Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights

The Faerie Queene

In the cradle of life, between the Tigris and Euphrates, where once the land of Nod, which is to say Wandering, stood to the east of Eden, it was Omar the Ayyar who showed Dunia, his queen, the first signs of the rifts appearing in the body of the four-headed monster which had set out to rule the earth. In those days she was moving around the world like a bright shadow resembling a blurred light in the corner of the eye, and with her, inseparably, was her favorite spy, both of them searching high and low for the four Grand Ifrits. Those boys have got better at hiding out than when we were fooling around in the old days, she told Omar. Back then I could see through their cloaking devices without even trying. But maybe in those days they secretly wanted to be found.

If relatively little has come down to us about the master spy of Qâf, Omar the Ayyar, it is very probably because of the residual prejudice among the jinn towards male homosexuality, cross-dressing, and suchlike practices. The jinnias, or jiniri, of Peristan evidently had no objection to lesbian activity, and indeed during the period of the sex strike there was a dramatic spike in such behavior, but among the male jinn the old bigotries were widespread. Omar’s well-known professional exploits, his intelligence-gathering in the guise of a harem eunuch or in women’s clothing, had won him a great reputation as a spy, but they also made him an outsider among his own kind. He himself would say that he had always been an outsider anyway. His dress was deliberately flamboyant, with brocade shawls flung over his shoulders with meticulous abandon, and many outrageous hats; his manner was decadent and brittle, and he set himself up as an aesthete and dandy and affected not to give a damn what any of his peers thought. He gathered kindred spirits around him in the intelligence service of Qâf, which had the unintended consequence of making many people in Fairyland profoundly distrust this team of brilliant butterflies who were also the most effective snoops in the upper world. However, Dunia had always trusted him totally. In the final conflict against the Grand Ifrits she came to feel like an outsider too, setting out to avenge the father whom she had never managed to please by murdering members of her own race. Omar the Ayyar accompanied her every day as she hunted down the dark quartet, and she came to feel that they were kindred spirits in many ways. Her fondness for the human race, her love of one man and their descendants, set her apart from her people too. She was aware that she did not possess the personal characteristics which had made her father so widely loved and admired. She was direct, truthful and forceful, whereas her father had been oblique, distracted and charming. Her insistence on the sex strike made things worse. She could foresee a moment in the not-too-distant future at which the ladies of Peristan would lose sympathy for her, and shrug their collective shoulders at her war against the Grand Ifrits. What was the lower world to them anyway? And why was she so hot and bothered about it? This was a war she could lose if it went on much longer. It was essential to find the four dark jinn before very long. She was running out of time.

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.

The fictional Greek god Proteus was a powerful metamorphic deity of the sea, as fluid in his transformations as water itself. Blood-Drinker was fond of transforming himself into sea-monsters and it is possible that he and Proteus were one and the same, that Proteus was the name the ancient Greeks gave him during their time. Dunia slipped into the grand bath hall of Peristan and there in the enormous bottomless saltwater pool was the Ifrit prince, now a long slippery eel, now a nameless spiky bug-eyed monster of the deep ocean trenches, and around him were the ladies of Fairyland squealing with anticipatory joy. Dunia had to move swiftly. As she plunged below the surface of the water to grab Ra’im Blood-Drinker by his sex — because whatever fantastic sea-beast he was impersonating at that moment, he would make sure he retained the equipment he needed to make love to the ladies of Fairyland — she spoke to him in the unvoiced private language of the jinn. I never did like fucking fish, she said, but fish-man, your time has come.

This was what she knew about male metamorphs: they would elude you, they would turn themselves into water and slip through your fingers, unless you were quick enough to grab them by the balls and hold on tightly. Then you had to cling on until they had tried everything they could think of; and if you were still there at the end, with their balls in your fist, then they were yours.

Easier said than done.

This was no ordinary metamorph, but Ra’im Blood-Drinker, the Grand Ifrit. He was a shark gaping at her with his great jagged teeth and a serpent winding around her to crush her in his coils. He was seaweed binding her and a whale trying to swallow her and a great stingray that could mortally damage her with his tail. She clung to him and avoided his traps. She was a black cloud with a hand emerging from it clutching his manhood. She was dazzling in her speed, her twists, her feints. She matched his moves and surpassed them. She was invincible. His transformations multiplied and accelerated. She was equal to them all. And finally he was spent, gasping his last breaths as she rose above the water and burned it with her electric hands and he was caught: tossed, fried and done. His body lay upon the water like a shipwreck.

