The Steel Seraglio (51 page)

This daily meeting, for I could learn of no others, is the means by which Bessa is governed. I was left astonished, as I am sure you, Lord, will be astonished, that the city has survived for as long as it has. If it is your will to invade this singular place, be assured that they have no ruler capable of resisting you.

I kiss the ground before your feet, my Lord, and eagerly await my summons to return to your presence.

Farhat had begun laughing halfway through the letter. By the time she reached the end, her shoulders were shaking.

“It’s wonderful!” she managed, wiping her eyes. Do we know who sent it?”

“No.” Gursoon was smiling in spite of herself, but her tone was serious. “If the Caliph had found out, he would have told me. You notice there’s no address or signature.”

“Well, we can’t show it to Imtisar, that’s for sure. Grace and beauty! She’d never let us forget it. And you!” Her shoulders shook again, but a look at Gursoon’s face sobered her. “You don’t think it’s funny?”

“This one won’t hurt us,” Gursoon conceded. “But it worries me that after all these years there are still people who want to make war on us. We’ve done nothing to harm his master, whoever he is. Maybe lost him a trade agreement, but that happens everywhere. It seems he wants to snuff us out simply for what we are.”

Farhat was serious again. “You’re not really concerned are you? The Caliph himself saw it as a joke; look at his note to you.”

“Kephiz Bin Ezvahoun might do well to joke a little less,” Gursoon said darkly. From what Anwar Das tells me, even his own power may not be as secure as it once was.” She leaned back in her seat, turning away from the thought. “But you’re right, Farhat. We have strong allies, and I’m not truly worried that some distant sultan with a grudge could be a threat to us. Our own trading partners would dissuade him, if it came to it. Only . . . Zuleika has never dropped her guard, in all the time the city has been ours. She still drills the army, and still keeps the weapons store full. And Anwar Das is still making his enquiries, looking for possible threats to the city, though we’ve been at peace now for years. I just wonder if, perhaps, I’ve allowed myself to become too complacent. If we are ever threatened again, how would I deal with it?

“That’s easy,” Farhat said. She took the pot and poured more coffee for them both. “Raise your veil and blast them with the beauty of your face!”

The cheerful sounds of the square were all about them, and the city glowed in the golden light. Gursoon allowed herself to be soothed into laughter, and the two women sat peaceably together, chatting about other things as the evening fell.

Rumours arose at this time of a bandit king called the Lion of the Desert. He was both ruthless and ambitious, it was said, and had already united several existing companies of thieves under his own rule, in most cases by defeating and killing their existing leaders in single combat.

These reports were for the most part ignored in Bessa: bandits and rumours were alike perennial, and could be relied on to go away if you didn’t turn your head to acknowledge them.

But the Lion did not go away, and the rumours turned into inconvenient fact. Trade caravans travelling from Bessa toward Perdondaris were waylaid and did not return. Nobody survived these encounters, so the Lion’s involvement remained a matter of hearsay and whisper, but it seemed safe to say that there was a new power in the land—a roving, mobile power, unlike the powers that ruled from behind city walls.

Zuleika’s janissaries went out into the desert and the mountains on wide patrols, hoping to find the Lion’s lair or else to meet his cohorts in the field. They were unsuccessful: this bandit king, if he existed, knew better than to engage a trained military unit in the open, and no one seemed to know where he was hiding.

After a summer of such provocations, Zuleika made the decision to send a company of her soldiers along with each caravan. The attacks became less frequent, but they did not stop. Several caravans, in spite of their armed escorts, found themselves encircled at night by hostile forces who rained arrows on them out of the desert, night after night. Then, when the guard company were diminished and demoralised by this skirmishing, the bandits would mount an ambush and fight them to the death. In every case where this happened, the guards and camel-drivers were slaughtered and left to lie where they had fallen. There were never any bodies belonging to the attacking force.

Zuleika saw this for what it was—the Lion of the Desert, or whoever was leading these raiders, wished to tell Bessa as little as possible about who they were fighting: their weapons, their tactics, their numbers. Perhaps he was also hoping to weaken the morale of the Bessan forces by creating the myth that his fighters were indestructible. It was a clever trick, and Zuleika had to admire the care with which it was executed; the dead soldiers had also been stripped of their weapons, so it was impossible to prove that they had drawn blood, and the sand had been raked over with branches so there was no battle sign left for her to read.

