Kitap dosya olarak indirilemez ancak uygulamamız üzerinden veya online olarak web sitemizden okunabilir.
Kitabı oku: «Castle in the Air», sayfa 2
CHAPTER TWO In which Abdullah is mistaken for a young lady
He woke to find himself lying on a bank, with the carpet still underneath him, in a garden more beautiful than any he had imagined.
Abdullah was convinced that this was a dream. Here was the garden he had been trying to imagine when the stranger so rudely interrupted him. Here the moon was nearly full and riding high above, casting light as white as paint on a hundred small fragrant flowers in the grass around him. Round yellow lamps hung in the trees, dispelling the dense black shadows from the moon. Abdullah thought this was a very pleasing idea. By the two lights, white and yellow, he could see an arcade of creepers supported on elegant pillars, beyond the lawn where he lay; and from somewhere behind that, hidden water was quietly trickling.
It was so cool and so heaven-like that Abdullah got up and went in search of the hidden water, wandering down the arcade, where starry blooms brushed his face, all white and hushed in the moonlight, and bell-like flowers breathed out the headiest and gentlest of scents. As one does in dreams, Abdullah fingered a great waxy lily here, and detoured deliciously there into a dell of pale roses. He had never before had a dream that was anything like so beautiful.
The water, when he found it beyond some big fern-like bushes dripping dew, was a simple marble fountain in another lawn, lit by strings of lamps in the bushes which made the rippling water into a marvel of gold and silver crescents. Abdullah wandered towards it raptly.
There was only one thing needed to complete his rapture and, as in all the best dreams, it was there. An extremely lovely girl came across the lawn to meet him, treading softly on the damp grass with bare feet. The gauzy garments floating round her showed her to be slender, but not thin, just like the princess from Abdullah’s daydream. When she was near Abdullah, he saw that her face was not quite a perfect oval as the face of his dream princess should have been, and nor were her huge dark eyes at all misty. In fact, they examined his face keenly, with evident interest. Abdullah hastily adjusted his dream, for she was certainly very beautiful. And when she spoke, her voice was all he could have desired, being light and merry as the water in the fountain and the voice of a very definite person too.
“Are you a new kind of servant?” she said.
People always did ask strange things in dreams, Abdullah thought. “No, masterpiece of my imagination,” he said. “Know that I am really the long-lost son of a distant prince.”
“Oh,” she said. “Then that may make a difference. Does that mean you’re a different kind of woman from me?”
Abdullah stared at the girl of his dreams in some perplexity. “I’m not a woman!” he said.
“Are you sure?” she asked. “You are wearing a dress.”
Abdullah looked down and discovered that, in the way of dreams, he was wearing his nightshirt. “This is just my strange foreign garb,” he said hastily. “My true country is far from here. I assure you that I am a man.”
“Oh no,” she said decidedly. “You can’t be a man. You’re quite the wrong shape. Men are twice as thick as you all over and their stomachs come out in a fat bit that’s called a belly. And they have grey hair all over their faces and nothing but shiny skin on their heads. You’ve got hair on your head like me and almost none on your face.” Then, as Abdullah put his hand rather indignantly to the six hairs on his upper lip, she asked, “Or have you got bare skin under your hat?”
“Certainly not,” said Abdullah, who was proud of his thick wavy hair. He put his hand to his head and removed what turned out to be his nightcap. “Look,” he said.
“Ah,” she said. Her lovely face was puzzled. “You have hair that’s almost as nice as mine. I don’t understand.”
“I’m not sure I do either,” said Abdullah. “Could it be that you have not seen very many men?”
“Of course not,” she said. “Don’t be silly – I’ve only seen my father! But I’ve seen quite a lot of him, so I do know.”
“But – don’t you ever go out at all?” Abdullah asked helplessly.
She laughed. “Yes, I’m out now. This is my night garden. My father had it made so that I wouldn’t ruin my looks going out in the sun.”
