Yes, Essindibad Copperbottom can hear you, Scheherazade. But being able to overhear monologs by somebody like Scheherazade is not an unmixed blessing. I looked out, and the tedious dragons had indeed filled the underground ocean waterway. They would hinder any naval activity and might indeed make it impossible. Anyhow, the ‘Other Thing’ that took over when Scheherazade's brains abdicated in her had taken over in her now. I have always loved a reckless sea-battle myself, but now my wife and I were manacled prisoners amidships and a little bit aft, right where the copied crack in the ship would allow it to be burst asunder. I could see the crack plainly. I should have had the hull-crack in my own ship fixed long ago, but how did I know that it would be copied? It was right where the ship we were prisoned on would be rammed, either by my own ship now captained by Madam Scheherazade or by the ‘Open-Ended Analytics Almost-Anything Ship’ of John Thunderson Ali ben Raad and his mechanical bride Blue Moon. I wondered for what reason Scheherazade wanted the tinted bottles with the popper-proof corks. Well, there was one on my own ship that she was captaining now. And she'd said that she could hear me, but she didn't know that I could overhear her.
“Scheherazade, there is a big, blue bottle not three feet from you if you’re sitting in the captain's chair,” I called. “It's in an otherwise-empty bilge-bucket at your left under the wardroom table. Whatever you want it for, it's there. And it does have a popper-proof cork. I have to sign off now. I'm assaulted again.”
“Tear his tongue out, Magician,” howled the false ship that I was in.
“But of course I will,” the Magician-Navigator laughed. “It is these little pleasures that make the job worth while. Oh, on alert now though! He'll not escape, and I'll tear out his tongue later. We are going through difficult water for the moment. I believe it is some of those tedious dragons we’re cutting through. And Oh, Oh, we are rammed amidships and a little bit aft!”
“Burst your bonds, Sindbad Copperbottom!” my wife the Grand Dame cried out in her wonderful and now blood-thirsty voice. “All great heroes can burst their bonds in the moment of supreme crisis.”
I tried it, and I could not burst them. And in that moment we were rammed, amidships and a little bit aft. The ship burst asunder and began immediately to sink.
“Go topside myself. Go topside, the crew!” the Magician-Navigator called out with authority in his voice. “We'll board and capture the two attacking ships even as this one sinks under our heels. Topside, all! Topside, Ship! Oh, that's funny, Ship. How could a ship go topside of itself? You must stay here and drown in yourself, Ship, along with False Sindbad and his buxom wife. Die creeps, die!”
The Magician-Navigator and all the false crewmen snatched weapons from the bulkhead (those bolo-knives such as are used when boarding ships in battle), and they all scampered topside for gore and glory.
“Burst your bonds, my love!” my wife cried out again. “If you are the True Sindbad and the True Hero then you will be able to burst them. They’re only iron.”
But I could not burst them.
“Burst your own bonds, wife!” I cried in exasperation. And my wife did burst her bonds. Then she shook all the jags of broken iron off her and stood up. And I was seized with fury, shame, jealousy of her heroism, and the strongest resolve I ever felt since my fourth voyage-adventure.
I burst my bonds, leg clamps, manacles, chains, all. Only a True Sindbad, only a True Hero could have burst them. And my wife and I took the last two bolo-knives from their hooks on the bulkhead and rushed up to top-deck which was already awash with midnight salt-water. And then we set ourselves to slay or be slain. But we were right at the precincts of Hell Itself, our waves and wake sloshing against the hot and drafty iron doors of Infernity. And before the precincts, one does not pass from life to death nor from death to life except by diabolical orders.
“We must get a little order and system in this butchery,” Madam Scheherazade was singing out from the hatches of my own Tried-and-True Ship, with its great crack amidships and a little bit aft. She had set the twelve fair-sized bottles and the one large bottle in a row on the foredeck, and something was creating the illusion that all of them were much larger than they really were.
