The Djinn Garden

  ***

  Fazil bin Abou led his guests out of the barn that used to be a castle and into the garden they had visited the day before. Unlike the copper castle, the garden had not changed when its owner died, but remained as beautiful and idyllic as it had been yesterday.

  “What is the nature of this garden?” Leila asked. “It is not as it appears to be.” Jafar could see the apprehensive look upon her face, and he remembered her earlier comments about the mystery and “wrongness” of this place that looked so tranquil.

  “Indeed it isn’t,” bin Abou said. “To explain it fully, I must tell you more about the scarouche that kept me prisoner here.

  “The scarouche would, of course, not answer any of my questions about it, lest I learn too much and find a way to destroy it. But in the odd moments I could steal over the course of eleven years, I managed to learn some facts and guess at others. Centuries ago, this island was inhabited by a powerful yatu who, for one reason or another, developed an abiding hatred of all djinni. In order to satisfy this hatred, he developed the scarouche with powerful magical abilities. At some point the yatu vanished from the island, but I was never able to tell exactly what happened. Perhaps the scarouche killed its master, or perhaps the yatu simply died and the scarouche continued on, or perhaps the yatu transformed himself into the scarouche. Whatever happened, the scarouche has ruled this island ever since and continued waging the yatu’s war against the race of the djinni.

  “Whenever some djinn wanders near this island, the scarouche attacks it with a powerful magical spell that transforms it into some kind of plant or flower, which he then brings as a trophy into this garden. What you see around you is a collection of djinni captured and imprisoned over the centuries by the scarouche.”

  Leila smiled with the cold satisfaction of knowing that her instincts had again been vindicated, while Selima cried out, “Then one of the plants here must be Cari!”

  “That is my strong suspicion,” bin Abou agreed.

  “Which one is she?” Prince Ahmad demanded to know.

  “Alas, I do not know.”

  “You’ve been living here for eleven years,” Jafar growled irritably. “Surely you must know if one plant has only been here a couple of days.”

  “My master seldom let me come here by myself,” bin About said defensively. “Like Captain El–Hadar, I have never much fancied gardens even under normal circumstances, and I am very much afraid of djinni. Plus, the fact that these flowers were fellow prisoners of the scarouche, even though they were only djinni, made me even more uncomfortable. I paid little attention to this place.” He paused. “I could point out a few of the larger trees and bushes that I know were here for a long time, but that will only be of slight help to you.”

  “Is there some way we could transform the djinni back to their natural form?” Prince Ahmad asked.

  “We must not do that haphazardly!” Jafar warned quickly. “Haven’t you heard the story of the fisherman and the bottle?”

  The prince thought a moment, then looked abashed. “Of course I have. The djinn was furious over his long imprisonment and wanted to kill the fisherman who finally set him free.”

  “Here we have possibly hundreds of djinni imprisoned for who knows how many centuries, and no bottle to trick them back into,” Jafar said. “If we free the wrong ones, our chances of survival are small indeed.”

  “But we have to free Cari,” Selima pleaded.

  “I know,” her father said, nodding. “But we have to do it the right way. Let me think a few minutes.” He turned away from his companions and gazed out over the garden, as though his naked eye could discern Cari from all the other transformed djinni. But all he could see were flowers, bushes, shrubs and trees, none more distinctive than the rest.

  He turned back to address bin Abou. “Did your master have any sort of magical workshop? Did he keep a grimoire of his secrets?”

  “I have never seen anything like that,” bin Abou said, “but there was one area where I was totally forbidden to go. The scarouche vanished in there from time to time, and I wouldn’t see him again for hours or days.”

  “Sounds promising,” Leila said.

  Bin Abou led them away from the garden, around to the other side of the ramshackle “castle.” There he showed them a door built into the wall. The door handle was an iron loop, with an identical iron loop beside it built into the doorsill. Threading around and through these loops to form a chain was a tangled knot of vipers, angrily hissing and spitting as they slithered back and forth through the loops.

  Jafar looked over to Leila. “Are those real snakes?”

  Leila examined them carefully from a safe distance. “They’re not natural snakes,” she said, “but they are very real and probably very deadly, whatever they are.”

  While the rest of the party stared at the door wondering what to do next, Verethran the monkey scampered over to it. Stopping about a cubit away, he studied the situation with his head cocked first one way, then the other. Suddenly he raced over to the side of the door away from the snakes and, with a couple of gestures too fast for the eye to follow, removed a pair of nearly invisible hinges. A quick pull brought the door crashing outward, and the vipers vanished into thin air.

