Sindbad, The Thirteenth Voyage

by R. A. Lafferty

  Yes, Harun Al-Rashid was the man of a thousand masks of disguises, but none of them disguised him at all. Every person in the Caliphate recognized him immediately in any or all of them.

  “The Boy-Caliph was weeping this afternoon in the Olive Groves,” the Black Dog in the corner charged.

  “I weep! I deny that I ever wept!” cried the Boy-Caliph with ringing insincerity. But the clown flesh-mask that he was wearing now had, beside the wide gap-tooth grin and a bulbous nose, a heavy dribble of tears at the corner of each happy eye. “I am the Golden Boy. What would I ever have to weep about. Somebody kill the Black Dog!”

  “The Black Dog is gloom, and it is the son of Death,” the Black Dog said with a heavy and hellish voice. “The Black Dog was born dead and cannot be further killed. Ah, but the Black Dog has recordings of the Boy-Caliph weeping in the Olive Groves today.”

  “No, no, that was not the weeping of myself,” Harun maintained. “There is old, old weeping, residual weeping in the Olive Groves. There one may hear Adam weeping when he remembers Cain, or the Giant Anak weeping when he remembers the daughters of men. Ah, I miss the daughters of men myself when I am dead for a while. But I do not weep when I am in my happy voyage. Myself was the Genie in a bottle for a thousand years. Myself was the ‘Thing’ in Pandora's box, the ‘Thing’ that did not fly out when the lid was raised because my wings were broken. But even then I did not weep.”

  Of what did the Boy-Caliph consist? His flesh was fifty years old in his present life. Nor was he retarded in his functions, for he had sired his first son when he was six years old and his second son when he was seven. But he was eternally boyish; and yet his boyhoods were interrupted by his strange deaths. I had a very good account of his death on Kentauron Mikron, and I had a fair accounts of three other of his deaths. But, in every case, mythological elements had crept into his deaths, or may indeed have been in them as genuine elements when he died.

  Was Harun even human? Was he perhaps one of the Sila who live a thousand years, or a Marid who live a million, or an Ifrift who live a thousand million years and who may spend as long as a million years at one time imprisoned in a bottle? (The Ifrits fall for the Bottle Trick every time; they suffer from ‘Bottle-Imprisonment Syndrome’.) Was Harun a Shaytam? Or even a Ghul? No, not that. He hadn't the ravening cruelty of the Ghul, though he did have a streak of cruelty in his humor and his antics.

  All this time there were old anecdotes and practical jokes being acted out by the Boy-Caliph and his familiars. Some of them had been written down as much as a hundred years earlier, but they had been written by the Comic Prophets out of the ever-unfolding Comic-Glory-That-Was-And-Is-And-Will-Be of Harun the Golden Boy. Well, there was the living tale, or at least the animated tale of the lady who   —

  Ah, some of us were being put out of the huge dim-purple room then. Perhaps we can come back to the animated tale of the lady who   —   But none but believers in the Prophet could be present now.

  None but believers could be present now when Al-Amin (he had arrived with the sound of ten thousand horses and horsemen somewhere within the walls of Baghdad Mirage itself), when Al-Amin the eldest son of Harun Al-Rashid should be installed as Caliph in the place of his boyish father. The details of the installation might be seen by none but believers’ eyes: but a hint of what the installation would consist of might be taken from Harun's collecting one hundred gallons of Christian blood. My Grand Dame and I belonged to the minority of Christians on Kentauron Mikron, so we had to contribute. Alexander of Astrobe, one of the Master Spies now in Baghdad Mirage (we had fallen into conversation and friendship with him) belonged to the Militant Christians of his golden world of Astrobe, and he had to contribute. There were about a thousand Christians out of the ten thousand persons in the big room (somehow the ten thousand had been comfortable and leisurely and uncrowded there which meant either that the room was larger than it seemed or that it was composed of ‘Mirage Space’), so it was no hardship on us that a hundred gallons of blood would be taken from our number.

  “What will you do with it, Harun?” one of us Unbelievers-In-The-Prophet called as we were being pushed out of the room.

