by Mike Carey
“You know me,” Gursoon repeated, “just as you know the others who deposed Hakkim. Layla, too, is in our number, as are all the other ladies of the seraglio. Issi, the chief camel-driver, is here, and so is Bethi, who once styled the hair of Al-Bokhari’s wives. Karam,” she addressed a short, stocky man with dark hair, “your beloved Johara is here, and her child with her. Yusri, your—” Here, Gursoon was cut off. Another guard stepped forward, his eyes hard.
“Yusri is dead,” he called out in a cold voice. “He was hit by one of your people’s arrows.”
Gursoon did not miss a beat. “Then that is a great tragedy, and I will grieve for him. But do not forget that a battle has just been fought. You fought us on the usurper’s orders, and would have slain us all on those same orders.” She glared at them, defying any man to contradict her.
“We all have dead to mourn,” she continued. “The loss on both sides is the greater because some of those we fought against were our friends. We are not foreign aggressors. We’re Bessans, all of us, and we came to liberate the city, not to steal it. Whatever the evils of this fight, I will not have them compounded in the name of revenge. The killing ends here, with a choice. Lay down your weapons on the plain and come back home. Or leave Bessa and never return there.
“If you choose the first option, there will be no reprisals against you, so long as you offer us none. If the second, then we will give you provisions for your journey, and dressings for your wounded. But whichever you choose, there is one thing you would do well to remember.” Gursoon stared out at the army, fixing them with that falcon stare of hers. All the warmth had drained from her voice, and her eyes were like pebbles in her face. Those who had known her in the seraglio watched and listened for some trace of the Gursoon they knew, the amiable peacemaker who put people so effortlessly at their ease. They found none. Even Zuleika was surprised at the edge in her tone.
“That you fought against us, however unknowingly, is your first offence against the city of Bessa,” she said, “and this your first warning. Give me cause to issue a second, and a vengeance will descend upon you so dark and so terrible that it blocks the daylight out. You will not take arms against us. You will not even begin to plan such a thing. Your regret, though short-lived, would be intense.”
In the end, and after much discussion, all the soldiers decided to stay. As they filed back through the Northern Gate in single file, Gursoon and Zuleika noted down the name of each one, and the street in which he lived. If they remained peaceable for a period of five years, Gursoon told them, the list would be destroyed.
“I still think we should have shot them,” Zuleika muttered, as the last man had trooped back into the city.
“Protected our interests by force, you mean,” Gursoon replied. “We gained control in that manner, it is true, but we cannot hope to keep it in the same way. The city is free now, Zuleika. That freedom was born from chaos, but chaos will not sustain it. I think it is time we began planning for peace.”
That night was filled with reunions, which would not wait until the daylight. The dust-raisers walked through the Northern Gate to a roar of joy and relief. Crowds of people thronged the street, watching for the return of their loved ones. Mothers rushed to embrace their children, friends searched anxiously for the faces of friends, shouting out to them across the sea of people when they were found. A tall, full-figured woman with a coil of dark hair burst into tears at the sight of Issi. She ran to him, closely followed by three gangly boys. Wife and sons reached the camel-driver at the same time and clung to him, the boys so much taller than their father that they almost obscured him from view. All that testified to Issi’s presence in the group were his loud, laughing sobs, which rose occasionally above the loving murmurs and muffled prayers of his family.
Taliyah, not seeing her betrothed in the crowd, ran to his house as fast as she had run to the water gate earlier that day. On her way she heard her name cried many times, and in many tones, from the warm delight of friends to the wrenching joy in her mother’s voice. She stopped for none of them, until she heard her name uttered in notes of rich mahogany and umber, and felt her dye-maker lover’s arms fold round her.
