending twilight. The fire at one side of the camp was still burning; figures appeared to be dancing before it.

  Shea jockeyed the carpet up to what he judged was an altitude safe from arrow shot and turned to Medoro. “Well, what’s the alibi? You better make it damn good.”

  “I—I—but friend Harr, let the shield of our bread and salt turn aside the sword of your anger. Truly is it said by al-Qa’sun that he who sees into the hearts of many can seldom see into his own. Ah, most miserable of men!” He bent his head and the jewelled bracelets flashed as he beat his breast. “Your servant had no other thought but that when the end of the bond was lost, so much was lost that I should regret it to the end of days. But there is no might save in Allah, who has preserved you to be the delight of our eyes.”

  “You damn twerp,” said Shea, through his teeth. “So you thought you’d sneak off and leave me and then make a poem about it. That’s the idea, isn’t it?”

  “Nay, I am but a reed in the wind of your displeasure, and my breast is straitened, my brother,” said Medoro, and reaching to the hem of his robe at the chest, gave it a little rip. (Shea noticed that it appeared to have been re-sewn several times; it was evidently a habit with the young man.) “Now there is no help for it but I must die.” Two big tears rolled down his cheeks and stood gleaming on the tusks.

  Belphegor put her arm around his shoulders. “Ah, unhappy wight, grieve not! Sir Harold, I charge you straitly that you shall not overbear him, for he is a troubadour, and I hold it somewhat less than knightly to treat him as less than one who has sustained you throughout this deed.”

  “Okay, okay,” said Shea. “He’s a hero and a pet. I just don’t know why we bothered rescuing you at all. You were doing all right when we came in.”