by L-J Baker
Adijan and Her Genie
L-J Baker
* * *
Chapter One
Adijan sweated as she watched the gate guards search a protesting merchant. The short shadow of the Ul-Feyakeh city wall provided no shade from the relentless heat. Concealed beneath her hat, the packet of strange powder she must deliver to the house of Remarzaman the enchanter pressed as heavily as a lump of lead. She resisted the urge to adjust the way her fez sat on her head. The caliph’s executioner would cut off one of her hands if they caught her smuggling.
“Next,” a guard shouted. “You! Move it.”
Adijan mustered what she hoped looked like a casual smile springing from an innocent heart and tugged her donkey the few paces forward. “Well met, oh glorious official of the most wise caliph. May the Eye bless you and your endeavors this fine day.”
The guard grunted and eyed the bags on her donkey. Adijan offered the cloth bill of fare from her employer, the Merchant Nabim. It was always safer to carry something taxable. The excise guards hated nothing more than letting anyone through without collecting at least a copper curl from them. Adijan surreptitiously wiped a trickle of sweat from the side of her face. The guard poked and prodded the bags. He untied one and sniffed.
“Murris root?” he asked.
“Yes, sir,” Adijan said. “The finest and most fragrant you could buy this side of the Devouring Sands. Dried to perfection in the pure air of the –”
“Yes, yes.” The guard shoved past her.
Adijan retained her good-natured smile, while silently begging the All-Seeing Eye to speed the inspection to a happy conclusion. Behind her, bad-tempered animals and their owners grumbled in the heat as they waited. Swarms of black flies buzzed around the stinking pats of donkey and camel dung. The guards acted oblivious to the seething impatience clogging up the road.
The officials of Ul-Feyakeh were the least corruptible and most arrogant. Adijan had heard fellow couriers whisper about spells placed on the guards. With over two dozen years experience of life at its lowest, Adijan didn’t need to blame magic for any human vice, failing, or folly, she remembered three weeks rotting in a flea-infested jail for attempting to bribe an Ul-Feyakeh night-watchman and endured the tension and perspired.
“What’s this?” The guard jabbed a grubby finger at the leather bag tied to the donkey’s shoulder.
“You have a fine eye, glorious sir,” Adijan said. “That is the best of the wares I carry. Made from the –”
“What is it?” He tugged at the knots.
“Allow me, enlightened one.”
Adijan loosened the ties. Silk slithered from the leather bag. Edged with a deep border of brightly-colored embroidery, the red shawl shimmered and shone in the midday sun. Shalimar would gasp to see such finery. Adijan might not earn enough to buy her wife such a garment, but some day she would. If she successfully completed this delivery to the enchanter, Merchant Nabim would owe her enough that she could buy her own donkey. Then she could work for herself and begin building up her own lucrative delivery business. She just needed to get past this excise man without him finding that packet under her hat.
“This beautiful scarf is a gift I carry from the merchant, my master,” Adijan said, “to the virtuous daughter of his great friend, Merchant Dalian, on the occasion of her wedding to the son of the –”
“Yes, yes. A gift, you say?”
“As splendid and worthy a present as –”
“There is tax to pay.” The guard scowled at the cloth bill of fare. “Is this –?”
“At the bottom, oh glorious sir.” Adijan flashed him a smile as she knotted the bag ties. “Gift. Lady’s headdress. Silk.”
The guard grunted. “Thirty-seven curls in all.”
Adijan quietly sighed her relief. No strip-search this time. She was going to get away with it. Eye be praised! Not only that, but the thirty-seven curls were exactly right. He didn’t add on a coin or two for himself. In any other city, the guard would have helped himself to at least a handful of the murris root.
While groveling a little more, Adijan tugged a battered leather bag from inside her shirt. She tipped the copper coins onto her palm. Pretending not to be able to count, she watched the guard pick coins from her pile. He scrupulously took thirty-seven without pocketing a couple for himself. Perhaps these excise men were under some enchantment of honesty after all.
Adijan offered up heart-felt thanks to the All-Seeing Eye and tugged her donkey away through the open gateway.
