“You came across the desert from the sea,” she said tolerantly, “riding one camel and leading two others. But an hour before your coming, one of the watchers on the city wall had seen a djinn in the desert. When you came, so stupid that you could not even speak the language of humans, do you think we did not know you for what you are—a djinn?”
“A djinn,” said Tony blankly. The word was one of the very few—alcohol was another—which would be the same in Arabic and English. “Do you mean those creatures of the Thousand and One Nights?”
“Of history, yes.” Ghail’s tone was bitingly scornful. “And if we had doubted, within the hour there came a Bedouin to the city gate, a one-eyed man with a sword-slit nose, who told us of your taking the form of a bale of rich silk, torn open upon the beach of the sea. When he and his companions alighted from their camels to gather up the wealth, you changed instantly to the likeness of a young man strangely garbed and ran swiftly to their camels and flogged them away faster than the men could follow. The man demanded his camels, and they were those you brought to the gates of the city. So they were yielded to him. Do you deny now that you are of the djinn?”
Tony swallowed, hard. A one-eyed man with sword-slit nose? That was the man he had killed, back at the seashore! He’d been trying hard to forget the encounter, though if he’d ever had to pick out anybody on looks alone to be worked over with a scimitar, that man would have been the one. But—he could not have come and demanded the camels! It was not possible! Tony had left him an exceedingly messy object on the sand, and had chased his two companions with the scimitar as much in horror of his first dead man as out of any sort of anger. He swallowed again, very pale.
“You could not speak our human language.” Ghail was tolerant, and scornful, and amused. “So I taught it to you. We hoped to make a bargain with you, because some of you djinn are willing to be traitors to your race. Perhaps you are ready to make such a bargain. But it is insolence for one of the djinn to think of purchasing a human slave!”
Even Tony’s conscience was stunned, now.
“L-look!” he said desperately. “In my world, djinns are only fables! What do they look like?”
“When the watcher on the city wall saw you on the desert, you had the form of a whirlwind. Why not? Is not that the way in which you travel?”
Tony swallowed yet again. His conscience had made a quick recovery. Now it began to say something piously satisfied about now look what a jam he’d gotten himself to, actually thinking romantic thoughts about an idiot girl who believed in imaginary creatures like djinns and efreets! But Tony shut it up. He saw implications of the theory of multiple worlds that he hadn’t realized before. What is true in one world is not necessarily true in another. What is false in one world, also, is not invariably false in another. Actually, if there are enough worlds, anything must be true somewhere. Anything!
And he remembered—and flinched at remembering—his impression of a huge, vaporous, open-mouthed face which had been looking down at him in the small boat when he waked on the shore. He remembered the sand devil, the whirlwind, which had looked like dark smoke in spite of the fact that it was whirling over white sand. It had kept pace with him as he went to meet the Bedouin and their attempt to kill him. It had hovered interestedly near during that encounter. And it had wavered hopefully after him all the way across the desert to this city.