After consultation with Gursoon and a full debate in the Jidur, she doubled the guard contingents. It was important that the trade caravans continued. Bessa needed to keep her obligations to her neighbour cities, and to continue to expand her economic activity to cover the massive spending that was underway on the city’s infrastructure. Schools and lazarets, public gardens and slum clearances all cost money.

But the cohorts of the city guard were finite too, and all of this meant that they were spread more thinly than Zuleika liked. In retrospect, she was playing into the Lion’s hands, as she realised when the next attack came not on the caravans but on the crocus fields.

Ever since Anwar Das’s great coup in Susurrut, and the bargain he had struck with Rudh Silmon, the refining and sale of saffron had been the city’s sheet anchor, raising more revenue than all her other crops combined. That was so, at least, until the day when the people of Bessa woke under a choking black blanket, to find the crocus fields on fire. The bittersweet smoke stung the eyes of the citizens and made them weep, and there was plenty to weep about. Farhat was obsessively protective of the crocuses, and had cool storerooms filled with seed pods already laid aside for next year, but the entire harvest was destroyed, and a precisely calculable fortune lost to Bessa’s treasury.

The general assembly in the Jidur seemed paralysed for once; they proposed a motion ordering Zuleika to triple the guards on the fields. She explained, coldly but calmly, that this would only be possible if she removed most of the armed escorts from the caravans, which would only encourage further depredations.

“Then what do you propose?” one of the speakers demanded. “We do nothing, and allow our wealth to be consumed?” It was a man who said this: Ereth En-Sadim, a cousin of the En-Sadim who Zuleika had murdered on the day when the seraglio escaped into the desert. He had heard, of course, of how his kinsman had died, but had never seemed to hold it against Zuleika. He was all about the bottom line.

“I’m not suggesting we do nothing,” Zuleika answered him, when her turn came to speak. “But this bandit clearly has a plan, and our own actions and decisions are factored into it. If we keep on reacting blindly to each stab, each feint, then when the knife is drawn across our throats we won’t see it coming.”

This speech caused perturbation, and the perturbation caused more debate, which caused more edicts. A recruitment drive for the city guard was decreed, but this was meaningless; Knowing as much as she did about the secret ways in and out of cities, and the covert methods sometimes used to topple them, Zuleika had already doubled the size of the guard and increased its effectiveness by ten times. But as far as this went, Bessa was a victim of her own affluence: there was full employment, a trade boom and (as a consequence) more wealth, shared more equally, than anyone had ever known. The reserve pool of citizens who desperately wanted to be guards wasn’t big enough to make the planned expansion feasible.

Other edicts were more controversial, and more scattershot. A curfew was imposed, and then withdrawn again almost immediately—the crisis was outside the city gates, not inside. Letters were drafted to the neighbour cities asking them to confirm their trading agreements with Bessa and commit to their continuance, but the letters were never sent, because Farhat knew better than to sow panic by groping after security. The city announced a zero tolerance policy for bandits, and it was suggested that Anwar Das, along with the other surviving members of his own cohort, should be questioned in secret conclave about his past activities and present allegiances. Gursoon scuppered this decree by threatening to walk away from the Jidur for good if it were ever put into force, and such was the respect in which she was held that the idea was dropped immediately.

Zuleika, meanwhile, consulted with Das in a very private garden on the roof of the old palace: their conversation centred on what practical measures they could take on their own initiative.

“I believe this is a time for subtlety and indirection,” Das said. “You were right when you told the Jidur they were reacting blindly, and a great many of our problems stem from that blindness—I mean, from a lack of information.”

“Agreed,” said Zuleika. “So . . . ?”

“So. I’d like to walk abroad a little, incognito, and see what I can find out about this Lion of the Desert by listening in insalubrious places.”

Zuleika favoured him with a searching glance. “And how does a Bessan diplomat go incognito?”