“I mean, out into the town, to see all the people,” Abdullah explained.
“Well, no, not yet,” she admitted. As if that bothered her a little, she twirled away from him and went to sit on the edge of the fountain. Turning to look up at him, she said, “My father tells me I might be able to go out and see the town sometimes after I’m married – if my husband allows me to – but it won’t be this town. My father’s arranging for me to marry a prince from Ochinstan. Until then I have to stay inside these walls of course.”
Abdullah had heard that some of the very rich people in Zanzib kept their daughters – and even their wives too – almost like prisoners inside their grand houses. He had many times wished someone would keep his father’s first wife’s sister Fatima that way. But now, in this dream, it seemed to him that this custom was entirely unreasonable and not fair on this lovely girl at all. Fancy not knowing what a normal young man looked like!
“Pardon my asking, but is the prince from Ochinstan perhaps old and a little ugly?” he said.
“Well,” she said, evidently not quite sure, “my father says he’s in his prime, just like my father is himself. But I believe the problem lies in the brutal nature of men. If another man saw me before the prince did, my father says he would instantly fall in love with me and carry me off, which would ruin all my father’s plans, naturally. He says most men are great beasts. Are you a beast?”
“Not in the least,” said Abdullah.
“I thought not,” she said, and looked up at him with great concern. “You do not seem to me to be a beast. This makes me quite sure that you can’t really be a man.” Evidently she was one of those people who like to cling to a theory once they have made it. After considering a moment, she asked, “Could your family, perhaps, for reasons of their own, have brought you up to believe a falsehood?”
Abdullah would have liked to say that the boot was on the other foot, but, since that struck him as impolite, he simply shook his head and thought how generous of her it was to be so worried about him, and how the worry on her face only made it more beautiful – not to speak of the way her eyes shone compassionately in the gold and silver light reflecting from the fountain.
“Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that you are from a distant country,” she said, and patted the edge of the fountain beside her. “Sit down and tell me all about it.”
“Tell me your name first,” said Abdullah.
“It’s rather a silly name,” she said nervously. “I’m called Flower-in-the-Night.”
It was the perfect name for the girl of his dreams, Abdullah thought. He gazed down at her admiringly. “My name is Abdullah,” he said.
“They even gave you a man’s name!” Flower-in-the-Night exclaimed indignantly. “Do sit down and tell me.”
Abdullah sat on the marble kerb beside her and thought that this was a very real dream. The stone was cold. Splashes from the fountain soaked into his nightshirt, while the sweet smell of rosewater from Flower-in-the-Night mingled most realistically with scents from the flowers in the garden. But since it was a dream, it followed that his daydreams were true here too. So Abdullah told her all about the palace he had lived in as a prince and how he was kidnapped by Kabul Aqba and escaped into the desert, where the carpet merchant found him.
Flower-in-the-Night listened with complete sympathy. “How terrifying! How exhausting!” she said. “Could it be that your foster father was in league with the bandits to deceive you?”
Abdullah had a growing feeling, despite the fact that he was only dreaming, that he was getting her sympathy on false pretences. He agreed that his father could have been in the pay of Kabul Aqba, and then changed the subject. “Let us get back to your father and his plans,” he said. “It seems to me a little awkward that you should marry this prince from Ochinstan without having seen any other men to compare him to. How are you going to know whether you love him or not?”
“You have a point,” she said. “This worries me too sometimes.”
“Then I tell you what,” Abdullah said. “Suppose I come back tomorrow night and bring you pictures of as many men as I can find? That should give you some standard to compare the prince with.” Dream or not, Abdullah had absolutely no doubt that he would be back tomorrow. This would give him a proper excuse.
Flower-in-the-Night considered this offer, swaying dubiously back and forth with her hands clasped round her knees. Abdullah could almost see rows of fat bald men with grey beards passing in front of her mind’s eye.
“I assure you,” he said, “that men come in every sort of size and shape.”
