by Mike Carey
‘Three thousand,’ Anwar Das said, and Farhat, Zeinab and Huma gasped in fervent relief. Since the answer was obviously coming in any case, Zuleika didn’t ask the question, but Imtisar stiffened and stared at Anwar Das. ‘What have you done?’ she demanded.
‘Ten days ago,’ the ambassador said, ‘I entered into negotiations with the Caliph of Perdondaris.’
‘Kephiz Bin Ezvahoun,’ Umayma said. But she knew her mistake at once, and corrected it. ‘No, you mean the new one. Garudh.’
For Bessa’s great neighbour was undergoing its own upheavals. The old caliph was now in his final sickness, and in the absence of a son his nephew, Garudh, had selflessly stepped in to supply his place. Though Bin Ezvahoun was yet alive, Garudh took counsel and delivered edicts on his behalf. It was a coup, but a coup so soft and gradual that the cities of the plains had taken a full year to hear its footfall. And it would be years yet before the repercussions – in wars, and intrigues, the collapse of old amities and the painful forging of new ones – began to be felt.
‘Garudh,’ Anwar Das confirmed. His expression and tone had an exemplary blandness about them, and he met nobody’s gaze while he spoke. But he cleared his throat, as though the name might have stuck there for a moment, a little unpleasantly. ‘The subject of my discussion with the . . . acting caliph was the purchase, or as it might be the hire, of mercenary soldiery.’
The faces around the table now all mirrored Anwar Das’s careful lack of expression. Taking on mercenaries had been discussed for many hours in the Jidur – hours of bitter argument, furious denunciation, shameless attacks on character and reputation and at least one actual fist fight. For many in that assembly, the thought of emptying the public purse to purchase the services of killers (Zuleika was never considered under that heading) was anathema; for just as many, the thought of allowing foreign fighters inside the city walls to examine its approaches and defences was just as distasteful. Between the conscience of the former and the paranoia of the latter, the debate had stalled. Therefore, any words that Anwar Das had exchanged on this topic with the Caliph of Perdondaris, or with his nephew, had been unauthorised adventurism of a kind that could easily lose him his post.
But there was no arguing with results.
‘Five hundred mercenaries,’ Zuleika mused. ‘If they’re seasoned, they’ll be well worth having. I’m assuming the price was pretty steep, though?’
Anwar Das shook his head, looking a little grave now. ‘You mistake me, Zuleika. The caliph’s answer was no. He refused to become entangled in our small war, perhaps fearing that to offer us aid might turn the attention of the Lion towards himself.’
‘But Perdondaris could roll over the Lion and squash him flat!’ Imtisar protested.
‘That’s most likely true. But the assessment of risk is a subjective science. And why take on any risk at all, when you don’t need to? The caliph weighed the money I was offering against the benefits of strict neutrality, and went with the latter.’
‘Filthy coward,’ muttered Umayma.
‘But in that case,’ Zuleika asked Anwar Das, ‘where did these five hundred fighters come from?’
‘I’m glad you asked,’ the ambassador said gravely. ‘I followed a hint given to me by the Lady Gursoon.’
There was silence for a moment. The loss of Gursoon was still raw – it seemed outrageous to invoke her name lightly, in support of a scheme that might still prove disastrous. Both Imtisar and Farhat looked ready to protest. But Anwar Das held up a hand.
‘I spoke to her just before she died,’ he said. ‘She suspected I would make an advance to Perdondaris, and advised against it. She had, perhaps, a clearer understanding of the situation there than I. But she made another suggestion. You remember that Fouad was a member of a nomad tribe: his family often came here to trade, and she met them several times after his death. She reminded me how many of the nomads, Fouad’s people and others, have had to move aside as the Lion’s army passed, or flee ahead of it. How many have lost their livelihoods – the goats they herded, the horses they bred, the tents they lived in. And she reminded me of what Fouad used to say, that should you quarrel with a plains nomad, you’d better have ten good men to back you up if you want to go home with both ears.
