Sindbad, The Thirteenth Voyage

by R. A. Lafferty

  “Pretty sure. Either Constantinople fell in 1453 and Columbus discovered America in 1493, or Constantinople fell in 1493 and Columbus discovered America in 1453. I'm pretty sure that the first case is the correct one, for Columbus had with him an old man who was a refugee from fallen Constantinople and who in his youth had sailed clear around the world in the service of the City-Empire of Constantinople.”

  “But, Madam Scheherazade,” Ali ben Raad, nee John Thunderson, protested. “Columbus discovered America in 1492. There is a mnemonic verse that children use to remember the date:

  ‘In fourteen hundred and ninety-two,

  Columbus sailed the Ocean Blue.’ ”

  Scheherazade went into peals of laughter (she had a pretty laugh) on hearing this gaffe of Thunderson, and we were all amused by it. “If there is any way to get a thing wrong, John Thunderson, you'll get it wrong,” she chortled. “The correct mnemonic verse, of course, is:

  ‘In fourteen hundred and ninety-three,

  Columbus sailed the deep blue sea.’

  “I'm really amazed that you got it wrong by only one year. That's the closest you’ve ever come to anything. No, Caliph Al-Amin, I am sorry, but you will not have the glory of conquering Constantinople. That glory will go to a Turk named Mohammed the Second, a grandson of the Caliph Bayazid of the Ottoman Turkish Caliphate.”

  “What, a Caliph from that family of Turkish dogs! I know that low family of adventurers. I'd almost rather that the Christians would keep the City than that it should fall to a dog of that family of dogs. What will Allah have been thinking of when he permits the Ottoman Turks to become Moslems?”

  One of the Spy-Birds I had sent out came back and spoke to me:

  “Whatever Mamun the Great says when he arrives here will be a lie,” the bird said, “for the truth would be too damning to him. Mamun has gone to the ‘Door of Hell’ where you were recently, and he has received instructions from one of the Greater Devils imprisoned there, for Mamun is now of the party and allegiance of the Devils. But he'll tell some wild story when he comes, to discredit his brother the Caliph Al-Amin.”

  “My brother is of the party of the devils now, so your Spy-Bird says, Sindbad?” Al-Amin asked sadly (I was surprised that he had been able to hear the words). “This is a great sorrow to me. But now I hear him in my own head again, riding, riding, riding to come against us here in Baghdad.”

  The second of the Spy-Birds came to me and reported:

  “Do not believe the future Caliph Mamun the Great when he arrives here,” the bird said. “He has been getting his orders through a hole in the Iron Doors from the biggest devil of them all, the Devil Himself. Mamun will say something horrifying to discredit the present Caliph Al-Amin here, and he will succeed in discrediting him. Mamun the Great and the Biggest Devil were cackling in delight about some trick they were playing with the dragons. I didn't quite catch what it was.”

  “The dragons, those most tedious and most malodorous beasts on Earth!” Caliph Al-Amin cried in anguish. “They are too stupid to help anybody play a trick. Look at the oafs! They’re so full of something, probably swamp weeds, that I doubt whether they can fly at all now. I would declare open season on dragons except that they’re so foul when they’re dead: that's probably what saves their lives. But I'd give a lot to clear them out of the Caliphate. We should drive them all to China or Franconia.”

  We moved again in the wonderful Ovation-Triumph-Parade. But there were protesting pickets. They had their slogans written large on entire camel skins turned inside out and held high on forked poles:

  “Up with Lady Narkos! Down with False Al-Amin the Toy Caliph!”

  Lady Narkos was hashish. She was Poppycock or Opium. She was heroin. She was Methanane. She was Codeine. She was Angel Flesh. She was Mushroom Blood. She was Mirage and Illusion. There were even those who maintained that Holy Baghdad itself was one of her illusions, that it was only a Pipe Dream, that without Lady Narkos to spread her pleasant and colorful fuzziness over everything Baghdad would be seen as only a dismal collection of mud huts on the muddy river banks, and that all its vaunted artiness would be nothing except out-of-tune mumbles and jumbles and botch. Lady Narkos was the glorious fuzziness of life, and she had strong partisans.