She led her donkey through the maze of narrow, stinking back streets, avoiding the busy bazaar. She fended off noisy hawkers and shouting beggars. The smoke from a sizzling brazier made her mouth water, but with the packet under her hat, she wasn’t tempted to stop and eat.
The pale stone of the wall around the house of Remarzaman reflected the sun in an eye-watering dazzle. Adijan stopped at the tall iron gates and gaped. More like a palace than any normal house, three graceful minarets thrust up from amongst the plethora of arches, tiled roofs, and balconies. Tame peacocks strutted around the fountained pool set in a lawn of dark green grass. There must be a hell of a lot of money in the magic business. Just when she began to wonder how much that packet under her fez was really worth, a brawny man stepped from the shadows at the side of the gate.
“Greetings, oh glorious sir,” Adijan said. “I am a courier from the Merchant Nabim in Qahtan. I have a delivery for the enchanter.”
“Give it to me.” The guard held out a large, scarred hand.
“Glorious sir, my wise and esteemed master needs proof I delivered the package. If you were he, would you trust my word?”
The man looked her up and down and spat. He grated back one of the metal gate bolts. “Leave the donkey.”
Adijan tied the donkey just inside the gates and trotted after the guard. She craned her neck to see the splendors of the garden. Surely Paradise itself would not contain such a profusion of greenery and flowers – or so many gardeners. Luscious scents hung in the air, including the sweet ripeness of fruit. Her stomach grumbled.
The man led her to a shaded side door and made her wait outside. She sat cross-legged on the dusty mat. One day, she decided, she and Shalimar would live in a place like this. She could probably dispense with the peacocks and their raucous calls, though Shalimar might like them.
Adijan retrieved the precious packet from beneath her hat. Now damp from her sweaty head, it was carefully wrapped in three layers of cloth. It contained a pale yellow powder. It wasn’t ground mistweed pods, because it tasted faintly sour and hadn’t affected her vision.
“You are from Nabim?”
Adijan looked up at a young man in a spotless white shirt and pantaloons with a vibrant blue silk sash around his waist. The upturned toes of his boots flashed with silver-threaded embroidery. There really must be a mountain of money in the magic business if even the enchanter’s secretary could afford such princely splendor.
Adijan scrambled to her knees and bowed until her forehead touched the ground. “Oh, great and noble sir, I humbly beg your leave to deliver a package from my master, the Merchant Nabim, to your master, the exalted enchanter, Remarzaman.”
The young man snapped his fingers. Adijan surrendered the package. He turned it in his hands. “It has been opened?”
“No, sir,” Adijan lied. “But, forgive me, noble sir, for I did, most clumsily, drop it once. The All-Seeing Eye knows that nothing fell from the package.”
“Hmm. Well, my master will know if any is missing. Here.”
Instead of the cloth of receipt Adijan expected, he dropped a small red leather bag near her hand. He turned to leave.
“Sir!” Adijan called. “Forgive me. My master requires a receipt.”<
br />
“This final installment completes the payment. What better proof of receipt can there be than the necklace itself?”
He strode off and signaled to the scar-handed gate guard. With the shadow of the guard falling across her, Adijan bowed low to the young man’s retreating back and grabbed the leather bag.
Before she untied her donkey, Adijan tucked the small bag into her secret pocket. This unexpected return delivery would surely add a few copper curls to the sum she had already accumulated from Merchant Nabim. Together, the enchanter’s bag and the cloth of credit from Nabim comprised the key to her prosperous future. In the small pouch Shalimar had sewn inside the front of her long shirt, the precious load should be safe from pickpockets and muggers. Anyone looking hard enough to see the bulge below the waistband of her pantaloons would mistake it for something definitely not worth trying to steal.
Adijan’s regard of Merchant Dahan’s house decreased markedly after her visit to the enchanter’s home. She received a generous ten curl tip from the merchant’s wife for delivering the scarf, and a plate full of food from the kitchens. She gobbled the food and completed her job by surrendering the donkey and the other bags of wares to Merchant Nabim’s warehouse.
