Beneath Ceaseless Skies #110 Read online

  “Lá! Lá!” said a voice. “Or have you come to take my place? With a little practice, you might say that stuff as well as I, but judging from the size of you, you will not fit here. Not, anyway, in one piece.”

  Jon threw down the iron bar and bent his head low to the ground. “You do speak Harábese!” he whispered to the blank side of the block. He thought of the poor chemist, compelled by the obligation imposed by the former caretaker to act as translator until the end of his days.

  “What else has been heard in this alley for the last thousand years?” the djinee asked.

  Jon stepped out the door again, quickly lest he miss some visual manifestation from the eye in the alley. At this sudden action, Iánheh, who had been dozing at her station, looked his way. He waved off any approach.

  But the block was simply the block, just as before, without the faintest flicker of subtle fire. No grapes had been eaten. No manifested figure of a djinee stood anywhere.

  The djinee said, “What do you want of me? What plagues you, or that child down the alley, that my words can’t cure? Bring her closer, if she’s ill. Take the remedy and leave me in peace.”

  “Leave you in peace?” exclaimed Jon, who had no intention of doing any such thing. “Is this peace? A dirty back alley where any dog might salute you? Where old women beg for favors you can’t grant?”

  “Who says I cannot grant them?”

  Jon made no direct reply to that. The powers of wish-granting genies are greatly exaggerated in popular fiction and opera, and sometimes even in the newspapers, but novelists, lyricists, and journalists do not create the notion from whole cloth. And, after all, supplicants had been coming to this djinee for centuries; such evidence indicated that the djinee had some power. Jon said, “You know that you do not belong here.”

  “And do you?”

  “That’s quite another matter.”

  “Is it? And what are you going to do? You are just a foreigner without any power here.”

  Thus Jon knew then that the centuries of exile in this back alley of the Oom-ál-Faqr had rendered the djinee very provincial. Foreigners had been powerful in Ópet for a long time, although, in this one little back alley, and also in hundreds of others in the Oom-ál-Faqr, that was not entirely true. After all, how could the khedeev or any other ruler of the country reach into every nook and crevasse, even if he had a hundred arms? For if he had a hundred, the alleys would number a thousand. And if he had a thousand, the alleys would spread into catacombs and eat away at the earth like a bone-cancer, making it spongy, and then would the palace of the thousand-armed khedeev collapse!

  The khedeev, like everyone else who has ever ruled Ópet (if not everyone else who has ever tried to) knew this. It is part of the bargain of the Oom-ál-Faqr, and no doubt other places in the world too, whether the low slums that suckle upon the Celestial Mansion of the Emperor of Renguo, or the scattered jungle-hamlets of Chocolatala, or the deepest, darkest tenements of Ilyonton’s East End. Jon, not being a government man, did not entirely apprehend the fuller scope of implications, but he could appreciate what pertained to his own circumstance.

  He considered returning with paper and water to make a squeeze that Hoozeyn’s artisans could copy, but no: he was determined to return no ephemeral imitation to the Pink Chapel but the very solid object of “His crowning glory,” both to pay his Club dues and to choke Pendergast, pari passu!

  Delighted by this prospect, Jon sat himself down against the wall. “You say,” Jon said, “that I’m just a foreigner without any power, and perhaps that’s true, perhaps that’s not. What power do you have, really, servicing a few old women a few days out of a month? Don’t you know that you’re a prince?”

  “Of course I do,” said the djinee with what sounded remarkably like an offended sniff, though perhaps it was just a creak of subsidence from the timber roof of the ancient little house.

  “You belong in King Ósorathó’s rose-granite chapel that sits on the western bank of the Fiáró, facing the sunrise. You’ll be in a better state there.”

  “I should not think so,” the djinee replied.

  “Well,” said Jon, “that’s only because you’ve spent the last—” He looked again at the wall, judged its style and material and age against what he had read in books and had seen elsewhere in the city, and continued: “—seven hundred years or so looking at an alleyway from upside-down.”

