The Girl with the Peacock Harp

by Michael Eisele

  Slipping the phone back into its holster she glanced up to find Monkey still staring down at the tiny silver device. ‘Who speaks to thee?’ he asked in that bass voice that still seemed so incongruous coming from his slender body.

  She answered in as matter of fact a tone as she could, ‘My brother writes to ask if I am well.’ Monkey received this in silence. Struck by a sudden curiosity, Nadia asked, ‘Do Jinn have family?’

  Monkey’s eyes flared and she saw his jaw clench. ‘Am I commanded to answer?’ he growled.

  ‘No, of course not.’ said Nadia. ‘Come on, we’d better go.’ Thoughtfully she led the way through the gathering gloom to where she could see a light burning by the main gate. Her heart sank as she saw the same officious fool still on duty, talking into a mobile phone. She stopped and Monkey at her side paused obediently. ‘That man in the booth up ahead,’ she said softly, ‘can you, like, make him be somewhere else—without harming him,’ she added hastily.

  Again there was no sort of magical gesture; the young constable was simply . . . not. ‘What have you done?’ Nadia said in sudden fear. ‘Where is he?’

  ‘As thou commandest,’ said Monkey, once more in Arabic. ‘He is unharmed at this moment. As to the moment after this, who can say?’

  Nadia felt like stamping her foot in exasperation. ‘Put him in his home, safe and unharmed!’ she said.

  The Jinni looked bored. ‘It is done,’ he said, then, curiously, ‘Was he not thine enemy?’

  ‘No.’ replied Nadia wearily, ‘just a silly nobody.’ The Jinni frowned but said nothing as they made their way into Lispenard and turned left toward the main road. With Monkey following at her heels, Nadia started down the darkened street. They should have no trouble finding a taxi on the main road at this hour. She glanced back at the Jinni briefly, trying once more to guess what he was thinking. If you discounted the strangeness of his eyes, which were lowered and in shadow at the moment, he really looked like some normal teenager dressed in a copy of her clothes with his shirt worn loosely over his jeans and the sleeves rolled up. Yet at one word from her, he had said, he could transport both of them anywhere she wished. Yeah, she reminded herself, and what fun to arrive with her skin flayed off! How had the tales got it so wrong? But perhaps all of the Jinn were not bent on revenging themselves on the person who summoned them. What had Mr Green said? It was the binding that enraged them. Perhaps if you knew how, you could sort of hire them to do things. Quid pro Quo, she thought distractedly.

  They emerged from the dim quiet of Lispenard into the brightly lit chaos of the main bus route and Nadia scanned the speeding mass of vehicles looking for the boxy black shape of a London cab. She checked to make certain Monkey was just behind, then turned back just as two, then three cabs passed, engaged, their yellow roof lights extinguished. Finally she spotted a free one in an outside lane, and signalled imperiously with an upraised forefinger as her mother always did. The driver, obviously an old hand, blinked his lights in acknowledgment and somehow eeled his way across two lanes of traffic, earning nothing worse than a beep from a passing bus.

  A pleasant faced man of about thirty wearing a flat cap and an open necked windbreaker rolled down the passenger window and called out, ‘Where to, Miss?’ his sharp, knowing gaze giving them the cab driver’s lightning assessment.

  ‘Hampstead Heath,’ Nadia called back.

  The Driver pursed his mouth in a silent whistle. ‘That’d run you about thirty quid, young lady,’ he cautioned. ‘You’re sure that’s where you want to go?’

  ‘Perfectly sure,’ Nadia answered, careful of her diction. She had learned long ago that Londoners, like Parisians, responded to nuances of pronunciation as animals responded to scents. She opened the back door and ushered Monkey in.

  The Jinni gave her one dubious glance and obeyed, feeling the upholstery nervously as he settled himself. ‘If thou must have gold to pay for this journey,’ he said quietly as she took her seat beside him and closed the door, ‘Thou need only ask it of me.’

