The Steel Seraglio

by Mike Carey

  “This is impressive! I know camels can go for a high price, but you two have really outdone yourselves. It looks like you brought the entire market home with you!”

  It was decided that work would begin in earnest the next day at dawn. Warudu already had her group of carvers, and Issi and his men were going hunting. Umayma declared that she would go with them, causing them to murmur and shift their feet a little uneasily.

  “I’m not sure that a hunt is a safe place for a lady—” one of the camel-drivers began. She shot him a fierce glare and he subsided into uncertain mumbling. Then she brandished a long wooden spear in his face, its point wickedly sharp.

  “I made it,” she told him smugly, “from the tree Warudu chopped down”. She was immediately surrounded by a small crowd of interested men, examining the spear and nodding approvingly, or offering opinions as to its sharpness and heft.

  Maysoon volunteered to teach another group how to shape clay, while Farhat offered to instruct others in the skill of embroidery. Everyone who found that these crafts were not to their liking was laid to the charge of Rihan, the most experienced of the weavers in the seraglio, who agreed to oversee the creation of woven bracelets, belts and tapestries. Gursoon looked on the five groups of assorted women and camel-drivers with satisfaction, then glanced at the bandits, who still loitered sulkily at the edge of the crowd.

  “Get over here,” she said sharply. “If you can’t weave, you won’t hunt, and you refuse to try your hands at anything else, then I am sure you can at least cook.”

  Anwar Das gave her a lopsided smile. “Nothing could be easier, lady. I feel I should warn you now, however, that when you taste our cooking you will have only yourself to blame.”

  For most of the concubines, the days that followed were some of the hardest of their lives. Their tender skin burned, unused to the searing heat. Their hands and feet, soft from lives of comfort and ease, blistered from the strain of endless work: chopping down the scraggly trees around the oasis to get wood for the evening fire and Warudu’s carvings, moving heavy bags of provisions into the cave, butchering the oryxes Issi’s men brought home in the evenings. The weavers’ arms ached from twining thread, and the whittlers cut their fingers when their knives slipped.

  The food was dull almost beyond endurance. Tough, chewy oryx meat or maize porridge, more often overcooked than not, and seasoned only with a few wild dates or the bitter, fleshy saltbush leaves that made them all wince with their sharpness.

  The days were long. They woke when it was still dark, and their work occupied them until there was no light left in the sky. The heat was terrible during the day, the water strictly rationed, and at night all the warmth seemed to drain out of the air, leaving them freezing cold.

  When Farhat had said that there would be no more servants in the desert, Gursoon had envisaged arguments and screaming. In fact, the baking sun wrought a reversal of roles on its own, and with no need for persuasion on her part. The servants had always had to work long hours in the sun; their skin was tanned and their hands tough from it. They were used to toil, so they were the ones who coped best with the unceasing work, the pitiless extremes of heat and cold. Several of the courtesans, as they struggled to carry bags of grain or recoiled at the prospect of cutting up a dead antelope, felt shamed when their own serving maids took up the work without complaint, and completed it more expeditiously.

  Where before they had been meek and obedient, now it fell to Bethi, Farhat, Thana and the others to boss and direct, scold and comfort. For the first few days, many of the younger concubines were sure that they were going to die. Fernoush got heatstroke, then Halima, then several others. It began with a pulsing headache behind their eyes, a pain that was both sharp and dull at once, then weakness, numbness, vomiting. The others laid them all in the shade of the cave, looking on with terror while they groaned and thrashed about, weeping piteously.

  Anwar Das and Yusuf Razim watched all this for a while, exchanged a few quiet words, then walked over to the oasis. They returned with a handful of wild dates, some salt bush leaves, and a skin of water, and proceeded to mix them together into a concoction that tasted so hideous, many of the girls could hardly bring themselves to swallow it. They all did, however, whereupon Das told them to rest for a few hours, promising that they would soon feel better.

  Zuleika gave Das a sceptical look as he passed her on his way to prepare some more of the disgusting mixture. He returned the look with a cheerful grin. “Not so useless as you thought, are we, lady?” he said to her. “We may not be good for much, but one thing every desert bandit knows is how to survive heatstroke. We wouldn’t have lasted long out here, otherwise.” The sun-dazed girls recovered, and Zuleika was glad for the first time that she had spared these troublesome brigands’ lives, even if Anwar Das’s cooking did not taste much better than his medicine.

  Things became easier by degrees, almost without them realising it. Sunburn peeled off, and the concubines’ skin baked to a deep brown. The blisters on their hands healed, leaving them strong and calloused.

  Issi and Zeinab took the first lot of bracelets, tapestries, pots and statues to the markets of Agorath and returned smiling, with food for the month and a generous purse of coins to spare.

  Umayma brought down her first fully grown oryx. The men carried her into the camp on their shoulders, cheering and slapping her on the back as if they had never had doubts about her presence in the hunting party.

  Life in the camp began to settle into a rhythm: long mornings of work, a break at midday to escape the worst of the heat, meetings in the evenings. At first Zeinab and Issi made the trip to Agorath once a month. Soon, however, the seraglio was producing so many goods that these journeys became weekly, and a rotating shift of people was set up to make them.

