“Karim?” Emma breathed.
“Shhh!” came the reply. And a heartbeat later, Karim’s flying carpet appeared from the darkness. Kneeling next to the blue genie were Maimun and the dromedary.
“My mistress, forgive us for coming only now!” Karim whispered. “But this palace wasn’t easy to find! Luckily the forever-hungry dromedary has a fine nose!”
The dromedary snorted and cast a bored glance around the hall.
Maimun pulled a bunch of keys from his gold-embroidered cloak. “This time Sahim really went too far!” he whispered, while he unlocked Emma’s cage with trembling hands. “Capturing my guests! Does he think I’ll let him get away with everything? You look even paler than before, oh flower of a cold land!”
“Where did you get the keys?” Emma whispered. As she stepped on the carpet, she decided she did like Maimun after all.
“We took them off two fellows who looked even paler than you,” Maimun answered quietly. “We stuffed them into Karim’s bottle. But they didn’t have his nose ring.”
“Of course not!” Emma whispered back. “Because Sahim is wearing it as an earring!”
Maimun cast a worried look at the yellow genie. Karim, however, seemed so angry that his color changed until his bald head looked like a very ripe blue grape.
“My nose ring on his . . . ear?” he growled. “How dare he, that son of a slimy snail, of a tailless dog? Oh, forgive me”—Karim bowed to Tristan—“forgive me, king of all dogs. That just slipped out.”
Tristan smacked his lips and sniffed the dromedary’s backside.
Karim drifted silently into the air. “Wait here,” he breathed. And before Maimun or Emma realized what he was doing, he was already drifting, like a pale-blue balloon, toward Sahim’s spiderweb hammock.
Karim looked so ridiculously small compared to the yellow genie that Emma’s fear nearly made her forget to breathe.
Sahim snorted in his sleep, and he rubbed his fat belly. Fifteen black spiders were sitting on it.
“Please keep sleeping, you monster,” Emma whispered. “Please!”
Nothing moved in the other cages. All of the yellow genie’s prisoners seemed to be fast asleep. Only one of the flamingos pulled its head out from under its wing and stared at the flying carpet.
Karim was now only an arm’s length from Sahim’s mustard-yellow earlobe.
“Oh, please hurry, Karim!” Emma heard Maimun mutter.
Something rustled beneath them. The flamingo had pushed its beak through the bars.
“Maimun! Didn’t you say Sahim stole your tame flamingos?” Emma whispered. “Is that one of them over there?”
“Where?” Maimun asked. He turned around.
The bird with the crooked beak let out a bloodcurdling screech of joy as it recognized its former master. The Barbary sheep lifted their heads and began to bleat. The gold jackals barked, and the desert monitors hissed.
And Sahim woke.
With a howl, the yellow genie shot up from his hammock just as Karim’s fingers closed around his ring. “Ahhh! What is this?” Sahim bellowed. He shook his head so hard that the spiders and scorpions scattered from his turban.
Sahim’s yellow fingers reached for his ear, which Karim was dangling from like a blue gemstone.
“Karim, you miserable pip of a grape—that can only be you!” Sahim boomed, while Karim wriggled like an eel to avoid his fingers. “Just you wait! I shall crack you open like a bug!”
“We have to help him, Maimun!” Emma screamed. “Or do you want to watch him be crushed? Yallah!” she shouted, grabbing the fringe of the carpet—forgetting in her excitement that she only knew the order for landing. The carpet lurched downward. The dromedary fell over, and Maimun nearly dropped headfirst into a jug. Tristan just managed to catch his trouser leg.
“What are you doing?” Maimun screeched. He pulled Emma’s fingers off the carpet and only barely steered the carpet clear of a giant spiderweb. But as he turned it, Sahim’s burning eyes were already fixed on them.
“And who do we have here?” he boomed. “The caliph of Barakash delivers his dromedary to me in person. Or did you come to steal my little Sandy Head?”
The dromedary hid its head behind Maimun’s back, and Tristan growled so loudly that his entire body trembled.
Emma couldn’t take her eyes off Karim, who was still hanging on to his nose ring and trying to pull it off Sahim’s earlobe.
“Yes, exactly. That’s why I’m here, you thieving sack of mustard!” Maimun screamed as loudly as he could up at the yellow cat eyes. “I am taking it all back, everything you stole from me. And then I will release your prisoners.”
“Really?” Sahim growled. His eyes narrowed. He took a breath—and blew them all off the carpet.
I knew it! I shouldn’t have opened the bottle, Emma thought as she fell. A sticky spiderweb slowed her fall a little, but she still landed hard on a pile of dusty carpets. Tristan dropped onto her belly. The dromedary landed on its own hump. And Maimun went headfirst into a giant clay jar.
With a nasty grin, Sahim reached for his earlobe again. And this time he managed to grab hold of Karim, despite how hard the blue genie kicked and wriggled.
