The Steel Seraglio (10 page)

From the saddler Zuleika went again to Sasim, whom she found loitering in one of his usual haunts. She put on a sad and chagrined face, and let him see that she was cast down. When he asked her what ailed her, she shook her head and blinked away imaginary tears.

“I’ve been a fool, Sasim,” she said. “I went back to the saddler, and I told him I didn’t believe his boasting. And he went to his workshop and reached into the biggest of the three vats there. That’s where the bag was. But it wasn’t full of gold.”

She waited out his reaction, the sudden draining of hope from his face. Then she took his hand and pressed five of her father’s ten dinars into it. “It was only silver,” she said.

Sasim’s face was a marvel to behold: he stared at the dinars with incredulous joy. “A bag full of silver!” he exclaimed, his voice trembling. “You did well, Zuleika. You did very well. It’s not gold, but still . . . a whole bag full of silver! A man could live like a king!”

Sasim’s delight abated a little when Zuleika told him that the layout of the saddler’s house was very complicated. But when she offered to come along on the raid herself, and lead him to the right place, his doubts vanished and he embraced her with as much fervour as he ever had in her narrow bed.

“But tomorrow night is best,” she told him. “It will be dark of the moon, and we won’t be seen.”

It took a little more persuasion—Sasim’s impatience was hard to curb—but finally he accepted Zuleika’s argument as good sense and agreed to wait a day. “Bring a knife,” she told him as they parted. “If the saddler wakes, we’ll have to kill him.” Sasim assured her that he would come armed and ready.

Now, at last, Zuleika went to the guard station for her weekly encounter with Rhuk. Normally this was brief and straightforward: she handed over the silver, he counted it, gave her a curt nod, and she left.

This time, she handed over an empty purse. Rhuk held it upside down and shook it, as though the missing dinars might somehow have lodged in its lining. “What’s this?” he growled.

“My father has decided he can get better protection from the watch post by the Eastern Gate,” Zuleika said. “He won’t pay you any more.”

Rhuk gave her a look of glum ferocity. “Is he mad?” he asked her. “I know damn well he runs a gaggle of whores in that flea-pit. I can have him in chains before sunup if he tries to stiff me!”

Zuleika shrugged. “For whoremongering, he’d get a fine of five dinars. He thinks that’s preferable to paying you ten a week.”

Rhuk sighed, stood, and reached for his sword belt, which spent far more time hanging on a nail next to the door than it ever did around his waist. It clearly pained him to have to go to such wearisome lengths in order to administer justice.

“If you kill the cow,” Zuleika said quickly, “you can’t milk it afterwards. I know a way you could turn this to much better advantage, and profit both of us.”

Rhuk sat down again, with an even bigger sigh. “I’m listening,” he said.

Zuleika spoke with the captain for some several minutes, and left him well pleased with the intelligence she had provided. Returning to the inn, she went to Ehara—her final port of call—and asked her for a favour. She even told her a little about what she was planning, but omitted some salient details. Ehara was worried for the young girl, but agreed to fall in with her scheme for the sake of the friendship that had long existed between them. “But you need to watch yourself, sugar lump,” she warned her. “If this goes bad on you, you’ll have nowhere to run.”

If it goes bad
, Zuleika thought,
I won’t live to see another morning.
It was all or nothing, and she felt that she could accept either of those extreme outcomes. It was the broad spectrum in between that terrified her.

That night she couldn’t get to sleep at all. She thought of all the ways in which she could fail: of how flimsy her plan was, in the end, and how much it depended on her understanding of these men whose downfall she plotted. What if she was wrong about one or more of them? What if her system of classification still had some bumps and holes in it?

But she was in the hands of the Increate now—it was already much too late for doubts or second thoughts. She endured the night, and the day that followed, with all the stoicism a fourteen-year-old can muster. The sun rose and fell again; the moon absented herself. The night was a quilt as thick as wool.

Sasim was the first link in the chain, and Zuleika knew him, at least, very well indeed. So much so, that when he arrived at the back door of the inn a little after midnight, and confessed to her that he had forgotten to bring a knife, she handed him, without a word, a seven-inch carver from her father’s kitchen on which she had put an edge that could have parted a flea’s leg hairs. She also had a wooden mallet with iron bands wrapped around the head to weight it—a weapon her father kept stowed behind the bar for use on rowdy drunks. This she retained herself.

