The Steel Seraglio

by Mike Carey

At this man’s side rode a second man whose manner was less alarming but equally exotic. His face was painted pure white, and the word “speaker” was written in red upon his brow. On his chest, further characters appeared, spelling out the two words “unto infidels.” He was naked except for a breach-clout, he bore no weapon, and he rode without a saddle.

  “Greetings unto you,” Jamal said, bluntly. “What brings you here?”

  The dark man spoke tersely in a tongue Jamal had never heard, and his white-faced companion, after a short silence, said “We came because of the war.” His voice was high and fluting, almost effeminate. Evidently he was acting as translator.

  “Because of the war?” Jamal repeated. “What do you mean? Are you emissaries from one of the cities of the plain?” Clearly they were no such thing, but Jamal preferred to let them state their business in their own words; he offered this unlikely scenario for them to disagree with it, and so define themselves.

  Again, the dark man spoke, his utterances sounding almost like the barking of a dog.

  “We offer our services,” the white-faced man said. “If we fight beside you, you will win. We are the Misreia, unbeaten in battle. We number five thousand, and each of us is worth fifty. Our blades sing in the air with the voices of those we have slain—a choir louder than the angels of Heaven.”

  Jamal blinked, and Nussau looked grave. “You’re mercenaries, then,” the mercenary captain said. He said it with a profound lack of enthusiasm, but Jamal’s interest quickened. He had just lost a large number of fighting men—he wasn’t going to reject new recruits out of hand.

  The white-faced man translated. His companion—or more likely his master—made a harsh sound and spat. Then he spoke at greater length.

  “We do not fight for money,” the white-faced man parsed, “or for any material reward. Only our god demands recompense.”

  “And how much does your god charge?” Nussau asked, with heavy sarcasm.

  “Our god is great.”

  “Evidently.”

  “Greater, far, than other gods.”

  “And therefore?”

  “Two-thirds of any bounty taken from the city will be due to Him. And two-thirds of the city’s people, to be His slaves and serve His chosen.”

  “Unacceptable,” Nussau said.

  It was an absurd price to ask; presumably it was intended as the opening gambit in a protracted bout of haggling. But it would be difficult for Jamal to haggle with Nussau beside him, defending his own men’s share of the spoils. Reluctantly, he shook his head. “Your god’s price, though he be greater than any other god, is too high. We can’t afford him.”

  The white-painted man conferred with his master and then looked up again, staring meaningfully over Jamal’s left shoulder at the city. “Then we’re free to offer our services elsewhere,” he said, his tone pitched between a statement and a question.

  “By no means,” Jamal said. “If you try to enter the city, we’ll be obliged to turn and fight you.”

  Nussau, being of a more practical turn of mind, added a further argument. “They’d never let you in, in any case. They’d be bound to assume you were with us, and that your offer was a subterfuge. Any sane man would come to the same conclusion.”

  “And how could they agree to pay you in the coin of their own citizenry?” Jamal asked. “Nobody would fight alongside you, for the privilege of being your slave—so you’d stand alone on those walls, and as you can probably see even from here, they wouldn’t hold your weight for very long.”

  All of these points were passed along to the red-robed chieftain, who digested them with scant pleasure. He spoke again, what sounded like a single word.

  “A half of the spoils,” the white-painted man said.

  “No,” said Nussau again.

  “The timing of these negotiations,” Jamal said, “is unpropitious. You say you number five thousand. We have many more than that number, and though we obviously wish to retain them all for the final assault on the city, we will if it proves necessary turn from our task long enough to gut you like dogs and water the desert with your blood. I say this with all due respect.”

  The chieftain, apprised of this assertion, looked thunderous, but said nothing. For twenty heartbeats, he and Jamal merely stared at each other, as though each was waiting for the other to blink.

  Finally the chieftain spoke again, for a final time. Before his companion had even begun to translate, he wheeled his horse about and galloped away.

