by Tahir Shah
‘Please come and save me, dear Adam, I beg you…’
Adam got to his feet, and counted ten paces south of the campfire. Then, kneeling, he dug down through the cool sand with his hands. He was about to give up, when his fingertips touched something hard.
Stone.
Digging faster, he unearthed a granite slab, a great iron ring set squarely in the middle. Without giving it any thought, he yanked the ring with all his strength, and the slab slid easily away.
Adam peered down into the hole into a dawn realm.
Squinting, he made out a kind of tropical jungle: a profusion of trees and luxuriant vines, of insects and suffocating heat. Climbing down through the boughs of a colossal tree, he made his way onto the forest floor.
As he stood there, taking in a scene from a dreamscape, the first light broke through.
A pair of suns rose both at once – one in the east, the other in the west.
Shading his eyes, Adam watched as the jungle came to life.
Animals he had never seen before swung from one vine to the next, or prowled between the trees, hunting their morning prey.
There were sloths with two heads, zebra in rainbow stripes, and cheetahs weighed down with mighty ibex horns. And there were giant anteaters, as well, and mice with human-like hands and feet, and spiders the size of antelopes.
Through the jungle wafted the voice once again:
‘Clear your mind of everything you know, Adam,’ it cautioned, ‘and place one foot before the next. Whatever you do, do not glance down at your feet.’
‘How do I know that I can trust you?’ Adam thought.
Reading his mind, the voice answered:
‘You do not, and that’s why you can.’
Doing as he was told, Adam trod a path through the trees, taking care not to look down. As he paced along, he smelled the aroma of roasting meat, and the tart scent of bitter oranges. Then he felt a strange sensation… a sensation of something crawling over his feet and legs.
Straining to obey the voice, he forced himself to refrain from looking down. But the smell and the tingling became too great. Unable to withstand a moment more, Adam lowered his gaze.
Horror is too feeble a word to describe his distress.
His feet and legs were sheathed in squirming worms, glowing red as they gnawed at his flesh. And, as they did so, they emitted a coating of waxy oil, a kind of anaesthetic.
Fearfully, Adam swished the worms away.
But, as he did so more appeared, until his hands were covered in them as well.
As he fought in a frenzy to rid himself of the scourge, the voice came once again. Soothing and calm, it drifted effortlessly through the trees.
‘Rip off your shirt,’ it said, ‘and allow the worms to feast on your chest.’
‘But they’re killing me!’ Adam shouted out loud.
‘Trust me,’ said the voice.
Without any other choice, Adam tore off his shirt. The worms slithered all over his chest, glowing red as they got to work on it.
But, quite suddenly, they began to turn purple-blue and fall away as scabs.
Adam tramped on through the suffocation of trees, following the voice.
The undergrowth became increasingly dense, until it was a struggle to make any headway at all.
Progressing inch by inch, Adam began to sense grave danger.
Something deep inside was cautioning him to turn back, to flee. But, as before, the voice soothed him, luring him forwards.
All of a sudden the trees gave way to a wide clearing. The ground there was infested with orange beetles, armed with crab claws.
In the middle of the glade was a primitive machine.
The sides consisted of three pairs of multiple scimitars, each one attached to a flywheel. The central unit was a mass of cogs and levers, with a large pair of scales at the front. But the base of the creation was not mechanical at all.
It was alive.
Avocado-green and scaly, it was the colour and consistency of an alligator’s back, and was moving slowly, as if rearranging itself.
Approaching cautiously, crunching a path through the orange beetles, Adam took in the details of the outlandish contraption. As he drew close, he noticed something – something that caused his feet to root themselves in the ground.
A woman was encased in the central unit.
Strapped down, she was unable to move. The scimitars were angled in such a way as to carve her up if she tried to escape. Without being told, Adam knew that the woman was Princess Leila.
‘I shall disarm this thing and release you!’ he exclaimed, quite overcome with sorrow.
The princess did not reply.
Not at first.
She just blinked, the rest of her body held rigid. Then, telepathically, she said:
‘Dear Adam, I am indebted for your bravery. But there is only one way to rescue me. In the pans of the scales you will need to place two objects. The first is Hope, and the other – Fear. Attempt to disentangle me, and I shall be chopped to pieces.’
‘But Hope and Fear have no form,’ Adam said. ‘They are invisible, intangible.’
The princess blinked once again.
‘It is for you to find them,’ she replied, a tear running down her cheek.
‘Where shall I search?’
‘In your heart.’
Adam reached forwards, until his hand was no more than an inch from the machine. He could feel the princess’s warmth.
‘I will save you,’ he said. ‘If I have to scour the universe for Hope and for Fear…’
With that, he was gone.
Retracing his path once again to the surface, Adam found himself at the campfire, the embers still crackling and spitting in the breeze. Leaning back on his haunches, he pondered how and where to find the qualities needed for the scales.
‘I shall set out at dawn, and travel the world,’ he whispered, ‘and will not give up until I have captured Hope and Fear.’
Before the sun had broken over the horizon, Adam’s footsteps stretched in a line to eternity.
