The Steel Seraglio (54 page)

“And what they said was
la im sa’ika we ahlaam shede
.”

“
Sign me up
,” Zuleika translated. “By the gods, Anwar Das! The Yeagir! You’ve brought us Yeagir horsehusbands!”

“And horsewives,” Anwar Das reminded her. “To the number of five hundred. It seems the word had spread from oasis to oasis, and these—the proudest and most reclusive people of
As-Sahra
—had come to hear of our need.”

Silence around the table as the implications of this sank in. The Yeagir were a law unto themselves: arrogant and insular, a tribe whose full complement was also its royal family, since for any Yeagir to cede sovereignty to any other was impossible. All knew of them, but few had ever met one. Fewer still had walked away from such a meeting.

“And what’s their price?” Imtisar asked, when she deemed the silence had lasted long enough.

“They ask no price,” Anwar Das said.

“What? But then, to take on someone else’s fight—”

“That’s not what they’ve agreed to, lady. Apparently, the lion’s men killed a young boy from one of the Yeagir meinies, having met him at a waterhole and quarrelled with him when he refused to stand aside and let them drink. Now that insult has to be wiped out in blood. They have come to fight for Bessa because they consider it a more condign revenge to thwart the Lion in his goals than to kill a few of his people in a pointless bloodletting. All this they explained to me that night. And then they followed on behind me as I rode back toward the city, forbearing to share the amenities of my camp. Now they await us at the Well of Sparrows, due north of here, and we have six turns of the glass to tell them our decision.”

“Our decision is yes,” Zuleika said instantly.

“But the Jidur knows nothing about this!” Imtisar protested, horrified. “And it’s not as though they could be hidden. Once they enter the city, the lawmakers will know that you went behind their backs.”

“Then if we all survive, they can hang us,” Zuleika said. “The Lion has, at a conservative estimate, some twenty thousand soldiers. It may be as many as thirty thousand, since he’s careful to break up the companies when he marches to make counting difficult. In a pitched battle, he’d swallow us like a drunken man swallows a sherbet, in one gulp. And these desert riders—if you lop off their arms in a fight, they’ll fight on with the dagger in their teeth. They’ll be troublesome to handle, but by the devil’s hairy balls, they’ll earn their keep!”

The meeting broke up, after some further discussion of ways and means, and Anwar Das was despatched to invite the Yeagir within the city walls. Because they came in by night, only the guards on the Northern Gate saw them arrive: but word of their presence had already spread by morning, and the citizenry of Bessa came down to stare at these silent and intimidating strangers as they boiled their tea over copper braziers and oiled their hair and skin with unguents that smelled of horseshit.

The Yeagir bore this awed scrutiny with stolid indifference. And then, shortly before midday, swirls of dust on the horizon announced the imminent arrival of the Lion’s army, drawing off the crowd as the ocean is drawn by the moon.

At first they stared from the battlements and from the plain in front of the Eastern Gate. Then as the dust rose—even as the sun did—towards the zenith of the sky, Zuleika gave orders for the city to be sealed, and they went inside without demur.

The Lion was methodical: his troops arrived in perfect order to deploy around the curve of the city’s eastern walls. Later, of course, they would move to encircle it completely: this was a show of strength, intended to impress upon the people of the city the hopelessness of their position.

After some minutes, a single figure rode forward from the host, seated on a white stallion and robed in white so that beast and rider seemed at first to be one entity. He stood before the walls in silence for a while, waiting for some answering figure to appear on the battlements above him: none did.

“You brought this on yourselves,” the Lion of the Desert called up to the silent walls, when it was clear no interlocutor would step forward. “This city had a ruler once—a just and a fair one. He was overthrown by a monster, and then in the fullness of time, when the monster was cast down in his turn, the rightful prince appeared to claim his birthright. But you stood against right and against nature—against man’s law, and the Increate’s. You refused the yoke, and therefore chose the sword. You roused the lion. Today the lion has come to chastise you.”

He paused for an answer. No answer came.