  There was no shortage of volunteers. Everyone loved going from the silent desert into the bustle and noise of a great city, and they always came back full of gossip, relating details of the latest fashions and the other wares on sale in the market to crowds of fascinated listeners. Even Anwar Das wanted to try his hand at haggling. When he suggested it, however, Zuleika gave a snort of derision.

  “Entrust our business affairs to a criminal? You presume too much on our good nature, camel thief,” she growled.

  The other reason that everyone was so eager to go to Agorath was because of the news they heard there about Bessa. None of this was good. It was Zeinab and Issi who first discovered that Al-Bokhari and his wives had been executed, from a couple of women gossiping at a nearby stall. All the women had expected that, but it was still painful to hear of it. Other reports were even more disquieting. Men publicly flogged for loving other men, women forbidden to go out in public without a male escort. And executions, dozens of them, in front of the royal palace every week. Zuleika, however, cautioned them all carefully against pressing the people they heard for too much information about the state of affairs in their home city.

  “We don’t want to draw attention to ourselves,” she reminded them. “In Agorath, no one knows where we’re from. We’re just merchants, we don’t have a story.”

  She was right, and they held their tongues, but nothing could prevent them from worrying about the parents, brothers and sisters they had left behind. Though there were days when the women who went to the market came back excited and laughing, on other occasions they returned with their faces shadowed by worry.

  Zuleika was recognized by everyone now as the unofficial leader of the group, and the others spoke to her with a new deference and respect. It was not just her unshakable assurance; her judgements were sound and, as Gursoon had pointed out, she had saved their lives when Hakkim’s soldiers would have slaughtered them. At the evening meetings, her opinion on any matter was always eagerly anticipated, and it was usually she or Gursoon who had the last word.

  Another respected presence in the camp was Rem, although when she was not t
eaching she seldom spoke. The women of the seraglio had grown used to her long silences, which they knew now were a part of her nature, and did not stem from any coldness or hostility. When she did speak, people paid attention. Rumours about her mystical sight had spread through the camp; she commanded awe, and would perhaps have inspired a little fear, were it not for the fact that her silence was companionable, and her manner friendly. In spite of her gift, she put people at their ease.

  Whenever anyone had a spare moment, at breaks in their work, or at the close of the day before the evening meal, or in the early mornings before work began, they would spend it at Rem’s reading lessons. These she ran constantly: there was always someone free who wanted to be taught. Even some of the bandits were wont to attend.

  The different groups of craftswomen began to stagger their breaks, so that everyone could have their time with Rem without flooding her with too large an audience at once. Even so, attendance at the lessons was so high that she was constantly having to recruit her more advanced students as assistants to help teach the others. The adults were too busy to do this; however useful reading was as a skill, earning money for the journey to Yrtsus still had to be their main priority. So the task fell to the children, who took a delicious pleasure in instructing their elders.

  Work in the camp was progressing well, and little by little the seraglio was accumulating a store of money. This fund grew slowly, however. What they made in the market could not all be spent on provisions for their journey, and besides the cost of buying more thread and clay, mere daily necessities such as food ate up a significant proportion of their profit. In the time it took them to amass enough money for a month’s worth of provisions for the proposed exodus, almost everyone in the seraglio had at least basic reading skills, and most could write a little as well.

  Two students stood out from the rest. One of these was Anwar Das, who picked things up almost faster than Rem could teach them. The other was Zuleika, who was quite astonishingly bad, mastering even the simplest concepts only with great difficulty, and quickly becoming sullen when the point of an exercise was not immediately apparent to her.

  As Zuleika watched the truncated curves of the words she formed in the sand with a puzzled scowl, Rem watched Zuleika. The assassin was at once inexpressibly graceful and strangely awkward in her movements with the stylus, bending the whole of her sinuous body into the new skill, her hesitant arm and delicate fingers as yet unfamiliar with the motions she tasked them with.

  Rem looked at her face, intent on its work, her lashes lowered as she concentrated on the sand at her feet. Even then, she reflected, when she seemed so utterly caught up in what she was doing, there was something constantly alert about Zuleika. Her body was drawn back like a bowstring, taut with a barely perceptible tension, tensed in perpetual readiness to embrace or to strike. Rem found herself contemplating, with a strange fascination, both of those extremes. To meet Zuleika in the profoundest depths of some passion, whether of murder or of lust: it was a prospect that thrilled her, and afterwards left her flustered and ashamed.

  With the exception of Anwar Das, none of the thieves showed any particular talent for reading or writing. They sat alongside the women sheepishly, each chewing his wooden stylus with an expression of consternation and slight alarm. Yet they still attended every session that they could, as did everyone else, regardless of their aptitude.

  It has to be said that this was only partly for the interest of learning. It was also for the stories. Rem’s stories were incandescent. She had begun them one day as a way of rewarding the seraglio children when they worked hard and listened attentively. She thought, besides, that experiencing some of the pleasures to be found in the written word would encourage them in their application and enthusiasm.

