The Steel Seraglio (2 page)

How do you come by children, in a city of women?
he asked his guide. (Like many heroes, he was a man of little discretion.) The young woman laughed, but gave him no reply.

She took him further into the city, and his wonder grew as he walked. She told him a little of this and that:
here is our square for dancing or disputing, there the schoolhouse, this garden is reserved for those who need to rest their spirits.

But no word of what he had come so far to find. At length he could bear the uncertainty no more, and he stopped and asked his guide outright.
But the book
, he said,
the book of all knowledge. Where do you keep that?

She stopped too, looking not angered at his rudeness but thoughtful, and maybe also amused. With a courteous gesture she turned, retracing some of their path, and led him into what seemed the outskirts of the city, to a low, stone house set apart from the others. Gesturing to him to wait, she slipped inside, and he heard quiet voices.
This is what you seek
, she told him when she reappeared.

He had to duck beneath the arch of the door. His guide drew the curtain behind him and left him there. The room was cooler than the warm evening, darker than the torch-lit night outside. A lamp cast its small circle of light, and in the light sat a thin woman with a book in her hands. His heart leapt at the sight. It was a small volume, but thick and richly bound: as she turned a page its cover glinted with the colours of jewels. An urge seized him to take the book now, grab it and run into the night. He had taken a step forward when the reader, who till now had not seemed to notice his presence, lifted her hand in a gesture of welcome.

Sit down if you wish
, she said, without raising her eyes from the book.

There was a second stool by her own: he took it and risked a glance over her shoulder. The book was in no language he had ever seen: even the characters were strange to him. He could not make out a single word. He sat motionless, at the end of his road, while the woman read quietly beside him. After a while she sighed, closed the book and looked at him. Her eyes were black as ink, and as unreadable as the characters in the book.

You have come a long way
, she said at last.

At that, all his frustration burst from him.
And all for nothing!
he cried, leaping to his feet.
Lady, how . . . ?

She smiled and laid the book aside, and he saw on the low table beyond her, a heap of other volumes. She gestured into the darkness around them, and he saw for the first time that the room was lined with cabinets, each one filled with scrolls, tablets, leather-bound spines.

Not for nothing, maybe. I am the librarian of Bessa
, she said.
And I am also the book you seek; there is no other.

Before first light the women who had found him came for him again. They gave him dried dates and all the water he could carry, and two of them led him away from the city. The wind covered their footprints. By dawn they stood on a featureless plain; the women pointed to the south where he could see, many leagues off, the bushes that marked a waterhole, and they watched him as he made towards it.

He never looked back, he said. He knew as he walked that he would never return to the city of women, and no persuasion would make him tell any man the way there. Sometimes, when very drunk, he would hint: over such-and-such a mountain; west for three days, or maybe five . . . but no more. Nor would he ever say what he had asked the Living Book, or what she had told him during their time together. Some wisdom is too precious to be revealed, he said. But for the rest of his life, as he wandered from town to town, he was assured of a drink and a bed everywhere he went, just for the story.

The truth opens gradually, like a flower. Or else it falls on you all at once, like a bag of spanners.

The city of women was both greater and less than you imagine.

I am a book, in which the future is written: I am a woman whom you might pass in the street without noticing, and never again be able to call to mind.

My name is Rem, and I can see the future. It’s my gift. The Increate parted the veils for me and bid me look, which I did. Am doing. Will do. Tenses get a bit confused at that point, as I’m sure you’ll understand, and unravelling them again can be a bitch.

I can be a bitch, too: I was taught by an expert. Unlike the sight, it’s a gift I’ve come to value more and more as life goes on.

The sight has its upside and its downside. On the one hand, it gives you a kind of perfect sense of your own location. You can never lose yourself in the ever-branching forest of cause and effect, because you can see the invisible threads that link every effect back to its cause, at one remove and two and three and four, and so on back to the effect that had no cause and caused all things. On the other hand, that very certainty as to where you stand can be paralysing. Any motion you make, any degree of freedom you have, is—from the standpoint of eternity—infinitesimal, so you might as well not move at all.

