The Steel Seraglio (31 page)

“Is that it? Must we follow this lunatic plan? All I want is our safety. For all of us. To live free of fear and poverty. Is that too much to ask?”

They smiled, then. The faces were more than ever those of boar, lion and snake, but the same smile was on every one. The tall man with the tail spoke for all.

There is no safety
, he told her.
You may have freedom, if you choose it. But you must give something, and take something in return.

Issi could never remember later how the djinni came to him, nor quite what they looked like, nor how they sounded. A gust of sand blew up around him as he entered the valley, stinging his face so that he had to bend his head and squint at the path. Imtisar, just ahead of him, seemed not to notice. But the wind rose. In a moment he was surrounded by a dust storm, cutting out sight and sound.

Issi had encountered enough desert storms to know what to do; he threw his cloak over his head and stood still, only throwing out an arm to brace himself against the rock wall. But the wall was not there: all his groping failed to discover it; and at the same moment the noise of the storm vanished. He was blind and deaf, with no point of contact to the world.

In a sudden panic he threw off the cloak. The storm still whirled all around, but no stinging grains hit him. The noise had receded to a distant buzzing. There was nothing else to hear; nothing to see. But as he peered through the dust cloud for any sign of his companions, he could make out shapes. They might have been angels: winged giants, so far off he could barely see them through the storm. In another moment they seemed as small as insects, buzzing almost around his head.
They are the djinni
, he thought.

There seemed no way he could make them hear him, but he had to know the answer. He cupped his hand and shouted through the churning motes. His voice came back to him as less than a whisper.

“My wife and sons: are they well? Will I see them again?”

And miraculously, an answer came, buzzing in his ears with the storm:

They are alive, and remember you.

“Please,” Issi begged the insect voices. “How can I get back to them?”

This time his own voice sounded so faint he thought the djinni would not hear. But their reply came stronger than before.

Make exchange with the boy behind you.

The storm stopped as suddenly as if it had never been. Crouched behind him, wide-eyed and trembling, was Jamal.

It had not been a whim, to follow them. When it became clear that he was not to be included in the party, he had already filled the largest water-skin he could find and hidden it with a blanket under rocks at the western edge of the camp. He had taken a bag for food, too, but had not been able to fill it: just the morning’s bread, and a double handful of dried fruit hurriedly snatched from the stores, for which he risked humiliating punishment if caught. There was no time to get more. He watched them leave just before sunset and waited for his opportunity. When everyone around him was busy with Farhat’s chores, it was easy enough to slip into the darkness.

For almost as long as he could remember Jamal had longed to be older, had fretted about his small size and lack of strength, so that they all ignored him and treated him as a child. But now, moving unseen behind the chosen five, matching their footsteps with his own, keeping just within earshot, he revelled in his own lightness and speed. When they finally stopped to sleep he moved a little further away and dug himself a hollow in the warm sand, feeling, as he wrapped himself in his blanket, that he could have gone on for much longer.

He woke chilled and stiff in the darkness to the sound of their voices, and scrambled to his feet: they were moving on already. He trudged after them as the sun rose at their backs. When the sun reached its height he regretted that he had not brought a scarf for his head, or any kind of tent. The adults, his quarry, made a shelter of three of Issi’s light wood poles and a thin cloth to hide from the worst hour of the heat. Jamal had to huddle beneath his heavy blanket, holding it away from his face with his knees and trying not to move.

Many times during the next two days he thought about calling out; running to Zuleika and the others and announcing that he was joining them. They had come too far already to turn back, and too far to send him back alone. But something always prevented him: pride, perhaps. At other times he wondered why no one had simply turned around and seen him. But not one of the five looked back, or if they did it was in blindness. All their attention was fixed on what lay ahead; Jamal’s too.

By noon on the third day his water was gone. It came to him that he might die now if he did not call to the five ahead, but he kept on in silence, and they did not turn. As the day wore on he realised he had no more voice to call.

