The Grave Robbers of Genghis Khan (13 page)

Philippa wrinkled her nose with distaste and closed the book loudly.

“Horrible, horrible, horrible,” she exclaimed. “Why must people always behave so horribly?”

And why had her uncle underlined this passage?

It was the fifth book, however, that left her most disturbed of all. This was the oldest book, entitled
Twice Upon a Time: The Importance of Twins and How They Will Save the World from Itself. A Prophecy by Taranushi.

Of course, Philippa was well aware that Taranushi was the name of the first great djinn, which was why his memory was so important to the Marid. Before the time of the six tribes — of whom the Marid was the most powerful tribe for good — it was Taranushi who had been charged with controlling the rest of the djinn, only he was opposed by a wicked djinn named Azazal and was defeated.

Hardly knowing what to expect, Philippa opened the book and started to read another passage underlined in maroon ink by her studious uncle.

Philippa put the book aside and shook her head in disbelief. She could hardly ignore the fact that these passages had all been underlined with Nimrod’s own fountain pen. Nor the fact that these words and ideas — many of them horrible to her — were now in her own dear uncle’s head.

Was it possible that he was actually contemplating — she could hardly bring herself to think such a thing — throwing herself and John into a volcano in order to placate it in some way?

What was she going to tell John? Should she tell John anything? If they really were in danger, didn’t he deserve to know?

Suddenly, the words she herself had uttered to Liskeard in relation to his horrible bad breath seemed to thrust themselves back into her memory.

“Sometimes you learn the most from books you aren’t supposed to read, and words you aren’t supposed to hear.” How very true that was, she thought. How true.

A
rriving in the ancient port city of Djibouti, on the Horn of Africa, the Somali pirate ship was met by two officials from the People’s Rally for Progress, which is the largest political party in Djibouti. Other political parties are allowed in Djibouti but only the People’s Rally for Progress (the RPP) is ever allowed to form a government.

The two officials were, as a result, members of the government as well as being senior officers in the Djibouti Secret Police. Following the arrest of several hundred people in the city, a ring of American spies had been uncovered by the secret police. The ring was actually just one man and everyone who was unfortunate enough to share the same apartment building with him; they were unfortunate because they were all tortured to reveal information possessed by only one man, and it was several days before the secret police found out who the man was. But this was how the two officials from the RPP knew that the Somali pirate ship was being watched closely by NATO, and why they told Captain Sharkey that it would be
better if he left Djibouti, and why, not long after the
Shebelle
docked, it set sail again immediately, for the port of Aden, in Yemen, on the other side of the Red Sea.

Once there, Captain Sharkey and his first mate, Mr. Khat, debated what to do with Groanin.

“Now that NATO is onto us we should get rid of him,” said Mr. Khat. “As quickly as possible. Before they have soldiers abseiling down from a helicopter onto the deck of our ship to rescue him and kick our behinds into prison.”

“What would you suggest?” asked Captain Sharkey.

“Throw him to the sharks,” he said. “It’s what we usually do.”

“I’m bored with throwing people to the sharks,” said Captain Sharkey. “Once you’ve seen one person being fed to the sharks, you’ve seen them all. Besides, there’s no profit in it.”

“Then perhaps we could sell him to
.  Şābh al-Mjnwn. Here in Yemen.”

“Şābh al-Mjnwn?”

“It means ‘the Crazy Gang.’ ”

“I know what it means, Mr. Khat. But who are they?”

“Yemeni terrorists. Experts in kidnapping American and European VIPs. And extremely ruthless. Much more ruthless than us.” Mr. Khat shook his head. “I mean, they’re crazy. Everyone in Yemen says so.”

Captain Sharkey nodded. “How crazy are they?”

“Really crazy.”

“How crazy, out of ten?”

“Well, how crazy would you say we are, out of ten?” asked Mr. Khat.

Captain Sharkey thought for a moment. “Six or seven,” he said at last.

