Salman Rushdie: Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights

Why was she so bothered about it indeed? There was an answer to that question, a reply she carried with her everywhere, and which she had never given, not even to Omar the Ayyar, the supreme gatherer and keeper of secrets, and it was this: she knew she was partly responsible for what was happening. In the long centuries of calm during which the slits between the world had silted up and the upper and lower worlds lost contact with each other and went about their separate business, there were many in the valleys and lakes of Fairyland who thought that was just fine, the lower world was messy and full of argument, while in their fragrant gardens they knew something very like eternal bliss. In the mountain kingdom of Qâf things looked a little different. For one thing, the Grand Ifrits had their eyes on the kingdom, and it was necessary to remain vigilant and keep defenses high. And for another, the (then) Lightning Princess missed the earth, and her many widely dispersed heirs upon it. During the time of separation she often dreamed about reuniting the Duniazát, releasing their powers and building a better world with their help. So she had searched the worlds between the worlds, the layers between the layers, looking for the ruined gateways, trying to reopen them. She had been an archaeologist of the buried past, excavating the lost, broken, clogged pathways, always hoping to find a way through. And yes, she knew that other, darker forces in Fairyland were engaged in the same work, and she could not deny that she was aware of the risks to the lower world if the roads were reopened, but still she tried, as any mother would, to be reunited with her scattered brood, which was all she had left of the man she once loved. In the world below, the searches of the jinn for the way through to their lost playground manifested themselves, or so we now believe, as storms. The heavens themselves cracked under the jinn’s yearning fists. And yes, in the end they opened and what followed, followed.

Well, so it was. Unlike most of her kind Dunia was capable of human responses: responsibility, guilt, remorse. Like all of her kind she was able to fold unwanted thoughts into deep cloudy places within herself where, most of the time, they lay forgotten, like fogged images, like vague curls of smoke. She had tried to hide Ibn Rushd in that way and failed. And then he came back to her in the form of Geronimo Manezes and for a moment she felt again that old lost human emotion: love. Oh, how like her beloved he was! The face, that adored face. The genes descending the centuries to burst out of his skin. She could have loved him if she had allowed herself to do so, and yes, there was a soft spot in her for him even now, she could not deny it, even as he was in the arms of his Lady Philosopher whom she could cheerfully have fried alive with one flick of her lethal wrist. But she would not. Because Mr. Geronimo was only an illusion of the past after all, and now that illusory love had been replaced in her breast by genuine hatred.

It was time to find her erstwhile playmates and destroy them. Where were they? How were they to be found?

Look on the ground, not in the skies, Omar the Ayyar told her. They will be perceived by their effects.

And there in the cradle of life, poised at the summit of the ruin of the Great Ziggurat of Ur, the “house whose foundation created terror,” they saw the enchanted armies turning upon each other as if the Sumerians and Akkadians of old, so long symbiotically integrated into a single plural culture, had lost their minds and begun to slaughter their neighbors in the streets. Black flags were borne into battle against other black flags. There was much shouting down there about religion, about unbelievers or heretics or unclean godless ones, and it did seem as if the religious shouting enabled the warriors to put extra venom into the downswings of their swords, but Omar saw what was really happening, he understood that the Grand Ifrit Shining Ruby had left his unwanted South American redoubt and come to confront Zumurrud the Great on territory earmarked for Zumurrud’s desert Foundation. Shining Ruby, the Possessor of Souls: his bewitched army marched in lockstep against the mercenary regiments Zumurrud had bought with jewels, drugs and whores. And it was Shining Ruby’s possessed men who prevailed. The sheer savagery of their assault terrified the Zumurrud mercenaries, who had not been given nearly enough jewels to make these crazy white-eyed trance-killers from hell worth standing up to. The mercenaries dropped their weapons and ran away, leaving the field of battle to Shining Ruby’s men. Where is Zumurrud? Dunia asked Omar. Is he even here? That lazy bastard is probably asleep on a mountain somewhere while his creatures take a beating. Overconfidence always was his problem.

