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That very night he pulled his blue bull-lizard from a high cupboard, where the fellow had been gnawing on an old wine bottle, and whispered the words on his back, the black and winding words that the lizard’s fringed flesh offered up to him. The lizard’s eyes flared, and his scales split open to reveal terrible scarlet embers, and smoke belched from his poor mouth.
“Lem! You are a tedious man! Why do you drag me from my paradise of six towers, where the music of the Djinn twangs stars against the wind hour after hour, and pack me into your foul, stinking lizard once more? This is no fit vessel for me!”
“I am sorry, Kashkash! But I have great need! You were so kind and wise when last we spoke, and you heard my travails, and told me where to find my wife, huddled against the cliff! I have done so, and she is here, bedded into my house!”
“Then why do you trouble me?” The lizard licked his eyeball in an uninterested fashion. He grimaced, the taste of eyeball being less than savory.
“She is unhappy, and I cannot make her well. She does not speak, she does not make the tiger soup, she does not love the thyme-scented bed!” Lem rubbed the bridge of his nose and pled wretchedly with his beast. “I wish, I just wish her desires were not so great, that she were not so vast and empty, a pit into which my love pours and yet sounds no echo. I wish her needs were smaller and sweeter.” He licked his lips. “I fear she will take up the harp soon, and then where shall I be?”
The lizard considered. “Surely this is easy enough for me to accomplish, who may hold in the circuit of his arms all possible things, even to the crushing of a Star into a house not big enough for her smallest finger. Even this Star. But why should I do such a thing?”
“Because I will keep her safe! I will keep her and love her, I will be as grass beneath her feet, and I will never let the tigers touch her again, I swear it, noble Kashkash!” Lem took the tiny lizard’s claws into his hands.
“Don’t touch me, you filthy tiger-tanner. I certainly do not care—but very well. And have a care with this lizard. I do not enjoy being summoned. I prefer to appear in regal excitations of smoke and flame whenever I please.”
“Of course, Kashkash.”
“Go to your wife and see what I have accomplished in your name.”
“Yes, Kashkash.”
The flames beneath the lizard’s skin snuffed themselves out and his broken scales sealed up again with a hiss of steam.
I would like to say I felt it, but I did not. When Lem came rushing to me, his face once more full of eagerness and need, his face once more adoring and stricken, I was no larger than his hand. I waited for him to be horrified, to curse the name of his lizard, but he exclaimed, he exulted, he danced in his rickety house. He clasped me close to his cheek.
“Now you will never leave me, never, and we will be happy, Li, you will see!”
But I was not happy. I hated how small I had become, how impossible it was for me to eat or touch or see anything without the help of Lem, who for his part was pleased as a full tiger. He carved for me a tiny bed of cherrywood and packed it with soft linens. He made for me minuscule knives and forks. I wept, and little more. But as the years went on he began to fear for me, helpless as I had suddenly become. He forbade me to leave the house, to become the quick and thoughtless prey of a passing owl, and then forbade me to leave my bed of cherrywood, in case some cruel mouse were to take me in his hunger. I lay abed and did not move, and this suited me well enough, for I cared for nothing, and stared into the dark, trying to imagine myself home.
So it was that he removed the blue bull-lizard from its perch near the chimney, and whispered once more the incantatory scales which were scrawled there. I lay in my cradle and watched the poor beast swell up with fire and spew his smoke, remembering the scent of the burning grass, remembering the grass I had been.
“Lem, I do not like you.” The lizard belched. “Why must you call me again? I told you, I prefer my entrances to be of my own choosing.”
“But, Kashkash! Hear me! I cannot bear the state of my life—what if, small as she is, my darling Li, my crocus-girl, my cat, were to be gobbled up by a possum or rat or falcon who knows no better? I cannot watch her always! I have not slept in so many days.”
“What is it you ask of me? I cannot follow your gibbering.”
“I wish that she would stay with me forever, safe and whole and untouched! I wish I could be certain that she remain unharmed, for all my days and more!”
The burning lizard considered. “In your madness, Lem, you do know she is not your Li, don’t you? I never promised you your old wife back, and what I arranged for you was infinitely better than some lackluster flower-farmer.”
Poor Lem, gentle Lem, looked at his lizard blankly, without comprehension.
“She is a Star, Lem. She burned the earth when she came, and if you would understand me, I would tell you that I myself leapt from the smoke of her searing grasses. This is why you have this silly lizard, who nibbled rather densely at the scorched prairie where she fell. This is why I come to you when I have no real desire to. Every creature longs to see how his family is getting along.” The lizard grinned, fire leaping out of his throat. “But if this is your wish, I shall do what I must—and in this way no one will be able to say I was not the first, that I was not the finest and first of all Djinn! Darling Lem. Good boy. She will be safe, I promise. But this is your last wish.”
Lem frowned, his eyes bleary and dim. “Why? Because I have had three? I have heard this is a law.”
“No, because I find you tiresome. Go away.”
The lizard bellowed out his fire and closed up his scales. He extended his long, pink tongue, and on it was a box all of sparkling carnelian, on its edges carved wheeling, curling grasses, with a tiny
lock gleaming on its side. It was just the size of my bed.
“Oh,” breathed Lem. “Yes.”
THE TALE OF THE
CAGE OF IVORY
