God-in-the-Bottle

A fable

What you do is you set traps for them. They favor jam, small porcelain masks and tiny, functioning fishing rods; these are placed on the bottoms of glass jars. Then, in the twilight hours, they come: through the chimney, a window or perhaps, in these days, some drain pipe. If you get up at dawn, sometimes a god will have tarried too long and remain in one of the jars; swiftly plug it with a large cork rubbed with rosemary. Eventually, the god will become stiff and grey, like a stone figurine.

These things were taught to me by the tribesmen of the Village of Miraculous Carvings. They had been capturing and selling the bottled gods for seventeen centuries; first in vessels of carved limestone, then clay and, later, glass. All the village was very rich, I saw; they explained that at night the bottle-gods whispered of the secrets of Heaven and Earth; so they were deeply valuable. (This knowledge hitherto unguessed-at they sold to me in exchange for seven wood-gold coins from Ys and a copy of the Book of the Dream World; it is, perhaps, the fairest of trades to deal mystery for mystery.)

It is told of Haroun al-Raschid, the Scintillating Caliph, who would have been wise regardless, that he had eleven clay god-urns about his bed, who taught him all the languages of the world, and the ways and paths of the dream-world; he believed them to be djinn. In the end, gripped by curiosity because he could not see the shapes or faces of the djinn inside the urns, he uncorked one, and peered inside.
They say that is how Haroun al-Raschid, the Scintillating Caliph, died.