The Five Fakirs of Faizabad (19 page)

L
ike many public buildings in Israel, the Jewish National & University Library in Jerusalem on Mount Scopus looked more like a military headquarters than a repository for all the nation’s books. It was built of beige-colored stone and featured a little ornamental pool out front with three primitive-looking fountains that reminded Nimrod of drinking-water faucets in the lavatories at his old school.

Inside the dimly lit lobby of the building was a triptych, meaning “three,” of modern stained-glass windows — one red, two blue — that also reminded Nimrod of being back at school: It looked like just the kind of thing that the art class might have painted on one of the larger walls.

“The red panel has exactly seventy-seven panels,” Nimrod told Rabbi Joshua when he came to find him in the lobby. “I just counted them while I was waiting.”

“I didn’t know that,” said Rabbi Joshua. “Gee, thanks a lot. Seventy-seven is one of my favorite numbers.”

“Is it really?”

“It’s the smallest possible integer requiring five syllables in English. Let’s go and talk in my office.”

Rabbi Joshua led the way. He was a tall, thin man with a long black beard and long locks of hair on the sides of his head. He wore a plain white shirt and black trousers, and on his head, a little skullcap.

“Hot out there,” he said, changing the subject for just a second since, as it happened, he hadn’t yet given up on the number seventy-seven. “Seventy-seven is one of the coolest numbers there is.” His accent was American.

“Really?” said Nimrod.

“Oh, sure. It’s the twenty-second discrete biprime as well as being a Gaussian prime since it’s a multiple of two primes — seven and eleven. Which of course means it’s a Blum integer. Not only that, but it’s the sum of three squares: four squared plus five squared plus six squared. Believe me, I could go on all day about seventy-seven. Did you know that it’s the sum of the first eight prime numbers?”

“Er, no,” said Nimrod. He could see that it was going to be a difficult meeting. If there was one thing he disliked, it was a number freak.

“Like I said, it’s a very cool number. In Islam. In Judaism. In Christianity. During the Second World War in Sweden, at the border with Norway? They used it as a shibboleth — a password — because it’s not easy to say seventy-seven in Swedish and that way it was easy to work out if someone was Swedish, German, or Norwegian.”

“And to keep them out,” said Nimrod. “Yes, that sounds like Sweden, all right.”

Rabbi Joshua’s office was a shrine to numerology and the Kabbalah. There was a curious poster on his wall depicting a tree of life that looked more like an ancient family coat of arms, pictures of famous mathematicians, a coin-operated model of the Temple of Solomon, and an odd piano that Nimrod commented on: It had a normal-looking keyboard, but attached to the keyboard were a series of wooden cages in ascending order of size.

“That’s an interesting piano,” he said.

“It’s a cat piano,” said Rabbi Joshua. “The idea is you put cats of different sizes in the cages and when you hit one of the piano keys it pokes the cat and makes it scream. You put the kittens at the treble end of the keyboard and the fully grown ones at the bass end.”

“What a horrible thing,” said Nimrod, who was fond of cats.

Rabbi Joshua smiled. “I’ve never played it,” he admitted. “Not yet, anyway. Hey, it’s nice to see a fellow djinn. In here I’m kind of by myself, and I don’t put myself in djinn society the way I should. How is Mr. Rakshasas?”

“Dead,” said Nimrod.

“Gee, that’s too bad. What happened to his books?”

“He left them to me.”

“He had some rare ones, didn’t he?” said Rabbi Joshua. “So, what can I do for you?”

“I’d like to borrow something from your archives department.”

“That could be difficult. Some of that stuff is pretty valuable.”

“Well, I’m not asking to borrow the Albert Einstein Archive,” said Nimrod.

“Good, because I’d have to say no. Even to you, Nimrod. I could let you see it, though. Hey, did you know that Einstein’s birthday on March 14, 1879, can be arranged as 3-14-1879 or 3.141879? Which means that his birthday is just 0.000287 percent away from being the number pi, which, as I’m sure you know, is 3.141592 and probably the most important number in geometry. I mean, no wonder Einstein’s mind was in tune with the universe, right?”

Nimrod nodded. “No, it’s the Joseph Rock Archive I want to borrow.”

“Rock. Rock. Can’t say I recall that name off the top of my head,” admitted Rabbi Joshua.

“He was an explorer,” said Nimrod. “An Austrian-American who traveled in Tibet a lot.”

