The City of Silk and Steel

by Mike Carey

  Walking quickly through the deepening dark, Zuleika headed out from the camp and then circled it at a half-mile’s distance. She had tried, while the sun was still up, to locate by sight the best places for sentries to be posted, and she headed for these first. She was lucky three times, finding her quarry each time before he found her, and dispatching him quickly. A prolonged search failed to find a fourth. She returned to camp, carrying with her three bows and three quivers of arrows.

  The silent combat now entered its final stage. She handed two of the bows to two of her lieutenants. The rest were already armed with bows taken from the men who had been killed in the tent. The last bow Zuleika kept for herself.

  The women dispersed and took up their positions in the darkness around the guards’ campfire, fifty yards or so away from it in all directions. Zuleika counted the men still seated around the fire: there were fourteen, tightly grouped. She drew back the bowstring, took careful aim, and fired.

  Her first arrow took a luckless soldier through the throat. She nocked a second immediately and fired again, but the first death was the signal and now arrows were whistling in on the men from all sides. Most went wide, but that didn’t matter – the important thing was to let the guards know that they were surrounded, so that they’d kick out the fire and take up defensive positions. This would have been indubitably the right thing to do if they were indeed facing a hostile host sitting out in the dark of the desert, but Zuleika, firing from right on their doorstep, killed three more while they were doing it.

  The extinguishing of the fire was the second signal. The waiting women raised a fearful noise, filling the air with high-pitched battle cries. The soldiers, embattled and terrified, returned fire with bows and slings, though they could see no enemy. Zuleika, meanwhile, drew sword and dagger and walked among them.

  The dark was almost absolute. The women’s fire, a little way off, was still lit, but nobody had been tending it and it had died down to a red glow. The desert night was moonless, and the stars hoarded their glimmer for themselves. Zuleika’s blades flicked at throats and poked at hearts: man after man fell, seeing her only when it was too late.

  The last three fights were the hardest. The men’s eyes had adjusted to the dark by this time, and they’d realised that they were facing a single opponent close to hand as opposed to an army firing from a distance. The three men threw themselves on Zuleika at once, and she was so busy defending herself against their flashing blades that she could make no headway against them. She saw an opening, leaped in and stabbed one of the three through the throat, but a sword hilt smacked her in the side of the head and she fell. The body of the man she had just struck fell across her, pinning her.

  She saw the sword reversed in its owner’s hand and raised above her, ready to plunge into her chest.

  Something shot out of the night, like a darker line drawn across the darkness: the soldier fell, with a small grunt of surprise.

  The sole surviving guard might still have pressed his attack and slain her, but finding himself alone he turned and ran. Zuleika’s dagger took him low in the back.

  Climbing to her feet, still a little groggy from the blow to her temples, she examined the corpse of the man who had almost killed her. It took her only a moment to find the slingshot stone, still embedded in the hole it had made in his skull.

  The boy Jamal stepped out of the darkness, his sling in his hand, and stared down at his handiwork. Triumph fought with sick horror in his face.

  ‘You have my thanks,’ said Zuleika quietly.

  ‘You should have told me,’ the boy said, his tone cold. ‘They’re all traitors and jackals. I wish I could have killed more of them.’

  Then he burst into tears.

  When the other women ventured to approach at last and view the outcome of the skirmish, they found Zuleika cradling the wildly weeping boy to her breast, her face – for the first time in all of this – betraying something like alarm.

  And here again, I propose to pause. There are other events that must be visited if you are fully to understand what it was that happened next.

  How Hakkim Found His Enemy

  In the kingdom of Bessa, thirty years after the death of the prophet Al-Mutassin, there lived a scholar by the name of Hakkim Mehdad.

  Hakkim was not in the first instance a scholar by his own choosing, but he seemed predestined by nature to pursue such a calling – he puzzled and alarmed his parents, an elderly shoemaker and his much younger wife, by refusing to speak until his fifth birthday, and even thereafter could seldom be coaxed into uttering more than two or three words together; but it was clear even to the casual observer that Hakkim’s silence was not the silence of vacancy. On the contrary, he would spend hours in silent reverie, or tracing abstract figures in the dust by the door lintel with the end of a stick.

