“How do you mean?”
“The family would come home and find their belongings outside. On the street, on the roof. So they would bring them back in again, but whenever they went out, they came home and even the furniture was outside the house. They said, ‘No more!’ and left, but another man, he came and said he would live there. He did not mind about jinn. Jinn, you see, are weaker than men. They cannot control us. We have the stronger soul. So he moved into the house and he brought some things, and for two days everything was fine. Until one night, he was thrown from his bed. The wall pushed him out. He was very frightened, but he stayed another night. And the same thing—something pushed from behind and he fell on the floor. Still he would not leave. He did not want to be weaker than the jinn, but he had no sleep and was afraid of being hurt, and he was becoming crazy. His sister, she say, ‘Come to my house, and you will sleep like a baby.’ So he went with her and slept for two days and then he went back to his house—and, ya Allah! All his belongings were in the street. He left then and that house is still empty. The jinn have it now. They wanted it. They have it.”
“So . . . in this case, they were stronger than the humans?”
“This man had a weak soul.”
He had another story, and then another, in which jinn were angels of mercy.
The warm waters of the spring were tingling on Gabriel’s skin. “So they’re not evil? I mean, dangerous?”
Abid wobbled his head. “Sometimes yes. Sometimes no. Men are stronger, so bad men can use jinn to do bad things to their enemies.”
“You mean like casting a spell on someone?”
“A spell, yes.”
“And you believe in them?”
“God made man and jinn to worship Him. They are like us—Muslim and Jew and non-believer.”
“Have you ever seen one?”
Abid looked down along the gurgling river. “Yes.”
“And?”
But Abid got up, wiping the dust off the back of his dishdasha.
“So humans can see jinn, yeah?”
“If the jinni wants you to see him, you can see him. We must hurry.” Abid was heading back to the car. “It will rain soon.”
A black cloud had darkened the river, which no longer seemed so tame; in the gloaming, it looked very much like a hideaway for spooks and specters. Gabriel felt edgy as they set off for Rustaq to see another fort, especially when a few drops of water on the windscreen suddenly became slashing rain that thundered down onto the jeep.
With a glance at the sky, Abid invoked Allah as the vehicle bumped off the stones and back up to the track. “This is not good. It has been raining in the mountains. The wadis will flood.”
“Flash floods? Really?”
“Don’t worry. It will be fine.”
They managed to get across one wadi, where the river was rising, before coming to another just as a great torrent of brown water came roiling past. Abid drove back to a more elevated spot and parked. They could go neither forward nor back. “We have to wait.”
“So this is a flash flood?” Gabriel asked, raising his voice to be heard above the lashing on the roof and watching the slow flow of sludge. “Not exactly flashy, is it?”
“But it is very strong.”
Raindrops bounced around the bonnet, furious.
“How long will we be here?”
“A few hours maybe.”
“How many hours?”
Abid shrugged. “Five. Six.”
“Jesus.” They might be there all night. Omanis were loose with time. It was an elastic concept: five, six hours could mean ten, or two, and Gabriel loved it. He’d be happy to get into the groove of a time-loose existence—but this flood was keeping him from her.
From her, his jinniya. No way. For one thing, she had an Irish accent. She wasn’t Eastern in any respect. Irish jinn—now there’s a concept.
The water, thick as mud and full of debris, pushed past, with sporadic rushes, as if upstream someone was sweeping out a lake.
Unprompted, Abid began to talk again. His uncle, he said, had married a jinn and had a jinn family—female jinniya, he explained, always gave birth to jinn children—and they lived alongside his human family in another house beyond the orchard, but no one knew about them until his uncle died. He had divided his estate between his jinn family and his human family, since the Quran insists that all wives and children should be equally cared for, but his mortal children could not accept this. His eldest son even moved his own family into the house where the jinn lived. Abid shrugged. “For the jinn wife, it’s punishment time. After the funeral—fourteen days—any time the family has a meal, huge dust comes and spoils it. And then the house, the windows are rattling, shaking, showing her anger. Still they won’t recognize her, so she sends her boys to cry outside the door and the human family couldn’t do anything to stop this, so his sons went to find out what was the problem and she came to meet them. ‘I came only for one reason,’ she told them. ‘My children they have human brothers and if you don’t recognize them, I will make sure you will disappear from this world. One by one.’ The dead man’s sons laughed and told her that jinn are not strong enough to do that, but she said, ‘I have the power. My husband made me that promise, that my family would be recognized, and if a human promises something, he should do it.’”
Abid looked up and down the watercourse a little uneasily. “Jinn live sometimes near riverbeds. Places where not many people come. Like this. They come at the end of the day.”
He seemed a little spooked; Gabriel was fairly spooked himself.
“Very soon after that,”
