Scorpion Soup

by Tahir Shah

  The witch climbed down a cedar ladder until she reached the parquet floor, and began hunting the volume she had come for.

  ‘What are you searching for?’ said a voice.

  The witch looked around.

  ‘Who… who’s there?’

  ‘I am the library,’ the voice replied. ‘Tell me the book you wish for, and I will give it to you.’

  ‘A talking library?’ hissed the witch.

  ‘But, of course,’ said the shelves.

  ‘The spell to travel in time,’ said the witch. ‘I want it! Give it to me at once!’

  A warm wind ripped through the chamber, and when it had gone, an over-sized tome was sitting squarely on the central table.

  ‘Page six hundred and nine,’ said the voice.

  The witch pulled back the cover and thumbed her way through the book.

  ‘Six hundred…’ she said aloud… ‘and nine.’

  Squinting to read the uneven print, she scanned the page.

  ‘This is no spell,’ she said gruffly.

  ‘Of course it is,’ said the library. ‘You must read it to activate its power.’

  And so the witch took a deep breath, and read:

  The Clockmaker’s Bride

  There was a family of Persian clockmakers whose work was patronised by the rich, and whose expertise reached the attention of the sultan himself. Obsessed with mechanical devices, the ruler ordered for the artisan to be brought before him.

  The clockmaker was brought to the rose garden in which the sultan was reclining on a spacious divan.

  ‘I shall make for you a clock with many faces, Your Imperialness,’ he said obsequiously. ‘I will design it to show the time in every realm, with the hemispheres and the planets as well – each of them revolving around Your Excellency’s own shadow.’

  The sultan touched a hand to his chin. He liked people grovelling, and so did not speak until he was sure there was no more fawning to come. Then he said:

  ‘I have an entire wing of the palace filled with clocks! I have big clocks and small clocks, clocks fashioned from gold and silver, from ivory and the rarest of wood. I have clocks that chime, and others that play dainty tunes. I have clocks that open up to reveal yet more clocks, and have clocks that tell the time in ways you yourself have never imagined to be possible!’

  The clockmaker glanced at the gravel beneath his feet. He didn’t want to say it, but it seemed as though the sultan had enough clocks already. Just as he was about to say something suitably fawning, the sultan beckoned him closer.

  Apprehensively, the clockmaker approached the royal divan.

  ‘I do not want a clock,’ said the sultan.

  ‘Ah,’ intoned the clockmaker.

  ‘No, no,’ the sultan said. ‘Not a clock… but a chair. I want a chair instead.’

  The clockmaker frowned.

  ‘Then, I shall find a great carpenter, Your Specialness,’ he whispered.

  The sultan held up a finger.

  ‘A chair,’ he went on, ‘that is powered by clockwork, and that can travel through time.’

  ‘Through…’

  ‘Time. A chair that can travel through time.’

  ‘But… but… but, Your Magnificence,’ squirmed the clockmaker.

  The sultan brushed him away with his hand.

  ‘Fail me,’ he said with almost no interest, ‘and every member of your family shall be hunted out and slain, and their bones boiled down!’

  The next thing he knew, the clockmaker was in his workshop with a royal command, and with a problem the size of the sultan’s ego itself.

  ‘How will I ever make a clockwork chair that can travel through time?’ he asked his assistant. ‘I have a single month to complete the task. Disappoint the sultan, and he’ll swipe off my head, and that’s just the start.’

  The clockmaker’s assistant sighed.

  ‘The only way to accomplish this feat is to enlist the help of a jinn,’ he whispered.

  ‘What nonsense are you uttering?’

  ‘The soul of a jinn,’ the assistant explained… ‘You will need to trap a jinn and to harness his soul.’

  ‘Whatever for?’

  ‘Well,’ said his assistant, ‘as everyone knows full well, jinn can travel through the atmos, from one sphere to the next.’

  ‘A clockwork chair powered by means of a jinn?’

  The clockmaker’s assistant sniffed.

  ‘Indeed, master.’

  ‘But how would I get my hands on a jinn?’

  ‘With a trap.’

  ‘And how would I trap myself a jinn?’

