The Steel Seraglio (52 page)

“The news is all bad,” he warned her in advance.

Zuleika poured two glasses of wine laced with brandy, handed one to him and then sat. She made no reply, knowing that he would tell the story in his own way and in his own time. But he paced a while, and fastened the wooden shutters across the window, too, before he spoke again.

“In Ibu Kim,” he said, “I found Bessan goods for sale in bazaars we never use. Inquiring as Medruk Nifahr, a petty thief, I ascertained soon enough that these were wares brought into the city by the Lion’s men, to be resold there. But that led me to wonder how it was that stolen goods with our makers’ marks upon them could be sold so freely in a city with which we have a trade agreement. So I made a second pass, as Indrusain Irumi, a prosperous merchant with suspect acquaintances including the aforementioned Medruk Nifahr. Bethi posed as my wife, and had several intimate conversations with the younger son of Ibu Kim’s sultan. He was profligate with his words.”

“I’ll bet he was.”

Das took a sip of the fortified wine, and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, leaving a cleaner smear across his dust-masked face. “It became apparent,” he told her, “that this was a franchised operation, carried out with the blessing of Ibu Kim’s viziers. The Lion of the Desert sells what he steals from us at half the price we normally ask, and the profits are shared equally between him and the sultan.

“Moreover, Ibu Kim is not the only city with whom the Lion has made this arrangement. I found the same pattern in Ashurai and Sebun. You’ll note that these are currently the furthest cities with whom we regularly trade. I don’t think that’s coincidental. The Lion has chosen to begin at the edges of our perception and steal in upon us slowly—with the long-term aim, it seems, of sabotaging our economy, disrupting our alliances, and leaving us comprehensively isolated.”

Zuleika nodded, her face grimly set. “Which in turn is instrumental to a further aim—that of attacking and conquering the city.”

Anwar Das stared at her. His cup, which was halfway to his mouth, did not reach it. “How did you know that?” he demanded, looking both surprised and chagrined. “I travelled a hundred leagues and risked my neck more times than a chook has feathers to find that out!”

“I’m sorry, Anwar Das. Your revelation first, then mine.”

“No,” he insisted. “I intend to have the last word on this. You go first.”

“The Lion,” Zuleika told him, “is Jamal.”

Anwar Das’s eyebrows rose a trifle. “Your former prince, and would-be insurrectionist.”

“Yes.”

“Whose throat you forbore to slit, despite my earnest pleading.”

“Even him.”

“So divine a thing is mercy.”

“Go ahead and gloat.”

They drank in silence for a minute or two, musing on the implications of this. Then Anwar Das resumed.

“Depressing as that is, it’s not the worst news,” he said. “From Ibu Kim, I followed the Lion’s trail westward.”

“Westward? There’s nothing west of Ibu Kim but the sea.”

“Aye, exactly. And on the sea, a fishing port, so small it doesn’t even have a name. And yet, in that negligible place, I met a great many slab-faced men with their own weapons and armour, not one of whom could get his tongue around a simple ‘good morning.’ I know, because I am uncommonly polite and exchanged the time of day with dozens of them. Whatever their native language was, it was not one I knew. Some of them may not even have had a native language.”

Zuleika so far lost control of herself that she stood, and took an involuntary step towards Anwar Das. “Mercenaries,” she said.

“Barbarians,” he countered coldly. “Call them what they are. Men from the lands north of the Tigris, who never knew until now that civilization resumed beyond the desert’s reach. How our young Lion made contact with them in the first place, we may not guess—still less, how he was able to negotiate with them or in what coin he pays them. But he has bought himself an army, nonetheless, and an army of indecent size. He hasn’t bought it to let it lie unused.

“He will bring it here. He will bring it against us. I think he only waits now because in the plan he has formulated he will come to Bessa when Bessa is already on its knees—and for the moment, though we stagger, we still stand.”

Zuleika put her free hand to the hilt of her sword, and half-drew it from its sheath. Her own words from another time rose in her mind. “We must become once again the seraglio of steel,” she said.

“Ah,” said Anwar Das. “But that was another battle, against a lesser enemy. Will steel suffice, this time? I think it may not.”