Tempted though she was by the lure of a drink and pipe of mistweed at a wine shop, Adijan coaxed an immediate delivery to Qahtan out of the warehouse factotum. The best he could offer was a heavy bag crammed with copies of receipt rolls and tally sticks. No donkey. She’d have to shoulder the bag herself and earn only a meager handful of curls. Still, she gratefully accepted. Having traveled to Natuk before coming to Ul-Feyakeh, she had already been away from home for seven days and she missed Shalimar. She wanted to see the look on her wife’s face when she showed her their new donkey. If she haggled hard enough, she might have enough left over from buying the animal, paying for a week or two stabling, and discharging their rent arrears with the landlord, to buy Shalimar some cloth for a new dress.
Adijan hefted the bag and whistled to herself as she passed along the harassed lines of merchants and couriers waiting for inspection at the gates of Ul-Feyakeh.
As she trudged the dusty road to Qahtan, Adijan refined her dreams of a delivery and courier empire that would stretch across all the known lands between the Western Ocean, the Black Wall Mountains, the Devouring Sands, and the Endless East. Her income would rival that of the sultan himself. She would buy a house like Remarzaman’s – only bigger. Shalimar could fill it with orphans, stray dogs, song, and happiness.
Long before sundown, Adijan’s daydreams gave way to speculation about what sort of necklace she was carrying from the enchanter that was worth more than one payment of illicit material.
She picked her way amongst the tumble of boulders beside a dried stream bed. The sinking sun cast long, concealing shadows. She selected a spot where she was hidden from casual observation. This route was not as notorious as some for cut-throats, brigands, and slaver gangs, but she saw no point in presenting an easy target to anyone who might pass.
Adijan let the bag fall from her sweaty shoulders to thud on the ground. Shadows of the boulders congealed around her as the last brilliant slivers of the sun quenched against the horizon. She untied a worn blanket from her waist and pulled it around herself. Shalimar had labored long and hard to weave the blanket for Adijan just after they were married. In four years, the vivid colors had mercifully faded from eye-watering brightness, but Adijan wouldn’t have traveled without it even had it magically glowed. Her dreams of success included never spending more than a day away from home at any one time, unless to take Shalimar to visit a famous temple, see a fabled garden, or meet the sultan.
Grinning at the memory of Shalimar’s sunny smile, Adijan tugged the leather bag from its concealment within her clothes.
The red bag felt warm from being close to her body. It barely filled her palm. The soft, supple leather was the highest quality, though it bore no tool work or adornment. It felt light enough to be a cheap string of glass beads rather than an expensive gold necklace.
She frowned as she chewed a tough lump of smoked goat meat. Might it be possible Merchant Nabim and the enchanter hoped to deceive everyone, including herself, about its value by not making a fuss about it? She would put no cunning trick past Nabim.
She held the bag up to the failing light and squinted at the thin thongs holding the end closed. It looked like a straightforward knot. Cautiously, she tugged at the thongs. No enchantment burst around her. She up-ended the bag. A cloth-covered wad dropped onto her thigh. The thin cloth, of a very fine, dense weave, bore a crossed-pattern of yellow and red threads through it. That must be the enchanter’s signature pattern. The three tiny yellow seals fixing the end of the cloth were more flexible and shiny than ordinary wax.
Adijan bit her lip as she stared at the seals. She had risked much to open the bag. Breaking the seals would be madness. Every child learned in its cradle about the dire and everlasting consequences of meddling with the work of enchanters. Unwilling to become a donkey or grow extra heads, she contented herself with easing the folded cloth apart to see if she could glimpse what it held without straining the seals.
She licked sweat from her upper lip. The elaborate wrapping concealed a small pendant on a plain chain. Both parts looked like tarnished brass. That made her uneasy. Very uneasy. No one in their right mind, let alone a fabulously rich enchanter, would go to so much trouble if this really was just a cheap necklace.
Adijan carefully returned the cloth-wrapped bundle to its leather bag, tied the thongs, and stowed it inside her clothes. Whatever it was, she’d be happy to get it to Merchant Nabim, take what he owed her, and forget she had ever held the enchanter’s mystery bundle.
