Tales of the Djinn: The Guardian (31 page)

“Hm.” Joseph made it sound as if he didn’t
like this idea. “We’d need a referee, someone to track results and
announce them at the end. Would you appoint one of your men to
submit to an honesty spell?”

“I would,” Zayd said. “Are you prepared to
have this challenge take place tonight?”

“One moment,” Arcadius cut in, his tone as
dry as the sand he stood on. “Before my servant enters into this
bargain on my behalf, I’d like to speak to him privately.”

Zayd appeared to enjoy this sign of
dissension within their ranks. He leaned back in his throne and
waved for them to go.

Because he held Elyse’s leash, Joseph pulled
her along for the huddle, which began as soon as they were out of
the crowd’s earshot. Elyse didn’t know if she was expected to share
her opinion and was too enraged to care.

“You know,” she said to Arcadius icily, “if
you’d told me you were making a display of our private moments, I
could have acted more vanilla. Then maybe that maniac wouldn’t be
convinced I’m the only prize worth bargaining for.”

“I was concerned you’d give away that you
knew we were being watched.”

Elyse slapped him in the chest. “That’s no
excuse. It was a horrible thing to do. That man saw us. You should
have given me a choice.”

Arcadius rubbed his breastbone where she’d
hit it. “You’re telling me you’d have agreed?”

“I don’t know.” She crossed her arms. “I
would have worn more clothes at least.” Arcadius began to smile.
“Don’t you
dare
be amused. You owe me the biggest apology in
the history of both of our planes.”

“I’m sorry,” he said. “If you’d allow it, I’d
spend eternity making it up to you.”

She turned her head away. He’d complied too
glibly. “Tell me you’re going to win this,” she said to Joseph.

“I probably am.”

“Probably!”

“Calm down,” Arcadius said. “You going
ballistic will hardly convince Zayd you’re vanilla.”

Elyse was so angry she couldn’t speak.

“Tell her,” Joseph advised. “Zayd has already
decided she’s worth trading a carpet for.”

Arcadius pulled a face but followed his
counsel. “We wouldn’t hand you over.”

“What?”

“If we lose, I’ll forswear myself. I’ll fight
every man he has to keep you safe from him.”

Elyse’s fury swung so quickly to concern her
emotions got whiplash. “He has a lot of men. You couldn’t defeat
them all.”

“I’d try,” Arcadius said simply.

“And if he failed, I’d kill
you
.”
Joseph shrugged when she gaped at him. “Better that than living
through what Zayd would do to you, since you’d end up dead either
way.”

Elyse broke into a ragged laugh. “That’s
practical, I suppose.”

Joseph smiled crookedly back at her.

“Can you win the wager?” she asked, trying to
speak calmly.

“I believe I have the measure of this
audience. And the human tech gives us an advantage. These desert
djinn won’t understand the monitor can’t be tricked by putting up a
stoic front.”

“So we’re doing this?” Arcadius asked,
surprisingly democratically.

“Yes,” Joseph voted.

“Yes,” Elyse sighed when he turned to
her.

~

Together with Zayd’s raven-garbed sorcerers,
Joseph cloned five working copies of the heart-rate monitor.
Arcadius and Elyse kept an eye on their friend. Though too far away
to hear what was said, they saw he was comfortable with his ifrit
counterparts. Elyse wondered if there was a special geekdom for
magicians. Maybe they felt a kinship to each other irrespective of
moral differences.

Having had the interval to consider, Zayd
quickly named the men who’d wear the monitors. Three of his
smoke-haired fighters stepped forward. One of the fighters’ ears
were pierced with multiple gold rings. A red-eyed albino joined the
group, followed by an old man so tall and emaciated he literally
seemed to be skin and bone. For all the emotion the group
displayed, their faces could have been carved from stone. Elyse
hoped Joseph was right about the monitors not caring.

The sixth man Zayd called underwent a charm
that compelled him to be honest. Elyse noticed he seemed less than
ecstatic over the honor.

After this, everyone took a break to eat.

Darkness had fallen by the time they gathered
again at the fighting ground. Joseph stood alone within the large
oval. Torches burned to either side of him. Behind him was a
leather folding chair he could sit on if he desired. An ifrit
servant scurried over with a silver cup and a goatskin that held
water. Joseph thanked him, waiting in silence for everyone to sit.
He seemed dignified in his tunic and over-robe—big enough to be a
fighter but radiating the spirit of a man of intellect.

