The Curse of Zohreh Read online

  She racked her brains, trying desperately to think how the curse might strike Khaled through her going into the garden. There was no fire out there – but perhaps it would be some other thing, like a bolt of lightning hitting him? Yet it was a perfect, cloudless day, not a sign of storm. She dragged herself slowly back to her quarters and lay on her bed, watching the hands of the clock go round, thinking about the curse, wondering how many other deaths there might have been, imagining the terror and pain of dying by fire. It was horrible – horrible – but she was trapped. She was bound to her promise to Zohreh, and she could not back out.

  The palace was quiet when she got up an hour later and slipped out. Khaled was in his room, reading, while Husam, his sword across his knees, dozed in a big armchair by Khaled’s bed. Kareen prowled the corridors of the palace, talking to the House-Jinns, and the servants were all busy with their multifarious tasks. Nobody saw her.

  She was in the garden now. It was quiet and still, and full of sunlight. She had no idea what to do. Slowly, she made her way to a stone bench and sat down. A fountain played near her but she hardly saw it or heard it. She did not even think of Zohreh, or try to summon her ghost. Her mind was full of fire. Roaring, red and yellow flames. She saw Khaled’s bright, handsome face, his hand reached out to her in friendship. Then she saw his dark eyes wide with terror, in a ring of flame, his hands outstretched, pleading … pleading … Oh, Khaled, Khaled, her heart wept, how I wish … how I wish …

  ‘Ugh!’ she gave a strangled cry as someone’s arm gripped her round the throat. She tumbled off the bench, kicking and struggling, trying to catch her breath to scream. A figure loomed over her: not a spy from the house, as she’d half suspected, but a stranger, dressed in blue jeans, a pale shirt and a leather jacket. Something bright swung at his neck. He had a black headcloth tied around the lower half of his face so only his eyes were visible. In that instant of utter terror, Soheila saw a cruel, hungry yellow glare: a glare that was not quite human.

  She had time to utter one pitiful scream before the man pinned her down. She spat up at him, and he growled, deep in his throat, and drew a knife. ‘Shut up. The al-Farouk boy. Where is he?’

  Soheila’s heart twisted. Her mind filled with Zohreh’s words. This was how it was meant to happen. Part of her – the violent, vengeful part – wanted to say, ‘Khaled? You want Khaled? I’ll give you Khaled …’ but the rest of her wouldn’t let her. The words would not come, they would not leave her mind. Instead, she opened her mouth and gave a choked, desperate warning howl, quickly cut off by the man’s stunning blow.

  Khaled’s room looked out onto the back garden. He had tried to read but he was restless and couldn’t settle down, unlike Husam, who snored peacefully in his chair. He was pacing about when he heard the scream. In an instant he was at the window, looking into the garden, and saw Payem struggling with a veiled stranger, then saw the stranger hit the boy, hard, so that he crumpled to the ground. He didn’t think twice, but jumped out of the window and threw himself on the man.

  It was like throwing himself at a brick wall. He was stunned by the man’s strength. It was all over quite quickly. A blow to the side of his head knocked him cold; in the next instant, he was gagged, trussed, and thrown over the man’s shoulder. Then the man flung a rope ladder over the wall and swarmed up it with his burden. He reached the top of the wall and dropped down. Seconds later, a car started up, and roared away.

  Soheila had come to just in time to see the man disappearing with Khaled over his shoulder. Her head ached and her heart hammered. What had happened? Why had Khaled come into the garden? Then full memory returned to her. She rocked back and forth on her haunches, moaning quietly, trying to think. He must have heard the struggle. He must have come out to help her. And so he had been kidnapped. Was this what Zohreh had wanted?

  ‘No, no, no,’ she whispered to herself, brokenly. ‘This isn’t right. It isn’t right.’ She gave an involuntary shudder as she remembered those cold, cruel eyes. Eyes with a cold fire burning in them. A cold fire. Oh God, oh Lord Akamenia, what would the man – or the thing – do to Khaled? No. She did not want this. She did not.

  ‘Grand-daughter,’ came Zohreh’s voice in her head, suddenly, harshly, ‘grand-daughter, this is not a time to be weak. You must get back the treasure of our family. You must put my spirit to rest.’