  ‘With a narwhale’s tusk, of course.’

  There were many things unknown and misunderstood at the time in which the clockmaker lived. But one of them, thankfully, was not how to trap a jinn using a narwhale’s tusk.

  An hour or two in the magicians’ market, and the clockmaker had all the equipment necessary to catch himself a jinn, and to enslave it to his cause.

  Turning on his heel, he set off into the desert, where the jinn liked to spend their nights sprawled out on the cool, empty sands.

  In one hand he had a basket of green chillies finely chopped and, in the other, a bowl of camphor. And strapped to his back was a narwhale’s tusk, the long twisting strand of ivory catching the last strains of evening sunlight.

  A few miles from town, the clockmaker set up a camp.

  He collected a little firewood and dried palm fronds, lit a fire, and threw the camphor onto the flames.

  A cloud of pungent smoke billowed out over the desiccated sands, dissipating into the night.

  The clockmaker waited, as he had been told to do by the jinn-catching expert in the magicians’ bazaar.

  He waited and waited, and eventually fell asleep.

  Just after dawn, as he made up his mind to return home, he heard a rattling sound.

  It grew louder and louder, until it seemed as though each grain of sand for a thousand miles was shaking.

  Boom! Boom! Boom!

  The clockmaker feared an invading army was marching towards him.

  Raising a hand to his brow he scanned the horizon.

  Nothing.

  But the booming went on, the desert shuddering.

  Peering with all his might, the clockmaker spied a dust cloud far away. It was heading towards him.

  Again, he scanned the distance, squinting into the blinding light.

  Eventually, he saw it. Or, rather, he saw something:

  A pair of feet as big as boulders, gunmetal grey and moving one after the next.

  Above them were the legs and the body, the arms and the head. Colossal, unyielding, imposing in the most debased of ways.

  The clockmaker would have run, but his gut told him to hold fast. Terrified, he waited until the immense figure was looming over him. One more step and he would have been crushed into dust.

  The creature, a jinn called Mezmiss, stopped an inch away.

  Its shadow fell upon him – freezing and dark, it stank of death and destruction.

  ‘Who dares summon me, Mezmiss, Master of all Jinn?’ cried the monster.

  The clockmaker stepped back, hoping to escape the fearful shadow. But, as soon as he broke free from the shade, he caught sight of the jinn’s features – and wished he had never seen them at all.

  ‘I am a clockmaker, your jinnship,’ he said. ‘And it was I who called you to meet me in this place.’

  The monster grunted.

  ‘And by whose authority did you dare to summon me?’

  ‘On the authority of the ivory king!’ the clockmaker stammered, his neck craning back.

  ‘Then where is his sword, thou feeble human?’

  Holding up the narwhale’s tusk, the clockmaker gritted his teeth and snarled as he had been told to do.

  The ground shook as never before, as the jinn, Mezmiss, collapsed to his knees. Without wasting a moment, the clockmaker ran forwards, and threw the chillies into the monster’s eyes. And, as he was
floundering in pain, the clockmaker climbed onto the creature’s head and dug his thumbs into its nostrils.

  ‘I am your master now!’ he declared. ‘I and only I!’

  Mezmiss lowered his head in subservience.

  ‘So be it,’ he uttered reticently. ‘What is your wish, O human?’

  Climbing down, the clockmaker held the ivory tusk up high.

  ‘My wish is for you to travel to another time, and to take me with you.’

  The Master of all Jinn snarled his most diabolical snarl, enraged that the mortal knew of the secret formula to harness a jinn’s inner strength.

  Reciting an incantation as he burned another block of camphor, the clockmaker wore the monster down, until he was no more than a grey fleshy lump of pulp.

  ‘So be it,’ whimpered the jinn, his menacing tone now gone, ‘I will lend you my soul, so long as you promise me to return it.’

  The clockmaker made a solemn guarantee and, before he knew it, a hoopoe was singing before him in a cage.

  ‘There it is,’ said the jinn, his strength all spent. ‘There is my soul.’