“Then they are probably a nine. Take my word for it. These guys, they’re really crazy.”

Captain Sharkey nodded. “Okay, I’m gonna ask my little friend Ringo what we should do next.”

Captain Sharkey lifted his eye patch, removed the beetle from his empty eye socket, and kissed its leathery back.

“Yes, we give the Englishman to the Crazy Gang, or no, we give him to the sharks.”

Then he placed the beetle on the table and awaited its decision.

Ringo stayed motionless for a minute or more while it contemplated which way to walk. Finally, it made its decision and walked toward the Somali word for
yes
.

Which is how it came to be that later on that same afternoon, a group of very fierce-looking men with dark glasses, bright red beards, and white robes collected Groanin from the
Shebelle
and, with a great deal of shouting and gesticulating, they pushed the butler toward a new-looking green Toyota sedan that even now was being polished proudly by one of the other Crazy Gang members, almost as if he had just taken delivery of the car.

The leader pointed at the open trunk and indicated that Groanin should get inside.

“I’m not a suitcase, you know,” protested Groanin. “I’m British.”

“Don’t ask questions, Englishman,” said the man with the largest red beard. “Get into the trunk of the car.”

“Where are we going?” asked the Englishman. “I said, where are we going?”

“Didn’t I tell you not to ask questions? Get into the trunk of the car.”

“A
please
would be nice,” said Groanin. “Costs nothing to have good manners, you know. Even for someone like you who has no manners at all.”

Captain Sharkey and Mr. Khat watched these proceedings nervously as the negotiations for the sale of Groanin to Şābh al-Mjnwn had been attended by a great deal of bad temper on the part of the Crazy Gang members. Captain Sharkey had rarely ever met people who were so cross and he was relieved to see the backs of them.

“Shall we tell them about the Englishman’s enormous strength?” Mr. Khat asked his captain.

Captain Sharkey shook his head. “I don’t think we’ll mention it now that they’ve paid for him,” he said. “Just in case they become even angrier than they are already.”

“That hardly seems possible,” said Mr. Khat.

“Do you think it’s the fact that they have red hair?” wondered Captain Sharkey. “That makes them so angry? Or does being very angry make your beard turn red?”

“I don’t know, Captain. But that looks like a new car. And I’d hate to be around to see how angry they get when the Englishman decides that he’s had enough of being shut in that trunk.”

Captain Sharkey grinned. “Don’t worry. We’ll be at sea by then. And perhaps we should stay away from Yemen for a while.”

Groanin climbed into the trunk of the green Toyota and sat down. He was hardly happy about this new development, but the men from Şābh al-Mjnwn were heavily armed and, once again, he thought it best not to argue. Besides, there was a mattress in the trunk, a blanket, some jars of his favorite baby food, and several bottles of water. As the terrorists closed the trunk and then drove off with their new captive, Groanin settled down and, before long, managed to fall fast asleep.

He might have found this more difficult if he had known that as well as himself, the trunk of the Toyota contained one other living thing: the largest camel spider in Yemen. And while the butler was asleep, the camel spider, which looked like some sort of alien from the planet Mars, crawled onto his large, warm stomach.

Camel spiders are not true spiders and have nothing at all to do with camels. They are giant Solifugae, which are members of the class Arachnida, and while not particularly venomous, they do use their own digestive fluids to liquefy their victims’ flesh into a soup, making it easy to suck this into their stomachs. They are also very, very fast on their
ten
legs. The reason they are called camel spiders is because some people think they gnaw on the stomachs of sleeping camels, which the beasts don’t feel, due to the numbing effect of their anesthetic venom.

If Groanin had been aware of the presence of the camel spider … but, look, perhaps it’s just fortunate that he remained soundly asleep.

For now.

