Free Scorpion Soup by Tahir Shah

universe, repeated his question, a strain of displeasure in his voice.
    ‘It… it… it…’ started the clockmaker, ‘is a contrivance by which the spheres of the cosmos may be breached by the frailties of Man.’
    Smoothing down an eyebrow with the tip of his index finger, the Caliph walked over to the machine and inspected it studiously. His attentive gaze took in the dials and the levers, the gauges and the gears.
    ‘And what gives it propulsion?’ he asked.
    ‘A little hoopoe, Your Majesty,’ said the clockmaker.
    ‘A simple bird?’
    The Caliph broke into a smile.
    ‘A bird, Highness,’ repeated the clockmaker, ‘but not a simple bird.’
    ‘And where is it, this bird?’
    Getting to his feet, the clockmaker paced softly over to his machine, and leant down to where the cage had been placed. His expression went from one of fear to one of extreme alarm.
    ‘The hoopoe has gone!’ he cried.
    Unable to witness a demonstration of the device, the Caliph clapped his hands and the clockmaker was taken away, back to the cells.
    As for the machine, it was dragged to the stables and left to rust.
    It happened that one of the guards entrusted with the job of hauling the machine to the Caliph’s throne room, had heard the hoopoe chirping. Taking pity on the little creature, he removed its cage, and took the bird home, where he fed it some choice little morsels of meat.
    The next morning, the guard’s daughter woke before her father and, finding the bird there, she jumped up and down with delight. Eager to pick it up and caress its delicate plumage, she opened the cage door.
    Instantly, the hoopoe flew from the cage, out of the open window.
    Locked up in the tower, the clockmaker cursed himself for his reverse in fortune, and he damned the person who had taken the soul of Mezmiss, Master of all Jinn. He was certain that any minute now the jailer would be along to wrench out his teeth.
    The hoopoe flapped its way over Baghdad, the city of gardens, palaces, and of fountains. Unable to believe its luck at being set free at last, and to have been transported to such luxuriant surroundings, the bird flew down to a large garden, and began pecking a lawn there for worms.
    By chance, the garden belonged to a royal princess, the daughter of the Caliph himself. Her name was Princess Amina, and she loved nothing more than little hoopoes.
    Sitting in the shade of her balcony, she spied the bird foraging about, and she gave the order for her gardener to fetch the creature and to put it in a cage.
    Within an hour, the bird had been trapped in an unwieldy butterfly net, and it was hanging in a gilded cage in the princess’s bedroom. That night, the hoopoe serenaded its new owner to sleep.
    And, as she slept, she had the most remarkable dream of her life.
    She dreamed that a stranger arrived from another time, and took her on a fabulous machine to a land where rainbow waterfalls cascaded down from the sky. And she dreamed that this stranger was the most talented and kind man in existence, but that he was languishing at that very moment in the most gruesome of cells – lost somewhere in her father’s prison.
    The next morning, the princess awoke to the sound of the hoopoe singing once again. Her eyes wide with wonder, she sat bolt upright and called for her lady-in-waiting.
    ‘You must hurry to the cells,’ she said, ‘and search out a foreigner who is being tortured there.’
    ‘But how will I know him, Your Highness?’
    The princess thought for a moment.
    ‘Take the hoopoe,’ she replied, ‘and when he sings, you would have found the prisoner I want to see. Bring them both to me – and waste not a moment!’
    Just as the torturer was peering into the clockmaker’s mouth once again, there came the dainty sound of a woman’s voice at the door of the cell. Grimacing, the jailer slid back the bolts, to find the princess’s lady-in-waiting, a caged bird in her hand.
    No sooner had the hoopoe’s tiny eye spotted the