“Mind telling me why you want to look at it?”

“I promise you,” said Nimrod, “it’s got nothing to do with numbers.”

“Everything’s got something to do with numbers,” insisted Rabbi Joshua. “That’s what makes them so interesting.”

“If you say so.”

“Tell you what. I’ll play you at Djinnverso. Best of five games. If you win, you can borrow this Joe Rock Archive.”

“And if I lose?” asked Nimrod.

“You let me take a look at the Rakshasas Library. See what he’s got in there. Maybe we could make you an offer for some of the good stuff.”

“All right,” said Nimrod. “It’s a deal. Best of five.”

“Five’s an even cooler number than seventy-seven,” said Rabbi Joshua, fetching his Djinnverso set from a drawer in his desk. “Five’s a prime number, a Fibonacci number, a Catalan number, a pentagonal number, a Bell number, a centered square number; there are five elements including spirit, and five natural senses; five Sikh virtues, and five Sikh sins; in many ways five is my favorite number of all.”

They started to play. Nimrod won the first game and Rabbi Joshua won the second. However, he was not content with the wager they had made and offered Nimrod what the djinn call a Pension Bet. This is when one djinn agrees to give another three wishes for his old age (or sometimes before), when full djinn power has begun to fade.

“You mean on top of the bet we already made?” asked Nimrod. “Concerning the Rock Archive.”

“Sure,” said Rabbi Joshua.

Nimrod didn’t like Pension Bets because, on principle, he didn’t like the idea of one djinn owing something to another. To make a Pension Bet was, as Rakshasas had once said, “Like one dog chaining itself to another, it stands to reason that two dogs will want to go two different ways.” In spite of these reservations, Nimrod agreed to the bet, however, for he could see no other way of reaching Shamba-la than getting to borrow the Rock archives.

Nimrod won the next two games.

Which also meant he won the right to borrow the archives and the Pension Bet of having three wishes from the rabbi.
With anyone else but a djinn, Nimrod might have forgiven the debt, but djinn etiquette was very precise about such matters: To decline the three wishes won as a result of a Pension Bet would have counted as a grave insult and might have resulted in his being challenged to a djinn duel.
¹

“Double or quits,” offered the rabbi.

“Six wishes from one djinn to another?” Nimrod shook his head. “Impossible. You know how it works. A fourth wish cancels out the first three.”

“Not three wishes from me,” explained Rabbi Joshua. “I own a lot of Pension Bets, from other djinn. Lilith de Ghulle, Jirjis Ibn Rajmus, Mr. Vodyannoy, to name but three.”

“I bet you do.”

Nimrod shook his head, which seemed to set something off in his memory because suddenly he recalled something that Zagreus had told him on the plane from London to Fez: that he believed his progression from one incarnation to another had been prevented by a Mr. Churches. To Nimrod, it seemed quite possible that the name Zagreus had heard had really been that of Mr.
Jirjis,
which sounds a bit like “churches.”

“I don’t think I’d like to have the son of Rajmus the Ifrit owe me a Pension Bet,” said Nimrod. “I might not get the chance to call it in.”

“Maybe you’re right at that,” admitted Rabbi Joshua. “He was kind of angry about it when he lost.”

“How did you come to be playing a nasty piece of work like him, anyway?”

“Jirjis?” Rabbi Joshua shrugged. “It’s a library. People want to borrow books and archives. Even wicked djinn from the deep south of the United States.”

“What did an Ifrit want to borrow?”

“As a matter of fact, he wanted to borrow the Einstein Archive.”

“Did you lend it to him?”

“No. Of course not.” Rabbi Joshua shrugged again. “I won that bet. So, what do you say?”

“You mean double or quits?” Nimrod shook his head. “I should say not.”

“All right, all right, you win, Nimrod,” said Rabbi Joshua. “Let’s go and see if we can find that Rock Archive for you.”

Nimrod followed Rabbi Joshua downstairs into the library’s basement and then beyond that into the deep rock of Mount Scopus, where, in
A.D.
66, a Roman legion had camped in order to besiege the city of Jerusalem.

“Conditions down here are perfect for the storage of rare archives,” explained Rabbi Joshua. “Air temperature is a constant sixty degrees Fahrenheit, with exactly fifty percent humidity. And of course, security is excellent. Quite apart from the usual electronic bits and bobs, I have installed one
particular device I think you’ll be interested in: a golem. You know? A man-thing, an artificial creature made from clay. To protect the archives.”