P
hilippa uttered her focus word and was quickly enveloped by white smoke. Leaving behind her transubstantiated self, she drifted up through the ceiling of the library and then the top of the old lamp and, once outside, she began to gather her atoms urgently. This was always a slightly nerve-racking moment for any djinn, especially one who was young and inexperienced. For Philippa, it always felt as if the string on a valuable necklace had broken and she was anxiously collecting lots of precious pearls that were still bouncing and rolling around the floor, worried that she would lose one and wondering what would happen if ever she did. A missing leg? An ear out of place? No teeth perhaps?

Finally, she heard herself take a loud, euphoric breath and then opened her eyes with a strong sense of relief that she seemed to be all in one piece.

“Is that painful?” inquired Axel, handing Moby the duck back to her.

She hugged the duck to herself. “No,” she said.

“It looks as though it might be,” observed Professor Sturloson.

“Transubstantiation?” Philippa shook her head. “No, not really. All the same it always feels kind of weird to be mundane again. I mean, human. To have a human body is, well, limiting. Being spirit, or smoke, is more natural to us. A more profound state. You sort of gain a better understanding of who and what you are when you’re out of body. You know?”

“Not really,” admitted the professor.

“No, I guess you couldn’t. Sorry.”

“And inside the lamp, or bottle,” continued the professor. “What does it feel like? Rather close, I imagine. Like being shut into the trunk of a car, perhaps.”

Philippa shook her head. For a moment, she was too distracted by what she had learned in the library to answer him; but after a moment or two longer she said, “No, not at all. You see, the inside of a djinn bottle or lamp exists outside time, and normal three-dimensional space does not apply. So it’s impossible to imagine that you’re inside anything at all. Unless, that is, you choose to have the interior of the lamp look like the inside of a house. Or in the case of this particular lamp, a huge library.”

“I see,” said the professor who, quietly, didn’t see at all.

“Could you go inside another person?” said Axel.

“Yes,” said Philippa. “But only with their permission.”

This wasn’t true, of course, but she hardly wanted to alarm the handsome Icelander, not when she was as fond of him as she was.

“So, if you were inside me,” said Axel, “you could read my thoughts.”

“Yes, I suppose I could.”

Nimrod smiled at Philippa.

“Did you find the books you were looking for?” he asked her.

“Silly question,” said Philippa.

“Yes, of course.”

She showed him the book she had brought with her, only for the sake of appearances and again to elude her uncle’s curiosity.

“
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
,” she said, surprised to find that this was the book that had come to hand as she was leaving the library.

“I’m pleased to see you’re reading Coleridge,” said her uncle.

“Why was it a silly question?” asked Professor Sturloson. “When your uncle asked if you had found the books you were looking for. Is the library as well stocked as that?”

And partly to deflect her uncle from further conversation on the subject of what she had been reading, Philippa explained that it was a wishing library.

“You just wish for the books you want to read,” she said, “and then they sort of leave their places on the shelves and make their way up to the reading desk.”

“How?”

“They sort of float through the air, like this carpet,” said Philippa.

“Do you have to know the titles?” asked Axel.

“If you know the title or the author, that’s an advantage, obviously. Otherwise, you just work by subject. A very specific subject, sometimes. For example, if you want a book on ice hockey in Hawaii, or whaling in the Congo, then that’s what you would wish for.”

“And if there are no books on those subjects?”

“There’s always a book,” said Philippa. “Whatever you can think of, there’s always a book on it.”

“I can’t see the point of all these books,” said John. “Just gathering dust, most of them. I mean, some of them never get read at all. What’s the point of writing a book that no one is ever going to read?”

“I’ve written a few books like that myself, John,” confessed the professor. “But sometimes you just feel you have to write them. Regardless of whether or not anyone will read them.”

“That sounds like a waste of time,” said John. “All that work. All that writing. All those words. Strikes me there are better things to do with your time than write a book that no one is ever going to read. That’s like building a football stadium for a team that doesn’t exist. Or making a record that no one is ever going to listen to. What’s the point of them? That’s what I want to know.”