They went together to the saddler’s house. Sasim was ready to pick the lock, but Zuleika tried the latch and the door opened at once. “Look,” she said. “The fool has left his door unlocked!” She stood aside deferentially to let Sasim enter first, as was only right and proper, then once inside she led the way, not to the saddler’s workshop, but to his bedroom. The door stood ajar: again, Zuleika opened it wide, and stood aside meekly to let Sasim precede her.

He stepped inside, and found himself in pitch darkness. He stumbled on a sandal that was lying on the floor, and the saddler, lying awake in an erotic fever, sat bolt upright at the sound.

“Sweetest of blossoms!” he cried. “Come to me!”

Sasim, when that huge bulk rose up before him in the dark, was almost petrified with fear. But he had a knife in his hand, and instinct took over. He ran at the saddler and stabbed him through the heart. The saddler fell back onto the bed, with a sound like a broken bellows.

Sasim had never killed a man before, and in the aftermath of the act he was rooted, for a moment, to the spot. In that moment Zuleika struck, hitting him a stunning blow on the head with the iron-chased mallet. Sasim collapsed in a heap on the blood-slicked floor.

Zuleika ran to the saddler’s workshop and threw the five dinars she still had (the remainder of Rhuk’s diverted bribe) down on the floor beside the big vat. This detained her only a second, but she could already hear Sasim stumbling and cursing behind her; she had only dazed him with the blow, not knocked him unconscious. She threw the window bolt and slipped out into the night.

Sasim had a shrewd suspicion that he had been betrayed, but he was still sold on the idea of the bag of silver in the saddler’s shop. Lighting the lamp with trembling fingers, he found the largest vat demonstrably empty, but a scatter of silver dinars lying on the ground beside it.

These few coins told a clear story. Zuleika had been there before him, and had stolen the bag of silver!

Enraged beyond reason at this duplicity, Sasim found his way back to the door, staggered across the courtyard and rounded the façade of the inn until he stood below Zuleika’s room. The shutters were ajar, and a lamp burned within. So the little double-crosser thought she was safe, did she? She was going to find out how wrong she was!

Sasim had made this climb a dozen times or more. Woozy though he was from the knock on the head, he made it again now, scaling the rough stones with the kitchen carver clenched in his teeth like a bandit in an old story.

He slammed the shutters wide and jumped over the threshold, transferring the knife to his hand so he could bellow out the words that boiled in his chest. “I’m going to slice you thinner than paper, you filthy little traitor!”

Vurdik the Bald did not enjoy being interrupted in the act of love, and it was considered prudent in the circles in which he moved to keep a sword or a dagger ready to hand even in the quietest moments. He was already rolling off Ehara’s voluptuous body and reaching for the blade he’d left under the bed before Sasim had taken three steps into the room.

On the fourth step, as Sasim was slowing down in the realisation that he was not addressing Zuleika after all, the bandit’s scimitar came up and knocked the carver from his hand with a ringing clash of steel.

There was no fifth step. The bandit’s blade swept across Sasim’s throat on the repass, and so keen was its edge that it all but decapitated him. The boy sank to his knees, his mouth opening and closing on voiceless protests and reproaches, and then fell face forward on the floor.

“Why did he call me a traitor?” Vurdik wondered, belatedly. “I don’t even know him.”

Down below, in the inn’s kitchen, abandoned at this hour, Zuleika lit a lamp and waved it three times out of the window—left to right, right to left, left to right. Watching for her signal, Sergeant Rhuk ordered his men to move from hiding and surround the inn. The door of the Blue Wheel was knocked down with a wooden ram, and watch officers poured into the building.

In vain, Kishnothophur the innkeeper protested and remonstrated, pleading both that he was innocent and that he was up to date with his bribes. Rhuk ordered a search of the inn’s many rooms, and although it yielded no whores (the whores having been warned by Zuleika to leave quietly on the midnight hour, except for Ehara who Zuleika swore to the officers was her mother), it did produce one bandit chieftain, just as Rhuk had been promised. Vurdik injured three officers before he was subdued, but finally a thrown club laid him low. He was arrested for multiple thefts and murders, and Kish for harbouring a known desperado.