Gursoon, after she had brought Dip back to his father, went to the palace stables. Night had fallen, but a full moon shone in the sky, and by its pale light, she could just make out a man leaning against one of the stable doors. He straightened up at her approach, and crossed over to her. His hair was greyer than when Gursoon had last seen him, but still tightly curled. His pale green eyes were just as she remembered them. The festivities in Bessa that night lasted until dawn. As the moon rose, people began to flood out into the streets, throwing dried rice and cheering. Gursoon walked with Fouad to the town square, and there she danced, just as she had when she was a girl. That night, she was lithe and graceful as a leaping salmon, in spite of her age. And Fouad watched her swoop and twirl from the side of the square, knowing that no man now could claim her against her will.
Rem found Zuleika where she knew she would be, standing at the top of the east watchtower and gazing out over Bessa, which shone with lanterns and seethed with activity as if it were a feast day. They looked down at the city for a while in silence. Then Rem took Zuleika’s hand.
“There’s something I need to do,” she said. “Will you come with me?”
They walked hand in hand through the crowds until they reached the palace. Umayma and Zeinab were on guard outside the gates, and let them in with a friendly nod. The gardens were cool and quiet, and bathed in silver light. Rem led Zuleika through them to the palace, and then up the winding central stairs in the great hall. The throne room she passed without a glance; only Hakkim’s body lay there, and that held no interest for her. She continued to climb until she reached the sultan’s bedchamber, where she found what she was looking for behind a curtain in the corner of the room. With one broken hand, the boulder of negative thought was as difficult for Rem to lift as it had been for the young Hakkim, the day that he first felt its weight, and found in it his calling.
“What are you doing?” Zuleika asked her, as Rem strained and heaved at the stone.
“I’m killing an idea. I’ll explain later.”
“Ah.”
Zuleika came to help her, and together the two women dragged the boulder over to the window and heaved it out. The bedchamber was near the top of the palace, so it had a long way to fall. It cracked the flagstones where it landed, producing a jagged pattern of fragments. For a moment, nothing else happened. Then, slowly, a hairline crack spread up the boulder from its base. It fell into two jagged halves, silently as a door opening on oiled hinges. To an insect, perhaps, the breaking of Hakkim’s faith might have sounded like a calving glacier, or the earth cracking apart. To the lovers standing side by side at the window, any noise it made was drowned out by the singing and laughter drifting upwards from the bright city below.
Bessa, at Once and Ever
They built a city that shone like a vision, because it was born from a vision, a vision of stone and water and parchment. The stone was cut from the sun at dawn, the water shimmered like liquid fire, the parchment sang.
They did not tear anything down. They did not hold with tearing things down. They built. They built a Library out of gold, and they placed within it a scroll which contained all the knowledge of all the ages of the world.
In the centre of the city they built a fountain where the water spurts up to twice the height of a man. Where it flows, its colours changing with the colours of the sky, all may come and drink.
Joyful are the people who inhabit the city. Their voices sing, they dance in the streets. Their pageants are numerous and bright. It is a city of light and music. There is an embroiderer there, as I have heard, whose work is of such beauty that her own needle weeps to see it. A carver lives there whose statues come to life, so skilfully are they wrought. Many wondrous people dwell in the city: a
woman who cries tears of ink, and a woman who has the golden touch and the death touch, and all in the city are blessed by the djinni with long life, and with many powers.
The walls of the city are high. They encompass it all around. Yet there is a gate in those walls, of burnished gold, and whosoever approaches it may enter if she will, for it stands always open. The gatekeepers are robed in saffron and red, and they welcome the traveller with these words: “Be weary no longer, and be no more oppressed. Lay down your burden of pain at the gate. Enter the city of women and rejoice!”
Gursoon
The library isn’t made of gold. What a ridiculous idea! We’re rich, but we aren’t that rich.
And he’s missed out the most important part. That’s the House of Laws. It might not seem worth mentioning: it’s fairly small. But it is the forge on which we make our city day by day.