Fish supper tonight, she said, and left him to sink beneath the surface.

She came out of the palace of the baths to face a hostile crowd. There were boos and cries of Shame on you. Ah, the confusion and fear of the jinnias of Peristan faced with one of their own, the Queen of Qâf Mountain, no less, become a murderer, killer of dark princes. They had all fled the baths when the fight began, and now they saw the palace broken and damaged, its golden arches fallen, its vaulted glass roof smashed, the palace turned into a mirror of so many war-smashed structures in the lower world; and yes, they knew the ruins could be rebuilt in a trice, a magic spell would give them back the palace immaculate and unspoilt, that was not the issue. No magic could raise Ra’im Blood-Drinker from the dead. And Shining Ruby was gone as well. Those truths were irreversible. The ladies of Fairyland turned their backs to Queen Dunia and she understood that she had lost her place in their ranks. No matter. It was time to return to the lower world and bring the war to an end.

In the midst of the battle there had been time to do one small good deed. The foolish Signor Giacomo Donizetti of New York, former seducer of unhappily married women, afterwards victim of a wicked, though not undeserved, tit-for-tat hex that obliged him to adore all women unreservedly, and presently wretched and rudderless, was of no use to her as a fighter; but maybe she could heal him. She was the mother of all her flock, the useless ones as well as the worthwhile, and she saw the good in this stray sheep of the Duniazát, hiding beneath the lechery and cynicism, and she pitied him for the spell cast on him by this or that small-fry bad jinni. Breaking the enchantment was easy and then Giacomo was once more immune to doctors’ receptionists and bag ladies, but he remained a lost soul until she listened to his heart and whispered to him what he must do, and wherein his salvation lay. Soon after that he opened a new restaurant.

It was an insane time to open an upscale eatery, even for somebody who had once been among the princes of the city’s nightlife. Those days were long gone and now, in wartime, people rarely ventured out to dinner, and when they did it was to grab something easy, something that required no investment of time or money on the part of either the vendor or the purchaser. Into that devastation of what had formerly been the gastronomic capital of the world came Giacomo Donizetti restored to his peacock finery with an establishment of polished wood and even more highly polished metal and glass. It shone like a new sun, and even though almost nobody went to eat there Donizetti’s extraordinary kitchen staff, pulled together from all the newly unemployed master chefs, pâtissiers and sommeliers in America, daily produced a menu as dazzling as the furnishings, so that the empty restaurant with its perfect table settings and even more immaculate waitstaff became a beacon of hope, a Statue of Liberty made not of copper but rather of food and wine. Afterwards, when peace returned to the world, it made Giacomo Donizetti’s fortune, becoming something like a symbol of the resistance, an emblem of the city’s old characteristics of defiance and optimism; but in those days people marveled at the epic folly of opening such a place: a brilliantly illuminated and opulent saloon containing the best of everything, except customers.

He had named the restaurant in the Venetian manner, Ca’ Giacomo, and its cuisine was Venetian too, featuring such delicacies as baccalà Mantecato, or creamed cod, bisato su l’ara, which was eel roasted with bay leaves, and caparossoli in cassopipa, or clams with parsley. There was rice and peas, risi e bisi, and stuffed duck, anatra ripiena, and for dessert there was a trolley bearing fried cream and torta Nicolotta and torta sabbiosa as well. How did Donizetti do it? people wondered. Where did he find the produce, and where did he get the cash? He answered all such questions with a Venetian mask of indifference, and a shrug. You want to eat? Don’t ask. You don’t like it? Eat someplace else.

His patrons’ pockets were deep. Zumurrud the Great was not the only one with caves full of precious stones larger than dragons’ eggs. And a jinnia queen can put meat and fish in your freezer with just a flick of her hand.