‘So when the caliph turned me down I took a circuitous route back to the city, through a dozen or so of the largest encampments I could find. Most, obviously, were on the move, and had scant time to listen to my tenders. Still, in each I was given at least a cursory hearing. I promised that any man or woman who agreed to fight for Bessa in this conflict would be given afterwards if he or she survived ten goats or three horses and a sum equal to the yearly pay of a labourer. If they died, a like sum would be paid to their families. And in each case, after I’d spoken, a few people came to me and joined my train – two here, three there, perhaps as many as ten in the larger camps.’
‘Ten times a dozen doesn’t add up to five hundred,’ Zuleika pointed out. She was staring hard at Anwar Das.
‘No,’ he agreed. ‘It doesn’t. But one morning, having retired to sleep at the usual time and after consuming only a moderate amount of wine to quench the fires of the day, I awoke to find my tent surrounded by silent, grim-faced warriors on horseback. They were dressed in jerkins and breechcloths of faded leather, without adornment. They wore no swords at their sides, but each instead had three long spears strapped to his back. At least, the men were so accoutred; as for the women, each bore a curved dagger and a leather bolas. Their skin was so dark it was more black than brown, and therewithal it shone like polished wood. Their faces were like the death masks of princes: fine of feature, but with a cold and forbidding immobility. They outnumbered my retinue by more than ten to one, so as you may imagine I waited most politely to hear what they had to say for themselves.
‘And what they said was La im sa’ika we ahlaam shede.’
‘Sign me up,’ Zuleika translated. ‘By the gods, Anwar Das! The Yeagir! You’ve brought us Yeagir horse-husbands!’
‘And horsewives,’ Anwar Das reminded her. ‘To the number of five hundred. It seems the word had spread from oasis to oasis, and these – the proudest and most reclusive people of As-Sahra – had come to hear of our need.’
Silence around the table as the implications of this sank in. The Yeagir were a law unto themselves: arrogant and insular, a tribe whose full complement was also its royal family, since for any Yeagir to cede sovereignty to any other was impossible. All knew of them, but few had ever met one. Fewer still had walked away from such a meeting.
‘And what’s their price?’ Imtisar asked, when she deemed the silence had lasted long enough.
‘They ask no price,’ Anwar Das said.
‘What? But then, to take on someone else’s fight . . .’
‘That’s not what they’ve agreed to, lady. Apparently, the Lion’s men killed a young boy from one of the Yeagir meinies, having met him at a waterhole and quarrelled with him when he refused to stand aside and let them drink. Now that insult has to be wiped out in blood. They have come to fight for Bessa because they consider it a more condign revenge to thwart the Lion in his goals than to kill a few of his people in a pointless bloodletting. All this they explained to me that night. And then they followed on behind me as I rode back toward the city, forbearing to share the amenities of my camp. Now they await us at the Well of Sparrows, due north of here, and we have six turns of the glass to tell them our decision.’
‘Our decision is yes,’ Zuleika said instantly.
‘But the Jidur knows nothing about this!’ Imtisar protested, horrified. ‘And it’s not as though they could be hidden. Once they enter the city, the people will know that you went behind their backs.’
‘Then if we all survive, they can hang us,’ Zuleika said. ‘The Lion has, at a conservative estimate, some twenty thousand soldiers. It may be as many as thirty thousand, since he’s careful to break up the companies when he marches to make counting difficult. In a pitched battle, he
’d swallow us like a drunken man swallows a sherbet, in one gulp. And these desert riders – if you lop off their arms in a fight, they’ll fight on with the dagger in their teeth. They’ll be troublesome to handle, but by the devil’s hairy balls, they’ll earn their keep!’
The meeting broke up after some further discussion of ways and means, and Anwar Das was dispatched to invite the Yeagir within the city walls. Because they came in by night, only the guards on the Northern Gate saw them arrive, but word of their presence had already spread by morning, and the citizenry of Bessa came down to stare at these silent and intimidating strangers as they boiled their tea over copper braziers and oiled their hair and skin with unguents that smelled of horse shit.
