The Steel Seraglio (56 page)

But just before the sun’s red eye was lost from view, the western wall, across an area twenty paces wide, sagged like the belly of a spavined horse and readied itself to fall.

In the camp of Jamal, this:

The Lion inspected his troops, who after seven days of battle were both dirtier and grimmer than they had been erewhile. There were fewer of them, too, as was only to be expected. Where there had been thirty cohorts of a thousand each, now there were perhaps twenty-seven. It was a loss without meaning: a few grains of sand from the storm that he had brought against Bessa. Although an hourglass perhaps made a better comparison, since each man in fighting and dying marked an increment in an inevitable process. As the sand poured out, Jamal came closer and closer to his inheritance and to his destiny.

Certainly Nussau, the mercenary captain, saw things in this wise. He could afford to be sanguine, since (apart from that one incident by the Southern gate) Jamal’s losses had come overwhelmingly from his homegrown troops rather than from the better trained and better fed soldiers-for-hire who bulked out his numbers. Nussau had consulted with his junior officers, and he was confident that the city would fall on the morrow. He congratulated Jamal on how well the campaign had gone so far, and even haggled about the division of the spoils when the city was sacked. Jamal had agreed that Nussau would take half of any wealth that was found; now Nussau contended that this should be raised to six parts in ten, and Jamal, after some circumambulation, agreed.

When they retired to their tents, their mood was sanguine.

In the night, however, the storm reached its height and a keening wind woke Jamal from a troubled sleep. He could not remember his dreams, but felt that they had been unpleasant. Some of their mood now seeped, unbidden, into his waking mind.

The omens were good, but he was far from happy. He had not expected Bessa to stand for a full week, and though in absolute numbers he was still strong, the utter loss of two wings of cavalry disturbed him greatly. So did the fact that the concubinate had not attempted to parley. He remembered his abortive rebellion, and how Zuleika had descended on him out of a clear sky, knowing everything he intended to do while concealing her own stratagems perfectly.

Was it possible that she had a plan which encompassed all that had happened so far? That despite all the indications of success, and the massive odds in his favour, she was about to destroy him in a way that was as absolute and unexpected as the ruination of his previous schemes?

Reason said no. But reason could not raise its voice above the wind’s screaming.

Like a man still in the grip of a dream, Jamal left his tent. His bodyguards made to follow him, but he stayed them with a gesture. He walked away from the camp and the watchfires, his own soldiers eyeing him curiously as he passed them unseeing.

He was a child of Bessa: he knew that there were wells outside the walls, and he knew where they were. He went to the largest of them now, and peered into its lightless depths as though he were interrogating his own heart.

Then he took from the sabretache he wore at his waist a small bottle he had not touched nor even thought about for many months. It contained the poison he had bought from dead Hakkim’s disciple. The cap twisted in his hand, the wax seal giving with a sound like a sigh.

The bottle upended itself, and the poison dribbled sluggishly from its neck, down into the well.

Jamal watched his own hand with something like unease. The movement had come ahead of the decision, or at least ahead of the conscious realisation. But he knew exactly what it was he was doing. It was just that his hands had known it first.

As he replaced the stopper and put the empty bottle back into his sabretache, he became aware that he was being watched. He turned and saw one of his own men staring at him from a few yards away. The man was squatting to shit—presumably the reason why he had come so far from the camp’s perimeter. His eyes were wide, and his mouth hung open.

Mushin. The man’s name was Mushin. He was one of the first; the men Jamal had recruited in Ibu Kim, before he left that pestilential place forever.

For some reason, possibly arising from the lingering atmosphere of the dream, Jamal felt the urge to explain his actions, though he knew that Mushin probably could not be made to understand them.

“It’s one more assurance,” he said, controlling with some difficulty the tremor in his voice. That was not enough: Mushin still gaped like a dead fish. “One more guarantee that we’ll bring them down. If they survive this siege, it won’t matter. This well draws from the same aquifers as those in the western part of the city. They’ll fall, now. They’ll have a choice between dying of thirst or dying by poison. Even if the walls hold, they’ll still fall.”