Then a wormhole appeared in the sky, boiling with smoke at its edges, and out came Shining Ruby in triumph riding a flying urn. To hell with those Latino latitudes, he cried. The cradle of civilization is mine. I will plant my standard in the Garden of Eden itself and all men will fear my name.

Stay out of this, Dunia told Omar the Ayyar. You’re not the fighting type.

Here once again we must overcome our long-standing cultural distaste for acts of extreme violence and set down an account of one of the very rare murders within the tribe of the jinn, and, to our knowledge, the first ever carried out by a jinnia queen. Rising in wrath from the ziggurat and ascending into the sky on a carpet of sheet lightning, fully revealed in all her terrible majesty, Dunia certainly took Shining Ruby by surprise, shattering his urn with a thunderbolt and sending him tumbling to earth. But it takes more than a bad fall to kill a Grand Ifrit and he rose, puffing a little but otherwise unharmed, to face her. She flew at him releasing spears of lightning and forced him to shed his human form and stand on the earth as a pillar of fire and then she wrapped him in herself, becoming thick, choking, airless smoke, denying the fire the air it needed, strangling him in great nooses of smoke, suffocating him in smoke, pitting the essence of her femaleness against his deepest male nature, squeezing him in smoke, and letting him flail and thrash and sputter and flicker; and so die. When he was gone and she took human form again nothing remained of him, not even a little pile of ash. Until that fight to the death she had not been sure of her strength, but after it she knew. There were three remaining Grand Ifrits and now they had more reason than she to be afraid of the coming fight.

After the death of Shining Ruby his army was released from his spells of possession and the soldiers stood in confusion, blinking and scratching their heads, not knowing where they were or why. The mercenaries had dispersed and not even those who witnessed the sudden perplexity of their foes retained any appetite for the fray and so the battle ended in comic absurdity. The jinn world, however, was not amused, and Dunia’s deed was greeted with outrage. News of the event spread almost instantaneously via the jinn’s internal communications network and horror spread through Fairyland. For several days Dunia didn’t care. It was often true in wartime that the civilians at home were faint of heart and images of death and destruction made them long for peace. News and gossip focused on such images and undermined the necessary work being done by those on the front lines. She scorned to face her critics. She had a war to fight.

She sent Omar the Ayyar back to Peristan to find out what he could, and when he returned he said, I think you had better come. So in a bother of frustration she left the lower world and returned to the peaceful gardens on the other side. When she arrived she understood that by killing a Grand Ifrit she had exhausted the sympathy of her people, and not even the memory of her lost father was enough to win it back. Shining Ruby, long, slender, prancing, a harlequin playboy of a jinni, a fair-faced fellow with a wealth of personal charm in spite of his long, serrated tongue, had been well liked by the ladies of Peristan, and his murder snapped their antiwar solidarity and brought the sex boycott to an end. Most of the male jinn were at war, of course, which did nothing to improve the love-hungry ladies’ mood. But one of the great ones had returned and there was a great commotion at the palace of the baths because he had come there to disport himself with whichever and however many of the ladies of Fairyland were of a mind to join him at play. The cries of delight emanating from the great bathhouse told Dunia what she needed to know. A metamorph was present, and pleasing the ladies in many different guises, a dragon, a unicorn, even a big cat. The sexual organ of the lion — and of many other large cats — is bedecked with spines that face backwards, so when it is withdrawn it rakes the walls of the lioness’s vagina in a way that may or not be pleasurable. In the palace of the baths there were sex-starved jinnia ladies who were ready to try anything, even that. It was hard to know if the screams that ensued expressed pain or pleasure or some interesting combination of the two. Dunia didn’t care. The size of the crowd and the excitement of the women told her that the metamorphic entity inside must be a major talent. One of the Grand Ifrits had come home to visit. Ra’im Blood-Drinker, she said to herself, saggy-ass Ra’im who is so difficult to kiss, your lustful appetite has brought you within my grasp.