  “We will withdraw,” the white-faced man said. “If you prevail, you will not see us again. If you lose, we will harry you as you retreat, and rape and murder your soldiers. We will do these things, however many you number. This is my Lord’s promise to you.”

  Jamal reached for his sword, but Nussau clamped a heavy hand on his forearm and stayed him from drawing it. “If we’re forced to retreat,” he said, “although that won’t happen, we’ll be short of horses and provisions. We’ll take your mounts for both, your robes for wash-cloths, and leave you to walk home naked across As-Sahra. This is my promise to your Lord.”

  The white-painted man dipped his head in a perfunctory bow and rode away.

  “Why didn’t you let me kill him?” Jamal snarled.

  Nussau gave a coarse laugh. “Those insults meant nothing,” he said. “They merely allowed that jackass to withdraw without loss of face. But a decapitated messenger would have forced him to fight. You’ve much to learn about human nature, Jamal.”

  And it certainly seemed that the mercenary captain was right. The strangers decamped immediately, and they did not look back. Ever cautious, Nussau had them followed for some several miles by three of his best scouts: they did not turn back, or split their forces, or even look behind them. They headed due north, towards the mountains, and presumably beyond them to their distant homeland.

  The way was clear for the final assault on Bessa. It now transpired that Jamal’s deserters, in leaving, had sabotaged most of the siege catapults with judiciously laid fires, but Nussau greeted this discovery with only mild irritation. There was little need, at this stage, to pound the walls further: the breaches already made offered doorways enough.

  But Bessa did not fall that day. Perhaps it was because the reduction in the numbers of the attacking forces forced them to make their forays across a narrower front, where the walls were weakest. Or perhaps it was because the tall, slender woman whom Nussau’s soldiers called “the demon” was so very prominent in that day’s fighting, hurling herself again and again into lost positions, only to win out and buy her people a second or a minute’s advantage. However it was, though they came against the walls with might and main, and wreaked red havoc among the defenders, the Lion’s cohorts did not gain a single good foothold throughout what remained of the eighth day of the siege.

  At night, there was muttering. Some among the mercenary officers felt aggrieved that they were now bearing the full weight of this conflict alone, when the contract to which they had assented saw them as the mercenary wing of a greater force. They had been happier when Jamal’s expendables were taking most of the pounding, and acting as a human bulwark against their own losses.

  Nussau went among them and rallied them with words both sweet and stern. He reminded them of the booty to be won on the morrow, when the walls finally fell. He reminded them, too, that any man who defaulted in his duty would lose all pay accrued during this campaign, as well as a goodly portion of the skin on his back.

  These exhortations had their effect. On the ninth day, the attackers launched themselves on the ruined walls and the all-but-ruined defenders with the ferocity of madmen and the fervour of marabouts. Under this onslaught, the Bessan soldiery fell back rapidly, and then with unexpected suddenness a section of the damaged west wall fell, not under any direct assault but from the damage previously inflicted on it.
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  The defenders had presumably planned to fall back on the palace when the walls were breached, but this instantaneous collapse prevented them from doing so. As Jamal’s troops charged through the breach, the beleaguered Bessans fled under heavy fire to a tall structure with walls of pink stone—the only nearby building that was even remotely defensible.

  This was, by now, the only real front. Elsewhere on the walls, surprisingly small pockets of defenders were wiped out with ease as the besieging troops took control of stretch after stretch of the battlements. The defenders, men and women alike, fought until they dropped—but they dropped quickly as the spread of Jamal’s troops across the battlements allowed more and more fire to be trained on them. What had been a pitched battle now devolved into a series of localised culls, which the mercenaries carried out with brisk efficiency.

  By the time the main gate was broached by the battering rams, there was silence across the rest of the city. Apart from that one building, where a few of Zuleika’s janissaries had managed to go to ground, nothing moved.

  Jamal entered Bessa in state, riding a white stallion through the jubilant ranks of the mercenaries. They cheered him to the skies, and he accepted their homage with some considerable satisfaction.

