The Steel Seraglio

by Mike Carey

  “Lady,” Anwar Das said at last, gently. “We must leave.”

  And they broke apart, and went their ways, their suffering a mirror to the lamentations played out all around them by friends and families sundered now forever: those about to leave pulled unwilling and weeping from the arms of those who had chosen to stay.

  The procession that wended its way to the cattle market gate made up the vast majority of the city’s population, along with five hundred able-bodied fighters who would protect them from casual predation on their journey. From Jamal’s army, if Jamal realised what was happening, there could be no protection.

  They left the city in total silence. Only four or five abreast, they walked in a long, straight column out from Bessa and onto the plain. In front came the children, schooled not to speak, carried by mothers and fathers or led by their teachers Hayat, Laila, Mahmud and Mayisah. Old Rashad, who had been begged by his son and grandchildren not to stay behind, walked in tears, held up by Dip and Walid; he had left his old deputy, Karif, to die on the city walls. Beside him came Farhat, leaning heavily on the arm of Huma.

  Behind the old, the young and the infirm came the able-bodied women and men. The members of the Artisan’s Guild walked behind Farhat, holding those of their works they could not bear to leave behind: Taliyah carried a roll of paintings, while Maysoon’s daughter Suri and her apprentice had wrapped their most precious pots for safekeeping in Farhat’s tapestries. Those that walked in the rear of the column led horses and camels, all muzzled, gentling them with strokes and whispered words.

  They passed between two of Jamal’s encampments, close enough on either side to have called out to the men in both and been heard—but the air was in turmoil, the rent veils of the storm sliding over everything and its voice booming over all other voices. They would not have found their way at all, except that Rem led them, and she knew in advance the position—both relative and absolute—of each of her footfalls. She did not walk through the storm: eyes closed, she walked through the stillness that was and would be again.

  When they were almost a mile out, the Bessans turned half-about, and under the direction of Zuleika’s most experienced officers formed themselves into a phalanx. Those who were actual soldiers, and whose bearing was therefore the most convincing, stood in the van. They had darkened their skin with henna and tangled their hair with tar: in place of the tunics and breastplates they had been wont to wear on Bessa’s walls, they stood (or rode) mostly naked, with only jerkins and breach-clouts made up hastily from uncured leather. Close at hand, they looked like maniacs or ecstatics lined up with implausible discipline. From a distance, they hoped to pass for a foreign army.

  They waited out the storm, and then the sun. And on the morrow, when Jamal and Nussau rode towards them, it was Anwar Das, white-painted, who rode halfway to meet them. The man at his side was a Yeagir, though his speeches were chants in the sing-song nonsense language used to send small infants to sleep. Anwar Das, for his part, disguised his voice by forcing it into a shriller register, and trusted to the painted words on his brow and on his body to prevent Jamal from looking too closely at his face. Another could have been sent, but Anwar Das’s heroic deceitfulness was legendary: who else could have been trusted to sell such a lie?

  So he made his offer to Jamal—an offer that Jamal obligingly refused—and then he rode away, back to the ranks of the Bessan refugees. They turned again, setting Bessa at their backs, and began their long march. At first they were followed by Jamal’s scouts, but after a few hours these fell away and they were alone.

  Their goal was the mountains, and the caves of the bandits which they had left so many years before. But that was only a staging post on a much longer journey.

  Jamal did not at first understand what it was that Zuleika had said. But then certain thoughts and images cohered in his mind in a sudden, abstract wash of thought, and enlightenment came. He knew, then, why the streets were so empty, and why the Bessan defenders had failed, at the end, to fall back to the palace and bar themselves in. There were too few left, by then, to maintain a line as they retreated, or to cover each other’s backs as they crossed open squares and piazzas: all they could do was run, and they had not run far.

  He knew, too, who it was he had spoken to out on the plain on the morning after the storm, how he had been fooled into allowing the people of Bessa to escape the siege unmolested—and how, therefore, he had come to inherit, as in his nightmare of yesteryear, a city of the dead, with no populace, no farmlands and no safe water.

