A muster of warriors stormed onto the square. They screamed in a savage falsetto, and their faces shone with sweat. Their robes billowed like sails as they galumphed about, scimitars flashing. Each man was further armed with a scrawny chicken, which he twirled above his head like a terrified pinwheel. The wind died again, the torches flared. The thick silhouette slouching toward Gorelik took corporeality and became General Qazwini, rotund, dripping with medals. Responding to his presence as if to a command, the warriors tore the chickens apart and in a flurry of squawks ate them alive.

“You will review my troops?” he ordered. “I have army of two hundred and ten men and four women who would to be men, you know?”

“Not me,” Gorelik said. “I don’t know one end of a troop from the other.”

“Follow me!” bin Zaki shouted, snaring a torch. We did, uncertainly, as if he were a crimp, and we were press-ganged into unconsenting service. From under the trees, a band struck up a creaky rendition of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” then with equal dubiety, “Anchors Aweigh,” Assama lacking an anthem of its own. The instrumentalists whacked away with sticks, stones, and tambourines, and snorted extravagantly into nose flutes. Chatterton was enthralled.

Beyond the square was a clearing of tramped-down grass, altogether like the coat of a dog with the mange. A path meandered through a courtyard, where a raggedy-lettered sign, barely visible in the torchlight, warned:

THERE IS A FINE OF TWO CHICKENS
FOR BOTH OFFENCES
PLEASE NOT TO SPIT
AND LITTERING!!

Beyond it was the palace.

That so insignificant a path could lead to such an imposing structure lacked congruity. But there it was, a whimsical pile looming, dominating the land as an iceberg crowns the surrounding sea. It soared up and up, surreal, audacious, like some enormous, irregularly rounded candle dripping tallow, its wick lost in the mist beyond the gleam of the torches.

We entered a long rectangular room lit by saucer lamps.

“The Hall of Great Fragrance!” bin Zaki announced. “Guaranteed to produce subduing atmosphere for your endearment.” All the surfaces of the chamber—floor, walls, ceiling—seemed to be made of a blistered, lavalike stone. It was of course not stone at all, but the amazing masonry of Grady’s quest.

On one side of the room a row of twelve sausage-fat pillars, about ten paces apart, was carved in the round: squat effigies of men on one side, facing on the other a parallel row of women.

Neither group was tall enough to support the ceiling. No matter, for from each male figure protruded a penis, thick as a phone pole, sinuous as a hose, that curved upward, rose to become a beam as it stretched horizontally across the hall, snaked downward to a compliant woman, to embrace her in its corkscrew grasp, and then lodge in the snuggery of her pudendum.