He tried repeatedly to thank her but she waved him away. It’s good for me too, she said. Wherever I’ve been, whoever I had to kill, I can come here every night and eat with the kitchen brigade. If I am your only customer, so what? It’s my money I’m losing. Fegato, seppie, Venetian baicoli biscuits. A glass of good Amarone wine. Yes. This heals me too.

In the unexpected lull that followed the deaths of Shining Ruby and Ra’im Blood-Drinker, things began to feel different in the city, though everyone was hesitant to use the word better. However, as the resistance grew; and as the mobs of the parasite-jinn disappeared from the city’s streets, many of their number standing petrified here and there as signs of a shift in the conflict; and as the strangenesses diminished in number, frequency and ferocity; so people began to venture out into the streets and parks again. Like the first crocus of spring, a runner was sighted on the promenade along the banks of the Hudson, not running away from a monster, just running for fun. The rebirth of the idea of pleasure was itself like the arrival of a new season, even though everyone knew that as long as the malevolent Zabardast and Zumurrud were out there — these names had become familiar to everyone on the planet — the danger remained. Liberation radio stations began intermittently to broadcast and all of them asked the same question: Where are ZZ Top?

As the calendar marched towards the thousandth day of the time of the strangenesses, Mayor Rosa Fast took a bold decision and returned to her office with little Storm by her side. Also by her side was her newly appointed security chief, Jinendra Kapoor, conqueror and petrifier of the parasite-jinn.

Judging by what you did here, Mayor Fast told Jimmy, you’re at least partly made of the same stuff as them. But when you’re fighting monsters it’s good to have a few monsters on your side too.

I’m not coming into the office, he told her. I’ve been in enough offices in my life and I’m not coming into any more.

I’ll call you when I need you, she said, and pressed a small device into his hand. This works on a maximum-security frequency, she said. They haven’t penetrated it yet. It will ring, and vibrate, and these lights around the edge here will flash red.

When Commissioner Gordon wanted Batman, said Jimmy Kapoor, he sent up the Bat-Signal. This is like waiting for your burger order to be ready in Madison Square.

It’s what you’re getting, she said.

Why is the kid looking at me like that?

She wants to see if I can trust you.

And can you?

If I couldn’t, Mayor Fast said, your face would right now be covered in the sores of your treachery. So, I guess you’re okay. Let’s go to work.

The kidnapping of Hugo Casterbridge from the Heath near his Hampstead home was a new twist in the dark spiral of the war. The composer set off for his usual early morning walk accompanied by his Tibetan terrier Wolfgango (on the original score of The Marriage of Figaro Mozart’s name had been absurdly Italianized, to Casterbridge’s great and often-stated amusement). Afterwards members of the public remembered seeing Casterbridge waving his stick at the traffic on East Heath Road as he crossed over onto the Heath. He was last observed walking northeast along Lime Avenue towards the Bird Sanctuary Pond. Later that morning Wolfgango was found barking unstoppably at the sky and guarding the abandoned knobkerry as if it were a fallen warrior’s sword. Of Hugo Casterbridge, however, there was — briefly — no sign.

It is at this point, near the end of our account of the conflict, that we are obliged to leave London as abruptly as Casterbridge had left it, and return to Lucena, in Spain, where everything began, where the jinnia Dunia had once presented herself at the door of the Andalusian philosopher with whose mind she had fallen in love, and where she bore Ibn Rushd the children in whose descendants she had now awakened their sleeping jinn natures, to help her in her fight. Lucena at this time retained much of its old-world charm, though in the old Jewish quarter of Santiago no trace remained of Ibn Rushd’s residence. The Jewish necropolis had survived, as had the castle and the old Medinaceli palace, but it is to a less folkloristic part of town that we must turn our gaze. In the centuries that had passed since the time of Ibn Rushd the entrepreneurs of Lucena had gone into the furniture business with considerable enthusiasm, so that it sometimes seemed that the town was entirely composed of factories making things to sit on, lie on, or put your clothes away in, and outside one such factory its owners, a pair of brothers named Huertas, had built the biggest chair in the world, some eighty-five feet tall; and it was on this chair that the Grand Ifrit Zabardast seated himself calmly, cold as a reptile, a giant not quite as big as his erstwhile friend Zumurrud the Great, with the helpless figure of Hugo Casterbridge held in one hand, irresistibly reminding the older cinemagoers in the gathering crowd of Fay Wray wriggling in the mighty grasp of Kong.