  Everyone was startled, but Selima recovered quickest. Clapping her hands, she laughed and said, “Once again, our little monkey–warrior brings us victory.”

  Verethran gave her a deep, comic bow that made everyone laugh, then turned and darted into the scarouche’s workshop. The rest followed more cautiously, mindful that there might be further traps in there set for unwary intruders.

  The large open room was dark and gloomy, the only light being what shone through the now–open doorway and through a few large chinks between the wooden slats of the walls. Cobwebs stretched across corners of the ceiling, and portions of the floor were dimly painted with illegible symbols. A broad wooden worktable covered with occult paraphernalia stretched across the entire back wall, and there were cobwebs attached to parts of it as well. The table was the only furnishing in the otherwise bare room.

  Dust was everywhere: on the table, on the equipment, on the floor except for a path from the door to the worktable that had been used not too far in the past. Dust choked the air, raised by the shock of the crashing door. It was thick enough to make Leila sneeze and start El–Hadar to a coughing fit. As the group walked into the room they raised still more dust, making it even harder to see.

  Jafar al–Sharif compared this sight to his memory of Shahdur Castle, citadel of the wizard Akar. Everything there had been scrupulously clean and precise, tended by a small army of fantastical servants. While much of that was necessitated by Akar’s blindness, Jafar wondered whether that might not be part of the reason why Akar was such a mighty sorcerer while the scarouche was limited to a small island in the middle of the Central Sea.

  Jafar walked slowly over to the workbench and looked over its contents. As a powerful wizard in his own right, he would be expected to know the importance of most or all of the objects that cluttered the surface, though in truth they were all a mystery to him. While the rest of the group looked on in silence, he continued his inspection, nodding sagely from time to time, hoping desperately to find some clue that would solve this problem. A grimoire would be best; even without Cari to aid him, his reading skills were now good enough to piece out what he needed to know—assuming the scarouche hadn’t written it in some private code, as many yatus were known to do.

  But there was no book, coded or uncoded. He would have to find some other solution.

  His attention was caught by a pair of bottles on the left side of the table. One bottle was small and green, the other large and blue. Although they stood side–by–side, the green one was covered with dust while the blue one was clean. In fact, the blue bottle was virtually the only dust–free implement on the tabletop.

  Jafar turned to bin Abou. “Did your master ever mention using any particular aids that helped him in his ma
gical spells?”

  Bin Abou thought carefully. Finally he said, “About three years ago he mentioned being low on a certain powder, and he would have to make more to continue his transformations of the djinni. He left the island searching for the ingredients, and was gone for several days. But he never mentioned anything about it again, so I don’t know exactly what happened.”

  “But he continued transforming djinni who passed by?”

  “Oh yes. Scarcely a month went by without him roaring in triumph about another addition to his garden.”

  Jafar picked up the blue bottle and pulled out the stopper. The bottle was half full of a red–tinted powder; lifting the container to his nose he sniffed cautiously, but could detect no particular odor. He put the bottle back on the table and replaced the stopper.

  Next, he picked up the small dusty green bottle and unstoppered it. The stopper came out reluctantly, and when Jafar looked inside he saw the bottle was almost completely empty, with just a trace of white powder on the bottom. He didn’t even have to lift the bottle to his nose to sense the heavy odor of stale air that emanated from it.

  “Did the scarouche ever transform any of the flowers back into djinni?” he asked.

  Bin Abou scarcely hesitated. “Not to my knowledge. As you said, it might be dangerous.”

  “Yes,” Jafar said, stroking his beard thoughtfully with his right hand. He looked at the opened green bottle in his left hand, then at the blue bottle on the tabletop.

  Finally he made a decision. “This is what I think,” he said, trying to project more confidence in his opinion than he truly felt. “These two bottles contain the only powders in this room. If the scarouche used powder to transform Cari just a couple of days ago, it must have been the one from the blue bottle, since the green one hasn’t been opened in a very long time. But the green one sat right next to the blue one. It’s possible the two powders have no relation to one other—but it’s also possible the green bottle contained the antidote. Just a little bit and rarely used, but perhaps necessary in case of an emergency.”

  “That is a very large assumption,” El–Hadar said.