  This thoughtful demeanour was accompanied by a singular aversion to action. When his older siblings bullied or berated him, which was often, Hakkim would stand with head bowed and face grimly set, as if he hoped by extreme stillness to merge into his surroundings and be forgotten. His retaliations, such as they were, would come later, when a favourite toy belonging to one of his tormentors would be found mangled and broken, the subject of some sublimated assault.

  Hakkim’s father was only a humble cobbler, and so had never had the opportunity to pursue learning for its own sweet sake. He took these signs for what they were, evidence that his son lived far more in the fastnesses of his own mind than in the everyday ruck of two over-crowded rooms over a narrow shop in the narrowest of Bessa’s teeming streets. It must also be said that young Hakkim showed no skill in his father’s trade, and could not be used in the workshop even in relatively simple tasks such as waxing leather or punching eyelets. Any pair of shoes he touched was unlikely to survive the acquaintance, no matter where in the process of manufacture their paths crossed.

  Over his wife’s tearful protests, Hakkim’s father therefore determined to place his youngest son in service with a local holy man, the bargain being that Hakkim would tend house, cook and clean, fetch and carry, and would in return be granted both ineffable wisdom and a daily meal of bread and beans.

  A suitable holy man was duly found. His name was Rasoul, and he was an Inviate, which is to say a crypto-theist: the core of his belief was that the Most Holy deliberately obscures His path so that humankind may not sully His greatness by approaching near it with their lowly understanding. Alone among the sects, then, the Inviates do not pray for enlightenment; they pray to reassure God that they’re not going through his trash (that is to say, the created cosmos) in order to find out what he’s been up to.

  Hakkim’s soul was fervent, primed for belief. He progressed quickly in his studies, and astonished his master with the retentiveness of his memory. By the age of ten, he could recite all the three-hundred-thirty-and-three Inviate prayers (most of which are variations on ‘we’re not peeking’) without a pause or a stammer, accompanying each with its prescribed repertoire of hand movements and postural shifts.

  For most of his eleventh year, too, young Hakkim continued to take pleasure and pride in these accomplishments. Such feats of will and memory were a playground for his intellect, which hitherto (like his skinny, wiry body) had lived within the straitest of bounds. Then, gradually and inexorably and very much to his own surprise, that delight began first to diminish and then to be seasoned with irritation. Probing the tender place, the young adept found that there were passages in the Inviate scriptures on which his mind, though not his facile tongue, faltered.

  In particular, he questioned the Inviate stance towards the supreme being. Why show such exaggerated respect for God, Hakkim wondered in the privacy of his heart, when so much about His programme and His motives had to be taken on trust? It seemed to him both craven and sycophantic to thank the deity for undoubted benefits – sentience and reason – whose use was then so hedged about with prohibitions that they might just as well not have been bestowed in the first place
. It was as if the almighty had given him a sword, perfectly balanced and ecstatically sharp, and bid him in recompense to keep it in its sheath at all times.

  When Hakkim tasked his master with these troubling thoughts, the pious old man was ready with a cogent and unanswerable argument: he beat his errant disciple with a switch made from supplest cedar wood, until the lad could scarcely walk.

  ‘Your questions are heresies both in and of themselves, Hakkim,’ he pointed out gently, when his aching muscles finally compelled him to lay down the cane. ‘You must cleanse yourself of them. Come, and I will show you how.’

  He went out into the courtyard behind his house, with Hakkim limping respectfully along three paces behind him. There was a well out there, with a stone coping, and a small mound of loose stones left over from the making of the well. Most of the stones were negligible in size, but one was a dull grey boulder as big and broad about as a festival loaf.

  ‘This,’ said Rasoul, pointing to the grey stone, ‘is the burden of negative thought. Carry it across the courtyard, and set it down beside the gate.’