And it was from this chair that he issued the following challenge to his female adversary: Aasmaan Peri, Queen Skyfairy of Mount Qâf, or whatever you call yourself now, you, Dunia of this debased lower world, you who show yourself to be more in love with this pathetic globe, and your own half-breed rodents within it, than with your own kind, O trivial daughter of a far greater father, watch me now. I killed your father. Now I will eat your children.

He asked Hugo Casterbridge if he had any last words. The composer replied, It’s a terrible thing when one speaks metaphorically and the metaphor turns into a literal truth. When I said that the gods men invented had arisen to destroy them, I was being largely figurative. It is unexpected, and almost gratifying, to discover I was being more accurate than I thought.

I am not a god, said Zabardast the Sorcerer. You can’t imagine God. You can barely imagine me, but I am the one who is going to eat you alive.

Certainly I could not have imagined a cannibal god, said Casterbridge. That is … disappointing.

Enough, said Zabardast, opening his great mouth wide, and swallowing Casterbridge’s head in a single gulp. And after that the arms, the legs, the torso. The crowd that had gathered screamed and ran away.

Now Zabardast for once raised his voice and roared. Where are you? he bellowed though his mouth was full, and bits of Casterbridge fell from his lips as he spoke. Dunia, where are you hiding? Don’t you care that I just ate your son?

She was silent, and nowhere to be found.

Then something very unexpected happened. Zabardast the Sorcerer put his hands to his ears and began to shriek uncontrollably. The fleeing crowd stopped and turned to look. Nobody could hear anything, though the dogs of Lucena began to bark agitatedly. On the giant chair the Grand Ifrit writhed in agony and cried out as if a hot arrow were piercing his eardrums and scalding through his brain, and all of a sudden he lost control of his human shape, exploded into a fireball, burned the great chair of Lucena to the ground, and then his fire went out, and he was gone.

Now there was a boiling in the heavens and a wormhole opened and Dunia and Omar the Ayyar descended from the skies.

When I worked out how the poison spell worked, how to use the dark arts and compress the murderous occult formulae, how to sharpen its barbs and spear it to its goal, Dunia murmured to Omar, it was too late to save my father. But it was in time to kill his murderer and avenge his death.

It was one thing to seize tracts of the earth and declare a kingdom. It was another thing entirely to rule it. The dark jinn, fractious, inattentive, vain and cruel as they were, feared but also hated, found in a short time — even before the thousandth day arrived — that their vision of colonizing the earth and enslaving its peoples was a half-baked loaf, which they possessed neither the efficiency nor the culinary skill to cook properly. The only gift of power they possessed was the gift of force. It wasn’t enough.

Even in those violent and amoral times, no tyranny was ever absolute; no resistance was ever absolutely crushed. And now that three of the four Grand Ifrits were gone, the grand project began to come apart at speed.

We say again: more than one thousand years have passed since these events occurred, so many of the details of the collapse of the imperial project of the dark jinn are lost, or so inexact that it would be inappropriate to include them here. We can assert with some degree of confidence that the recovery was swift, indicating both the resilience of human society and the shallowness of the control of the jinn over their “conquests.” Some scholars compare this period to the later stages of the rule of the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb in India. The last of the six Grand Mughals did indeed extend the empire’s rule all the way to the southernmost tip of India, but the conquest was a sort of illusion, because as his armies returned to his northern capital, so the “conquered” lands of the south reasserted their independence. Whether or not this analogy is accepted by all, it is certainly the case that after the fall of Shining Ruby, Ra’im Blood-Drinker and Zabardast the Sorcerer, their enchantments failed all over the world, men and women returned to their senses, order and civility were everywhere restored, economies began to function, crops to be harvested, factory wheels to turn. There were jobs again and money regained its value.

