The Steel Seraglio (55 page)

Tayqullah blinked. He wasn’t used to being disobeyed, and didn’t seem to like it. “I told you to kill him,” he growled. “Do it.”

Mushin made no move. “I’ve claimed him,” he repeated.

Tayqullah sighed, and shook his head, but he was smiling as he did it. “I knew you wouldn’t disappoint me,” he said. His scimitar cleared its scabbard and he whirled it around his hand in a series of tight arcs as he advanced on Mushin. With only the dagger in hand, Mushin waited. The certainty of death brought with it a strange calm.

“Let him have the boy,” Jamal said from behind him. They all turned to face him, and Tayqullah paused with his sword still aloft. There was a moment of expectant silence. Jamal walked up to them and met the big man’s gaze. “It is my wish.”

“Then so shall it be,” Tayqullah muttered. He walked away, the steel still unsheathed in his hand. The others waited for a few moments, presumably uncertain as to whether further orders would be forthcoming, but Jamal dismissed them with a nod, and they left hurriedly.

“You saw how she pleaded with you,” Jamal said. “Not for herself. For the boy.” He wasn’t looking at Mushin, and Mushin therefore could not be sure that he was being addressed. In any case, he had no idea what he should reply, so he merely waited, his legs feeling suddenly nerveless and weak, until Jamal spoke again. “She reminded me of someone. A little. Only a little. What you did . . . there was a rightness to it, in my mind, and I honour you for it. But all the same, you should from henceforth do all the things that are asked of you, without hesitation or argument. Otherwise, Tayqullah will kill you, and I will say nothing.”

And then he, too, walked away.

Mushin removed the ropes that bound the boy’s hands, and the gag from his mouth. The boy was so terrified, still, that he seemed unable to move of his own volition. Mushin had to carry him. He took him to the tent he shared with seven other men, offered him water and food (although he took neither) and gave him a bedroll to sleep on.

“I didn’t mean that about needing a catamite,” he assured the boy. “I’m not going to fuck you.” The boy didn’t seem to understand, or to care. He only wept, and Mushin knew that he had not altered the weight of his soul by a thousandth of a grain. He had destroyed this child’s life, and then only failed to deliver the coup de grace. Outfaced, unmanned, he fled.

But he kept the child with him in his tent from that day forward, and looked out for him as best he could. Since the boy refused to speak, even to give himself a name, Mushin invented a name for him: Abidal. The other men in the tent ignored the lad at first, until Mushin, in a burst of inspiration, began to have conversations with him in which he supplied both sides of the discourse, with Abidal’s persona that of a gruff-voiced tough of whom the more timid Mushin was afraid. This relationship, played out in a number of
ad hoc
scenarios, caused great hilarity among the other soldiers, and led them to adopt the boy as some kind of a mascot. They kitted him out in a black djelaba, gave him a dagger to wear as a sword, and generally played along with the idea that he was a pint-sized berserker who grown men were afraid of offending.

Mushin’s goal in this way was to keep the boy alive and unmolested, but he had no idea whether Abidal knew this or cared about it one way or another. The boy’s demeanour was either solemn or impassive, depending on how you looked at it. He never spoke, and bore Mushin’s comedic monologues in stolid silence. When the men marched, he marched until he dropped, and then Mushin carried him on his shoulders. When they camped, he stayed in the tent, alone with his thoughts.

So it went until the army came to the City of Women, and the fighting began. And after that, there was scant time for joking.

Mushin would not see all of the siege of Bessa, but he would see enough of it to learn for certain what by then he already suspected: that the tragedy he had once read in Jamal’s eyes was not, as he had thought, in the distant past—but one that Jamal had incubated inside himself for many years, and was now bringing to birth.

Bessa was a paradox: ripe to fall, yet hard to crack.

The armies of the Lion of the Desert broke over it in waves, assailing the walls alternately with stones flung from siege catapults and then with living tides of armed men.

The defenders cast down the scaling ladders, shored up the breaches with rubble and wooden baulks, stitched empty air with skeins of arrows and poured libations of burning oil on the attackers’ heads.