“I’ve written seven books like that,” admitted the professor. “At least, that’s what it feels like sometimes.”

“Seven?” John looked aghast. “If I lived to be a hundred, I don’t think I could ever write seven books. How old are you, anyway?”

The professor laughed. Behind his black mask and
without a smile the laugh sounded like something artificial to John. Something weird, anyway.

Philippa looked over the edge of the carpet and saw that they were no longer over the sea.

“Where are we?” She was hoping to change the subject again.

“Somewhere over Pakistan,” said Nimrod.

“That’s another country that doesn’t much care for unidentified flying objects, isn’t it?” said Axel.

“Yes, it is,” said Nimrod. “But we have no choice but to fly over it, Afghanistan being landlocked like it is.”

“What’s
landlocked
?” asked John.

“It doesn’t have a coast.” Nimrod grinned at John. “So if anyone ever offers you a job as the head of the Afghan Navy …”

“I’ll know they’re pulling my leg,” said John.

Philippa smiled at her uncle but there was no humor in her smile; it felt like the professor’s laugh without a smile. She was only smiling because she needed time to think about what he was planning, if anything.

“So we should be keeping a lookout,” said John. “All of us.”

“Yes, indeed,” said Nimrod.

Philippa saw an opportunity to speak with her brother out of Nimrod’s earshot. She said to Axel, “All right. John and I will take the port side, and the professor can go on the starboard side with you.”

“Any volcanoes in Pakistan, Professor?” said John. “Just so that we can tell the difference between the ash cloud of a volcano and a rocket launch.”

“They’re mostly small mud volcanoes,” said the professor. “The only one of any note is Neza e Sultan, in the northwest of the country, on the Afghan border.”

“We should be flying over it any minute now,” said Nimrod.

“But it’s been extinct for centuries,” added the professor.

“You mean that pointy bit of rock that looks like two praying hands?” said John.

The professor crawled toward the port side of the carpet, where John and Philippa were now on watch.

“It doesn’t look like it’s extinct now,” said John. “Look. There’s a trail of smoke coming out of the top.”

“My God, you’re right,” said the professor. “This is bad. This is very bad. If an extinct volcano has started smoking, this is very bad indeed.”

Nimrod steered the flying carpet toward the curious little volcano for a closer look. And while he and the professor and Axel began to discuss this latest discovery, Philippa took John aside and told him what she’d discovered in the Rakshasas Library.

When she’d finished, she waited impatiently for John to say something.

“Well, what do you think?”

“And so you think that because of all those underlinings Nimrod has made in those books you were looking at, then maybe he’s planning to sacrifice us to the gods of the volcano, or something like that?”

She shrugged. “I don’t know what to think, John. Not yet. But they say two heads are better than one, so I wanted to know what you thought. So?”
“I dunno.”

She glanced nervously at her uncle, who was still locked in conversation with the two Icelanders. “All right, one and a half heads,” she said.

John shot her a sarcastic smile. “Funny,” he said.

“Sorry.”

John shrugged. “I don’t mind volunteering for stuff that’s dangerous. As long as it’s for a good cause, mind you, as long as it’s for a good cause. But there’s no way that someone is going to fling me into a volcano to appease this Caterpillar guy or Shoetickelme.”

“Catequil and Xiutecuhtli,” said Philippa, correcting him patiently.

“Yeah. That’s what I said, isn’t it?”

“Look, I just mentioned those two pre-Columbian gods as an example. I really don’t think they’re anything to do with all this.”

“That’s good, because I don’t ever think I could pronounce those names without a tongue transplant.” John gave his uncle a sideways look. “He doesn’t look like he’s planning to sacrifice us.”

“Oh? And what would that look like?”

“I dunno. Different. He might look a bit guilty or something. Like he might avoid your eye. I know I would avoid someone’s eye if I was planning to sacrifice them. Especially if they were kids. You’d be kind of shifty, wouldn’t you? Like it was already on your conscience.”