Many, including the present authors, trace the beginnings of the so-called “death of the gods” back to this period, ten centuries ago. Others prefer other, later origin points. It seems to us self-evident, however, that the use of religion as a justification for repression, horror, tyranny, and even barbarism, a phenomenon which undoubtedly predated the War of the Worlds but was certainly a significant aspect of that conflict, led in the end to the terminal disillusion of the human race with the idea of faith. It has now been so long since anyone was gulled by the fantasies of those antique, defunct belief systems that the point may seem academic; after all, for at least five hundred years, such places of worship as survived the Dissolution have taken on new functions, as hotels, casinos, apartment blocks, transportation termini, exhibition halls, and shopping malls. We hold, however, that it remains a point worth making.

We return to our narrative to consider the behavior of the figure who was ostensibly and certainly in his own estimation the most powerful of all the jinn: the single surviving Grand Ifrit, the highest prince of the dark jinn, Zumurrud the Great.

Of all his jewel caves this was the best, the one he came to when he wanted comfort. To wash away his pain and grief and lift his spirits he needed to be alone with what gave him the greatest joy, and that was emeralds. Deep below the sharp harsh mountains of A. it lay, a city of emerald whose only citizen he was: Sesame the Green, more beautiful to him than any woman. Open, he commanded her, and she opened for him. Close, and she closed around him. There he rested, wrapped in a coverlet of green stone in the heart of a mountain, mourning his lost brethren, whom he had both hated and loved. That all three of them had been bested and destroyed by a jinnia was hard to credit. Yet it was true, just as it was also true that one of the most fearsome of the earthly warriors the Lightning Queen had unleashed against his own cohorts was a female, one Teresa Saca, whose thunderbolts at times rivaled those of the Queen of Qâf herself. There were times when life seemed incomprehensible. At such times the green jewels spoke to him of love, and cleared his thoughts of confusion. Come to me, my precious ones, he cried, and gathering up armfuls of the magic stones, he pressed them against his heart.

How could it be that things were suddenly going so badly? For more than nine hundred days there had been no real obstacles in the way of his grand design, and now, calamity upon calamity. He blamed his fellow dark jinn for much of the growing débâcle. They had shown themselves to be untrustworthy, even traitorous, and they had paid the price. Even the manner of Zabardast’s end had been a kind of treason, for the sorcerer jinni had known that he, Zumurrud, had planned to make an example of one of the Lightning Queen’s creatures, a certain Airagaira, who had been subdued and captured with great difficulty after his attack on the Glory Machine which Zumurrud had ordered to be built outside the city of B. Zumurrud had neutralized the thunderbolt abilities of this earlobe-less Airagaira by fastening him to a strike termination device that automatically sucked the fellow’s lightning harmlessly down into the ground. Thus fastened to a stake beside the machine he had vandalized, he was to be an example to all of the failure of resistance. Then Zabardast had upstaged the plan with his self-indulgently exhibitionist piece of saturnine cannibalism, and look how that had ended. It was impossible to trust anyone, even one’s oldest allies.

In a kind of angry stupor Zumurrud the Great tossed and turned on his emerald bed, the stones pouring over his body as he moved this way and that. Then at a certain point his foot touched something that was not stone and he reached down for it. It was a small bottle, not a fancy artifact of precious metals studded with gemstones such as might be expected to lie hidden in a jinni’s treasure cave, but a cheap affair, plain, rectangular, made of thick blue glass, and missing its cork. He picked it up and regarded it with disgust. It was his old prison. Once he had been lured inside by a mere mortal and remained captive within those blue walls for centuries until Ghazali the sage of Tus set him free. He had kept the bottle here in the heart of his treasure, buried under precious stones, as a reminder of his caged history and his humiliation, which was the cause of his rage. But as he held it in his hand he understood why it had come back to visit him at that moment.

Prison, he addressed the bottle, you emerge from the shadows like the answer to my unasked question. Curse of my past, now you will be the curse of another’s future.

He snapped his fingers. The bottle was corked again: stoppered tightly and ready for use.

