The Steel Seraglio (58 page)

The defenders began to sprint through the front door and to dive from the windows of the house. Backlit as they were by the bright flames, they made easy targets. Jamal’s archers took them at their leisure.

He knew her when she came. She did not run, but strode through the doorway with her sword in her hand, her steps even and her head high. The first arrow took her in the shoulder and the second low down in the side. She fell to her knees as a third pierced her right hand. The sword fell from her grip and clattered on the flags.

“Stop firing!” Jamal cried. “Stop firing!”

A few more arrows were launched, but they went wide. Jamal’s order was relayed by the sergeant in a cattle market bellow, and the archers lowered their bows.

Jamal dismounted and went to her, kneeling before her to stare into her eyes. They were open, but dulled with shock. Blood was trickling from the corner of her mouth, and her breathing was so shallow it was scarcely visible.

“Zuleika,” he said to her, gently.

“Jamal,” she said, her voice almost a whisper.

“How goes it with you, lady?”

She did not answer this sally. Presumably she had too few breaths left to waste any of them on badinage. Her eyes met his, but they did not focus. Her expression was unreadable. He wanted more from her than just his name.

“Your city has fallen,” he told her. “Your soldiers are dead.”

Disconcertingly, Zuleika smiled. “My city . . .” she breathed. “My city left this place two days ago.”

It happened in this wise.

As Anwar Das had suggested, the people of Bessa went from the palace back to their homes, where they quickly gathered as many of their possessions as they could carry, as well as water and provisions. They were fleeing from a death they knew was certain. Jamal’s poisoning of the wells, two scant hours in their future, was a sentence of execution pending over every one of them. The people assembled again in the Jidur. The storm was at its height, and the shrieking of the air, added to their own state of restlessness and urgency, caused some to faint and many to weep.

The evacuation of the city’s civilian population was to be total. Among the soldiery, it was decided that the issue of who should stay and who should go would be settled in the first instance by asking for volunteers. Zuleika believed that two hundred men and women, judiciously positioned, would be sufficient to maintain the illusion that the walls were fully defended, and to have some reasonable chance of holding them, at least for a few hours, against Jamal’s assaults. Each soldier, then, would place a scrip into a jar passed around by Zuleika herself. The scrip would contain either the soldier’s name, if the soldier wished to volunteer, or else a cross or some other random mark if the soldier did not. Only if fewer than two hundred names were given would Zuleika ask—or order—specific people to stay.

Rem watched as Zuleika read the names aloud. They were the names of friends, making compact to die so that other friends might (if the Increate willed it) live. They were the names of heroes, who would have no other memorial.

Umayma was called first, and she saluted her chief with closed fists as though this in itself were victory. Rihan, Dalal, Najla, Firdoos, all were named: and each name carried a full freight of memories—for Rem, memories not only of the past but of the futures that would not now be lived.

The tally reached one hundred, sixty and seven. Zuleika pronounced herself satisfied with this number, but old Issi stood, shaking his head sternly. “The lady said two hundred,” he said to the room at large, his voice as strong as ever. “Are we to be shamed in this way? To send her into this lost battle with a smaller muster than she asked for? No! Never! Not while I live!” Issi’s eyes shone with tears as he stared round him, meeting every gaze in turn. “You know what they said of us. That every citizen of Bessa was a sultan. That was us. That was ours. And today, every citizen of Bessa is a soldier. I demand the right to add my name to Zuleika’s muster!”

“I demand the right to add my name!” another old man echoed, rising to his feet.

“I demand the right to add my name!” cried a woman from the other end of the hall. It was Halima, who had said once that she could not kill if called upon.

“I demand the right to add my name!” came from all sides of the hall, and Zuleika raised her hands in surrender.

“I will refuse no one,” she said. “Step forward, then, all those not of the city guard, who wish now to stand with the guard in its extremity.”

Three or four dozen stood, and walked towards her. Among them was Imtisar, leaning heavily on the arm of Jumanah. Zuleika put a hand on the old woman’s shoulder. “You’re sure this is what you want?” she whispered.