“Then we’ll become that thing on which steel breaks,” Zuleika said.

Even though Anwar Das had located and identified Jamal’s army, it was no easy matter for the Bessan polity to chart its progress. At first, Zuleika sent agents into the field to locate and follow the horde; she abandoned this approach after the third such agent failed to report back. Clearly, whatever else they were, the barbarians whose loyalty Jamal was renting were no fools. They had scouts out around the main body, and the scouts had sufficient experience to blood their own tracks.

The next attempt, which entailed trying to get one or more of her people recruited into Jamal’s forces, fared no better. Anwar Das had heard rumours that the Lion of the Desert had been recruiting followers from Ibu Kim and Susurrut, but it was soon evident that his muster was full. Zuleika’s agents wasted weeks trawling the taverns and whorehouses of those cities, without encountering a single press gang or even a bandit on a weekend pass.

The truth was that Zuleika’s skills, as far as warfare went, had always been tactical rather than strategic. Gifted though she was with intelligence and animal cunning, it still didn’t come naturally to her to think on these scales. It took a combination of the four of them, Gursoon as well as Anwar Das, Rem alongside Zuleika, to find a way past this impasse. It was unsubtle, but it was effective, providing an accurate picture of Jamal’s forces which—though it came with a built-in time delay—entailed no risk.

It worked in this wise: Zuleika set her spies to wait at the waterholes, and to ask the refugees who came through there, fleeing ahead of the horde, from whence they had come and for how long they had travelled. There were more than enough people there to ask, for though the Lion’s forces did not lay siege to any of the cities they passed, and indeed skirted as wide of them as was feasible, they had no choice but to live off the land. Their quartermasters and acaters pillaged the goat herds of the mountain peoples and the tent villages of the plains nomads, and those people moved on before them in a great wave of the displaced and the pauperised.

Debates ensued in the Jidur as to whether these refugees should be offered sanctuary.

Farhat: I don’t think we can let them go on into the deep desert. They’re exhausted already. They won’t survive.

Khelia: But we have no room. Where would they live?

Imtisar: Some of them could live in the barracks. Don’t we need soldiers? Well, here are soldiers in plenty.

Zuleika: Untrained, undernourished, and terrified. They wouldn’t be soldiers, they’d be oxen in a fire pit, waiting to be roasted. Take them in, by all means, but if you’re thinking of enlisting them into the city guard, then you might as well save time and effort by cutting their throats as soon as they sign their names.

Issi: We should at least make the offer. Compassion demands that we take them in, if they want to come here.

Gursoon: There’s no compassion in inviting these wretches into a war zone.

This last was unanswerably true. Judging by the combined accounts of the refugees, there could no longer be any doubt: the Lion’s army was heading towards Bessa, steadily and directly. Even its slow progress was bad news rather than good, because Gursoon and her lawmakers knew exactly what it meant. An army that wanted only to raid, as some of the plains tribesmen had once raided across the northern reaches of
As-Sahra
, could move with spectacular speed and be at the gates of a city almost before the watchmen had raised a cry. But an army that meant to lay siege required solid lines of supply, and therefore moved more slowly, cementing in place the support structures that would later keep it alive. Jamal’s measured progress was an indication that he meant business.

More handwringing and heart-searching in the Jidur, but on this point very little argument.

Risheah: This is our home, and we love it. Of course we’ll fight for it, and die for it. If we lose Bessa, that will be like death in any case.

Lying at Zuleika’s side, Rem listened in silence to long accounts of the preparations that she already had in train. She had a score of fletchers turning out arrows, and two score blacksmiths forging swords at a fantastic rate, and despite her sour words about making untrained people fight, she had instituted a voluntary training regime for the ordinary people of the city, who were being drilled in the use of these newly delivered weapons by sergeants selected and overseen by Zuleika herself.

There was an unspoken question in all of this, which Zuleika forbore to ask. Do we win? Do we prevail here, and go on as we have done before, or do we end now in blood and fire?