He walked through days and nights, seeking out anyone who could help him with his quest.
In the next kingdom, he met a hermit who listened to his tale. When he had heard it, the recluse instructed him to search out the Blue Mountains. Because only there, the hermit insisted, could the riddle be solved.
At the Blue Mountains, Adam was informed by a diviner that the only way to find Fear and Hope was not to search for them at all.
Undeterred, he kept searching.
He walked and he walked, and he walked and he walked, until he had crossed half the known world. Each person he asked pointed him in the direction of another, until he was despondent and almost broken. His health suffering from worry, he realised how deeply he had fallen in love with Princess Leila.
After many months of adventure, he found himself in the middle of nowhere – at the desert campfire where his journey had begun.
‘I have failed you, dearest Leila,’ he said in a whisper, his words carried away on the breeze.
‘No, no, you have not, Adam,’ came the voice. ‘Look into your heart and you will know what to place on the scales.’
Plunging his head in his hands, he struggled to reach a decision.
But he could not.
And so, unable to carry on, he paced over to the stone slab, and descended back into the jungle world in which the King of Zilzilam’s daughter was kept prisoner.
Although months and years had passed on the surface, it seemed as if the sands of the hour-glass fell far more slowly in the jungle realm than they did on the surface above. Hardly a day had gone by since he had embarked on his quest.
Wending his way through the trees, Adam retraced his path towards the glade in which the princess was imprisoned. As he walked fitfully between the vines, he noticed a mango tree, its ripe fruit hanging down in great quantities.
Overcome with hunger, he picked one of the mangoes, and ate it.
W
ithin a few feet of the tree, he reached the glade in which the machine was still standing. As before, the scimitars were razor-sharp, glinting in the blinding light.
While he watched, they began to move as if his arrival had triggered them. The scimitars scythed alarmingly through the air and, as they did so, the machine’s reptilian underbelly coursed back and forth, surging to life.
‘Please hurry!’ whispered the princess. ‘Precious time is running out. In moments, I fear I shall be dead!’
Adam stood before the machine, his blood fortified with adrenalin. Although desperate to rescue the princess, he felt helpless. With her certain death a moment away, Adam knew he had to try something.
As he conjured up the courage to overcome his fear and destroy the machine, he felt his face and hands running with perspiration.
‘Fear,’ he thought, wiping his forehead dry. ‘This is Fear!’
Rinsing a hand over his brow once again, he collected a few drops of sweat, and dripped them into the left pan of the scale.
But what about Hope?
Drawing a deep breath, Adam was about to resign himself to failure, when he remembered the mango seed, still clutched in his hand.
‘This is Hope,’ he said. ‘The Hope of a mango tree.’
In a quick movement, he dropped the seed into the second pan.
The machine whirred and grunted, the scimitars flashing in the jungle light.
And, all of a sudden, the straps and bindings disintegrated.
Princess Leila was free.
Adam and the princess returned to the surface, and to the Land of Zilzilam.
Forty days of celebration were held, so overjoyed was Leila’s father that his favourite daughter had been saved.
When the festivities were at an end, Adam and the princess were married in a tumultuous marriage ceremony.
Another forty days of festivities followed.
And, with time, Adam ascended to the throne of Zilzilam, reigning as its king for many years. His wisdom and courage are still spoken of today, and his acts of kindness are the stuff of legend far beyond the ancient walls of Zilzilam.
As the years passed, King Adam devoted more and more of his time to improving the kingdom, and the living standards of its people. He made sure that everyone had enough food and a good education, and that every citizen had the opportunity to come to him directly with their problems. The gates to the palace were always open, and everyone knew that King Adam would see them if they needed his help.
One evening, when he had ruled for seventeen years, Adam was sitting in the durbar attending to some official papers. As he pressed his signet ring into a wax seal, a wizened old man staggered in. The man had a long white beard that reached down to his knees, and was wearing a jet-black cloak that covered his form in its entirety.
Rising from his throne, King Adam went to greet the stranger.
When they were both seated, and once tea had been served, the old man spoke:
‘O great King Adam of Zilzilam,’ he said, his words muffled with age, ‘I have waited seventy years to bring you a message, a message that will save your kingdom and your life.’
Adam looked into the old man’s dull eyes, and wondered whether he was unhinged. But before he could say a word, the stranger went on:
‘When I was a young man,’ he said, ‘I was a shepherd on a remote hillside a great distance from here. From dawn until dusk each day, I tended the family flocks. And, each night, I would bed down on the hay in a little stone barn, and I would sleep like the dead.
‘One night, while deep asleep, I walked from the barn, over the hills, until I came to a jagged rock face. There, in a cleft between the crags, an oracle spoke to me. It said that I was to be a messenger and that, one day many years hence, a good king would be saved by the message it was to impart.’
‘What was the message?’ asked Adam gently.
The old man held out a withered hand.
‘I shall tell you,’ he said. ‘Each night I would return to the crag as a dream-walker. And I would listen to the message of the oracle. And, little by little, the oracle passed on details of the message in a most unusual way. Only when the entire message had been entrusted to me did I awake to understand that I had been the confidant to an oracle.
