The Steel Seraglio (24 page)

“He just wants to beg for his life,” Zuleika said impatiently. “Any man will make any promise, when death’s hanging over him, and then break it after. Don’t listen.”

“A confession,” Anwar Das said, to the room at large. “I’ve done terrible things, and now, as I leave this life, I yearn to unburden my conscience. Let me do so, ladies, and I’ll die with a light heart. I don’t plead for life. Far from it! I’ve deserved death no fewer than three times, and only wish to tell you how.”

Gursoon looked around the room. Most of the women were nodding or murmuring assent. It seemed a reasonable request, from a young man of such fine features and attractive build, whose time on this Earth was about to be so tragically cut short.

“Go to it,” Gursoon told him. “But be brief.”

“I ask that my hands should be untied,” Anwar Das said. “I give you my word, I won’t try to run or offer violence to anyone here.”

He was speaking to Gursoon, and Gursoon nodded. Zuleika rolled her eyes, but came around behind Anwar Das and cut the rope that bound his hands.

“If you offer violence,” she murmured to him, “you make this quicker and easier. You’ll be dead before you draw two breaths.”

“Thank you, lady,” Anwar Das said, massaging his swollen wrists. “Your candour is appreciated.”

He struck a stance, and began his story.

“There was once a young man,” Anwar Das said, “of noble birth, good family, honest character and astonishingly attractive features, who nonetheless had been marked by unkind fate for vicious and unexpected reverses.”

There was a shifting and shuffling among the concubines. Several sat down, crossed their legs and rested their chins upon their fists.

“Stick to the point,” Zuleika suggested tersely, but this injunction was met with reproachful glances from many quarters, and Anwar Das felt sufficiently encouraged to continue.

“This young man,” he said, “was the son of a great merchant in the city of Yrtsus. And when I say a great merchant, I don’t just mean a wealthy one. Isulmir Das had a generous heart, and was always mindful of those less fortunate than himself. He held this opinion: that the holy duty of
zakaad
, the giving of alms, is the most important of the commandments laid upon us by the Increate. He never passed a beggar’s bowl without blessing it with silver. Never cheated a trader. Never made a bargain by lying to or tricking those he dealt with. Why, once I saw him give back to a wine merchant a barrel of brandy that had been sent to him by mistake, when he had ordered small beer. Your mistake, he told the man, shall not be my exultation, nor your loss my profit.”

Zenabia, whose father was a wine merchant, nodded vigorous agreement with this sentiment.

“But alas!” sighed Anwar Das. “Virtue must be rewarded in Heaven, for on Earth it is trodden underfoot every day by triumphant vice. My father—I’m sorry, I mean the merchant, of course—was murdered by an unscrupulous courtier, the Most Upraised Nilaf Brozoud, who hated his goodness and had a covetous eye on his properties. Worse! The innocent son was falsely accused of the father’s murder. So not only had he lost a parent, but he stood guilty in the world’s eyes of the foulest crime there is—patricide! He fled into the desert with nothing but the clothes he stood up in, a bare inch ahead of the baying mob, who pursued him with swords and cudgels and, if they had caught him, would have deprived him summarily of his life.”

The concubines were agog. Zuleika tutted and fingered her dagger. Gursoon looked wryly amused, but did not intervene as the camel thief got fairly into his stride.

“Pity him!” he cried. “This noble youth, brave but untried, barely old enough yet to wear a beard. Thrown to the mercies of the world, he was. Every man’s hand raised against him, and every door closed in his face. He wandered long over the dunes, in the heat of the day, his tongue parched, the tears of filial grief evaporating unfallen from his eyes.”

Zuleika could not withhold a profane oath at this point, but Anwar Das rode right on over it, his glance flicking from one of the women to another, always holding each one’s gaze until he received some hint of a response. “For days and nights he staggered on. Lost, alone, closer and closer to death. And at last he fell among thieves, who roamed wild in the deserts of the west and considered all who came there to be their rightful prey.

