The Steel Seraglio

by Mike Carey

  En-Sadim looked stricken for a moment, then angry. “You must not speak before your betters,” he said. “Kneel. I will return to you shortly.”

  “Great sir,” Zuleika essayed again, “I beg you not to do this thing. It is a terrible crime, and will stain your soul into eternity.”

  The legate’s face darkened. He strode two steps forward, which brought him directly before the concubine, and he drew back his hand to strike her across the face.

  This action was not destined to be completed.

  Zuleika leaned aside from the blow, her feet not moving at all but her upper body flexing like a coiled cobra. She caught the legate’s hand in both of hers, and bending it behind his back, broke it quickly and expeditiously at the elbow. En-Sadim crashed to his knees, unmanned by pain.

  Reaching behind her, Zuleika plucked the brazier from its stand, holding it in her bare hand without seeming to notice the fierce heat. The legate’s mouth had opened by this time on what was presumably going to be a scream: the concubine emptied the red-hot coals and glowing ash directly between his parted lips and he spasmed in strangled silence, his head striking the ground as his spine folded forward.

  The two other men responded to this astonishing event in very different ways. After one moment of stricken amazement, Captain Numair stepped in to save his master; the messenger, yielding to the same impulse that had almost possessed him earlier, turned to flee the tent and shout for help. Help might not be needed, since the captain would surely deal with this madwoman, but at least his own valuable person would be placed out of harm’s reach.

  Zuleika leaned down, drew the dagger from En-Sadim’s belt, and threw it with whiplash swiftness. It was a ceremonial dagger, and poorly balanced. It struck the messenger in the back of the head, pommel-first, laying him out unconscious before he could reach the pavilion’s entrance.

  This allowed Captain Numair time to reach the concubine, but he had not thought to draw his sword along the way. He punched her instead, a solid blow to the jaw which he thought would fell her. Zuleika did not even appear to feel it. She jabbed her fingers, as straight as a ruled line, into the Captain’s throat, and sudden agony spiked and splintered inside his gullet as though he had swallowed a draught of iron nails.

  He opened his mouth on a bellow that would have brought the guards at a run, but no sound came from him. That first blow had ensured that the battle would be fought in silence.

  The young concubine was upon him with such dizzying speed that she seemed to be three or four women occupying the same space, and only the Captain’s armour saved him from an instant and ignominious defeat. Well, that and a lucky prescience that caused him to raise his forearms en garde in time to ward off the rain of slashing blows she aimed at his unprotected eyes.

  Then she danced away before he could respond, so light on her feet she might have been a child’s balloon, untethered from gravity. Numair did not think of retreating: this woman had assaulted his master, and it was his job to deal with her. Nor did he waste any further thought on the possibility of summoning help—he had no voice left to shout with, and he had seen what had happened to the luckless messenger when he had dared to turn his back on this termagant.

  So he drew his sword and advanced, whirling the weapon before him in a wicked arabesque as he had been taught. Zuleika retreated, feinting left and right as if she wished to find a way past the whickering blade. Emboldened, Numair pressed her hard, his eyes only on her slender figure. She was in the corner of the tent now, with no more room to retreat.

  The captain leaned forward to deliver the death thrust. Zuleika ducked under his blade and was for an instant on her knees before him. Then she came vertically upward. Her open palm caught Captain Numair under the chin and all the force of her rising body, her straightening arm, her flexing shoulders was somehow translated into a force that operated only at the base of her wrist. Numair’s neck snapped with an audible crack, and he fell, bewildered and disbelieving as he died.

  Zuleika took the captain’s sword out of the air, as though the air had offered it to her, and cast her gaze downwards on En-Sadim. He was choking to death on the hot coals, his body wracked by terrible convulsions. Zuleika drove the blade into the legate’s back and slid it along the runnel of his fourth rib to slice his heart in two. The angel of death is the angel of mercy, also.

  The messenger recovered his senses to find the young woman kneeling over him, the bloodied sword still smoking in her hand. “I only delivered the letter!” he whimpered. “As I was charged to do! I bear no blame!”