“Was that altogether wise?” asked Nimrod.

“There’s a great tradition of creating golems to protect us Jews,” said the rabbi.

“Yes, but surely you remember what happened when the rabbi of Prague, Judah Loew ben Bezalel, made a golem in 1580? The thing ran amok and started killing not just people who were persecuting Jews but a lot of innocent people also.”

Rabbi Joshua shook his head. “That’s because he didn’t make it properly. He was relying on an incorrect translation of how to make a golem contained in the Book of Creation. Mine is the correct word of power, which means the golem can only obey me.”

“Nevertheless,” argued Nimrod, “you would still have to write the word of power on a piece of parchment and hide it somewhere on the golem’s body.”

“Relax, Nimrod,” said Rabbi Joshua. “Everything is under control. I know what I’m doing. I put the word of truth in its mouth. To deactivate it, you would merely have to say the Hebrew word for truth.”

They reached a thick glass door that slid open when the rabbi tapped a series of numbers into a keypad on the wall.

“How often do you come down here?” asked Nimrod.

“In truth, hardly at all. That’s the main reason I try to deter people from frivolously using the archive. We like
to leave the atmosphere in the archive rooms undisturbed, to keep the temperature constant. We call these the Goldilocks rooms. Not too hot and not too cold. To protect the archives.”

“And the golem lives in here?”

“It doesn’t live,” said the rabbi. “That’s the whole point of a golem. It’s not like a bottle imp. It’s just a thing. A man with no soul.”

“Wasn’t Adam, in the Book of Genesis, a golem, too?” said Nimrod. “For the first twelve hours of his existence?”

“Yes, I suppose he was,” admitted Rabbi Joshua. “But then the trouble only started after he was given a soul.”

“True,” said Nimrod. “But life — any kind of life, even life that’s not much more than dirt — finds a way.”

“Not this time.” The rabbi operated another sliding door and led Nimrod down a long corridor that opened on to a series of archive rooms. But as soon as they had turned a corner in the corridor, it was plain that something had gone badly wrong. The glass door to the Einstein Archive had been shattered and papers were strewn all across the floor. Nimrod guessed this was the Einstein Archive because Albert Einstein’s distinctive features were carved in basrelief above what remained of the door.

Rabbi Joshua let out a wail of horror and rushed inside.

“Oh, my goodness!” he said. “We’ve had a break-in. The Einstein papers. They’re everywhere. Just look at all this mess.”

Nimrod picked a sheet of paper off the floor and glanced over a sample of Einstein’s very small, black handwriting,
which was in German, of course. Nimrod thought it looked like a fairy’s handwriting, and he’d only seen one hand that was smaller and neater: his own.

“Can you tell if anything has been stolen?” he asked.

“No. It’ll take ages to find that out. Who would do such a thing?”

“I can think of one person,” said Nimrod.

“Who?”

“Jirjis Ibn Rajmus.”

I
n a quiet field behind the black ruins of St. Archibald’s Cathedral on the top of Bumby’s forbidding North Cliff, Philippa rolled out her sapphire-blue flying carpet under an enormous gray cloud and prepared for takeoff, which is to say she sat down and gathered her thoughts prior to uttering her new focus word.

She had given a great deal of thought to devising a new focus word and had come up with an even longer word than her previous word, which was: FABULONGOSHOOMARVELISHLYWONDERPIPICAL. Philippa had chosen a new word that was easy for her to remember and articulate but which, at the same time, was extremely time consuming to say. The simple fact of the matter was that lately she was more than a little in awe of her own djinn power and had concluded it might be better to have a focus word that was so very long she might still be able to change her mind about using
djinn power before she finished saying it; in which case she might leave the rest of the word unspoken. In this way, she hoped she might avoid the same mistakes her mother, Layla, had made that had resulted in her complete renunciation of her own djinn power. Otherwise, it was only too easy to turn two men into budgies. Or cats and dogs. Which was not a power Philippa much enjoyed.

Mr. Swaraswati sat beside Philippa on the carpet and, pulling his big toes toward him like the reins of a horse, nervously awaited its ascent. Having spent so much of his life buried six feet underground, the idea of flying several thousand feet above it left him feeling anxious and apprehensive and a little light-headed.

“And you’re sure it’s possible to breathe at such an altitude?” he asked Philippa. He looked pale and nauseous and his hands were trembling.

