LITMIR.BIZ

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      Flower-in-the-Night considered this offer, swaying dubiously back and forth with her hands clasped round her knees. Abdullah could almost see rows of fat bald men with grey beards passing in front of her mind’s eye.

      “I assure you,” he said, “that men come in every sort of size and shape.”

      “Then that would be very instructive,” she agreed. “At least it would give me an excuse to see you again. You’re one of the nicest people I’ve ever met.”

      This made Abdullah even more determined to come back tomorrow. He told himself it would be unfair to leave her in such a state of ignorance. “And I think the same about you,” he said shyly.

      At this, to his disappointment, Flower-in-the-Night got up to leave. “I have to go indoors now,” she said. “A first visit must last no longer than half an hour, and I’m almost sure you’ve been here twice as long as that. But now we know one another, you can stay at least two hours next time.”

      “Thank you. I shall,” said Abdullah.

      She smiled and passed away like a dream, beyond the fountain and behind two frondy flowering shrubs.

      After that, the garden, the moonlight and the scents seemed rather tame. Abdullah could think of nothing better to do than wander back the way he had come. And there, on the moonlit bank, he found the carpet. He had forgotten about it completely. But since it was there in the dream too, he lay down on it and fell asleep.

      He woke up some hours later with blinding daylight streaming in through the chinks in his booth. The smell of the day before yesterday’s incense hanging about in the air struck him as cheap and suffocating. In fact the whole booth was fusty and frowsty and cheap. And he had earache because his nightcap seemed to have fallen off in the night. But at least, he found while he hunted for the nightcap, the carpet had not made off in the night. It was still underneath him. This was the one good thing he could see in what suddenly struck him as a thoroughly dull and depressing life.

      Here Jamal, who was still grateful for the silver pieces, shouted outside that he had breakfast ready for both of them. Abdullah gladly flung back the curtains of the booth. Cocks crowed in the distance. The sky was glowing blue, and shafts of strong sunlight sliced through the blue dust and old incense inside the booth. Even in that strong light, Abdullah failed to discover his nightcap. And he was more depressed than ever.

      “Tell me, do you sometimes find yourself unaccountably sad on some days?” he asked Jamal as the two of them sat cross-legged in the sun outside to eat.

      Jamal tenderly fed a piece of sugar pastry to his dog. “I would have been sad today,” he said, “but for you. I think someone paid those wretched boys to steal. They were so thorough. And on top of that, the Watch fined me. Did I say? I think I have enemies, my friend.”

      Though this confirmed Abdullah’s suspicions of the stranger who sold him the carpet, it was not much help. “Maybe,” he said, “you should be more careful about whom you let your dog bite.”

      “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 lay down to sleep the previous night, when he was thinking of taking the carpet to the Grand Vizir. 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 centre 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 realised!”

       CHAPTER THREE In which Flower-in-the-Night discovers several important facts

      Abdullah carefully tied the carpet round the roof pole again and went out into the Bazaar, where he sought out the booth of the most skilful 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, oh paragon of the paintbrush. And if your invention fails, which I hardly think likely, oh 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 judgement perhaps inform this humble draughtsman 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 showing her other men beside 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

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