  The third Spy-Bird came back to me:

  “The thing that the future Caliph Mamun the Great and the High Devil along with the three biggest deputy devils were so gleeful about is that the dragons were being used to smuggle demons out of hell,” the bird gave its report. “Sure the dragons swallowed the demons whole as they came out through the holes in the corroding iron. It doesn't hurt the demons to be swallowed. And the reputation that dragons have for being fire-breathers comes from them so often carrying fiery demons in their stomachs. Kill all the fat-stuffed dragons and open them up and spill the demons out of them! Don't let them take wing! Don't in any case let them get to the Spies’ presently invisible space ships that are now riding at sky-anchor right above Holy Baghdad itself! The demons are using the dragons, and they intend to use the space ships to get out of hell and off-world and to infect all the other worlds.”

  “Kill them, spill them, break them open!” the Caliph Al-Amin howled. “Archers, knife-men, knout-men, bludgeon-men, catapult-men, kill the bloody dragons! And kill all the bloody vermin that comes out of their paunches!”

  Oh, there was a great slaying of dragons then such as was a pleasure to see! And there was a great opening of them up. Fire poured out of them when they were split open, and sulfur and brimstone and red quicksilver. Quick devils hid in the fumes, and then broke clear and rushed every way to avoid the knives and knouts and bludgeons. Some of the devils rushed into human persons and possessed them, and threw them down, and caused them to speak in tongues, and foam at the mouths, and to prophecy falsely.

  “Shall we kill the people who are indwelt by devils now?” a Captain of the knout-men asked.

  “Nay, kill no human person,” the Caliph cautioned. “Their bodies are temples even when defiled by demons. But we must get the devils out of them somehow. And some of the dragons have taken wing and are flying in spite of being so heavily laden. Where do they fly to? No, no, kill no human person!”

  “Kill no devils either,” the Boy-Caliph-Emeritus Harun al-Rashid bawled out incontinently. “They are all personal friends of mine. They are my Other People. I have a foot in each of the Three Worlds, in sublunar Earth, in the heavens, and in hell. And I will defend my devils forever.”

  “Oh, be quiet, my tedious father,” the Caliph Al-Amin growled.

  Then the mask of the boy-father Harun, the mask of the appearance of his own face two days ago, fell off and revealed the present face of the foul-starred Harun al-Rashid. It was horrifying, fetid, evil, hellish, laughing, haunted. And now the magnetic aura of the Harun was reversed. No more did it bring delight to all who were intersected by its field. Now it brought revulsion, fear of falling, fear of fire, fear of damnation, the sensation of strangling and drowning, the sensation of being buried alive, despondency, loathing, agony of dying, all things sordid and dismal and waylaid and lost.

  But the end of the Harun was not yet. That was only a strong premonition of it. He rallied. He assumed a new mask. He projected a new aura. For a while he regained some of the influence he had lost.

  “Loyal Eagles, Loyal Kites, Loyal Roc if you can hear me and come here soon enough, all of you, assail the flying dragons!” Caliph Al-Amin cried out. “People, fill the royal balloons with royal gas and ascend to the flying dragons. Oh, oh, oh, they are already at the space ships of the careless Spies! They are at the ships that are riding invisible at sky-anchor just above us. And now the ships lose their invisibility, and the demons pour into them from the disgorging dragons. Shoot them down! Fill the sky with arrows and javelins!”

  But the space ships of Master Spy Citizen Heifritz, of the Master Spies Alexander of Astrobe, Cato of Camiroi, Madam Jingo, and the Golden Tom-Cat were all filling with devils. And then those Plague S
hips, as they had become, vanished with whoosh and flame, each on the skyway to its own world to bring infectious devils there.

  “Oh, what have I done, what have I done!” the Caliph Al-Amin moaned. “Our own plague-world will now spread its plague to the other four of the Five Worlds; and very soon all seventeen worlds, and then all ten thousand worlds, all will fall to the plague. The plague of devils will eat up all the skies. What will we do?

  There was a sudden great permutation of the weather. An icy death-wind blew out of the hot desert. It was like a freezing horror that congealed the mind and the spirit and the body. But it was only one man arriving. And he had been expected.

  Mamun the Great, the brother of the Caliph Al-Amin, burst onto the scene on a lathered racing horse that fell dead as the pretender Caliph Mamun jumped clear of it. But the horse did not fall dead passively. It bounded end over end. It rolled like a hoop. It skidded, and it left a long and bloody swathe on the stones after it was dead. It was one of those pumpkin-colored Arabian horses that cannot even die without making a great show about it.