And on the other attacking ship, the Mechanical Wife Blue Moon had set a victrola to playing genuine Chicago style Slippery-Blood Music. John Thunderson, whatever his other faults, would never have put to space and time in his ‘Almost-Everything Space-and-Time-Ship’ without a victrola and a good stack of ‘Slippery Blood’ records.
So we hacked and were hacked with the Bolo-knives, and we entered into the honest joy of irregular combat on the blood-slippery decks. The dragons who were in the way everywhere, opened their mouths so wide that they seemed able to swallow any and all of the three ships. Indeed, one of them did swallow the entire False Ship replica of my True Ship, but in that moment we had all leapt clear of it to the foredeck of my own True Ship. And then it was kill or be killed.
I noticed then that the dragon that had swallowed the False Ship had spewed it up again. And somehow, though that ship now looked even more disreputable than it had when it had burst asunder, yet it had also acquired an aura of embattled heroism. Being an accurate copy of my own heroic ship it could hardly avoid having an heroic aspect.
“False Ship, False Ship,” Scheherazade was calling to it, “there is another fate for you. When you have been swallowed into the maw that I have in mind for you, you may look back on your short stay in the dragon's maw with affection.” And then she addressed herself to her crewmen.
“Retreat, Crewmen, in the way that I have told you,” the intrepid Scheherazade called out. How she had told her crewmen to retreat I did not know, but they disappeared completely from my vision. They were gone, clear gone.
“After them, after them,” the Magician-Navigator howled out. “They cannot escape us. They have withdrawn into those curious blue rooms on the foredeck. After them with your bold Bolos! Kill them kill them!”
And the eleven crewmen from my false ship along with the Magician-Navigator rushed with their drawn blades into the twelve curious blue rooms on the foredeck, which rooms happened to be the twelve fair-sized blue bottles, somehow enlarged by an enabling imagination. Ah, they rushed in murderously. But there were only illusions of crewmen, and not the crewmen themselves, waiting for them in those straited places.
And then the Magician-Navigator and the False Crewmen were in the bottles, stunned by the impact of their own headlong rush, Scheherazade and John Thunderson and the mechanical wife Blue Moon slammed the popper-proof corks into each of the bottles. And immediately those twelve blue rooms diminished to their proper fair-sized bottle size. All those murderous crewmen were imprisoned in bottles, and so was the Magician-Navigator.
But the Magician-Navigator found his wits and his voice quickly. “The first minutes are critical,” I heard his voice, somewhat muffled by him being in the tightly corked bottle, I heard his voice being raised in introspective thought. “The first minute or so in the bottle is always critical, for if you don't get out in that first minute you may not get out in a thousand years. But we are not whipped yet. Ship, Ship, we are not whipped yet, and you are still sailing under orders. It is not for naught that the dragon spewed you up again. I order you now to sail high in the water right at this damnable craft, to heave yourself up and come on top of it on this foredeck, and to barge right into the large blue room which I believe is the headquarters and brain-room of this tricky cabal of persons. At us, Ship, and smash and enter!”
And it was with a terrible clash and clatter and rending of sea-planks (and a rending of my heart also, for some of those sea-planks were those of my own true ship), with a terrible buffeting and roaring and crushing, that the false ship climbed athwart the true, and barged right into the large and mysterious blue room which it believed was our headquarters and brain center. And when the false ship was in that large and mysterious blue room, myself and all of us slapped the popper-proof cork into the large blue
bottle, and we had one of the biggest (and someday to be the most famous) ships-in-a-bottle ever.
Then, ever faithful to any assignment given us, we all inspected the gates of hell, the great iron doors that the dragons were crowded against. I never saw such fat dragons in my life. What were they puffed up with?
“What are you fellows doing crowding around here?” I demanded of them.
“It's one of our favorite places,” a leader of the beasts told me. “We love the hot fumes that come through the holes in the doors. We love the fire. We are not ordinarily so fire-eating as is alleged against us, but we do love to swallow the globs of fire that creep through the big doors. Try some. They’re wonderful.”