“Look out upon this multitude,” the Lion called. “If you put a sword in the hand of every man, woman and child in that city—and such is your perversity, I judge that possible—you would still be outnumbered by my host. You cannot fight me, and you cannot entreat my mercy. I have none. Throw open your gates now, and throw down your swords, and even then, many of you will die: chiefly, the women of my father’s harem, the concubinate, along with their families and hangers-on. The rest of you will live, but will be punished in strict proportion to your participation in the civic life of Bessa. By how much you helped with hands and hearts and minds to turn the city where I was born into the obscenity it has now become, by so much will you suffer. No one will escape my rod. No one. So decide, and answer me.”

He fell silent again, and again the silence grew.

“Is nobody brave enough even to speak?” the Lion bellowed at last. “Are you all so cowed, so beaten down by the rule of whores that you have no voices left to plead or treat with me?”

Only silence. Only stillness.

He turned his horse around at last, and rode back towards his own ranks. “Then you’ll get my answer in due course,” he shouted over his shoulder.

There was a lull of some minutes, perhaps half a turn of the glass, while mechanisms of some sort were assembled in the foremost ranks of the Lion’s forces, from baulks of wood laboriously dragged by whole chains of draught camels. This was another reason, presumably, for the slow progress of the army as it marched on Bessa. The machines were siege bows and ballistas, and as soon as they were complete, the first rocks and arrows began to sail over the walls.

Along with the first volley came the severed heads of the peace delegation.

The forces of the Lion of the Desert, the unconquerable Jamal, moved across the face of
As-Sahra
like a louse across the armpit of God.

That was the trouble with the desert, Mushin thought. This must surely be the mightiest host that had ever been assembled in the world’s long history—fully thirty thousand men at arms, with horses and camels and siege engines so huge that they had to be carried along in separate pieces and only assembled when they were to be used—and yet, once they had left the coastal plain and were properly embarked upon their journey, their numbers seemed suddenly negligible.
As-Sahra
made you look small, no matter what you did.

Mushin was now a fully grown man of eighteen summers—a scion of Ibu Kim, with light fingers and a lighter heart, who had earned his bread by thieving, just as his father had done before him, and asked no greater gift from God than that he kept on allowing men to drink more than was good for them and to look the other way while their purse-strings were being cut.

But then he had met Jamal, and heard Jamal’s story—the story of a prince cozened by evil women, and beaten and cast into exile when he remonstrated with them. These were potent ideas, but it was not the story so much as the man telling it: a prince who drank at the common tap with common men, and stood his round, and laughed at coarse jokes and told a few of his own. It was hard not to love such a man, and then once you loved him you believed in him. You could see it in his eyes, anyway, in case you were ever inclined to doubt. His eyes were haunted by a great tragedy, and when he spoke you could see it moving there behind those two dark windows, barely contained.

And so it was that when Jamal asked Mushin to join him in a brave enterprise, he accepted at once. Others did, too—more than two dozen of them—but Mushin spoke up before any other and so Jamal named him as his lieutenant.

“A lieutenant!” he told his mother, when she called him fool and bade him stay where he belonged. “Not a common cutpurse any more, mother, for you to berate and disrespect. I’m an officer, now, and the privilege of rank is . . . is . . . is for you to shut up, unless you salute when you speak to me!”

Instead of saluting, Mushin’s mother—who had two inches and forty pounds on her wayward son—beat him with a broom handle and threw him out onto the street. But that mattered little, since Jamal was leaving the city the next morning in any case, bound for Susurrut. Mushin marched out of the wagon gate without a backward glance, and did not miss his home until almost lunchtime.

Jamal’s business in Susurrut was the same as his business in Ibu Kim: recruitment. He trawled the inns of Copper Street and Forgotten Lane from one end to the other, drinking—or at least clinking glasses, for Mushin noticed now that his new master drank but little himself—with all the local rowdies, swapping stories and punches, arm wrestling, gambling, kissing the whores on the hand and talking to them as though they were princesses, and ever and always laying his money down.

These methods met with much success, and the Lion’s numbers swelled in Susurrut. Among the new recruits was one Tayqullah, who when first he walked into the warehouse that was their current lodging introduced himself as Jamal’s lieutenant.