Oh, we kept the sultan’s palace. It’s useful for quartering foreign dignitaries when they come to Bessa to see if we exist, and if we do, what we are about. But the real decision-making goes on in the Jidur, where any citizen may come to speak or to vote. And once the vote is taken, the House of Laws writes the decision up for the people’s approval and—that granted—enacts it into our constitution.
The House is a former baker’s shop. Rem found it. We enlarged it a bit. Then we moved in. It was very comfortable in there really, once we’d cleaned out the dead rats. It has large windows that let in great swathes of honey-coloured light. A bright, airy space. It also has an underground storeroom; perfect for storing the ever-expanding records and annals of our new state, and deliciously cool.
What we like best about it, though, is the peace and quiet. Somehow, after the desert, I think we all got used to silence, to drifting light with no walls to hem it in, to dark caves with a slight smell of dank mildew. A bakery on an unfrequented side street behind the Jidur isn’t exactly the same, but it serves us well enough.
There’s such a lot to do, it seems like we spend most of our time there, not just working out the wording of the new laws and writing them down but also making up lists of matters to be discussed in the next full council at the Jidur, writing letters to friends and allies in other cities, hosting meetings of groups assembled for specific tasks like cleaning the wells or rebuilding the houses of the lepers’ quarter. It turns out, much to our surprise, that government when it’s done properly is a full-time job.
Someone came into the shop to buy bread once: we’d never thought to remove the sign! He stayed to watch us at work, fascinated and bemused, and at the end of the day volunteered for the group that will dig a main sewer beneath the streets of the Samratani. After that, Fernoush started working in the front room baking bread. Her father was a baker, and she appreciates the chance to keep her hand in. She makes quite a profit by it as well, and it makes the place smell wonderful. It’s nice, watching her work—feels almost like old times.
Those of us that stayed on to run the city after we had reclaimed it rarely have time to work with our hands now, not as we did in the desert. I’ll sometimes stroll round the market place and catch Zeinab on a stall, haggling up the price of a bracelet with some trader’s wife. Just for the joy of it. Issi is very proud of her. And Umayma still sneaks away to go hunting. Issi’s boys go with her. I think half of them have a fancy for that girl, and all of them compete for her approval with a single-mindedness that’s touching to see. She never was interested in them, though. Or only as hunting partners, anyway.
Yes, all of us who stayed in the council feel the need to steal away from time to time. Not all of us did stay, of course. Some joined the new palace guard. Others continued their work as artists and artisans. (I hear Maysoon has a nice little potter’s shop in the centre of the city. I must go and visit her there.) Some simply took up the threads of their old lives, or those bits of them that were left. There’s not much call for a royal seraglio anymore. There’s no more royalty, for one thing. A neighbouring caliph once remarked that the inhabitants of Bessa are its sultans. He meant it for a jest, but it is the truth.
It was sad, too, seeing the army disband. In the desert, the four hundred of us were a city all on our own. None of us really considered it at the time, but on some level we all knew that we could not return to the city we left behind, and keep our own intact. There was no more comfortable seraglio to contain us. We dissolved into the new Bessa like sugar into water, and of necessity we spread out through it, and what we once had was lost. It’s funny: we did it all for freedom, but in some ways, I know I will never be so free again as I was in that desert.
Oh, and of course we never call it “the city of women.” Just as we never called the Bessa that was “the city of men.” Ridiculous.
The rest? That’s all true.
Farhat
People ask me who the girl in my tapestries is. The plain girl in the white dress. She’s always there, in every one. Sometimes she dines with sultans in a great hall. Sometimes she fights dragons with a shining sword. Sometimes she is part of the story, and sometimes she watches from the crowd. She is not always smiling. She feels just as we feel. When the Seraglio was sent out into the desert, she wept little sapphire tears. When the city was reclaimed, she laughed with a mouth of scarlet and her eyes flashed emeralds. I cannot answer, when people ask, except to say that she is me, and all of us. She was a servant, and now she lives in a city where there are no servants. She can dine with sultans now, and count herself their equal. She never curtsies out of deference. She never begs anybody’s pardon.