The Yeagir bore this awed scrutiny with stolid indifference. And then, shortly before midday, swirls of dust on the horizon announced the imminent arrival of the Lion’s army, drawing off the crowd as the ocean is drawn by the moon.
At first they stared from the battlements and from the plain in front of the Eastern Gate. Then as the dust rose – even as the sun did – towards the zenith of the sky, Zuleika gave orders for the city to be sealed, and they went inside without demur.
The Lion was methodical: his troops arrived in perfect order to deploy around the curve of the city’s eastern walls. Later, of course, they would move to encircle it completely: this was a show of strength, intended to impress upon the people of the city the hopelessness of their position.
After some minutes a single figure rode forward from the host, seated on a white stallion and robed in white so that beast and rider seemed at first to be one entity. He stood before the walls in silence for a while, waiting for some answering figure to appear on the battlements above him. None did.
‘You brought this on yourselves,’ the Lion of the Desert called up to the silent walls, when it was clear no interlocutor would step forward. ‘This city had a ruler once – a just and a fair one. He was overthrown by a monster, and then in the fullness of time, when the monster was cast down in his turn, the rightful prince appeared to claim his birthright. But you stood against right and against nature – against man’s law, and the Increate’s. You refused the yoke, and therefore chose the sword. You roused the Lion. Today the Lion has come to chastise you.’
He paused for an answer. No answer came.
‘Look out upon this multitude,’ the Lion called. ‘If you put a sword in the hand of every man, woman and child in that city – and such is your perversity, I judge that possible – you would still be outnumbered by my host. You cannot fight me, and you cannot entreat my mercy. I have none. Throw open your gates now, and throw down your swords, and even then, many of you will die: chiefly, the women of my father’s harem, the concubinate, along with their families and hangers-on. The rest of you will live, but will be punished in strict proportion to your participation in the civic life of Bessa. By how much you helped with hands and hearts and minds to turn the city where I was born into the obscenity it has now become, by so much will you suffer. No one will escape my rod. No one. So decide, and answer me.’
He fell silent again, and again the silence grew.
‘Is nobody brave enough even to speak?’ the Lion bellowed at last. ‘Are you all so cowed, so beaten down by the rule of whores that you have no voices left to plead or treat with me?’
Only silence. Only stillness.
He turned his horse around at last, and rode back towards his own ranks. ‘Then by all means,’ he shouted over his shoulder, ‘let’s speak in actions, since you have no interest in words.’
There was a lull of some minutes, perhaps half a turn of the glass, while mechanisms of some sort were assembled in the foremost ranks of the Lion’s forces, from baulks of wood laboriously dragged by whole chains of draught camels. This was another reason, presumably, for the slow progress of the army as it marched on Bessa. The machines were siege bows and ballistas, and as soon as they were complete, the first rocks and arrows began to sail over the walls.
Along with the first volley came the severed heads of the peace delegation.
Mushin’s Tale
The forces of the Lion of the Desert, the unconquerable Jamal, moved across the face of As-Sahra like a louse across the armpit of God.
That was the trouble with the desert, Mushin thought. This must surely be the mightiest host that had ever been assembled in the world’s long history – fully thirty thousand men at arms, with horses and camels and siege engines so huge that they had to be carried along in separate pieces and only assembled when they were to be used – and yet, once they had left the coastal plain and were properly embarked upon their journey, their numbers seemed suddenly negligible. As-Sahra made you look small, no matter what you did.
Mushin was now a fully grown man of eighteen summers – a scion of Ibu Kim, with light fingers and a lighter heart, who had earned his bread by thieving, just as his father had done before him, and asked no greater gift from God than that he kept on allowing men to drink more than was good for them and to look the other way while their purse-strings were being cut.