La Incoerenza is still standing after a thousand years, a well-looked-after place of secular pilgrimage and reverence, the house restored and maintained, the gardens carefully tended in memory of the great gardener who created them long ago; it is a sight to see, like all the great battlefields of the world, Marathon, Kurukshetra, Gettysburg, the Somme. Yet the battle fought here, the terminal conflict of the War of the Worlds, was like no other ever fought on earth. It involved no armies; it was, instead, a fight to the finish between supernatural entities, so potent that it has been said of them that they contained armies within themselves. On each side stood a single titanic figure, superhuman, implacable, one male, one female, one fire, the other smoke. There were others present. The greatest of the dark jinn had brought half a dozen of his cohorts as seconds, and Dunia the Lightning Queen had summoned her most reliable soldiers too: Omar the spy, and the earthlings Teresa Saca, Jimmy Kapoor and Geronimo Manezes. Observing from the sidelines, knowing that their fate, and the fate of the earth, depended on the outcome, were the owner of the estate, the Lady Philosopher Alexandra Bliss Fariña, whose lifelong pessimism was about to be permanently validated or overthrown, depending on the outcome of the fray; her hirsute estate manager Oliver Oldcastle; and the mayor, Rosa Fast, who had been alerted by her security chief, Jimmy, a.k.a. Natraj Hero. (Little Storm was not present, it being rightly deemed too dangerous for her to be there.) Everyone who was at La Incoereneza on that night, the so-called Thousandth Night, has gone into the history books, and when their names are spoken nowadays it is with the hushed tones reserved for participants in the greatest episodes of the human story. Yet the primary combatants were inhuman.

It was arranged as once, in ancient times, duels were arranged. A challenge was issued, by Zumurrud the Great, sent at speed down the jinn communications networks, and accepted. The location was specified by Zumurrud with undisguised scorn. That place where your fancy boy who reminds you of your dead lover now disports himself with the woman he prefers to you. I’ll crush you while he watches and decide what to do with him afterwards, when all the world is mine. The offering and return of insults was a part of the convention of the challenge to single combat, but Dunia maintained her dignity, and the time and place were set. He’s giving you home advantage, Omar the Ayyar told her. That’s his overconfidence talking. It makes him vulnerable. I know, she said. Then it was time.

At La Incoerenza, a place of immense beauty dedicated by its creator Sanford Bliss to the idea that the world did not make sense, Dunia and Zumurrud finally came face to face to decide what kind of sense the world would make from then on. It was after sunset and moonlight lay uneasy on the great river at the foot of the estate. The flying urns on which Zumurrud and his party had arrived hovered by the sundial on the lawn like giant fretful bees. The wormhole through which they came boiled in the sky above them. Mr. Geronimo, Jimmy Kapoor and Teresa Saca moved around the edges of the great lawn, on the lookout for any dishonorable attack by the seconds of the Grand Ifrit. The two principals circled each other on the lawn, considering their first moves. Clouds ran across the sky and when the moonlight was lost and an unearthly darkness enclosed the fighters, filling their nostrils with the smell of death, Zumurrud the Great attacked. It was he who had summoned the wind and now its ferocity increased. The figures on the periphery had to take shelter for fear of being blown away, for this was a wind from hell, its purpose the annihilation of Dunia’s human form so that her smoky essence could be blown away to the four corners of the earth. But she was not so easily vanquished and held firm. Then rain joined the wind and that was her magic, a rain so heavy that it seemed as if the river itself had risen from its bed and was falling upon them, a rain whose purpose was to extinguish the fire of which the Ifrit was made. But that failed too. Neither of these warriors would be so easily broken. Their shields were more than equal to the task of deflecting these assaults.

Through the howling of the wind and the pounding of the rain Mr. Geronimo heard a woman’s voice shrieking abuse at the jinni entourage, How would you like it if your world was devastated the way you have ruined ours? — that was the question this voice asked over and over again, punctuated by much bad language. Mr. Geronimo realized that the screaming woman was Teresa Saca, whom Dunia had summoned to fight at their side. She seemed more than a little deranged to Geronimo Manezes. It was also unclear if her wrath was aimed only at the Grand Ifrit and his followers. It was an anger that seemed to spread like a plague, infecting everything it touched, and maybe, Mr. Geronimo thought, a part of this anger was directed at Dunia as well. It was a hate-filled shriek that if aimed at any human group of people, tarring them all with the same brush, would have been called — yes — racially prejudiced. Teresa Saca, it seemed to him, listening to her shriek into the raging elements, matching their fury with her own, crackling with electricity around the edges of her body, was bigoted against all the descended creatures of the upper world, and therefore, of course, against the jinnia within herself as well. Her hatred of the other was also a hatred of the self. She was a dangerous ally.