  “O, but I was not in an alleyway, always,” the djinee corrected. “Once, the prince was in a palace. Rosewater upon my head! And the bricks of every wall were plastered with bright colors, and the floors were swept every day, not just on the days when old women (and young ones! yes, the young ones most!) came to beg favors, for they did that too, then. Begged favors of the prince, and the prince granted them as if he were a djinee. But in time the king grew jealous, or envious, or some other hardness took hold of his heart. Or perhaps it was God. And there was an earthquake. Or maybe it was a war. And the prince who granted favors was upside-down, stuck in a wall.”

  And what the djinee said sounded mostly right to Jon, except that the Pink Chapel was a temple and not a palace. Not all djinees appreciated such differences among human places.

  “Listen,” Jon said urgently, “you suffer unfortunately, but after today it’s all your own doing if you don’t listen to me and do as I say. I know men who are putting together the building that the earthquake or war or whatever it was tore asunder. I can put you back into your proper place. You’ll be restored to enjoy whatever existence you had there. These men I know, they call you ‘His crowning glory.’”

  “I was once, I think I know that,” the djinee said.

  “But I will have to remove you from here. Your attendant will object, if you don’t release him from his bond.”

  “To him I will speak no other words than the ones I have always spoken! How can I trust him? He would sell me if he knew I could speak so. He has said this himself, more than once, as he curses me.”

  “He says these things only because he fears you, or else because he fears his God; I don’t know which. Even if it is true, he won’t sell you, not before I can get you out, anyway. I’ll be back before noon tomorrow with a gang and a permit.”

  * * *

  The following morning Jon learned that the bashaw-ruzool (that is, the chief of bailiffs) would not give him a permit or guarantee of any kind that might suspend the activities of the bólees (that is, the police) because the Oom-ál-Faqr was (as has already been said) one of the places in the city that the arms of the khedeev did not reach—and did not want to. “Therefore,” concluded the bashaw-ruzool (though he did not convey the khedeev’s capitulation quite so plainly), “I cannot give to you any permit that says we will not do anything whatsoever. Because that would imply that without your having that permit, we would, could, or might have power to do something, which we manifestly do not.” (This man was, one should note, the very same bashaw-ruzool who had failed to find anything wrong with Iánheh’s performances when she was in the employ of a certain rope-charmer, which is another tale, but let it be noted that he was thus demonstrably a man of the law and not of his opinion.)

  Jon Fox was uncomfortable with the idea of knocking down a wall in the Oom-ál-Faqr without some form of official sanction.

  “The sáyeed is wise at last,” Iánheh concluded. They stood, again, at the mouth of the alley, while another audience of the misfortunate went on, fifty feet away. “But what will the djinee do if you break your promise to him? He that takes away illness can bestow it.”

  “Eh?” said Jon. He had been thinking only of the other consequence—namely, his manifest failure—which seemed to him far more immediate and terrible than any djinee-cast plague. “Maybe Pendergast can do something... direct Hoozeyn’s gangs here for a day. Baker’s Guns. Something.”

  The audience ended. The misfortunates stood up. This was a bigger crowd today: an old woman, two grown men, a small girl, and three older boys, one of whom limped, though, t
o judge by the gestures and tone of those with him, this was an improvement.

  Jon began to vacate his place, but Iánheh touched his sleeve to hold him fast.

  The people who passed them paid them no ill mind, except for one old woman who paused to give Jon an assessing look. She said something quickly in Harábese, patted Jon’s arm—Jon was by now accustomed to being so assailed by Ópetian women—and hurried after the others.

  The woman’s dialect had been too thick, and her tongue too quick, for Jon to catch her meaning, but he noticed that Iánheh was grinning and sucking on a corner of her qafiyeh. His demands for a translation were not immediately met, and while they argued—or rather, while Jon repeated his demands to know to which sort of insult he had been subjected and Iánheh failed to comply because there are things that a young woman ought not to say to a man—a shout echoed from the far end of the alley.