  He had reverted to Arabic, and she answered him in the same language. ‘Red hot coins dropped upon my head from a great height?’ she countered, ‘’Perhaps another time.’ The Jinni looked puzzled but subsided.

  The driver, one William Barker, according to his plastic-framed license, looked over his seat dubiously at the exchange. Speaking Arabic in public tended to put people on guard ever since the train bombings of a couple of summers past, and Nadia was quick to respond. ‘My friend was just saying that he expected to find London wrapped in fog,’ she said confidingly, with a between-us-Londoners kind of tone.

  ‘Owh!’ exclaimed Barker with a relieved grin. ‘First time in the Big Smoke, is it? Well, you tell him the London fog’s a thing of the past, but I wouldn’t be at all surprised if we had a bit o’ rain tonight.’

  ‘I can speak English,’ the Jinni stated, sounding offended.

  The driver blinked at the unlikely bass voice, but answered, ‘And very well, too, I’m sure, sir,’ before putting the cab into gear and pulling smoothly into the afternoon traffic.

  After a while they left the busy commuter routes behind, and began to wind through the less travelled roads that lay around Hampstead Heath. Nadia glanced over at the Jinni from time to time. He sat staring out the window as the spaces between houses gradually increased, giving way to open pasture land. Something in his intent posture prompted her to ask, in a low voice, ‘Do you know this place, where we are going?’

  ‘We are near the place where I was first summoned, accursed be that day,’ he answered without turning, in Arabic again. He was silent then, but Nadia had the feeling he was struggling with a question of his own. Finally he turned to her, gripping the cab’s upholstery with one sinewy hand. ‘For what purpose hast thou bound me?’ He asked, his bitterness seeming to give way for an instant to something like perplexity. ‘Thou dost not ask for riches, or to destroy thine enemies, or for a great palace to dwell in. Thou hast not even bound me with charms so that I may not harm thee. Of what sort amongst witches art thou?’

  ‘Of no sort,’ Nadia answered, ‘I am not any kind of a witch. I wish only to set thee free to go to thy home.’

  ‘All men lie.’ retorted the Jinni, and turned back to the window, just as the cab slowed and Barker slid back the glass privacy panel.

  ‘We’re at Parliament Hill, Miss,’ he said. ‘Was there any place special you wanted to go here?’

  Nadia shook her head cheerfully as she rooted around in her shoulder bag for the money she always kept there for just such emergencies. Sure, she told herself, you never know when you might have to take a jinni into a field miles from London to try to find a way to send him home before he kills someone. ‘I’m taking my friend here to see the city lights at night,’ she added, not much caring if the man thought she was a little bonkers or out for a romantic evening stroll. ‘How much please?’

  ‘Thirty-four pounds eighty’ Barker stated, in a neutral tone which betrayed nothing of what he might be thinking.

  Nadia handed over two twenty pound notes, holding up a hand after to indicate there was to be no change, a gesture also borrowed from her mother. Barker smiled and touched two fingers to his cap, as Nadia pushed her way out of the passenger door and beckoned Monkey to follow. The cab departed and they were alone.

  It was quiet on the Heath, the threatened storm seeming to have driven the various walkers and hikers indoors. A fitful wind was blowing, flattening the tough sedge grass and sighing through clumps of low bushes. The cloud cover was complete except for a thin line of sky lit at the horizon against which London appeared as flat silhouettes of geometric shapes dotted by vertical rows of windows, as though the sky were a parchment lampshade pieced by pinholes.

  The Jinni stood looking off into the distance and it was a moment before Nadia realised that both his fists were clenched and he was trembling with tension. ‘Why hast thou brought me to this place and no other?’ he said hoarsely. With a jerk he turned to face her
. ‘Why!’ he shouted suddenly. ‘If thou art in truth no witch?’

  ‘I just wanted to get you away before you hurt someone,’ she said helplessly.

