He paid no attention when all the noises in the Bazaar stopped, like birds when a hunter enters a wood. He did not really notice the heavy marching of feet, nor the regular clank, clank, clank of mercenary armour that went with it. When someone barked, “Halt!” outside his booth, he did not even turn his head. But he did turn round when the curtains of the booth were torn down. He was sluggishly surprised. He blinked his swollen eyes against the powerful sunlight and wondered vaguely what a troop of northern soldiers was doing coming in here.
“That’s him,” said someone in civilian clothes, who might have been Hakim, and then faded prudently away before Abdullah’s eyes could focus on him.
“You!” snapped the squad leader. “Out. With us.”
“What?” said Abdullah.
“Fetch him,” said the leader.
Abdullah was bewildered. He protested feebly when they dragged him to his feet and twisted his arms to make him walk. He went on protesting as they marched him at the double – clank-clank, clank-clank – out of the Bazaar and into the West Quarter. Before long, he was protesting very strongly indeed. “What is this?” he panted. “I demand – as a citizen – where we are – going!”
“Shut up. You’ll see,” they answered. They were too fit to pant.
A short while after, they ran Abdullah in under a massive stone gate, made of blocks of stone that glared white in the sun, into a blazing courtyard, where they spent five minutes outside an oven-like smithy loading Abdullah with chains. He protested even more. “What is this for? Where is this? I demand to know!”
“Shut up!” said the squad leader. He remarked to his second-in-command, in his barbarous northern accent, “They always whinge so, these Zanzibbeys. Got no notion of dignity.”
While the squad leader was saying this, the smith, who was from Zanzib too, murmured to Abdullah, “The Sultan wants you. I don’t think much to your chances, either. Last one I chained like this got crucified.”
“But I haven’t done anyth—!” protested Abdullah.
“SHUT UP!” screamed the squad leader. “Finished, smith? Right. At the double!” And they ran Abdullah off again, across the glaring yard and into the large building beyond.
Abdullah would have said it was impossible even to walk in those chains. They were so heavy. But it is wonderful what you can do if a party of grim-faced soldiers are quite set on making you do it. He ran, clank-chankle, clank-chankle, clash, until at last, with an exhausted jingle, he arrived at the foot of a high raised seat made of cool blue and gold tiles and piled with cushions. There the soldiers all went down on one knee, in a distant, decorous way, as northern soldiers did to the person who was paying them.
“Present prisoner Abdullah, m’lord Sultan,” the squad leader said.
Abdullah did not kneel. He followed the customs of Zanzib and fell on his face. Besides, he was exhausted and it was easier to fall down with a mighty clatter than do anything else. The tiled floor was blessedly, wonderfully cool.
“Make the son of a camel’s excrement kneel,” said the Sultan. “Make the creature look us in the face.” His voice was low, but it trembled with anger.
A soldier hauled on the chains and two others pulled on Abdullah’s arms until they had got him sort of bent on his knees. They held him that way and Abdullah was glad. He would have crumpled up in horror otherwise. The man lounging on the tiled throne was fat and bald and wore a bushy grey beard. He was slapping at a cushion in a way that looked idle, but was really bitterly angry, with a white cotton thing that had a tassel on top. It was this tasselled thing that made Abdullah see what trouble he was in. The thing was his own nightcap.
“Well, dog from a muck heap?” said the Sultan. “Where is my daughter?”
“I have no idea,” Abdullah said miserably.
“Do you deny,” said the Sultan, dangling the nightcap as if it were a severed head he was holding up by its hair, “do you deny that this is your nightcap? Your name is inside it, you miserable salesman! It was found by me – by us in person! – inside my daughter’s trinket box, along with eighty-two portraits of common persons, which had been hidden by my daughter in eighty-two cunning places. Do you deny that you crept into my night garden and presented my daughter with these portraits? Do you deny that you then stole my daughter away?”
“Yes, I do deny that!” said Abdullah. “I do not deny, oh most exalted defender of the weak, the nightcap or the pictures – although I must point out that your daughter is cleverer in hiding than you are in finding, great wielder of wisdom, for I gave her in fact one hundred and seven more pictures than you have discovered – but I have most certainly not stolen Flower-in-the-Night away. She was snatched from before my very eyes by a huge and hideous djinn. I have no more idea than your most celestial self where she is now.”
“A likely story!” said the Sultan. “Djinn indeed! Liar! Worm!”
“I swear it is true!” Abdullah cried out. He was in such despair by now that he hardly cared what he said. “Get any holy object you like and I swear to the djinn on it. Have me enchanted to tell the truth and I will still say the same, oh mighty crusher of criminals. For it is the truth. And since I am probably far more desolated than yourself by the loss of your daughter, great Sultan, glory of our land, I implore you to kill me now and spare me a life of misery!”
“I will willingly have you executed,” said the Sultan. “But first tell me where she is.”
“But I have told you, wonder of the world!” said Abdullah. “I do not know where she is.”
“Take him away,” the Sultan said with great calmness to his kneeling soldiers. They sprang up readily and pulled Abdullah to his feet. “Torture the truth out of him,” the Sultan added. “When we find her, you can kill him, but have him linger until then. I daresay the Prince of Ochinstan will accept her as a widow if I double the dowry.”
“You mistake, sovereign of sovereigns!” Abdullah gasped as the soldiers clattered him across the tiles. “I have no idea where the djinn went, and my great sorrow is that he took her before we had any chance to get married.”
“What?” shouted the Sultan. “Bring him back!” The soldiers at once trailed Abdullah and his chains back to the tiled seat, where the Sultan was now leaning forwards and glaring. “Did my clean ear become soiled by hearing you say you are not married to my daughter, filth?” he demanded.
“That is correct, mighty monarch,” said Abdullah. “The djinn came before we could elope.”
The Sultan glared down at him in what seemed to be horror. “This is the truth?”
“I swear,” said Abdullah, “that I have not yet so much as kissed your daughter. I had intended to seek out a magistrate as soon as we were far from Zanzib. I know what is proper. But I also felt it proper to make sure first that Flower-in-the-Night indeed wished to marry me. Her decision struck me as made in ignorance, despite the hundred and eighty-nine pictures. If you will forgive me saying so, protector of patriots, your method of bringing up your daughter is decidedly unsound. She took me for a woman when she first saw me.”
“So,” said the Sultan musingly, “when I set soldiers to catch and kill the intruder in the garden last night, it could have been disastrous. You fool,” he said to Abdullah, “slave and mongrel who dares to criticise! Of course I had to bring my daughter up as I did. The prophecy made at her birth was that she would marry the first man, apart from me, that she saw!”
Despite the chains, Abdullah straightened up. For the first time that day he felt a twinge of hope.
The Sultan was staring down the gracefully tiled and ornamented room, thinking. “The prophecy suited me very well,” he remarked. “I had long wished for an alliance with the countries of the north, for they have better weapons