  “True. But it’s the only assumption I know how to make. If I were to use my own powers of wizardry to analyze the magic used here, it might take me days or weeks to develop an antidote, and we don’t have the time to waste. I think we must try the powder in the green bottle and pray that Oromasd has been kind enough to place the answer within our grasp.”

  “But even if the green bottle is correct,” Prince Ahmad said, “there is not very much of it, and there are many flowers in the garden. We dare not use it indiscriminately, as you pointed out. How shall we know which flower to use it on?”

  “That’s my job,” Leila spoke up suddenly.

  “I know you have the talent to see when something is false,” the prince said, “but you’ve also said you don’t have the power to see the false things as they really are. Everything in that garden is false. How will you know which false flower is really Cari?”

  Leila took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “There is a trick I can sometimes play on my mind. I look at something and try to imagine it’s something else; then my talent lets me know whether what I’m picturing is false. I can look at a flower and try to imagine it’s Cari, and hope my feelings will tell me if I’m right or not.”

  “That doesn’t sound very reliable,” El–Hadar said.

  “It’s not,” Leila admitted. “It depends on how well I can visualize what I’m trying to see—and at best I can only get hunches and guesses, rather than definite knowledge. I can remember very well what Cari looks like—but if anyone has a better plan, I would be both delighted and relieved to hear it.”

  She looked around at the faces of her companions, but met only hopeless stares. “I was afraid of that,” she said at last. “The task is mine. I promised you when I joined the party that I would put my talents to use for you. Now I am called to do so.”

  “Can we help you in any way?” Selima asked.

  Leila smiled ruefully. “Yes. Leave me alone in the garden. Go as far away as you can. I will need perfect concentration if I’m to make this trick work, and your very presence around me might be too much of a distraction. Plus, if I should free some hostile djinn by mistake, I will be the only one to pay the price for my error. That knowledge alone will remove some of the pressure on me, that no one else will be hurt by my blunder.”

  “You are a woman of great courage,” Prince Ahmad said. “I’m very glad I put aside my misgivings and agreed to let you join our party. You are a worthy companion indeed, and if our mission does succeed you will be ranked beside Rida and Shamilah in the annals of history.”

  “One thing at a time,” Leila said with firm practicality. “If I don’t succeed here, there’ll be no further annals of history and nothing else will matter. Please, O Prince Fazil, point out to me those plants you know have been here a long time, so I won’t waste my efforts on them.”

  The former chamberlain led the group on a tour around the garden, pointing at different trees and bushes that he recognized as long-standing features. As he’d said, they were only a small fraction of the garden’s total inventory.

  “Thank you for even that much help,” Leila said when he finished. “The rest, my friends, is up to me alone. Go to the shore and wait by the boat. If I free Cari, she can carry me there to meet you. If I free something else....” She shrugged her shoulders and let her voice trail off.

  “I’d like a word with you in private,” Jafar said.

  “Always eager to receive my lord’s wise counsel.”

  The others withdrew, expressing the hope that Oromasd would guide Leila’s choice. Jafar looked straight into Leila’s face and said, “Let me, at least, stay with you. What little I’ve learned of magic may be of some help—”

  The woman shook her head. “You would be my greatest distraction, O my love. You would only make me more nervous than I already am. I’m honored by the love in your offer, but the risk is great enough as it is.”

  Jafar hesitated before he spoke again. “I’m worried about how your feelings may interfere with your task. There have never been warm feelings between you and Cari—”

  “I bear her no grudges, no ill will. Any hostility on her part is based on her feelings for you.”

  “What do you mean, her feelings for me?”

  Leila paused to find the most careful wording she could. “You’re her master, and she must protect you. As a woman, I can understand her natural suspicions. You and I have grown so close so quickly that I am in a position to hurt you if I wished. I think she’s just…overly concerned about your safety.”

  “I hope you’re right.” He paused, then took from around his neck the amulet of Kharouf the yatu. “Put this on,” he told her. “If by some mischance you awaken an evil djinn, this will protect you from his harmful spells.”

  But not from his teeth or his claws, she thought. Nevertheless she slipped the amulet around her neck, then put her arms around Jafar. He held her tight and she kissed him with all the love that filled her soul. Finally he broke reluctantly from her embrace, mumbled a quiet prayer for Oromasd’s blessing, turned and walked back down to the shore.

  Leila watched him, mist in her eyes, until he was gone from view. Then, with a deep sigh, she turned and walked into the garden.