“Tombs, my master. The tombs of infidels of long ago.”

  “Some are lit from within. Their lights are faint, but I see them. Look there.”

  “Those are ghûl lights, my master,” Ali told him. “Ghûls dwell in the tombs.”

  The old man said, “Tell him of them.”

  “It is unlucky to speak of them, my master,” Ali said, and he looked to one side.

  “Speak nevertheless,” said the storyteller, “and may your ill luck fall upon me.”

  “Have they no ghûls in Baghdad?”

  The storyteller nodded. “Evil things that claw at graves by night and sometimes kill the watchmen.”

  “So are they here,” said Ali. “They devour the sere bodies of infidels long dead, and eat the funeral meats left with them. They don their jewels too, and hold an evil carouse, dancing to a music that would drive a true believer mad. When day comes, they hide the jewels, so that honest men cannot find them.”

  The storyteller thought upon this for a time, and at last he said, “What of the kings’ tombs we saw? Are there greater ghûls in those?”

  The boy Ali shook his head. “There’s a guardian set there by the kings, with a man’s face and a lion’s feet. Should any ghûl approach those tombs, he would rise and tear it to pieces. If its face were a lion’s, my master, it would flee, for all beasts fear them greatly. If its hands were a ’man’s, it could do nothing, for the hands of men are weak against ghuls. Thus it is as it is, and they fear it and do not come. Now let us speak no more of these evil things.”

  “Boy,” said the old man, “take up my stick.”

  Ali picked it up—a long slender rod of heavy wood, topped with a knob of bone.

  “I can’t see which tombs show a light,” the old man said.

  “But you can. Stand up, boy! Are you standing up?”

  Ali rose again. “Yes, my master. I stand.”

  “Then point my stick at a tomb that shows a light, boy. At the nearest.”

  They were abreast such a tomb as he spoke. A faint blue ghûl-light played about its mouth, at times weakly, at others more strongly. “I have done so, my master,” whispered Ali.

  Slowly, though not feebly, the old man’s hand reached for his staff, a dark serpent that tested the distance between one branch and the next. After what seemed to Ali a very long time indeed, the strong brown fingers touched the white wood.

  And the radiance at the tomb’s entrance brightened, as if a balefire had been kindled within, and a great voice boomed forth from the narrow stone doorway. All the horrors of death were in it: the stench of corpses, and the dust and the dirt that follow that stench. As the hyena gives tongue though its mouth chokes on putrescence, it howled, “Hail to thee, Mullah Ibrahim! Peace be, between thee and me!”

  Ali returned the old man’s stick to the place at his side where it had lain. And thereafter he sat with his head in his hands, and said nothing of cliff or mountain, ruined temple or mosque of faith, or of anything else that the boat passed. For he recalled that the storyteller had told him that his teacher had been the Mullah Ibrahim; and he knew that the two, although they might feign to have met first that day in the bazaar, were in reality pupil and master, and that they had snared him for a purpose he could not guess.

  · · · ·

  At last the storyteller took him by the shoulder and said, “Come!”

  Ali raised his head and saw they were at the landing of the pasha’s palace. He saw too that dawn had come, or nearly, for it was almost the hour at which a man can distinguish between a fine white thread and a black one, which in Ramadan signals the beginning of the fast.

  He rose as he was bid and mounted the slippery stone steps, the storyteller following him with his hand still gripping Ali’s shoulder, and the old man walking before them, tapping each step with his stick.

  Sandalwood gates studded with iron stood at the top of the stair. A janissary dozed before them, his back to a pillar, his hand folded across the muzzle of his long, ivory-inlaid musket.

  “Hush,” commanded the old man. “He will not wake, but should we make too much noise, he may lift his head and speak.” He brushed the grey stones of the wall with one hand and held his stick before him with the other.

  Ali nodded, though he wanted to shout.

  For a thousand steps and more they crept in the shadow of those grey stones, until the wall curved away from the river. The storyteller said, “Now we must make haste. Night is nearly flown.”

  “Not for me,” the old man told him.