Anwar Das made a great show of admiring the scent of a yellow rose. “Are you asking in your official role as head of the city guard,” he asked her, “or in a more private and casual capacity, out of innocent curiosity? I ask because these are difficult times, and my probity has come into question.”

Zuleika gestured impatiently. “Private. Casual. That one. All right, it was a stupid question.”

Das answered it anyway. “When I was with the bandits,” he told her, “I used to dress as a leper so that I could loiter unseen in the stables and marketplaces of the Southern cities. It worked reasonably well, but I was limited to what I could discover by passive eavesdropping, because who would answer the questions of a leper?

“Consequently, when I came into the city’s employ, I set up a number of aliases—one or more in each of the cities I’ve dealt with on Bessa’s behalf. These false identities range from petty criminals to merchants, and mostly require little upkeep. I’ve found them useful on a score of occasions, and I’ve encouraged my spies to copy my example. Bethi took to it at once: her aliases probably outnumber mine at this point.”

“You’ve ruined that girl,” Zuleika said, darkly.

Anwar Das acknowledged the compliment with a grave bow.

He left the same night, alone, and was gone for three weeks. In that time, two more caravans were attacked. The first was wiped out to the last man and woman. In the second, though, the drivers and merchants were all guardsmen and guardswomen in mufti, and the curtained howdah at the head of the train held not a pampered merchant but Zuleika.

The trap had been very carefully prepared. Each evening when the train stopped and encamped, Zuleika would wait for dark to fall and then send fully half of her cohort out on wide patrols around the camp, charging them to rejoin the caravan just before dawn.

The first two nights were without incident. On the third, the bandits struck—and then were struck in their turn, finding themselves trapped between their erstwhile victims and a phalanx of skilled fighters descending on them out of the dark.

The bandits were tough and experienced, and they fought with a silent ferocity that amazed Zuleika. They must have known, after she turned up at their backs, that their position was hopeless, but it didn’t occur to any of them to surrender. They sold their lives as dearly as they could, and when they were finally overwhelmed their leader killed the last two of his own fighters still standing with two strokes of his scimitar, before turning his dagger on himself.

There was a survivor, though: a wounded man, younger than most of the contingent, who was brought to Zuleika after a search brought him to light. He had been hit by three arrows, one of which had embedded itself deeply in his lower abdomen, so he could not be saved; but she had the wounds bound, gave him water and a bed, and sat with him until he died.

Zuleika didn’t interrogate the man in any formal way, but she plied him with small kindnesses in the way that a torturer would have plied him with thumbscrews. She told him her name, held his hand, and stroked his brow. The man knew that he was dying, and that hers was the last face he would ever see. She needed, in the end, no more pressure or leverage than that. When she finally asked him who he was, and who he served, he answered freely, though through teeth clenched tight in pain.

“We are the Claws of the Lion,” he groaned. “Colder—than melt-ice is our hate, and harder our hearts than the edge of steel.”

“Really?” Zuleika asked. “And who is it that you hate?”

“We hate—you. We hate Bessa. Because you are an obscenity. A city founded on injustice, steeped in lies. A blasphemy!”

These words did not surprise Zuleika; she knew there were many who saw the existence of the Bessan polity in these terms—either because it was run by women or because it was run by commoners. Still, the declaration made her eyes narrow and her jaw set. These bandits had motives beyond pure profit, then—and a bandit who has motives beyond pure profit is a soldier, whether he admits it or not.

“Is that what your master says?” she asked the young man, voicing none of this.

“My master doesn’t—need to,” he gasped. “The truth of it—cries out to all the world. And that’s all he asks. That we serve truth!”

“He sounds like a noble and an upright man,” Zuleika observed.

“He is my king. And your king, too.”

With these words, the man died. But with these words, Zuleika knew.

Anwar Das returned to Bessa three days after this conversation, and found Zuleika at the guard barracks, drilling a most unpromising batch of new recruits. Fresh from the road, standing in his own sweat and in the dust and sand that had adhered to him along the way, he nonetheless waited quietly, watching the proceedings, until Zuleika reached a point where her charges could be left to practise alone. Then she beckoned him into the spartan room she maintained for the nights when she had to sleep at the barracks, and he closed the door behind him.