About an hour later the bluebell leaves parted to let through a monster black paw. It seemed interested in Abdullah. It kept its claws sheathed and patted at him. Abdullah was so horrified that he tried to hop away backward.
Whereupon he found himself lying on his back among the bluebells.
He blinked up at the trees first, trying to adjust to the way he suddenly had thoughts in his head again. Some of those thoughts were unpleasant ones, about two bandits crawling beside an oasis pool in the shape of toads and about eating a fly and being nearly trodden on by a horse. Then he looked around and found the soldier crouching nearby, looking as bewildered as Abdullah felt. His pack was beside him, and beyond that, Whippersnapper was making determined efforts to climb out of the soldier’s hat. The genie bottle stood smugly beside the hat.
The genie was outside the bottle in a small wisp like the flame of a spirit lamp, with his smoky arms propped on the neck of the bottle. “Enjoy yourselves?” he asked jeeringly. “I got you there, didn’t I? That’ll teach you to pester me for extra wishes!”
Midnight had been extremely alarmed by their sudden transformation. She was in a small angry arch, spitting at both of them.
The soldier stretched out his hand to her and made soothing noises. “You frighten Midnight again like that,” he told the genie, “and I’ll break your bottle!”
“You said that before,” retorted the genie, “and you couldn’t, worse luck. The bottle’s enchanted.”
“Then I’ll make sure his next wish is that you turn into a toad,” the soldier said, jerking his thumb at Abdullah.
The genie shot Abdullah a wary look at this. Abdullah said nothing, but he saw it was a good idea and might keep the genie in order. He sighed. One way and another, he just could not seem to stop wasting wishes.
They picked themselves and their belongings up and resumed their journey. But they went much more cautiously. They kept to the smallest lanes and footpaths they could find, and that night, instead of going to an inn, they camped in an old empty barn. Here Midnight suddenly looked alert and interested and shortly slipped away into the shadowy corners. After a while she came trotting back with a dead mouse, which she laid carefully in the soldier’s hat for Whippersnapper. Whippersnapper was not very sure what to do with it. In the end he decided it was the kind of toy you leaped on fiercely and killed. Midnight prowled off again. Abdullah heard the small sounds of her hunting most of the night.
In spite of this, the soldier worried about feeding the cats. Next morning he wanted Abdullah to go to the nearest farm and buy milk.
“You do it if you want it,” Abdullah said curtly.
And somehow he found himself on the way to the farm with a can from the soldier’s pack on one side of his belt and the genie bottle bumping at the other.
Exactly the same thing happened the next two mornings, too, with the small difference that they slept under haystacks both those nights and Abdullah bought a beautiful fresh loaf one morning and some eggs on the next. On the way back to the haystack that third morning he tried to work out just why he was feeling increasingly bad-tempered and put-upon.
It was not just that he was stiff and tired and damp all the time. It was not just that he seemed to spend such a lot of time running errands for the soldier’s cats, though that had something to do with it. Some of it was Midnight’s fault. Abdullah knew he ought to be grateful to her for defending them from the constables. He was grateful, but he still did not get on with Midnight. She rode his shoulder disdainfully every day and contrived to make it quite clear that as far as she was concerned, Abdullah was only a sort of horse. It was a bit hard to take from a mere animal.
Abdullah brooded on this and other matters all that day, while he tramped country lanes with Midnight draped elegantly around his neck and the soldier trudging cheerfully ahead. It was not that he did not like cats. He was used to them now. Sometimes he found Whippersnapper almost as sweet as the soldier did. No, his bad humor had much more to do with the way the soldier and the genie between them kept contriving to postpone his search for Flower-in-the-Night. If he was not careful, Abdullah could see himself tramping country lanes for the rest of his life, without ever getting to Kingsbury at all. And when he did get there, he still had to locate a wizard. No, it would not do.
That night they found the remains of a stone tower to camp in. This was much better than a haystack. They could light a fire and eat hot food from the soldier’s packets and Abdul
lah could get warm and dry at last. His spirits rose.
The soldier was cheerful, too. He sat leaning against the stone wall with Whippersnapper asleep in his hat beside him and gazed out at the sunset. “I’ve been thinking,” he said. “You get a wish from your misty blue friend tomorrow, don’t you? You know the most practical wish you could make? You should wish for that magic carpet back. Then we could really get on.”
“It would be just as easy to wish ourselves straight to Kingsbury, intelligent infantryman,” Abdullah pointed out—a little sullenly, if the truth be told.
“Ah, yes, but I’ve got that genie’s measure now, and I know he’d mess that wish up if he possibly could,” the soldier said. “My point is, you know how to work that carpet, and you could get us there with much less trouble and a wish in hand for emergencies.”
This was sound sense. Nevertheless, Abdullah only grunted. This was because the way the soldier put his advice had made Abdullah suddenly see things a whole new way. Of course, the soldier had got the genie’s measure. The soldier was like that. He was an expert in getting other people to do what he wanted. The only creature that could make the soldier do something he did not want was Midnight, and Midnight did things she did not want only when Whippersnapper wanted something. That put the kitten right at the top of the pecking order. A kitten! thought Abdullah. And since the soldier had the genie’s measure, and the genie was very definitely on top of Abdullah, that put Abdullah right down at the bottom. No wonder he had been feeling so put-upon! It did not make him feel any better to realize that things had been exactly the same way with his father’s first wife’s relations.
So Abdullah only grunted, which in Zanzib would have counted as shocking rudeness, but the soldier was quite unaware of it. He pointed cheerfully at the sky. “Lovely sunset again. Look, there’s another castle.”
The soldier was right. There was a glory of yellow lakes in the sky, and islands and promontories, and one long indigo headland of cloud with a frowning square cloud like a fortress on it. “It is not the same as the other castle,” Abdullah said. He felt it was time he asserted himself.
“Of course not. You never get the same cloud twice,” said the soldier.
Abdullah contrived to be the first one awake the next morning. Dawn was still flaring across the sky when he sprang up, seized the genie bottle, and took it some distance away from the ruins where their camp was. “Genie,” he said. “Appear.”
A flutter of steam appeared at the mouth of the bottle, grudging and ghostly. “What’s this?” it said. “Where’s all the talk about jewels and flowers and so forth?”
“You told me you did not like it. I have discontinued it,” said Abdullah. “I have now become a realist. The wish I want to make is in accordance with my new outlook.”
“Ah,” said the wisp of genie. “You’re going to ask for the magic carpet back.”
“Not at all,” said Abdullah. This so surprised the genie that he rose right out of the bottle and regarded Abdullah with wide eyes, which in the dawnlight looked solid and shiny and almost like human eyes. “I shall explain,” said Abdullah. “Thus. Fate is clearly determined to delay my search for Flower-in-the-Night. This is in spite of the fact that Fate has also decreed that I shall marry her. Any attempt I make to go against Fate causes you to make sure that my wish does no good to anyone and usually also ensures that I get pursued by persons on camels or horses. Or else the soldier causes me to waste a wish. Since I am tired both of your malice and of the soldier’s so continually getting his own way, I have decided to challenge Fate instead. I intend to waste every wish deliberately from now on. Fate will then be forced to take a hand, or else the prophecy concerning Flower-in-the-Night will never be fulfilled.”