  He had won the war, and at the same time defeated himself utterly: grasped after the substance, and caught the shadow.

  All that was left of his victory was Zuleika. And Zuleika was still smiling. It was not a deliberate taunt—she was thinking of her lover, safe and away and two days gone; of the city of women turned into a seed on the wind, that might take root elsewhere. She smiled because she was not a concubine any more, nor yet an assassin, but a soldier who has done her duty and could now hope to rest.

  But to Jamal, the smile was salt in wounds both old and new. He kicked out in a rage, sending Zuleika sprawling to the ground, and then he kicked her again and again as she lay. When she raised her right arm to ward off the blows, his foot connected with the arrow that had transfixed her right hand, and the shaft snapped in two.

  Around him, his troops watched the beating in stolid silence, without much interest. But Nussau, arriving then, viewed it with irritation. He had found to his horror that the spoils on which he and his men had placed such store were not to be had. Bessa had been emptied not only of its people but of most of its portable wealth. The granaries were empty, the shops and warehouses—those that had not been burned in previous incursions—stripped down to bare wood and cool stone. Bessa hosted nothing, now, save corpses and ruin.

  In dark mood, therefore, and impatient of Jamal’s self-indulgence, the barbarian captain drew his sword and stepped in to finish Zuleika with a single sword-thrust. To his annoyance, Jamal laid a hand on his sword-arm and shook his head.

  “No,” he said. “She’s mine.”

  “We need to talk about payment,” Nussau said brusquely. “And provisioning.”

  “We will talk,” Jamal told him. “But this must come first.”

  With curt gestures, he made the watching soldiers back away. “Nobody is to intervene,” he ordered. “Nobody touches her, but me. Nobody speaks to her, but me.” Then he stood over Zuleika and nudged her with the toe of his boot. At first she did not stir, but finally she raised her head—her lips split and bleeding, one eye already swelling shut from the beating he had given her. With the other eye alone, she met his gaze.

  “Fight me,” he invited her. “You heard what I told them. Fight me and win, and you’ll be free. That’s all you have to do.”

  He waited. He was not a patient man, but for this, and this alone, he found an unexpected reserve of patience in the fervid cauldron of his soul.

  Slowly—terribly slowly—Zuleika gathered herself. She struggled up onto her knees, using her left arm to support her weight. Once on her knees, she was able to grasp her sword in her left hand and then to rise to her feet, though she staggered and almost fell again.

  “It will be here,” Jamal told her, “and it will be now.”

  She nodded, acknowledging the remembered words.

  Jamal’s sword flicked from side to side as he moved in toward her, and Zuleika raised her own blade to block him, but there was no strength left in her. Jamal swept the sword aside with a tremendous stroke, and stabbed her in the stomach. He didn’t drive the sword in deeply; he did not wish, just yet, to deliver a killing blow. An inch or two only, then out and up, en garde, as he stepped back from a counterattack that didn’t come.

  Three more times he repeated this: advancing on Zuleika, beating down her defence with ease and then wounding her lightly before withdrawing. Th
e wounds bled freely, and the areas of saturated cloth spread and merged until Zuleika was robed in red. That she managed to keep her footing was something of a marvel to the men watching, who already knew of the Demon and had extended her their grudging admiration.

  “Finish it,” Nussau grunted, in something like disgust.

  Jamal did not wish to do so, did not relish the thought of turning from this cathartic killing to the other, more problematic aspects of his victory. But he bowed to the inevitable. Attacking once more, he stepped inside Zuleika’s guard, turned his blade deftly and raised it in a lateral flick that severed the tendon of Zuleika’s left arm. She dropped her sword again, the arm now even more useless than the right.

  He waited for her to fall, but she did not fall. No matter. He backed away a step and readied his blade for the coup de grace. But he could not forbear from one final taunt. “You see where you are?” he asked her, indicating with his sword-tip the blazing building at their backs. “Your heroic last stand was in a brothel. Your life came full circle, my lady, and you ended where you were always meant to be. A house of copulation. By such means does the Increate teach us our lessons.”