  “I offer you none,” Zuleika assured him, and since he was watching the sword he did not see that in her other hand she had picked up the legate’s dagger. A cold pricking in the messenger’s chest made him gasp: looking down he saw that the hilt of the dagger now protruded from his flesh, where the blade was buried deep. The concubine leaned down as if to embrace him, and covered his mouth with her hand as he expired.

  Nonetheless, the guards outside had heard some sound—the falling of the brazier, perhaps, or of one of the bodies, or the frenzied movements of En-Sadim as he was choking. Their footsteps approached the pavilion’s entrance, uncertainty written in their halting cadence.

  Zuleika gasped aloud, as if in the throes of violent orgasm. “Ah! Ah! Ah! Please! Yes! There!” The footsteps retreated again hastily.

  Zuleika surveyed the carnage, her brow creased in calm but serious thought.

  It is meet that we leave her there, for a moment or two, and speak about different but related things.

  The Tale of the Girl, Her Father, Her Two Suitors and the King of Assassins

  Time out.

  You may wonder—and I wouldn’t blame you—how a concubine should come to be so very proficient in the business of fighting and killing. You may question the veracity of the tale, and suspect your narrator, with whom you’ve travelled so far and in such pleasant, companionable discourse, of being a lying daughter-of-a-whore with the morals of a professional card-sharp or a politician.

  Be patient, as the Prophet says, and keep your mind open, that blessings may fall therein. And, please, cut me a little slack. This part of the story gets close to things that are close to me, and if I circle it like a wary trapper rather than marching right up to it like a brave soldier, well, that’s my business. You can always go and read another story, with a more forthright style.

  The woman named Zuleika was born in the city of Ibu Kim, and lived there until her fifteenth year. Ibu Kim lies to the south of Bessa, exactly as far as Perdondaris lies to its north; and if Perdondaris, with its palaces of marble and its roofs painted with gold, may be taken for Heaven, and Bessa for the middle ruck of common Earth, then Ibu Kim can surely stand for Hell.

  Ibu Kim was a city of brigands, jackals and kiddie-fiddlers: a kleptocracy, a failed state, a gangsters’ paradise and a rigged town. With few and insignificant farmlands, it relied on trade for its prosperity, but even its artisans were shiftless bums, happier to steal than to make, happier to fence than to steal. Whatever required the least effort was holiest gospel in Ibu Kim.

  Within the streets of that town, the crime of rape did not exist. To despoil the wife or daughter of a wealthy citizen was, to be sure, asking for trouble, because wealthy citizens are chary of all their possessions. But a poor woman, without friends, had to stay off the streets at night or else fall victim to the first man she passed who had a mind to cope her. Nor could she call out for assistance, in such extremity: the city watch would either ignore her cries or, if it was a slow night, stroll up and wait their turn.

  Zuleika, as I have said, survived to the age of fourteen in this horse-deficient shithole. She was sharp of mind and fleet of foot, and she took no heedless risks, but nonetheless, in that time, she had many narrow escapes.

  Her father, Kishnothophur, known (to those who needed to refer to him at all) as Kish, was an
innkeeper, at the sign of the Blue Wheel, and in his own small way a whoremonger, too. The profits he made from the twelve women in his employ were much greater than the profits he made from renting rooms, but in Ibu Kim, by a fine irony, for a woman to sell her sexual services was considered a crime—whereas for a man to take them by force was part of the ordinary rough-and-tumble of life. So the Blue Wheel was officially an inn, and a regular bribe of shiny silver coins prevented the city watch from inquiring into anything else that went on there.

  Kish had taken a young wife and fathered one child on her before she died of a quartan fever brought on by drinking bad water (the wells of Ibu Kim were used by footpads as a convenient place to dump bodies, and so they were often unsafe to drink from). Thereafter, the girl fell from his thoughts: Zuleika was raised by whores, and much loved and doted on by them. They protected her from the myriad dangers of that highly dangerous place, which meant among other things that they kept her both out of her father’s sight and out from under the feet of the clients.

