The Steel Seraglio (22 page)

They had stayed for most of a day, moving from cover to cover, and watching the men as they laid their traps for mountain hares and fetched water from a hidden pool. It seemed, as Issi had said, that there were few pickings for bandits these days: only one traveller had come over the pass all day, an old man who looked even scrawnier than his malnourished donkey. Three of the brigands had waylaid him, relieved him of his purse and let him go without even troubling to check his pack.

“They’re not very thorough,” said Zeinab. “Any trader coming this way would have a second purse hidden somewhere.”

“They’ve grown careless, maybe,” Zuleika said. “But be assured, if they saw a prize worth fighting for, they’d fight. We don’t know what weapons they may have. And we’re a group of women travelling alone, and richly dressed. If they see us like this, there will have to be killing.”

“Then we must make sure they don’t see us like this,” said Gursoon.

The bandits lived in a tiny valley, surrounded on all sides by walls of sheer rock. On one side of this valley, opposite the ridge from which Zuleika and Zeinab had spied on them, the large cave where they slept opened out of the mountains at its back, a great yawning mouth with its roof overhanging the sand like a drooping upper lip.

The cave smelled foul, and the thieves’ residency had not improved the valley much either. However, it was blessedly cool, there was a grove of wild dates and salt bushes which provided them with food even when traffic through the mountain pass was slow, and, better still, the same water which fed the little spring to which Zeinab had brought the seraglio gushed between the rocks at the base of the ridge into a much larger pool.

It was here that the twelve bandits washed and drank. In earlier days they had pissed there too, until one of their number, Anwar Das, had educated them in the finer points of basic hygiene. Anwar Das was a man of multitudinous talents, and in many respects almost as clever as he thought he was. He had tried to educate the bandits about a lot of things since he first joined their ranks, with varying degrees of success. Now, he addressed his companions as they lay on the ground or tossed pebbles idly at the cave wall, and patiently explained for the fourth time an idea that he had suggested earlier that day.

“But brothers, if we picked a base that
overlooked
a valley, rather than sitting at the bottom of one, we would be in a much better position. Anyone could ambush us here! Perhaps if we just
tried
a new site? For a day or two?”

“Shut up, Das.” Yusuf Razim, the head of the bandits, flicked a pebble in his direction. Das ducked it adroitly.

“I could go and search for a suitable spot myself. You wouldn’t even have to stir from your place! I’m sure if we—”

“Shut
up
, Das. Here I’ve been cutting the way for thirty years, and you come along, a bare scraping of a boy, trying to tell me my own business.”

Das, who was five-and-twenty, sighed inwardly and decided to change tack.

“Surrounded by walls like this, someone could be overlooking us at this minute, and we would never know of it until the guard arrived to arrest us all,” he said.

“That’s the whole point, you little piece of camel shite! Surrounded by walls like this, no one can see us in the first place. You can’t overlook something you can’t see.” Yusuf rolled his eyes at Das with withering contempt.

At that moment, as if underscoring Yusuf’s words, the bandits’ attention was arrested by the distinct sound of a woman weeping. The noise cut through the air from the sheer wall to their left, so close that each man felt his skin prickle as if the woman was standing directly by his side. Shattering the desert silence, her voice was a high, ethereal keening that made their hearts leap and their hair stand on end. In an instant, the chief bandit’s face had transformed from swaggering triumph into terror.

“A ghost maiden,” he breathed.

Das imagined banging Yusuf’s head repeatedly into the cave wall, in the vain hope that some good sense might trickle in through a crack.

“Fortunate for us if it is,” he muttered through gritted teeth. “Right now, brothers, the graver possibility is that it is in fact an actual woman, the wife of some merchant who has lost his way and whose armed entourage might discover our whereabouts,
as I warned you
. If that were the case, we would have to choose between killing the woman out of hand or abandoning our base with precipitate haste.”

“Or keeping her as a doxy,” suggested one of the others.

Eleven men reflected cheerfully on the prospect. Anwar Das shook his head in mute despair.

“May I suggest that we go and investigate?” he muttered. “And that we take our weapons?”

There was a general rush for the back of the cave, where the swords and daggers were stashed. There followed a few moments of physical comedy as they picked up each other’s favourite implements, then fought and scuffled until they had all swapped back. Sometimes, Das wondered that these interludes produced so few actual casualties.

As it turned out, the woman was not the wife of a merchant, though she did not seem to be a ghost maiden either. She was kneeling in the sand not five feet away from the concealed entrance to the valley, completely alone. She turned a tearstained face towards the bandits as they rushed upon her, her expression suddenly becoming panicked.

“Don’t come any closer!” She was sobbing hysterically in her fear. “Please! For the love of the Increate, stay away from me!”

The bandits looked at one another uncertainly. The woman was clearly no ghost, but how could she have got out here, into the middle of the desert, when they saw no others near, nor any camels that could have carried her? They could not expend much thought on the mysterious lady, however, so transfixed were they by the pile of gold that lay at her side. Gold bangles, gold necklaces, gold earrings, all tangled together in a shimmering mound. Yusuf was just stepping towards it greedily, when Anwar Das made a swiping motion with his arm, bringing him up short.

“You idiot! What are you—” the bandit exploded at him.

“Look,” Das raised his arm, directing the bandits’ gaze away from the gold that had been holding their attention as if they were a flock of magpies.

The woman was surrounded by the carcasses of desert jackals: five big, furry bodies, teeth drawn back from their rigid lips in a voiceless snarl. Though they looked and looked, the thieves could identify no wound on their bodies to suggest how the beasts had met their end. They radiated out from the girl in a perfect circle, and at the edge of that circle the bandits stopped, eyeing her warily and brandishing their swords.