  But the sight that met his eyes sobered him somewhat. The streets of Bessa were mostly empty—its citizens presumably hiding in their houses and waiting for the worst. What citizens he did see were uniformed and dead, but there were not many even of these. His eyes lingered on each corpse as he rode past it. The silence which had announced his victory scant minutes before now seemed somehow funereal.

  A scar-faced sergeant led him to the pink building where the last defenders had taken refuge. Though it was a formality, Nussau, with a fine tact, allowed the Lion of the Desert the privilege of directing the last engagement of the campaign. But Jamal seemed in no hurry to do so.

  “What is this place?” he asked the sergeant.

  “Sign over the door calls it the House of Pleasant Fires, sir,” the sergeant answered, with a brisk salute. “Looks like a brothel. Should we mount a charge, sir? Looks like they’re all out of arrows, else they wouldn’t let us get so close.”

  “A moment,” Jamal said. He rode his horse a little closer to the building. It stood in a small square, with the blind sides of other buildings to right and left and the city walls facing it. Nothing moved inside.

  “The city has fallen,” Jamal called out loudly. “Come out with empty hands, and throw yourselves on my mercy.”

  “Do you have any mercy, Jamal?” Zuleika answered him from inside the building. “You’ve kept it well hidden until now.”

  Jamal’s heart raced. He realised then that when he had examined the dead bodies in the streets he had been looking for hers—and had been glad not to find it. Zuleika’s death should not, could not be anonymous. It mattered too much.

  “Oil and arrows,” he ordered. “Burn them out.”

  Cavalrymen galloped past the front of the house, hurling clay jars full of oil in through the windows to shatter on the stone floors inside. Then they withdrew and the archers fired arrows whose heads had been wrapped in oily rags and set ablaze.

  Inside of a minute, the inside of the House of Pleasant Fires was belying its name, its interior a flesh-broiling inferno.

  The defenders began to sprint through the front door and to dive from the windows of the house. Backlit as they were by the bright flames, they made easy targets. Jamal’s archers took them at their leisure.

  He knew her when she came. She did not run, but strode through the doorway with her sword in her hand, her steps even and her head high. The first arrow took her in the shoulder and the second low down in the side. She fell to her knees as a third pierced her right hand. The sword fell from her grip and clattered on the flags.

  “Stop firing!” Jamal cried. “Stop firing!”

  A few more arrows were launched, but they went wide. Jamal’s order was relayed by the sergeant in a cattle market bellow, and the archers lowered their bows.

  Jamal dismounted and went to her, kneeling before her to stare into her eyes. They were open, but dulled with shock. Blood was trickling from the corner of her mouth, and her breathing was so shallow it was scarcely visible.

  “Zuleika,” he said to her, gently.

  “Jamal,” she said, her voice almost a whisper.

  “How goes it with you, lady?”

  She did not answer this sally. Presumably she had too few breaths left to waste any of them on badinage. Her eyes met his, but they did not focus. Her expression was unreadable. He wanted more from her than just his name.

  “Your city has fallen,” he told her. “Your soldiers are dead.”

  Disconcertingly, Zuleika smiled. “My city . . .” she breathed. “My city left this place two days ago.”

  It happened in this wise.

  As Anwar Das had suggested, the people of Bessa went from the palace back to their homes, where they quickly gathered as many of their possessions as they could carry, as well as water and provisions. They were fleeing from a death they knew was certain. Jamal’s poisoning of the wells, two scant hours in their future, was a sentence of execution pending over every one of them. The people assembled again in the Jidur. The storm was at its height, and the shrieking of the air, added to their own state of restlessness and urgency, caused some to faint and many to weep.