Adijan curled up on the ground and pulled Shalimar’s blanket around herself.
“All-Seeing Eye,” she muttered, “I thank you for allowing me to live and prosper this day. I beg you to allow me another such day tomorrow. And, you who know all and see all, I beg you to keep Shali safe and happy. Please don’t let my love sit up too late sewing. And don’t let Yussuf il-Masouli, our nasty landlord, bother her. I’ll pay the rent when I get back. I really will this time. In full. And I also beg your daily benevolence for Aunt Takush, Fetnab, Kilia, and the other women at the friendly house. I thank you. I thank you. I most humbly thank you.”
She dozed off imagining what might be in the bag and why Merchant Nabim hadn’t told her to expect the enchanter to give it to her to take back to Qahtan.
The next morning, Adijan chewed a day old lump of flatbread for breakfast as she followed the trail around the rocky base of a hill. A shadow leaped at her. She glimpsed a ragged beard and a club. A sickening pain smashed into the side of her head.
Adijan woke and groaned. Her head pounded. She lay face-down on the stony ground. A scorpion scuttled away into the shadows. As she struggled to sit up, a lightning bolt exploded inside her skull. She groaned again and held her head.
All-Seeing Eye, she hurt.
Carefully, Adijan peeled open her eyes to squint. The merciless sun shone from mid-morning high. Her attackers had taken her sack.
“Pocked scabs from a flea-infested dog turd.”
Adijan found a nauseatingly tender spot on the back of her head where dry blood crusted her hair. A sore line around her throat was all that remained of her purse. They had left her without a single copper curl.
“Oh, no!” Adijan shoved her hands inside the front of her pants. “Please, Eye, let the bill – yes! Thank you.”
She gripped the debt cloth and the leather bag. They had robbed her of money, sack, food, water, Shali’s blanket, and even her sandals. But she could weather those losses with the truly valuable goods safe. She blew a kiss at the sky.
She shoved herself to her feet. Stones and pebbles jabbed her soles. A giant hammer thumped inside her head with each step and her mouth tasted like the underside of a donkey’s tail. There had better be a village or stream close. She would have to beg for food.
<
br /> After three long, bruising days, Adijan limped to the southern gates of the walled city of Qahtan.
“Stop.” The city gate guard held out a hand. “No beggars, thieves, or riff-raff. Go away.”
Adijan peered past him to one of his companions with a bushy beard. He’d arrested her half a dozen times. She knew the names of his children. “Corporal Rashid! Has that brother of yours got married yet?”
Rashid looked her up and down. “Adijan al-Asmai. What happened this time?”
“Robbed,” she said. “Look, I’m starving. I haven’t eaten properly since I left Ul-Feyakeh. And my feet are killing me.”
“No point searching you this time, then.” Rashid nodded her through.
“May the All-Seeing Eye smile on you and yours,” Adijan said.
Though she dearly desired to go straight home to see Shalimar, get her aching belly filled, and her bloody feet bathed, she hobbled toward the wealthy merchants’ quarter.
As Adijan limped to the rear of the Merchant Nabim’s house, she forced herself to ignore the mouth-watering smells of cooking assailing her from every direction. Her stomach growled and clenched. A servant opened the door. He almost shut it in her face but Imru glanced up from his pile of accounts and beckoned her over.
The skinny eunuch looked her up and down. “What happened to you?”
“Robbed the day after I left Ul-Feyakeh,” she said.
“They get much?”
“Everything. Even took my bloody sandals. May they rot in a pit of cobras. Is that water?”
Adijan helped herself from the jar on the table near a neat stack of bill cloths.
Imru wrung his hands. “He won’t be happy. Not at all. He particularly asked to know as soon as you returned. He’s being unusually secretive. And oddly excited.”
“Yeah?”
“As if he were expecting something special. Well, whatever it was, you’ve lost it. He won’t be happy. Not happy at all.”
“Maybe.” Adijan wiped dribbles from her chin. “The one thing they didn’t get was what the enchanter gave me to bring back.”