No response from Mushin, whose face seemed fixed forever in that mask of horror and mental incapacity.

“It won’t matter. When we take the city, we’ll dig new wells. They’ll be further from the walls, but that’s only a hardship to the idle. Nothing is lost by this.” Jamal had run out of words, so he fell back on repetition. “Nothing is lost.”

Finally, Mushin got his lower jaw back into its customary position, stood and adjusted his robes. He still said nothing, though, and only watched Jamal as if afraid that his chief would attack or berate him. Jamal had no intention of doing either.

“Tell the soldiers,” he ordered Mushin. “This well is forbidden. All the wells on this side of the city—they shouldn’t be used. A single sip will kill.”

He expected a salute, and possibly a “Yes, Jamal,” but clearly that was too much to ask for from this dullard. “Tell them,” Jamal said again, then he turned his back and walked back towards the distant campfires, barely visible through the swirling sand.

The storm raged through the entire night, and he did not sleep again. But in the morning, the wind fell and the sand sank back to the desert floor like the falling of a curtain.

What it revealed made the soldiers of the Lion wish that it had stayed.

Within the walls of Bessa, this:

The seventh day was unlike the others they had endured. Each in its turn had wrought darkly on the city and its defenders; each in its turn had scattered tragedies and disasters with a liberal hand, ending lives and loves, unmaking friendships and betrothals, changing the human geography of Bessa as profoundly as its material substance. But the seventh day was the day when Zuleika knew for sure that Bessa could not stand.

It was also the day when Bethi died. She was no soldier, and had no illusions that she could become one. She had sought out the place where she could do the most good, and had organised two parallel groups of citizens both to supply the soldiers on the walls with food and water and to carry messages between the various towers and guard posts.

She was on the street when the third and largest of the breaches occurred, and went down under the hooves of a group of riders. The message she was carrying when she died warned that such an incursion was imminent.

Bethi was one of Zuleika’s closest friends, and Anwar Das’s beloved. Three times he had asked for her hand, and been rebuffed—for though she loved him as fervently as he loved her, she was also as promiscuous as he by nature and inclination. She had told him they would wed, at last, when no man or woman else would look at them.

Now he knelt by her catafalque in the numb silence of grief. He had nothing to say in response to the clumsy words of mourning and comfort offered by his friends. All words had deserted him, and he cared not in the darkness of that moment whether he ever spoke again. Zuleika respected his speechlessness, and only held him, mute, as they wept together.

Then she gathered herself for what must now be done.

Though a night attack was far from being out of the question, she posted a skeletal watch on the walls and called an open meeting in the Jidur. There were things she wished to discuss not just with the lawmakers and strategists but with all of the people in the city, and they would not wait until the morning.

The storm frustrated her, initially: the wind ripped the breath from her mouth, and raised its own voice over hers. It quickly became clear that the meeting would have to move indoors, and the throne room in the palace was chosen as the venue, since it was the only space that was big enough to contain them all.

The room had not been entered since the day of Hakkim’s death. Zuleika ascended the steps of the throne, treading through inch-thick dust, and turned to face her audience. There was utter silence in the room. She knew that Rem was standing behind her, carefully out of her line of sight—afraid, as always, that her own reactions would spark some change of heart in her lover, and so weave her into the unfolding of events in ways that would be traumatic and unbearable. Zuleika took some comfort from her presence, but given what she was about to suggest, she yearned for more tangible support.

“We persuaded ourselves against all reason that the city could hold,” she said. She spoke in the same ringing voice she would have used in the Jidur, but here it wasn’t needed: the room’s perfect acoustics brought her voice to the ear of everyone present. “And we’ve made that ridiculous argument good for seven days. But reason gets the last word, my sisters and my brothers. Tomorrow, or the next day, or the day after that, Bessa will fall. Thereafter, the Lion will kill those of us he cares to kill and take the rest into a servitude worse than that you knew under Al-Bokhari—because now you’ve tasted freedom, and the taste will never leave your lips.”

