Scorpion Soup (12 page)

The green jinn shook with rage. And, as he shook, the heavens shook, and the world shook as well.

‘Your pitiable race entrapped me in an urn for a thousand years and a day!’ he roared, ‘and you, and all other living things, shall now pay the price of my wrath!’

With the people of the city hastening about in terror around him, Adam touched a fingertip to his chin.

He thought for a moment, then he said:

‘Well, O mighty creature, surely you would wish to talk to me before you snuff out my life.’

The jinn drew breath to speak. And, as he did so, the palm trees on the coast were sucked back, as if a storm was about to make landfall.

‘I have no time to waste in meeting my victims one by one!’ he spat.

But, just before the monster could utter another syllable, Adam held up his finger again.

‘I feel embarrassed to tell you this,’ he said slowly, ‘but everyone is gossiping about you in the lanes of the old city.’

‘No doubt they are declaring how fearsome I am!’ cried the monster.

‘Alas, they are not, O great one,’ Adam replied.

The jinn narrowed his eyes, each one the size of the moon.

‘I shall slay you first for uttering lies!’

Adam held his ground, his head cocked back as he took in the creature’s immense form.

‘They are saying that you’re attacking us out of fear,’ he said, ‘and out of sheer cowardice. They say that you couldn’t harm an ant let alone a great city such as Alexandria!’

‘
Pah
!’ exclaimed the green jinn. ‘I could swallow the entire city whole! And I will!’

Swelling in size until even larger than before, the monster once again bore down.

But Adam laughed at the sight.

‘Your cowardice is surely proven by your size,’ he said. ‘Any creature so enormous could destroy an entire city. The challenge would be to cause the same harm when smaller in scale.’

The green jinn emitted a crazed shriek of fury. So loud and violent was it, that the ground buckled as though struck by an earthquake.

‘I could slay you all if I were half the size!’ he boasted, before instantly reducing his form to the size of a mountain.

Adam held up a finger.

‘You are still very big,’ he said, ‘and it is making conversing with you challenging. Could you not make yourself a little smaller?’

The green jinn shrank again, from the size of a mountain, until he was the height of a giant, a giant in human form. His mouth packed with sharp yellow teeth, each one framed in red, he loomed down over Adam.

‘Speak your last words O mortal!’ he bellowed.

Adam touched a finger to his chin once again.

‘Surely even a giant could exact terrible damage on a place like this,’ he said. ‘But that’s not what the people of Alexandria think. As I told you, they say that you couldn’t harm an ant!’

The green jinn turned purple with wrath, his mouth dripping with blood.

‘Show me an ant, and I shall smite it!’ he exclaimed.

Adam leant down, and pretended to pick a speck from the ground.

‘Here is an ant,’ he said.

Filling his lungs with air, the jinn was about to blow a jet of fire down at the ant, when Adam said:

‘As everyone knows, the people of Alexandria are very hard to impress. They take any opportunity to make fun of people from outside the city. And if they see a giant killing an ant – well, that’s not going to impress them at all.’

The green jinn released his breath. He frowned.

‘Well, what would impress them?’ he asked. ‘And tell me swiftly, or I shall snuff you out as soon as look at you.’

Adam thought for a moment, and replied:

‘Well, surely, what would impress them would be an ant to be dispatched by something even smaller than it, like a flea.’

The green jinn spat blood.

‘I have dignity, you know!’ he exclaimed. ‘I am a great jinn, and am not going to transform myself into a flea.’

‘A pity,’ said Adam. ‘Then the people will gossip about you all the more.’

‘But I am just about to kill every last one of them!’ bawled the green jinn. ‘So I really don’t care what they say!’

Adam sighed.

‘But surely as a creature of such dignity and poise, you would feel all the more satisfied were you to prove your strength by such an insignificant act as killing an ant.’

Spitting more blood and then fire, the green jinn reduced his size from that of a giant to that of a flea.

‘Show me the ant,’ said a faint voice, ‘so that I may smite it at once!’

But Adam wasn’t listening. Instead, he stepped forwards and ground the sole of his sandal into the dirt, until the green jinn was quite definitely dead.