  ‘Oh, Grandmother of Grandmothers,’ wept Soheila, ‘I am weak, and I do not know what to do any more.’ She thought, ‘I was the bait for poor Khaled. I trapped him. If I had not come out into the garden, he would not have been kidnapped, taken into the power of Yellow Eyes. What is he? Oh God, what is he?’

  ‘Grand-daughter,’ said Zohreh, very sharply indeed, ‘that was no demon. It was a man – an enemy of this house.’

  ‘But why did you make me –’

  ‘You could not kill him yourself,’ said Zohreh’s voice coldly. ‘It was best this way. The curse will be accomplished, as it should. He is the only child of this house. Now the house of al-Farouk will die, and justice will truly be done.’

  ‘No!’ shouted Soheila. She put her hands over her ears. ‘I will not listen to any more. I will not!’

  She broke off abruptly. She’d heard noises in Khaled’s room, and a familiar voice calling out, ‘Husam?’ She panicked. The red-headed Jinn! She knew Kareen Amar did not like her, or trust her; she’d have no mercy if she discovered what had happened. Soheila would have to hide, and quickly.

  Kareen Amar had spoken to a few of the House-Jinns, but hadn’t learnt much. Down near the repository of forgotten books she came across Farasha, who was still fluttering in a state of great excitement over the sensational find in his own domain. He was inclined to keep jabbering at Kareen about it, and she was about to make her excuses and leave, when he said, ‘The news of the great find is so wondrous that it has reached the ears of even the most insignificant kitchen boy!’

  ‘A kitchen boy?’ said Kareen. ‘What do you mean? What did he look like?’

  ‘Like a kitchen boy,’ shrugged Farasha indifferently. ‘A little greaser: scrawny, small, spiky black hair and round eyes like a wild kitten. Wore an apron.’

  ‘Payem,’ said Kareen. ‘What did he do?’

  ‘He just stood and stared through the window in awe,’ said Farasha, modestly adding, ‘Perhaps he saw me, too.’

  Kareen frowned. Without a word to Farasha, she turned and went striding towards the kitchens, Farasha fluttering behind her in a rather indignant way. He’d only just begun to enjoy himself recounting his experiences; he wasn’t about to let the other Jinn escape so easily.

  The appearance of the odd foreigner in the palace kitchens caused a bit of a stir; the family rarely came into these precincts, and guests never. The staff were even more surprised to discover the weird redhead had come looking for the new kitchen boy. When Miss Josephine, with an undertone of incredulous contempt at the foreigner’s bad manners, told Kareen briskly that she’d sent the boy to bed because he was sick, she was most miffed when the redhead turned abruptly and left without a word. It took Miss Josephine a minute or two, and the relief of boxing Ismail’s ears for staring, to recover.

  Meanwhile Kareen strode along to the servants’ dormitory, Farasha following her. He hadn’t gone into the kitchens, it being beneath his dignity as a Book-Jinn to go into such a place, but he was determined to see what Kareen was up to. He tried to speak to her, but she took no notice. When they reached the dormitory, which of course was empty, she stood there for a moment, then stalked off to the servants’ bathroom, much to Farasha’s disgust. He was even more disgusted when she called the Bathroom-Jinn’s name. Hamarajol was of the lowest possible caste of House-Jinns; if Farasha associated with him publicly he would lose rank. Farasha could hardly believe that a powerful Jinn like Kareen Amar would stoop to speak to one as lowly as Hamarajol, and thought that a long sojourn in foreign parts must have effaced the Jinn’s knowledge of what was seemly and what was not in Al Aksara. Or perhaps the free s
pirits were like that: unlike House-Jinns, they had no notion of the finer things in life.

  Despite his indignant twitterings to himself, Farasha’s curiosity still got the better of him. He had lived for a long time untroubled by questions or wonderings, and he hardly even realised that he had changed. He just knew he had to know, and that this feeling would not leave him alone. So he fluttered about anxiously at the door to the bathroom and finally settled in a rather gingerly fashion on the doorjamb, for thus it could be said he had not, properly speaking, entered the unclean domain. He hoped Hamarajol would have enough sense of propriety to pretend he wasn’t there, but in this he was wrong.

  ‘Ha, Farasha!’ said Hamarajol, interrupting Kareen as she asked him if he knew where Payem was, ‘come for a bit of slumming, have you, old friend? Well, well, wonders will never cease.’