The double execution was held on a market day, and was therefore very well attended. Seeing his daughter in the crowd, Kish cursed her with sobs for her treacherous heart and her whore’s lies. Zuleika took out an apple and ate it slowly, in his sight, until the trapdoor fell open and the last breath caught in his throat.

The stone under the kitchen floor that was too heavy for Zuleika to lift offered no problem to a dozen determined women. Ehara counted Kish’s hoard carefully, in full sight of the other whores, and then divided it into twelve equal portions. She wanted to give Zuleika a share, too, the more so because Zuleika had given her father’s inn, in perpetuity, to Ehara to own: but sergeant Rhuk had been as good as his word, and passed on to the girl a full quarter of the reward he won for the capture of Vurdik. Zuleika already had all the money she needed, and a little over.

The time had come to part. Ehara asked Zuleika, not for the first time, to stay with her and be her daughter. Zuleika embraced the older woman fervently, and thanked her for all her many acts of kindness, but she had no intention of staying in Ibu Kim. Through many tears on both sides, she promised to return and visit often.

The next morning, on a fine camel bought with her share of the reward money, she left the city alone and took the direction of distant Perdondaris. Many things can befall a woman alone in the deep desert: Zuleika feared none of them so much as she feared dying in the city where she had been born.

Imad-Basur was surprised to see her, but listened with rapt attention to her story. He admitted, when it was done, that Zuleika had certainly succeeded in the challenge he had set her. Two men hanged, and two others dead by the blade: it was a tally that few of his students could claim for a single night’s work.

“Then will you teach me?” Zuleika asked him, bluntly.

The caliph of assassins thought long before replying. To train up a woman in the arts of death! Such a thing defied all convention, all propriety. But clearly this was a most unconventional woman—and Imad-Basur had never thought propriety worth a turd.

“I will teach you,” he told her. “And I believe you will make me proud.”

Zuleika surveyed the carnage in the legate’s tent with a frown. An onlooker might have thought—assuming he lived long enough to think anything—that she was mourning the dead. She wasn’t; she was only considering what had to be done next, and how best to do it.

If the legate’s body was discovered, the situation would quickly become impossible. Not only would she herself be killed for what she had done, but the other concubines and their children would soon fall victim to sultan Hakkim’s edict. Other people besides the guard captain must have seen the messenger arrive; they would either return to Bessa or send a rider there to know the sultan’s pleasure. That must not be allowed to happen. And if it was to be prevented, Zuleika had to carry out a lot more killings in very short order. Doing so was going to present a serious logistical challenge.

There were some thirty guards in the caravan, and they were widely scattered along its length. Some had presumably been posted as sentries, a good way out from the camp. They all had to be dealt with, and in such a way that none of them were forewarned by seeing or hearing the deaths of the others. Zuleika was good, but she wasn’t that good.
Nobody
was that good. However the feat was to be accomplished, she was going to need help: and she knew in what quarter it must be found.

Having reasoned the thing through to this point, Zuleika forgot all doubts and equivocations and got down to business. She dragged the bodies of the guard captain and the messenger into a corner of the tent, out of any line of sight from the entrance. The legate’s corpse she propped up in a chair, with his back to any incoming traffic.

Next, she repaired her own appearance. She used what was left of the massage oils to remove En-Sadim’s heart’s blood from her hands and face, her bare breasts and belly, very thankful that she had disrobed before she began to go to work on him. Wiping her hands dry on the messenger’s cloak, she dressed quickly. Though there were some dark red stains on her leather sandals that she could not remove, she was confident that she could pass a casual inspection.

She retrieved the sultan’s letter from where it had fallen. Zuleika had never learned to read, and the import of this fell heavily on her now. If En-Sadim had not insisted on hearing the letter read aloud, all of this would have transpired very differently.

She tucked the scroll into her bodice and stepped boldly out of the tent. Letting the flap fall to behind her, she stood there, framed against the pure white of its fabric, as the guards outside turned to look at her.