Word of his bravery and cunning spread through Alexandria, and Adam was hailed as the city’s saviour. Gifts and titles were lavished upon him, and the wealthiest members of society sought to marry him to their most beautiful daughters.

But, courteously, Adam refused all the awards, the gifts, and the invitations to wed.

Packing a simple leather satchel, he set out into the desert, hoping to have a little time and space to think.

With the stars glinting in the heavens above, he sat beside his campfire. Staring into the flames, his mind thought about the frailty of jinn and of men.

Suddenly, Adam heard a voice.

‘Adam, dear Adam,’ it said. ‘My name is Leila, and I am the daughter of the King of Zilzilam. I am trapped beneath the very sands on which you are camped. Rescue me and I promise to fill your heart with joy.’

Adam twisted round to the left, then the right. The enveloping darkness was empty of any life.

‘I can’t see you,’ Adam whispered. ‘Am I imagining you?’

The voice came again, a little louder than before, running on the breeze.

‘I am trapped beneath the sands. Walk ten paces south of the fire. Dig down with your hands, and you will find a stone slab. Pull it back and descend.’

Half-wondering whether he was dreaming, Adam glanced back at the fire. The embers were glowing now, fanned by the wind.

He was about to curl up on his blanket and sleep, but the voice came a third time:

‘Please come and save me, dear Adam, I beg you…’

Adam got to his feet, and counted ten paces south of the campfire. Then, kneeling, he dug down through the cool sand with his hands. He was about to give up, when his fingertips touched something hard.

Stone.

Digging faster, he unearthed a granite slab, a great iron ring set squarely in the middle. Without giving it any thought, he yanked the ring with all his strength, and the slab slid easily away.

Adam peered down into the hole into a dawn realm.

Squinting, he made out a kind of tropical jungle: a profusion of trees and luxuriant vines, of insects and suffocating heat. Climbing down through the boughs of a colossal tree, he made his way onto the forest floor.

As he stood there, taking in a scene from a dreamscape, the first light broke through.

A pair of suns rose both at once – one in the east, the other in the west.

Shading his eyes, Adam watched as the jungle came to life.

Animals he had never seen before swung from one vine to the next, or prowled between the trees, hunting their morning prey.

There were sloths with two heads, zebra in rainbow stripes, and cheetahs weighed down with mighty ibex horns. And there were giant anteaters, as well, and mice with human-like hands and feet, and spiders the size of antelopes.

Through the jungle wafted the voice once again:

‘Clear your mind of everything you know, Adam,’ it cautioned, ‘and place one foot before the next. Whatever you do, do not glance down at your feet.’

‘How do I know that I can trust you?’ Adam thought.

Reading his mind, the voice answered:

‘You do not, and that’s why you can.’

Doing as he was told, Adam trod a path through the trees, taking care not to look down. As he paced along, he smelled the aroma of roasting meat, and the tart scent of bitter oranges. Then he felt a strange sensation… a sensation of something crawling over his feet and legs.

Straining to obey the voice, he forced himself to refrain from looking down. But the smell and the tingling became too great. Unable to withstand a moment more, Adam lowered his gaze.

Horror is too feeble a word to describe his distress.

His feet and legs were sheathed in squirming worms, glowing red as they gnawed at his flesh. And, as they did so, they emitted a coating of waxy oil, a kind of anaesthetic.

Fearfully, Adam swished the worms away.

But, as he did so more appeared, until his hands were covered in them as well.

As he fought in a frenzy to rid himself of the scourge, the voice came once again. Soothing and calm, it drifted effortlessly through the trees.

‘Rip off your shirt,’ it said, ‘and allow the worms to feast on your chest.’

‘But they’re killing me!’ Adam shouted out loud.

‘Trust me,’ said the voice.

Without any other choice, Adam tore off his shirt. The worms slithered all over his chest, glowing red as they got to work on it.

But, quite suddenly, they began to turn purple-blue and fall away as scabs.

Adam tramped on through the suffocation of trees, following the voice.

The undergrowth became increasingly dense, until it was a struggle to make any headway at all.

Progressing inch by inch, Adam began to sense grave danger.