“Then that would be very instructive,” she agreed. “At least it would give me an excuse to see you again. You’re one of the nicest people I’ve ever met.”
This made Abdullah even more determined to come back tomorrow. He told himself it would be unfair to leave her in such a state of ignorance. “And I think the same about you,” he said shyly.
At this, to his disappointment, Flower-in-the-Night got up to leave. “I have to go indoors now,” she said. “A first visit must last no longer than half an hour, and I’m almost sure you’ve been here twice as long as that. But now we know one another, you can stay at least two hours next time.”
“Thank you. I shall,” said Abdullah.
She smiled and passed away like a dream, beyond the fountain and behind two frondy flowering shrubs.
After that, the garden, the moonlight and the scents seemed rather tame. Abdullah could think of nothing better to do than wander back the way he had come. And there, on the moonlit bank, he found the carpet. He had forgotten about it completely. But since it was there in the dream too, he lay down on it and fell asleep.
He woke up some hours later with blinding daylight streaming in through the chinks in his booth. The smell of the day before yesterday’s incense hanging about in the air struck him as cheap and suffocating. In fact the whole booth was fusty and frowsty and cheap. And he had earache because his nightcap seemed to have fallen off in the night. But at least, he found while he hunted for the nightcap, the carpet had not made off in the night. It was still underneath him. This was the one good thing he could see in what suddenly struck him as a thoroughly dull and depressing life.
Here Jamal, who was still grateful for the silver pieces, shouted outside that he had breakfast ready for both of them. Abdullah gladly flung back the curtains of the booth. Cocks crowed in the distance. The sky was glowing blue, and shafts of strong sunlight sliced through the blue dust and old incense inside the booth. Even in that strong light, Abdullah failed to discover his nightcap. And he was more depressed than ever.
“Tell me, do you sometimes find yourself unaccountably sad on some days?” he asked Jamal as the two of them sat cross-legged in the sun outside to eat.
Jamal tenderly fed a piece of sugar pastry to his dog. “I would have been sad today,” he said, “but for you. I think someone paid those wretched boys to steal. They were so thorough. And on top of that, the Watch fined me. Did I say? I think I have enemies, my friend.”
Though this confirmed Abdullah’s suspicions of the stranger who sold him the carpet, it was not much help. “Maybe,” he said, “you should be more careful about whom you let your dog bite.”
“Not I!” said Jamal. “I am a believer in free will. If my dog chooses to hate the whole human race except myself, it must be free to do so.”
After breakfast, Abdullah looked for his nightcap again. It was simply not there. He tried thinking carefully back to the last time he truly remembered wearing it. That was when he lay down to sleep the previous night, when he was thinking of taking the carpet to the Grand Vizir. After that came the dream. He had found he was wearing the nightcap then. He remembered taking it off to show Flower-in-the-Night (what a lovely name!) that he was not bald. From then on, as far as he could recall, he had carried the nightcap in his hand until the moment when he had sat down beside her on the edge of the fountain. After that, when he recounted the history of his kidnapping by Kabul Aqba, he had a clear memory of waving both hands freely as he talked and he knew that the nightcap had not been in either one. Things did disappear like that in dreams, he knew, but the evidence pointed, all the same, to his having dropped it as he sat down. Was it possible he had left it lying on the grass beside the fountain? In which case—
Abdullah stood stock-still in the centre of the booth, staring into the rays of sunlight which, oddly enough, no longer seemed full of squalid motes of dust and old incense. Instead, they were pure golden slices of heaven itself.
“It was not a dream!” said Abdullah.
Somehow, his depression was clean gone. Even breathing was easier.
“It was real!” he said.
He went to stand thoughtfully looking down at the magic carpet. That had been in the dream too. In which case—“It follows that you transported me to some rich man’s garden while I slept,” he said to it. “Perhaps I spoke and ordered you to do so in my sleep. Very likely. I was thinking of gardens. You are even more valuable than I realised!”