  “Drink it, of course,” Harun called back in his boyish jangle. But the muleteer's flesh-mask that he was wearing now had one great eye winking so were not so sure that our blood really was for drinking.

  As we went from the room and into one of the many broad, subterranean streets that ran both below Baghdad and its suburbs, I was shocked to see some three hundred of Al-Amin's horsemen riding, each carrying a freshly-severed human head on the end of a long lance.

  Five Eighths Of The Way To Hell

  The ‘room’ into which we unbelievers had been herded was a very large mausoleum or burial crypt, deep under and much older than the walls of Baghdad. “We will just keep you in this place because we may need several of you,” one of the Captains of the guards told us. “And we will probably have to come into here for several reasons.” But the huge crypt-room had most of the hard amenities, stone benches and stone tables, and even stone bowls filled with stone fruit.

  “You ask, Essindibad, and you tell me that my cousin Heifritz also asks ‘Whence this gathering of spies?’ And I can only say that all the spies, and I and thou also, have heard the distant jangle-music of the belled dragon. Aesop, perhaps, or another, had the fable of the belled cat. Should a mouse be brave enough to tie a bell on a cat, and should the cat be foolish enough to leave the bell hanging around its neck, then all the mice would have warning whenever the cat so much as stirred. Well, a belled dragon does stir whenever the Golden Boy or the Boy-King is about to fulfill his mission, and that belled dragon is stirring now. As to who it was who belled that dragon originally I have no idea; but research may yet turn up the name of the bell-hanger, just as research may yet turn up the name of the ‘Song that the Sirens sang’.”

  It was the Master Spy Alexander of Astrobe talking. My good wife Grand Dame Tumblehome began to doodle words with a stylus on a piece of shoulder bone of a sheep.

  The stone table at which several of us were sitting was of highly polished chalcedony or agate stone. A piece of chalcedony as large as that big tabletop was worth all the wealth of a realm. When we looked down at the tabletop, it mirrored our own faces as clearly as a fine glass mirror of Kentauron Mikron might have done might have done   —   but with a difference. Our mirrored faces changed, and other things changed, apparently following the trend of our thoughts. Sometimes I could gaze into my own face as it was when I was an eleven-year-old boy. Sometimes I could see it when I was an elderly but not yet senile man. I could not see my face when I was still older than that. Either I remained an elderly but not yet senile man for a very long time, or I died at that stage and had no older face. But others at the table, by experimenting, could see themselves as they would be after they were dead, rotted first, and then only as skull faces.

  “What the Golden Boy does best is die,” Spy Alexander continued. “For that he is born. And born and born and born again. For that he comes into the world. We all of us are born to die, in a certain sense. But the Golden Boy is born to die in a special way. His death is always the main thing about him. It is for his death that the Eagles gather.”

  “The name of the of the song that the Sirens sang was ‘Bide a While’,” my good-wife said. “And I have written the first stanza of it here on this shoulder-blade of a sheep for your edification:

  ‘Oh bide a while with us and love

  Hotly, fully to the wales.

  Empassioned girls have plenty of

  Gills and fins and fishy tails.’ ”

  Spy alexander looked doubtfully, even distastefully at my good-wife. “I love first rate and structured code,” he said. “But I hate such unstructured and amateurish code as that. It is not really playing the game to use it. Cannot you tell us, Grand-Dame Tumblehome, in easy words what you are trying to say? Cannot you give me the message directly?”

 
; “No, I cannot,” my good-wife said. “The message? Oh no, the message is too intricate to give in easy words. You must work for it. In any case, ‘The Song the Sirens Sang’ has nothing to do with any message. I asked the polished stone table (in my own way I asked it) to give me part of the Song the Sirens Sang, and it flashed it up at me and I copied it on the sheep-bone. So it wasn't a great song! What do you expect from a bunch of ocean gamins?”

  A few hundred guards rode into the mausoleum on horseback.

  “We miscounted,” one of their captains said. “We need nine more human heads, imposing ones preferred. You, sir,” he was speaking to Master Spy Alexander of Astrobe, “you have the sort of imposing head that I mean. We will have to take it with us. It'll bring up the average. We are sorry to inconvenience you, but yours is really a prime head.”

