THE IFREET FATHER, Teresa Noelle Roberts 7/7
“A fight! A fight!” cried passers-by. Just as in a rough section of Cordoba, the crowd grew into a mob, hemming them in. Halim and Halima drew their weapons.
A tall ifreet broke through the press of bodies. He was clothed in luxurious fabrics and dripping with jewelry, even the horn on his forehead sporting a gaudy ornament. “No one harms this woman!” he barked, tossing aside anyone who got in his way.
He muscled his way through to Labbannah. Then he stopped, looked down at her from his great height. “Daughter? You have changed.”
“So have you.” For it was her father—his voice, his features—but twisted to an ifreet. Her heart sank, knowing from the form he wore that he had become thoroughly corrupted. But it was still not hopeless, she told herself; if the great-grandson of Iblis could be saved, so could her father.
“Come with me, child! We shall feast!” With the faithful Halim and Halima following, her father hustled her away to a palatial home carved from chalcedony.
And there he locked the door. “As I promised,” he said, his grin distorting to reveal horrible fangs, “we shall feast. Or rather I shall feast and you shall be the feast.” Claws sprouted from his hands. “I couldn’t let anyone else devour my darling daughter!” As he said it, his fanged mouth smiled, but his eyes, although they burned like any djinni’s, were terrified and sad, and Labbannah knew something of her father remained inside the ifreet.
With trembling hands, Labbannah ripped open the bottle and screamed the charm.
White light burst forth, surrounding her father. He froze, locked in a halo of purity, and his growl of frustration shook the chalcedony palace. But the djinn-fire in his eyes faded and her father’s familiar brown eyes looked back at her, full of grief, guilt, and fear.
She turned to Halim and Halima. “Pray,” she implored them. “I do not know how long this magic will last, but surely it is the work of a holy mystic and prayer will make it stronger.”
And while the two goodly djinn prayed quietly, Labbannah went to work on her imprisoned father.
She called upon all that she had ever read or heard. She recited parts of the Koran that spoke of mercy for those who turned back to the right path. She quoted the hadith, the works of great scholars, even the philosophy of the Greeks. She told the tale of Mohammad’s visit to Paradise, in hopes that houris and otherworldly beauty that surpassed even the Kaf might tempt him. (After all, if a man takes the right road for the wrong reasons, he still reaches his destination.) She told him Halim and Halima’s tribe would take him in and help him be strong. And with each argument, she begged him, “Father, will you not lead this second life as a good person—or djinn—should?”
And each time, his ifreet voice said, “No, for then I would have to leave this amazing city of jewels.” But his human eyes looked as if part of him wished to say yes.
She talked until her voice was hoarse. She talked until she could think of no argument that might sway him.
She talked until she saw the spell was fading.
And then Labbannah took the greatest chance she had taken yet.
While Halim and Halima cried out in horror, she stepped forward and put her arms around him, although the heat of his ifreet-flesh singed her garments and burned her bare skin. “Father, I love you!” she cried. “Why must you be so selfish?”
He pressed his claws against her body, but did not drive them in.
“I have traveled to the edge of the world for you. I have nearly lost my honor and my life for you. I have given my youth for you.”
He bent down and opened his great mouth as if to devour her, but did not do so.
“I have done all this because I want to know that when my life ends we will meet again in Paradise. Father, you have always given me everything I asked of you. Can you not give me this?”
Then something happened that all her reading told her should never happen.
The ifreet wept.
Ifreet cannot weep, for tears are incompatible with their fiery flesh.
The tears steamed on his skin as they fell, burning him as fire would a human, but he still he wept. He retracted his claws, shrank back his fangs, pulled away so he was no longer hurting her, and still he wept.
As he wept, his ifreet form boiled away and the almost-human one of a righteous djinni emerged beneath it.
Finally he could weep no more. He looked up, and his burned face was Abdullah’s, but Abdullah’s without some of the wiliness and greed that marred even his finest moments.
“Lead me from this place, daughter,” he said, “before my resolve fails. I have tried to be good for my own sake, or for Allah’s, and failed. But I think for your sake, Labbannah, I can do it. You are a jewel more precious than the emerald on which this city is built.”
Teresa on the Ifreet Father: "[It's] inspired by Arabic folk and fairy tales and the history and legends of Islamic Spain.
The highly educated heroine Labannah may sound like a modern invention, but upper-class women in al-Andalus often had opportunities unavailable to women in Christian Europe. One caliph's personal librarian, for instance, was female."
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