Zuleika paused. The emotions welling within her made it difficult for her to speak. But nobody interrupted her, and in due course she took up her theme again.

“We decided to make our stand here because we felt that to lose Bessa was the same as death. I spoke those words myself, and I applauded when others spoke them. But it was a lie, and I should have known better. Death is the end of every hope and every possibility. To flee with your lives is not the same, even if you’re scattered like dust across
As-Sahra
. Hope remains. Possibility remains. Bessa is its people, not its stones. If the stones fall and the people live, Bessa may live again. If you die here, Bessa dies with you.

“So I stand before you now to urge the exact opposite of what I urged erewhile. The streets and towers you love are now a trap that holds you. I want you to consider ways in which you might escape from that trap.”

This time, when Zuleika paused, the spell of silence was broken. A hundred voices answered her, and then a thousand. The citizens forgot the discipline of the Jidur, for this was not the Jidur, and they forgot the courtesies of the everyday because they felt their distance from the everyday as one might feel the pain of a wound.

Zuleika weathered the bombardment of voices, until Imtisar stood and quelled them: Imtisar, who was so old and frail now that she was barely able to stand at all. She did it with a gesture—fingers of one hand folded into the palm of the other—which she sometimes used in the Jidur to mean “this discourse is against the purpose of the debate.” It worked. All voices were stilled again, and those who wished to speak stood, waiting to be recognized by the chair—a role that Imtisar had assumed by means of that very gesture.

Many responded, and at first the responses were all of the same tenor:
We swore we would stand to the last man and woman, and we mean to be true to what we swore
. But the certainty of death weighed on them all, and by some magic the many iterations of this theme began to change it from within into its own opposite. It is hard enough to love death in the abstract; nobody wants to die when death is before them.

But when all had spoken, Rem stood. Within the prism of her inward sight, a possibility so remote it could barely be made out at all had come into clear focus—had become, in the space of a few heartbeats, an actuality. Rem’s agitation prevented her, for a moment, from even speaking.

“Rem is recognized,” Imtisar said, in a quavering voice.

“He poisons the water!” Rem cried, her arms waving in front of her face as though she was trying to draw the horrific scene on the empty air. “Jamal! He has a bottle in his hand! He pours it into the well, and poisons the city’s water. Two hours from now, he did this. Does this. It can’t be stopped. It happened . . . it would have happened . . . because we stood against him for so long, we made this thing inevitable. He can’t be stopped. He couldn’t ever have been stopped!”

She faltered; almost, she fell. Zuleika supported her and helped her to sit again, her hands still jerking spasmodically.

There was shocked silence at first. All who had heard Rem speak knew now that their position was hopeless. One by one they stared into the abyss and made their accommodation with what they found there.

From heroic defiance, the speeches modulated into arguments about feasibility. How could they flee, when the city was surrounded by armed men? Even if they escaped, Jamal would hunt them down—his cavalry was much faster than a column fleeing on foot with all its worldly goods—and take them into servitude, if he did not simply slaughter them on the spot. Then, too, they would be fleeing into the mouth of a raging sandstorm, which would blind and scatter them, slow them still further, and quite possibly kill a great many of them before their flight had fairly begun.

Backwards and forwards the arguments swayed, like a spinning plate balanced on the end of a stake. And as with the plate, irreparable damage seemed the most likely outcome wherever in its orbit it finally slowed.

Now that Zuleika had spoken, Rem felt safe to go to her. They sat on the steps of the throne, their hands clasped together, and listened as one after another rose and spoke.

The last to speak was Anwar Das. He had come direct from Bethi’s bier, and he walked like a man already dead. His words are not recorded.

The storm died out just before dawn, and the sun rose at last on an altered landscape.

This is the way of things, after a sandstorm. Valleys and ridges move their places by as much as a mile, level plains shrug themselves into hillocks, and once-familiar places must be learned all over again.