The Steel Seraglio (57 page)

In this case, the human landscape had been similarly transformed.

True, there were still warriors, men and women alike, on the walls of Bessa. And true, an army still faced them on the plain.

But the Lion’s forces were a third of their former size: a core of eight or nine thousand remained from the vast horde of the day before. Mushin had gone among the fighters from the desert cities, and told the tale of the poisoning of the wells. Those pragmatic people had few taboos, but this was the strongest of them; they had fled their former chief in the night, even while the storm was at its height, and there was now no sign of them. Only Jamal’s mercenary troops, who cared a great deal more about the spoils of the soon-to-be-sacked city than they did about poisoned water, had stayed in their places.

In their place, though, another army—an army of strangers—faced Jamal’s across a half-mile of wind-rucked sand.

Jamal and Nussau surveyed the newcomers with troubled hearts and grim faces.

At first, Jamal thought that they were the deserters from his own army, intending not to leave his service but to renegotiate the terms on which they fought. A second, longer glance told him that this was not so; wherever it had come from, this new-arrived force was not local, and not his. The swarthy complexions and richly coloured robes of the warriors told a different story.

An hour passed, and then a second hour, and the newcomers did not move. Nussau’s mercenaries began to grow restive, since their chief had not yet ordered them to renew their assault on the besieged city. Jamal had expected them to be more dismayed by the desertions, but if anything they seemed to be pleased that they would not have to break the spoils of fallen Bessa into quite so many shares. Certainly, they harboured no doubts about their ability to take the city, which was clearly now on the very brink of falling.

But it would be folly to launch an assault with—potentially—a fresh enemy at their rear. At last, Jamal and Nussau both went out to meet the newcomers, taking with them only half a dozen handpicked warriors. They rode to a midway point between the two armies, and there waited.

From the newcomers, only two men rode out.

At closer quarters, their strangeness was even more apparent. One of the two was as dark as ebony, but his face was daubed with white paint into the likeness of a skull. His teeth, exposed in an almost ceaseless grimace, had been painted red. Red was the colour of his robes, too, except where strips of tanned animal hide had been tied like brown ribbons around his upper arms and the calves of his legs. Overall, he looked like a piece of half-cured meat. But the scimitar that hung from his saddle horn was fully three feet long—a weapon designed for a berserker who did not need to worry, when he charged, about the safety of those around him. Even the man’s horse was barbarically appointed, its mane dyed black, and black nails hammered into its pawing hooves.

At this man’s side rode a second man whose manner was less alarming but equally exotic. His face was painted pure white, and the word “speaker” was written in red upon his brow. On his chest, further characters appeared, spelling out the two words “unto infidels.” He was naked except for a breach-clout, he bore no weapon, and he rode without a saddle.

“Greetings unto you,” Jamal said, bluntly. “What brings you here?”

The dark man spoke tersely in a tongue Jamal had never heard, and his white-faced companion, after a short silence, said “We came because of the war.” His voice was high and fluting, almost effeminate. Evidently he was acting as translator.

“Because of the war?” Jamal repeated. “What do you mean? Are you emissaries from one of the cities of the plain?” Clearly they were no such thing, but Jamal preferred to let them state their business in their own words; he offered this unlikely scenario for them to disagree with it, and so define themselves.

Again, the dark man spoke, his utterances sounding almost like the barking of a dog.

“We offer our services,” the white-faced man said. “If we fight beside you, you will win. We are the Misreia, unbeaten in battle. We number five thousand, and each of us is worth fifty. Our blades sing in the air with the voices of those we have slain—a choir louder than the angels of Heaven.”

Jamal blinked, and Nussau looked grave. “You’re mercenaries, then,” the mercenary captain said. He said it with a profound lack of enthusiasm, but Jamal’s interest quickened. He had just lost a large number of fighting men—he wasn’t going to reject new recruits out of hand.

The white-faced man translated. His companion—or more likely his master—made a harsh sound and spat. Then he spoke at greater length.