  Leaving the desert, the clockmaker hastened back to his workshop, where he hung the cage on a hook, and got to work. He devised an interlocking gearing system, using hydraulics and dials, astrolabes and cogs, a mechanism that would harness the power of the jinn’s soul.

  The only thing on the craftsman’s mind was preserving his throat.

  On the morning of the deadline, the sultan sat perched on his throne, waiting for the clockmaker to arrive, fingertips pressed together in contemplation.

  ‘Perhaps he has fled, Majesty,’ said the chief minister.

  ‘Or has taken his own life,’ taunted another courtier.

  The sultan glanced at his favourite clock, as it struck the midday hour.

  At that moment, there was the sound of iron wheels moving over wood.

  The clockmaker stepped cautiously into the throne room. He was holding a square cage, in which the hoopoe was chirping. Behind him was wheeled a large mechanical device covered in a silky cloth.

  The sultan craned forwards, squinting to focus on the bird.

  ‘What is a hoopoe doing here?!’ he bellowed.

  The clockmaker smiled politely.

  ‘It is more than a mere bird,’ he said. ‘It is the soul of a jinn, a jinn who can travel back and forwards in time.’

  Jerking away the cloth, the clockmaker revealed his creation.

  Elaborate in every way, the intricate and interwoven mechanism was encased in glass, so that every moving part could be clearly seen and admired.

  At the front, upholstered in crushed vermilion velvet, was a grand fauteuil.

  The clockmaker opened a door in the contraption, slotted the bird’s cage into position, and bowed deeply.

  As he did so, the machine came to life.

  The dials began to revolve, the cogs rotate, and the astrolabes flash, as they caught light from the crystal chandelier above. In the middle of it all, alarmed by the mechanism around it, the little hoopoe tweeted fitfully.

  ‘It is ready, Your Majesty,’ said the clockmaker, a tone of anxiety in his voice, for he had not yet had the time to test his machine.

  The sultan got to his feet, and stepped over.

  ‘Are you certain that it works?’

  The clockmaker looked at him hard, their eyes locked onto each other.

  ‘Indeed, Your Majesty,’ he said.

  The sultan twisted the royal signet ring on his left hand round a full turn.

  ‘Then go back to the tenth year in the reign of the Caliph Harun ar-Rachid, to the great citadel of Baghdad, and bring me the imperial ring.’

  The clockmaker took a step backwards.

  He touched a finger to his Adam’s apple, at the point where he imagined the executioner’s axe would fall.

  ‘A great challenge, Your Majesty,’ he said coldly.

  The sultan smiled at the corner of his mouth.

  ‘Off you go, then,’ he said.

  With a deep sigh, the clockmaker stepped up into the chair, the hoopoe still tweeting against the sound of the mechanism. Adjusting the dials, he checked the pressure on a pair of gauges, and pressed a button in the middle of the instrument panel.

  With the bird chirping in terror, the machine shuddered and spluttered to breaking point.

  Then it vanished.

  The sultan’s eyes widened; he was too shocked to speak.

  Where the machine had so recently stood, was a patch of slimy blue jelly.

  The sultan inspected it from a distance.

  ‘How dare he sully the royal Court,’ he said.

  Clinging to the velvet seat, the clockmaker’s body was displaced across time, reconstituted at the last moment, as it reached the tenth year of Harun ar-Rachid’s reign. The first sound to touch his ears was the little hoopoe. He smiled.

  ‘Thank God it is still alive,’ he said.

  The clockmaker was about to step out of the chair when a party of imperial soldiers marched up, grabbed him, and trussed him in chains. As for the machine, it was loaded onto a cart and taken away, the hoopoe chirping wildly in fright.

  As the city of Baghdad slept below, the prisoner was taken to a tower in the citadel complex, with a view out over the Tigris. Beaten and bruised, he was hung up on a cell’s wall, a bucket of animal blood hurled over him for good measure.

  The jailer, who doubled as a torturer and sometimes executioner as well, held up a pair of pliers and grinned a toothless grin. He was a vile and putrid example of manhood, one who derived pleasure from wielding authority.

  Preparing himself for the agony of torture, the clockmaker said a prayer to the Master of all Jinn.