  Before them stood a cracked ashlar from which the unholy glyphs of infidel times were almost weathered away, the refuse of the pasha’s garden on the other side of the wall. Here the old man seated himself, saying, “Take off your robe, boy, and cast it at my feet.”

  Ali did not wish to do so, but the storyteller cuffed him until he thought it better to obey.

  But while they scuffled and Ali wept, the old man paid them no heed. His blind eyes were upturned to the dimming stars, his crooked legs crossed under him, the palms of his hands flattened upon the glyphs. He neither moved nor spoke.

  “O my master, what is he doing?” Ali ventured when he had tossed his robe at the base of the rose-hued ashlar.

  Fingering his beard, the storyteller said, “He sends his soul to Jinnistan, the Land of Sorcery.”

  “Is it near?” Ali inquired.

  “As close as the ground under our feet,” the storyteller told him. “And as distant as Mount Kaf.”

  Then Ali opened his mouth to frame another question; and though he did not speak, it remained thus open for some time after, for he saw his robe stir as though there were a serpent beneath it.

  “Now,” said the storyteller, speaking softly and quickly.

  “Hear me. I’ll instruct you only once, and if you should fail it’s your life. In the garden, find the great fountain. From it lead half a dozen paths. Follow the narrowest, the path of pink stones. A woman waits at the end, beside the bush I told you of. She’ll indicate the correct rose to you. Bring it to me, and you’ll be restored to your proper shape. You’ll be well rewarded, and all will be well for you.”

  Poor Ali did not nod, nor did he express his understanding in any other way; and although he heard the storyteller’s words, he scarcely knew they had been spoken. For the robe the old man had given him danced like a pot on the fire, waved its arms, and lifted into the air, filled out in a fashion that showed plainly that another wore it, though that other was not to be seen.

  The storyteller pinned Ali’s arms to his sides. “Cease your squirming,” he hissed. “Move or cry out, and I’ll break both your legs and throw you into the river.”

  And the robe settled over poor Ali’s head, blinding him.

  · · · ·

  Then he could see once more, though the world appeared to his eyes a larger and a far stranger place than he would ever have believed it could. The storyteller had released him; but the robe held both his arms to his sides still, for they were not in its sleeves. Rather, the empty sleeves now flapped and fluttered as if a gale blew for them alone, though the body of the robe was quiet.

  The wall of the pasha’s garden rose higher than the sky, and though the grey light of dawn was all the light there was, everything Ali saw seemed brighter and newer than he had ever seen anything before. The stars were amethysts and jacinths, sapphires and hyacinths; the Nile a rich mocha sea, a crocodile on a distant mudbank a living emerald. He wished both to sing and to fly, and very much to his own astonishment he did both at once, rising on wings that seemed to fan the air without effort, and trilling like such a music box as ears have never heard.

  The pasha’s wall, which had appeared an impassible barrier, was no more than a rope of stones trailed over the ground. He had crossed it before he could decide whether to cross or not, and a country of silver fish ponds and gay flower beds stretched beneath him, like the most gorgeous of carpets in the faraway palace of the sultan. In a wink he saw the great fountain and the path of pink stones, which soon vanished, however, beneath stately palms and lush fruit trees.

  I’m a bird, he thought; and if I wish to be a boy again I must follow that path. But do I really wish it? What is this thing they call the soul, that flies to Jinnistan or Paradise, but a bird that sleeps in the body until it is time to quit the nest? Thus I have died, very likely, already. Why should I die twice?

  Besides, when I was a boy I had to beg my bread. As a bird I can eat bugs—there are more than enough to feed all the birds that Allah’s hatched since the beginning of the world. As a boy I had lice, which could not be checked without coppers for the bath. As a bird I have mites, which can be checked with a bath of dust. As a boy I played with my fellow boys. But as a bird, shall I not sing all day with my fellow birds? There passes one now, my comrade in the air.

  At this thought, the bird Ali glanced to his right, where a wild duck winged its way toward the marshes of the Faiyum. Just as he looked, a falcon stooped for it like a thunderbolt; the unfortunate duck gave an eerie, despairing cry and plummeted to earth.

