In the neighborhood of Lower Manhattan called Little Syria, not far from where the Golem came ashore, there lived a tinsmith by the name of Boutros Arbeely. Arbeely was a Maronite Catholic who’d grown up in the bustling village of Zahleh, which lay in the valley below Mount Lebanon. He had come to adulthood at a time when it seemed every man under the age of thirty was leaving Greater Syria to seek his fortune in America. Some were spurred on by missionaries’ tales, or by relatives who’d made the journey and whose letters home now arrived thick with banknotes. Others saw a chance to elude the army conscription and punishing taxes demanded by their Turkish rulers. In all, so many left that in some villages the markets fell silent, and the grapes on the hillsides were left to burst on the vines.
Arbeely’s late father had come from a family of five brothers, and over the generations their land had been divided and redivided until each brother’s parcel was so small it was hardly worth the effort of planting. Arbeely himself made barely a pittance as a tinsmith’s apprentice. His mother and sisters kept silkworms to bring in extra money, but still it wasn’t enough. In the general rush to America, Arbeely saw his chance. He bid his family farewell and boarded a steamship bound for New York, and soon had rented a small smithing shop on Washington Street, at the heart of the growing Syrian neighborhood.
Arbeely was a good and conscientious worker, and even in New York’s crowded marketplace his goods stood out as quality for the price. He made cups and plates, pots and pans, household tools, thimbles, candlesticks. Occasionally a neighbor would bring him something to repair, a damaged pot or a twisted door hinge, and he would return it in better shape than when it was new.
That summer Arbeely received an interesting request. A woman named Maryam Faddoul came to the shop with an old, battered, yet rather lovely copper flask. The flask had been in Maryam’s family as long as she could remember; her mother, who’d used it for olive oil, had given it to Maryam when she’d sailed to America. “So you’ll always have a piece of home with you,” her mother had said.
With her husband Sayeed, Maryam had opened a coffeehouse on Washington Street, which quickly became a thriving hub of the neighborhood. One afternoon, while surveying her bustling kitchen, Maryam decided that the flask, while still beloved, had grown a bit too pockmarked and worn. Would it be possible, she asked Arbeely, to repair a few of the dents? And perhaps restore the polish?
Alone in his shop, Arbeely examined the flask. It was about nine inches high, with a round, bulbous body that tapered to a thin neck. Its maker had decorated it with a very precise and detailed band of scrollwork. Instead of the usual repeating pattern, the loops and whorls threaded through their neighbors seemingly at random, before joining up with themselves again.
Arbeely turned the flask around in his hands, fascinated. Clearly it was old, older perhaps than Maryam or her mother knew. Copper was rarely used on its own anymore, owing to its softness; brass and tin were much more durable and easier to work. In fact, given its likely age, the flask didn’t seem as battered as perhaps it should have been. There was no way to determine its provenance, for it had no forger’s stamp on its bottom, no identifying mark of any kind.
He examined the deep dents in the scrollwork, and realized that correcting them would lead to visible seams between the new work and the old. Better, he decided, to smooth out the copper, repair the flask, and then rework the entire design.
He wrapped a sheet of thin vellum around the base, found a stick of charcoal, and took a rubbing of the scrollwork, careful to catch every mark of the maker’s awl. Then he secured the flask in a vise, and fetched his smallest soldering iron from the fire.
As he stood there, his iron poised above the flask, a strange feeling of foreboding stole over him. His arms and back turned to gooseflesh. Shivering, he put down the iron, and took a deep breath. What could possibly be bothering him? It was a warm day, and he’d eaten a hearty breakfast. He was healthy, and business was good. He shook his head, took up the iron again, and touched it to the scrollwork, erasing one of the loops.
A powerful jolt blasted him off his feet, as though he’d been struck by lightning. He flew through the air and landed in a heap beside a worktable. Stunned, ears ringing, he turned over and looked around.
There was a naked man lying on the floor of his shop.
As Arbeely stared in amazement, the man drew himself to sitting and pressed his hands to his face. Then he dropped his hands and gazed around, eyes wide and burning. He looked as though he’d been chained for years in the world’s deepest, darkest dungeon, and then hauled roughly into the light.