“Let go of the ring, you bluebird brain!” Sahim growled.
“It is mine!” Karim shouted feebly.
“Let goooo!” Sahim howled. He yanked so hard at Karim’s legs that his earlobe stretched like a piece of yellow chewing gum.
Then it happened. Suddenly. The nose ring opened.
Sahim howled and grabbed his ear, but it was too late. Karim was already fixing the ring to his shrunken nose.
And finally he grew.
8
THE BATTLE OF THE GENIES
Karim grew until the giant hall was filled with his blue light. Sahim’s palace became cold and damp, and the stuffy air began to smell of spring. The yellow genie trembled like a leaf in a cold wind.
“Finally!” Karim shouted as he stretched his huge limbs.
“Get out of my palace, you inflated hippopotamus!” Sahim screamed. His teeth chattered, and his body grew pale.
“You are the one to leave, Master of Evil!” Karim thundered so loudly that the old walls shook, and the dome above the giant spiderweb started to crack.
Then the blue genie grabbed the yellow genie, and the yellow genie grabbed the blue genie, and the two giant genies began to fight.
Sahim’s hot skin steamed where Karim’s fingers touched it, and soon the spiderweb was full of little glistening droplets of water. The yellow genie’s movements became slower and clumsier. One of his scorpions jumped onto Karim’s bald head. It climbed down his nose and stretched its pincers toward the ring. But Karim just brushed the scorpion off like an annoying crumb.
Sahim screamed with rage and tried to reach for Karim’s nose ring himself. But his fingers trembled so badly that he couldn’t grab hold of it.
“Are you cold, Master of Evil? You don’t like fresh air?” Karim boomed, then he blew his dusky-cool breath into Sahim’s face.
The yellow genie shrank back as though Karim had blown icicles into his eyes. He sneezed so hard that his turban slipped. He wheezed as he tried to straighten it again—and then he stared at his hands in shock. They were blue. As blue as the sky above the desert. “Ahhh!” Sahim cried. He stared down at himself. Even his belly was changing color, his ankles, his toes, too. “Oh no!” he howled. “This is abominable. I look like a grape. Like a swamp hen! Like the belly of a bee-eater.”
Then he gasped for air, steam shooting from his ears like a kettle, and became as stiff as a rock before dropping into his spiderweb.
“Quick. Stuff him into his bottle, Karim!” Maimun called. His ears were still bright red from falling into that jug.
“Well, that could be a little difficult, oh glory of Barakash!” Karim warbled. He tapped his finger against Sahim’s blue nose. “For that he’d have to thaw first, and that might take at least a hundred years.”
“A hun
dred years? That sounds reassuring,” Emma muttered. She suddenly felt terribly tired.
Karim leaned down toward her and smiled. “Well, my mistress?” he said. “Are you now happy with my size?”
“Oh yes. I find it quite impressive,” Emma answered, smiling back at him. “But could you now free the other prisoners? Believe me, it feels horrible to be locked up in a cage like that.”
It took many, many hours to unlock all the cage doors, and the same amount of time again until the last kinglet had fluttered off into the dusky skies and the last dab lizard had slipped back into the desert.
Sahim’s palace was quiet. Even the spiders and scorpions had gone.
Only Tristan was still sniffing around the old walls. The dromedary yawned as it put its head on the sacks Maimun had dragged onto the carpet. “Pomegranates, cactus figs, apricots . . . ,” Maimun listed, sitting down on top of the pile. “Tonight there shall be no dry bread eaten in Barakash. Come on, Karim. Let’s fly home. The sun’s already rising. If we wait any longer, we shall be roasted over the desert.”
“Right away, Master!” Karim replied. He drifted back to the frozen Sahim and pulled the ring off his nose. “A hundred years pass quickly,” he said with one final glance at his blue-tinted enemy. “And I’ve always been a little forgetful.”
Emma and Tristan were already sitting on the carpet. Karim leaned down to her and whispered with a broad grin (the grin of a fully grown genie is very, very broad), “Grant me one wish, mistress of my heart! Take this ring into your cold land and have the king of all dogs bury it. I can’t think of a safer place.”
Emma carefully took the ring from Karim’s blue fingers. She still couldn’t believe how big they had become. “Of course, with pleasure,” she said. “I will tell Tristan to dig a particularly deep hole.”
“Wonderful!” Karim called out. “Then let us leave. Oh, I feel wonderful. No genie can challenge Karim the Beardless.”
But Maimun carefully cleared his throat. “Aren’t you forgetting something, Karim?” he asked. The genie looked at him in confusion.
Maimun crossed his arms. “Didn’t you tell me Sandy Head still has three wishes, oh Master of Forgetfulness?”