  This ended the interrogation. The chemist was dancing as if possessed, throwing his hands up in the air, slapping them against the walls, twirling like a darwesh, displaying his Western shoes beneath his robe, which he in the course of his dance threw off, revealing his Western suit. He sang something as incomprehensible as the old woman’s insult.

  “Sáyeed! Has the djinee entered him?”

  “That’s the stuff of fiction,” Jon said, unsure.

  While passersby had not paid any mind to the audiences, this display could not help but garner attention: unbridled joy was rare in the Oom-ál-Faqr. Most of those who lingered were murmuring (as Jon understood) “another man cured.” The chemist, having broken his broom and crushed his basket beneath Western his shoes, set his tárboosh in place and re-made his turban before ascending the alley.

  The Ópetian declined any sign of recognition of Jon Fox. He was himself again, a respected tutor of chemistry at the Polytechnic Institute. This foreigner was part of an old life of superstition he was abandoning forever in the Oom-ál-Faqr.

  So after, Jon inquired of the djinee: “What did you tell him?”

  “I told him that the god” (“pá natr,” the djinee said, this phrase in some Old Ópetian dialect) “told me that I must release him. Is this not the very truth? Only a god can restore one such as I to his place! I will worship him who restores me!”

  “A god!” Jon said aloud, horrified by the notion of Walter Pendergast as a god—even of the lower case!—to a djinee. That was too favorable a position, one that risked bestowing unknown perquisites, for the full extent of this djinee’s powers were, to Jon, unknown. Silently, he said to himself: “It won’t be that way.” Yet, he was quite stuck. If he revealed “His crowning glory” in situ, Jon would make Pendergast the djinee’s “god.” If he did not reveal “His crowning glory,” Jon would deny Pendergast his deification, true, but Jon would also fail in his own task and, in doing so, make Pendergast right. Which fate was worse, Jon could not decide.

  And if, tomorrow, supplicants came and found their djinee—or god—spouting its gibberish with no translator.... Jon could barely stand to think of it. He had seen something like this occur in the East End of Ilyonton years ago, when a popular phantasmagorion had closed up shop. The very same patrons who had formerly come to drop their copper pennies into the slots of viewing-booths or to buy tickets for the stage show now came to rip the doors off the vacated building. They tore the interior to bits, in hopes of prying loose some ghost or genie left behind or cornering some tattered phantasmal trace fit to be captured in a looking-glass, lamp, or bottle. He doubted that the people here, in the Oom-ál-Faqr, would behave so very differently.

  Iánheh, learning of his fears, said cheerfully, “Let’s go, sáyeed! There’s a solution to your troubles. Leave its implementation to your dragoman, because that is what you pay her for.” And she called, to the djinee, “Niboo! Nim noofr, noofr!” That is to say: “Sáyeed! All’s well, all’s well!”

  “Who is this daughter?” cried the djinee, who had not heard anyone (aside from Jon muttering the “gibberish”) address him in something like his own language for a very long time.

  Jon said, “She’s a good dragoman, or has been to me, anyway. If she continues to be, you and I will each be back where we belong, you in your chapel and I in my Club,” and the djinee hummed happily in reply, if it was not an echo in the alley of Jon’s own hope.

  * * *

  Jon did not see Iánheh the next day, nor that after. He paced between the Hotel Royale and the Pink Chapel several times a day to inquire of anyone nearby if they had seen a kópeet dragoman. No one had, or at least not the one for whom he was looking.

  He did not find her at the Bab-ál-Láhem, nor did any returning tourist party recognize her description. He asked others whom he knew—the street-barber, the women from whom he bought his bread, others, even Taggett—and none could or would say where she might be. To avoid the temptation of the Oom-ál-Faqr, Jon took instead to his room, a third-rate one he rented at the Royale. He sulked there the following days, and Madame Royale sent a servant to look after him now and then. The servant always found Jon at a book or notes, if he did not find him asleep. Even Pendergast poked his head into Jon’s room once and when Jon—in an unguarded, half-sleeping moment—muttered, “I’m working on your blasted crowning glory, God-damn-you,” Pendergast went away laughing.