As before, Elyse and Arcadius sat with Zayd
under his canopy. She wasn’t terribly religious, but she closed her
eyes and thought a silent prayer. She hoped no one noticed. She
understood the ifrits didn’t approve such things. Arcadius laid his
hand on her shoulder and left it there.

“You know who I am,” Joseph said in a smooth
natural tone. His audience had been stirring on their seats and
cushions, but they fell still as he began. Joseph gazed at them and
went on. “I am Joseph the Magician. Joseph the Eunuch, some call
me. I am different from you, and yet underneath all djinn are made
the same. Smoke and fire form our spirits, ash and sparks our
bodies. We love God or we do not, but we are one family.”

He paused for a sip of water.

“Is this the story?” someone muttered.

Joseph’s expression remained pleasant. “This
is the truth behind
all
stories, whether we hail from the
open desert or a djinn packed city. Every man knows what it means
to laugh or cry, to love or hate, to strive for courage or shake
with fear.” He pointed to his audience. “Do you have the courage to
hear my tale? Will you listen or turn away? This story concerns
people I care about.
I
will feel it as I tell it. Do you
dare to let yourself?”

“Clever boy,” Arcadius said very quietly.

“Will there be sex?” a second heckler
demanded.

“This is a story of Iksander the Golden, my
sultan, the most beautiful ruler the Glorious City has ever known,
the most beautiful man the women of the Qaf have ever laid eyes
on.” Joseph paused once more and grinned.

“There will be sex,” he promised.

The Sultan and the Sorceress

IT is a fact well established that Sultan
Iksander adored his wife, the beautiful Najat, who he rescued from
captivity in an ifrit’s tavern. She was royal like him and as
gracious as she was well favored. Those who knew the couple thought
the match excellent. Though it began as infatuation, their feelings
soon deepened to devotion. Sultan Iksander took no other
kadin
but her, shamefully neglecting the women of his harem.
For her part, Najat did everything in her power to bring her
husband joy, whether it be sending a servant across the city for
the best figs or rubbing his tired feet at night.

She rubbed more than Iksander’s feet of
course. The couple’s physical affection for one another was
infamous. Servants never knew when they’d round a corner in the
palace to find the Glorious City’s leading couple engaged in coitus
with half their clothes torn off. If the sultan traveled outside
the city for state business, immediately on his return, he would
closet himself and his wife to sate the needs that had gone unmet
in the interim. Thumping noises and hungry groans would ring out as
they screwed for days, pausing only to eat and rest.

In this manner, they lived blissfully for
many years.

One lack alone marred their happiness.
Despite much trying, the sultan’s beloved wife did not conceive a
child.

Iksander assured Najat this could not make
him adore her less. They would adopt, he said—some wonderful orphan
child who needed parents like themselves. Though Najat pretended to
be comforted by his words, she could not accept this idea. She
wanted to create a child
with
Iksander, an heir who sprang
from both their loins. The failure—for this was how she saw it—wore
on her increasingly over time.

It happened that, seven years following her
rescue from the tavern, whispers blew to the palace that a powerful
sorceress had taken up residence in the lower town. Najat’s
personal maids were aflutter over the wonders she was rumored to
perform: love spells and healings and even messages from the
dead.

I must visit her
, Najat thought.
Surely she can help me become pregnant
.

Najat knew her husband wouldn’t approve of
this. His most trusted friend, the commander of his army and all
the guards, had in his service a highly skilled magician. If they
consulted anyone, Iksander would want it to be him.

Regrettably, Najat had never been easy with
this servant, for he was not a whole man. She was accustomed to
perfection in all things—not to mention males she could dazzle with
her beauty. To make matters worse, the magician was a favorite of
the
valide sultana
, the sultan’s widowed mother, who
presided over everyone in the harem . . . Najat included. As
sometimes happens between old mother and young wife, the pair
didn’t get along. Najat was reluctant to let her mother-in-law
discover the seriousness of her condition. Should she find out, the
sultana was sure to pressure her son to impregnate a harem girl of
her own choosing—likely whichever doe-eyed seductress would annoy
Najat the most. Once that happened, no matter how unshakable
Iksander declared his love to be, Najat would be pushed to the
sidelines.

