The Complete Compleat Enchanter (44 page)

That ought to do for what Doc Chalmers called the “somatic” part of the spell. As for the verbal part, how could he do better than Shakespeare, slightly modified for the occasion? Shea turned round and round on his heel, moving his hands in Chalmers’ passes and chanting in a low voice:

“Black spirits and white, red spirits and gray,

Mingle, Mingle, mingle, you that mingle may;

Fair is foul and foul is fair;

Change, O change the form we bear!”

“Okay,” he said to Medoro; “come along.” They swung around the corner of the tent. The guard who had been talking to them was just facing their way. He took one look at them, gasped: “The Jann!”, dropped his sword, and ran for his life. The other guard looked also, turned a curious mottled color, screamed: “The Jann!” Falling on the ground he tried to bury his face in the grass.

Shea lifted the flap and led the way boldly in. There was no light in the outer compartment, and it was already dim with exterior twilight, but there was no mistaking the mountain of flesh piled among the rugs. Shea started toward it, but in the darkness tripped over some small object. He pitched forward and, unable to stop himself, struck the mass of Roger in the midriff in the position of a man kneading a vast vat of dough.

Roger awoke at once, rolling to his feet with incredible speed. “La-Allah-il’-Allah!” he cried, snatching a huge scimitar from the wall of the tent. “Ha, Jann! I have not fought Jann!” The sword curved back for a blow as Medoro cowered away.

“Wait!” yelled Shea. The scimitar checked. “Hold a minute, will you?” said Shea. “We’re really friends. I’ll show you.” He stepped over to Medoro, pronouncing the counterspell and pulling at the chin-length tusks into which the slivers beneath Medoro’s lips had turned.

Nothing happened. The tusks did not give. Between them Medoro still wore his foolish, frightened grin, and above, a pair of bull-like horns continued to project from neat holes in the young man’s helmet.

Shea repeated the counterspell again, louder, feeling of his own face and head, and discovering that he was likewise festooned with horns and tusks. Again, however, nothing happened.

Far away somewhere a voice rose in a banshee howl. That would be an inam whose alarm clock, or whatever he used for the purpose, was a little fast, calling the faithful to prayer. The others would soon follow.

Shea faced Roger and said: “Listen, let’s talk this over. We’re Jann, all right, sent here by the big boss to fight with the best mortal fighter in the world. But we have some pretty terrible powers, you know, and we want to arrange things so you don’t have to put on a scrap at odds of more than two to one.”

It sounded phony as hell in Shea’s own ears, but Roger let the scimitar droop and grinned beefily. “By Allah the Omnipotent! The hour of good fortune has come upon me. Surely there would be no greater pleasure than to be with two of the Jann in battle bound.”

Roger flung himself among the rugs, half-turning his back toward Shea, who motioned frantically to Medoro to sit beside the colossus. Shea hoped Medoro would keep doing what he did best, namely talking. The twerp was probably too scared to do anything else, for he flopped beside Roger, saying: “Among our people we have a poem of the combats of the Jann. Would your lordship care to hear it? If you have a lute—”

“O Jann, I would hear it not much more than a poem about dogs pissing on the street. Learn that at Castle Carena I acquired the taste for the despisal of poetry, since the worst of all poets came among us to visit: Medoro by name.”

Shea caught the glance of appeal and indignation which Medoro flashed over his shoulder through his jinn makeup, but continued to stroll about the tent, out of the conversation. A large dagger with an ornate gold-hilted handle hung on the wall; he hefted it by the scabbarded blade and looked at the back of Roger’s head.

“Know, O Lord Roger,” said the poet rapidly, “that by poetry and song alone is the world advanced. For it is the rule of the Prophet, on whose name be blessings . . .”

A steel spike stuck up through the center of Roger’s turban, meaning that he had on some kind of helmet beneath the cloth. If Shea hit him while he wore that, the dagger hilt would merely go bong, and Roger would turn and grapple.

Medoro was talking a perfect flood of words that made little sense.

Shea reached down, gripped the spike firmly, and switched it forward, tumbling helmet and turban both over the big man’s face.

“Ho!” cried Roger’s muffled voice as he reached upward.