But then he had met Jamal and heard Jamal’s story – the story of a prince cozened by evil women, and beaten and cast into exile when he remonstrated with them. These were potent ideas, but it was not the story so much as the man telling it: a prince who drank at the common tap with common men, and stood his round, and laughed at coarse jokes and told a few of his own. It was hard not to love such a man, and then once you loved him you believed in him. You could see it in his eyes, anyway, in case you were ever inclined to doubt. His eyes were haunted by a great tragedy, and when he spoke you could see it moving there behind those two dark windows, barely contained.
And so it was that when Jamal asked Mushin to join him in a brave enterprise, he accepted at once. Others did too – more than two dozen of them – but Mushin spoke up before any other and so Jamal named him as his lieutenant.
‘A lieutenant!’ he told his mother, when she called him fool and bade him stay where he belonged. ‘Not a common cutpurse any more, mother, for you to berate and disrespect. I’m an officer now, and the privilege of rank is . . . is . . . is for you to shut up, unless you salute when you speak to me!’
Instead of saluting, Mushin’s mother – who had two inches and forty pounds on her wayward son – beat him with a broom handle and threw him out onto the street. But that mattered little, since Jamal was leaving the city the next morning in any case, bound for Susurrut. Mushin marched out of the wagon gate without a backward glance, and did not miss his home until almost lunchtime.
Jamal’s business in Susurrut was the same as his business in Ibu Kim: recruitment. He trawled the inns of Copper Street and Forgotten Lane from one end to the other, drinking – or at least clinking glasses, for Mushin noticed now that his new master drank but little himself – with all the local rowdies, swapping stories and punches, arm wrestling, gambling, kissing the whores on the hand and talking to them as though they were princesses, and ever and always laying his money down.
These methods met with much success, and the Lion’s numbers swelled in Susurrut. Among the new recruits was one Tayqullah, who when first he walked into the warehouse that was their current lodging introduced himself as Jamal’s lieutenant.
Mushin stood, realising as he did so that Tayqullah had more of an advantage over him in height and mass even than his mother had. Nonetheless, he spoke up boldly. ‘I’m Jamal’s lieutenant,’ he told the big man. ‘And you’d do well to—’
He woke up some hours later, with the lower half of his face so swollen and bruised that he couldn’t talk or eat for three days. At that, he was told by some others among the new men, he was lucky; Tayqullah had been known to break a man’s neck with that punch of his.
When he finally regained the use of speech, Mushin asked Jamal to sort out this small matter of the chain of command. Jamal explained the situation to him. The precise terms of the explanation were complicated and extensive, but the nub of it was
that Mushin and Tayqullah were both Jamal’s lieutenants. Tayqullah was the lieutenant when it came to making decisions, having ideas and giving orders: Mushin was the lieutenant in terms of prestige and trust and being able to call himself one, except when Tayqullah was in earshot.
After Susurrut, they got to work in earnest – and in spite of what Mushin had told his mother about moving up in the world, most of the work was robbery. And the part of the work that wasn’t robbery was murder.
Mushin didn’t mind robbery, but found murder upsetting. It was one thing to stick a knife in a man who was trying to stick one in you; it was, indefinably but definitely, a different thing to cut the throat of a man (or woman) whose arms two other men were holding. After the first three raids on Bessan caravans had been carried in this wise, Mushin found an opportunity to talk to Jamal in private, and offered as a suggestion that they should take the camel-drivers and merchants alive and ransom them back to Bessa. ‘And then we get even more of their money, don’t we, Jamal? It’s like we rob them twice, every time. Genius!’
But Jamal didn’t think it was genius. He reminded Mushin that having ideas wasn’t in his job description, and explained to him – patiently, for the most part – why it was necessary at this stage to kill every man and woman in the caravans. ‘Some of them might know me by sight. Even if they don’t, others might recognise me from their description. Better, for now, if they don’t have the faintest idea who their enemy is. The fires of our imaginations, Mushin, unlike most fires, burn brightest if you starve them of fuel. So, for now, flailing in the dark against an enemy who could be near or far, the lawmakers of Bessa will injure only themselves. This is the first phase in a grand plan, my friend. Stay with me, and watch it work itself out.’