CHAPTER THREE In which Flower-in-the-Night discovers several important facts
Abdullah carefully tied the carpet round the roof pole again and went out into the Bazaar, where he sought out the booth of the most skilful of the various artists who traded there.
After the usual opening courtesies, in which Abdullah called the artist prince of the pencil and enchanter with chalks, and the artist retorted by calling Abdullah cream of customers and duke of discernment, Abdullah said, “I want drawings of every size, shape and kind of man that you have ever seen. Draw me kings and paupers, merchants and workmen, fat and thin, young and old, handsome and ugly, and also plain average. If some of these are kinds of men that you have never seen, I require you to invent them, oh paragon of the paintbrush. And if your invention fails, which I hardly think likely, oh aristocrat of artists, then all you need do is turn your eyes outward, gaze and copy!”
Abdullah flung out one arm to point to the teeming, rushing crowds shopping in the Bazaar. He was moved almost to tears at the thought that this everyday sight was something Flower-in-the-Night had never seen.
The artist drew his hand dubiously down his straggly beard. “For sure, noble admirer of mankind,” he said. “This I can do easily. But could the jewel of judgement perhaps inform this humble draughtsman what these many portraits of men are needed for?”
“Why should the crown and diadem of the drawing board wish to know this?” Abdullah asked, rather dismayed.
“Assuredly, the chieftain of customers will understand that this crooked worm needs to know what medium to use,” the artist replied. In fact, he was simply curious about this most unusual order. “Whether I paint in oils on wood or canvas, in pen upon paper or vellum, or even in fresco upon a wall, depends on what this pearl among patrons wishes to do with the portraits.”
“Ah – paper, please,” Abdullah said hastily. He had no wish to make his meeting with Flower-in-the-Night public. It was clear to him that her father must be a very rich man who would certainly object to a young carpet merchant showing her other men beside this prince of Ochinstan. “The portraits are for an invalid who has never been able to walk abroad as other men do.”
“Then you are a champion of charity,” said the artist, and he agreed to draw the pictures for a surprisingly small sum. “No, no, child of fortune, do not thank me,” he said when Abdullah tried to express his gratitude. “My reasons are three. First, I have laid by me many portraits which I do for my own pleasure, and to charge you for those is not honest, since I would have drawn them anyway. Second, the task you set is ten times more interesting than my usual work, which is to do portraits of young women or their bridegrooms, or of horses and camels, all of whom I have to make handsome, regardless of reality; or else to paint rows of sticky children whose parents wish them to seem like angels – again regardless of reality. And my third reason is that I think you are mad, my most noble of customers, and to exploit you would be unlucky.”
It became known almost immediately, all over the Bazaar, that young Abdullah the carpet merchant had lost his reason and would buy any portraits that people had for sale.
This was a great nuisance to Abdullah. For the rest of that day he was constantly being interrupted by persons arriving with long and flowery speeches about this portrait of their grandmother which only poverty would induce them to part with; or this portrait of the Sultan’s racing camel which happened to fall off the back of a cart; or this locket containing a picture of their sister. It took Abdullah much time to get rid of these people – and on several occasions he did actually buy a painting or drawing, if the subject was a man. Which of course kept people coming.
“Only today. My offer extends only until sunset today,” he told the gathering crowd at last. “Let all with a picture of a man for sale come to me an hour before sunset and I will buy. But only then.”
This left him a few hours of peace in which to experiment with the carpet. He was wondering by now if he was right to think that his visit to the garden had been any more than a dream. For the carpet would not move. Abdullah had naturally tested it after breakfast by asking it to rise up two feet again, just to prove that it still would. And it simply lay on the floor. He tested it again when he came back from the artist’s booth, and still it just lay there.
“Perhaps I have not treated you well,” he said to it. “You have remained with me faithfully, in spite of my suspicions, and I have rewarded you by tying you round a pole. Would you feel better if I let you lie free on the floor, my friend? Is that it?”
He left the carpet on the floor, but it still would not fly. It might have been any old hearthrug.
