“Not I!” said Jamal. “I am a believer in free will. If my dog chooses to hate the whole human race except myself, it must be free to do so.”
After breakfast Abdullah looked for his nightcap again. It was simply not there. He tried thinking carefully back to the last time he truly remembered wearing it. That was when he had lain down to sleep the previous night, when he was thinking of taking the carpet to the Grand Vizier. After that came the dream. He had found he was wearing the nightcap then. He remembered taking it off to show Flower-in-the-Night (what a lovely name!) that he was not bald. From then on, as far as he could recall, he had carried the nightcap in his hand until the moment when he had sat down beside her on the edge of the fountain. After that, when he recounted the history of his kidnapping by Kabul Aqba, he had a clear memory of waving both hands freely as he talked, and he knew that the nightcap had not been in either one. Things did disappear like that in dreams, he knew, but the evidence pointed, all the same, to his having dropped it as he sat down. Was it possible he had left it lying on the grass beside the fountain? In which case—
Abdullah stood stock-still in the center of the booth, staring into the rays of sunlight, which, oddly enough, no longer seemed full of squalid motes of dust and old incense. Instead, they were pure golden slices of heaven itself.
“It was not a dream!” said Abdullah.
Somehow his depression was clean gone. Even breathing was easier.
“It was real!” he said.
He went to stand thoughtfully looking down at the magic carpet. That had been in the dream, too. In which case—
“It follows that you transported me to some rich man’s garden while I slept,” he said to it. “Perhaps I spoke and ordered you to do so in my sleep. Very likely. I was thinking of gardens. You are even more valuable than I realized!”
Chapter 3: In which Flower-in-the-Night discovers several important facts
Abdullah carefully tied the carpet around the roof pole again and went out into the Bazaar, where he sought out the booth of the most skillful of the various artists who traded there.
After the usual opening courtesies, in which Abdullah called the artist prince of the pencil and enchanter with chalks and the artist retorted by calling Abdullah cream of customers and duke of discernment, Abdullah said, “I want drawings of every size, shape, and kind of man that you have ever seen. Draw me kings and paupers, merchants and workmen, fat and thin, young and old, handsome and ugly, and also plain average. If some of these are kinds of men that you have never seen, I require you to invent them, O paragon of the paintbrush. And if your invention fails, which I hardly think is likely, O aristocrat of artists, then all you need do is turn your eyes outward, gaze, and copy!”
Abdullah flung out one arm to point to the teeming, rushing crowds shopping in the Bazaar. He was moved almost to tears at the thought that this everyday sight was something Flower-in-the-Night had never seen.
The artist drew his hand dubiously down his straggly beard. “For sure, noble admirer of mankind,” he said, “this I can do easily. But could the jewel of judgment perhaps inform this humble draftsman what these many portraits of men are needed for?”
“Why should the crown and diadem of the drawing board wish to know this?” Abdullah asked, rather dismayed.
“Assuredly, the chieftain of customers will understand that this crooked worm needs to know what medium to use,” the artist replied. In fact, he was simply curious about this most unusual order. “Whether I paint in oils on wood or canvas, in pen upon paper or vellum, or even in fresco upon a wall depends on what this pearl among patrons wishes to do with the portraits.”
“Ah, paper, please,” Abdullah said hastily. He had no wish to make his meeting with Flower-in-the-Night public. It was clear to him that her father must be a very rich man who would certainly object to a young carpet merchant’s showing her other men besides this Prince of Ochinstan. “The portraits are for an invalid who has never been able to walk abroad as other men do.”
“Then you are a champion of charity,” said the artist, and he agreed to draw the pictures for a surprisingly small sum. “No, no, child of fortune, do not thank me,” he said when Abdullah tried to express his gratitude. “My reasons are three. First, I have laid by me many portraits which I do for my own pleasure, and to charge you for those is not honest since I would have drawn them anyway. Second, the task you set is ten times more interesting than my usual work, which is to do portraits of young women or their bridegrooms, or of horses and camels, all of whom I have to make handsome, regardless of reality; or else to paint rows of sticky children whose parents wish them to seem like angels—again regardless of reality. And my third reason is that I think you are mad, my most noble of customers, and to exploit you would be unlucky.”
It became known almost immediately, all over the Bazaar, that young Abdullah, the carpet merchant, had lost his reason and would buy any portraits that people had for sale.
This was a great nuisance to Abdullah. For the rest of that day he was constantly being interrupted by persons arriving with long and flowery speeches about this portrait of their grandmother which only poverty would induce them to part with; or this portrait of the Sultan’s racing camel which happened to fall off the back of a cart; or this locket containing a picture of their sister. It took Abdullah much time to get rid of these people—and on several occasions he did actually buy a painting or drawing if the subject was a man. That, of course, kept people coming.
“Only today. My offer extends only until sunset today,” he told the gathering crowd at last. “Let all with a picture of a man for sale come to me an hour before sunset and I will buy. But only then.”
This left him a few hours of peace in which to experiment with the carpet. He was wondering by now if he was right to think that his visit to the garden had been any more than a dream. For the carpet would not move. Abdullah had naturally tested it after breakfast by asking it to rise up two feet again, just to prove that it still would. And it simply lay on the floor. He tested it again when he came back from the artist’s booth, and still it just lay there.
“Perhaps I have not treated you well,” he said to it. “You have remained with me faithfully, in spite of my suspicions, and I have rewarded you by tying you around a pole. Would you feel better if I let you lie free on the floor, my friend? Is that it?”
He left the carpet on the floor, but it still would not fly. It might have been any old hearthrug.
Abdullah thought again, in between the times when people were pestering him to buy portraits. He went back to his suspicions of the stranger who had sold him this carpet and to the enormous noise that just happened to break out in Jamal’s stall at the precise moment when the stranger ordered the carpet to rise. He recalled that he had seen the man’s lips move both times but had not heard all that was said.
“That is it!” he cried out, smashing his fist into his palm. “A code word needs to be spoken before it will move, which for reasons of his own—no doubt highly sinister—this man withheld from me. The villain! And this word I must have spoken in my sleep.”
He rushed to the back of his booth and rummaged out the tattered dictionary he had once used at school. Then, standing on the carpet, he cried out, “Aardvark! Fly, please!”
Nothing happened, either then or for any word beginning with A. Doggedly Abdullah went on to B, and when that did no good, he went on again, through the whole dictionary. With the constant interruptions from portrait sellers, this took him some time. Nevertheless, he reached zymurgy in the early evening without the carpet’s having so much as twitched.