Castle in the Air. Diana Wynne Jones
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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. Which 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 round 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 having so much as twitched.
“Then it has to be a made-up word or a foreign one!” he cried out feverishly. It was that, or believe that Flower-in-the-Night was only a dream after all. Even if she was real, his chances of getting the carpet to take him to her seemed slimmer by the minute. He stood there uttering every strange sound and every foreign word he could think of, and still the carpet made no move of any kind.
Abdullah was interrupted again an hour before sundown by a large crowd gathering outside, carrying bundles and big flat packages. The artist had to push his way through the crowd with his portfolio of drawings. The following hour was hectic in the extreme. Abdullah inspected paintings, rejected portraits of aunts and mothers, and beat down huge prices asked for bad drawings of nephews. In the course of that hour he acquired, beside the hundred excellent drawings from the artist, eighty-nine further pictures, lockets, drawings, and even a piece of a wall with a face daubed on it. He also parted with almost all the money he had left over after buying the magic carpet – if it was magic. By the time he finally convinced the man, who claimed that the oil painting of his fourth wife’s mother was enough like a man to qualify, that this was not the case, and pushed him out of the booth, it was dark. He was by then too tired and wrought up to eat. He would have gone straight to bed had not Jamal – who had been doing a roaring trade selling snacks to the waiting crowd – arrived with tender meat on a skewer.
“I don’t know what has got into you,” Jamal said. “I used to think you were normal. But mad or not, you must eat.”
“There is no question of madness,” Abdullah said. “I have simply decided to go into a new line of business.” But he ate the meat.
At last he was able to pile his hundred and eighty-nine pictures on to the carpet and lie down among them.
“Now listen to this,” he told the carpet. “If by some lucky chance I happen to say your command-word in my sleep, you must instantly fly with me to the night garden of Flower-in-the-Night.” That seemed the best he could do. It took him a long time to get to sleep.
He woke to the dreamy fragrance of night flowers and a hand gently prodding him. Flower-in-the-Night was leaning over him. Abdullah saw she was far lovelier than he had been remembering her.
“You really did bring the pictures!” she said. “You are very kind.”
I did it! Abdullah thought triumphantly. “Yes,” he said. “I have one hundred and eighty-nine kinds of men here. I think this ought to give you at least a general idea.”
He helped her unhook a number of the golden lamps and put them in a ring beside the bank. Then Abdullah showed her the pictures, holding them under a lamp first, and then leaning them up against the bank. He began to feel like a pavement artist.
Flower-in-the-Night inspected each man as Abdullah showed them, absolutely impartially and with great concentration. Then she picked up a lamp and inspected the artist’s drawings all over again. This pleased Abdullah. The artist was a true professional. He had drawn men exactly as Abdullah asked, from a heroic and kingly person evidently taken from a statue, to the hunchback who cleaned shoes in the Bazaar, and had even included a self-portrait halfway through.
“Yes, I see,” Flower-in-the-Night said at last. “Men do vary a lot, just as you said. My father is not at all typical – and neither are you of course.”
“So you admit I am not a woman?” said Abdullah.
“I am forced to do so,” she said. “I apologise for my error.” Then she carried the lamp along the bank, inspecting certain of the pictures a third time.
Abdullah noticed, rather nervously, that the ones she had singled out were the handsomest. He watched her leaning over them with a small frown on her forehead and a curly tendril of dark hair straying over the frown, looking thoroughly intent. He began to wonder what he had started.
Flower-in-the-Night collected the pictures together and stacked them neatly in a pile beside the bank. “It is just as I thought,” she said. “I prefer you to every single one of these. Some of these look far too proud of themselves and some look selfish and cruel. You are unassuming and kind. I intend to ask my father to marry me to you, instead of to the prince in Ochinstan. Would you mind?”
The garden seemed to swirl round Abdullah in a blur of gold and silver and dusky green. “I – I think that might not work,” he managed to say at last.
“Why not?” she asked. “Are you married already?”
“No, no,” he said. “It is not that. The law allows a man to have as many wives as he can afford, but—”
The frown came back to Flower-in-the-Night’s forehead. “How many husbands are women allowed?” she asked.
“Only one!” Abdullah said, rather shocked.
“That is extremely unfair,” Flower-in-the-Night observed, musingly. She sat on the bank and thought. “Would you say it is possible that the prince in Ochinstan has some wives already?”
Abdullah watched the frown grow on her forehead and the slender fingers of her right hand tapping almost irritably on the turf. He knew he had indeed started something. Flower-in-the-Night