  * * *

  Late one evening, the hotel servant arrived with a small card, folded and sealed with wax. Inside were Emerish words written in a neat, if childlike, hand: “The sáyeed has an apt next 1 hr after sun rise.” He knew the hand, and the brain that had thought to write it. He slept little that night and paced, half expecting his dragoman to give more hint than that. Weary of pacing, to fend off sleep he even lit his oil lamps and shaved. Jon Fox emerged that following morning at his usual pre-dawn hour, looking ill-slept but otherwise more respectable than he had some other days, properly shaved and groomed. In the hotel restaurant, Pendergast, Farrington, and Klein greeted him over their morning papers, bread and marmalade, and glasses of strong coffee, as if nothing had ever been amiss. At fifteen minutes before the appointed hour, Jon got up without a word and walked out to the street. The morning traffic of pedestrian tradesmen, carted freight, and tourists hoping to miss the worst heat at the desert “sights” was well underway. Among them was no sign of Iánheh.

  From their lofty obelisk perches, horologues of the temple sonorously marked the moment of the appointed hour. When this chanted song had subsided and the sun stood over the horizon, a new, livelier sound of singing and drums quickened Jon’s pulse. It was a kópee wedding procession taking advantage of the cool morning air, with female dancers in flowing dresses making circles around the wealthy young bride, who, reciting pieces of love-poetry that extolled her (one must hope) beloved, occupied a sedan chair borne on the shoulders of six eunuchs. Trailing along after came a little contingent of donkeys festooned with bells and fringe, laden with gifts. It would not be unlike Iánheh to insert her own occasion into such a parade, to give her business some “dignity,” but she was not following.

  So, as glum as he had been yesterday and the days before, Jon Fox wandered toward the site of the Pink Chapel, knowing that Baker’s Guns would not let him pass.

  He did not have time to decide whether or not to be surprised to encounter his dragoman on the Corniche with a donkey cart. “An ass isn’t suited, maybe, for ‘His crowning glory,’” Iánheh said, “but even a god will compromise. The cart’s owner, however, is another matter! I must return it when you’ve finished your end of this business, sáyeed.”

  With little prompting she told Jon what supplicants had come the next day: the pitiable, if not fatal, case of a little boy with an epigastric hernia. Iánheh explained to them that the djinee had sent away the other translator (which was very much the truth) because God had spoken to the djinee (which was rather less the truth) and declared that the djinee must vacate the place. Of course the djinee, trapped in the block, could not very well move himself: the supplicants had too been sent by God to
do God’s bidding, so all would be all right for them at the end.

  The supplicants had been understandably suspicious: after all, Iánheh was a kópeet and could not be trusted in matters of religion. But one of them remembered Iánheh’s father the vaccinator, and, through certain other assurances (some from the djinee in Harábese), Iánheh vouchsafed that all would be as their God willed. So the supplicants had fetched kin, strong men who knew about building walls and about tearing them down. These men pried up the block and deposited it upon the cart, which they entrusted into Iánheh’s care. “So I hope, sáyeed, that your intents are pure and your efforts successful in getting the djinee back where he belongs. Otherwise, once proved to be a liar, I will have much to answer for!”

  “And what a wonder that would be,” Jon murmured, but he was smiling, for his faith had not been ill placed and the looming reward was handsome: his reinstatement into the Club could not be long in coming now, and, even sooner, Pendergast would be proved wrong.

  Pendergast was not long in showing up on site, with Farrington and Klein. He saw Jon, and his gaze lingered on the cart and Iánheh, who did what Jon would not do: grin most openly at him. He and his compatriots ducked beneath the tarpaulin.

  “Soon for your fitting!” Jon said to the djinee, who hummed again, and Jon was pleased to know that it was still there, though perhaps the sound was only the axel of the old cart, groaning under its heavy load.

  Soon after, Pendergast emerged. He made a straight line for Jon and the cart.

  Jon could contain himself no more. “I have ‘His crowning glory’!”

  “You can’t have it,” Pendergast said. “It’s impossible.”