I only ever knew one human being of whom that was not true, who seemed to move with perfect freedom, and around whose actions all things wheeled like the tethered tracks of an astrolabe.

But I’ll speak of those things in their place.

In the meantime, and for the sake of context, imagine me against a backdrop of dry and baking sand. Shallow waterholes, of the kind called camel-licks, are spaced a hundred miles apart in the desert that seems to have no end: sky-blue eyes that stare up at the Increate in unblinking worship. When those eyes close in summer, the desert is impassable. There are deeper wells too, of course, but these cannot be seen because wherever one was found a caravanserai sprang up, and then a town, and then in some cases a city. Water, for all that it pools and flows and has no shape of its own, is the wheel on which we are shaped. In Bessa, where I was keeper of the books, there is a day of observance when we show our gratitude to Heaven for its liquid bounty by not drinking from sunup to sundown. Our parched lips move in prayer, but the only words we speak are “thank you.”

It won’t always be like this: the deserts, the scattered cities, the model of a civilization laid out like a string of pearls across the silent immensity of
As-Sahra
, the great nothing. One day we’ll be gone, and the sands will close over us. One day the sun will set in the east and rise in the west. Not literally, you understand: that’s just a poetic way of saying that sooner or later the Increate is going to decide to park his car in someone else’s driveway. The power of Persia and Arabia will wane, and the infidel kingdoms will have their day.

Oh, don’t fret. This will be a whole sackful of centuries from now, and despite the Earth tilting wildly on its geopolitical axis, nothing else is going to change very much. Oh, except magic. Magic just stops working somewhere along the way, more or less overnight. Quantum physics steps into the gap, strutting like a rooster.

What else? In fifteen hundred years someone will figure out a way to squeeze black juice out of the yellow sand, and that will get everyone very excited. Some people who were rich already will get a lot richer, and some people who were poor will be told that they’re richer but will be pretty sure that they’re not.

A century or so after that, the desert will become a sort of prophet in its own right, preaching to the nations of the world and telling them that to be barren is their inalienable destiny. Into every land, the heat will march like an army, build ramparts of baking air, defying humankind to come against it.

I’m hitting the high points here, you understand: missing out a lot of stuff that’s mostly in a similar vein. And I’d like to make it clear from the outset that despite the male pronoun that slipped past my inner editor earlier on, I don’t really think of the supreme being as a man. It’s just a habit, a linguistic default built into me during the years of my childhood, and even though I lived in a place that came to be called the City of Women that’s still the way my mind works when I slip it into idle and let it coast. I’d like to break the habit, but I’m a realist: I know that if I start off by referring to the Increate as a woman I won’t keep to it, and it’s a pain in the base of the spine to scrape ink (especially the indelible ink in which I write) off limed and scudded calfskin.

However that might be (and I could write a treatise on equivocation and compromise), sex—sex in all of its senses—is at the centre of this story. It’s at the centre of everything, isn’t it? Assuming you’re of post-pubertal age in your own personal where-and-when, you probably have a few opinions on the subject yourself, and whether they’re for or against I’ll bet good money that they’re intense. Intensity is part of the package. Sooner or later our souls find their centre of gravity in a hot, salt-tasting kiss and a trembling touch. Trembling is a good sign: it means you’re open to a world that knows you’re coming.

I reached for the shaving knife there, intending to banish that last sentence from the calfskin because it sounded so much like a tired, dig-in-the-ribs play on words. But let it stand. So many terms denoting orgasm also mean arrival, and that’s a trend that will continue through all the ages of man (and woman). Ich komme. J’arrive. Vengo. Only the people of the far north, in a land that will be called Hungary, will choose to express the sexual climax in a word that means “I just left.”

For me it was coming, not going. Arriving, not leaving. I’m here now, aren’t I? I’m not going anywhere. And in spite of all I’ve lost, all the friends I’ve said farewell to when I’d barely learned the inflections of their names, I cannot envisage, and could not endure, a Hungarian orgasm. Give me excess of love, whatever it costs. We pay with our souls, and if we die with our souls intact we know we haven’t loved enough.