  But a story from Rem lifted the floodgates between all stories, so that they roared from out their confines, mingling their rushing waters together. Her words had the music of many voices in them; she wove her narratives into a tapestry on the living air, one that seemed to shine in peoples’ minds long after it was finished, like the after-glow of a bright light. She told the women, the children and the men of bright cities, filled with huge beetles with metal carapaces. She told them about far off lands where the deserts were made of ice, and argosies that sailed the skies as now they did the sea. Sometimes her tales were peppered with questions, and she could barely get through a sentence without a cluster of voices piping up from the crowd gathered at her feet. This was the way with the very first one she told.

  “Would you like to hear a story?” She addressed the question to a group of children, though their mothers immediately drew closer, relishing the chance for some entertainment.

  But the story baffled them.

  “What’s a whale?” a boy asked.

  “It’s like a big fish.”

  “And the man with one leg hated the fish,” one of the mothers broke in. “Why was that?”

  “Because it took away his other leg.”

  “But the fish was just an animal. How stupid to hate an animal! Starbuck should have told him it was nonsense!”

  Other times her subjects were more easily grasped. Rem told the camp all the old stories from the scrolls in the library, and many more besides. She told them the folktales of their own childhoods, and even Zuleika listened to the half-remembered things with a half-smile curving across her lips.

  Soon, this entertainment was a regular feature of the evenings, when the daily meeting was done. Rem was not the only gifted storyteller amongst the concubines, though her tales were doubtless the strangest. Bethi and Anwar Das, of course, entranced everyone with their convoluted tales, delivered in dramatic tones and accompanied by frequent re-enactments. The story of how the seraglio fooled the thieves they performed as a two-hander; it was fast becoming a favourite with the children. Fernoush knew some ballads, which she sang in her high sweet voice to great acclaim, and some tears. Gursoon had always regaled the concubines and the children with her stories—romance for the little ones and smut for their parents—and it was seldom hard to persuade her to treat them to a tale or two when the firelight dipped low. One of the bandits once started to relate a joke about an old camel and somebody’s mother-in-law. Luckily Gursoon had heard it before, and reminded him sharply that there were children present. Other people delivered accounts of great battles or conniving murders, of daring escapades and foul brigands—though Anwar Das protested against these last, as being prejudicial to himself and his comrades.

  Nor did the stories end when the fire died. They wove their own way through the camp, conjuring songs to people’s lips and thoughts to their heads. Warudu and her apprentices carved new and beautiful shapes, and soon Rem had a whole host of wooden figures to accompany her tales: a platoon of tiny soldiers, a menagerie filled with leaping antelopes and soaring birds. Scenes of great battles and magnificent pageants worked their way into Rihan’s tapestries. Farhat embroidered a frieze devoted to the tale of how the seraglio was cast out into the desert.

  One day, a tale Rem told about a man with a beautifully coloured robe made Taliyah’s eyes light up. The girl had been brooding and silent for some time now, and all but her mother and siblings had kept their distance from her, knowing that she sorrowed. A daughter of the seraglio, she had loved a dyer in Bessa, and planned to marry him. The young man was respectable and fairly prosperous, and everyone had expected the sultan to approve the match any day. Then the Ascetics took the city, and Bokhari Al-Bokhari was no longer in a position to approve anything. Taliyah was sent into the desert, along with all the other concubines. She had hardly spoken to anyone since.

  But that evening, Taliyah began chipping bits of rock from an outcrop near the base of the cave wall. She ground them up, heated the powder in a shallow stone bowl over the fire until it turned red, then mixed it with gum from a little box around her neck. In a few days’ time, after grinding up many dif
ferent rocks and plants, Taliyah had a small collection of paints and dyes, and the seraglio another shanty trade to swell its income.

  When Taliyah suggested to Maysoon and Warudu that she decorate their handiwork, they agreed readily. She was a bright girl, and had learnt much from her lover about the skill of crafting colours. Her lush greens, brazen reds and cool, delicious yellows not only fetched a high price at the market by themselves—when she painted Maysoon’s pots and Warudu’s statues, they almost doubled in value. Gradually, she began to talk again, chatting quietly to the other women as she worked.

  She grew especially close to Warudu. The two had never known each other that well when they lived in the seraglio, but Taliyah became fond of the older woman’s forthright manner, and respected the pains she took over her statues. For her part, Warudu had known Taliyah’s mother. It had saddened her to see her friend’s daughter, once a happy and excitable girl, turn pale and withdrawn, and she was glad that she seemed so much improved.

  Taliyah did feel better. She liked the peaceful life of the camp, with its large community and constant, reassuring hum of voices. Her art brought her joy, and she was pleased with the respect her skills earned her. However it was still a source of astonishment to her that the other women in the camp were so perennially cheerful. Hadn’t they all left people behind? Yet Zeinab and Issi joked and laughed as if they were back in Bessa, and Warudu sang as she carved, pausing now and then to look out over the camp with a broad smile on her lips.