It had begun as a double line of iron ribbons that stretched from north to south, following the contours of the desert’s edge. Then, the engine: a screaming creature of steam and steel that rode the iron faster than a jinni could fly. Terrifying explosions racked the air as the humans blasted tunnels out of ancient rock. Even the skies themselves became mazes, as railway trestles stretched between the cliff-sides and telegraph wires rose alongside the tracks.
With the trains to transport their harvests, the Homsi farmers now pushed outward, cultivating new fields of wheat and cotton. Safe, rocky soil turned damp and treacherous. The jinn at the desert’s eastern edge were herded inward, forcing rival clans into close quarters. Old feuds were resurrected, new ones invented—until even at the habitation’s center one could see the dust and sand clouding the air as they waged their petty battles.
But as troublesome as Homs had become for the jinn, it couldn’t begin to compare to Palmyra.
The oasis city of Palmyra had featured in the legends of both men and jinn for millennia. In ancient times, the stories went, a young human king named Sulayman had come to a palm-shaded village at a dusty crossroads and declared, This shall be a part of my kingdom. He demolished its brick huts, and commanded that edifices of shining stone be built in their place—all the work of legions of jinn who were bound into slavery by Sulayman’s magic. It was they who quarried the stones and lifted them into place on powerful winds, who roamed the desert in search of rare metals to gild them with. The tribes of men came to revere Sulayman, and told tales of his great deeds and greater wisdom—but in the stories of the jinn he was a despised tyrant, a figure of terror and hatred.
Even Sulayman was mortal, though, and when he died, the scourge of his rule died with him. Centuries later, the Romans would conquer Palmyra and make it a polyglot capital of commerce, a city of temples and amphitheaters and soaring colonnades. Then they, too, were conquered, and Palmyra shrank in significance as the trade routes shifted, becoming merely another oasis again. At last the local Bedu tribes reclaimed it, raising their tents beside the crumbling temples, herding their sheep among the columns.
But the memory of the jinn was long, and those who lived within sight of Palmyra’s foothills avoided them as a man might avoid a notorious abattoir. They called Palmyra the City of Sulayman, or simply the Cursed City, and it figured in many an elder’s threat:—Be careful, young one, or you will be banished to the City of Sulayman, and his ghost will rise from the stones to bind you. Or,—If you do not behave, I will take you to the Cursed City and cast you into the deepest, darkest well, then fill it to the brim with angry ghuls. No such threat was ever carried out, but the youngsters were cowed nevertheless.
Among this innumerable population of jinn there lived a young jinniyeh of fifty years or so who seemed, to all appearances, to be an ordinary member of her tribe. She’d spent her childhood in the usual way: learning to ride the winds, and fighting in the mock battles of the young, and listening to stories of brave jinn and dastardly humans, the tales that belonged to all her kind and those of her tribe alone. She heard the tales of the recent battles at the habitation’s western edge, and of the Homsi farmers who had caused them, and grew more and more curious—until finally she decided to see for herself.
—Come with me, she said to a young jinni, one of her usual playmates.
—Where are we going?
—To look at the humans.
Together they flew west. The habitation passed below them, bearing the signs of battle: sands swept clean by the winds, rocks cracked and scattered. At last they approached the outskirts of a farm, where green rows of winter wheat grew in soil dark with water. The air held traces of it, and prickled at them like a warning before a storm.
—It goes on forever, the young jinni said in nervous fascination.
—Look, said the jinniyeh.
A man was walking among the rows. In one hand he carried a curved metal blade fixed to a wooden handle. He stopped here and there to examine the soil, then chose a few of the stalks, sawed them carefully with the blade, and squinted at their cut ends.
The jinniyeh pointed at the blade.—Is that iron?
—Don’t go any closer, warned her companion. But she crept forward, and he followed, until they were directly behind the man, close enough to touch. The faint breeze they rode stirred the wheat and sent it shaking.
Suddenly the man whipped around, his scythe slicing through the air, its blade missing them by inches. Fear, involuntary and instinctual, seized the jinniyeh’s companion. In the next moment he’d turned and fled.
But the jinniyeh felt nothing.
Warily the farmer scanned the rows, scythe at the ready. At last he decided it had been a bird or an animal, not the bandits he’d feared. He set down his scythe and walked to the end of the row, to drink from a water-skin that waited beneath a tree.
The jinniyeh watched him go, then peered down at the scythe. What had happened? Why hadn’t she felt the fear? She came closer, closer—but still nothing. At last she changed to human form, lifted the scythe by its wooden handle and examined it. Rust bloomed here and there along the flat of the blade. Wheat-sap stained its edge. She braced herself, and touched it with a finger-tip.
Nothing. No terror, no cold and searing pain—only