“That’s true,” admitted Philippa. “But he did mention
Taranushi’s prophecy and he did leave out some crucial parts relating to us. And there’s another thing, too.”

“What’s that?”

“In all of our adventures, I’ve had the feeling that we weren’t being told everything about ourselves. We’ve had little bits here and there, but never quite the whole story.”

“What are you saying?”

“That just maybe we’ve been laid out for this all along. Set up. And that everyone’s been in on it except us.”

John thought about what his sister had said and nodded. “You’re right, sis. All the other djinn kids seem to be different from us. Maybe that’s because we have a mundane dad and a djinn mom. On the other hand, maybe there’s another reason behind it, after all.”

“Maybe that’s the real reason Mom wanted nothing to do with the world of djinn,” said Philippa. “Because she knew or suspected what destiny might — and I do stress the word
might
— have in store for us both.”

“Nimrod didn’t know that Vesuvius was about to become active again,” said John. “Did he?”

“I think that’s true,” admitted Philippa. “But you can’t ignore the underlinings in those books. In his ink. With his pen. I don’t think it was Liskeard who did that. And who else does that leave? Nobody.”

John shook his head. “After all we’ve been through,” he said. “Hey. I just had a thought.”

“At last.”

“You don’t suppose that Groanin’s departure has anything to do with this, do you?”

“How do you mean, John?”

“Well, if he found out something about Nimrod planning to make sacrifices out of us, well, he wouldn’t just stick around waiting for it to happen, would he?”

“You’re right,” said Philippa. “He wouldn’t.” She racked her brain for a moment. “It was a bit strange the way he quit like that. Even for Groanin. One minute he was on board and the next he’d jumped ship.”

“That’s what I’m talking about.”

“I never thought of that. But it could be connected, yes.”

“So what are we going to do? Nimrod’s much too powerful to try and go inside his body to find out what’s in his mind.”

“We’ll just have to keep a very close eye on him,” said Philippa. “And take comfort in the knowledge that if the prophecy is true, then because we’re twins, we’re more than twice as powerful as one.”

“That’s right,” agreed John. “We do have a bond that makes us stronger. Always did. Always will.”

Philippa nodded. “I think the time has come when we have to start using that extra power.”

“What are you two gossiping about?” said Nimrod.

“Nothing much,” said Philippa.

“Really? The pair of you looked as thick as thieves a moment ago.”

Philippa got up and went to sit beside Nimrod.

“We’re just getting a bit bored, that’s all,” said Philippa,
stroking Moby’s green head absently. “It seems like we’ve been sitting on this carpet forever.”

“We’ll be landing soon,” said Nimrod. “In the desert, near Kandahar. We wouldn’t want to draw any more attention to ourselves than can be helped. It’s the second-largest city in Afghanistan.”

“Oh,” said John.

“You don’t sound particularly impressed, my boy,” said Nimrod.

John shrugged. He was feeling distinctly cool toward his uncle. The prospect of being sacrificed has a very sobering effect on any child.

“But this is a historic place,” insisted Nimrod.

“So?” said John defensively. “Everywhere’s historic, if you think about it. I’ll bet if you started digging up Des Moines, in Iowa, you’d find all sorts of historic stuff.”

“Perhaps.” Nimrod nodded, politely acknowledging John’s point. “Only Kandahar is a bit more historic than most places. After all, it was founded by none other than Alexander the Great. Which is more than you can say for Des Moines, attractive as that particular city must be.”

“What else has it got apart from history?” demanded John.

“Kandahar is famous for a number of things,” said Nimrod. “It’s a major trading center for sheep and camels. This is why we’re here, of course. And for fine fruits, like pomegranates.”

He paused for a moment, measuring the effect his next few words might have on his young nephew and niece.

“What else?” he said. “Ah, yes, it’s also the home of my wife. Your aunt Alexandra.”