Something deep inside was cautioning him to turn back, to flee. But, as before, the voice soothed him, luring him forwards.

All of a sudden the trees gave way to a wide clearing. The ground there was infested with orange beetles, armed with crab claws.

In the middle of the glade was a primitive machine.

The sides consisted of three pairs of multiple scimitars, each one attached to a flywheel. The central unit was a mass of cogs and levers, with a large pair of scales at the front. But the base of the creation was not mechanical at all.

It was alive.

Avocado-green and scaly, it was the colour and consistency of an alligator’s back, and was moving slowly, as if rearranging itself.

Approaching cautiously, crunching a path through the orange beetles, Adam took in the details of the outlandish contraption. As he drew close, he noticed something – something that caused his feet to root themselves in the ground.

A woman was encased in the central unit.

Strapped down, she was unable to move. The scimitars were angled in such a way as to carve her up if she tried to escape. Without being told, Adam knew that the woman was Princess Leila.

‘I shall disarm this
thing
and release you!’ he exclaimed, quite overcome with sorrow.

The princess did not reply.

Not at first.

She just blinked, the rest of her body held rigid. Then, telepathically, she said:

‘Dear Adam, I am indebted for your bravery. But there is only one way to rescue me. In the pans of the scales you will need to place two objects. The first is Hope, and the other – Fear. Attempt to disentangle me, and I shall be chopped to pieces.’

‘But Hope and Fear have no form,’ Adam said. ‘They are invisible, intangible.’

The princess blinked once again.

‘It is for you to find them,’ she replied, a tear running down her cheek.

‘Where shall I search?’

‘In your heart.’

Adam reached forwards, until his hand was no more than an inch from the machine. He could feel the princess’s warmth.

‘I will save you,’ he said. ‘If I have to scour the universe for Hope and for Fear…’

With that, he was gone.

Retracing his path once again to the surface, Adam found himself at the campfire, the embers still crackling and spitting in the breeze. Leaning back on his haunches, he pondered how and where to find the qualities needed for the scales.

‘I shall set out at dawn, and travel the world,’ he whispered, ‘and will not give up until I have captured Hope and Fear.’

Before the sun had broken over the horizon, Adam’s footsteps stretched in a line to eternity.

He walked through days and nights, seeking out anyone who could help him with his quest.

In the next kingdom, he met a hermit who listened to his tale. When he had heard it, the recluse instructed him to search out the Blue Mountains. Because only there, the hermit insisted, could the riddle be solved.

At the Blue Mountains, Adam was informed by a diviner that the only way to find Fear and Hope was not to search for them at all.

Undeterred, he kept searching.

He walked and he walked, and he walked and he walked, until he had crossed half the known world. Each person he asked pointed him in the direction of another, until he was despondent and almost broken. His health suffering from worry, he realised how deeply he had fallen in love with Princess Leila.

After many months of adventure, he found himself in the middle of nowhere – at the desert campfire where his journey had begun.

‘I have failed you, dearest Leila,’ he said in a whisper, his words carried away on the breeze.

‘No, no, you have not, Adam,’ came the voice. ‘Look into your heart and you will know what to place on the scales.’

Plunging his head in his hands, he struggled to reach a decision.

But he could not.

And so, unable to carry on, he paced over to the stone slab, and descended back into the jungle world in which the King of Zilzilam’s daughter was kept prisoner.

Although months and years had passed on the surface, it seemed as if the sands of the hour-glass fell far more slowly in the jungle realm than they did on the surface above. Hardly a day had gone by since he had embarked on his quest.

Wending his way through the trees, Adam retraced his path towards the glade in which the princess was imprisoned. As he walked fitfully between the vines, he noticed a mango tree, its ripe fruit hanging down in great quantities.

Overcome with hunger, he picked one of the mangoes, and ate it.

Within a few feet of the tree, he reached the glade in which the machine was still standing. As before, the scimitars were razor-sharp, glinting in the blinding light.

While he watched, they began to move as if his arrival had triggered them. The scimitars scythed alarmingly through the air and, as they did so, the machine’s reptilian underbelly coursed back and forth, surging to life.