Abdullah thought again, in between the times when people were pestering him to buy portraits. He went back to his suspicions of the stranger who had sold him this carpet and to the enormous noise that just happened to break out in Jamal’s stall at the precise moment when the stranger ordered the carpet to rise. He recalled that he had seen the man’s lips move both times, but had not heard all that was said.
“That is it!” he cried out, smashing his fist into his palm. “A code word needs to be spoken before it will move, which for reasons of his own – no doubt highly sinister – this man withheld from me. The villain! And this word I must have spoken in my sleep.”
He rushed to the back of his booth and rummaged out the tattered dictionary he had once used at school. Then, standing on the carpet, he cried out, “Aardvark! Fly, please!”
Nothing happened, either then or for any word beginning with A. Doggedly, Abdullah went on to B, and when that did no good, he went on again, through the whole dictionary. With the constant interruptions from portrait sellers, this took him some time. Nevertheless, he reached zymurgy in the early evening without the carpet having so much as twitched.
“Then it has to be a made-up word or a foreign one!” he cried out feverishly. It was that, or believe that Flower-in-the-Night was only a dream after all. Even if she was real, his chances of getting the carpet to take him to her seemed slimmer by the minute. He stood there uttering every strange sound and every foreign word he could think of, and still the carpet made no move of any kind.
Abdullah was interrupted again an hour before sundown by a large crowd gathering outside, carrying bundles and big flat packages. The artist had to push his way through the crowd with his portfolio of drawings. The following hour was hectic in the extreme. Abdullah inspected paintings, rejected portraits of aunts and mothers, and beat down huge prices asked for bad drawings of nephews. In the course of that hour he acquired, beside the hundred excellent drawings from the artist, eighty-nine further pictures, lockets, drawings, and even a piece of a wall with a face daubed on it. He also parted with almost all the money he had left over after buying the magic carpet – if it was magic. By the time he finally convinced the man, who claimed that the oil painting of his fourth wife’s mother was enough like a man to qualify, that this was not the case, and pushed him out of the booth, it was dark. He was by then too tired and wrought up to eat. He would have gone straight to bed had not Jamal – who had been doing a roaring trade selling snacks to the waiting crowd – arrived with tender meat on a skewer.
“I don’t know what has got into you,” Jamal said. “I used to think you were normal. But mad or not, you must eat.”
“There is no question of madness,” Abdullah said. “I have simply decided to go into a new line of business.” But he ate the meat.
At last he was able to pile his hundred and eighty-nine pictures on to the carpet and lie down among them.
“Now listen to this,” he told the carpet. “If by some lucky chance I happen to say your command-word in my sleep, you must instantly fly with me to the night garden of Flower-in-the-Night.” That seemed the best he could do. It took him a long time to get to sleep.
He woke to the dreamy fragrance of night flowers and a hand gently prodding him. Flower-in-the-Night was leaning over him. Abdullah saw she was far lovelier than he had been remembering her.
“You really did bring the pictures!” she said. “You are very kind.”
I did it! Abdullah thought triumphantly. “Yes,” he said. “I have one hundred and eighty-nine kinds of men here. I think this ought to give you at least a general idea.”
He helped her unhook a number of the golden lamps and put them in a ring beside the bank. Then Abdullah showed her the pictures, holding them under a lamp first, and then leaning them up against the bank. He began to feel like a pavement artist.
Flower-in-the-Night inspected each man as Abdullah showed them, absolutely impartially and with great concentration. Then she picked up a lamp and inspected the artist’s drawings all over again. This pleased Abdullah. The artist was a true professional. He had drawn men exactly as Abdullah asked, from a heroic and kingly person evidently taken from a statue, to the hunchback who cleaned shoes in the Bazaar, and had even included a self-portrait halfway through.
“Yes, I see,” Flower-in-the-Night said at last. “Men do vary a lot, just as you said. My father is not at all typical – and neither are you of course.”
