“Naturally—” began Tony. Then Nasim’s voice came to him.
“You carried him, Abdul,” said Nasim proudly, “which is what a djinn should do for his king. But I played the part of a proper djinnee, too! I held his coat!”
Tony turned to her. He accepted the belted-in-the-back camel’s-hair coat. Then he said politely:
“That was very nice of you, Nasim. I appreciate it a lot. But won’t you please put on some clothes?”
Chapter 16
The palace of the djinn king wasn’t what it had been. Not only the djinn officially off-duty, as it were, had attended Tony’s duel with Es-Souk; guardsmen also had quietly transformed themselves from twelve-foot military figures into gazelles, whirlwinds, lions, and other swiftly moving creatures to attend the sporting event. The court, generally, had poured out to see the ruckus. And in addition, various djinn serving as towers, pinnacles, rooms, articles of furniture and virtu, rugs, hangings, plumbing fixtures and structural elements had taken time off from supporting the state and majesty of the king.
Some of them went back to their assigned positions in the structure after it was all over, but some did not. In consequence, from the official lodging of the Queen of Barkut, the all-encircling palace looked ragged. Here an art gallery was exposed to the blazing sunshine. There the more intimate arrangements of the djinn monarch’s seraglio were in plain view. And the dusty, thinly grassed meadow within the palace looked like a country fairground on opening day. Some thousands of djinn milled about, in all the diverse shapes and forms their personal preferences dictated. Some talked. Some argued. A few—even at such a moment—made such romantic overtures to other members of the race of opposite gender as might have been expected. But on the whole, the several-thousand-odd djinn gathered beyond the Queen’s vegetable gardens were there to see Tony.
He made his report to the Queen, drinking coffee in her cottage. Ghail moved about, ostensibly assisting the Queen in serving him, but actually listening avidly and looking at him from time to time with widely varying expressions.
“The devil of it is,” said Tony querulously, “that instead of making me unpopular, killing Es-Souk seems to have made me something of a hero!”
The Queen nodded.
“They’re like children,” she said sagely. “Just like children—or apes. Much like horses, too. Djinns are great fun! They make lovely pets when you understand them!”
Tony’s expression lacked something of full sympathy.
“Somehow,” he admitted, “just personally, you understand, I can’t imagine wanting to pet a quarter-ton of fissionable material, whether it was in the form of a chimaera or a cute little moth’s egg hiding in a crack until the time was ripe for conversation.”
“I still don’t see,” said the Queen, brightly, “just how you set him off—this Es-Souk, that is. Is it a secret of the royal family of your nation?”
Tony shrugged helplessly.
“I didn’t intend to set him off,” he admitted. “I did think I might pin his ears back, and with him, the king’s, but I didn’t anticipate an atomic explosion. But it does make sense, after a fashion. After all, when anything’s put into an atomic pile it becomes radioactive, and a radioactive substance isn’t immune to ordinary chemical effects. It works just like ordinary matter except for its radioactivity. So it’s reasonable enough that perfectly normal, perfectly stable compounds like lasf would act chemically on djinns. The results, though—”
“Chemically?” queried the Queen. Ghail stood still, looking strangely at Tony.
“Of course,” said Tony. “I had you draw me a picture of the lasf-leaf. Remember? And I recognized it. We have that plant in my country. We call it hogweed, or ragweed. It’s a pest to some humans.”
The Queen listened. Tony drank more coffee.
“Ragweed,” he said. “Sneezing. You anoint your weapons with it. The djinns run away. Sometimes they sneeze. And I’d drunk some of the stuff the other day and that night Es-Souk tried to strangle me, and I coughed. And he sneezed. That’s ragweed, all right! The pollen is worst of all. It hits some human people too. You see?”
The Queen said brightly: “I fear not, Lord Toni.”
“Ragweed; sneezing; hay fever,” explained Tony. “The djinns are subject to hay fever. It’s an allergy. A racial trait. Ragweed, which doesn’t bother most humans, is deadly poison to them. Like DDT to bugs. It’s so strong a poison that merely its odor sets them crazy. You people have been wasting the stuff. You’ve swabbed guns and bullets with it. It dried, and by the time you got to where you were going to fight the djinn, most of it was gone. They ran away from the dried, dusty remains that by pure accident stuck to your weapons. You see? That night in my bedroom I had the stuff on my breath. When I coughed, Es-Souk got a whiff of it. And I figured that if so little of it would chase him, the real stuff tossed down his throat would really go to town. And it did!”
He looked hopefully at them. But he knew no Arabic word for “allergy” or “hay fever” or “pollen,” or for “radioactive” or “fissionable” or “atomic.” Even the English word “ragweed” in an Arabic context did not seem to mean lasf to the Queen or Ghail. To the two of them, he seemed to be speaking quite sincerely about matters so erudite as to be beyond their understanding. And at that it would have taken him a week to clarify the word “allergy.” They would never have understood DDT. The Queen dismissed the explanation.
“Doubtless it is clear to you, Lord Toni,” she observed, “but we poor women find it too involved. You speak of the magics and arts of your own nation. What shall you do now?”
Tony blinked. Then he remembered his anger.
“I’m going to see the king,” he said indignantly. “He arranged that business of Es-Souk’s escape, dammit! He expected to get me killed, with himself in the clear! I’m going to give him the devil! And if he acts up,” he added truculently, “I’ll blow on my cigarette lighter! That will hardly set him off, but it’ll scare him green!”
The Queen looked hard at Tony. Then she exchanged an astonished glance with Ghail.
“Have you looked out the door?” she asked softly.
Tony looked, and grew uncomfortable. “Do they have autograph hunters here, too?”
Ghail said firmly, “I do not know whether you are as stupid as you pretend, but certainly you had better go out and speak to those djinns! They are impressed enough now!”
“Impressed?”
Ghail said exasperatedly, “Get up! Go out! Let them bow down to you! Then, if you wish, you can go to see the king!” But as he stood up with a bewildered expression, she said softly, “You are very wonderful!”
“What?” He looked incredulous, and then turned swiftly to the Queen. “Oh, yes! Ghail tells me, Majesty, that she is your personal slave and can’t be sold or given without your consent. I’d—er—like to have a business conversation with you sooner or later.”
Ghail stamped her foot. “Get—out!”
Tony looked incredulous again. He went reluctantly out of the door.
A bull elephant charged toward him from fifty feet away. Tony took one look and reached for his cigarette case. Then the elephant changed smoothly into some thousands of billiard balls in red, green, blue, black and pink, which swept onward in a clacking tide of bewildering intricate motions upon and against each other. The balls shrank as they rolled. Then, suddenly, they jerked to a halt and into the rotund, turbaned, swaggering form of Abdul in one instant.