  He made ready to strike, and then realised that Zuleika was still staring over his shoulder at the inferno which the House of Pleasant Fires had become. He turned to look in the same direction, standing away from her at the same time in case this was some trick—even without a weapon, even dying on her feet, Zuleika presented a clear and present danger.

  But it was not a trick. Haloed by flames, a figure stood in the doorway of the burning house, as though fire was her home. She was very slight, and the intensity of the light behind her ate into the edges of her silhouette, making her slighter still—superhumanly attenuated into the merest ribbon of flesh between the fire and the fire.

  “Imir Nussau,” the figure said. “Min he Shara insulleh han mu’neana kulheyin. B’rabatha me kuth imal han. Drueh in neru keli mu’neana ha.”

  The words were low and harsh, throat-spoken. Nussau stiffened, his eyes opening a little wider. It had taken Jamal thus far to recognize the dialect of the northern tribes, though the captain and his officers spoke it to each other each night around the campfires, as did the common soldiers on the few occasions when he walked among them.

  “What is she saying?” he demanded, unsettled not by the apparition nor by her words, but by captain Nussau’s reaction of hackles-up surprise.

  Still speaking, or perhaps reciting, the figure came forward a few paces. Still backlit, her features were invisible, but she looked more human now—to Jamal, at least. But clearly the soldiers around him were less reassured.

  This was because they could understand her speech, as Jamal could not.

  “Captain Nussau,” she had said. “Your wife, Shara, writhes and screams now in childbirth. Half out of her, half in, your son hangs between life and death. The Increate watches you, and His hand is poised.”

  Nussau had left his wife in the fifth month of her pregnancy, and he could count as well as the next man; he knew that her time was now upon her. His gaze was fixed on the half-invisible figure as she walked out of the fire, directly towards him.

  “The Increate watches, and His hand has fallen. Born into death, your son’s eyes never open. The next child, a girl, lives to be six, dies then by drowning. There is no third. Your name dies with you.”

  An explosive gasp escaped from Nussau’s chest.

  The fire-woman spoke next unto the sergeant—a man so solid, a man of such girth and sinew, you’d think to see him standing still that he had never moved. “Sergeant Drutha,” she called. “The blood in your shit is an omen of death. By winter you are shrivelled to a husk, eaten from within like a cankered fruit. The poison is in your veins and crawling toward your heart.”

  The sergeant swore, and drew his sword. The fire-woman didn’t even turn to acknowledge him. But the soldier standing nearest to the sergeant ran toward her with a spear pointed at her breast.

  “You die now,” she told him, still without turning. And he did, though none saw what killed him. He just fell, suddenly, to his knees and then full length, and lay forlornly at the woman’s feet—an unintended tribute, which she ignored utterly.

  “Manasih Rey,” she continued, still advancing on the soldiers step by measured step. “Your betrothed fucks another in the bed you built for her. And the man she ruts with is mad, and kills her for the money in her purse. For three gold pieces she lies torn and opened—not now, but two months hence. However quickly you run back along the line of your marching, she’s dead and stinking when you open your front door. The sight will never leave you.

  “Qusid Apheli, your family is well, but you don’t see them again. Running from this place, you’re knocked aside by a stronger man and your skull breaks when you hit the ground. Uncaring, comrades kick and trample you. When all is done, your body is a smear like the smear of a dog crushed by many cart wheels.

  “Adir Beg, death does not even have to stoop to pick you up. The despair you carry inside you is his doorway, and the dagger at your waist is his key. You slit your wrists, three years from now, just as your older brother Yushif did before you. Your corpse lies at the side of a road until some stranger, passing by, drags it to a ravine and rolls it over the edge. Kites eat your body. Jackals fight for the bones.”

  It must have been the voice that did it. The details were circumstantial enough that every man addressed knew what he was hearing for the truth, and was struck dumb by it, but for the others . . . it was the voice. They heard the blade of a relentless fate grinding against their souls as against a strop, and they feared to be there when the blade was finally raised to chastise them.