“This is my home,” Imtisar said with energy. “No rabble will throw me out of it. And I’ll take a few of them down, as well.”

“I’m staying too,” Jumanah said. “With Imtisar, and Najla. My place is here with them.”

When the tally was finally made, the muster stood at two hundred and seventeen. Zuleika gave order that the new recruits should be given weapons and breastplates. Zeinab, whose name had not been called, came to her friend Umayma with the best sword and scabbard she could find.

“It shouldn’t end like this,” she wept, as the two friends embraced.

Umayma did not weep.

“I buried my son’s head, a week ago,” she said, her voice hard. “Where his body lies, I know not. My life is over, Zeinab, but I give my death freely, for whatever it may be worth.”

While the volunteers were armed, Zuleika came to Rem to say her farewells.

Zuleika was accustomed to keeping her emotions in check. It was the first thing that an assassin learned, and it was a lesson that was revisited, in a sense, with every subsequent killing. Still, when she embraced Rem, she did not trust herself to speak. Her hands were steady; her voice, she knew, would not be.

Rem made no pretensions to stoicism. She clung to Zuleika in an access of despair. “I can’t,” she wept. “I can’t live without you! Don’t make me! Don’t make me!”

“I’ll follow you,” Zuleika whispered, stroking her hair. “I’ll follow you, Rem. If we can hold through today and tomorrow, those of us who are left will do then exactly what you’re doing now. We’ll only be two days behind you.”

Rem knew that these were lies, and was not soothed by them. It was not her foresight that told her this, but remorseless logic. Only the storm gave this current plan the smallest chance of succeeding, and whatever passed now, nobody left in the city would follow. This was the last time that she and Zuleika would ever touch. But she knew, too, that what she said and did now would affect Zuleika’s spirits for good or ill, and so she said no more, but held to her beloved as if her muscles had locked and her flesh had petrified. Whereas it was only her heart that had suffered this fate.

“Lady,” Anwar Das said at last, gently. “We must leave.”

And they broke apart, and went their ways, their suffering a mirror to the lamentations played out all around them by friends and families sundered now forever: those about to leave pulled unwilling and weeping from the arms of those who had chosen to stay.

The procession that wended its way to the cattle market gate made up the vast majority of the city’s population, along with five hundred able-bodied fighters who would protect them from casual predation on their journey. From Jamal’s army, if Jamal realised what was happening, there could be no protection.

They left the city in total silence. Only four or five abreast, they walked in a long, straight column out from Bessa and onto the plain. In front came the children, schooled not to speak, carried by mothers and fathers or led by their teachers Hayat, Laila, Mahmud and Mayisah. Old Rashad, who had been begged by his son and grandchildren not to stay behind, walked in tears, held up by Dip and Walid; he had left his old deputy, Karif, to die on the city walls. Beside him came Farhat, leaning heavily on the arm of Huma.

Behind the old, the young and the infirm came the able-bodied women and men. The members of the Artisan’s Guild walked behind Farhat, holding those of their works they could not bear to leave behind: Taliyah carried a roll of paintings, while Maysoon’s daughter Suri and her apprentice had wrapped their most precious pots for safekeeping in Farhat’s tapestries. Those that walked in the rear of the column led horses and camels, all muzzled, gentling them with strokes and whispered words.

They passed between two of Jamal’s encampments, close enough on either side to have called out to the men in both and been heard—but the air was in turmoil, the rent veils of the storm sliding over everything and its voice booming over all other voices. They would not have found their way at all, except that Rem led them, and she knew in advance the position—both relative and absolute—of each of her footfalls. She did not walk through the storm: eyes closed, she walked through the stillness that was and would be again.

When they were almost a mile out, the Bessans turned half-about, and under the direction of Zuleika’s most experienced officers formed themselves into a phalanx. Those who were actual soldiers, and whose bearing was therefore the most convincing, stood in the van. They had darkened their skin with henna and tangled their hair with tar: in place of the tunics and breastplates they had been wont to wear on Bessa’s walls, they stood (or rode) mostly naked, with only jerkins and breach-clouts made up hastily from uncured leather. Close at hand, they looked like maniacs or ecstatics lined up with implausible discipline. From a distance, they hoped to pass for a foreign army.

