Wizard's Castle: Omnibus - Jones Diana Wynne - Страница 69

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The genie seemed a little puzzled. “This is odd,” he said. “My powers of divination are usually excellent, but I can’t make head or tail of this.”

A bullet plowed into the sand not too far away. Abdullah ran, carrying the genie like a vast streaming mauve candle flame. “Just take me to that person!” he screamed.

“I suppose I’d better,” said the genie. “Maybe you can make some sense out of it.”

The earth seemed to spin past under Abdullah’s running feet. Shortly he seemed to be taking vast loping strides across lands that were whirling forward to meet him. Though the combined speed of his own feet and the turning world made everything into a blur, except for the genie streaming placidly out of the bottle in his hand, Abdullah knew that the speeding camels were left behind in instants. He smiled and loped on, almost as placid as the genie, rejoicing in the cool wind. He seemed to lope for a long time. Then it all stopped.

Abdullah stood in the middle of a country road, getting his breath. This new place took a certain amount of getting used to. It was cool, only as warm as Zanzib in springtime, and the light was different. Though the sun was shining brightly from a blue sky, it put out a light that was lower and bluer than Abdullah was used to. This may have been because there were so many very leafy trees lining the road and casting shifting green shade over everything. Or it may have been due to the green, green grass growing on the verges. Abdullah let his eyes adjust and then looked around for the person who was supposed to help him find Flower-in-the-Night.

All he could see was what seemed to be an inn on a bend in the road, set back among the trees. It struck Abdullah as a wretched place. It was made of wood and white-painted plaster, like the poorest of poor dwellings in Zanzib, and its owners only seemed able to afford a roof made of tightly packed grass. Someone had tried to beautify the place by planting red and yellow flowers by the road. The inn sign, which was swinging on a post planted among the flowers, was a bad artist’s effort to paint a lion.

Abdullah looked down at the genie’s bottle, intending to put the cork back into it now he had arrived. He was annoyed to find he seemed to have dropped the cork, either in the desert or on the journey. Oh, well, he thought. He held the bottle up to his face. “Where is the person who can help me find Flower-in-the-Night?” he asked.

A wisp of steam smoked from the bottle, looking much bluer in the light of this strange land. “Asleep on a bench in front of the Red Lion,” the wisp said irritably, and withdrew back into the bottle. The genie’s hollow voice came from inside it. “He appeals to me. He shines with dishonesty.”

Abdullah walked toward the inn . When he got closer, he saw that there was indeed a man dozing on one of the wooden settles that had been placed outside the inn. There were tables there, too, suggesting that the place also served food. Abdullah slid into a settle behind one of the tables and looked dubiously across at the sleeping man.

He looked like an outright ruffian. Even in Zanzib, or among the bandits, Abdullah had never seen such dishonest lines as there were on this man’s tanned face. A big pack on the ground beside him made Abdullah think at first that he might be a tinker—except that he was clean-shaven. The only other men Abdullah had seen without beards or mustaches were the Sultan’s northern mercenaries. It was possible this man was a mercenary soldier. His clothes did look like the broken-down remains of some kind of uniform, and he wore his hair in a single pigtail down his back in the way the Sultan’s men did. This was a fashion the men of Zanzib found quite disgusting, for it was rumored that the pigtail was never undone or washed. Looking at this man’s pigtail, draped over the back of the settle where he slept, Abdullah could believe this. Neither it nor anything else about the man was clean. All the same, he looked strong and healthy, although he was not young. His hair under its dirt seemed to be iron gray.

Abdullah hesitated to wake the fellow. He did not look trustworthy. And the genie had openly admitted that he granted wishes in a way that would cause havoc. This man may lead me to Flower-in-the-Night, Abdullah mused, but he will certainly rob me on the way.

While he hesitated, a woman in an apron came to the inn doorway, perhaps to see if there were customers outside. Her clothes made her into a plump hourglass shape which Abdullah found very foreign and displeasing. “Oh!” she said, when she saw Abdullah. “Were you waiting to be served, sir? You should have banged on the table. That’s what they all do around here. What’ll you have?”

She spoke in the same barbarous accent as the northern mercenaries. From it Abdullah concluded that he was now in whatever country those men came from. He smiled at her. “What are you offering, O jewel of the wayside?” he asked her.

Evidently no one had ever called the woman a jewel before. She blushed and simpered and twisted her apron. “Well, there’s bread and cheese now,” she said. “But dinner’s doing. If you care to wait half an hour, sir, you can have a good game pie with vegetables from our kitchen garden.”

Abdullah thought this sounded perfect, far better than he would have expected from any inn with a grass roof. “Then I would most gladly wait half an hour, O flower among hostesses,” he said.

She gave him another simper. “And perhaps a drink while you wait, sir?”

“Certainly,” said Abdullah, who was still very thirsty from the desert. “Could I trouble you for a glass of sherbet—or, failing that, the juice of any fruit?”

She looked worried. “Oh, sir, I—we don’t go in much for fruit juice, and I never heard of the other stuff. How about a nice mug of beer?”

“What is beer?” Abdullah asked cautiously.

This flummoxed the woman. “I—well, I—it’s, er—”

The man on the other bench roused himself and yawned. “Beer is the only proper drink for a man,” he said. “Wonderful stuff.” Abdullah turned to look at him again. He found himself staring into a pair of round limpid blue eyes, as honest as the day is long. There was not a trace of dishonesty in the brown face now it was awake. “Brewed from barley and hops,” added the man. “While you’re here, landlady, I’ll have a pint of it myself.”

The landlady’s expression changed completely. “I’ve told you already,” she said, “that I want to see the color of your money before I serve you with anything.”

The man was not offended. His blue eyes met Abdullah’s ruefully. Then he sighed and picked up a long white clay pipe from the settle beside him, which he proceeded to fill and light.

“Shall it be beer then, sir?” the landlady said, returning to her simper for Abdullah.

“If you would, lady of lavish hospitality,” he said. “Bring me some, and also bring a fitting quantity for this gentleman here.”

“Very well, sir,” she said, and with a strongly disapproving look at the pigtailed man, she went back indoors.

“I call that very kind of you,” the man said to Abdullah. “Come far, have you?”

“A fair way from the south, worshipful wanderer,” Abdullah answered cautiously. He had not forgotten how dishonest the fellow had looked in his sleep.

“From foreign parts, eh? I thought you must be, to get a sunburn like that,” the man observed. Abdullah was fairly sure the fellow was fishing for information, to see if he was worth robbing. He was therefore quite surprised when the man seemed to give up asking questions. “I’m not from these parts either, you know,” he said, puffing large clouds of smoke from his barbarous pipe. “I’m from Strangia myself. Old soldier. Turned loose on the world with a bounty after Ingary beat us in the war. As you saw, there’s still a lot of prejudice here in Ingary about this uniform of mine.”

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