Thump! The dagger hilt hit his shaven poll in the medullar region. Shea was left with the helmet-and-turban combination in his left hand as the ox rolled over and down. From outside came the united squalling of the call to prayer.

A thread of spittle ran down Medoro’s chin beside the left tusk, and his hands fluttered wildly. “There—there is no gug-grace or goodness but in Allah,” he babbled. “What thought is now to be taken for preservation?”

“Suppose you just leave that to me while you get busy and find some extra turbans. I haven’t steered you wrong yet, have I?”

Medoro, familiar with camp life, quickly found the turbans in the inner compartment, and they tied Roger firmly, winding him round and round with them and knotting them until he looked like a cocoon. He seemed to be breathing all right; Shea hoped his skull were not fractured. Time was getting shorter and shorter, with the show outside about to begin.

Medoro said: “O Lord Harr, surely we shall never be able to move him hence, and what of the fearsome appearance you have put upon us?”

“Shut up,” said Shea. “I’m thinking.”

“If we had but the magic carpet of Baghdad—”

Shea snapped his fingers. “Right on the button! I knew I’d forgotten something. Here, find stuff that’ll make a small fire with a lot of smoke. Is there a feather anywhere around here? Don’t argue with me, damn it. This is important if you want to see Belphegor again.”

When Medoro returned from the inner compartment of the tent with a few twigs and the aigrette of an ornamental turban, he found Shea already busily at work. The journeyman magician had caught a couple of the big blue flies that buzzed about in vast numbers, and looped a silken thread from Roger’s wrappings about them, attaching one end of it to the fringe of Roger’s main carpet. The flies tried to take off as he released them.

“Put those twigs in a little pile here and light them,” Shea directed, rolling back the carpet to leave a bare space on the ground.

While Medoro made the light with flint and steel and a tinderbox, Shea pulled the aigrette apart and began weaving it into the carpet, knotting it into the fringe. Outside something seemed to be going on. As the flame caught, shouts and the sound of running became audible.

The twigs, aromatics, filled the tent with pungent smoke as Shea recited the spell he had been composing:

“Be light—
cough!
—carpet, as the leaves you bear;

Be light as the clouds that fly with thee.

Soar through the skies and let us now but share

The impulse of the strength. Let us be free

From—
cough! cough! cough!
If even

The Roc and all the Jann could fly like we

Then were they—
cough!
right aërial indeed.

To you the spirits of the sky are given

That they may help us in our sorest need.

Cough-cough-cough!”

The smoke died. The carpet was beginning to wiggle, parts of it rising from the ground and settling down again with a slight
whump,
while the tumult outside increased. The Jinn that was Medoro rubbed smarting eyes.

“O Sheikh Harr,” he said, “this is not the worst of poetry, though it must be admitted that you failed to accompany it with the lute. Moreover there was a foot missing from the fifth line, and the end is somewhat weak.”

“Never mind the higher criticism, but help me get this elephant onto the carpet, will you?” said Shea.

They rolled Roger over and wrapped him in one of the sitting carpets before depositing him on the—Shea hoped—flying one. His eyes had come open and he regarded them balefully. Where the gag allowed, the muscles of his face moved in something like prayer.

Shea flung back the tent door and looked out. There was certainly something happening in the gathering dusk; people running in all directions with manifold shoutings. As Shea watched, a big square tent with a pennon on top, farther along the hillside, corkscrewed down into collapse.

“Sit down and hold on,” Shea told Medoro. He himself climbed on the carpet, which seemed to be showing signs of restlessness even under Roger’s weight. Reaching to his full height, Shea swung his sword at the roof, which split to show an indigo sky from which one solemn star winked back at him. He squatted and declaimed:

“By warp and by woof,

High over the roof—”

Chop!
went a sword into one of the tent ropes outside.
Chop!
went another. “Stand, in the name of Allah!” shouted a voice.

Shea finished:

“Fly swiftly and surely

To serve our behoof!”

The tent collapsed, and the carpet swooshed up and out through the gap, its fringes flapping.