The man staggered to his feet. He was tall and well built, with handsome features. Too handsome, in fact—his face had an eerie flawlessness, like a painting come to life. His dark hair was cropped short. He seemed unconscious of his nakedness.
On the man’s right wrist was a wide metal cuff. The man appeared to notice it at the same time as Arbeely. He held up his arm and stared at it, horrified. “Iron,” he said. And then, “But that’s impossible.”
Finally the man’s glance caught Arbeely, who still crouched next to the table, not even daring to breathe.
With a sudden terrible grace, the man swooped down upon Arbeely, grabbed him around the neck, and lifted him clean off the floor. A dark red haze filled Arbeely’s sight. He felt his head brush the ceiling.
“Where is he?” the man shouted.
“Who?” wheezed Arbeely.
“The wizard!”
Arbeely tried to speak but could only gargle. Snarling, the naked man threw him back to the ground. Arbeely gasped for air. He looked around for a weapon, anything, and saw the soldering iron lying in a pile of rags, gently smoldering. He grabbed its handle, and lunged.
A blur of movement—and then Arbeely was stretched out on the floor again, this time with the iron’s curved handle pressed at the hollow of his throat. The man knelt over him, holding the iron by its red-hot tip. There was no smell of burning flesh. The man didn’t so much as flinch. And as Arbeely stared aghast into that too-perfect face, he could feel the cool handle at his throat turn warm, and then hot, and then hotter still—as though the man were heating it somehow.
This, Arbeely thought, is very, very impossible.
“Tell me where the wizard is,” the man said, “so I can kill him.”
Arbeely gaped at him.
“He trapped me in human form! Tell me where he is!”
The tinsmith’s mind began to race. He looked down at the soldering iron, and remembered that strange foreboding he’d felt before he touched it to the flask. He recalled his grandmother’s stories of flasks and oil lamps, all with creatures trapped inside.
No. It was ludicrous. Such things were only stories. But then, the only alternative was to conclude that he’d gone mad.
“Sir,” he whispered, “are you a jinni?”
The man’s mouth tightened, and his gaze turned wary. But he didn’t laugh at Arbeely, or call him insane.
“You are,” Arbeely said. “Dear God, you are.” He swallowed, wincing against the touch of the soldering iron. “Please. I don’t know this wizard, whoever he is. In fact, I’m not sure there are any wizards left at all.” He paused. “You may have been inside that flask for a very long time.”
The man seemed to take this in. Slowly the metal moved away from the tinsmith’s neck. The man stood and turned about, as though seeing the workshop for the first time. Through the high window came the noises of the street: of horse-drawn carts, and the shouts of the paperboys. On the Hudson, a steamship horn sounded long and low.
“Where am I?” the man asked.
“You’re in my shop,” Arbeely said. “In New York City.” He was trying to speak calmly. “In a place called America.”
The man walked over to Arbeely’s workbench and picked up one of the tinsmith’s long, thin irons. He gripped it with a look of horrified fascination.
“It’s real,” the man said. “This is all real.”
“Yes,” Arbeely said. “I’m afraid it is.”
The man put down the iron. Muscles in his jaw spasmed. He seemed to be readying himself for the worst.
“Show me,” he said finally.
Barefoot, clad only in an old work shirt of Arbeely’s and a pair of dungarees, the Jinni stood at the railing at Castle Gardens, at the southern tip of Manhattan, and stared out across the bay. Arbeely stood nearby, perhaps afraid to draw too close. The shirt and dungarees had come from a pile of old rags in the corner of Arbeely’s workshop. The dungarees were solder-stained, and there were holes burned into the shirtsleeves. Arbeely had had to show him how to do up the buttons.
The Jinni leaned against the railing, transfixed by the view. He was a creature of the desert, and never in his life had he come so close to this much water. It lapped at the stone below his feet, reaching now higher, now lower. Muted colors floated on its surface, the afternoon sunlight reflecting in the ever-changing dips of the waves. Still it was hard to believe that this was not some expert illusion, intended to befuddle him. At any moment he expected the city and water to dissolve, to be replaced by the familiar steppes and plateaus of the Syrian Desert, his home for close to two hundred years. And yet the moments ticked away, and New York Harbor remained stubbornly intact.