“Our worry is that you might let some of the devils out with your meddling and milling around here,” I said.
“No chance of that,” the dragon snorted. “The devils stay a ways back when we are at the doors. We swallow devils right through the holes in the walls. They know that and are wary of us.”
“There's something not quite right about that explanation and about this place,” Scheherazade said. “I'll think what is wrong by and by. I only hope I don't think of it too late.”
“If there's something wrong with this place, then let's get out of here,” I said reasonably enough. “Let's go back to the tall city of Baghdad and have a ‘triumph’ staged for us. And I don't trust you dragons here. I'll not leave you behind us. Come along with us now, come on!”
So we all went back to Baghdad in my good ship and John Thunderson's comical ship. We came to the Holy City at earliest dawn for accolade, ovation, triumph, exultation, glory, parade, and pomp. And three hundred giant dragons (What made them so fat? With what were they stuffed?) marched at our heels and gave color to the parade.
More Tedious Than Dragons
Of course the new Caliph Al-Amin gave himself the chief place in the ovation. He needed it. His popularity had been slow in coming to its zenith, though it's true that he had been caliph for less than a full day. He hadn't a magnetic personality. He hadn't a chemical aura like that of his boy-father Harun al-Rashid. Some of his reforms, in especial his spoken attacks on Lady Narkos, turned the people off. They seemed in bad taste. Lady Narkos, she of the lilac-colored dreams and the pleasant mists, she who threw her purple-golden cloak over every bright dome of Holy Baghdad and made them numinous, she who created the mirages which alone made life worth living, she was not to be slighted by any Caliph.
And the boy-father Harun al-Rashid had detracted somewhat from Al-Amin's popularity by his jibing and japing and burlesquing of him. And now that boy-father, who had become Caliph Emeritus, had to be in that great Ovation-Parade, had to make himself the effective center of it. There was no way to keep him out.
He wore a suit of clown motley, green shoes with turned-up toes, and a green wig. His mask was a depictment of his own face as it had been until two days ago. But now it was said that there was something very wrong with his more recent face. It almost was no longer that of a boy. It had gone, skipping young manhood and middle manhood, to the face of an uncommonly old man. But that remained rumor. None of us had seen his aged face, nor would we ever.
Some of the servitors of the new Caliph Al-Amin had protested to him about the clownishness of the boy-father. “It is all right,” the new Caliph said. “These things are allowed against his death.” Everybody understood that the Boy-Caliph Harun al-Rashid was in the last day or two of his life.
There had been some opposition to the Ovation-Triumph-Exultation-Glory-Parade-Pomposity, and part of that opposition was from the other Master Spies, those who had not been appointed by the Caliph Al-Amin ‘to take ship and find passage under the Earth and prevent traitors from opening the iron hell-doors under the Earth, and to verify that those iron doors remained safely closed against the Powers of Evil’. Well, every new Caliph on coming into office had the iron doors verified as to their safety, and this Certification was always part of the Ovation-Parade of the new Caliph. There was not usually this pettiness against it. I will not attribute this pettiness to jealousy on the part of the other Master Spies, nor to any sort of bad faith on their part, but only to their being uninformed about the situation. And I attribute it to the ‘Spirit of Suspicion’ that is always a part of the make-up of second-rate Master Spies. These were my best friends on this world, but they would not be my best friends back home.
The Master Spy Citizen Heifritz said that the business of the Iron Doors of Hell was all a hoax and a superstition, that the iron doors that we had visited were only the rusted doors of an old canal lock that had been silted over with the rising of the plains around them and the erosion of the mountains above them both of which cause silting and rising of rivers and submerging of canals. And he said that the devils behind those iron doors (if indeed there were any devils imprisoned there) were no more than common spirits (albeit unclean spirits), and that doors of iron or other material could not be an impediment to their coming or going, though there might be impediments of some other sort. He said that the whole adventure reeked of boyishness and ignorance.