  ‘Oh yeah, to a place neither mountain nor plain, at a time neither day nor night,’ returned Monkey, his voice grating, thick with rage, and she realised he was repeating what Mr Green had said, ‘To the very place where I was summoned, fool that I was, and bound to this earthly shape, a hundred of your years ago! Go now! Begin! Light thy fire, cast thy foul spell! What great work shall I now perform for thee? But take care, witch,’ he spat out the last word as though it were a stone in his mouth. Then he thrust his face forward, and his voice became a low growl, ‘Weave my chains well, for if thou dost not, no human for a thousand years hast died as thou shalt die.’

  Nadia felt herself close to tears. ‘No!’ she shouted back. ‘I want to free you! I want to send you home! Why can’t I just command you to be free, to go home?’

  The Jinni screamed with rage and a whirlwind sprang up under his feet, carrying him high off the ground in a vortex of pebbles, leaves and bits of earth. Nadia covered her eyes against the wind-borne grit as the Jinni’s voice thundered out over the hill top. ‘Command the sun to rise where it sets! Command rivers to flow up and fire to burn downward! Do this, O great wizard, before thou commandest freedom!’

  ‘Stop!’ Nadia yelled, her hands over her ears. ‘Please, just . . . stop!’

  The wind abruptly ceased, and Monkey dropped softly to the earth. ‘Knowest thou not how changed are the Jinn who linger too long on this world?’ he said. ‘Thy world, with its seductive pleasures and sensations of the body? To my world wilt thou command me to go? Yet is my world no further than this.’ And he reached out into the empty air. ‘And as near to me,’ he continued in an anguished tone that was worse than the rage had been, ‘as near as the blood in this cursed body. Yet is it forever closed to me.’ He placed a hand on his chest, then clenched it into a fist, his eyes burning into hers. ‘So mock me not, witch, with thy prattle of freedom. Tell me what thou wilt have of me, who am thy captive and slave.’

  Nadia stood, feeling as helpless as she ever had in her life. What a fool she had been to get mixed up in this! How wrong Al Khidr had been about her! She was no witch. She knew nothing about magic. How could she? The only thing she understood at all was computers, and what use was a . . . wait a minute. She stared at Monkey’s contorted face, not really seeing him. What if a computer . . . what if there was a virus or some sort of corrupted download that messed things up—what could you always try? Return the computer to an earlier time before the contamination occurred. System restore, they called it. Yes, she thought, but this was a living being. But a being, she reminded herself, whom she could command to do . . . anything. Somewhere she remembered hearing words . . . words in an older English—English Lit! That was it! ‘Hubble bubble, toil and trouble.’ No, that was the witches in Macbeth. What had Miss Tomkins said about Shakespeare? That he must have had contact with real witches . . . stuff in his plays was too authentic sounding. Everyone had laughed, and made jokes about Miss Tomkins and her broomstick . . . but it was another play she was thinking of . . . Oberon! That was it! They’d done a scene from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, where Oberon removes the enchantments. . . .

  And suddenly she had it. You couldn’t really put it the same way in modern English, but she knew with an intuitive certainty what she had to say. ‘Hear me then!’ she said, stepping back a pace and pointing to Monkey who lowered his head with a bitter grimace. The words seemed to come of themselves: ‘Be thou as thou wast wont to be! See thou as thou wast wont to see!’

  Somehow her voice sounded magnified, the words slightly changed from the original into what might have been a blessing or a curse. As the echoes chased themselves from the hillside and back again, The Jinni stared at her motionless for a long moment, and the first doubts began to stealthily appear. But then his face lit up and there was a ripple, a shimmer in the air and then—it was like watching a video reverse itself! Monkey flickered, faster and faster—she saw shadowy figures appear and disappear, the light come and go, a dim sun seemed to set in the east over and over, chased by an even dimmer moon. Nadia squinted, trying to follow the sequence of events, but the scenes changed more and more rapidly . . . until she saw the very meadow where they now stood and a small fire burning with a greenish glow, and a figure wrapped in a shawl gesturing to a shadow that stood just outside the fire . . . and then that scene too flickered and was gone and the hillside was empty—no, not empty, for she was there and it was the same . . . only where was the Jinni? She became aware that the air in front of her still had that strange shimmer, making the outlines of the distant city waver and dance.