How, he wondered, had he come to this place?
The Syrian Desert is neither the harshest nor the most barren of the Arabian deserts, but it is nevertheless a forbidding place for those who do not know its secrets. It was here that the Jinni was born, in what men would later call the seventh century.
Of the many types of jinn—they are a highly diverse race, with many different forms and abilities—he was one of the most powerful and intelligent. His true form was insubstantial as a wisp of air, and invisible to the human eye. When in this form, he could summon winds, and ride them across the desert. But he could also take on the shape of any animal, and become as solid as if he were made of muscle and bone. He would see with that animal’s eyes, feel with that animal’s skin—but his true nature was always that of the jinn, who were creatures of fire, in the same manner that humans are said to be creatures of earth. And like all his brethren jinn, from the loathsome, flesh-eating ghuls to the tricksterish ifrits, he never stayed in any one shape for very long.
The jinn tend to be solitary creatures, and this one was more so than most. In his younger years, he’d participated in the haphazard rituals and airborne skirmishes of what could loosely be called jinn society. Some minor slight or squabble would be seized upon, and hundreds of jinn would summon the winds and ride them into battle, clan against clan. The gigantic whirlwinds they caused would fill the air with sand, and the other denizens of the desert would take shelter in caves and the shadows of boulders, waiting for the storm to pass.
But as he matured, the Jinni grew dissatisfied with these diversions, and took to wandering the desert alone. He was inquisitive by nature—though no one thing could hold his attention for long—and rode the winds as far west as the Libyan Desert, and east to the plains of Isfahan. In doing so, he took more of a risk than was sensible. Even in the driest desert a rainstorm could strike with little warning, and a jinni caught in the rain was in mortal danger. For no matter what shape a jinni might assume, be it human or animal or its own true shape of no shape at all, it was still a living spark of fire, and could easily be extinguished.
But whether luck or skill guided his path, the Jinni was never caught out and roamed wherever he would. He used these trips as opportunities to search for veins of silver and gold, for the jinn are natural metalsmiths, and this one was unusually adept. He could work the metals into strands no thicker than a hair, or into sheets, or twisted ropes. The only metal he could not touch was iron: for like all his kind, he held a powerful dread of iron, and shied away from rocks veined with ore in the way a man might recoil from a poisonous snake.
One can wander far and wide in the desert without spying another creature of intelligence. But the jinn were far from alone, for they had dwelt as neighbors with humans for many thousands of years. There were the Bedouin, the roving tribes of herdsmen who scratched out their perilous existence on what the desert had to offer. And there were also the human cities far to the east and west, which grew larger every year, and sent their caravans through the desert between them. But neighbors though they were, both humans and jinn harbored a deep distrust of each other. Humankind’s fear was perhaps more acute, for the jinn had the advantage of invisibility or disguise. Certain wells and caves and rock-strewn passes were considered habitations of the jinn, and to trespass was to invite calamity. Bedouin women pinned amulets of iron beads to their babies’ clothing, to repel any jinn that might try to possess them, or carry them away and turn them to changelings. It was said among the human storytellers that there had once been wizards, men of great and dangerous knowledge, who’d learned to command and control the jinn, and trap them in lamps or flasks. These wizards, the storytellers said, had long since passed from existence, and only the faintest shadows of their powers remained.
But the lives of the jinn were very long—a jinni’s lifespan might last eight or nine times the length of a human’s—and their memories of the wizards had not yet faded to legend. The elder jinn warned against encounters with humans, and called them conniving and perfidious. The wizards’ lost knowledge, they said, might be found again. It was best to be cautious. And so interactions between the two races mostly were kept to the occasional encounter, usually provoked by the lesser jinn, the ghuls and ifrits who could not keep themselves from mischief.
When young, the Jinni had listened to the elders’ warnings and taken heed. In his travels he’d avoided the Bedouin, and steered clear of the caravans that moved slowly across the landscape, bound for the markets of Syria and Jazira, Iraq and Isfahan. But it was perhaps inevitable that one day he should spy upon the horizon a column of some twenty or thirty men, their camels loaded with precious goods, and think, why should he not investigate? The jinn of old had been incautious and foolhardy in allowing themselves to be captured, but he was neither. No harm would come from merely observing.
