He stopped, and seemed to lose himself in contemplation. After a moment, Uncle Mafìo said, “It is an appealing dream.”
Beauty said distantly, “Dreams are the painted pictures in the book of sleep.”
Again we waited, then I said, “But I do not see what that has to do with—”
“The Old Man of the Mountain,” he said, as if coming abruptly awake. “The Old Man gives that Night of the Possible. Then he holds out promise of still other such nights.”
My father, my uncle and I exchanged glances of amusement.
“Do not doubt it!” the landlord said testily. “The Old Man, or one of his Mulahidat recruiters, will find a qualified man—a strong and bold man—and will slip a potent bit of banj into his food or drink. When the man swoons to sleep, he is spirited away to the Castle ul-Jibal. He wakes to find himself in the most lovely garden imaginable, surrounded by comely lads and ladies. Those haura feed him rich viands and more of the hashish and even forbidden wines. They sing and dance enchantingly, and reveal their nippled breasts, their smooth bellies, their inviting bottoms. They seduce him to such raptures of lovemaking that at last he swoons again. And again he is spirited away—back to his former place and life, which is humdrum at best, and more probably dismal. Like the life of a karwansarai keeper.”
My father yawned and said, “I begin to comprehend. As the saying goes, he has been given cake and a kick.”
“Yes. He has now partaken of the Night of the Possible, and he yearns to do so again. He wishes and begs and prays for that, and the recruiters come and tantalize him until he promises to do anything. He is set a task—to slay some enemy of the Faith, to steal or rob for the enrichment of the Old Man’s coffers, to waylay infidels intruding on the lands of the Mulahidat. If he successfully performs that task, he is rewarded with another Night of the Possible. And after each subsequent deed of devotion, another night and another.”
“Each of which,” said my skeptical uncle, “is really nothing but a hashish dream. Misguided, indeed.”
“Oh, unbeliever!” Beauty chided him. “Tell me, by your beard, can you distinguish between the memory of a delightful dream and the memory of a delightful occurrence? Each exists only in your memory. Telling of them to another, how could you prove which happened when you were awake and which when you were asleep?”
Uncle Mafìo said affably, “I will let you know tomorrow, for I am sleepy now.” He stood up, with a massive stretch and a gaping yawn.
It was rather earlier in the night than we were accustomed to go to bed, but I and my father also were yawning, so we all followed Beauty of Faith’s Moon as he led us down a long hall and—because we were the only guests—allotted us each a separate room, and quite clean, with clean straw on the floor. “Rooms deliberately well apart from each other,” he said, “so that your snores will not disturb each other, and your dreams will not get intertangled.”
Nevertheless, my own dream was tangled enough. I slept and dreamed that I awoke from my sleep, to find myself, like a recruit of the Misguided Ones, in a dreamlike garden, for it was full of flowers I had never seen when awake. Among the sunlit flower beds danced dancers so dreamily beautiful that one could not say, or care, whether they were girls or boys. In a dreamy languor, I joined the dance and found, as often happens in dreams, that my every step and prance and movement was dreamily slow, as if the air were sesame oil.
That thought was so repugnant—even in my dream I remembered my experience with sesame oil—that the sunlit garden instantly became a bosky palace corridor, down which I was dancing in pursuit of a dancing girl whose face was the face of the Lady Ilaria. But when she pirouetted into a room and I followed through the only door and caught her there, her face got old and warty and sprouted a red-gray beard like a fungus. She said, “Salamelèch” in a man’s deep voice, and I was not in a palace chamber, or even a bedroom of a karwansarai, but in the dark, cramped cell of the Venice Vulcano. Old Mordecai Cartafilo said, “Misguided One, will you never learn the bloodthirstiness of beauty?” and gave me a square white cracker to eat.
Its dryness was choking and its taste was nauseous. I retched so convulsively that I woke myself up—really awoke this time, in the karwansarai room, to find that I was not dreaming the nausea. Evidently our meal’s mutton or something had been tainted, for I was about to be violently sick. I scrambled out of my blankets and ran naked and barefoot down the midnight hall to the little back room with the hole in the ground. I hung my head over it, too wretched to recoil from the stink or to fear that a demon jinni might reach up out of the depths and snatch at me. As quietly as I could, I vomited up a vile green mess and, after wiping the tears from my eyes and getting my breath back, I padded quietly toward my room again. The hall took me past the door of the chamber my uncle had been given, and I heard a muttering behind it.
Giddy anyway, I leaned against the wall there and gave ear to the noise. It was partly my uncle’s snoring and partly a sibilant low speaking of words. I wondered how he could snore and talk at the same time, so I listened more intently. The words were Farsi, so I could not make out all of them. But when the voice, sounding astonished, spoke louder, I clearly heard:
“Garlic? The infidels pretend to be merchants, but they carry only worthless garlic?”
I touched the door of the room, and it was unlatched. It swung easily and silently open. Inside, there was a small light moving, and when I peered I could see that it was a wick lamp in the hand of Beauty of Faith’s Moon, and he was bending over my uncle’s saddle panniers, piled in a corner of the room. The landlord was obviously seeking to steal from us, and he had opened the packs and found the precious culms of zafràn and had mistaken them for garlic.
I was more amused than angry, and I held my tongue, so as to see what he would do next. Still muttering, telling himself that the unbeliever probably had taken his purse and true valuables to bed with him, the old man sidled over beside the bed and, with his free hand, began cautiously groping about beneath Uncle Mafìo’s blankets. He encountered something, for he gave a start, and again spoke aloud in astonishment:
“By the ninety-nine attributes of Allah, but this infidel is hung like a horse!”
Sick though I still felt, I very nearly giggled at that, and my uncle smiled in his sleep as if he enjoyed the fondling.
“Not only an untrimmed long zab,” the thief continued to marvel, “but also—praise Allah in His munificence even to the unworthy—two sacks of balls!”
I might really have giggled then, but in the next moment the situation ceased to be amusing. I saw in the lamplight the glint of metal, as old Beauty drew a knife from his robes and lifted it. I did not know whether he intended to trim my uncle’s zab or to amputate his supernumerary scrotum or to cut his throat, and I did not wait to find out. I stepped forward and swung my fist and hit the thief hard in the back of his neck. I might have expected the blow to incapacitate such a fragile old specimen, but he was not so delicate as he looked. He fell sideways, but rolled like an acrobat and came up from the floor slashing the blade at me. It was more by happenstance than by deftness that I caught his wrist. I twisted it, and wrenched at his hand, and found the knife in my own hand, and used it. At that, he did fall down and stay down, groaning and burbling.
The scuffle had been brief, but not silent, yet my uncle had slept through it, and he still slept, still smiling in his sleep. Appalled by what I had just done, as well as by what had almost been done, I felt very alone in the room and badly needed a supporting ally. Though my hands were trembling, I shook Uncle Mafìo, and had to shake him violently to bring him to consciousness. I realized now that the more than ordinarily nasty evening meal had been heavily laced with banj. We would all three have been dead but for the dream that had wakened me to the danger and made me disgorge the drug.