Djin and the Art of Bluffing
Djin and the Art of Bluffing
The debate had been raging for hours now, and the
prospects for getting an inn and a bed were rapidly
taking a spectacular dive off of the cliffs of
possibility. Rajad was tired (he had been riding a
great clumsy camel behind his master for days to get
to this place), sore (riding a great clumsy camel
causes one some pain), and utterly confused by the
swirl of the discussion. He had no idea what was
being talked about, and even if he had, he thought it
unlikely that he would understand any of the
arguments for or against the subject. You see,
Rajad's master and his contentious cronies were
philosophers.
Rajad was catching snatches of conversation now, in
intelligible words which caused him to shudder within
his jellaba. The words "djin" and "afrit" were
interspersed with "dao" and "maridd," and Rajad knew
all too well what that meant. The pugilistic
learneds were discussing the genii, bad luck no
matter what. If the elemental spirits heard their
names being called, their attention was certain to
turn to the speaker. Tales of wishes
notwithstanding, meeting the genii, of any race, was
not a lucky sign. In fact, it was usually a signal
that one's luck (and one's current incarnation) had
quite run out.
So it was that Rajad was quite upset even before he
heard a whining roar from the far desert. When he
realized that he could also hear the crackling of
lightning from the realm of the cloud-people, an
undulant hiss from the nearby harbor, and the crack
and rumble of earth moving in great quantities, he
knew exactly what was happening. He also fainted
dead away.
This finally caught the attentions of the
gathered philosophers, who had been so caught up in
their intellectual free-for-all that they had not
even noticed the signs. Now they, too, heard, and
their faces turned the color of the desert sand in
the saltlands as they realized just what they were
listening to. They flowed out of the tent as one
body, a sea of robes and beards and camel sticks, to
look to the horizons. Sixteen eyes swept from desert
to city to harbor at their feet, and sixteen eyes
grew wide with fear.
From the desert swirled the most malevolent-looking
tornado that any of them had ever seen, sweeping from
one side to the other of the narrow approach to the
city. Screaming and howling, it carried several
recognizable and apparently living camels, as well as
assorted date palms, prayer carpets, minaret domes,
and people, in its windy funnel.
Meanwhile, on the ocean side of the city, the harbor
looked as if someone had pulled a gargantuan plug at
its bottom. Boats lay on their sides on soggy sand,
docks stuck out into nothing, and sailors ran about
where hours before only crabs and fish had gathered.
But the water had no just disappeared. Hulking out at
sea, miles away at the mouth of the harbor, an
impossibly large mass of water seemed to the
philosophers to be humping up like an island. It rose
to perhaps one or two hundred feet and began its
landward charge.
Meanwhile, in the very center of the square in which
the philosophers stood, a spike burts from the earth
with a deep rumbling and a sharp crack. It rose into
the air, its point sharp against the hazy sky thick
with tornado-blown dust. In a very short time, it
rivalled the tallest buildings in the city, and grew
ever taller as they watched.
Soon continued...time constraints
Email: jaygray@webtv.net
