Gateway to Elsewhere

Chapter 4

Three weeks later, in mid-morning, Tony sat comfortably in the shady part of the courtyard and looked more or less dreamily at the slave girl Ghail’s legs. She had nice legs, and rather a lot of them was on display. They were slim, as a girl’s legs ought to be, and they tapered nicely to the knee, and then they flared just the right amount at just the right place below them, and went down to very nice ankles, and below them to small bare feet—very dusty at the moment—one of which tapped ominously on the floor of the courtyard. He was still kept behind a locked iron grate, technically imprisoned, and his conscience had had a swell time pointing out to him how completely irresponsible and harebrained and half-witted all his actions had been. He was, however, unworried except over the reaction that tapping foot might presage.

At first, of course, he’d been totally unable to speak Arabic, and nobody in Barkut seemed to be able to speak English. He’d tried to communicate from his original prison cell with the help of a dog-eared guide book he’d picked up second-hand in Suez. The vocabulary it offered, however, was limited. It gave the phrases for complaining that prices were too high, that the food was overripe, and that the speaker wanted to go back to his hotel. But in Barkut Tony had been charged nothing, the food was good if monotonous—though fresh ripe dates had been a revelation to him—and he was in jail and had no hotel. After two days of this unsatisfactory conversation, he’d been moved to a convenient cell-and-courtyard in the palace. He’d been inspected by various whiskered people he thought were officials, and then the slave girl Ghail had appeared and resolutely set to work to teach him to talk.

That was the way she undoubtedly looked at it. Tony was presumably an adult male, but he babbled only a few Arabic words, and those with a vile accent. The slave girl had settled down to the job with something like a scowl. She had an imperial carriage, which Tony recalled vaguely could be credited to the carriage of burdens on her head as a child. She was long-legged and lissome and had an air of firm competence, and he knew she was a slave girl because married women and the marriageable daughters of citizens walked the streets—if at all—only when swathed in voluminous robes and with veils which complied with the strictest of Moslem traditions. This girl Ghail was not swathed to speak of, and she was not veiled at all, and she was distinctly pretty and very far from shapeless. And she regarded Tony with a scowling disparagement which made him work earnestly to learn to carry on a conversation.

Matters had progressed nicely in three weeks, and Tony found himself possessed of a talent for languages. But now she tapped her foot ominously on the floor of his comfortable prison. She said, in measured calm:

“Now, just what do you mean by that?”

Tony spoke apologetically. But he was pleased with the fluency he displayed in the Arabic she had taught him.

“I wanted to know.”

“And just why did you want to know the name of my owner and the value in money that is placed upon me?” demanded the girl.

“Sooner or later,” explained Tony, trying hard to be convincing, “I shall be questioned by the rulers of this place. I think that is why you have been set to teach me the language. When I am questioned and can explain myself, I shall become high in favor, and rich. It was my thought that then—Allah permitting—I would purchase you from your owner.”

The slave girl’s foot tapped more forbiddingly still.

“And for what purpose,” she demanded icily, “would you wish to purchase me?”

Tony looked at her in pained astonishment. His conscience mentioned acidly that this conversation was not only improper but indiscreet. A brisk young executive would never… To which Tony replied that he wouldn’t have much fun, then. When his conscience began a heated rejoinder, he cut it short.

“Truly,” said Tony in false piety, “somebody has undoubtedly said that the desires of a man’s heart are many, but that if there is not one woman more desirable than all else, he is not human.”

His Arabic was still sketchy, but he put it over. The girl’s eyes, however, instead of warming, burned angrily. “You are human?” she demanded.

“All too human,” admitted Tony, “what else?”

She stood up in queenly indignation. She smiled—but painfully and with contempt, like someone speaking to a half-wit or worse.

“You came across the desert from the sea,” she said tolerantly, “riding one camel and leading two others. But an hour before your coming, one of the watchers on the city wall had seen a djinn in the desert. When you came, so stupid that you could not even speak the language of humans, do you think we did not know you for what you are—a djinn?”

“A djinn,” said Tony blankly. The word was one of the very few—alcohol was another—which would be the same in Arabic and English. “Do you mean those creatures of the Thousand and One Nights?”

“Of history, yes.” Ghail’s tone was bitingly scornful. “And if we had doubted, within the hour there came a Bedouin to the city gate, a one-eyed man with a sword-slit nose, who told us of your taking the form of a bale of rich silk, torn open upon the beach of the sea. When he and his companions alighted from their camels to gather up the wealth, you changed instantly to the likeness of a young man strangely garbed and ran swiftly to their camels and flogged them away faster than the men could follow. The man demanded his camels, and they were those you brought to the gates of the city. So they were yielded to him. Do you deny now that you are of the djinn?”

Tony swallowed, hard. A one-eyed man with sword-slit nose? That was the man he had killed, back at the seashore! He’d been trying hard to forget the encounter, though if he’d ever had to pick out anybody on looks alone to be worked over with a scimitar, that man would have been the one. But—he could not have come and demanded the camels! It was not possible! Tony had left him an exceedingly messy object on the sand, and had chased his two companions with the scimitar as much in horror of his first dead man as out of any sort of anger. He swallowed again, very pale.