  She stood alone on the hillside, knowing it was over, remembering again setting the mink free and feeling that same irrational pull, wanting to follow . . . ? Then it was as if she were encircled by an invisible movement that was not like a wind, and a multitude of voices that were not exactly sounds, all singing inaudibly with an incredible outpouring of gladness. The words in her mind were in an archaic Arabic—it sounded like ‘Mashkoor Ukhti’. Not sure of the correct response she spread her arms to embrace the empty air and the sense of movement grew faint and was gone. Nadia stood there for a long moment, staring sightlessly toward the winking lights of London. Then with a sigh she turned to follow the long road back. At some point she thought in a disconnected way, she would call a cab to take her home but for now she was grateful for the twilight and the silence. The clouds were dispersing and the first stars were beginning to appear as she walked, the last words from the Jinni —or had there more than one? repeating in her head: ‘Mashkoor Ukhti.’. . . ‘Thank you . . . my sister?’

  THE GIRL WITH THE PEACOCK HARP

  It was in the city of Azul-din,

  In the street of the old bazaar

  That I first heard the cry of the peacock harp

  At the Inn of the Broken Jar.

  ***

  Arrived I late at the Eastern Gate

  Where a single torch burned low

  Gave I Salaam to the porter there

  That in answering bade me go.

  ‘And where might I find rest this night

  ‘Or a cushion on which to lie

  ‘And the fiery kiss of the sweet kumiss

  ‘And to tether my camel by?’

  ‘O, go,’ quoth he with a wave of the hand.

  ‘To the street of the old bazaar

  ‘To the street of the place where all ways meet

  ‘At the Inn of the Broken Jar.

  ‘To seek is to find, my wandering friend

  ‘For the window that shows a light.

  ‘They do say the girl with the peacock harp

  ‘Makes her music there this night.’

  Small thought I had for harp or song

  But fared on with weary feet

  That arrived at the sign of the Broken Jar

  Hung over a dusty street.

  And lo, the doorway was opened wide

  And a window was warm with light

  I tethered my beast and fared within

  From out of the lonely night.

  There all on a dais beneath the lamp

  The peacock harp sang sweet

  In the hands of a girl a third of my years

  Cross-legged on a sheepskin seat.

  With slender hands she sounded the strings

  Pale skinned she was and fair

  And braided close as they do in the North

  Was her crown of red-gold hair.

  Yet as she sang the sun rose up

  Like the throat of a brazen bell

  And the notes of the harp turned to water drops

  In the depths of a Bedou well.

  And she sang to me, by the Prophet’s beard

  Of the lonely road so long

  As if she had seen through my tired eyes

  And put my heart in her song.

  And all, all th
ere did sit enthralled

  As silent and moved as I

  All—save one clad in rusty black

  Yellow-faced with a glittering eye.

  Such a one as was left behind

  When the great Crusades had passed

  Like a carrion crow whose time had come

  When all lay still at last

  And harshly spoke, like a crow in truth,

  In the midst of a delicate trill

  With hands tight clenched he rose to his feet

  Spake thus: ‘Thou whore, keep still!’

  ‘Well knowest I thy devil’s harp

  ‘That leadeth men on to sin

  ‘And thy face so innocent, golden haired

  ‘Where Satan himself dwells in!’

  The girl played on, and glancing up

  Spake thus: ‘Then hath thy wife

  ‘Shut her door to thee that thou rantest thus?’

  The man howled and drew his knife.

  By Allah my hilt was in my hand

  And I measured the space between

  When of a sudden the girl arose

  Her face set still, serene.

  Then a chord rang out from the peacock harp

  That never had louder played

  The lamplight sang to a murmurous glow

  And Time itself slowed and stayed.