Meanwhile, like a cornerman at a title bout, Mr. Geronimo was becoming worried about Dunia’s approach to the fight. She seemed content to react rather than take the initiative, which felt like a mistake to him. He tried to tell her, wordlessly, but she was listening to nobody now, all her effort bent on the battle. Zumurrud was changing form, unleashing the worst of all the monsters within him: the creature with iron teeth and a thousand heads with a thousand tongues, once known as the Blatant Beast. With the thousand tongues he could not only bark like a dog, snarl like a tiger, growl like a bear, yowl like a dragon, and seek to bite his adversary with many three-pronged serpent stings; he could also hurl literally hundreds of hexes, spells and enchantments at Dunia simultaneously, paralyzing spells, weakening spells, killing spells. And there were many tongues to spare for abuse, abuse in many languages, the languages of men and jinn, which revealed in Zumurrud a level of moral degradation that shocked all who heard it.

And as he watched Zumurrud in the form of the Blatant Beast assault Dunia in many hundreds of different ways, and saw her whirl and spin and deflect and defend like a great Valkyrie, or a goddess of Olympus or Kailash, and as he wondered how long even she could withstand so ferocious an assault, and as he listened to Teresa Saca’s screams, How would you feel if it happened to you, Mr. Geronimo experienced a sort of inner vision or epiphany. The doors of perception opened and he saw that what was evil and monstrous about the jinn was a mirror of the monstrous and evil part of human beings, that human nature too contained the same irrationality, wanton, willful, malevolent, and cruel, and that the battle against the jinn was a portrait of the battle within the human heart, which meant that the jinn were somehow abstractions as well as realities, and that their descent to the lower world served to show that world what had to be eradicated within itself, which was unreason itself, unreason which was the name of the dark jinn within people, and as he understood this, he also understood Teresa Saca’s self-hatred, and knew, as she knew, that the jinn self within them both needed to be expunged, the irrational in man as well as jinn had to be defeated, so that an age of reason could begin.

We listened to what he told us. We are still listening, after a thousand years. This is Mr. Geronimo the Gardener, after all. We all know what he understood that night, the Thousandth Night, when Dunia, the Lightning Queen Aasmaan Peri, which is to say Skyfairy, fought against Zumurrud the Great.

She was tiring. Zumurrud could see that. This was the moment he had waited for, as a matador waits to see the acceptance of defeat in the eyes of the bull. This was the moment when he abandoned the persona of the Beast, resumed his own form, produced the blue bottle from a fold in his red shirt, removed the cork, and cried out with all his force:

Jinnia foolish, jinnia blind,

Now I hold you in my mind!

In this place confinèd be,

Ever more belong to me.

This was said in the Secret Language of the jinn, in which the most potent of spells are written, and which demands an immense expenditure of power on the part of the speaker. The humans watching the scene did not understand the words but they saw their effect, saw Dunia stagger and fall, saw her being dragged feet first along the grass towards the little bottle which gaped at her like the devil’s mouth.

What did he say? the Lady Philosopher screamed at Omar the Ayyar, but Omar was watching wide-eyed as Dunia was pulled towards the bottle. Tell me, Alexandra cried, and so Omar absently did, repeating the words of power in a whisper and offering a rough translation. Then Zumurrud in triumph spoke again.

Jinnia fierce and jinnia grand,

Now I hold you in my hand.

In this place confinèd be,

Ever more belong to me.

What? Alexandra demanded, and Omar told her. It’s over, he said. She has lost.

Then Dunia screamed. It was the scream of power Mr. Geronimo had heard when her father died. It knocked humans and jinn flat on their backs and it broke Zumurrud’s hold over the spell. He staggered backwards clutching at his ears and the little blue bottle spiraled through the air and landed in Dunia’s right hand, and the cork in her left. Now she drew herself to her feet and reversed the spell.

Mighty, proud and strong Ifrit,

Come and sit thou at my feet.

In this place confinèd be,

Ever more belong to me.