  ‘I am not your friend,’ said Farasha, quite forgetting that one shouldn’t answer impertinence from an inferior. ‘And I am not slumming. I have come as the representative of House-Jinns, and command you to answer our honoured guest.’

  Hamarajol gurgled with laughter, his yellow eyes in his shapeless grey body sparkling with mirth. ‘Well, then, it seems I can do naught but answer, oh august Farasha.’

  ‘I am glad to see you have at last come to your senses and seen what is seemly,’ said Farasha – and goggled in a bewildered fashion at Hamarajol’s and Kareen’s amusement.

  ‘Now then,’ said Hamarajol, in a mock solemn tone, ‘now that we have observed the formalities, and seeing as how I have none other but an exalted representative of the House-Jinns here in my humble abode, I will tell you both that I have precisely no idea where the child you are looking for is. However, if I were you, I should look in the garden. I have heard from my sources there – my old friend the Jinn of the compost heap, to be precise – Farasha, you’d love to meet him, must introduce you one of these days – that the person in question is always skulking in and out of there, probably avoiding work, but perhaps for nefarious purposes. Who knows, given the ways of the Clay People?’

  ‘Thank you, Hamarajol, we will go and see if we can find the kitchen boy in the garden,’ said Kareen. She was turning to leave when the yellow eyes twinkled and the Bathroom-Jinn said, in an elaborately casual voice, ‘Of course, if you’re looking for a suspicious kitchen boy, you might be looking for quite a while.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Well,’ said the Bathroom-Jinn, with a coarse laugh that made Farasha squirm, ‘very little can be hidden here in my domain. Let’s just say I have incontrovertible proof that your kitchen boy is no boy at all.’

  ‘Payem is a girl?’

  ‘Certainly seems like it,’ said Hamarajol, and his grey blubbery mass shook with laughter.

  ‘But why would the child dress up as a boy, just for a job in the kitchens? They employ girls there, too. It makes no sense.’

  ‘Search me,’ said Hamarajol lightly. ‘Who knows what Clay People do things for?’ He winked at Farasha. ‘Well, best get on, my friends. I will treasure the memory of the day a Book-Jinn came to visit me. What tales I’ll have to tell my friends in the compost heap, and the drains.’

  ‘If you dare –’ began Farasha, furiously, looking to Kareen Amar for support. But Kareen Amar was gone.

  Twenty

  Soheila crouched behind some bushes, wretched and sick. She should go and sound the alarm, she thought, but if she did they’d want to know why she’d tarried in telling them what had happened. ‘They’ll think I was in on it,’ she thought. ‘They’ll beat me – punish me – maybe even kill me, who knows?’ She could feel hot tears banked up inside her eyes, but refused to let them out. She tried to get a grip on herself, to harden her heart. She was a descendant of Zohreh, after all. She could not cry; she must not be weak. But her head ached horribly. She did not want Khaled to be hurt – yet she had had to do as Zohreh wanted. She tried to tell herself she hardly knew Khaled, so why should his fate upset her so? What was more, he was an al-Farouk; he was from a family who were enemies to her own.

  But her mind kept returning to him, slung helplessly over Yellow Eyes’s shoulder as if he were a sack, not a person. She could imagine his terror and pain all too well. She groaned inwardly.

  Oof! The breath was knocked out of her suddenly. She found herself on the ground, staring up at two wild, furious faces: the red-headed Jinn with the old swordsman behind her.

  ‘Who are you, really?’ said Kareen Amar, and her eyes glowed dangerously. ‘Don’t you dare lie to me or I’ll frizzle you in an instant.’ A flame leapt from her fingers. ‘Don’t think I wouldn’t, you little spy, you thief.’

  Husam’s face was stern and angry. ‘Why have you come here? Tell us at once, or it’ll be the worst for you.’

  Terror instantly filled Soheila but she managed to say, ‘My name is Payem, I’m a Parsarian –’

  ‘I said no lies!’ said the Jinn, grabbing Soheila by the scruff of her neck and pulling her to her feet. She loomed over the child, her breath as hot as the wind from the desert. ‘Payem is a boy’s name, and you’re a girl.’

  Something like a moth fluttered down from the low branch of a tree and landed on Kareen’s shoulder. A petulant voice said, ‘Don’t deny it, girl. We know. The Bathroom-Jinn told us.’