“We do not fight for money,” the white-faced man parsed, “or for any material reward. Only our god demands recompense.”

“And how much does your god charge?” Nussau asked, with heavy sarcasm.

“Our god is great.”

“Evidently.”

“Greater, far, than other gods.”

“And therefore?”

“Two-thirds of any bounty taken from the city will be due to Him. And two-thirds of the city’s people, to be His slaves and serve His chosen.”

“Unacceptable,” Nussau said.

It was an absurd price to ask; presumably it was intended as the opening gambit in a protracted bout of haggling. But it would be difficult for Jamal to haggle with Nussau beside him, defending his own men’s share of the spoils. Reluctantly, he shook his head. “Your god’s price, though he be greater than any other god, is too high. We can’t afford him.”

The white-painted man conferred with his master and then looked up again, staring meaningfully over Jamal’s left shoulder at the city. “Then we’re free to offer our services elsewhere,” he said, his tone pitched between a statement and a question.

“By no means,” Jamal said. “If you try to enter the city, we’ll be obliged to turn and fight you.”

Nussau, being of a more practical turn of mind, added a further argument. “They’d never let you in, in any case. They’d be bound to assume you were with us, and that your offer was a subterfuge. Any sane man would come to the same conclusion.”

“And how could they agree to pay you in the coin of their own citizenry?” Jamal asked. “Nobody would fight alongside you, for the privilege of being your slave—so you’d stand alone on those walls, and as you can probably see even from here, they wouldn’t hold your weight for very long.”

All of these points were passed along to the red-robed chieftain, who digested them with scant pleasure. He spoke again, what sounded like a single word.

“A half of the spoils,” the white-painted man said.

“No,” said Nussau again.

“The timing of these negotiations,” Jamal said, “is unpropitious. You say you number five thousand. We have many more than that number, and though we obviously wish to retain them all for the final assault on the city, we will if it proves necessary turn from our task long enough to gut you like dogs and water the desert with your blood. I say this with all due respect.”

The chieftain, apprised of this assertion, looked thunderous, but said nothing. For twenty heartbeats, he and Jamal merely stared at each other, as though each was waiting for the other to blink.

Finally the chieftain spoke again, for a final time. Before his companion had even begun to translate, he wheeled his horse about and galloped away.

“We will withdraw,” the white-faced man said. “If you prevail, you will not see us again. If you lose, we will harry you as you retreat, and rape and murder your soldiers. We will do these things, however many you number. This is my Lord’s promise to you.”

Jamal reached for his sword, but Nussau clamped a heavy hand on his forearm and stayed him from drawing it. “If we’re forced to retreat,” he said, “although that won’t happen, we’ll be short of horses and provisions. We’ll take your mounts for both, your robes for wash-cloths, and leave you to walk home naked across
As-Sahra
. This is my promise to your Lord.”

The white-painted man dipped his head in a perfunctory bow and rode away.

“Why didn’t you let me kill him?” Jamal snarled.

Nussau gave a coarse laugh. “Those insults meant nothing,” he said. “They merely allowed that jackass to withdraw without loss of face. But a decapitated messenger would have forced him to fight. You’ve much to learn about human nature, Jamal.”

And it certainly seemed that the mercenary captain was right. The strangers decamped immediately, and they did not look back. Ever cautious, Nussau had them followed for some several miles by three of his best scouts: they did not turn back, or split their forces, or even look behind them. They headed due north, towards the mountains, and presumably beyond them to their distant homeland.

The way was clear for the final assault on Bessa. It now transpired that Jamal’s deserters, in leaving, had sabotaged most of the siege catapults with judiciously laid fires, but Nussau greeted this discovery with only mild irritation. There was little need, at this stage, to pound the walls further: the breaches already made offered doorways enough.

But Bessa did not fall that day. Perhaps it was because the reduction in the numbers of the attacking forces forced them to make their forays across a narrower front, where the walls were weakest. Or perhaps it was because the tall, slender woman whom Nussau’s soldiers called “the demon” was so very prominent in that day’s fighting, hurling herself again and again into lost positions, only to win out and buy her people a second or a minute’s advantage. However it was, though they came against the walls with might and main, and wreaked red havoc among the defenders, the Lion’s cohorts did not gain a single good foothold throughout what remained of the eighth day of the siege.