People recognize me in the streets, now that my embroidery has become popular. They sometimes curtsey or bow to me. Gursoon says that Bessa has no need for sultans, nor for queens; its figureheads are its artists, its craftswomen and its poets. I am happy with this, so long as we artists and poets never feel the need to emulate those symbols we have replaced. We overthrew them—this does not mean that we should follow them. We couldn’t if we tried, anyway. We are different from them on a level that is always seen but rarely perceived, and really amounts to all that we are good for. I try to keep it before me always. Without it, this city would be brought to something worse than destruction—it would return to the way it was. The difference is this: almost everyone in Bessa is an artist, a craftswoman or a poet. They are sublimely simple things to be. You don’t need fame, or even skill. Most importantly of all, you don’t need birth. They are designations with no walls around them. Many people say many things about Bessa. I say this. And I raise people up, when they bow. I shake my head if they go to drop a curtsey. I look into their faces. I smile.
Fouad
Take our orders from women: why not? I did as Gursoon told me for years. She just has more of a head for some things than I do. And the women leave me free to follow my calling, which is all a man needs.
The last sultan, the fanatic, now, he was a hard one to live with. He sold my horses, all of them! Set me to tending camels and donkeys, and nursing sick goats. I should have followed the women; borrowed a horse and gone after her as I did before. But my daughter had not long had her twins, and my son . . . By rights I know Danyar is Bokhari’s boy, but when did a sultan care for those sorts of rights? I’d taken him on as stable-boy and he was promising, a gentle hand with the beasts, and a fine rider already. But he was only thirteen then, and small for his age. I couldn’t leave him.
When the women came back we didn’t have much time to spend celebrating; there was too much to be done. Rashad had a few of us into the kitchens for a drink, and old Issi told us some of what they’d been up to. It was quite a story. My Gursoon has a way of turning a situation to her advantage; the others too, of course. I think Rashad had given up hope of ever seeing them again, but me—no.
What now? Well, it’s as you see. I won’t deny I miss the old horses, but these here are good beasts. My brother found them for me; he didn’t undercharge me, either. Now I can teach my daughter to ride, and my grandson
s, as a man should. And any others who want to learn. Of course women can ride, it was my mother who taught me. They have arms and legs the same as us, don’t they?
I don’t know if we’ll marry. Gursoon might not have me—it was thirty years ago I last asked her. And we’ve managed well enough without it up till now. We’ll go out riding together, though. She says she’s too old, she’s forgotten how, but you never forget.
I’m not a great one for words. But it’s good to have her back. You know how it is after a storm, when everything goes back to how it should be, and you can stand up again and look around you? Yes, that’s how it is. I can see properly again.
Taliyah
I missed him. I did. I spent most of my time in the desert pining for him. Every time I ground stone to make paint, I did it for him. We voted to go to war, but when I cast my lot I saw his face. It felt like a homecoming, not an invasion. For all of us, I think. We all carried the faces of loved ones in our minds like banners. Their names were our rallying cries. The others returned to Bessa for sons and daughters, for fathers and mothers and sisters. I came back a bride, and if a battlefield lay between me and my beloved, then so much the better if it was strewn with the corpses of those who had parted us. I thought he would be proud. I was proud. There was a desert and death between us, and I walked through both—for him!
And in my more mundane mind, I knew now that I had a craft, a livelihood. When I left I was an ignorant child, but now I was a grown woman. Do not believe that I had no fears. I had steeled myself for a cooling of feeling. In my darkest dreams I had seen him wed another, had seen that hair’s breadth between joy and despair crossed, irrevocably, as he crossed the threshold into his wedding home. In my terror, I had even imagined his death. I came armed against these fears, ready for them. I was so afraid as I ran through the streets, one mischance after another pressing against my mind, that I was surprised by his embrace when it came. The relief of it nearly crushed me to the floor.