“Oh, shame on my bald head!” Karim slapped his forehead. “Is there nothing left in this head of mine but desert sand?”
“It’s fine,” Emma told him. “There’s still time. First let us fly back to Barakash. Tristan and I really don’t fancy being roasted over the desert.”
Tristan confirmed this with a smack of his lips. And so Karim blew the flying carpet with his friends across the wide desert and back to Barakash.
Sahim’s palace was quickly covered again in yellow sand.
9
THREE WISHES
For two days and two nights, Emma sat at the beautiful well in Maimun’s palace, pondering what she should wish for. She was surrounded by the tame flamingos they had freed from Sahim’s cages, and Tristan often came to visit her. But when the third day dawned, Emma still didn’t have a last wish. And it was time for her to fly home.
So she went to Karim, who was just then carrying Maimun on his shoulders to the highest tower of the palace. “Karim!” she called. “I give up. I can only think of two wishes. Do you want to hear them?”
“Of course, my mistress!” Karim called back. He carefully put Maimun down behind the tower’s battlements. Emma looked into the genie’s eyes, which were as black as the night above the sea. She cleared her throat. “Right. My first wish is actually Tristan’s,” she said. “I don’t mind his short legs, but he’d like to be taller, because of the other dogs, and so . . . do you understand?”
Karim nodded. He put his hands together. “So be it!” he called out, so loudly that all over Barakash the lizards fell off the walls.
Blue smoke rose around Tristan, and when he and his wagging tail reappeared, his legs really had grown longer. And his head had somehow gotten bigger, too. Emma thought he looked altogether a little strange, but Tristan seemed very happy, and he went to give Karim’s blue fingers an approving lick.
“Wonderful,” said Emma. She cleared her throat once more. “Then here is my second wish. . . .”
“I’m listening!” Karim breathed.
“I wish that my brothers get an itchy scalp for three days every time they annoy me.”
“Three days! That’s harsh!” Maimun laughed. “I’m glad I don’t have a sister.”
But Karim just put his huge blue hands together again and called, “So be it!”
A cool breeze brushed through the hot air of Barakash, and a few wisps of blue smoke drifted past Emma’s nose.
“Right!” Emma said, while Tristan admiringly sniffed his long legs. “I should get home. After all, I want to see whether my second wish will also work. But I will miss the good weather.”
“And we will miss you, too, pasty face,” Maimun said, tugging at Emma’s sandy hair. Then he whispered something into Karim’s huge blue ear.
The genie raised his eyebrows and smiled. “A good idea!” he whispered. He got up and crossed his arms as he looked down at Emma.
“Since you don’t have a third wish, oh mistress of my heart . . . ,” he began. His voice sounded so deep and rich that it felt like a warm wind brushing over Emma’s face. “My caliph suggested I give you a gift. Something very rare, very precious . . .”
“P-precious?” Emma stammered. “If you’re thinking of jewels or something, I really wouldn’t know what to do with them.”
Karim smiled and clicked his tongue twice. Then he reached into the air as though trying to pluck a bird from the sky. He leaned back down to Emma and held out his hand to her.
On it lay a bottle, barely bigger than a yogurt pot. Emma could see a tiny figure behind the pale-green glass. It was as blue as Karim. “This is a young genie,” Maimun explained. “Barely seven years old, but genies grow fast. Come next year you’ll have to get him a bigger bottle.”
“Oh!” Emma said. She stared reverently through the green glass.
The tiny genie gave her a shy smile and bowed.
“What is his name?” Emma whispered.
“He is called Khalil!” Karim answered. “Which means ‘good friend’ in your language.”
Emma felt a little weak with happiness. “I hope he’s not afraid of dogs,” she said. Khalil was curiously pressing his nose against the glass.
“Ooh, no!” Karim laughed. “But the cold weather in your land might give him some trouble. You should get him something warmer to wear. It’s exactly ten days until he’ll slip out of his bottle for the first time. Always pay attention to his color. As long as he’s dark blue, he’s doing well.”
The tiny genie yawned and scratched himself behind one ear.
“He shouldn’t really do magic more than once a day for the next two years,” Maimun added. “And you should put him in moonlight every now and then. It’ll make him grow faster.”
“I’ll do that,” Emma answered. She held the bottle in front of Tristan’s nose.
Khalil looked a little alarmed, but he tried hard not to show his fear.
“Don’t worry, Tristan will protect you,” Emma whispered at the bottle. “My home is really quite nice, except for the weather and my four brothers. But they can be nice, too, sometimes.”
Then she said goodbye to Maimun and the dromedary and the blue-patterned grandmother, who even packed some honeyed dates for her, and Karim took Emma and Tristan home. This time they didn’t need a carpet. Karim carried them in his big blue hands.
They landed on the beach just as the sun rose.
And it was almost a little warm.
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Emma and the Blue Genie Page 3