  Hakkim obeyed, with great difficulty. The wounds of his beating had not yet begun to scab over, and his blood made the heavy stone slick, so that it was hard to hold on to as he hefted its considerable weight and staggered across the dusty courtyard to its further end.

  ‘Now bring it back again to the well,’ Rasoul commanded.

  Again, the lad did as he was told, though his sinews cracked and his heart fluttered like a pennant in a gale.

  ‘One hundred times must you bear your burden thither,’ the holy man told his novice, ‘and one hundred times bear it hither again. And when you are done, this burden will pass from you. Go to it, my child.’

  Verily, this was an ordeal. It would have been hard enough even if the boy had been hale; stiff and sore as he was from the beating, it was an endless labyrinth of torment. He could have walked away from it, perhaps, if he had been a different boy. But he was who he was, and so he obeyed.

  Through the watches of the night, he bore the stone hither and thither. The first ten journeys he was able to count, and the ten after that still had some separate and definable existence. After that, and with surprising abruptness, they merged into a terrifying totality. Possibly the beating he had received made him feverish – possibly the hidden God sniped at him from cover, petty and implacable. He had always carried the stone, and always would. He could no longer remember picking it up, and could not imagine putting it down. It seemed a part of him: the anchor to which he clung, the spine that kept him upright, the whirling planet in whose soil his feet were rooted. When he realised that he had lost count, he started again from one.

  Some time towards morning, the fever broke; or else God relented and withdrew. Hakkim came slowly back to himself, slumped over the stone, his breath sounding in his chest like a dying rat thrashing inside a paper lantern, his cold, waxen skin running sweat in the way a half-scalded cheese runs with whey.

  It was a terrible irony that Hakkim’s punishment should become his vision, and therefore the foundation of his spiritual life. He clung to the stone, and the stone welcomed his embrace.

  It was the burden of negative thought, Rasoul had said. It did not seem a burden now.

  As the first cocks crowed in the neighbouring yards, Hakkim took the stone into his master’s chamber and brought it to his master’s bed. He stood there in the dawn light, the burden of negative thought cradled in his hands like an infant. He spoke his master’s name, calmly but commandingly.

  Rasoul opened bleary eyes, half-seeing, half-rising from the shallow, milky well of the dreams that come after the dawn.

  ‘Quietly,’ he mumbled. ‘The birds—’

  Hakkim let go of the stone, which in falling crushed Rasoul’s head to a pink, bone-seeded pulp. Then he went through the house to his own room, packed his meagre belongings, a skin of water and some bread. He left while the muezzins were still singing the faithful of a thousand churches to a thousand devotions. He held none of those holies in his heart, and he saw, with the clarity of youth and sickness, how strong that made him.

  Hakkim’s second master, Drihud Ben Din, was an Ascetic, a denier of pleasure. The boy sought him out by reputation, and auditioned him rigorously while seeming to submit himself to the master’s interrogation. The questions Ben Din asked him about his habits both of thought and of life pleased him – they implied an austere and self-denying lifestyle, in which negative thought, so far from being eschewed and punished, was elevated to its proper status. Through negatives, through denial, we come at last to the truth: without them we labour forever in the qu’aha sul jidani, the labyrinth of masks.

  In the Ascetic’s house, Hakkim flourished – although he would not have used that word, with its overtones of vegetable excess. He grew straight and upright, towards the light, never deviating in any direction that might be marked on a compass, never falling for the snares that the world sets in the path of the righteous.

  Ascetic: a barbarous word of occidental provenance. It comes from the askesis, the emptying out of the appetites, the intellect, the habits both of thought and action. Hakkim experienced now the transcendent consequences of that emptying: his soul filled up with itself, balancing the pressure of the world and holding him in perfect dynamic equipoise.

  Drihud Ben Din was most impressed with his disciple. He had never before encountered such self-abnegation, such steadfast will, in a boy so young. He tutored Hakkim well in the tenets of his new faith, until the day came when Hakkim began to add to those tenets himself and to expound their wisdom to his master more eloquently than the older man could express them himself. ‘You are ready now,’ Ben Din said approvingly, ‘to test yourself in the Jidur.’