He approached the caravan slowly and fell in behind at a safe distance, matching their pace. The men wore long, loose robes of many layers, all dusty with travel, and covered their heads with checked cloth against the sun. Snatches of their conversations carried to the Jinni on the wind: the time to their next destination, or the likelihood of bandits. He heard the weariness in their voices, saw the fatigue that hunched their backs. These were no wizards! If they’d had any powers they would magic themselves across the desert, and save themselves this endless plodding.
After a few hours the sun began to lower, and the caravan passed into an unfamiliar part of the desert. The Jinni remembered his caution, and turned back toward safer ground. But this glimpse of humankind had only inflamed his curiosity. He began to watch for the caravans, and followed them more and more often, though always at a distance; for if he drew too close, the animals would grow nervous and skittish, and even the men would feel him as a wind at their backs. At night, when they came to rest at an oasis or caravanserai, the Jinni would listen to them talk. Sometimes they spoke of the distances they had to travel, their pains and worries and woes. Other times they spoke of their childhoods, and the fireside tales their mothers and aunts and grandmothers had told them. They exchanged well-worn stories, boasts of their own or of the warriors of ages past, kings and caliphs and wazirs. They all knew the stories by heart, though they never told them the same way twice and quibbled happily over the details. The Jinni was especially fascinated at any mention of the jinn, as when the men told tales of Sulayman, the human ruler who seven hundred years before had yoked the jinn to his rule, the first and last of the human kings to do so.
The Jinni watched, and listened, and decided they were a fascinating paradox. What drove these short-lived creatures to be so oddly self-destructive, with their punishing journeys and brutal battles? And how, at barely eighteen or twenty years of age, could they grow to be so intelligent and cunning? They spoke of amazing accomplishments, in cities such as ash-Sham and al-Quds: sprawling markets and new mosques, wondrous buildings such as the world had never seen. Jinn-kind, who did not like to be enclosed, had never attempted anything to compare; at most the homes of the jinn were bare shelters against the rain. But the Jinni grew intrigued by the idea. And so he selected a spot in a valley and, when he was not chasing caravans, began to build himself a palace. He heated and shaped the desert sands into curving sheets of opaque blue-green glass, forming walls and staircases, floors and balconies. Around the walls he wove a filigree of silver and gold, so that the palace appeared to be netted inside a shining web. He spent months making and unmaking it according to his whim, and twice razed it to the ground in frustration. Even when whole and habitable, the palace was never truly finished. Some rooms sat open to the stars, their ceilings confiscated to serve as floors elsewhere. The web of filigree grew as he found veins of metal in the desert rocks, and then all but vanished when he ransacked it to gild an entire hall. Like himself, the palace was usually invisible to other beings; but the men of the desert would sometimes glimpse it from a distance, as the last rays of the evening sun struck it and set it ablaze. Then they would turn, and spur their horses faster—and not until many miles had passed, and they were safe within sight of their own cooking fires, would they dare to look back again.
The shadows were growing longer at Castle Gardens, yet still the Jinni could not tear his eyes from the harbor. Once, when quite young, he’d come across a small pool in an oasis. In the manner of youth everywhere determined to test their limits, he took on the shape of a jackal, waded into the pool up to his haunches, and stood there as long as he dared, the chill seeping up through his paws and into his limbs. Only when he thought his legs might collapse did he leap back out again. It was the closest he’d ever come to death. And that had only been a very small pool.
It would take almost no effort to vault the railing, to fall or leap in. Only a minute or two of immersion, and he would be extinguished.
Nauseated, he dragged his eyes away. Steamers and tugboats chugged by, leaving their spreading wakes behind. At the horizon, the fading light picked out an undulating line of land. On an island in the middle distance there stood an enormous statue in the shape of a woman, made of what looked to be some greenish metal. The scale of the statue was boggling. How many rocks must have been melted, how much raw metal collected, to create her? And how did she not break through the thin disk of land, and fall into the sea?