  Some of the whores came and then went, without fuss or notice; some, for reasons Zuleika was too young to appreciate, had more staying power. If the child had a favourite, it was Ehara, a woman of statuesque frame and generous nature. Ehara looked less like a prostitute than like a public building, but still inspired strong loyalty from her clientele. Zuleika’s duties at this time were many: buying food at the weekly market, drawing water, sweeping the floor of the inn, washing the wine cups and jars at the end of the evening and the bed linen twice a month, anointing the walls with white lime when they were soiled, and taking the weekly bung of ten silver dinars to the sergeant of the guard. Whenever she was not engaged in these pursuits, Zuleika would sit with the older woman and help her with her toilet—combing out her long hair, painting her toenails, or otherwise beautifying her various extremities.

  Only on the nights when the moon was absent from the sky was Zuleika barred from Ehara’s company. It was then that the inn received a clandestine but much valued visitor: Vurdik the Bald, the bandit chieftain of the Yashifia. Vurdik was legend in Ibu Kim; his men harried the caravans of every neighbouring city from sunrise to sunset, and though his industry was much admired, he was still a proscribed criminal with a price (which varied according to the season and the vagaries of government) upon his head.

  But in the Blue Wheel, Vurdik was a paying customer. He went by a different pseudonym each month, lived lavishly, and was rewarded with every luxury the house had to offer. One of those luxuries was exclusive access, whenever he stayed, to Ehara’s body.

  After one of Vurdik’s visits, Ehara was unable to work for three days because of a beating the bandit chief gave her when he was in his cups. Zuleika tended to her friend’s injuries through those days. Her father decided not to summon a doctor, both because of the expense and because of the awkward questions that might be asked about the identity of Ehara’s assailant.

  Still a child, untutored in the world’s ways, Zuleika was moved to rage and tears at how Ehara had been hurt—and then to horror at Ehara’s own reaction. “Oh, Vurdik isn’t so bad, my love,” the older woman told the girl, through thickened lips. “I could do without the beatings, but the beatings are nothing compared to what he’d do to me if I ever tried to leave. And with a man who’s just a thug, if you’re quick, you can always dodge the worst of it. It’s the clever ones you want to watch. They’ve got worse ways to hurt you, and you don’t always see them coming.”

  I mention this anecdote because of its wisdom and wide applicability—and because it stayed in Zuleika’s mind and ultimately formed the foundation of a more advanced social theory. Different people menaced you in different ways, it seemed, and you needed to have a suitable answer for all of them. It was a long-term project for Zuleika, but it started on that day.

  Meanwhile there were other things going on in the young girl’s life, and some of them presented with a lot more urgency. She was coming into her change, now, and men were starting to notice her. One of them was her father, whom she caught watching her on a number of occasions with a thoughtful expression. She knew Kish well enough to discount the possibility that he wanted to bed her himself—he was hugely uninterested in sex, except as a commercial proposition. He did, however, know what virginity was worth, and how best to package and retail it.

  Another man who showed a definite interest was the saddler (if he had a name, he kept it to himself) who lived and worked directly opposite the inn, in the Courtyard of the Trades. This gentleman watched Zuleika stumble-step towards puberty, and he conceived a lust for her. In Ibu Kim, a woman’s first bleeding is taken to be a gentle reminder from the Increate that she should by now have been married or sold. The saddler saw this moment coming, from a considerable distance, and (as it were) decided to stake a prior claim.

  On Zuleika’s fourteenth birthday, he made Kish a gift of a silver-inlaid saddle, with a brushed silver saddle horn, and complimented him on his daughter’s great beauty. “She’ll make someone a fine wife,” he hinted, over a jar of wine (the cheap stuff) which Kish had cracked open for the occasion.

  Kish agreed that Zuleika promised well.

  “A woman is like a camel,” the saddler opined. “If a man cares for her, she will carry him in comfort through the longest journey.”