  The Jidur, the Garden of Voices, was a place unique to Bessa. It was a large public square, paved with pink stone, where it was the right of any marabout to bid against other holy men and visionaries for the souls of passers-by, using as coin his eloquence and his sanctity. To the Jidur, then, Hakkim set forth, early enough in the day that the sky was the same colour as the stones beneath his feet. He was the first to arrive, and he picked the choicest spot, at the centre of the square where four wooden benches had been set underneath an old and wide-spreading lemon tree, to allow weary travellers a momentary respite from the heat. A fat and oleaginous adept of the Tsevre school, arriving some minutes later, argued without much conviction that this highly desirable pitch belonged by rights to him, but Hakkim was not to be cajoled or browbeaten. He held his ground, as the other spaces around the square filled up, and the Tsevretist retired at length with bad grace to stand out in the heat of the day.

  When the sun was as high as the upper branches of the lemon tree, the first curious souls began to wander in from the adjacent streets to see what flavours of enlightenment were on offer that day. Hakkim was ready to receive them. Or at least he thought he was, until the moment when he opened his mouth.

  ‘The pursuit of pleasure is as hollow and futile as the pursuit of a beautiful woman,’ he opened. His voice sounded a little weak and quavering even to himself, but it was the first proposition he had ever offered up in public, and he was confident that his delivery would improve. Unfortunately, in the moment of hesitation that these thoughts occasioned, a Durukhar marabout who was stationed to Hakkim’s left, and who had not yet begun his own sermon, spoke up.

  ‘That’s an unfortunate simile,’ he said. ‘They might be one and the same thing. When a man pursues a beautiful woman, surely pleasure is exactly what he promises himself.’

  ‘And that promise,’ Hakkim agreed, only mildly outfaced by the objection, ‘is deceitful, for the pleasure that woman brings is fleeting, like all—’

  ‘Have you ever experienced the pleasure that woman brings?’ asked a sceptic sitting comfortably with his back to the base of the lemon tree. ‘You look a little young.’

  ‘All pleasures,’ said Hakkim sententiously, ‘are alike in that they divert the flesh a
t the expense of the mind and soul. For everywhere in life, we find—’

  ‘Wait, wait, wait,’ said the Durukhar, who was evidently of a pedantic turn of mind. ‘All pleasures divert the flesh? What about solving a rebus or a riddle? That’s a pleasure that diverts the mind.’

  Hakkim was momentarily gravelled by this, but he dived into the breach as best he could. ‘The mind is of the flesh,’ he pointed out, stammering a little now. ‘The brain is the seat of intellect, and the brain is a bodily organ. Therefore all pleasures of the intellect are pleasures of the flesh.’

  ‘That’s ridiculous,’ a third man piped up. He was cradling a lemon in his hand, but it was not apparent whether he intended to eat it or throw it – both pursuits were allowed in the Jidur. ‘So there’s no difference between having sex and having an argument?’

  ‘Certainly my wife can do both at once,’ the man sitting under the tree observed, and the sally was approved with loud guffaws all round.

  The pestilential Durukhar perceived now that he was in a position to drive off the opposition. ‘And it were as much nourishment to think about eating a sherbet as actually to taste it – since the pleasure in each case is comparable.’

  ‘Comparable in kind,’ Hakkim corrected his rival angrily. ‘Not in degree. My point is—’

  ‘So what, wise master, is the rate of exchange?’ asked the Durukhar with feigned politeness. ‘How many times must one think about a sherbet before one has attained the same amount of pleasure as could be had by tasting it?’ The crowd laughed, encouraging the Durukhar to further efforts. ‘And would you advise the same approach with your beautiful woman? You could think many times about enjoying her, instead of essaying her once.’

  ‘He’s thinking about her now,’ jeered the man with the lemon, seeing Hakkim’s furious blush. There was more laughter, and a number of vulgar exhortations.