  “Oh no, mine is not an imposing head at all,” Spy Alexander protested. “Notice how my upper lip pouches out. It makes me look like a rock coney, utterly without distinction.”

  “Yes, so it does. I didn't notice your upper lip pouched out like that before. Oh well, keep your head. We'll find what we need somewhere.”

  And another Captain of Horsemen said to my good-wife: “You madame, you barefaced unbeliever that you are, you have a very distinguished head. I have seldom seen such a distinguished head on a woman. We'll use it.”

  My wife does indeed have a distinguished and beautiful head and face. But she protested the matter:

  “No, my head is not distinguished at all. It is too fat, too heavy. It looks like the head of a dame hippopotamus.”

  “It does, yes,” the Captain agreed thoughtfully. “I didn't notice that before. Well, we'll find what we need somewhere.”

  The Horsemen then beheaded eighteen persons in our crypt-room. They selected the nine most imposing heads from the eighteen and gave the other nine with all eighteen bodies to the dogs. They selected well, for the nine heads they stuck on the ends of their long lances and rode away with were indeed imposing. But we had the feeling that the new regime in the Caliphate might prove to be an oppressive one.

  “Of the series of Golden Boys, of which Harun Al-Rashid seems to be a recurring unit in several but probably not all of the chains, I will say that they are pseudo-Golden-Boys,” Spy Alexander was continuing his discourse. And yet he seemed a little bit shaken by the near encounter he'd had with his head. Ah well, spies are taught to keep their heads at all times. “Only one of them was the Golden Boy, the Boy-King; but he was imitated both before and after the fact by these lines of pleasant imposters. The swift and sudden pleasures encountered by all persons in the presence of the pseudo-Golden-Boys is bait; and we are the fish who take it. I believe that all of them stem from hell. But here I must impose something that strains my Christian faith. For we militant Christians of Astrobe believe in only one hell. But the Moslems of Gaea-Earth, and other persons on other worlds, subscribe to from seven to nine hells. I believe that the fakery of the Golden-Boy-lines stems from one of the usually easy-going hells of the Moslems. It is evil, of course, and it is set in the direction of ultimate evil. But it will hardly arrive at that ultimate in this aeon, and probably not in the next.

  “The Golden Boys have no adult form, not the pseudo ones, not even the True One. Christ Himself of Gaea-Earth was not made man: he was made boy. And as a Boy, but perhaps under the appearance of a Man, he was executed, with a fantastically powerful recoil that shook Gaea in root and branch. The Lords of a more easy-going hell believe that they can ape this great redemptive recoil: and they shoot their bolts, their Golden-Boy arrows, one after the other. There it is, Essindibad and his good wife! If you have followed me this far, you have followed me five-eighths of the way to hell. Do you think you might follow me a little bit further?”

  There was the sound, or the feel, of ten thousand intaking breaths. It was so massive that it caused the atmospheric pressure of the whole crypt to fall suddenly. “Whatever it is, it will be a lulu,” my good-wife said. “Cover your ears, guys. This'll be a blast.”

  The soil of several of the ancient graves began to move and jerk in anticipation. A shiver ran through the thousands of sets of bones buried under our feet and all around us. The dead, like canaries and mice, are early detectors of catastrophic atmospheric changes.

  Then it came. Oh, it was only the blast of ten thousand trumpets sounding loudly together. We had covered our ears, but now we felt the blood running out from between our fingers. And yet the trumpet tune, when separated from its too-loudness, was a rather spirited and pleasant little call. The name of the call was “Wake the Town and Tell the People,” and this was only the fifth time it had ever been sounded.

  The first of the Abbasid Caliphs had not been blown into power by this trumpet blast. He, Abu-l-Abbas el-Saffah, had composed the tune in the fourth and last year of his reign, and it was blown for subsequent Caliphs. For the news of “Wake the Town and Tell the People” was that there was a new Caliph.

  When the tune was blown, the soil of three of the ancient graves moved and jerked still more; and mummified members began to push through that soil. But they'd never make it out that way.

  Then a determined and solitary trumpeteer came into our mausoleum room. “We need three dead men in good condition to witness and attest the installation of the new Caliph,” the lone trumpeteer declared resolutely. “Three dead men in good condition,” he repeated, “and I believe I know just which plots they occupy.”