At the end of the first day, the city stood. Its walls were piebald with running repairs, the crenelations of its gates gap-toothed, its battlements puddled with congealed blood, but it stood. And for every Bessan who had fallen, two or three of the Lion’s men had fallen too.

The second day was no different, except that the assaults began earlier and finished later: for fully fifteen hours the bombardments and massed charges continued. The defenders were at full stretch, because the attacks came at all points around the city walls: Jamal was able to rotate different cohorts into his front lines, ensuring a continual supply of fresh fighters, but the warriors of the City of Women enjoyed no such luxury. They were tied to the stake, and must endure.

The fighting was bloodier, as well as longer. When the Lion’s troops withdrew, they left the sand strewn with hundreds of their dead. But Jamal was well satisfied, nonetheless. He had discussed with Nussau, the gaunt and weathered captain of his mercenary division, the arithmetic that governed sieges—he felt that his losses were within acceptable bounds, and knew that he could sustain them for far longer than Bessa could.

The third and fourth days followed the same pattern. The defenders succeeded in keeping the Lion’s soldiery off the walls, but they succeeded by the thickness of a hair. With each fresh assault, it seemed a miracle that they did not succumb. With each fresh bombardment, the walls creaked and groaned like living things, and though they did not fall they showed every sign of wanting to. Meanwhile, stones that missed their mark sailed over the walls to wreak havoc within.

In the course of the fifth day, one of the city gates to the South was all but breached, and only desperate manoeuvres by the defenders had kept it standing. On the following day it would certainly fall. To the western reach, also, there was a stretch of wall that had taken more damage from the catapults than any other. Despite appearances, it seemed to be of recent and hasty manufacture, and was not sufficiently braced to withstand the fifty-pound stones that were being hurled against it.

On the sixth day, therefore, the Lion’s tactics were different. All of his catapults were lined up along the western wall, keeping up a relentless barrage against a stretch of stonework perhaps two hundred yards long. Initially firing at random, the engineers paused every half hour or so to read the wall and interpret the patterns of damage they saw there, increasingly concentrating their barrage where it would do the most harm. It was like doing a jigsaw puzzle in reverse, taking out at each stage the pieces that seemed the most promising.

Meanwhile, foot soldiers ran against the Southern gate with heavy battering rams—wooden logs thirty feet long with the forward end lapped in iron. They were protected by their comrades, who held aloft body-length shields as wide as an outstretched arm, so the arrows and spilled oil of the defenders told but little on their momentum.

By mid-morning, the gate was off its hinges and only standing because of the improvised scaffolding thrown up behind it.

By noon, it hung at so louche an angle, a running man could have sprinted to the top of it and stepped off onto the battlements.

And a little while after that, it fell.

Jamal’s foot soldiers, well-drilled, moved quickly aside to right and left, and his cavalry charged into the breach. Three hundred men on stallions—better far than camels once they were on paved stone—galloped through the gaping portal five abreast, their scimitars whirling like the skirts of dancers.

These were the elite of Jamal’s army: the cream of the northern mercenaries whom he had travelled so far and paid so much to acquire. They were practised killers, as much at home in the saddle as on the ground, and so proficient with a sword that if two men had stood at arm’s length to the left and right of a rider as he advanced, the rider could have cut both throats
en passant
without unseating himself.

But no men—and no women—opposed them. They rode into a narrow avenue, high-walled on either side, and followed it for perhaps a hundred yards before they realised that they had ridden into a trap. Behind the problematic gate, before the battle had even begun, the city’s masons under Zuleika’s instructions had built a killing ground, enclosed by tall, uneven stone ramparts (the rubble from the demolished buildings outside Bessa’s walls had been put to good use).

From these ramparts, now, arrows rained in unsettling profusion. The archers were not the city’s trained soldiery, nor yet the Yeagir volunteers: they were the young and the old of Bessa, who could not serve on the walls but could at least string a bow. In such narrow confines, it wasn’t necessary for them to be able to aim.

