He approached the caravan slowly and fell in behind at a safe distance, matching their pace. The men wore long, loose robes of many layers, all dusty with travel, and covered their heads with checked cloth against the sun. Snatches of their conversations carried to the Djinni on the wind: the time to their next destination, or the likelihood of bandits. He heard the weariness in their voices, saw the fatigue that hunched their backs. These were no wizards! If they’d had any powers they would magic themselves across the desert, and save themselves this endless plodding.
After a few hours the sun began to lower, and the caravan passed into an unfamiliar part of the desert. The Djinni remembered his caution, and turned back toward safer ground. But this glimpse of humankind had only inflamed his curiosity. He began to watch for the caravans, and followed them more and more often, though always at a distance; for if he drew too close, the animals would grow nervous and skittish, and even the men would feel him as a wind at their backs. At night, when they came to rest at an oasis or caravanserai, the Djinni would listen to them talk. Sometimes they spoke of the distances they had to travel, their pains and worries and woes. Other times they spoke of their childhoods, and the fireside tales their mothers and aunts and grandmothers had told them. They exchanged well-worn stories, boasts of their own or of the warriors of ages past, kings and caliphs and wazirs. They all knew the stories by heart, though they never told them the same way twice and quibbled happily over the details. The Djinni was especially fascinated at any mention of the djinn, as when the men told tales of Sulayman, the human ruler who seven hundred years before had yoked the djinn to his rule, the first and last of the human kings to do so.
The Djinni watched, and listened, and decided they were a fascinating paradox. What drove these short-lived creatures to be so oddly self-destructive, with their punishing journeys and brutal battles? And how, at barely eighteen or twenty years of age, could they grow to be so intelligent and cunning? They spoke of amazing accomplishments, in cities such as ash-Sham and al-Quds: sprawling markets and new mosques, wondrous buildings such as the world had never seen. Djinn-kind, who did not like to be enclosed, had never attempted anything to compare; at most the homes of the djinn were bare shelters against the rain. But the Djinni grew intrigued by the idea. And so he selected a spot in a valley and, when he was not chasing caravans, began to build himself a palace. He heated and shaped the desert sands into curving sheets of opaque blue-green glass, forming walls and staircases, floors and balconies. Around the walls he wove a filigree of silver and gold, so that the palace appeared to be netted inside a shining web. He spent months making and unmaking it according to his whim, and twice razed it to the ground in frustration. Even when whole and habitable, the palace was never truly finished. Some rooms sat open to the stars, their ceilings confiscated to serve as floors elsewhere. The web of filigree grew as he found veins of metal in the desert rocks, and then all but vanished when he ransacked it to gild an entire hall. Like himself, the palace was usually invisible to other beings; but the men of the desert would sometimes glimpse it from a distance, as the last rays of the evening sun struck it and set it ablaze. Then they would turn, and spur their horses faster—and not until many miles had passed, and they were safe within sight of their own cooking fires, would they dare to look back again.
The shadows were growing longer at Castle Gardens, yet still the Djinni could not tear his eyes from the harbor. Once, when quite young, he’d come across a small pool in an oasis. In the manner of youth everywhere determined to test their limits, he took on the shape of a jackal, waded into the pool up to his haunches, and stood there as long as he dared, the chill seeping up through his paws and into his limbs. Only when he thought his legs might collapse did he leap back out again. It was the closest he’d ever come to death. And that had only been a very small pool.
It would take almost no effort to vault the railing, to fall or leap in. Only a minute or two of immersion, and he would be extinguished.
Nauseated, he dragged his eyes away. Steamers and tugboats chugged by, leaving their spreading wakes behind. At the horizon, the fading light picked out an undulating line of land. On an island in the middle distance there stood an enormous statue in the shape of a woman, made of what looked to be some greenish metal. The scale of the statue was boggling. How many rocks must have been melted, how much raw metal collected, to create her? And how did she not break through the thin disk of land, and fall into the sea?
According to Arbeely, this bay was only the smallest part of an ocean whose vastness defied comprehension. Even in his native form he could never have hoped to cross it—and now that native form was lost to him. He’d examined the iron cuff thoroughly, hoping to find some overlooked weakness, but there was none. Wide but thin, it fit close to his wrist, and was hinged on one side. The setting sunlight gave a dull sheen to the clasp with its pin. He couldn’t budge the pin, no matter how hard he pulled. And he knew, without even trying, that Arbeely’s tools would be no match for it.
He closed his eyes and attempted for the hundredth time to change form, straining against the cuff’s enchantment. But it was as though the ability had never existed. And even more astonishing, he had no recollection of how it had come to be on his wrist.
Along with their longevity, the djinn were blessed with prodigious, near-eidetic memories, and the Djinni was no exception. To him, a human’s powers of recollection would seem only a dubious patchwork of images. But the days—weeks? longer?—that preceded capture, and the event itself, were concealed from his mind by a thick haze.
His last clear memory was of returning to his palace after tracking an especially large caravan, with close to a hundred men and three hundred camels. He’d followed them eastward for two days, listening to their conversations, slowly getting to know them as individuals. One camel driver, a thin, older man, liked to sing quietly to himself. The songs told of brave Bedouin men on swift horses, and the virtuous women who loved them; but the man’s voice carried a sadness even when the words did not. Two guards had discussed a new mosque in the city of ash-Sham, called the Grand Mosque, apparently an immense building of stunning beauty. Another young guard was soon to marry, and the others all took turns joking at his expense, telling him not to worry, they would hide outside his tent on his wedding night, and whisper what to do. The young guard retorted by asking why he should trust their advice on women; and his tormentors responded with fantastic tales of their own sexual prowess that had the entire company howling with laughter.
He’d followed them until at last on the horizon he spied a low band of green. It was the Ghouta, the oasis fed by the river that bordered ash-Sham. Reluctantly he’d slowed his pace and watched until the caravan became a thin wedge on the horizon, a spear-point piercing the Ghouta. The green belt might appear benign, but even the Djinni was not so rash as to travel into it. He was a djinn of the desert, and in the Ghouta’s lush fields he would be out of his element. There were stories of creatures there that didn’t take kindly to wayward djinn, and would trick them into the river, holding them under until they were extinguished. He decided to exercise caution for once and return home.
The journey back had been long, and by the time he reached his palace a strange loneliness had settled over him. Perhaps it had to do with the caravan. He’d grown used to their conversation, their songs and stories; but he had no part in them, he merely overheard. Perhaps it had been too long since he’d sought out his own kind. He decided he would leave off chasing caravans, and go to the habitations of his clan, and dwell among them for a time. Perhaps he’d even seek out female companionship, a djinniyeh who might desire his attentions. He’d arrived at his palace at sunset, making plans to leave again in the morning—and there his memories ended.
After that, only two images penetrated the haze. In the first, a man’s brown, gnarled hands clamped the iron cuff across his wrist, and with this image came the impression of searing cold and bottomless fear, a djinn’s natural reaction to iron—but how, he wondered, did he not feel it now? And then, the second image: a man’s leathered face, lips cracked and grinning, the bulging yellow eyes glowing in triumph. Wizard, the memory told him. But that was all; and in the next instant he was sprawled, naked and bound, on the floor of Arbeely’s shop.
Except that it had not been