Sure enough, rough voices shouted, and rougher hands clamped down on his own. Somebody snatched the sword hilt out from under his hand; somebody else yanked his arms up high behind his back. He bent forward, still trying to struggle up from his knees.
“No more!” a clear tenor commanded. “I must speak clearly with men who come by such magic as this!”
Finally Matt’s vision cleared, and he found himself staring at a Persian carpet. Panting, he glanced around frantically and saw Papa kneeling, bent forward, arms forced up behind his back by a robed and turbaned African. Matt felt massive relief that Papa was okay, or at least no worse off than he himself.
He resisted the urge to transport them both out of there with a spell. After all, he’d worked very hard to come here, hadn’t he? He turned his gaze forward and stared up at the figure reclining before him in a sea of cushions.
“I am Tafas bin Daoud,” the young man said. “Who are you, and how have you come here?”
Matt stared, and had to suppress an urge to call the roll. The kid looked scarcely old enough to have graduated from high school. He was slender and fine-featured, with dark skin, a high forehead, straight nose, and smooth cheeks… either he had a really excellent barber, or he had just had this week’s shave.
But his chin was strong, the set of his mouth was determined, and his eyes flashed with a lively and curious intelligence. Somehow, Matt felt certain he would have been an ideal student in an American university.
But he wasn’t in a classroom; he was in a tent big enough to be a small house, with tapestries hanging as partitions between rooms and big, stem-faced men in turbans and robes watching him with eagle eyes over hawk noses, hands fingering the hilts of scimitars and curved knives. Some of them were very dark-skinned, some light, some every gradation between; some were clearly Africans and some equally clearly Arabs. Some wore mustaches, some were clean-shaven… but all looked ready to kill Matt on the spot. They were only waiting for the Mahdi’s nod… and he was only waiting to hear what these strangers said.
Matt had better make it good.
“Good evening… ” Matt wondered about the form of address, and settled for “… Lord Tafas. I am Matthew Mantrell, Lord Wizard of Merovence.” He snapped a glare over his shoulder at the man holding him. The soldier stared in surprise; his hold loosened for a second, and Matt forced himself to his feet. “May I introduce my father, Ramon, Lord Mantrell.”
Papa looked up, eyebrows raised at the title.
The Mahdi’s eyes widened. “Ramon? You are of Ibile?” He finally seemed to notice Papa’s indelicate position and waved impatiently at the guard holding him. “Let him stand… we must honor enemies of such caliber.”
The guard reluctantly let Papa up, but kept hold of his hands.
“I am not of Ibile, Lord Tafas,” Papa said, “but my grandfather was. He crossed the Pyrenees in his youth to escape an evil tyrant.”
“Gordogrosso.” Tafas nodded. “Yes, the sage could not bid us march against Ibile until that corrupted king’s vicious force was gone.”
Matt thought of explaining that Papa had been talking about Franco, not Gordogrosso, but decided to let it pass.
“So now you come to reclaim your father’s estate,” the Mahdi inferred.
“No, Lord Tafas, we come to protest servants of the same God fighting one another.”
The kid on the throne stared, amazed by Papa’s audacity. So did Matt, though he’d been planning to say the same thing. The guards and officers around the room muttered in anger.
Tafas turned to Matt. “Do you, too, wish to follow your father’s cause?”
“Of course.” This wasn’t the time to explain who was following whom. “But at the moment, Lord Tafas, I’m astounded that you have come so far from Gibraltar so fast.”
Tafas waved the hidden compliment away. “These cowards of Ibile do not even stay to fight… they are gone before our army so much as sees their towns.”
So King Rinaldo was evacuating the towns that he knew he couldn’t defend, and avoiding a pitched battle. Wise. Probably overly cautious in getting the civilians out… Tafas’s troops seemed to be tightly disciplined… but soldiers on campaign had reputations for their dealings with civilians, so Rinaldo was probably wise. Besides, though most Muslims didn’t convert people by the sword, there was no guarantee they wouldn’t start, and there were always people hungry for martyrdom.
It also smacked of Rinaldo’s gathering his forces. He wondered what the King of Ibile was planning.
Tafas’s turn. “By what magic have you come here?”
“Oh, that?” Matt tried to be nonchalant. “A djinna gave us a ride.”
A murmur of surprise and wariness passed through the tent, and Tafas stared, a piercing look that seemed to go right though Matt. The young man asked, “A djinna? A female of the djinn? They are rarely seen!”
“Yes,” Matt agreed, “but very much worth the seeing. Seemed to be powerful enough, too.”
“How did you compel one of the djinn?” the Mahdi asked, wide-eyed.
“I didn’t.” Matt shook his head. “Just the other way, in fact. Her mortal master sicced her on me, sent her to try to kill me, so I had to free her from his spell in self-defense.”
The murmur was one of awe and fear now, and Tafas exclaimed, “Freed her? But a djinna must have been compelled by the Seal of Solomon!”
“Oh, I doubt that,” Matt said. “I mean, once you seal a djinni in a bottle with the Seal of Solomon, he stays there… and if you let him out, he’s a wild force. No, tying djinn to lamps and rings and such is another spell entirely.”
The whole crowd stared. Even Tafas seemed suddenly nervous. “You are indeed a master of magic, are you not?”
For the umpteenth time, Matt felt like an absolute charlatan. He’d been studying everything he could find about the lore of magic ever since he’d come to Merovence, but still felt that he barely knew how much he didn’t know, and it didn’t help to remember that every brand-new Ph.D. in any field of study felt the same way. But in this universe, poetry was magic, and he did know verse. “Let’s say I’m an apt student.”
“Surely if you can loose the djinn from their bonds of magic, you are a master, not a student!”
“Well, yes, but we’re never done learning, are we?”
“Are we not?” Tafas asked, round-eyed, and watching him, Matt could see that the so-called Mahdi had just absorbed something vital… and had suffered a major blow to his overconfidence.
Suddenly, Matt felt vastly wiser than the boy, and very, very old. “No one can make you keep learning, milord… but I’ve seen people who stopped. They grow stiff and narrow in their minds; they see less and less of the world around them, and never realize that it has changed since they were young, when everything was new and they delighted in each discovery. After a while, they grow so bored with life that they start wanting to die.”
Tafas almost managed to keep his shudder from showing. “A horrible fate! But how can people find new things to learn? Once you have memorized the Koran, what else is there to know?”
Somehow, Matt didn’t doubt this kid had memorized every letter of the holy book. “There is an ocean of commentary, just to begin with, which is what turns a man into a quadi, a judge, or a muzzein. Then, too, did you learn strategy from the Koran, or from campaigning?”
“I see your thought.” Tafas carefully evaded the question. “Perhaps it is that the Koran is life, and there is always more to learn about it.”
Some of the older men around the room were frowning. They had the look of clerics about them, and Matt decided to tread warily. “God is infinite, milord. We can never be done learning about Him… but we must never shirk the obligation to do so, either.”