  It was the thirteenth horse that Mamun the Great had ridden to death on his wild ride from the regional capital of Merv in Central Asia to Baghdad in the Two-Rivers Country. Mamun the Great was himself bleeding from mouth, nose, ears, and eyes, and he had the broken end of a jagged ulna bone protruding from the flesh of his right forearm. But he was laughing with red-and-black joy, and he cracked his broken voice at his brother and at the multitudes like a caravan-master's whip.

  “What will you do, my craven brother, you ask? You will stand aside and make room for a Caliph who is man enough to command both men and devils, man enough to command the ocean and land and fire and air and further air. Good Moslem people, and the sprinkling of visiting Christians among you, know that this false Caliph gave a commission to a false Sindbad to take ship and find passage under the Earth, and to prevent traitors from opening the iron doors of hell that are under the Earth, and to verify that those iron doors remain safely closed against the powers of evil. But to False Sindbad privately he gave a different instruction. And when I came to the place, good people, rowing a small boat alone, the Gates of Hell stood wide open, and the devils were pouring out of them by the thousands. Oh, the wretchedness, Oh the rottenness of this my brother the False Caliph who gave a false order secretly! Oh the wretchedness and the rottenness of the False Sindbad who fulfilled the false order! Well, I will put them both to death, of course, and I will undo the evil they have done inasmuch as I am able to do so. I will send ships after the Sky Ships of the False Spies in which the devils have escaped. And I will hunt down and extirpate such of the devils as are still on the surface of this world. Support me, people, and I will save you from this catastrophe!”

  “He lies, of course,” the third Spy-Bird spoke to me. “But you had better make your escape to some other place, Sindbad, when the duel and the eclipse are both going on.”

  “Speak, quaking brother of mine,” the Pretender Caliph Mamun the Great continued to attack his brother Caliph Al-Amin with his mouth. “Will you step down immediately from your office of Caliph? Or must I kill you? I dislike to kill you, for you are my brother and I will have the Mark of Cain on me if I do kill you. And yet I’ve noticed that the fratricides who have the Mark of Cain on them seem to lead charmed lives and are pretty much immune to assassination themselves. I myself intend to live a charmed life from now on. And if it will vantage me to kill you, then you can consider yourself as already dead. Stand at attention, craven brother, while I speak to you and question you! And let your answers be no more than ‘yes, yes’ or ‘no, no’, for anything beyond that is from the evil one. And let your eyes be cast down.”

  “Be quiet, lesser person,” the Caliph Al-Amin rejoined. “I am the Caliph, and I will ask the questions. And you will answer straight and without duplicity. You are a pretender, and you seem to be issuing a challenge. Will you fight me now for the Caliphate? Or do you wish to wait until the broken bone in your forearm has healed?”

  “Yes to the first question. No to the second,” Mamun the Great replied in a grinding voice as if it had sand in it. “I'll execute you now, of course. Should it take two arms to kill half a man? But as to my broken forearm, do you not know that I have a hundred powerful friends any one of whom can heal it in an instant? But that the people may see and believe   —  ”

  The Pretender Caliph Mamun the Great held his right arm extended in front of him. A stranger emerged from the crowd (but he was not such a person as could be lost in a crowd) came and touched the broken forearm of Mamun. And the splintered, broken bone went back into the flesh by itself: and the forearm glowed with dark strength. Little flames then ran along that healed forearm as a portent. And then something that had always been invisible about Mamun became visible: it was seen that little flames ran along all the flesh of Mamun the Great, a sign that he trafficked with illicit flames.

  “This son of mine who has been selected by the flames shall be called my true son,” the boy-father Harun al-Rashid proclaimed. “Let Mamun the Great be called my only son. Let the weak Al-Amin collapse with fear, for he is henceforth no son of mine.”

  “Oh, be quiet, my tedious father,” the Caliph Al-Amin growled. “All right, my brother Mamun, consult with the devils your seconds and decide what weapons you want to use. And I also will consult.”

  The Caliph Al-Amin selected Dame Scheherazade and myself Essindibad Copperbottom the Master Mariner and Master Spy to be his seconds, we being the two persons standing nearest to him at that moment. So we consulted together.

