“I know,” she said condescendingly. “You men only really talk to each other. You don’t often see things straight. If you only talked to women more… about things that really matter, that is—”
“May Allah forbid!” said Tony grimly. “I’ve never yet talked to a woman who didn’t try to make me apologize for being a man, or any who’d have bothered to talk to me if I hadn’t been! You are a queen, Majesty, and you’re giving me what I take to be rather complicated instructions. I’m only a man. So whatever I do—because I’m a man—you will explain should have been done differently. No man can ever do anything exactly the way a woman would like him to, but whatever he does, women will make the best of it. So I’m not going to try to do whatever it is you’re trying to command. I’m going to handle this my way!”
He spoke hotly, through a natural association of their viewpoint with that of his conscience. Which had reason behind it, at that. But at the same time, he wondered rather desperately what his own way would be.
The Queen regarded him complacently.
“I know. Men are like that.” Then she added, “I think you and Ghail will be very happy.”
Ghail turned crimson. She stamped her foot furiously. “Majesty—” she cried. “You go too far—”
There was a small-sized uproar outside. The voice of the stout woman, in alarm:
“Abdul! Abdul! You can’t do things like that!”
Tony plunged to the door. At the foot of the wall which was the djinn king’s palace, almost a quarter of a mile away, there was a twelve-foot soldier- djinn who by his gestures had just communicated some message of importance. In the stretch between the wall and the farmhouse, a charging rhinoceros raced at top speed. It plunged toward the small group of buildings. Fifty yards away it seemed to stumble, crash, and in mid-air turned into a round ball with spiral red-and-white stripes which made a dizzying spectacle as it rolled. It was five feet in diameter. It checked abruptly two yards from the Queen’s door and there abruptly wrinkled itself, changed color, and collapsed into the short, fat, swaggering djinn with a turban who was Tony’s guide to this place, who was Nasim’s friend Abdul, and who had awaited a summons to duty as a valet in the form of a cockroach atop the window hangings of Tony’s bedroom.
He bowed profoundly.