‘As the messenger, I was instructed to keep the message with me at all times in a certain way, and to bring it to you on this day. The oracle said that you, King Adam, would understand the secret wisdom held within it, and that by doing so, your kingdom would endure until eternity.’
‘Could I have the message?’ asked Adam, growing a little impatient.
Again, the old man held out a hand.
‘I shall give it to you,’ he said solemnly.
Standing slowly to his feet, he unfastened the buttons of his jet-black cloak, and the robe fell to the floor. Beneath it, the ancient was naked.
Every inch of his skin was tattooed with words.
‘This is the message,’ he said.
And, with that, he expired.
Bending over the emaciated corpse, Adam began to read:
The Unicorn’s Tear
There was once a swordsmith in Shandong who devised a secret method by which to craft a blade that never grew blunt. The more lives his swords claimed in battle, the sharper and more deadly they became.
Word of his breakthrough spread and, as it did so, every knight there struggled to get his hands on such a weapon.
As a consequence, there were more wars, battles and duels than there had ever been – as knights, warriors, cavaliers, and ordinary soldiers, fought one another to get possession of the blades.
An entire generation of fighting men was slain.
Witnessing the carnage, the master swordsmith took his own life, so horrified was he that he should have been responsible for filling all the cemeteries of the land.
But the deaths continued.
Day in, day out, warriors lost their lives for no reason but to fight for the sake of fighting. And, with each death, the swords became ever sharper.
Then came the day when every knight in the land was dead.
All except for two.
The first was named Da Shun, and the second was called Fu Sheng.
They met on an isolated hilltop overlooking the sea, as the rain lashed down. Each clutched a blade that had slain a thousand men.
At the appointed moment they began swinging blows at one another.
For a full day and a night, they fought.
But so equally matched were they, that neither managed to inflict a mortal wound on the other. Collapsing at the same moment on the windswept knoll, they both understood the futility of going on.
Fu Sheng spoke first:
‘Neither of us can win at this,’ he gasped.
Da Shun cocked his head in agreement.
‘So what shall we do?’
Silence prevailed for a long while, and then Fu Sheng said:
‘Let the first person to pass here decide who is the victor.’
‘So be it,’ intoned Da Shun.
And so they waited.
For days, and weeks, they waited.
In that time the two knights became friends. They shared jokes and secrets, and still they waited.
Until, one morning, an old crone heading towards the town passed them.
‘I am going to sell my berries,’ she said, ‘please allow me to pass unhindered.’
Da Shun put down his sword.
‘We will not harm you, old woman,’ he said. ‘Rather we just ask that you settle a score, and decide which of us is the winner of our duel.’
The crone didn’t know much about duels and duelling, but she knew enough to know that duels took place to decide who the victor would be.
So she said:
‘Fight your duel, then, and that will decide.’
‘But we have done just that,’ sighed Fu Sheng. ‘We have fought and we have fought, and have fought, and have fought, but we are so equally matched
that neither can win.’
‘I see,’ said the crone.
‘So,’ responded Da Shun, ‘which is the winner? You decide.’
The woman looked at both the knights, and she pitied them.
‘There is only one way to decide this,’ she said.
‘What is it?’ asked the knights both at the same time.
‘You must leave this hilltop,’ she said in a low voice, ‘and find a unicorn’s tear. The one of you who can bring it to me first will have won the duel.’
The knights looked down at the crone and they both frowned. As knights they expected a decision to be more immediate and simple.
‘Can you just choose one of us right now?’ asked Da Shun, ‘and the loser will have to fall on his sword.’
‘That’s the way it’s always been,’ added Fu Sheng.
‘I don’t care how it’s always been,’ said the old woman.
‘Very well,’ replied the knights in time with each other.
And, without another word, they left the hilltop.
Clambering onto his mare, Fu Sheng rode to the north. And, mounting his steed, Da Shun rode to the south.
Many kingdoms passed beneath the hooves of each horse. Both of the knights sought a unicorn for its tear, but neither had much luck at all.
Da Shun was directed to a cave in which a magician was crouched over an iron cauldron. When he asked where a unicorn might be found, the sorcerer pointed into the pot.
‘You are cooking unicorn?’ he asked in horror.
The magician nodded.
‘Well, where might I find a live unicorn?’
‘Up there,’ the sorcerer said softly, motioning to the sky.
‘Where?’
‘In the floating kingdom.’
Hastening outside, Da Shun cocked back his head and looked up into the clouds. Thousands of feet above, he spotted the outline of a city. He blinked, rubbed his eyes, and blinked again.
But the floating kingdom was real.
There were soaring turrets, domes, spiralling towers, high trees, a citadel, and impenetrable ivory-white walls. Even though it was day, stars were glinting above the floating city, for it was always night in that realm.
‘How do I get to it?’ asked Da Shun.
The sorcerer rubbed his hands together until they were warm. Then, touching them to the knight’s shoulders, he moved his hands in circles.
