The Steel Seraglio

by Mike Carey

  “Indeed,” answered Sahir, whose spies had reported no such thing. He glanced briefly at his vizier, who gave a fractional shake of the head. Behind the Ambassador, her two attendants exchanged dismayed looks, and one stepped forward, laying her hand on her mistress’s shoulder.

  “My lady . . .” she began.

  “Not now, Jumanah,” the Ambassador said, removing the hand. She turned back to Sahir, her eyes bright with eagerness. The sultan motioned to his servant to fill her cup again. “Do tell me more, lady,” he said.

  “Well,” she said. “It’s a matter of the utmost secrecy, but since you and he are family . . . You know that Raza has a huge corn surplus this year?”

  Sahir did indeed know this, and had been watching the resultant fall in prices with interest, but he shook his head. The lady drained her cup and leaned forward.

  “It’s worked out so well for us,” she confided. “Our harvest this year was poor—the dust storms came early, and nearly half was spoiled.” Her voice dropped. “We’ve kept it quiet till now. But the truth is, there’s nothing left in the granaries. We were staring famine in the face. And then we heard that Raza has a surplus! How wonderful! Our envoys are heading there right now, prepared to pay full price for their entire crop. You see what I mean, Excellency? The benefits of trade. We are saved from our little difficulty. And your cousin avoids a fall in price which would impoverish his merchants, and ultimately the whole city.”

  The vizier stepped forward and spoke into his master’s ear.

  “You are indeed fortunate,” Sahir said. “And when does this sale take place?”

  Both of the Ambassador’s attendants stepped forward. Jumanah touched her mistress on the shoulder again.

  “My lady,” she said quietly. “It grows late. “Do you think that perhaps . . . ?”

  The Lady Imtisar could make a hiccup sound decorous.

  “Is it so late, dear?” she said. “Just one more cup, then. You’ll join me, Excellency?”

  “And drink to free trade,” said the sultan gravely.

  The Ambassador and her ladies slept late the next morning. Long before they had roused themselves and assembled their men, the vizier Kedr had departed on the sultan’s fastest camel for Raza, where he astonished the chief corn merchant by offering full price for the city’s entire stock. So much did he buy that Raza itself was left with local shortages for some weeks afterwards.

  Several notable events resulted from the Lady Imtisar’s second embassy.

  Sahir bin-Hussein readied his armies and waited several weeks for news of famine and unrest in Bessa, which would be his signal to advance. Hearing nothing, he sent his spies again to the city, who returned bewildered to report its continued peace and prosperity. Sahir turned his fury on his vizier, and in the resulting quarrel Kedr left the sultan’s service for new employment.

  On that same day an unexpected message arrived from Raza. Suhayb bin Hassan had learned of Sahir’s purchase of the grain surplus, and could find no other motive for it than a friendly overture. Mystified, he concluded that his cousin had suffered a softening of the brain, and after some thought, decided to take advantage of this weakness through an overture of his own. He offered a good price for some of Gharia’s longhorn sheep, which he had long coveted. A rapprochement ensued between the cousins, which lasted for several years.

  The Bessan embassy returned home quietly. A few weeks later, when news arrived of the vizier Kedr’s departure from Gharia, a party of celebration was held in the former baker’s shop. The dancing spilled out into the square, and heroic quantities of wine were drunk.

  “Of all your manifold achievements, lady,” Anwar Das said to Imtisar, “this is the one that most fills me with admiration. You drank seven cups of the three-year-old wine, and could still walk? And talk?”

  “Seven cups,” confirmed Jumanah, with some pride.

  “I have a good head,” said Imtisar complacently. “Of course, this helped a little.”

  She held up a leather pouch, wide-lipped and suspended from two strings. “I had it concealed beneath my veil. The girls and I designed it together: with a little practice you can dispose of the drink very neatly. We shared it on the way home.”

