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 is 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 gray 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 tasseled 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, O 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 that 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 will swear to the djinn on it. Have me enchanted to tell the truth, and I will still say the same, O 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 forward 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 my 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 criticize! 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 than we can make here, some of those weapons being truly sorcerous, I understand. But the princes of Ochinstan are very hard to pin down. So all I had to do—so I thought—was to isolate my daughter from any possibility of seeing a man—and naturally give her the best of educations otherwise, to make sure she could sing and dance and make herself pleasing to a prince. Then, when my
daughter was of marriageable age, I invited the Prince here on a visit of state. He was to come here next year, when he had finished subduing a land he has just conquered with those same excellent weapons. And I knew that as soon as my daughter set eyes on him, the prophecy would make sure that I had him!” His eyes turned balefully down on Abdullah. “Then my plans are upset by an insect like you!”
“That is unfortunately true, most prudent of rulers,” Abdullah admitted. “Tell me, is this Prince of Ochinstan by any chance somewhat old and ugly?”
“I believe him to be hideous in the same northern fashion as these mercenaries,” the Sultan said, at which Abdullah sensed the soldiers, most of whom ran to freckles and reddish hair, stiffened. “Why do you ask, dog?”
“Because, if you will forgive further criticism of your great wisdom, O nurturer of our nation, this seems somewhat unfair to your daughter,” Abdullah observed. He felt the eyes of the soldiers turn to him, wondering at his daring. Abdullah did not care. He felt he had little to lose.
“Women do not count,” said the Sultan. “Therefore, it is impossible to be unfair to them.”
“I disagree,” said Abdullah, at which the soldiers stared even harder.
The Sultan glowered down at him. His powerful hands wrung the nightcap as if it were Abdullah’s neck. “Be silent, you diseased toad!” he said. “Or you will make me forget myself and order your instant execution!”
Abdullah relaxed a little. “O absolute sword among the citizens, I implore you to kill me now,” he said. “I have transgressed and I have sinned and I have trespassed in your night garden—”