But here I am, going on about myself and my own business as if I was at the centre of this story, instead of out on its edge. I promise not to do that too often. The next time I walk on-stage, I’ll do so quietly and demurely. I’ll try not to draw any more attention to myself than I strictly deserve, which—if I’m brutally honest—isn’t much.

This is not my story. It’s the story of Zuleika and Gursoon, Hakkim Mehdad, the legate En-Sadim, Imad-Basur, Anwar Das, Bethi, Imtisar, the Lion of the Desert and the seven djinni. It’s the story of the City of Women; of how it came to be, how it flourished, and how it was destroyed by a reckless and irrevocable act of mercy.

A curiosity: my name, Rem, will someday come to mean a line of text in a language spoken only by machines. Specifically, it will mean a line that the machines can safely ignore—one that’s only there as a mnemonic, a placeholder, for the people who give the machines their orders. A REM line might say something like “this bit is a self-contained sub-loop” or “Steve Perlman in Marketing is a shit.” The program as a whole rolls on past and around the REM lines, ignores them completely as it takes its shape, moves through its pre-ordained sequences, unfolds its wonders.

My mother named me well.

Once, long ago—so long ago, indeed, that historical records of any accuracy are almost impossible to come by—in a land of endless desert where water was scarcer than gold and truth scarcer than water, there was a city.

The name of the city was Bessa, and its ruler, the sultan Bokhari Al-Bokhari, was a man of no account at all. Al-Bokhari was strong neither in virtue nor in vice: he used his position primarily to gratify his sensual appetites, and left the running of the city to his viziers and other court officials.

These latter were a mixed bag, as such people tend to be. Some enriched themselves from the public coffers, flourishing in the sultan’s benign inattention like flowers that grow best in shady corners. Others lay back and let the current carry them through an easy and unreflective life. Some few did their job to the best of their ability, setting up oases of justice and good governance in the city’s general ruck of disorder.

It should not be assumed, by the way, that this was widely lamented. Bessa had had its share of tyrants, and most people who had an opinion on such things felt that a lazy hedonist was a comparatively light burden to bear. The risk of being flogged or beheaded for a minor misdemeanour was greatly lessened: heterodoxy in matters of faith and pluralism in the arts were alike tolerated, if not exactly celebrated. There was even a move afoot to allow women to officiate in the temples of the Increate, but this was unlikely to succeed. Who would follow a woman in prayer? Dogs? Camels? Other women?

So Bessa enjoyed its minor efflorescence, while the sultan enjoyed the rights and privileges of his exalted position. Chief among these was his seraglio.

The seraglio numbered three-hundred-and-sixty-five concubines, most of whom were young and comely. They had all been young and comely when they first arrived, but time takes its toll, and the complaisant sultan did not trouble to weed out from the throng those women who had declined in the vale of years. He just wasn’t that efficient—and furthermore he knew that in the great game of hanky-panky, youth was far from being the ace of trumps. Some of the older concubines were still very definitely on Al-Bokhari’s things-to-do list, while the Lady Gursoon was like an unofficial vizier, routinely consulted by the sultan on matters of state, up to and including treaties and trade negotiations.

Oh, he had wives, too, to be sure. Only ten of those, but because they were wives, with contracts and nuptial oaths to their credit, they had rank and privilege far above mere concubines. Their children were legitimate, and stood in line for the throne. They stood in line for a lot of other things, too, because there were dozens of them and the palace was only a modest two-hundred-up-and-two-hundred-down number with a view of the artisans’ quarter and the Street of Cymbals.

The seraglio was a separate establishment within the same walls, and by and large was a fairly cheerful one. The concubines were allowed to keep their children with them, and they lived in luxury, with storytellers and musicians to attend them. Their sole responsibility was a little light sexual putting-out from time to time, and for most of them that chore did not come more often than once in five or six years.