  “I am not in love with the weapons of this era,” Scheherazade complained, “and I have not been able to improve them with all my efforts. The rapier of the High French dueling days is not known here, nor is the saber of the Heidelberg students. And, lacking those two weapons, everything else about Arabic dueling of this century must be third class.

  “Ah, if only we could stage a D’Artagnan-type duel with the rapiers whispering silently on each other as the duelers fought their way up and down flowing staircases, jumped onto and from balconies, swung on chandeliers! And yes, the duelers should wear cavalier-style hats with very long feathers plumed from them, and be clad in brightly-colored silken doublets and cordovan-leather boots and Amsterdam gauntlets. Ah, and again, Ah! And a long ‘If Only!’ ”

  “I am sure that all of your props can somehow be provided, Madam Scheherazade,” the Caliph Al-Amin said. “We will propose it anyhow.”

  “I am an almost-magic blacksmith,” said a dirty-faced man who stepped out of the crowd. “And my shop is right around the corner on Blacksmith Street, I can make and adapt knives almost instantly, if Madam Scheherazade will provide me with a quick sketch.”

  Scheherazade drew a quick sketch on a piece of wood, and the blacksmith took it and went to make a matched set of D’Artagnan-type French rapiers.

  “I am a costumer,” said another man who stepped out of the crowd, “and my shop is right around the corner of Costumer Street. If Madam Scheherazade will provide me with a quick sketch of the costumes she wishes, I can either provide them out of stock, or I can rip up and combine several costumes and effects to get the proper results.”

  Scheherazade drew a quick sketch on another piece of wood for the costumes she had in mind, and she gave it to the costumer.

  Then a man who made great flowing stairways, another man who made hanging chandeliers such as one might swing on, another man who made balconies that had a theatrical look to them, another man who made cavalier-style hats with long-drooping feathers, another man who made boots out of mock-Cordovan leather (real Cordovan leather had not yet appeared on this world), they all offered their services for almost instant provision, and they all delivered on their promises.

  Oh, that great flowing staircase that gushed like waterfalls out of six different palaces and took up an entire broad street after all its tributaries had flowed into it! Oh that fantastic chandelier on which a man or e
lephant might swing! It was hung from a very tall gibbet that was rolled there on rollers. This gibbet had been specially built twenty years before this for hanging a giant. Many City-Planners have never given thought to just how high a gibbet must be to hang a genuine full-grown giant of the family of Anak. The special gibbet had been kept as a warning to any future giant who might be tempted to take liberties with Holy Baghdad.

  Surprisingly, Mamun the Great went along cheerfully with all the gimmicks devised by Scheherazade.

  “It will be an execution with class,” he said. “I am afraid that I usually do them crudely and with no style at all, but I'm willing to learn.” He put on a feathered Cavalier-style hat and a brightly colored silk doublet, the mock-Cordovan boots, Amsterdam gauntlets, and the arty weapons-sash. He sighted down the rapier. “A toy,” he said, “a toy. But then the brother I shall kill with it is only a toy. I am ready any time.”

  “Why am I afraid of him?” the Caliph Al-Amin asked us his seconds. “Why do I think that Mamun is larger and stronger than I am when I am plainly larger and stronger than he is? Why do I believe that he is a cannier weapon-wielder than I am, when I know for a fact that I am much better at every weapon than he is? In the clear light of day I know that I can kill him. Ah, but I have a horror of fighting him in the dark! I fear that he'll have all the powers of darkness on his side.”

  “You'd better hurry then,” I said. “The eclipse will be total. Yes, in just nineteen minutes it will be total.”

  “Maybe they’re wrong about the eclipse,” Al-Amin hazarded. “But I had better start the fight if there must be one. Craven brother of mine, Mamun the Great, come join the fight against me at once.”

  “Craven brother of mine, Al-Amin the Non-Great, come join the fight against me at once,” Mamun the Great called out.

  So they clashed and fought.

  And the fearful Al-Amin was a much better fencer than was the vaunting Mamun the Great. Al-Amin parried and struck, and he drew first blood. He parried and struck again, and he drew second blood. He drove Mamun the Great up the elegant sweeping staircase; and Mamun at least showed style in the stairway encounter, but not much real defense. Al-Amin parried and struck twice more, and he drew third and fourth blood. And Mamun was death-pale, but still vaunting.