  The final consequence of these events was perhaps the strangest. For a full year the city of Gharia experienced a glut of flour, which led several enterprising tradesmen to set up shop as bakers. As a result, the city developed a flourishing trade in pies and baked goods, for which it became famous. A distinctive knobbly pastry named the Suhayb was celebrated throughout the region for a hundred years afterwards: in fact it became one of Gharia’s staple trading items with the city of Bessa.

  Revolutions

  There was once a prince, who became something less than a prince; or at least, something different. He became a citizen; a man with no honorifics; an equal, lost from sight among his equals. It was not what he had sought, or what he had expected, and it took a heavy toll on him. In the end, it placed a strain on him that was beyond his endurance, and it turned him into something else again.

  The prince’s name, as you’ve probably already guessed, was Jamal.

  He was the son of a sultan—Bokhari Al-Bokhari, the ruler of Bessa—but it was not to be expected that he would ever become a sultan himself. His mother, Oosa, was the youngest of the sultan’s wives, and therefore, in the palace’s strict pecking order, the least of them. Jamal had seventeen legitimate brothers, all older than him and higher in the strict ranks of succession. His lot in life was to be pampered, to be cared for, to be pleasured, to be deferred to by the lower orders, and beyond that to be ignored.

  But Jamal’s nature was both curious and restless, and he did not submit to that fate as willingly as you might imagine. Imprisoned within the palace walls for most of his waking life, he explored as much of that little world as he could. He visited the ostlers in the stables, the cooks and acaters in the kitchen, the soldiers in the guard house, the falconers in the mews, the viziers and diplomats in the chancellery, the turnkeys in the oubliette, the scribes in the scriptorium, the smiths and potters and silkmakers and horners and lapidaries in their various workshops. All of these persons were, of course, obliged to receive him courteously, and to answer his questions, so in each place he learned; and in some, perhaps, more than in others.

  Jamal also spent a great deal of time in the seraglio, with his illegitimate half-brothers and half-sisters—the children of the concubines. These bastards could not inherit and therefore were mostly invisible, passed over in the palace intrigues that so engrossed those born on the right side of the sheets. Being eighteenth in line, Jamal was almost as negligible as they, but still he had the cachet of being able, when he chose, to enter the royal apartments without being challenged—and to summon or dismiss a guard. The bastard children, though they tried their best to hide it, were impressed by these appurtenances of power and prestige—and Jamal, for his part, found in their grudging admiration a welcome relief from the indifference, bordering on contempt, that he met from the other royal princes.

  It was a strange childhood, and it probably wasn’t going anywhere good. The death of the sultan, when it came, was likely to precipitate a great bloodletting among his heirs, and if civil strife was to be avoided, only one could be allowed to survive and flourish. Jamal could not hope to be that one, unless his father survived for long enough for him to reach his majority, and so death or exile would most likely be his fate.

  But then came the rise of the Ascetics, and of their terrifying leader, Hakkim Mehdad. The city was torn apart by sudden and unexpected insurgency. Suddenly, all bets were off. The upside of that was that all the other princes of the royal bloodline were killed in a single day; the downside was that Jamal was obliged to flee the city in the company of the concubines and the bastards. He was first in line, but to a throne that now harboured the hindquarters of a usurper.r />
  It was an upheaval beyond anything the boy could have imagined. He was then but twelve years old, and it was as if he had been plucked physically out of the life that he had known, erased and rewound, scraped like a manuscript whose surface must now bear fresh inscription.

  Against all the odds, he found the strength within himself to resist that dissolution. He held on to his sense of who he was, though there was nobody with whom he could discuss it.

  As himself, he wielded his sling to save the warrior-whore, Zuleika, from the usurper’s soldiery.

  As himself, he trained the children in the desert to defend themselves against attack, and helped with the building of the dust-raisers.

  As himself, he rode in the vanguard of the false army, when his petition to fight in the true one had been denied.

  And the city was recaptured, the usurper cast down, and that was the end of it all, or should have been. But the women seemed determined to see it as a beginning.

  On the day of victory, after the death of the accursed Hakkim, there were many tasks that Jamal felt were incumbent on him to perform.