  The lone trumpeteer blew successively at each of the three plots. He blew furiously, mountainously, mortally. And three very shabby men, with that shabbiness that is achieved only by spending many years in the grave, three very shabby men broke out of the ground and stood quaking and miserable.

  “Walk in loose-step, but walk briskly,” the lone trumpeteer ordered them. And then he jazzed them on their way with further spirited trumpeting. So the new Caliph would have three men, risen from the dead, to attest to his installation. Things like that are important in a monarchy.

  “I do not believe that Harun Al-Rashid is of the human species,” Master Spy Alexander of Astrobe was saying. “I was about to say that I do not believe he is entirely of the human species, but I caught myself in time. In the three days I have been here, I have begun to fall into the speech patterns and thought patterns of the people of Gaea. A person, I believe, is entirely human; or he is entirely unhuman. I must not wobble on the matter. Thence, Harun is entirely unhuman, though it hard to accept.”

  Why did it give me an uneasy feeling when I heard Alexander the Spy say this? The rumor that I had a ‘touch of smoke’, a touch of the Ifrit, in my own ancestry was only a rumor. But I thought Spy Alexander was wrong in his ‘all-or-nothing’ thesis.

  “The Harun is really a golden animal,” Spy Alexander was talking. “Either that, or he is some species of angel, which is even harder to accept. But I do not go along with those who say that this unhuman creature is not a creature of God. All creatures are ultimately Creatures of God, even this Golden Mock-God Boy. And every creature of God has the possibility of Good. So has this Boy-Caliph who is in the process of becoming an ex-Caliph. He has the possibility of good, but he has the actuality of evil. Harun is a pawn that the Satanic Majesty pushes forward in the game again and again. Again and again this privileged pawn is demolished, but is it possible that the Satanic Majesty gains in position every time this special pawn is destroyed?

  “Let us talk a little bit about the various brutal deaths of this Harun. A pleasant legend has been designed to cover every one of them, but I believe the facts themselves are grindingly unpleasant. Why is it absolutely imperative that this Golden Boy should be murdered again and again? Why in every case does he manipulate it so as to leave no choice in the matter? Why, in short, does he opt for being murdered? Why is the brutality of the necessary execution so emphasized and highlighted? Why is the era and the culture in which the necessary obliteration takes place always so maligned? Why is it so bad-mouthed forever and ever? The
world, whatever world it is in the particular case, has always a maniac compulsion to put itself in the wrong in this matter, just as Harun has a maniac compulsion to get himself grotesquely killed in this matter.

  “What about the wonderful aura of happiness with which Harun always surrounds himself?” I asked.

  “He's got it, he's got it!” Alexander of Astrobe cried. “What else can I say except that he's got it?”

  “But the sweep of it is many miles wide, realm-wide, sometimes world-wide,” I expostulated.

  “Yes, yes, I know. And yet I believe that it's only his body chemistry or alchemy. That is one reason that I believe he's a non-human creature. Humans never have bodies that are hundreds of miles in extent. But some species of Ifrit do apparently have such bodies. I believe that he is a very, very large Ifrit under the appearance of a very small man. Yes, I know that it sounds extreme, Essindibad. Well, it's only a working theory.”

  “An eclipse, an eclipse!” cried a man who entered our place, a man who seemed to belong to the new Al-Amin officialdom. “There must be an eclipse of the sun to correspond to every installation of a Caliph. One planner has said that we need an eclipse to convince and impress the ignorant, but this is false. We need an eclipse to convince and impress the three-quarters educated. The ignorant do not care at all whether a shadow that darkens the sun is natural, or contrived, or merely unusual. But we do need an eclipse.

  “There has been an eclipse for the installation of each Caliph of the present dynasty. And the installation dates were not selected to coincide with an eclipse. The installations were mostly by impulse and quick overthrow. How the eclipses happened to fall on Installation Day in the earlier cases I do not know, but it has to happen tomorrow. Spies are supposed to be smart, so I am putting this problem to several of you. We will need the eclipse in the morning, sometime after the sun is high.”