According to Arbeely, this bay was only the smallest part of an ocean whose vastness defied comprehension. Even in his native form he could never have hoped to cross it—and now that native form was lost to him. He’d examined the iron cuff thoroughly, hoping to find some overlooked weakness, but there was none. Wide but thin, it fit close to his wrist, and was hinged on one side. The setting sunlight gave a dull sheen to the clasp with its pin. He couldn’t budge the pin, no matter how hard he pulled. And he knew, without even trying, that Arbeely’s tools would be no match for it.
He closed his eyes and attempted for the hundredth time to change form, straining against the cuff’s enchantment. But it was as though the ability had never existed. And even more astonishing, he had no recollection of how it had come to be on his wrist.
Along with their longevity, the jinn were blessed with prodigious, near-eidetic memories, and the Jinni was no exception. To him, a human’s powers of recollection would seem only a dubious patchwork of images. But the days—weeks? longer?—that preceded capture, and the event itself, were concealed from his mind by a thick haze.
His last clear memory was of returning to his palace after tracking an especially large caravan, with close to a hundred men and three hundred camels. He’d followed them eastward for two days, listening to their conversations, slowly getting to know them as individuals. One camel driver, a thin, older man, liked to sing quietly to himself. The songs told of brave Bedouin men on swift horses, and the virtuous women who loved them; but the man’s voice carried a sadness even when the words did not. Two guards had discussed a new mosque in the city of ash-Sham, called the Grand Mosque, apparently an immense building of stunning beauty. Another young guard was soon to marry, and the others all took turns joking at his expense, telling him not to worry, they would hide outside his tent on his wedding night, and whisper what to do. The young guard retorted by asking why he should trust their advice on women; and his tormentors responded with fantastic tales of their own sexual prowess that had the entire company howling with laughter.
He’d followed them until at last on the horizon he spied a low band of green. It was the Ghouta, the oasis fed by the river that bordered ash-Sham. Reluctantly he’d slowed his pace and watched until the caravan became a thin wedge on the horizon, a spear-point piercing the Ghouta. The green belt might appear benign, but even the Jinni was not so rash as to travel into it. He was a jinni of the desert, and in the Ghouta’s lush fields he would be out of his element. There were stories of creatures there that didn’t take kindly to wayward jinn, and would trick them into the river, holding them under until they were extinguished. He decided to exercise caution for once and return home.
The journey back had been long, and by the time he reached his palace a strange loneliness had settled over him. Perhaps it had to do with the caravan. He’d grown used to their conversation, their songs and stories; but he had no part in them, he merely overheard. Perhaps it had been too long since he’d sought out his own kind. He decided he would leave off chasing caravans, and go to the habitations of his clan, and dwell among them for a time. Perhaps he’d even seek out female companionship, a jinniyeh who might desire his attentions. He’d arrived at his palace at sunset, making plans to leave again in the morning—and there his memories ended.
After that, only two images penetrated the haze. In the first, a man’s brown, gnarled hands clamped the iron cuff across his wrist, and with this image came the impression of searing cold and bottomless fear, a jinni’s natural reaction to iron—but how, he wondered, did he not feel it now? And then, the second image: a man’s leathered face, lips cracked and grinning, the bulging yellow eyes glowing in triumph. Wizard, the memory told him. But that was all; and in the next instant he was sprawled, naked and bound, on the floor of Arbeely’s shop.
Except that it had not been only an instant. Apparently he’d been trapped in the flask for over a thousand years.
It was Arbeely who’d managed to calculate that figure, while searching for clothes for his naked guest. He’d pressed the Jinni for anything he could remember from the world of men, something that might narrow down the year of his capture. After a few false starts, the Jinni had recalled the caravan guards talking of the Grand Mosque, the new building in ash-Sham. “They’d said that inside the mosque was the head of a man, but not his body,” he said. “It made no sense to me. I might have misunderstood.”
But Arbeely assured the Jinni that he’d heard correctly. The head belonged to a man called John the Baptist, and the mosque was now known as the Umayyad Mosque—and it had stood in the city of ash-Sham for over a thousand years.