  They fled.

  Only a few, at first, but a few is all it takes. Seeing their comrades running, others ran too. The sergeant was the last to move, Captain Nussau among the first. Within seconds, the soldiers were barging and climbing over each other in their haste to reach the gates again and get out of this cursed city. Qusid was not the only one who was trampled in that panic flight, but his fate was exactly as the woman had told him it would be.

  Within a few seconds, only Jamal remained. The voice was as forbidding to him as to any man, but the words were gibberish, and the silhouette was close enough and clear enough now that he recognized it. This was Rem, the librarian: he knew her too well to fear her. Moreover, he knew her as the woman who had won Zuleika when he had desired her himself.

  He strode toward her, his sword drawn back, his mouth fixed in a rictus snarl.

  The two blows that killed him came simultaneously.

  Rem had been carrying a crossbow, low down at her side. Zuleika had drilled her in the weapon’s use during long hours. She knew that one must hold it as level as possible when firing, and pull on the trigger with a single, coaxing movement of the index finger, removing the sear cleanly from the string. Her aim was true, and her hand did not falter.

  Zuleika, for her part, had taken advantage of Rem’s prophetic tirade to grip in her teeth the shaft of the arrow that had pierced her right hand. Jamal’s kick had snapped off the head, so she was able to draw it through her wounded flesh. Of the three daggers in her belt, she chose the heaviest, because it would fly straight despite the trembling of her hand and the spasming of her muscles.

  The quarrel entered Jamal’s heart: the dagger, which was hiltless, buried itself to the fullness of its length in the back of his neck.

  He continued to move toward Rem, his own momentum carrying him. She stepped aside, and he fell at her feet, face down.

  His death removed him from the future, as a factor that might touch Rem or be touched by her. Instantly, in the kaleidoscope of her inward sight, he went from blurry incoherence into pin-sharp focus. She saw the lives he might have lived, and how few of them were good. A wasteland had surrounded him from birth. It would have taken a much s
tronger man to find a way across it.

  “Oh, Jamal,” she murmured, her voice thick with tears.

  On the cusp of death, he heard those words—the pity in them filled him with a horror greater than the dark into which he fell.

  Kneeling quickly by Zuleika’s side, Rem stripped off her shirt and tore it into strips to dress her beloved’s wounds. Zuleika had slipped by this time into a shallow unconsciousness, barely aware of what was happening to her.

  Rem, conscious of everything, gazed down at her in something like envy.

  She had managed a full day’s march away from Bessa, and every moment of that day had been a torment.

  The future broke into the present like a tidal wave infinitely renewed and sustained. With each breath, it brought a fresh lading of ruin. She was aware of every death, every ending: the unmaking of the city, the labour of all those years uncannily and cruelly reversed.

  She saw Rihan and Firdoos fall, back to back, and she saw horsemen trample them—Rihan still alive for a few moments as the hooves pounded her.

  She saw Umayma shooting arrow after arrow until none were left; saw her take an arrow herself in the heart, another in the belly, and then saw her scream Zufir’s name as she threw herself from the battlements onto the head of a startled soldier below, killing him even as she died.

  She saw old Issi split a man’s skull with a thrown axe; gentle Halima embed a slingshot stone in the socket of a cavalryman’s eye; stolid Dalal scream like a berserker as she hacked at the top of a scaling ladder and sought to topple it on the heads of the enemy who climbed it. And in each case, saw the death that followed: the extinguishing, as Zuleika had said, of all hope and all possibility.

  Imtisar’s end she also saw. Equivocating to the last, the old politician had set a banquet for herself in the Jidur, on a carpet she, Jumanah and Najla hauled laboriously from her own house. Wine and fruit there was, and honeyed cake. She took a tearful farewell of the younger women, who would die together at the wall an hour later, and settled herself on the most comfortable of the seats. When the soldiers arrived, she was eating a piece of cake. She raised her eyes and greeted them with level gaze.