What did she say? cried Alexandra, and Omar told her. Now it was Zumurrud being pulled towards the bottle, headfirst, his beard stretched out before him as if an invisible hand had grabbed it and was pulling it, and its owner, into the prison of the blue bottle. And Dunia cried out once again, with her last strength:

Feared and powerful Ifrit,

Today your mistress you must meet.

In this place confinèd be,

Ever more belong to me.

She knew at once, everyone knew, that she had overdone it. Her strength failed her. She fell into a deep swoon. The spell broke. Zumurrud began to rise in all his gigantic puissance. And the bottle,

to everyone’s surprise,

chose to spiral almost lazily through the air,

and came to rest in the outstretched right hand of Alexandra Bliss Fariña the Lady Philosopher,

and the cork in her left hand,

and to the consternation of all, and the joy of her allies, she repeated, word perfect, the first entrapment spell cast by the Lightning Queen, and Zumurrud crashed again to the ground, exhausted as he had exhausted Dunia, and was drawn relentlessly forward, until his whole huge spent body had squeezed into the tiny blue bottle, whereupon Alexandra pushed the cork into the neck, and he was caught, and it was over, and his flunkeys fled. They would be found afterwards and dealt with, but let that pass.

Mr. Geronimo and Omar the Ayyar and Jimmy Kapoor crowded around Alexandra and asked, How? How on earth? How in the name of? How by all that’s? How, how, how?

I was always quick with languages, she said deliriously, giggling lightly, as if she were flirting with young bucks at a summer garden party. Ask anyone at Harvard, she tittered. I picked them up in no time, like shiny pebbles on a beach.

Then she fainted away entirely, and Mr. Geronimo caught her, and Jimmy Kapoor snatched up the bottle before it hit the ground.

And that might have been an end to it all, except that Geronimo Manezes noticed that one of them was missing, and Where’s Teresa Saca? he cried out, and then they saw that she had taken the last of the flying urns, Zumurrud’s own urn, and was riding it up into the sky, into the wormhole that joined the upper world to the lower, and if they had been able to look upon her face they would have seen that in her eyes there rose an awful tide of blood.

If your world was devastated the way you have ruined ours, Mr. Geronimo remembered.

She has gone to attack Fairyland, he said aloud, and to destroy it if she can.

There are many kinds of casualty in battle, the invisible ones, the injuries to the mind, rivaling in number the fatalities and the physical wounds. As we look back at these events we remember Teresa Saca Cuartos as one of the heroes of that war, the electricity in her fingers responsible for many successes against the jinn armies; but also as a tragic victim of the conflict, her mind broken not only by the calamity she saw around her but also by the violence with which she had been bidden by the Lightning Queen to respond to the disaster of war. In the end, rage, no matter how profoundly justified, destroys the enraged. Just as we are created anew by what we love, so we are reduced and unmade by what we hate. At the end of the climactic battle of the War of the Worlds, with Zumurrud the Great in his bottle prison, held tightly in Jimmy Kapoor’s fist, and Dunia slowly emerging from unconsciousness, it was Teresa who cracked and headed for the hole in the sky.

She must have known it was a suicide mission. What did she expect? That she would pass unchallenged into the upper world and that those perfumed gardens, those cloud-capp’d towers and gorgeous palaces, would dissolve before her wrath and leave not a rack behind? That all that was solid there would melt into air, into thin air, before her avenging fury? And then what? That she would return to earth an even greater hero for having brought about the ruin of the fairy world?

We don’t know, and perhaps should not speculate. Let us simply remember with grief the madness of Teresa Saca, and the inevitability of her last moment. For of course she did not make it into Peristan. The giant urn was not an easy vehicle, as hard to ride as an untamed stallion, obedient only to its fallen jinn master. As Mr. Geronimo and the others watched her rocket into the air — the wind had died down, and the rain also, and a full moon brightly lit her ascent, or so the story goes — they saw that she was having trouble keeping her seat. And as she approached the stormy edges of the wormhole, the slit between the worlds, the air became more turbulent, and then even more turbulent, and she lost her grip on her enchanted steed, and those below watched in horror and she slid first this way and then that; and fell. To land like a broken wing on La Incoerenza’s sodden lawn.