It didn’t seem possible. How could he have been trapped for that long? Rare was the jinni that lived more than eight hundred years, and he himself had been nearing two hundred when he began to chase the caravans. But not only was he still alive, he felt no older than before. It was as though the flask had not only contained his body, but also paused him in time. He supposed that this way, a wizard could extend the usefulness of his captive for as long as possible.
The flask now sat on a shelf in Arbeely’s shop. Like the iron cuff, it revealed nothing of its maker. Arbeely had shown him the partially erased pattern of scrollwork around its base—apparently a sort of magical stopper that had kept him sealed inside. But how did you fit in there with the olive oil? Arbeely had asked, a puzzle not nearly as interesting to the Jinni as how he’d allowed himself to be captured and bound to human form in the first place. Perhaps the wizard had followed him to the jinn habitations, or laid some sort of trap. He wondered if the wizard had treated him like one of Sulayman’s slaves, forcing him to build pleasure palaces and slaughter enemies at his command. Or had the wizard simply cast him aside, like an enticing trinket that, once acquired, loses its appeal?
Of course, the man would be dead by now. The wizards of legend had been powerful indeed, but still mortal. The yellow-eyed man had long since gone to dust. And whatever enchantment he’d placed upon the Jinni, his death had not lifted it. The thought came, crawling, hideous: he might be trapped like this forever.
No. He pushed the thought away. He would not accept defeat so easily.
He looked down at the iron railing, then gripped it with both hands, concentrating. He was near exhaustion; the confinement in the flask had apparently destroyed his strength—but even so, within a few moments the metal was glowing a dull red. He tightened his grip and then let go, leaving behind an outline of his fingers pressed into the railing. No, he wasn’t helpless. He was still a jinni, one of the most powerful of his kind. And there were always ways.
He was beginning to shiver, but he ignored it. Instead he turned and gazed up at the city that rose from the water’s edge, the enormous square buildings that reached far into the heavens, their windows set with perfect panes of glass. As fantastical as cities like ash-Sham and al-Quds had seemed from the caravan men’s tales, the Jinni doubted that they’d been half so wondrous or terrifying as this New York. If he must be marooned in an unknown land, surrounded by a deadly ocean, and constrained to one weak and imperfect form, at least he’d ended up somewhere worth exploring.
Arbeely stood a few feet away, watching the glow of the iron railing fade beneath the Jinni’s hands. It still seemed impossible that this could be happening while the rest of the city went about its business, unchanged and unknowing. He wanted to grab the nearest passerby and shout: Look at this man! He isn’t a man at all! See what he’s done to the railing! He supposed that if he wanted to be hauled off to the lunatic asylum, there were worse ways to go about it.
He looked out across the bay, trying to see it through the Jinni’s eyes. He wondered how he himself would feel, to wake up and discover that over a thousand years had passed. It would be enough to drive anyone mad. But the Jinni only stood straight-backed and grim, staring at the water. He didn’t look like a man about to run amok. The dirty, too-small clothes he wore clashed ludicrously with his figure and features, hanging from him as though in apology. He turned his back to the water and gazed at the buildings massed at the park’s edge. It was only then that Arbeely noticed that the Jinni was shaking from head to toe.
The Jinni took a step from the railing. His knees buckled, and he fell.
Arbeely lunged and caught him before he hit the ground, and hoisted him to his feet. “Are you ill?”
“No,” the Jinni muttered. “Cold.”
They made their way back to the shop, Arbeely half-supporting, half-carrying his new acquaintance. Once inside, the Jinni stumbled to the banked forge and collapsed, leaning against its scorching side. The borrowed work shirt smoldered where it touched the metal, but he didn’t seem to notice. He closed his eyes. After a while his shaking stopped, and Arbeely decided he’d fallen asleep.
The man sighed and looked about. There was the copper flask, sitting on the shelf, but he didn’t want to think about it for the moment. He needed an easy task, something quiet and calming. He found a teakettle with a hole in the bottom, brought to him by a local restaurant owner. Perfect: he could patch a teakettle in his sleep. He cut a patch from a sheet of tin plate, heated both kettle and patch, and set to work.