Towards evening he passed a rock that he thought must be the Hill of the Hand. In some of the tales, pilgrims had found water there, and he thought he could hear it trickling. But he had fallen too far behind and the sun was nearly down: there was no time to waste in searching.
Afterwards
, he thought, and went on into the ravine.

He saw his father there, fighting with Hakkim Mehdad. Just past the stone spikes at the entrance they stood, locked together and swaying, their hands around each other’s throats. The sultan was dressed as Jamal had last seen him, in his silk chamber-robe: his bald head gleamed beneath the setting sun. Hakkim Mehdad was all in black, his head swathed in a black scarf. Jamal had never seen the man’s face; all that was visible of him now was his eyes, which glowed like those of a wolf at night.

His father turned his head and nodded to Jamal, then went back to throttling his enemy. With a cry that caught in his throat, Jamal ran to help him.

His way was blocked. Where his father had been there was now an army: countless stern-faced men, their spears all pointing at his heart. They did not attack, but stood waiting for him to speak. So this was the moment; but Jamal had no voice. Nevertheless, he made his demands, shaped with his lips and hurled towards them with all the breath he had, though his throat made no sound but a hoarse gasp.

“I want my kingdom back. And I want to avenge my mother and my father. Help me take back my rightful place!”

They heard him. At least, they seemed to answer. A voice came to him; he could not tell if it was one or many.

Some of your desires you will gain
, it told him.
But you must offer something. Now.

The last word was like a thunderclap. It wiped out the army, the spears and banners, like mist in the sun. Jamal was kneeling on bare sand, looking at bare rock. And beside him, gazing down with horror and amazement, was Issi.

NOW
, the djinni said, heavy as a great book closing, and vanished. The six gazed at each other in the empty ravine, in the last light.

“Jamal!” Gursoon exclaimed. How . . . ?”

“Not now,” Zuleika cut in. “What did you hear? What did they tell you?”

“That we need gifts . . .” Gursoon’s voice was doubtful.

“They told me I must give something,” Imtisar said. “And take something.”

“Make exchange . . .” Issi said. “But what does it mean?

“It means the gifts come from us.”

It was Rem who spoke. She had been sitting hunched, pressing herself against the rock wall furthest from the cave, and her voice was muffled. “I think . . . we have to give gifts to each other. Now, before the sun sets.”

“What gifts?” Zuleika seemed almost indignant. “We have nothing here!”

“Maybe when we get back . . .” Gursoon began.

“No!” Rem was suddenly on her feet, and shouting with desperate urgency. They turned to her in amazement. Her face was paper-white, the black tears marking it like bars.

“No. It has to be now. That’s how they work . . . Whatever you have, whatever you have with you, give it to someone. I don’t know why. But we must do it, before it gets dark.” She felt inside her tunic, pulled out a reed pen and pressed it into Zuleika’s hands. “Like this. Here. This is for you.”

Gursoon nodded, and pulled a ring from her finger, holding it out to Imtisar. The other woman, after some hesitation, reached up to take a comb from her hair. But as she took Gursoon’s ring she started and tried to give it back.

“I can’t take this! This is Bokhari’s ruby. It’s worth a fortune! Give me something less . . . that little silver ring you have . . .”

“This is what I’m giving you,” Gursoon said firmly. Take it, Imtisar, with my blessing.” She turned away. Imtisar gazed at the ring with appalled delight.

Issi had been patting down his clothes, finding nothing detachable. At length, with visible reluctance, he took something on a string from around his neck.

“It’s the key to the sultan’s stable yard,” he said to Jamal. “Just don’t lose it.” Jamal had nothing to hand him in return but an empty water-skin, which Issi took a little sourly.

Rem turned to Zuleika, who had not moved since she had accepted the little pen. It still lay in her hand, narrower than her smallest finger. She looked down at it as if uncertain what to do with it.

“I have nothing to give you,” she said. “There were only my knives, and I left them on the ground, back there. Shall I go now and get them?”

“No!” Rem was adamant. “It must be here and now.”