The Master Spy Alexander of Astrobe said the so-called ‘Main Gates’ underground near Baghdad, and the two smaller gates which were carried in the Caliph's ‘Inventory of Properties Located on Subterranean Waters’ were but three of the more than nine hundred ‘gates of hell’ located in the Caliphate itself. He said that he had seen that very morning a map in the Royal Archives that proved this. And he repeated the cavil that the devils are immaterial spirits (though sometimes assuming bodies for the sake of appearance, but these bodies were likely no more than compressed air), and being immaterial spirits they could not be imprisoned by material gates or doors.
The Master Spy who was code-named Rex Romae or the King of Rome said that nothing we could do here in the Caliphate would have any effect on the coming and going of devils because the real and only Gates of Hell were located under the City of Rome several thousand miles to the West. He said that he himself had the only key to those gates of hell (he showed it to us; it was quite a small key), and he was under instructions to let one minor devil come out every year so that humans would not be entirely free from temptations and would not miss all the character-building that comes from resisting temptations. But he said that he was instructed to let no major devil out under any conditions.
The Master Spy Madam Jingo said that the dragons should be investigated on the suspicion of carrying contraband material of some sort. She said that the luminous globs that they belched up were full of creatures that flew away or walked off, and that these were probably devils.
And the Master Spies Cato of Camiroi, Adrian the Christian, Irene of Cos, Qabda the Fist, and the Golden Tom-Cat all had objections and belittlements.
The man who was possibly the oldest in the world (maybe the wisest also), the Magi Badadilma the Armenian, declared that he would have nothing to do with the Ovation-Triumph-Parade because it was too hasty (it should not have been staged until the Caliph had been in office for at least three days, and Al-Amin was not going to be in office for three days), because it was political in motivation and was neither ethical nor eschatological. This hurt because this Magi Badadilma had taken part in the Ovation-Parades of several previous Caliphs.
But it was still a glorious Ovation-Parade. And the new Caliph Al-Amin experienced an elevation of spirits when the horse-hoof-beats in his head were replaced by the sound of oars rowing tiredly against a current somewhere.
“My brother the Pretender has a short attention span,” Al-Amin said. “He has forgotten that he was riding to Baghdad with murder in his heart, and he has gone rowing on some unidentified water on some other quest.”
The Caliph Al-Amin was satisfied with this explanation that he had dreamed up, but I was not. Taking advantage of an interval when the parade was not moving (a deaf and stubborn donkey-driver had driven one hundred donkeys right athwart the route of the Ovation-Parade, trying to get to the Midsummer Donkey Fair, whic
h was to be tomorrow and not today at all), and seeing a Bird-Master of my recent acquaintance in the crowd, I contracted with him to have three of his best Spy-Birds do a little job for me. And after I had instructed the birds briefly and quietly (you don't have to shout confidential matters at birds; creatures that can hear earth-worms breathing in the ground do not need to be shouted at), they flew off to fulfill their commissions.
Then the Ovation-Parade moved again, slowly but grandly. And now and then we members of the Royal Party spoke as we walked along, spoke of matters of prophecy and procedure and statecraft, and all the while we were showered with hundreds of thousands of roses and jasmines.
“Scheherazade,” said the new Caliph Al-Amin, “no one can read the future except only God and the nine specialized angels to whom he has given the power to read specific parts of the future. But I have reason to believe that you come from the future by some grotesque accident. So things that are of the future to us may not be of the future to you. And as you are a damozel who notices things and remembers them and gathers facts as another girl would gather figs or dates, you may have knowledge of the one thing that I need to know. Can you tell me what year we will take the great city of Constantinople from the Christians?”
“Constantinople will fall to the Moslems in the year 1453 of the Christian Calendar, I believe,” Scheherazade spoke with almost perfect certainty. “That would be the year 831 by the Moslem Calendar.”
“But that's six hundred and forty years yet, Madam Scheherazade. If that is true, then the glory of taking the City will go to another and not to me. Are you sure of your years?”
Sindbad, The Thirteenth Voyage Page 13