  The first was the despoiling of the usurper’s body. Jamal found the ex-sultan in his throne room, sprawled across the lowest steps that led up to the throne itself. Nobody had stayed to watch over it once he was dead, which shocked and angered Jamal. It could so easily have been stolen by one of the fleeing Ascetics, and afterwards given decent burial. It could have become a place of pilgrimage.

  Whatever Rem had done to Hakkim had left him whole, though the look of horror on his frozen features was certainly gratifying. With a sharp knife, Jamal first blinded the corpse in both its eyes, thereby blinding the spirit also. Then, steeling himself for the repellent task, he slit open the belly, found after a few moments’ groping the nested whorls of the dead man’s intestines and hauled them out. In the process he must have punctured them slightly, for a foul smell washed over Jamal and made him nauseous; he had to bend his head to his knees and draw a few shallow, shuddering breaths of cleaner air. The usurper’s tongue and the usurper’s manhood had both to be dealt with, but the boy’s eyes were swimming and his arms felt nerveless and weak.

  The tongue. He knew, in theory, what was to be done. You made an incision across the throat and dragged the tongue out at its base, so that it lay across the chest like a scarf or a blazon. But the throat was already damaged, mangled, and he couldn’t find the tongue: though he delved and rummaged deeply, there was nothing within the blood-black pit he’d hacked out with his blade that would yield to being pulled forth. In the end, his hands trembling now, Jamal was forced to reach into the mouth, cut away the portion of the tongue that he could reach and lay it on the chest like the fleshy petal of a ruined flower.

  The manhood was easier, but there was nowhere to burn it once it was cut away. Jamal wandered around the royal apartments, looking for a brazier that was still lit and becoming ever more frantic and furious when he failed to find one.

  Zuleika found him there, at last, with Hakkim’s sawn-off pizzle dangling forlornly in his grip and submerged tears shaking his frame. She took in the scene, and knew at once what it was he had meant to do. Finding oil and a tinder, she quickly made a pyre in a bowl that had held scented water, and then stepped back from it.

  “Whenever you’re ready,” she told Jamal.

  When the rest of the concubines entered a minute or so later, they found the woman and the boy standing side by side over the bowl of burning oil, within which something black and shapeless fried. The air was filled with a smell that belonged in equal parts to the charnel house and the kitchen.

  “What has he done?” Gursoon asked Zuleika. Her voice was tight with repressed anger.

  “He’s despoiled the body,” Zuleika explained. “Hakkim killed his father and his mother. There was a blood-debt to be paid.”

  Gursoon frowned. “I had meant to give the body to his followers,” she said. “It would have been the best way to soothe their feelings, and might have headed off further bloodletting. Now we can’t even let them see him, and they’ll know why.”

  “There was a blood-debt,” Zuleika repeated.

  “And now there’ll be more of them.”

  “Perhaps. Yes.”

  Jamal’s next duty, he decided, should be to oversee the execution of the Ascetics and palace guards who had been taken alive. He said as much, as soon as he felt sure that his voice would not shake. But here he came up against Gursoon’s will in a more direct way, and he did not carry it.

  “There’ll be no massacres,” the older woman told him, grimly. “We didn’t come here for that. And we didn’t cast Hakkim down so that we could become Hakkim in our turn.” She looked to Zuleika, as though she expected to be challenged. Zuleika only shrugged: she had her own opinions, clearly, but she did not voice them.

  The question of what to do with the prisoners was shelved, for the time being. That left Jamal’s address to his loyal subjects, and here, too, he was overruled.

  “Why would you wish to speak to them?” Gursoon asked him. “What do you think has happened here?”

  “The usurper has been cast down,” Jamal said. “The bloodline has been restored. Why? What do you think has happened?”

  Surprisingly, it was not Gursoon but Zuleika who answered him. “Bessa has been liberated,” she said. “It belongs to no one now, but only to itself. That is what we said we’d do, and that is what we’ve done. Jamal, there is no bloodline. There is no sultan. Nobody here wants to invent one.”