“They would have killed the young man. He had no means to defend himself, and his clothes, though ragged and dusty now, were of rich cloth. That would have been enough to damn him in their eyes, and indeed the leader—the infamous Vurdik the Bald—raised his sword over the young man’s head and made to bring it down.

“But the Increate watches over all things,
baraha barahinei
, and in that moment he sent a shaft of light into the bandit chief’s soul, so that he was struck with unwonted compassion. Instead of cutting the young man into four pieces, he took his own waterskin from his belt and gave him to drink from it.”

“A good way of picking up all sorts of unsavoury diseases,” Zuleika growled. The women furthest from her line of sight shushed indignantly, but fell silent when she turned to look in their direction.

“They made him one of their own,” Anwar Das said. “And though by nature he recoiled from the terrible acts by which these ruffians earned their daily living, still he owed them his life, and he paid that debt by participating in their depredations.”

“This is starting to sound like a plea for the defence,” Gursoon said sternly.

“By no means, lady,” Anwar Das protested. “It is, as I said, my confession—and here we have already come to the first mortal sin. The young man had been raised to value life and respect property, and now he became a bandit, a canker, a depraved and reckless thief, practising on the goods and livelihoods of his neighbours and fattening on their misfortunes. Is this not terrible? And yet, what choice did he have, since to defy the miscreants who’d found him meant certain death at their hands?

“And moreover, a hope grew in his breast that if he could survive, he could obtain justice—could go back to the city that birthed him and face down the most execrable moneylender, Nilaf Brozoud, who had murdered his blameless father.”

“You said Nilaf Brozoud was a courtier,” Zuleika pointed out.

Anwar Das nodded. “So he was. But he also lent money at interest. That was the source of much of his wealth. Also . . .” he tried to remember what he had learned from his conversations with the women “. . . he hobbled horses, in order to lay complaints against guiltless ostlers, and raised a tax on cloth that bankrupted the seamstresses of Yrtsus and caused terrible suffering to their innocent families.”

Gasps of outrage and muttered execrations from those women whose background included stables or sewing.

“The young man longed to face this man—this ignoble monster, rather—and throw his villainy in his teeth. And so one day, when he had been with the bandits a year, he bade them farewell and set off across the mountains to Yrtsus, determined at last to requite the death of his excellent father. The bandits offered to accompany the young man, and make his fight their own, but he thanked them and said that he would not have them come into danger for his sake.

“But in the mountains, even if one has a map, it’s fatally easy to become lost. The young man strayed from the path, and was soon confused by the myriad peaks and valleys, all alike, with which these hills abound. When night fell he was alone and without shelter, and a sandstorm greater than any witnessed on the Earth until then had descended out of the north, driving him—all unknowing—even further from his way.

“Stung and blinded by the sand, all but dead from exhaustion and thirst, the young man sank at last to his knees, and then fell prostrate. In that moment, he succumbed to despair—thereby, sweet ladies, deserving death a second time, since in despair we turn our backs to the Increate’s mercy and assume, always falsely, that he has no plan for us. The young man cursed his fate, and so proved himself unworthy of rescue or redemption.

“But though he abandoned the Increate, the Increate did not abandon him. The tips of his fingers, as he lay there on the face of the desert like a child upon his mother’s breast, touched something cold and hard. Drawing it forth from the sand, he discovered that it was a bottle.

“The young man was, as I have said before, almost dying from thirst. So he pulled the stopper from the bottle, thinking that it might contain water, and to his astonishment, out from those crystal confines came—”

“A djinn!” Zuleika grunted, in disgust. “He’s telling us a story with a djinn in it. The kind that lives in a bottle and grants wishes. Please let me kill him now!”

“It was no djinn,” Anwar Das said with dignity, although it had been about to be exactly that. “Please, lady, no interruptions. Out from those crystal confines, I say, poured an army of infinitesimally tiny men. Men the size of ants, whose voices were so small and so shrill that the astonished young man could make out nothing of what they said. And yet, by cleverly arranging themselves into the shapes of letters and words, they contrived to speak with him.”

It was the best that Anwar Das could do on the fly, having been deflected from his djinn, but the women seemed interested in this implausible development, and prepared to roll with it for a while at least.

