Craig Shaw Gardner by A Bad Day for Ali Baba

Author:A Bad Day for Ali Baba
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 2011-03-25T22:00:00+00:00

BOOK THE THIRD:

being

EVERYONE’S STORY

Chapter the Twenty-fifth,

in which, although there is still no cash,

yet does something get carried.

“But where are we?” Ali Baba asked, for even his woodcutter’s senses were befuddled by their djinni-aided flight.

“I have been this way before,” Harun remarked. “When you have been with these thieves as long as I have, you have been every way. I believe we are but a little distance from the cavern that contains all our gold.”

“What shall we do now?” Achmed asked of the others. “We could leave this life behind, shave our beards and trade in our robes for respectable clothes.” He looked to Marjanah, who, for some reason, had been spending a great deal of time in Achmed’s presence. “We could find new reasons to start afresh.”

“But what of that gold?” one of the others mentioned. “Not that any one of us wants to be a member of these thieves forever. But as long as that gold is there, who better deserves to have it than those who labored so to obtain it?”

“There are also some among us,” the thief once named Sinbad (and could now probably again be called by that name) remarked, “who are none too certain they want to remain in one locale for too long a period of time.”

“Surely,” Achmed objected, “you could not still be worried about-”

“The Queen of the Apes is everywhere!” Sinbad said, his eyes wide with fright.

“Oh, come now,” Achmed chided, “I was with you on those many months of flight before we were captured by the thieves. In all that time, the Queen of the Apes only caught you on six occasions.” He paused to think. “Or was it seven?”

But the other man would not be comforted. “It is easy for you to say!

You did not have to feel those paws! And those hairy kisses!” Sinbad began to look as if he had spent far too much time out in the sun. “And then, when she put all her weight atop me!” It was evident, from his expression, that he could bring himself to say no more.

Achmed answered with a question. “But if the Queen of the Apes was so set upon having you, why has she not found you again in all these months?”

“In this,” Sinbad replied, “the thieves saved me. I believe that she was scared away by our numbers.”

“But we must go on,” Achmed insisted. “All our voyages, all we have accomplished, cannot end like this!”

There it was again, thought Ali Baba, that thing about voyages. He had asked somewhat after this before, and received a somewhat oblique answer. But, now that they were free of their vile leader, he could no longer hold back on his questions, for now he trusted these others as closely as his own brother; more closely, actually, seeing as his actual brother was Kassim.

“Are you, then,” he asked of this Sinbad, who was actually a bit upon the scrawny side and not at all the type he would have chosen as a

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