  Soheila stared for a moment at this new shock; then she swallowed, bent her head and, said softly, ‘Very well. It is true. I am a girl. But I –’ She swallowed again, and said in a voice thick with real tears, ‘I am the oldest child of a widow in Shideh and my mother and twin baby sisters depend on my wages to survive. I thought that if I came on my own as a girl to Ameerat it might be difficult and even dangerous for me. So I dressed up as a boy. I did not intend any harm by it.’

  Kareen Amar stared at her. ‘You are not telling the truth.’ Her eyes were narrow.

  ‘We have just come from Khaled’s room,’ said Husam. ‘He has vanished. Where is he?’

  ‘How should I know?’ cried Soheila, nearly mad with terror and shame and sorrow. ‘How should I know? I am not his keeper.’

  ‘I saw her!’ shouted Farasha. His google eyes were popping out of his head. ‘She was looking into my room. And she heard you talking about the Talisman. She’s a spy. She’s been sent to steal the Talisman, and take away young master.’

  ‘No! No!’ shouted Soheila.

  ‘Just as I thought,’ said Kareen with grim satisfaction. ‘The al-Farouks have taken a snake to their bosom.’ She shook Soheila like a rat, her long nails digging painfully into the child’s flesh under the thin cloth of her tunic. ‘You’d better start talking, girl, and fast.’

  ‘Tell us. What did you want with the Talisman?’ demanded Husam. ‘Who sent you? What is your real name?’

  Soheila looked into Husam’s eyes, then Kareen Amar’s, and saw no mercy there. She looked at Farasha’s excited pop-eyes and thought, bleakly, this is it, I’m going to die, just like my ancestor; I’m going to finish here in the palace of my enemies, frizzled to death by the wild fire of a Jinn, or run through by a swordsman’s weapon; I’ll never see home again, or my parents, or my brother.

  A mixture of fury, pride, guilt and grief seized her then, and she shouted, ‘I don’t know the answer to your first questions. I have done nothing to Khaled and I do not know where the Talisman – my family’s Talisman – is. You are the ones who have it. Know that my true name is Soheila of the Melkior clan, and I am the great-great-great-grand-daughter of the wonderful and courageous lady who was so foully and treacherously slain by the wicked murderer and thief Kassim al-Farouk. One of the last of my name and my religion and my family, I came to Ameerat to avenge the death of my ancestor, to bring death and dishonour and distress to the family of al-Farouk, as it was brought on the innocent Melkior clan. Put me to death if you must – but with my last breath I will fortify Zohreh’s curse with such dark power that it will destroy everyone here, and bring these walls tumbling down.’ She had straightened herself in Kareen’s grasp; her head w
as flung back; her eyes shone with a ferocious intensity. She would die like a daughter of the house of Zohreh should, without fear. It was a moment before she realised the quality of the silence around her, and then she looked up to see that Kareen’s grip had loosened, Husam looked completely stunned, and Farasha was frozen like a goggling statue on the Jinn’s shoulder.

  Kareen said, very quietly, ‘You are a daughter of the house of Zohreh, truly?’

  Soheila did not understand what was happening or why neither of them made any effort to kill her. She said harshly, ‘I am not lying.’

  ‘No,’ said Husam coldly. ‘We see that. But we see much more. We see that you disgrace the memory of your great and courageous ancestor, coming in like a masked thief into the house of trusting and kind people, prepared to weave evil plots in darkness, repaying kindness and hospitality with deceit and dissimulation.’

  Hot tears sprang into Soheila’s eyes. The words hurt, especially coming from Husam, who had championed her as Payem. ‘You don’t understand. My ancestor’s spirit is here. I must do as she wants. Justice must be done.’

  ‘And what do you call justice?’ said Husam. ‘A stab in the back perhaps, or, as you’re a kitchen boy, a dose of cold poison, in secret? Or a match to their bedroom curtains? Ah, truly it is a wonder you think fit to claim ownership of the Talisman of the Star, which is a token of love and gratitude, not of ugly treachery and cold-blooded murder. Your family does not deserve it.’

  Soheila’s face flushed. Her heart was wrung with hatred and shame. She spat out, ‘I will not listen to you, in the name of Akamenia, my Lord and my God, and his Truthteller, who protected against all evil spirits.’

  ‘You are a little fool,’ said Husam wearily, ‘a little fool. Did you not realise that the al-Farouks have been sorry all down the long years for what Kassim did, and have tried to find your family?’