“It’s possible to breathe at up to twenty thousand feet,” said Philippa. “After that the oxygen gets pretty thin and you have to wear a mask.”

“Is that so the gods will not recognize you and throw you back down to the ground for your impudence in coming among them?” he asked.

“Er, no,” said Philippa. “It’s a mask to help you breathe more easily.”

Mr. Swaraswati took a deep breath and wondered if it might be best for him just to hold his breath until the flight was over. “I see. What speed will we travel at?”

“Oh, I dunno,” said Philippa. “Two or three hundred miles an hour?”

“Is it possible?” Mr. Swaraswati was incredulous. “If a man traveled at such a speed, surely he would die a horrible, horrible death. His head would fall off and his flesh would be torn from his bones. His eyes would be squeezed out of his skull and his lungs would be sucked out of his chest.”

“No, no,” Philippa said airily. “Men have traveled in space at speeds of up to eighteen thousand miles per hour.”

“Truly?”

“Truly.” Philippa smiled. “Ask Moo. She flew to Yorkshire with me. From Morocco.”

“Yes, it’s quite true,” said Moo. “And I’m still here to tell the tale. There’s absolutely nothing to worry about, Mr. Swaraswati, I can assure you.”

Mr. Swaraswati nodded gravely.

“I see,” he said thoughtfully. “That is most reassuring. And if we fall off the flying carpet, then we will not die, either, yes?”

“Er, no,” said Philippa. “That’s not quite correct. A fall from the sort of height we’ll be flying at would, most probably, be fatal. Nothing much has changed there, I’m afraid.”

“Then I’m afraid, too,” said Mr. Swaraswati.

“But it’s quite a big carpet,” said Philippa. “And these carpets tend to fly very hard and flat. So if you keep away from the edge and don’t wander around, I think you’ll be perfectly safe.”

“Perfectly safe,” said Moo, who was impatient to get back to London, especially now that it had started to rain.

When at last Mr. Swaraswati was reassured that he might fly on the carpet and live, Philippa set about taking off.

“DI​DD​LE​EY​EJ​OE​FR​OM​ME​JI​CO​FE​LL​OF​FH​IS​HO​RS​EA​TA​RO​DE​OH​AN​DS​UP​ST​IC​KE​MU​PD​RO​PT​HE​MG​UN​SA​ND​PI​CK​EM​UP​DI​DD​LE​EY​EJ​OE​FR​OM​ME​JI​CO!”

As soon as Philippa had finished speaking her new focus word, which took all of eight seconds, the flying carpet began to rise up in the air. It remained as hard as a wooden floor, but while they remained untouched by the wind, there was little Philippa could do to avoid the rain except issue Moo and Mr. Swaraswati djinn-made umbrellas and try to steer the carpet above the clouds. But having entered a large rain cloud, she discovered that it was thousands of feet in height and width, and it wasn’t very long before the carpet and its three passengers were being buffeted by some very turbulent weather.

“Sorry about this,” Philippa told Mr. Swaraswati and Moo. “It’s just a bit of air turbulence. I’ll try and get us above this cloud as soon as I can and find us some smoother air.”

“I say,” said Moo as the carpet hit an air pocket that felt like an earthquake. “Quite a roller coaster this trip, eh? Whoops. That one felt like I was in a barrel going over Niagara.”

Moo’s description of the flight was extremely accurate. For a moment, the carpet fell several hundred feet, before another air pocket brought them up short with a loud bang as if they had hit a huge pothole in a road.

“Oh, God,” said Mr. Swaraswati and, wiping the rain from his face and wringing out his beard, he began to pray, and pray quickly for the amber prayer beads he held in his
gnarled hand were passing between his finger and thumb so fast that he might almost have been counting the individual air pockets that buffeted the flying carpet. “I think,” he said, not unreasonably, “I have a tremendous fear of flying.”

Philippa concentrated on taking the carpet even higher, but the gray cloud, a cumulonimbus, heavy with rain like a giant dirty sponge filled with water, seemed to be interminable.

Worse was to follow, however, as a sheet of lightning flashed in front of them and lit up the sky like a phalanx of photographers. And a few seconds later, a rumble of thunder turned into a virtual artillery barrage.

“This isn’t good,” murmured Philippa.

“I will never complain about British Airways again,” Moo shouted above the tumultuous noise.

Mr. Swaraswati threw away his prayer beads and covered his ears with the palms of his hands. “Oh, calamity!” he cried. “Calamity!”