  As he did so, the jailer stepped forward, his pliers splayed apart and ready for use.

  ‘Open your mouth,’ he grunted. ‘And we’ll get down to work.’

  At that moment, there was the sound of leather boots rasping on stone. An officer from the royal guard had climbed the steps to the tower, and was racing down through the cell block.

  Banging on the reinforced iron door, he ordered the jailer to open up.

  ‘Get him down at once!’ the officer shouted. ‘I have orders to take the prisoner!’

  The jailer’s face fell. Lowering his trusty tool, he asked:

  ‘And who might have signed these orders?’

  ‘The Caliph Harun ar-Rachid himself!’

  The clockmaker was unchained and, the next thing he knew, he was in the throne room on his knees.

  Reclining on a voluminous gilded throne before him was the Caliph Harun of A Thousand and One Nights.

  A vizier swept through the chamber, whispered in his master’s ear, and melted away into the shadows. Narrowing his eyes, the Caliph remained silent for a long while.

  Eventually, in a slow and deliberate voice, he spoke:

  ‘I have come to understand that you were discovered with a mechanical device.’

  The Caliph touched the arm of his throne in a signal. A curtain was lowered at the far end of the hall, revealing the clockmaker’s chair.

  His eyes fixed in terror to the floor, its inventor cocked his head up and down in affirmation. So fearful was he, that he dared not look up at the Caliph’s hands, checking them for the signet ring.

  ‘Your Excellence,’ he babbled, his voice barely audible. ‘Yes, I created the machine.’

  ‘And what purpose does it serve?’

  The clockmaker said nothing, terrified of being executed on the spot as a sorcerer.

  The Caliph, master of the known universe, repeated his question, a strain of displeasure in his voice.

  ‘It… it… it…’ started the clockmaker, ‘is a contrivance by which the spheres of the cosmos may be breached by the frailties of Man.’

  Smoothing down an eyebrow with the tip of his index finger, the Caliph walked over to the machine and inspected it studiously. His attentive gaze took in the dials and the levers, the gauges and the gears.
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  ‘And what gives it propulsion?’ he asked.

  ‘A little hoopoe, Your Majesty,’ said the clockmaker.

  ‘A simple bird?’

  The Caliph broke into a smile.

  ‘A bird, Highness,’ repeated the clockmaker, ‘but not a simple bird.’

  ‘And where is it, this bird?’

  Getting to his feet, the clockmaker paced softly over to his machine, and leant down to where the cage had been placed. His expression went from one of fear to one of extreme alarm.

  ‘The hoopoe has gone!’ he cried.

  Unable to witness a demonstration of the device, the Caliph clapped his hands and the clockmaker was taken away, back to the cells.

  As for the machine, it was dragged to the stables and left to rust.

  It happened that one of the guards entrusted with the job of hauling the machine to the Caliph’s throne room, had heard the hoopoe chirping. Taking pity on the little creature, he removed its cage, and took the bird home, where he fed it some choice little morsels of meat.

  The next morning, the guard’s daughter woke before her father and, finding the bird there, she jumped up and down with delight. Eager to pick it up and caress its delicate plumage, she opened the cage door.

  Instantly, the hoopoe flew from the cage, out of the open window.

  Locked up in the tower, the clockmaker cursed himself for his reverse in fortune, and he damned the person who had taken the soul of Mezmiss, Master of all Jinn. He was certain that any minute now the jailer would be along to wrench out his teeth.

  The hoopoe flapped its way over Baghdad, the city of gardens, palaces, and of fountains. Unable to believe its luck at being set free at last, and to have been transported to such luxuriant surroundings, the bird flew down to a large garden, and began pecking a lawn there for worms.

  By chance, the garden belonged to a royal princess, the daughter of the Caliph himself. Her name was Princess Amina, and she loved nothing more than little hoopoes.

  Sitting in the shade of her balcony, she spied the bird foraging about, and she gave the order for her gardener to fetch the creature and to put it in a cage.

  Within an hour, the bird had been trapped in an unwieldy butterfly net, and it was hanging in a gilded cage in the princess’s bedroom. That night, the hoopoe serenaded its new owner to sleep.