“So you admit I am not a woman?” said Abdullah.
“I am forced to do so,” she said. “I apologise for my error.” Then she carried the lamp along the bank, inspecting certain of the pictures a third time.
Abdullah noticed, rather nervously, that the ones she had singled out were the handsomest. He watched her leaning over them with a small frown on her forehead and a curly tendril of dark hair straying over the frown, looking thoroughly intent. He began to wonder what he had started.
Flower-in-the-Night collected the pictures together and stacked them neatly in a pile beside the bank. “It is just as I thought,” she said. “I prefer you to every single one of these. Some of these look far too proud of themselves and some look selfish and cruel. You are unassuming and kind. I intend to ask my father to marry me to you, instead of to the prince in Ochinstan. Would you mind?”
The garden seemed to swirl round Abdullah in a blur of gold and silver and dusky green. “I – I think that might not work,” he managed to say at last.
“Why not?” she asked. “Are you married already?”
“No, no,” he said. “It is not that. The law allows a man to have as many wives as he can afford, but—”
The frown came back to Flower-in-the-Night’s forehead. “How many husbands are women allowed?” she asked.
“Only one!” Abdullah said, rather shocked.
“That is extremely unfair,” Flower-in-the-Night observed, musingly. She sat on the bank and thought. “Would you say it is possible that the prince in Ochinstan has some wives already?”
Abdullah watched the frown grow on her forehead and the slender fingers of her right hand tapping almost irritably on the turf. He knew he had indeed started something. Flower-in-the-Night was discovering that her father had kept her ignorant of a number of important facts. “If he is a prince,” Abdullah said rather nervously, “I think it entirely possible that he has quite a number of wives. Yes.”
“Then he is being greedy,” Flower-in-the-Night stated. “This takes a weight off my mind. Why did you say that my marrying you might not work? You mentioned yesterday that you are a prince as well.”
Abdullah felt his face heating up, and he cursed himself for babbling out his daydream to her. Though he told himself that he had had every reason to believe he was dreaming when he told her, this did not make him feel any better. “True. But I also told you I was lost and far from my kingdom,” he said. “As you might conjecture, I am now forced to make my living by humble means. I sell carpets in the Bazaar of Zanzib. Your father is clearly a very rich man. This will not strike him as a fitting alliance.”
Flower-in-the-Night’s fingers drummed quite angrily. “You speak as if it is my father who intends to marry you!” she said. “What is the matter? I love you. Do you not love me?”
She looked into Abdullah’s face as she said this. He looked back into hers, into what seemed an eternity of big dark eyes. He found himself saying, “Yes.” Flower-in-the-Night smiled. Abdullah smiled. Several more moonlit eternities went by.
“I shall come with you when you leave here,” Flower-in-the-Night said. “Since what you say about my father’s attitude to you could well be true, we must get married first and tell my father afterwards. Then there is nothing he can say.”
Abdullah, who had had some experience of rich men, wished he could be sure of that. “It may not be quite that simple,” he said. “In fact, now I think about it, I am certain our only prudent course is to leave Zanzib. This ought to be easy, because I do happen to own a magic carpet – there it is, up on the bank. It brought me here. Unfortunately, it needs to be activated by a magic word which I seem only able to say in my sleep.”
Flower-in-the-Night picked up a lamp and held it high so that she could inspect the carpet. Abdullah watched, admiring the grace with which she bent towards it. “It seems very old,” she said. “I have read about such carpets. The command-word will probably be a fairly common word pronounced in an old way. My reading suggests these carpets were meant to be used quickly in an emergency, so the word will not be anything too out of the way. Why do you not tell me carefully everything you know about it? Between us we ought to be able to work it out.”
From this Abdullah realised that Flower-in-the-Night – if you discounted the gaps in her knowledge – was both intelligent and very well educated. He admired her even more. He told her, as far as he knew them, every fact about the carpet, including the uproar at Jamal’s stall which had prevented him hearing the command-word.