They held each other’s gaze for several heartbeats Then Rem looked down at the pen in the other woman’s hand.

“The lessons I gave you,” she said. “Do you remember them?

Zuleika made a movement of irritation, suppressed it, nodded.

“Then give me a word.”

Rem blinked fiercely, and the black tears welled again. She reached to take the pen from Zuleika’s hand, dabbed the point into the black stream beneath one eye, and returned it. She held out her right arm, turning it to expose the white skin below the elbow.

“Just here. Write a token for me.”

It seemed to take them a long time. Zuleika, so sure and graceful with all the tools and motions of her chosen trade, was clumsy with the little slip of wood, handling it as if she were afraid of causing damage. She wrote her name in large, spiky script, separating each letter. The last one ended in a round blot. They stood together, Zuleika still holding Rem’s arm, and watched the word dry.

“Is it enough?” Zuleika asked at length.

Rem nodded, still gazing down at her arm with its new mark.

“So what do we do now?” Zuleika said.

Rem looked up. Her face was still white, but the black tears no longer welled from her eyes. For the first time in days, she smiled.

“It’s done,” she said. “Now we can go home.”

Let’s back up a little.

After I spoke those words, “We take back Bessa,” everything began to move in double-time. The council of war, the visit to the djinni: the flood of revolution engulfed us with such astonishing speed that most of us never paused to consider the precise nature of the current that swept us along. But it is part of my gift, and my burden, always to consider the current, and I would neglect the responsibilities of both if I avoided it now.

When I spoke to the women of the seraglio about retaking the city, I planted an idea in their minds. It was an idea of freedom and beauty and power, of women leaving the bedchamber and entering the throne room. It was the embryo of a political ideology at least six centuries before its time, but that does not even begin to explain its potency. It was not the newness of the concept, but its familiarity which moved them. They had all seen the rights to their own flesh passed from one man’s hand to another, and all had felt keenly their own powerlessness in those exchanges. In such situations, a version of the same concept has formed many times in many people’s thoughts, and most of the time fear, or reason, or a sense of overwhelming odds, has stifled it before it can be uttered. A thousand stillborn revolutions are buried a thousand times over for every day that the world has endured. It is very seldom indeed that one is delivered alive.

For an idea of the general effect my words produced, imagine a bomb going off in four hundred minds at once. And if the story I am about to tell now seems as strange and unbelievable to you as it does to me, then I can only say that the fallout from such arcane explosions is never the same twice, and most likely is beyond the power of human minds to anticipate.

At first, the party who had visited the djinni spoke little on the return journey. Their memories, not only of the djinni’s words, but of their own and each other’s speech and actions, differed in such fundamental respects that for the first two days after their departure all their conversations foundered into uneasy silence. More than this, for many leagues, each one of them was haunted by the sneaking conviction that the djinni watched them still, and though none dared voice the suspicion, all could feel that tightening sensation at the base of the skull which suggests the gaze of unseen eyes. It was not until a little before noon on the third day, when they reached the flat rock which lay a half-day’s journey from the bandits’ cave, that they began tentatively to discuss the djinni’s mysterious instructions, and the gifts they had been asked to exchange.

“Well, that was a waste of six days,” Imtisar proclaimed. The others shushed her hurriedly, even Jamal looking alarmed at this blatant disrespect.

“Please, lady, do not insult them,” Issi hissed, glancing behind him as if he expected a djinn to rise up from the sand at his back.

“Why not? We’re far from them now. Besides, I’m only speaking the truth. Why they decided not to help us is beyond me, but whatever their reasons, they have given us nothing we didn’t have already. All this trip has achieved is the redistribution of our own belongings.”

“Perhaps the djinni have enchanted them, so that they will help us in the battle,” Issi suggested. Imtisar shot him a disdainful look.

Gursoon was of the opinion that the function of the gifts was symbolic; perhaps they were meant as clues to how the seraglio should proceed, or warnings of the dangers they would face along their way. Imtisar seemed more convinced by this argument, but still eyed the objects sceptically.