“You could not speak our human language.” Ghail was tolerant, and scornful, and amused. “So I taught it to you. We hoped to make a bargain with you, because some of you djinn are willing to be traitors to your race. Perhaps you are ready to make such a bargain. But it is insolence for one of the djinn to think of purchasing a human slave!”

Even Tony’s conscience was stunned, now.

“L-look!” he said desperately. “In my world, djinns are only fables! What do they look like?”

“When the watcher on the city wall saw you on the desert, you had the form of a whirlwind. Why not? Is not that the way in which you travel?”

Tony swallowed yet again. His conscience had made a quick recovery. Now it began to say something piously satisfied about now look what a jam he’d gotten himself to, actually thinking romantic thoughts about an idiot girl who believed in imaginary creatures like djinns and efreets! But Tony shut it up. He saw implications of the theory of multiple worlds that he hadn’t realized before. What is true in one world is not necessarily true in another. What is false in one world, also, is not invariably false in another. Actually, if there are enough worlds, anything must be true somewhere. Anything!

And he remembered—and flinched at remembering—his impression of a huge, vaporous, open-mouthed face which had been looking down at him in the small boat when he waked on the shore. He remembered the sand devil, the whirlwind, which had looked like dark smoke in spite of the fact that it was whirling over white sand. It had kept pace with him as he went to meet the Bedouin and their attempt to kill him. It had hovered interestedly near during that encounter. And it had wavered hopefully after him all the way across the desert to this city.

He gulped audibly. The inference was crazy—but if this was a world in which djinns were real, then craziness was sense. And then something else occurred to him.

“How long after my arrival did the one-eyed man come to claim the camels?” he demanded.

The slave girl shrugged. “One hour. No more. That was why we were sure.”

“And the camels were stolen by the seashore.”

“You stole them! They were stolen by the sea.”

“I traveled some hours by camel,” said Tony grimly. “He must have followed their footprints in the sand—if he knew where to demand them. So he traveled as far on foot as I did on camel-back—if he tells the truth! But it took me five hours to reach the city from the sea on camel-back. Yet he made the journey on foot in only one hour more. How fast does the one-eyed man walk? As fast as a camel, even trailing?”

The girl Ghail stared at him. Her face went blank. It was a five-hour journey from the sea to the city. She knew it as well as Tony. That was by camel. On foot it would take a man ten hours or better. If the one-eyed man had trailed the camels, he could not possibly have arrived so soon. Not possibly.

“A whirlwind followed me all the way,” said Tony, swallowing. “And—I killed a one-eyed man with a slit nose as he and two companions tried to rob me. Somehow, I think that the one-eyed man who got the three camels sometimes doubles as a whirlwind.”

His conscience was strickenly silent. But Ghail knitted her brows and stamped her bare feet and snapped a number of Arabic words she had never taught Tony. They crackled. They sparked. They seemed to have blue fire around the edges.

“The misbegotten!” she cried furiously: “The accursed of Allah! From his own mouth came the proof that he lied! And we saw it not! He was the djinn! He has made mock of the wisdom of men! How he will laugh, and all his fellows!”

She turned upon Tony. “And you—you are as stupid as the djinn! Why did you never ask about your camels?” She paused suspiciously. “But—were they camels? Perhaps they also were djinn! Perhaps it is all a trick! You may be another djinn! This might be—”

Tony threw up his hands. “In my world,” he said helplessly, “djinn are fables.”

“Your world?” snapped the girl. “How many worlds did Allah make? And if djinn are fables, why is the throne of Barkut empty?”

“On the coins?” asked Tony as helplessly as before.

She stamped her foot once more. “On the coins and in the palace! What sort of fool are you? You say you are human? Will you drink of the lasf plant?”

She fairly blazed scorn at him; scorn and vexation and at least the beginning of bewilderment. Tony tried to placate her.

“If lasf is not something spelled backwards with added vitamins, and if other humans drink it, I have no objection at all!”

She jumped to her feet and hurried to the barred gateway of the courtyard adjoining his cell. She spoke imperiously through the bars. Even a slave girl can be imperious to other slaves, on occasion. And there was always somebody passing that barred gateway, with full freedom to look in. Tony had chafed at the fact—and been reproached by his conscience for chafing—when Ghail first began her daily lessons in Arabic. Lately he had become resigned. But he still wished stubbornly that things were different.

She came back with a polished brass goblet containing a liquid. She tasted it carefully, as if its contents might be doubtful, and then offered it to Tony.

“This is lasf,” she said sternly. “It is poisonous to the djinns. If you drink, it will be of your own will.”

Tony drank it. From the expression on her face, it seemed to be an action of extraordinary importance. He was tempted to make a flourish, but made a face instead. It was not wholly bad. It had a faintly reminiscent flavor, as of something he had drunk before. It tasted a little like some of the herb teas his maiden aunt had dosed him with as a child. From experience he knew that the flavor would last. He would keep tasting it all day, and it ought to be good for something or other, but he could not guess what.

He handed back the goblet.

“I wouldn’t say,” he remarked, “that it would be a popular soft drink back home, but I have tasted some almost as bad.”