“You’re not helping,” Philippa told her passengers. “Gee, no wonder pilots lock the door to the cockpit.”

“Can’t you get us out of here?” Moo shouted again to make herself heard above the terrible storm.

“I’m trying for Pete’s sake,” said Philippa, mentally redoubling her efforts to lift them clear of the tempest that now threatened to destroy them.

“Use your djinn power to quiet the storm,” suggested Moo.

Philippa frowned.
Who does she think I am?
she wondered crossly.
Moses?

“Or to make us feel more comfortable.”

“Not while I’m flying this thing, I can’t,” Philippa said through gritted teeth. “I don’t dare take my mind off handling the carpet in order to do any of that. I might lose control.”

That’s what comes of having a focus word that takes eight seconds to finish saying,
she told herself, and resolved to go back to something shorter as soon as they were out of the storm.

Another sheet of lightning illuminated the sky around them, only this time it seemed closer than before, flashing on and off like a huge neon light that was about to conk out.

“I thought you said it was perfectly safe,” yelled Mr. Swaraswati. By now, he was completely prostrate on the carpet, eyes closed, face pressed down as if he hoped he was underground again.

“It is,” said Philippa. “Just try to relax.”

For a moment Philippa lost sight of Mr. Swaraswati and Moo as the carpet entered a particularly thick and dark part of the thundercloud. And she was reaching out to take hold of the old fakir’s hand when a third sheet of lightning split the darkening sky in front of her.

It wasn’t just the sky that was split, only Philippa hardly knew this yet.

She snatched her hand away as if she had been electrocuted. Her whole arm felt numb. And when she inspected her fingers she found they were black as if they had been burned. Being a djinn this was hardly a great problem and
the realization that she had been struck by lightning quickly gave way to a fear that something had happened to Moo and to Mr. Swaraswati, who were still lost in the thick cloud that now enveloped them.

“Moo?” said Philippa. “Mr. Swaraswati? Are you all right?”

Hearing no reply, Philippa leaned to one side and stretched out her arm to reassure herself that they were still there. And not finding anyone, she leaned a little farther and then a little farther still until she almost fell off the carpet, or what was left of it.

Philippa let out a horrified scream, for it was quickly apparent to her that the flying carpet had been cut in two by the sheet of lightning and that Moo and Mr. Swaraswati were gone. She herself was so close to the new edge of the bifurcated carpet that there was even a scorch mark on the trousers she was wearing.

She shouted their names again, only this time more loudly; she did this several times until, to her huge relief, in the distance she heard them call back.

“We’re all right,” shouted Moo. “We’re still in the air, but we seem to be going around in circles. That last bolt of lightning must have cut the carpet in half. Where are you?”

“On the other half,” called Philippa. “Keep shouting, and I’ll come and look for you.”

“I’ve never been a very shouty sort of person,” said Moo. “But I’ll do my best. Perhaps, if I was to recite a poem, that might help.”

“I don’t see how reciting poetry could help the situation,” said Mr. Swaraswati. “A prayer might be better.”

“I mean that Philippa can hear me reciting it,” shouted Moo. “There’s one I know by Kipling that has five verses, so that should give her plenty of time to get a fix on us. I often used to recite it to the girls at my school in India. Many years ago.”

“Good idea,” shouted Philippa, and wheeled the carpet around in the direction of Moo’s voice even as the storm died away.

“There’s nothing like a bit of Kipling,” Moo told Mr. Swaraswati, “to keep your spirits up.” Moo started to recite the poem.

Philippa steered the flying carpet back and forth, up and down through the huge gray cloud, but she continued to fail to see her two companions, and having the strong impression that, if anything, Moo’s voice was getting even farther away, Philippa shouted out again.

“I can’t hear you,” she said. “What’s the matter? Moo? Answer me. Have you stopped? You said there were five verses of that poem. I’ve only heard three.”

There was no reply.

On she flew, around and around until at last she started to fear that she might end up getting as lost as Moo and Mr. Swaraswati.

“It’s no good,” she said after almost an hour’s search had passed without result. “I can’t see you and I can’t hear you. I’m hoping that maybe the strip of carpet you’re on will carry
you on to London and my uncle Nimrod’s house, like it was supposed to do. That’s where I’m going, too. And if you’re not there then Uncle Nimrod will probably know what to do, so don’t panic. Don’t panic. We’ll think of a way to find you. I promise.”