Occasionally he glanced at his guest, and wondered what would happen when he woke. Even silent and unmoving, the Jinni carried a strange air about him—as though he were not quite real, or else the only real thing in the room. Arbeely supposed that others would sense it as well, but he doubted they’d ever guess at its meaning. The young mothers of Little Syria still tied iron beads around their babies’ wrists and made gestures to ward off the Evil Eye, but out of tradition and fond superstition more than true fear. This new world was far removed from the tales of their grandmothers—or at least so they’d thought.
Not for the first time he wished he had a confidant, someone with whom he could share even the most outrageous secret. But in the tightly knit community, Boutros Arbeely was something of an outsider, even a recluse, happiest at his forge. He was terrible at idle chitchat, and at wedding banquets could be found sitting alone at a table, examining the stamp-marks on the cutlery. His neighbors greeted him warmly on the street, but never lingered long to talk. He had many acquaintances, but few close friends.
It had been no different in Zahleh. In a family of women he’d been the silent, dreaming boy-child. He’d discovered smithing by lucky accident. Sent to run an errand, he’d stopped in front of the local forge and watched, fascinated, as a sweating man hammered a sheet of metal until it became a bucket. It was the transformation that enthralled him: useless to useful, nothing to something. He returned over and over to watch until the smith, exasperated with being spied upon, offered to take on the boy as an apprentice. And so smithing came to fill Arbeely’s life, to the near exclusion of all else; and though he supposed in a vague way that someday he’d find a wife and start a family, he was content with things as they were.
But now, glancing at his guest’s prone form, he felt a premonition of lasting change. It was the same as when he’d been seven years old and heard his mother’s rising wail through the open window as she learned of her husband’s death, killed by bandits on the road from Beirut. Now as then, he sensed the threads of his life scattering and rearranging before this new and overwhelming thing that had landed among them.
“What is that you’re doing?”
Arbeely jumped. The Jinni hadn’t moved, but his eyes were open; Arbeely wondered how long he’d been watching. “I’m patching a teakettle,” he said. “Its owner left it on the stove too long.”
The Jinni inclined his head toward the kettle. “And what metal is that?”
“It’s two metals,” said Arbeely. “Steel, dipped in tin.” He found a scrap on the table and held it out to the Jinni, pointing out the layers with his fingernail. “Tin, steel, tin. You see? The tin is too soft to use on its own, and with steel there’s the problem of rust. But together like this, they’re very strong, and versatile.”
“I see. Ingenious.” He sat up straighter, and held out his hand to the teakettle. “May I?” Arbeely handed him the kettle, and the Jinni peered at it, turning it over in his now-steady hands. “I assume the difficulty lies in thinning the edges of the patch without exposing the steel.”
“That’s it exactly,” said Arbeely, surprised.
The Jinni laid his hand over the patch. After a few moments, he began to carefully rub the patch around its edges. Arbeely watched, dumbfounded, as the outline of the patch disappeared.
The Jinni handed the teakettle back to Arbeely. It was as though the hole had never been.
“I have a proposition for you,” said the Jinni.
Spring rains can come on suddenly in the desert. On the morning after the Jinni returned from following the caravan to the Ghouta, the skies clouded over, releasing first a thin patter of raindrops, and then a respectable downpour. The dry riverbeds and gullies began to run with water. The Jinni watched the rain sluice down the walls and crenellations of his palace, irritated at the inconvenience. He had planned to depart for the jinn habitations at first light, but now he would have to wait.
And so he roamed his glass halls, examining the metalwork and making idle changes here and there to pass the time. His thoughts returned to the men of the caravan, their conversations and jests. He remembered the old man’s songs about the Bedouin, and wondered if the men in them had truly been so brave, the women so beautiful. Or were they only invented legends, the details altered and exaggerated over time?
For three days the rains came and went, three days of infuriating confinement. If the Jinni had been able to go outside, and chase himself to the ends of the earth, then his growing obsession with the world of men might have dissipated, and he might have gone to visit the jinn habitations of his youth, as planned. But when the clouds exhausted themselves and the Jinni at last emerged to a newly washed landscape, he found that all thoughts of returning to his own people had vanished with the rains.