Any risk seemed worth facing if she could
prevent that.

Najat called her deaf mute guard to escort
her and dressed in her plainest clothes. She hid her face with a
veil borrowed from a maid. Her identity thus concealed, she slipped
away to the lower town. The season was high summer and it was
afternoon, the hour the wise close their shutters and try to nap.
Najat would not sleep today. The streets twisted like a maze
through the poor quarter, where the air was hotter than an oven and
cooling breezes refused to stir. The shop the sorceress had rented
opened onto a cobbled lane. Najat and her escort ducked under the
tapestry that hung across the door. Inside, at a table draped with
expensive silks and lit by a single lamp, a beautiful, very pale
woman sat.

Her hair was long and pure silver, her eyes
the milky blue of icebergs. Her flawless skin seemed woven from
moonlight. Najat was surprised to see such a young woman, never
mind one so finely dressed.

“I am the one you seek,” the woman assured
her. “And I know who you are. Sit at my table, and I will penetrate
the business that brought you here.”

Though disconcerted by this welcome, Najat
sat in the opposite chair. When she laid a coin on the table, the
sorceress made it disappear with a quick murmur.

“Take down your veil,” the sorceress said,
“and lay your hand in mine. No one will disturb us as long as you
silent friend guards the door.”

Najat laid her hand, palm up, in the hand of
the sorceress. As the woman traced its lines with one fingertip,
strangely sensual tingles rippled through Najat’s body. She almost
pulled her arm away, but then the sorceress spoke.

“There is a blockage in your womb. This is
the reason you cannot bear children.”

Najat gasped. The sorceress truly had divined
the purpose of her visit. “Can you cure me?” she asked.

The sorceress looked deeply into her eyes,
seeming to search for the answer there. Beneath her plain gown,
Najat’s nipples tightened without warning.

“I can,” the sorceress said, “but I shall
require two things. I need a golden hair from your husband’s head,
plus a single ripe strawberry only your lips have kissed. With
these ingredients, I can concoct a potion to triple the sultan’s
sexual potency. After he drinks it, his emissions will be powerful
enough to defeat any obstacle. Within a moon—two at the most—I
guarantee his son will grow inside you.”

Najat was no one’s fool. Though her judgment
might have been impaired by her anxieties, she knew sorceresses
didn’t give guarantees—not honest ones anyway.

Seeing her expression, the sorceress nodded
in understanding. “You doubt me, yet you believed the tales of what
I’ve wrought for others enough to try your luck. Bring me what I
ask and you’ll see proof yourself.”

“How do I know you won’t use your potion to
poison my beloved?”

“Would I sign my own death warrant? I am a
good magician, who works her wonders in the name of the Creator.
But you must do as you think right. Perhaps some other miracle
worker can help you.”

The sorceress inclined her shining silver
head, leaving the decision to Najat.

Iksander’s
kadin
stood up from her
chair. Her hopes and fears fought within her, making it impossible
for her to say “yea” or “nay.”

“Return tomorrow,” the sorceress said,
maintaining her humble posture. “I will prepare the cure you
seek.”

Her soft words freed Najat to go.

The instant she left, the sorceress sprang
up, shutting the shop’s wooden door behind the tapestry. If she had
seemed beautiful before, as she paced her shop she was glorious.
Truth be told, she was no ordinary sorceress. She was the Empress
Luna, monarch of the City of Endless Night, where the sun never
rises and the moon never sets. No territory in the Qaf was closer
to the Glorious City in wealth and might. For years, she had
dreamed of annexing Iksander’s city and ruling both. When she heard
he was the handsomest djinni of their generation, she dreamed of
annexing him. She’d come to his capital for the sole purpose of
seducing him.

Her present situation wasn’t her first
attempt. Using her magic arts, she’d convinced his staff she was a
member of his harem. His gifted friends protected him from spells,
but that did not dim her hope. With the utmost faith in her
luminous beauty, she arranged for him to “accidentally” witness her
bathing. The ploy earned her a scolding from his mother and not one
moment alone with him. Iksander saw beauty only in his wife. He
became the first man in Luna’s life to resist her.