“The tiny myrmidons told the young man that they were the lost legions of Jugul Inshah, who had been sent against the mages of Treis in the days when the world was just created and the Increate’s touch was fresh upon it, so that everything dripped magic as the trees drip water after a storm.

They had fought, and they had lost, and the mages of Treis had trapped them in a bottle, cursing them with the doubled curse of infinitesimal size and eternal life. The only way they could be restored to their former stature and live once again the life of normal men was to win the blessing of the king of Treis himself. But Treis had passed from the Earth ten thousand years before, and none knew now even where it had stood, so their plight was a parlous one.

“The young man told the diminutive army his own story in turn, and they commiserated with him on the perfidy of the evil merchant—”

“Courtier,” Zuleika muttered.

“—courtier, with mercantile interests, Nilaf Brozoud. Indeed, such was their pity and fellow feeling for the young man, whose person was so fine and whose morals were so upright, that they swore themselves into his service and offered to go with him into Yrtsus.

“The young man was loath to accept their assistance, since his purpose was so terrible and the risk so great, but they importuned him until he agreed. He went on with the bottle in his pack, and soon found the right way again. He was in Yrtsus before nightfall, and found an inn, the Seven Stars, wherein he could spend the night.”

“My father’s inn at Saruqiy was called the Seven Stars!” one of the women exclaimed.

Anwar Das knew this already, from an earlier conversation, but reacted with polite surprise. “Perhaps,” he suggested, “this inn was named for your father’s, for who has not heard of the Seven Stars of Saruqiy, its legendary hospitality, the sweetness of its wines, and its entirely reasonable prices?”

The woman nodded happily, and Anwar Das mentally moved one vote from the nays to the ayes.

“The innkeeper,” he went on, “a worthy man of advanced age, gave the young man news that saddened his heart. The grand vizier of Yrtsus had died only a week before, and Nilaf Brozoud had been appointed to that most honoured and impregnable of positions. He was now second only to the sultan himself, who placed absolute trust in him and loved him like a brother. The feasting and celebrations at the palace were still going on, and were set to continue until the first day of the month following.

“The young man’s heart was heavy. He had hoped to challenge a private citizen—wealthy, and powerful, but with no special protection under the law. Instead, he was setting himself up against the rule of the sultan himself, so that even if he succeeded in his quest he would likely still be treated as an enemy of the state and brought to the block or the scaffold.”

“Aren’t we owed a third mortal sin round about now?” Zuleika demanded.

“It’s coming soon,” Anwar Das assured her. “The young man gained entry to the royal palace, and . . .”

“How?”

“The gates were unlocked, and unguarded because of the feasting.”

“That’s ridiculous!” Zuleika exploded. And Anwar Das had to admit that it did sound weak.

“I misremembered,” he said. “The gates of the palace were indeed unguarded, because the guards had been given permission to attend the celebrations. But the gates were stout and heavy, made of oak seven inches thick, and locked with seven locks. Moreover, the walls were as high as twenty men, and as smooth as glass. When the young man came to the gates, he could see that it would be no easy task to gain ingress.

“But he took from his pack the bottle containing the miniature army, removed the stopper and set it on the ground. The tiny soldiers poured out once again, and stood awaiting the young man’s command. He told them about the gates with their seven locks, which stood now between him and his enemy.

“The minute legions once again flowed like sand to spell out their answer with their own bodies. ‘Once,’ they said, ‘we would have knocked down these gates with a battering ram, or levelled them with stones flung from mighty siege engines. Now, we have no such resources. But we will see what can be done.’

“They swarmed upon the gates like termites, these diminished heroes. The wood that seemed so smooth to me—I mean, of course, to the young man—offered to their small hands any number of shelves and escarpments and conveniently placed rugosities.

“They marched into the locks and set their shoulders to the wards, pushing them one by one into the neutral position. They hauled the tangs out of the recesses in the wall, and pushed them back into their housings in the locks themselves, until finally the young man had only to push upon the gates, and they fell open of their own accord on their well-oiled hinges.