  As did the bird Ali, diving under the shelter of a friendly orange tree and whizzing down the path of pink stones like an arrow.

  Through a grotto it wound, past lesser fountains and over a bridge not much larger than a table. At last it ended in a cul-de-sac closed by a large rosebush. A young woman waited there, unveiled, her dainty feet upon a slab of pink stone; but though any man would have called her lovely, she seemed a giantess to the terrified Ali, with hands that could break his bones as a squirrel cracks nuts. And though she whistled most plaintively to him, he was careful to perch well out of her reach.

  “Are you the bird?” she inquired of him.

  Her voice was gunfire and thunder to poor Ali, and yet he understood her words. He struggled to speak, but his lips were stiff, and he sang instead.

  “Then there’s no reason to delay,” said the young woman,

  “for that fat Omar will soon discover I’m absent from my bed.” With that, she drew scissors from the waist of her embroidered trousers and cut a dappled rose from the bush.

  Ali the bird fluttered to the rosebush and clamped his beak on the rose. But no sooner had it shut than the face of the sun peeped over the garden wall. Its first rays struck the little nightingale in the rosebush; at once his feathers were the brown stripes of a cotton robe, and Ali the boy who wore that robe.

  And as he staggered from the rosebush, his robe torn and his arms and cheeks scratched and bleeding, still too dazed to speak, the young woman caught him in such an embrace as he had never felt since the day his mother died.

  “I love you!” cried the young woman. “I love you, I love you, I love no one but you! You and you only are the pearl of the firmament to me, and shall be forever!”

  Ali took the rose from his mouth and discovered that the young woman was scarcely taller than he; and now that he was a boy once more (and nearly a man) he learned too how lovely she was, her flesh silver and her face the moon.

  “Will you tell me your name?” she asked, suddenly shy.

  “I’m Ali,” he told her. “And you are…?”

  “Zandra,” she said, and they kissed. As their lips met, the dappled rose she had cut for him withered and dropped from his fingers to the ground.

  And though he was a trifle the smaller, Ali knew that he was taller than the sky. What had Rustam, what had Akbar-Khan, that he had not? A horse? A sword? A banner and a thousand ragged rascals to follow it? They were trivialities and would be his as soon as he wanted them.

  “You’re unlucky, Zandra,” he whispered. “The spell of the rose has made you love a beggar boy; but though he will not be a boy always, nor a beggar always, he will be your slave always.”

  “I am unluckier than you know, O my heart,” she replied.

  “For this is the pasha’s garden, and I am the pasha’s. Should Omar the Chief Eunuch, or any of the others, find us here, he will slay you and hew my quivering body into four quarters.”

  “Then they must not find us. Tell me quickly—why did the storyteller send me for the rose?”

  “A storyteller?” inquired Zandra. “Describe him to me!”

  “He’s tall and straight, and very fine looking,” said Ali, recalling the man to his mind’s eye. “He has a beautiful brown beard, and a masterful gaze. His turban is silk, his vest is green kid, and he wears a pistol from Fez in a red sash. With him is a blind old man, a little taller even than he but stooped, Mullah Ibrahim the Wise.”

  “I know nothing of such an old man,” Zandra told him. “But the young one is no storyteller but Prince Abdullah al Hazik. A month past, he was my master’s guest in this palace. He met me in this garden, where no stranger is to be.”

  “And are you the pasha’s most favored wife?”

  Sadly, Zandra shook her head. “Only his concubine. There are more than a hundred of us.”

  “How did you come to meet my storyteller here? Was it by chance?”

  “No,” she said. She drew away from him by half a step, and her eyes found the pink stone at her feet.

  “Tell me!” demanded Ali. “It might save our lives. Do you think it really matters to me that another has seen my beloved’s face? I, who love you, and have worn others’ rags all my life?”

  “We danced for him,” confessed poor Zandra. “I and all the youngest of the pasha’s concubines. Our elders played for us on their lutes and zithers, and on the flute and the little woman’s drum. I had cymbals for my fingers, and gold bells on my wrists and ankles, and I played my tambourine. We had danced like that before, but never for a guest so young and handsome. O my heart, you should have heard the music, as fierce and sweet as the wind from sea!”

