The Caliph's House Read Online Free PDF Page A

blood?”
    â€œNo, no, no,” the Bear riposted. “You are the new master of the house and so only your blood will do.”
    We filed up to the toilet again and stared into the bowl. The thought that only my blood would suffice made me feel somehow important, indispensable—as if I was in charge. The Bear handed me the pin. I pricked my forefinger and let a large, single droplet of crimson blood splatter into the water. The guardians smiled broadly like Cheshire cats and took it in turns to shake my hand.
    From then on, they seemed to regard me with a little more respect. Osman brought a pot of chicken soup for us the next night. He said his wife had made it from a recipe that had been in her family for six hundred years. One mouthful and, he claimed, we would dance like angels inside. I was touched by the thoughtfulness and rather liked the idea of dancing like an angel. The soup was flavored with fresh coriander and saffron and a hint of ginger. It was quite delicious and made a change from our stark diet of bread and triangles of processed cheese. The morning after that, Hamza crept into the bedroom and sprinkled us with pink rose petals while we slept. And, so as not to be outdone, the Bear presented us with talismans fashioned from black calfskin. There was one each, of differing sizes—ranging from large to very small. We tied them around our necks dutifully and praised their craftsmanship.
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    THE FIRST DAYS SLIPPED BY . Talk of Jinns died down, but I knew the subject was still very much on the agenda. Hamza would roam around the house reciting verses from the Qur’an or sketching magic squares on the whitewashed walls. He said the squares were amulets. They were formed of nine smaller squares, each with a number written inside. Add up the three numbers of any line, and you got the number fifteen. When I asked what they were for, Hamza said they would help bring
baraka,
divine blessing, back to the Caliph’s House.
    The focus of his prayers was the largest courtyard, in which there lay a wonderful secret garden. It looked like the oldest part of the house. At each end there stood a long salon with a colonnaded verandah. The room at the east end had fabulous cedar doors twenty feet high and a pair of giant matching windows carved with geometric designs. I planned to turn it into a library lined with bookshelves from the floor up to the ceiling.
    After a week at the house, I realized that I still hadn’t seen inside the room at the western end of the courtyard. I tried the handle but it was firmly locked. Hamza was crouching behind a squat palm tree, going over a magic square with a nugget of coal. I asked him to open the door. He saluted, then pretended not to understand. When I repeated the request, he seemed displeased, but ambled off to fetch the key.
    As the chief guardian, nothing was more important to him than maintaining control. He controlled Osman and the Bear, anyone who came to the house, and, through skillful corralling, he managed to control us, too. The most effective method of staying in control was to lock all the doors at all times, unless one of us was in the room. Even then he quite frequently locked us inside. He kept all the keys in an old shoebox. There were hundreds of them. I would leave the kitchen for a few seconds to take a plate of food to Ariane, and when I came back, the room would be locked. The same with the bathroom—leave it for a moment and you couldn’t get back in. Sometimes you would hear Hamza’s worn leather-soled slippers shuffling away and the box of keys jangling.
    I waited twenty-five minutes at the locked courtyard door for Hamza to return. He may have been hoping I had lost interest and had gone on to do something else. When he did finally turn up, the shoebox under one arm, his head was stooped low. He rummaged in the box for a moment and winced in declaration: “The key isn’t