  On some level, he had already known this. It was a forlorn and weak part of him that had hoped—or rather pretended—that the past could somehow be restored. It couldn’t: the past was dead, along with so much else. He made no protest, and indeed no answer at all. In any event, no answer seemed to be required. Gursoon and the armed women with her went on with their task of securing the palace compound, which they intended to use as a base. They paid Jamal no further heed.

  Zuleika went with him to find his parents’ graves, and he was grateful to her for that, but it was a gratitude that held itself—by necessity—aloof. He couldn’t permit himself to depend on her any more, as he had in the desert. It was not clear to him yet what he would become, in this new morning that smelled of blood and spilled incense. Himself, of course—but he had a child’s intuition that there might be many versions of him, a breath or a thought away from incarnation, and that any commitments he might make now would be voided when one or other of these Jamals was born. Better to look inwards, and wait.

  In the event, there were no graves. Whatever Hakkim had done with the bodies of Bokhari Al-Bokhari, his wives, and the royal princes and princesses, he had left no trace. There was a fire pit, too far from the kitchen to be of any practical use in cooking, and it had seen extensive use; there was nothing else, and the bones in the pit had been smashed into pieces so small that they might have been anything.

  “I’m sorry,” Zuleika said.

  Jamal bowed his head, and she let her hand rest on his shoulder. He wanted to tell her how he had felt, first when he watched her fighting in the desert, a storm of violent possibilities discharging in such a narrow space, and then again, later, when he saw her naked in the water. But this was not the time. So he stood in silence, mourning his mother more than his father, and perhaps himself more than either of them. Finally Zuleika left him there, to work through the logic of his grief.

  He had plenty of time to do this, in the five years that followed, but in many ways the project evaded him. It was as though his feelings remained in that state of suspension which his twelve-year-old self had thought was momentary: as though he still stood beside the fire pit, staring at bones which told no tales and cast no auguries. Alone among those who had fled into the desert—or at least, so it seemed to him—Jamal found no point of attachment to this new Bessa to which they had returned. He could no
t seem to find a map of it within his mind.

  Discouraged and even a little shamed by that incapacity, he sank into a kind of depression, or a paralysis which was not quite depression because within it all emotions, even grief, seemed dulled and unreal. His life had stopped, and it was clearly in no hurry to resume. He even contemplated suicide, and purchased from a former Ascetic a poison of such potency—allegedly—that a single drop of it would kill a great multitude. But Jamal’s will was paralysed. All he ever did with the poison was to take it out and look at it from time to time, touch his lips to the glass and tilt the bottle so that it seemed as though he was sipping from it. A man cannot die from such things; in their default, he dies from other things that work more slowly.

  In the wider world around Jamal, many things of great import happened. The concubines formed a government, which considered by its own lights did reasonably well—it took a chaotic situation and introduced a modicum of order into it. But that was all it could do, ultimately. It could not remove the chaos, because it depended on the arbitrary interplay of too many different personalities. The women refused to nominate a leader: worse, whether naively or knowingly, they instituted rules and customs which prevented a leader from emerging.

  Jamal tried to explain this once, to the librarian, Rem, who chronicled the debates in the Jidur and composed the wording of the written laws on which the women placed such fanatical emphasis. Rem seemed to understand what Jamal was trying to say, but not to sympathise.

  “So you’re talking about a model where one person gets to run the state and embodies its laws?”

  “Yes.”

  “Sorry, Jamal. It’s shit. It happens a lot, but it’s shit every time. The trouble is, the one person who gets to run things is just as conflicted—just as big a mess—as any random man or woman you pass in the street. You say committees lead to chaos? Well, every one of us is a committee inside—lots of desires and instincts and ideas and unexamined beliefs, all pulling in different directions. Every king is a committee. The trick isn’t to eliminate the conflict, it’s to make a machine—a state—that allows every idea to be fed into the hopper and somehow winnows out the ones that are crazy or sick or stupid or unworkable. That’s what the Jidur is. What we want it to be, anyway.”