Wizard's Castle: Omnibus - Jones Diana Wynne - Страница 61

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Abdullah had, up to now, been unable to look away from the billowing figures of the two nieces. Now he raised his eyes and met the cynical look of the Justice of the Bazaar, who was just stepping out from behind a screen with his Register of Marriages in his hands. Abdullah wondered how much he was being paid.

Abdullah bowed politely to the Justice. “I am afraid this is not possible,” he said.

“Ah, I knew he would be unkind and disagreeable!” said Fatima. “Abdullah, think of the disgrace and disappointment to these poor girls if you refuse them now! After they’ve come all this way, expecting to be married, and got all dressed up! How could you, nephew!”

“Besides, I’ve locked all the doors,” said Hakim. “Don’t think you can get away.”

“I am sorry to hurt the feelings of two such spectacular young ladies…” Abdullah began.

The feelings of the two brides were hurt anyway. Each girl uttered a wail. Each put her veiled face in her hands and sobbed heavily.

“This is awful!” wept the pink one.

“I knew they should have asked him first!” cried the yellow one.

Abdullah discovered that the sight of females crying—particularly such large ones, who wobbled with it everywhere—made him feel terrible. He knew he was an oaf and a beast. He was ashamed. The situation was not the girls’ fault. They had been used by Assif, Fatima, and Hakim, just as Abdullah had been. But the chief reason he felt so beastly—and it made him truly ashamed—was that he just wanted them to stop, to shut up and stop wobbling. Otherwise he did not care two hoots for their feelings. If he compared them with Flower-in-the-Night, he knew they revolted him. The idea of marrying them stuck in his craw. He felt sick. But just because they were whimpering and sniffing and flubbering in front of him, he found himself considering that three wives were perhaps not so many, after all. The two of them would make companions for Flower-in-the-Night when they were all far from Zanzib and home. He would have to explain the situation to them and load them onto the magic carpet—

That brought Abdullah back to reason. With a bump. With the sort of bump a magic carpet might make if loaded with two such weighty females—always supposing it could even get off the ground with them on it in the first place. They were so very fat. As for thinking they would make companions for Flower-in-the-Night—phooey! She was intelligent, educated, and kind, as well as being beautiful (and thin). These two had yet to show him that they had a brain cell between them. They wanted to be married, and their crying was a way of bullying him into it. And they giggled. He had never heard Flower-in-the-Night giggle.

Here Abdullah was somewhat amazed to discover that he, really and truly, did love Flower-in-the-Night just as ardently as he had been telling himself he did—or more, because he now saw he respected her. He knew he would die without her. And if he agreed to marry these two fat nieces, he would be without her. She would call him greedy, like the Prince in Ochinstan.

“I am very sorry,” he said above the loud sobbings. “You should really have consulted me first about this, O relatives of my father’s first wife, O much honored and most honest Justice. It would have saved this misunderstanding. I cannot marry yet. I have made a vow.”

“What vow?” demanded everyone else, the fat brides included, and the Justice added, “Have you registered this vow? To be legal, all vows must be registered with a magistrate.”

This was awkward. Abdullah thought rapidly. “Indeed, it is registered, O veritable weighing scale of judgment,” he said. “My father took me to a magistrate to register the vow when he ordered me to make it. I was but a small child at the time. Though I did not understand then, I see now it was because of the prophecy. My father, being a prudent man, did not wish to see his forty gold coins wasted. He made me vow that I would never marry until Fate had placed me above all others in this land. So you see”—Abdullah put his hands in the sleeves of his best suit and bowed regretfully to the two fat brides—“I cannot yet marry you, twin plums of candied sugar, but the time will come.”

Everyone said, “Oh, in that case!” in various tones of discontent, and to Abdullah’s profound relief, most of them turned away from him.

“I always thought your father was a rather grasping man,” Fatima added.

“Even from beyond the grave,” Assif agreed. “We must wait for this dear boy’s elevation then.”

The Justice, however, stood his ground. “And which magistrate was it, before whom you made this vow?” he asked.

“I do not know his name,” Abdullah invented, speaking with intense regret. He was sweating. “I was a tiny child, and he appeared to me an old man with a long white beard.” That, he thought, would serve as a description of every magistrate there ever was, including the Justice standing before him.

“I shall have to check all records,” the Justice said irritably. He turned to Assif, Hakim, and Fatima and—rather coldly—made his formal good-byes.

Abdullah left with him, almost clinging to the Justice’s official sash in his hurry to get away from the emporium and the two fat brides.

“What a day!” Abdullah said to himself when he was back inside his booth at last. “If my luck goes on this way, I will not be surprised if I never get the carpet to move again!” Or, he thought as he lay down on the carpet, still dressed in his best, he might get to the night garden only to find that Flower-in-the-Night was too annoyed at his stupidity last night to love him anymore. Or she might love him still but have decided not to fly away with him. Or…

It took him a while to get to sleep.

But when he woke, everything was perfect. The carpet was just gliding to a gentle landing on the moonlit bank. So Abdullah knew he had said the command word after all, and it was such a short while since he had said it that he almost had a memory of what it was. But it went clean out of his head when Flower-in-the-Night came running eagerly toward him, among the white scented flowers and the round yellow lamps.

“You’re here!” she called as she ran. “I was quite worried!”

She was not angry. Abdullah’s heart sang. “Are you ready to leave?” he called back. “Jump on beside me.”

Flower-in-the-Night laughed delightedly—it was definitely no giggle—and came running on across the lawn. The moon seemed just then to go behind a cloud because Abdullah saw her lit entirely by the lamps for a moment, golden and eager, as she ran. He stood up and held out his hands to her.

As he did so, the cloud came right down into the lamplight. And it was not a cloud but great black leathery wings, silently beating. A pair of equally leathery arms, with hands that had long fingernails like claws, reached from the shadow of those fanning wings and wrapped themselves around Flower-in-the-Night. Abdullah saw her jerk as those arms stopped her running. She looked around and up. Whatever she saw made her scream, one single wild, frantic scream, which was cut off when one of the leathery arms changed position to clap its huge taloned hand over her face. Flower-in-the-Night beat at the arm with her fists, and kicked and struggled, but all quite uselessly. She was lifted up, a small white figure against the huge blackness. The great wings silently beat again. A gigantic foot, with talons like the hands, pressed the turf a yard or so from the bank where Abdullah was still in the act of standing up, and a leathery leg flexed mighty calf muscles as the thing—whatever it was—sprang upright. For the merest instant Abdullah found himself staring into a hideous leathery face with a ring through its hooked nose and long, upslanting eyes, remote and cruel. The thing was not looking at him. It was simply concentrating on getting itself and its captive airborne.

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