At night, there was muttering. Some among the mercenary officers felt aggrieved that they were now bearing the full weight of this conflict alone, when the contract to which they had assented saw them as the mercenary wing of a greater force. They had been happier when Jamal’s expendables were taking most of the pounding, and acting as a human bulwark against their own losses.

Nussau went among them and rallied them with words both sweet and stern. He reminded them of the booty to be won on the morrow, when the walls finally fell. He reminded them, too, that any man who defaulted in his duty would lose all pay accrued during this campaign, as well as a goodly portion of the skin on his back.

These exhortations had their effect. On the ninth day, the attackers launched themselves on the ruined walls and the all-but-ruined defenders with the ferocity of madmen and the fervour of marabouts. Under this onslaught, the Bessan soldiery fell back rapidly, and then with unexpected suddenness a section of the damaged west wall fell, not under any direct assault but from the damage previously inflicted on it.

The defenders had presumably planned to fall back on the palace when the walls were breached, but this instantaneous collapse prevented them from doing so. As Jamal’s troops charged through the breach, the beleaguered Bessans fled under heavy fire to a tall structure with walls of pink stone—the only nearby building that was even remotely defensible.

This was, by now, the only real front. Elsewhere on the walls, surprisingly small pockets of defenders were wiped out with ease as the besieging troops took control of stretch after stretch of the battlements. The defenders, men and women alike, fought until they dropped—but they dropped quickly as the spread of Jamal’s troops across the battlements allowed more and more fire to be trained on them. What had been a pitched battle now devolved into a series of localised culls, which the mercenaries carried out with brisk efficiency.

By the time the main gate was broached by the battering rams, there was silence across the rest of the city. Apart from that one building, where a few of Zuleika’s janissaries had managed to go to ground, nothing moved.

Jamal entered Bessa in state, riding a white stallion through the jubilant ranks of the mercenaries. They cheered him to the skies, and he accepted their homage with some considerable satisfaction.

But the sight that met his eyes sobered him somewhat. The streets of Bessa were mostly empty—its citizens presumably hiding in their houses and waiting for the worst. What citizens he did see were uniformed and dead, but there were not many even of these. His eyes lingered on each corpse as he rode past it. The silence which had announced his victory scant minutes before now seemed somehow funereal.

A scar-faced sergeant led him to the pink building where the last defenders had taken refuge. Though it was a formality, Nussau, with a fine tact, allowed the Lion of the Desert the privilege of directing the last engagement of the campaign. But Jamal seemed in no hurry to do so.

“What is this place?” he asked the sergeant.

“Sign over the door calls it the House of Pleasant Fires, sir,” the sergeant answered, with a brisk salute. “Looks like a brothel. Should we mount a charge, sir? Looks like they’re all out of arrows, else they wouldn’t let us get so close.”

“A moment,” Jamal said. He rode his horse a little closer to the building. It stood in a small square, with the blind sides of other buildings to right and left and the city walls facing it. Nothing moved inside.

“The city has fallen,” Jamal called out loudly. “Come out with empty hands, and throw yourselves on my mercy.”

“Do you have any mercy, Jamal?” Zuleika answered him from inside the building. “You’ve kept it well hidden until now.”

Jamal’s heart raced. He realised then that when he had examined the dead bodies in the streets he had been looking for hers—and had been glad not to find it. Zuleika’s death should not, could not be anonymous. It mattered too much.

“Oil and arrows,” he ordered. “Burn them out.”

Cavalrymen galloped past the front of the house, hurling clay jars full of oil in through the windows to shatter on the stone floors inside. Then they withdrew and the archers fired arrows whose heads had been wrapped in oily rags and set ablaze.

Inside of a minute, the inside of the House of Pleasant Fires was belying its name, its interior a flesh-broiling inferno.