Jamal’s cavalry turned en masse with skill and address, and rode hell for leather back towards the gate. But from the barricades above them, more rubble now fell to crush them and block their path. Between the hail of arrows and the rain of stone, barely a dozen of the three hundred made it alive back through the portal through which they had charged only a minute before.

The defenders on the walls cheered and called out to the men below, inviting them to come back for another visit, to bring their friends, to stay the night if they liked. Jamal’s troops milled and murmured, their spirits dismayed by the massacre; but only for a time. Before the glass was turned, they renewed their assault—only this time they didn’t try to enter the city by its Southern gate.

The sixth day, then, went to Bessa. When the sun went down, the western walls were still intact, and Jamal had suffered the first serious setback of his campaign.

The seventh day did not go so well. The greater numbers of the attackers began to tell more and more, and the beleaguered and exhausted defenders could not be everywhere at once. Close by the modest entrance known as the water gate, three or four siege ladders remained upright long enough to disgorge a small but determined group of fighters onto the battlements. These in turn sold their lives one grain at a time, like misers, and by the time they fell two score more had taken their place. The defenders were forced to turn now and face the enemy on their own level, which meant that they had less attention to spare for the enemy below. The rams came forward and the water gate fell.

Here there was no killing ground. Charging into the city, Jamal’s cavalry found nothing and nobody in its path. The riders fanned out quickly, torching buildings and putting any citizens they found to the sword. Within a few short minutes they cut a terrible swathe through Bessa’s undefended avenues.

On the street of the silversmiths, though, they were met—by a force much smaller than their own. A few dozen men and women on horseback, wearing no armour, blocked the way ahead of them. The ranking officer (it was that Tayqullah whose name has already appeared in these annals) gave the signal to charge, expecting that this ragtag force would melt away before them.

But the defenders were the Yeagir horsehusbands and their grim-faced womenfolk; therefore, they charged too, full into the face of the much more numerous enemy. The women raised their arms as though in some barbaric salute, and flung their bolases all at the same time. The bolases were just lengths of horsehide weighted at either end with a stone, but the women threw them with such skill and force that the air made a sound at their passage like the cracking of a flag in a gale.

Every bolas found its target. Some wrapped around the throats of the riders, breaking their necks or pitching them backwards off their mounts. Most encircled the horses’ legs, and folding tightly around them, hobbled and broke them in a violent instant. The front rank of Jamal’s cavalry went down in its entirely, the horses stopped so abruptly that some of them turned somersaults, crushing their riders as they fell.

The fall of the first rank brought down the second, tangled up in the dying and the already dead. The riders further back had halted their headlong career by then, and would have rallied—except that at that point, presented with such easy and tempting targets, the Yeagir men hurled their spears. Rider after rider fell, pierced through chest or neck; then the horsewives came among them, employing their daggers now, as their nimble mounts danced between the fallen men and beasts of the Lion’s ruined cavalry.

It was a rout. Tayqullah would have been ashamed to return to his chief and report it, except that he lay among the fallen, his throat slit from ear to ear by a horsewife so coolly detached she might have been peeling an apple.

But the merchants’ quarter was burning by that time, and there were few at hand to put out the flames. And up on the battlements, it had cost Zuleika more than she could afford to demolish Jamal’s beachhead and reclaim the walls. She had been forced to throw into that skirmish all the half-trained troops she had been holding in reserve. She had led them herself, and in the end they had triumphed. To the very few who survived, that was a source of some pride. But Zuleika was heartsick: she felt as if she had used the blood of her volunteers as a builder uses mortar.

That was the first of three such incursions. The second was across a narrower stretch of wall, and was quickly contained. None of the gates was breached. The third was even bloodier than the first, and the defenders only survived it because Zuleika sent twenty archers to the roof of a high grain warehouse that faced the city walls across a small courtyard. That accident of geography allowed her to direct a crossfire against the attacking troops and wipe them out before they could consolidate their position.

As the sun sank in the sky, it was obscured by ragged sheets of red-brown haze in the middle distance. A storm was coming, throwing sand into the faces of attacker and defender alike. Uncertain of their advantage, the Lion’s forces withdrew as the wind rose.