Thirteen

A bareheaded man and one of Shea’s rope-cutters were arguing so violently that neither noticed the carpet as it soared over their heads. Agramant’s camp was in pandemonium beneath; everywhere tents were wobbling and collapsing. Some were as large as circus tents, and great was the fall thereof. Lumpy objects moved under the enshrouding canvas, and here and there men fought. Out on one of the spurs of the hillside a tent had gone down into fire which blazed brightly in the gathering gloom, while people ran around it, trying to beat out the flames or douse them with futile small buckets of water.

The carpet heaved and bucked, swirling this way and that. A little experiment showed Shea that he could direct its movements by pulling left, right, up, or down at the fringe of its leading edge. However, further experiment added the information that it was so very sensitive on the controls that he must be careful lest he throw them into a loop. Roger almost rolled off as the vehicle took a vicious down-curve. Medoro, though he had not eaten, seemed to be having trouble keeping whatever was in his stomach.

“Where is it?” shouted Shea.

Medoro pointed to one of the largest tents of all, well up on the slope, with a swarm of pennons floating from its multiple peaks. Dardinell’s pavilion. Shea jerked at the fringe, and the carpet did a sweeping bank towards it.

The pavilion was a young city in itself. Besides the main tent, a score of lesser, outlying structures were connected to it by canopies. Among them the powerful figure of Dardinell himself could be seen among a group of officers on horseback who were trying to bring order into those on foot.

“Where’s the harem?” demanded Shea. Medoro put one hand to his tusks to hold back a gulp, and with the other pointed toward an elongated tent that sprang from one side of the main structure.

As the carpet swooped, the sound of Shea’s voice brought a face in their direction. There was a yell, the whole group flowered with faces, and a flung javelin went past. Before more could follow they were over the tangle of lordly tents and out of range. They sailed in toward the roof of the harem tent. As they did so, Shea, controlling the carpet with his left hand and some difficulty, whipped out his sword and made a twenty-foot gash in the fabric.

He then took the carpet around in a curve and back to the hole he had made. “Duck!” he said to Medoro. Aiming carefully, he drove for the hole, which had been widened by the tension of the ropes. One of Shea’s horns caught the edge for a moment, then ripped through. They were inside.

They were in a room full of women, so little below that Shea could have joined hands with them by leaning over the edge. The women, however, did not seem in a mood to join hands; instead, they ran in all directions, screaming: “The Jann! The Jann!” Shea encouraged them by leaning over and gibbering a little.

The carpet moved smoothly to the nearest partitions and then stopped, its leading edge curling where it met the cloth, and its side edges flapping like some lowly marine organism. Shea reached out and slit the camel’s hair across. The next room was a kitchen, empty save for the furniture of the trade. The next compartment held nothing but a pair of eunuchs throwing dice. These screamed in high voices, and one of them tried to crawl away under the outer edge of the tent, as Shea slit his way through the next wall.

“Damn maze,” said Shea. The outer tumult of the camp had been dampened to a whisper by the many thicknesses of cloth. Two more partitions, both yielding empty rooms, and the coolness of the evening was once more on their faces. Shea could see a couple of soldiers afoot and a horseman running past, silhouetted against a fire further down the hill. He hastily maneuvered the carpet around another curve and cut his way into the wall of the tent again. It was only the kitchen once more, and the whole structure of the tent seemed to be growing rickety from the repeated slashings.

Nevertheless Shea warped his craft up to the kitchen’s one unslit wall. A gash—and they had found their goal.

The room Lord Dardinell used for his more personal pleasures was full of precious things. Over against the wall, under a hanging out of which eddied a slow smoke of incense, priceless cushions had been piled on priceless carpets to make one of the most elaborate beds Shea had ever seen. In the midst of these cushions a bound figure writhed.

Shea tried to bring the carpet to a halt by pulling up on his leading edge, but that only took him to the ceiling; by pulling down, but that only brought him to the floor. He considered trying to snatch the girl on the way past as a bronco-buster picks a handkerchief from the ground, but rejected the idea as too risky. One hand would be needed for the carpet, and Medoro was no help at all.

He came around the room in another curve and recited:

“By warp and by woof,

In the midst of the roof,

To save the fair lady

Stand still and aloof.”

The carpet halted. It was a long way to the ground, and this would be no time to sprain an ankle. However, Shea, swung over the side, let himself down to his full length by gripping the yielding fringe, and dropped. He landed in the midst of the cushions on all fours, and got to his knees.