Castle in the Air (Howl's Moving Castle 2)

“Be quiet,” said the Sultan. “You know perfectly well I can’t kill you until I have found my daughter and made sure she marries you.”

Abdullah relaxed further. “Your slave does not follow your reasoning, O jewel of judgment,” he protested. “I demand to die now.”

The Sultan practically snarled at him. “If I have learned one thing,” he said, “from this sorry business, it is that even I, Sultan of Zanzib though I am, cannot cheat Fate. That prophecy will get itself fulfilled somehow, I know that. Therefore, if I wish my daughter to marry the Prince of Ochinstan, I must first go along with the prophecy.”

Abdullah relaxed almost completely. He had naturally seen this straightaway, but he had been anxious to make sure that the Sultan had worked it out, too. And he had. Clearly Flower-in-the-Night inherited her logical mind from her father.

“So where is my daughter?” asked the Sultan.

“I have told you, O sun shining upon Zanzib,” said Abdullah. “The djinn—”

“I do not for a moment believe in the djinn,” said the Sultan. “It is far too convenient. You must have hidden the girl somewhere. Take him away,” he said to the soldiers, “and shut him in the safest dungeon we have. Leave the chains on him. He must have used some form of enchantment to get into the garden, and he can probably use it to escape unless we are careful.” Abdullah was unable to avoid flinching at this. The Sultan noticed. He smiled nastily. “Then,” he said, “I want a house-to-house search made for my daughter. She is to be brought to the dungeon for the wedding as soon as she is found.” His eyes turned musingly back to Abdullah. “Until then,” he said, “I shall entertain myself by inventing new ways to kill you. At the moment I favor impaling you upon a forty-foot stake and then loosing vultures to eat bits off you. But I could change my mind if I think of something worse.”

As the soldiers dragged him away, Abdullah nearly despaired again. He thought of the prophecy made at his own birth. A forty-foot stake would raise him above all others in the land very nicely.

Chapter 6

Which shows how Abdullah went from the frying pan into the fire.

They put Abdullah in a deep and smelly dungeon where the only light came through a tiny grating high up in the ceiling—and that light was not daylight. It probably came from a distant window at the end of a passage on the floor above, where the grating was part of the floor.

Knowing that this was what he had to look forward to, Abdullah tried, as the soldiers dragged him away, to fill his eyes and mind with images of light. In the pause while the soldiers were unlocking the outside door to the dungeons, he looked up and around. They were in a dark little courtyard with blank walls of stone standing like cliffs all about it. But if he tipped his head tight back, Abdullah could just see a slender spire in the mid-distance, outlined against the rising gold of morning. It amazed him to see that it was only an hour after dawn. Above the spire the sky was deep blue with just one cloud standing peacefully in it. Morning was still flushing the cloud red and gold, giving it the look of a high-piled castle with golden windows. Golden light caught the wings of a white bird circling the spire. Abdullah was sure this was the last beauty he would ever see in his life. He stared backward at it as the soldiers lugged him inside.

He tried to treasure this image when he was locked in the cold gray dungeon, but it was impossible. The dungeon was another world.

For a long time he was too miserable even to notice how cramped he was in his chains. When he did notice, he shifted and clanked about on the cold floor, but it did not help very much.

“I have to look forward to a lifetime of this,” he told himself. “Unless someone rescues Flower-in-the-Night, of course.” That did not seem likely, since the Sultan refused to believe in the djinn.

After this he tried to stave off despair with his daydream. But somehow, thinking of himself as a prince who had been kidnapped helped not at all. He knew it was untrue, and he kept thinking guiltily that Flower-in-the-Night had believed him when he told her. She must have decided to marry him because she thought he was a prince—being a princess herself, as he now knew. He simply could not imagine himself ever daring to tell her the truth. For a while it seemed to him that he deserved the worst fate the Sultan could invent for him.

Then he began thinking of Flower-in-the-Night herself. Wherever she was, she was certainly at least as scared and miserable as he was himself. Abdullah yearned to comfort her. He wanted to rescue her so much that he spent some time wrenching uselessly at his chains.

“For certainly nobody else is likely to try,” he muttered. “I must get out of here!”

Then, although he was sure it was another notion as silly as his daydream, he tried to summon the magic carpet. He visualized it lying on the floor of his booth, and he called to it, out loud, over and over again. He said all the magic-sounding words he could think of, hoping one of them would be the command word.

Nothing happened. And how silly to think that it would! Abdullah thought. Even if the carpet could hear him from the dungeon, supposing he got the command word right at last, how could even a magic carpet wriggle its way in here through that tiny grating? And suppose it did wriggle in, how would that help Abdullah to get out?

Abdullah gave up and leaned against the wall, half dozing, half despairing. It must now be the heat of the day, when most folk in Zanzib took at least a short rest. Abdullah himself, when he was not visiting one of the public parks, usually sat on a pile of his less good carpets in the shade in front of his stall, drinking fruit juice, or wine if he could afford it, and chatting lazily with Jamal. No longer. And this is just my first day! he thought morbidly. I’m keeping track of the hours now. How long before I lose track even of days?

He shut his eyes. One good thing. A house-to-house search for the Sultan’s daughter would cause at least some annoyance to Fatima, Hakim, and Assif simply because they were known to be the only family Abdullah had. He hoped soldiers turned the purple emporium upside down. He hoped they slit the walls and unrolled all the carpets. He hoped they arrested—

Something landed on the floor beyond Abdullah’s feet.

So they throw me some food, Abdullah thought, and I would rather starve. He opened his eyes lazily. They shot wide of their own accord.

There, on the dungeon floor, lay the magic carpet. Upon it, peacefully sleeping, lay Jamal’s bad-tempered dog.

Abdullah stared at both of them. He could imagine how, in the heat of midday, the dog might lie down in the shade of Abdullah’s booth. He could see that it would lie on the carpet because it was comfortable. But how a dog—a dog!—could chance to say the command word was beyond him to understand entirely. As he stared, the dog began dreaming. Its paws worked. Its snout wrinkled, and it snuffled, as if it had caught the most delicious possible scent, and it uttered a faint whimper, as if whatever it smelled in the dream were escaping from it.

“Is it possible, my friend,” Abdullah said to it, “that you were dreaming of me and of the time I gave you most of my breakfast?”

The dog, in its sleep, heard him. It uttered a loud snore and woke up. Doglike, it wa

sted no time wondering how it came to be in this strange dungeon. It sniffed and smelled Abdullah. It sprang up with a delighted squeak, planted its paws among the chains on Abdullah’s chest, and enthusiastically licked his face.

Abdullah laughed and rolled his head to keep his nose out of the dog’s squiddy breath. He was quite as delighted as the dog was. “So you were dreaming of me!” he said. “My friend, I shall arrange for you to have a bowl of squid daily. You have saved my life and possibly Flower-in-the-Night’s, too!”