“Who are you, lady? What do you want here?” Yusuf growled, trying his best to sound intimidating.

The woman answered him with another burst of frantic tears. “It’s too terrible! Too terrible to tell!”

The brigands were nonplussed. This woman was alone—she had clearly brought down five jackals by herself, and yet she cried like a little child. Mustering the sum total of his persuasive skills, Yusuf grimaced at her in an approximation of a friendly smile.

“There, there,” he grunted. “We’re not going to hurt you. Just tell us what you’re about here, and we’ll let you be on your way.” He avoided mentioning that when she left, he and his brothers would be in possession of her gold jewellery. By this point, the men were more intrigued than uneasy, and were readying themselves for an interesting account.

“All right,” the woman sniffed, “I’ll tell you. Only don’t come too close!” She gestured helplessly at the dead jackals at her feet, her face crumpling as if she was about to cry again, “I don’t know what would happen!”

With those words, she raised her head and began:

“I hail from the distant city of Izz-ud-Din. Doubtless you have never heard of it; it is far, far from here. Indeed, I have wandered for many years to escape it.

“The sultan in Izz-ud-Din, in the days of my youth, was my own father, Ibtsaheem Ramid, and he was mad. His madness was like a poison poured in at the mouth of the city. Under his rule, Izz-ud-Din, once so fair, so prosperous, rotted and fell into poverty and decay. My father imposed such heavy taxes upon his people, that very soon they had nothing left to give him, not even the cloth they wrapped their corpses in. But what did he care for that? The old man had only one concern in this life, and that was gold.

“He prized gold above his very position and his kingdom. Certainly he prized it far above his daughter, and her sickly mother, dead long years ago from the grief of a cold bed and a cold husband. He hoarded vast piles of it, a glittering ocean of metal, in the caverns beneath his palace, and loved nothing better than to sit gazing at it for hours or even days on end, turning it over in his hands. Fondling it, lavishing it with kisses too precious to be spent on his pale daughter, who pined in the shadows for the dead mother whose arms had held her too briefly, and the mad father, whose arms had never held her at all.

“You may think that with his reason so far overthrown, the people of Izz-ud-Din might easily have risen against my father, and cast him from his throne. Indeed, even his own guards hated the man for his miserly ways and cruel temper (though none felt the sting of his hand or his stick more than I).

But when still a young man, the sultan had made the arduous journey to the cave of the seven djinni, and they had blessed him with the power to bestow curses on whosoever he chose. Because of this he was immeasurably powerful and his people could not, for all their anger, raise so much as a finger against him. His cook once brought him bad meat, so he conjured mad dogs to tear the man apart and consume him alive. If he disliked a vizier for whatever reason, he would root him to the spot and cause scorpions to crawl upon him until he was stung to death. So he continued his corrupt rule in the city, and none dared risk his ire.”

By now, the thieves were fully absorbed in the tale. Over the course of the woman’s narrative, most of them had lowered themselves to the floor and were sat clustered at her feet, though they still maintained a safe distance. They shuddered at her description of her father the sultan’s terrible powers, and even Anwar Das was listening to her with a guarded attention.

“And if his people lived in fear of him, then think how much worse it was for me! His daughter, his only child, who in his madness he loathed and despised. In his rages he would kick and beat me. Worst of all, though, were his words. He called me an ugly whore. He said that no man would ever want me, because his gold, my dowry, would remain forever in the palace, jealously hoarded.

“As if to grind my face in this pain, he would command me to spend my days in the cavernous gold vaults underneath the palace, endlessly polishing his many treasures. There were more in those vaults than I could count. What you see here is only a thousandth part of it.

“One day, my father called me into his throne room, his manner even wilder than usual. He had taken it into his head that all his gold should be melted down, and made into a giant statue to his eternal glory. The work was to begin immediately. Nothing would dissuade him from it. Though his own people had no bread, though their children were starving in the streets, he would have his golden statue, parading his wealth over his city’s crushing poverty.

“He called for giant smelting fires to be lit, and day and night he commanded his unwilling workers to carry his gold to the fires and melt it down. He oversaw their progress himself from the palace balcony, and any man that he caught stealing, or even working at a slower pace than he liked, would be punished with the most grievous torments.

“He forced me to work too. I suppose he saw it as the ultimate humiliation, and he was right. Seeing my dowry and my inheritance thrown away to flatter this madman turned my stomach. It turned my mind, too. Slowly, my shame and sorrow hardened into rage. The sight of my father once cowed and frightened me. Now, I spat at the mention of his name. A determination grew in me that his tyranny could endure no longer. He had ruined my life for long enough. And what better punishment, I reflected, than one which fitted the crime? What end more fitting than the one he had wrought upon himself years ago?

“It was not difficult to slip a little molten gold into a lead bowl while I was at my work. I ran to him in his bedchamber, and, finding him asleep, tipped the sluggish liquid down his throat. You will think me an unnatural daughter, and so I am, perhaps, but what of that? The pain I had suffered would needs have its utterance.

“I had planned to run then; I turned, and made a step towards the door. But the gold in my father’s mouth scalded him as it slid down his airways. He awoke, coughing on the already congealing metal, choking on gold and blood as the burning liquid ate him from the inside out. As vicious and ironic as one of his own curses; a suitable end for a miser.

“At the sound of his awaking I turned, and that was my mistake. For I saw him curse me with his eyes. I staggered forward, and his strong hand grasped hold of my wrist. His touch seared my skin, as if the boiling gold had spread out to the very tips of his fingers. Screaming, I broke away, but not before his hand had branded me where he had clutched me. See the mark I bear there still!”