  The evacuation of the city’s civilian population was to be total. Among the soldiery, it was decided that the issue of who should stay and who should go would be settled in the first instance by asking for volunteers. Zuleika believed that two hundred men and women, judiciously positioned, would be sufficient to maintain the illusion that the walls were fully defended, and to have some reasonable chance of holding them, at least for a few hours, against Jamal’s assaults. Each soldier, then, would place a scrip into a jar passed around by Zuleika herself. The scrip would contain either the soldier’s name, if the soldier wished to volunteer, or else a cross or some other random mark if the soldier did not. Only if fewer than two hundred names were given would Zuleika ask—or order—specific people to stay.

  Rem watched as Zuleika read the names aloud. They were the names of friends, making compact to die so that other friends might (if the Increate willed it) live. They were the names of heroes, who would have no other memorial.

  Umayma was called first, and she saluted her chief with closed fists as though this in itself were victory. Rihan, Dalal, Najla, Firdoos, all were named: and each name carried a full freight of memories—for Rem, memories not only of the past but of the futures that would not now be lived.

  The tally reached one hundred, sixty and seven. Zuleika pronounced herself satisfied with this number, but old Issi stood, shaking his head sternly. “The lady said two hundred,” he said to the room at large, his voice as strong as ever. “Are we to be shamed in this way? To send her into this lost battle with a smaller muster than she asked for? No! Never! Not while I live!” Issi’s eyes shone with tears as he stared round him, meeting every gaze in turn. “You know what they said of us. That every citizen of Bessa was a sultan. That was us. That was ours. And today, every citizen of Bessa is a soldier. I demand the right to add my name to Zuleika’s muster!”

  “I demand the right to add my name!” another old man echoed, rising to his feet.

  “I demand the right to add my name!” cried a woman from the other end of the hall. It was Halima, who had said once that she could not kill if called upon.

  “I demand the right to add my name!” came from all sides of the hall, and Zuleika raised her hands in surrender.

  “I will refuse no one,” she said. “Step forward, then, all those not of the city guard, who wish now to stand with the guard in its extremity.”

  Three or four dozen stood, and walked towards her. Among them was Imtisar, leaning hea
vily on the arm of Jumanah. Zuleika put a hand on the old woman’s shoulder. “You’re sure this is what you want?” she whispered.

  “This is my home,” Imtisar said with energy. “No rabble will throw me out of it. And I’ll take a few of them down, as well.”

  “I’m staying too,” Jumanah said. “With Imtisar, and Najla. My place is here with them.”

  When the tally was finally made, the muster stood at two hundred and seventeen. Zuleika gave order that the new recruits should be given weapons and breastplates. Zeinab, whose name had not been called, came to her friend Umayma with the best sword and scabbard she could find.

  “It shouldn’t end like this,” she wept, as the two friends embraced.

  Umayma did not weep.

  “I buried my son’s head, a week ago,” she said, her voice hard. “Where his body lies, I know not. My life is over, Zeinab, but I give my death freely, for whatever it may be worth.”

  While the volunteers were armed, Zuleika came to Rem to say her farewells.

  Zuleika was accustomed to keeping her emotions in check. It was the first thing that an assassin learned, and it was a lesson that was revisited, in a sense, with every subsequent killing. Still, when she embraced Rem, she did not trust herself to speak. Her hands were steady; her voice, she knew, would not be.

  Rem made no pretensions to stoicism. She clung to Zuleika in an access of despair. “I can’t,” she wept. “I can’t live without you! Don’t make me! Don’t make me!”

  “I’ll follow you,” Zuleika whispered, stroking her hair. “I’ll follow you, Rem. If we can hold through today and tomorrow, those of us who are left will do then exactly what you’re doing now. We’ll only be two days behind you.”

  Rem knew that these were lies, and was not soothed by them. It was not her foresight that told her this, but remorseless logic. Only the storm gave this current plan the smallest chance of succeeding, and whatever passed now, nobody left in the city would follow. This was the last time that she and Zuleika would ever touch. But she knew, too, that what she said and did now would affect Zuleika’s spirits for good or ill, and so she said no more, but held to her beloved as if her muscles had locked and her flesh had petrified. Whereas it was only her heart that had suffered this fate.