They waited out the storm, and then the sun. And on the morrow, when Jamal and Nussau rode towards them, it was Anwar Das, white-painted, who rode halfway to meet them. The man at his side was a Yeagir, though his speeches were chants in the sing-song nonsense language used to send small infants to sleep. Anwar Das, for his part, disguised his voice by forcing it into a shriller register, and trusted to the painted words on his brow and on his body to prevent Jamal from looking too closely at his face. Another could have been sent, but Anwar Das’s heroic deceitfulness was legendary: who else could have been trusted to sell such a lie?

So he made his offer to Jamal—an offer that Jamal obligingly refused—and then he rode away, back to the ranks of the Bessan refugees. They turned again, setting Bessa at their backs, and began their long march. At first they were followed by Jamal’s scouts, but after a few hours these fell away and they were alone.

Their goal was the mountains, and the caves of the bandits which they had left so many years before. But that was only a staging post on a much longer journey.

Jamal did not at first understand what it was that Zuleika had said. But then certain thoughts and images cohered in his mind in a sudden, abstract wash of thought, and enlightenment came. He knew, then, why the streets were so empty, and why the Bessan defenders had failed, at the end, to fall back to the palace and bar themselves in. There were too few left, by then, to maintain a line as they retreated, or to cover each other’s backs as they crossed open squares and piazzas: all they could do was run, and they had not run far.

He knew, too, who it was he had spoken to out on the plain on the morning after the storm, how he had been fooled into allowing the people of Bessa to escape the siege unmolested—and how, therefore, he had come to inherit, as in his nightmare of yesteryear, a city of the dead, with no populace, no farmlands and no safe water.

He had won the war, and at the same time defeated himself utterly: grasped after the substance, and caught the shadow.

All that was left of his victory was Zuleika. And Zuleika was still smiling. It was not a deliberate taunt—she was thinking of her lover, safe and away and two days gone; of the city of women turned into a seed on the wind, that might take root elsewhere. She smiled because she was not a concubine any more, nor yet an assassin, but a soldier who has done her duty and could now hope to rest.

But to Jamal, the smile was salt in wounds both old and new. He kicked out in a rage, sending Zuleika sprawling to the ground, and then he kicked her again and again as she lay. When she raised her right arm to ward off the blows, his foot connected with the arrow that had transfixed her right hand, and the shaft snapped in two.

Around him, his troops watched the beating in stolid silence, without much interest. But Nussau, arriving then, viewed it with irritation. He had found to his horror that the spoils on which he and his men had placed such store were not to be had. Bessa had been emptied not only of its people but of most of its portable wealth. The granaries were empty, the shops and warehouses—those that had not been burned in previous incursions—stripped down to bare wood and cool stone. Bessa hosted nothing, now, save corpses and ruin.

In dark mood, therefore, and impatient of Jamal’s self-indulgence, the barbarian captain drew his sword and stepped in to finish Zuleika with a single sword-thrust. To his annoyance, Jamal laid a hand on his sword-arm and shook his head.

“No,” he said. “She’s mine.”

“We need to talk about payment,” Nussau said brusquely. “And provisioning.”

“We will talk,” Jamal told him. “But this must come first.”

With curt gestures, he made the watching soldiers back away. “Nobody is to intervene,” he ordered. “Nobody touches her, but me. Nobody speaks to her, but me.” Then he stood over Zuleika and nudged her with the toe of his boot. At first she did not stir, but finally she raised her head—her lips split and bleeding, one eye already swelling shut from the beating he had given her. With the other eye alone, she met his gaze.

“Fight me,” he invited her. “You heard what I told them. Fight me and win, and you’ll be free. That’s all you have to do.”

He waited. He was not a patient man, but for this, and this alone, he found an unexpected reserve of patience in the fervid cauldron of his soul.

Slowly—terribly slowly—Zuleika gathered herself. She struggled up onto her knees, using her left arm to support her weight. Once on her knees, she was able to grasp her sword in her left hand and then to rise to her feet, though she staggered and almost fell again.