  Kish allowed that this was so. Further, he argued, it was so even of a camel that another man has already ridden.

  The saddler looked up from his drink, and a complicated discourse of raised and lowered eyebrows ensued.

  “The two cases are not comparable,” the saddler said. “A camel that’s already been broken in becomes more valuable as a result. A woman, substantially less.”

  “But if it were a choice,” Kish mused, “between an unbroken wife and no dowry at all, and a broken wife with silver in her train, a man’s very reasonable expectations might be tempered by a certain judicious pragmatism.”

  “Broken once?” the saddler asked bluntly. “Or broken many times?”

  “Once,” said Kish.

  “And how much silver?”

  “Twenty pieces.”

  “Ah.”

  “At least twenty.”

  “Ah, well.”

  “Possibly thirty.”

  “Ah, well, now.”

  Zuleika witnessed all this camel-trading in solemn silence, even when the saddler smiled and winked at her—as though his blunt bargaining for her body were some sort of compliment or tribute to her beauty. He was a huge man, as big and shapeless as a pile of flour sacks, and radiated a stench of sweat so strong and searing that even in the open air it made the eyes of those passing by blur with sudden tears. The dyes he used in turning raw leather into finished saddles had stayed on his skin in places, giving it a hectic, parboiled appearance.

  Zuleika did not love him. This is not a matter of size or smell or dappled pigment: it is a mystery, as all must agree. She could not give to him the part of her soul that was relevant to the matter. As to her body, she knew she could trust the two men to come to a mutually agreeable arrangement.

  In the end, it was decided that Zuleika should stay in her father’s house until she was fifteen. At that time, she would be inducted into the profession of prostitute and then cashiered out of it again in the same night: she would entertain a single client, chosen and vetted by Kish himself, and on the very next day she would be married to the saddler. “Whoever lies with her, he must be clean!” the saddler insisted, many times. But of course he would be clean; he would, after all, be rich, and the one presupposes the other.

  So Zuleika had a year to wait before she was given over to this unwelcome destiny: a bare year, and she had no plan. There were few options, in that city and at that time, for a girl who wished to be more than a beast of burden. In Bessa, it was said, women could sell goods at market, run inns and brothels, work in stable yards and mills. Bessa was three d
ays’ journey for a camel, nine or ten if you had to rely on your own feet.

  In the spring of that fifteenth year, Zuleika packed a few clothes into a bag, stashed the bag under her bed where it would be ready to hand, and waited for a night of thick cloud.

  It duly came. Zuleika stole down the stairs in her bare feet, carrying her sandals in one hand, the rest of her meagre possessions in the other.

  Her father was waiting for her in the yard. He dragged her back inside the house by her hair and beat her black and blue.

  In spite of his stolid demeanour, Kish was no fool. He had noticed the resolve growing in his daughter and had decided that the best way to head it off would be to allow it to grow to fruition and then to come down hard. He didn’t see this as cruelty, only as good husbandry, of the same order as beating a dog to teach it not to foul the floor.

  Ehara wept for the girl, and washed her bruises with wine vinegar. Zuleika didn’t weep for herself. She thought about her mistake, and promised herself that she would never misclassify a man again—you couldn’t base good decisions on bad taxonomy.

  But she was still a child, and she still saw the world—or parts of it, at least—in ways that were romantic and simplified. There was a boy four years older than her, Sasim, into whose orbit she fell, slowly and thrillingly, in the weeks after she recovered from the beating.

  She met the boy for the first time when she was walking to market with a basket in each hand and a sack tied to her back for vegetables. She met him again, the next time she carried the weekly bribe to Rhuk, the sergeant of the guard—and then a third time, when she went to the well for water. Eventually, it occurred to her that the tall, dark-eyed lad who loitered at the corner of the street close to the inn yard and greeted her so civilly when she passed was not there by chance. She began to slow down when she passed him, and exchange a few words: remarks about the weather; jokes about how many bags and baskets one girl could carry; finally, with a prickle of forbidden pleasure, given names.