Rem could not answer. Because her own survival was directly involved, and because of the inverse square law already described elsewhere in this narrative, the answer changed from moment to moment and seemed to hinge on things that made no sense to her. So she did not speak but only listened, her head resting in the crook of Zuleika’s shoulder, breathing in the musk of her sweat and watching the rise and fall of her breasts as she breathed. Before the library fell, it had been the place of all her happiness. Now the place of all her happiness was here, in this room, in this bed, and in these arms. If a word she could speak would save the city, or save Zuleika though the city burned, she would speak that word though it burst her lungs and cleft her heart.

But there was no word. All of her visions agreed on the blood, the pain, the slaughter that was to come. All converged on a scene in which Jamal, older but still recognizable, walked through Bessa’s streets and was met at every door post, every turning, by the bodies of the dead. With that sight painted on her inner eye, Rem was blind to all else and mute in the face of Zuleika’s logistical commentaries.

Their lovemaking, also, was desperate and clumsy, as though they had forgotten the rhythms of each other’s desire. They had not forgotten, but the future lay like a pit between them: fearful of falling into it, they misjudged every word and foreshortened every gesture. It was a terrible time.

The response of the city at large, meanwhile, was more equivocal or at least more nuanced than Zuleika’s. There were still some speakers in the Jidur who believed that a truce of some kind might still be possible, and that negotiators should be sent to meet Jamal’s armies on their way. Gursoon did not subscribe to this view, but the vote went against her and she dutifully assembled and sent forth a diplomatic legation. Jamal’s old friend from their desert-wandering days, Zufir, volunteered to lead it, and after some discussion was allowed to do so. But when fourteen days had passed and the delegation still hadn’t returned, even the most optimistic began to see war as inevitable.

It was at this point that the city suffered another blow.

Gursoon’s illness had been advancing slowly, leaving her each week a little stiffer, a little more easily tired. Her mind was as sharp as ever, but much of the day to day running of the city she now left to her trusted lieutenants. Anwar Das handled most of the diplomatic missions, Zeinab the trading agreements (her mentor Issi having long since retired), while the public works were overseen by Huma, who had a remarkable head for figures, and Mir Bin Shah, one of the chief builders. Gursoon’s opinion was still valued, and her good sense and experience as an arbiter were as much in demand as ever. But she spent more of her time than before drinking coffee outside the bakery, or walking the streets of the city, stopping every now and then as if to fix some familiar scene more firmly in her mind.

The week after the delegation had been expected to return, the council sat as usual, discussing matters both weighty and mundane. A motion to send a second party after Zufir’s was defeated; there were too many reasons to fear the worst. A report on the state of the city’s provisions was satisfactory: the year’s grain and date harvest looked promising, and the weapons-store was well maintained. The small schoolhouse to the east of the city needed pens and a wooden bench, and a new sewer was required by the cattle-market. The meeting broke up early, with the uncertain fate of Zufir and his party weighing heavy on everyone’s mind. The other council members clustered around Umayma, Zufir’s mother, as they left the house, offering what cheer and reassurance they could. But Gursoon remained in her seat, and Zeinab returned to see what the matter was.

“Zeinab,” the old woman said in a low voice, “I can’t move.”

They made her up a bed in the House of the Lawmakers. Nafisah was called at once, along with Gursoon’s son and daughter. Farhat, grey-faced, ran to the spice warehouse and scrabbled through the jars and sacks for remedial herbs. But before nightfall it was clear that the Lady Gursoon was dying.

She could still speak. She called Zeinab to her first, then Huma. Zeinab’s daughter Soraya, who had just returned from a trading journey, accompanied them. Gursoon was propped on pillows, with her daughter Mayisah and Farhat at her sides to hold her upright. She gave each of her two lieutenants instructions on the matters she thought most urgent—securing the crops and looking to the repair of the city walls—then fell back against her attendants, closing her eyes. “Thank you, my dears, for everything,” she whispered. The three women kissed her and left weeping. It was only Soraya who replied.

“Thank you, Auntie, for your stories.”

Gursoon’s interview with Anwar Das was shorter, and she sent away her daughter and her friend while she spoke to him. He left stony-faced, and would tell no one what she had said. By this time the square had filled with people, friends and gawpers in equal measures. Among them were the crowd of Gursoon’s grandchildren and great-grandchildren, but even the youngest waited patiently until they were called, knowing that their grandmother had a duty to the whole city.