Mushin stood, realising as he did so that Tayqullah had more of an advantage over him in height and mass even than his mother had. Nonetheless, he spoke up boldly. “I’m Jamal’s lieutenant,” he told the big man. “And you’d do well to—”

He woke up some hours later, with the lower half of his face so swollen and bruised that he couldn’t talk or eat for three days. At that, he was told by some others among the new men, he was lucky; Tayqullah had been known to break a man’s neck with that punch of his.

When he finally regained the use of speech, Mushin asked Jamal to sort out this small matter of the line of command. Jamal explained the situation to him. The precise terms of the explanation were complicated and extensive, but the nub of it was that Mushin and Tayqullah were both Jamal’s lieutenants. Tayqullah was the lieutenant when it came to making decisions, having ideas and giving orders: Mushin was the lieutenant in terms of prestige and trust and being able to call himself one, except when Tayqullah was in earshot.

After Susurrut, they got to work in earnest—and in spite of what Mushin had told his mother about moving up in the world, most of the work was robbery. And the part of the work that wasn’t robbery was murder.

Mushin didn’t mind robbery, but found murder upsetting. It was one thing to stick a knife in a man who was trying to stick one in you; it was, indefinably but definitely, a different thing to cut the throat of a man (or woman) whose arms two other men were holding. After the first three raids on Bessan caravans had gone down in this way, Mushin found an opportunity to talk to Jamal in private, and offered as a suggestion that they should take the camel-drivers and merchants alive and ransom them back to Bessa. “And then we get even more of their money, don’t we, Jamal? It’s like we rob them twice, every time. Genius!”

But Jamal didn’t think it was genius. He reminded Mushin that having ideas wasn’t in his job description, and explained to him—patiently, for the most part—why it was necessary at this stage to kill every man and woman in the caravans. “Some of them might know me by sight. Even if they don’t, others might recognize me from their description. Better, for now, if they don’t have the faintest idea who their enemy is. The fires of our imaginations, Mushin, unlike most fires, burn brightest if you starve them of fuel. So, for now, flailing in the dark against an enemy who could be near or far, the lawmakers of Bessa will injure only themselves. This is the first phase in a grand plan, my friend. Stay with me, and watch it work itself out.”

Tayqullah took a more direct approach. At the next raid he had three prisoners—a man, a woman and a boy of eight or nine years—brought before Mushin, bound and gagged, and gave him a blade. “These three are yours,” he told Mushin coldly. “Kill them.”

Mushin looked around him, and saw no face that he knew. The men closest to him were all of them Tayqullah’s cronies from Susurrut, and they all had their hands on the hilts of their swords. It was clear what fate awaited him if he refused to carry out these killings—and yet his hands trembled and his mind faltered.

Desperate, he considered attacking Tayqullah instead. He would lose, of course, and die, but he might inflict some damage before he fell. But that would change nothing, except to add one more body to the pyre: these three would die, regardless.

Mushin had once heard a marabout say that the Increate, when we die, weighs our souls against a feather: and if the weight of our sins is enough to tip the scales, he casts us into Hell. Mushin knew well that even if the counterweight was a reasonably sized ox, his chances of Heaven had been forfeited long since. But for some sins, the Increate hurls you down hard enough that you crash through the floor of Hell and keep on going.

Mushin saw off the man with a single stroke, drawing the blade quickly across his throat. The woman, seeing this, struggled against him when he came to her, and her death was worse: messier, and more drawn out, despite his efforts. In the one-sided struggle, the gag slipped from her mouth.

“My son!” she wailed. “My little boy! Please don’t hurt my—”

Mushin lowered the bloody dagger, his hand shaking as though with a palsy. This was the worst moment of his life. Fervently, even devoutly, he wished that he had never signed on with Jamal, that he had continued to live the desperate and yet comparatively carefree life of a cutpurse. In his mind’s eye he saw his past life in Ibu Kim as though down a long corridor: its squalors were tinged with surprising splendour.

Finally, he turned to Tayqullah.

“I’ll keep this lad for myself,” he said. “I need a catamite.”