  She whirled, hands above her head and fingers snapping; and her hips were the tossing billows of the wild Aegean from which she came, and her little feet thumped the path of pink stones in the rhythm of her dance.

  And though every fool in the bazaar would have said that there was no music, yet Ali heard it plainly, the shrilling of the shabbäbi and the thudding of the darabukka.

  Abruptly, she stopped. “And he looked at me, beloved, and I at him, and I knew he would meet me in the garden, beneath the moon. We went there to cool ourselves when we had danced, and I hid till all the rest had gone. Since that time old Rashsha has carried many messages for us.” Her eyes filled with tears.

  “I understand,” said Ali, who had once or twice assisted in the transmission of such messages himself. “But why did he want the rose?”

  Zandra wiped her eyes. “Because of the inscription on a certain stone that lies beyond our wall. I’ve never seen it, and I couldn’t read it anyway. But he says it says, ‘Here is the treasure of Osiris.’ That was a king of the infidels, I think. ‘I open to love alone.’ Prince Abdullah said it would open to the bearer of the rose. Where is it?”

  “I dropped it,” Ali confessed.

  “Here it is—on the stone. But how fast it faded!”

  Zandra bent to pick it up, and Ali was seized with shame to think that he had made this lovely child weep, and that she, the pasha’s concubine, should wait upon him, a pauper and a beggar. “No, nol” he protested. “Let me get it for you, my lady!”

  Their hands met upon the pink stone. It lifted at once as if hinged, and the rose slid from it to lie at the foot of the bush where it lies still. Before them opened a murky and narrow shaft which a flight of steep stone steps descended, as it seemed, forever.

  “Caught!” exclaimed a reedy voice behind them.

  They turned as one, and Zandra cried, “Omar! Omar, please, we—”

  “Silence, I say!” Twice Ali’s height, the eunuch lumbered toward them, penning them in the cul-de-sac; his belly preceded his advance as a battering ram leads a storming party, and he held a heavy scimitar at the ready. “I fear that you must die, my children. I… what is this?”

  “The secret road to a great treasure, sir,” said Ali, whose wits had been honed on many a dinnerless day. “Jewels and gold beyond counting. Look here.” Quickly he pointed to the glyphs carved on the underside of the stone: a bent object that might be a whip, a human leg and foot, a shallow cup, and a crocodile.

  “It’s plain enough, surely,” continued Ali, who had heard that eunuchs hunger after money and respect as whole men lust for power and women, though he could not read even plain Arabic. “The lash and the foot mean that anyone who walks here without permission will be beaten. The cup shows that this is where the drinking vessels are, and the crocodile that they belong to the king of the river.”

  Zandra whispered, “Oh, what a pity you must kill us, Omar! My screams and our blood, still more the hacked limbs of our dismembered bodies, will attract a great deal of attention to this spot. You’ll be lucky to get so much as a single goblet before the janissaries take charge of everything.”

  “But if you were to spare us,” Ali added quickly, “we could assist you. And since it would be our lives to reveal a word of this, we would reveal nothing, ever.”

  “Never!” confirmed Zandra.

  “Hmm,” said the eunuch. With his left hand he stroked his chin, which was smoother than Ali’s. He looked from one to the other with the clever little eyes of a pig. “I could take you elsewhere, however. Indeed it seems a capital idea. You, of course, will flee, young man—” Sudden as a cobra’s strike, his left hand seized Ali’s arm and clamped it like a vise. “And I should have the greatest difficulty catching you. I suppose you might even scale the wall—no doubt that’s how you got in. It would be best if you did not. Our Zandra may fly if she likes. She won’t get over the wall so easily, I think, and I shall hunt her down. Come, my children.”

  He swung Ali about, and Zandra followed weeping.

  With a crash like a thunderclap, the stone slammed closed behind them. The eunuch spun around to stare at it. “How did you get that open?”

  “We just touched it,” Zandra told him.

  Ali cleared his throat. “There’s another pink stone on the other side of the wall, sir. It’s all rather complicated—”