The Steel Seraglio (9 page)

“When will we leave?” Zuleika asked Sasim, as they lay in each other’s arms.

The question seemed to throw him. “When will we what?”

“When will we leave, Sasim? When will you take me away, and marry me?”

The boy was silent for a few heartbeats.

“It’s not a good idea to rush into something like that,” he told Zuleika at last. “I’ll have to make arrangements, first. Find a house for us to live in, and explain to my father. And clothes. You’ll need clothes.”

“I’ve got clothes.”

“I mean decent clothes. Suitable for a wife. What you wear makes you look like a whore.”

Zuleika felt a shiver of presentiment. Her best friends were whores, and she saw no shame in what they did. In her opinion, formed by the daily experience of life in a brothel, only the men who first used whores and then spoke the word with such vehemence were to be despised. But how do you say that to a lover, with the blood of your own virginity drying on your thigh?

Zuleika knew she had taken an irrevocable step. She had given away for free something which figured very largely in her father’s short-term profit forecasts, and when he found out, the shit would hit the fan so hard, the fan would probably be damaged beyond repair. She had to make good her escape before that happened, and Sasim was her only hope. She kissed him and embraced him and welcomed him into her a second time. Then, with many protestations of love, he exited via the window.

He came to her often in the weeks that followed, climbing in through the open window with unconscious grace, sliding into her bed and into her body as smoothly as an otter slides into a river. Their ardour was undiminished, their lovemaking hectic and joyous, but the small talk afterwards began to take an alarming turn. Was it true, Sasim asked, that Zuleika’s father had a fortune salted away? Where did he keep it? Did the door of the inn open with a key alone, or was it secured from the inside by deadbolts or chains?

Zuleika actually knew the answers to all these questions; they were, respectively: a moderate fortune, under a loose stone in the kitchen floor which was too heavy for her to lift, and two deadbolts and a bar. But unnerved by Sasim’s predatory fascination, she feigned ignorance. Sasim shifted tack. Perhaps, he said, Zuleika could make him a map of the inn’s interior, showing the location of her father’s room and of any storerooms she knew about. Perhaps, also, she could ask among the whores. Kish was certainly sampling his own wares, after all, and he might in the throes of drink or passion have let something slip.

Zuleika listened to these musings with a heavy heart. When the dark of the moon came next, bringing with it Vurdik the Bald and Ehara’s regularly scheduled ordeal, she acknowledged what in her heart she already knew; that men are mostly shits, and that any hopes she harboured from Sasim were reeds already broken. Worse, she knew that if they carried on rutting like rabbits in the springtime, sooner or later the odds would catch up with her. If she got pregnant, she was truly dead.

From now on, she decided gloomily, she would bolt her window shutters and take a different route to market.

At this point, two things happened. The first was that Zuleika realised that she had to save herself by her own efforts. The second was that a
deus ex machina
popped up right inside her guard.

The
deus ex machina
was, embarrassingly enough, another man—as though Zuleika didn’t already have a superfluity of those in her life. But this was no suitor, potential or actual—he came to stay at the inn of the Blue Wheel, a paying guest, and Zuleika, who was waiting tables when he walked into the room, knew from the sudden silence that this was a man of some importance.

She would not have known as much from the man’s build or bearing, or anything else about him. He was of unremarkable height, had a bland and forgettable face which looked as though it had been sanded smooth, and wore a drab tan djelaba that had known better decades.

But her father’s deference to the man was very marked. He was offered wine without ordering it, and the wine was the good stuff from one of the jars with a black line painted around its base. When he asked for a room, he was given the sky chamber, which faced the east on the inn’s top floor and was the best and largest room the Blue Wheel could boast of.

Plucking up her courage, Zuleika asked one of the other patrons who the stranger was.

The man looked at her in surprise, as though she’d asked what day of the week it was, or the name of the city in which she lived.

“That’s Imad-Basur.”

The name was enough, without any qualification or description. Imad-Basur, the Caliph of Assassins, the black-apparelled teacher, was known everywhere, and commanded through fear a level of respect as great as any real caliph had ever enjoyed. Indeed, he numbered caliphs among his victims. He was feared by the rich and powerful, but also extensively employed by them, his immunity from harassment guaranteed by the secrets he held and by the vast resources of the shadowy organisation he commanded. Nobody knew how many assassins had studied under him, or where they went once they graduated from his tutelage; nobody wanted to find out in a way that involved knives, poison or strangling cords.

Zuleika’s mind, when she heard that name, went into overdrive. Obviously, Imad-Basur had come to Ibu Kim to kill someone: and it must be a prestigious commission, or else he would have sent an underling. The Increate had dropped a priceless opportunity in her lap, and despite the dangers involved it would be madness for her to ignore it.

When everyone in the inn had retired for the night—even the whores clocked off at last when the moon rose—Zuleika knocked on the door of the sky chamber, and the stranger’s voice, from the other side of the door, bade her enter.

She walked in, carrying a tray on which was a jug of wine and a bowl of candied fruit. “Compliments of the house,” she said.

Imad-Basur was sitting in the window seat reading from a slender scroll. He appraised the girl for a few moments with a cool, neutral eye, before finally pointing to a table beside the bed. “Thank you,” he said. “Set it down there.”

Zuleika did, then she stood back and waited, arms at her sides, trembling slightly.

Imad-Basur stared at the small pile of coins that the girl had put down next to the tray, and then at the girl herself.

“What’s this?” he asked her, a slight edge of irritation or perhaps of warning in his voice.

“I’d like to hire you!” Zuleika blurted. That was all she could manage to get out.

The assassin king stood. His movements were slow and measured, as though in everything he did he was enacting a pre-existing ritual. He walked across the room, picked up the coins and counted them. He weighed them in his hand. Meagre as they were, they represented the sum total of what Zuleika had been able to squirrel away over the past year.

“Seventeen coppers,” Imad-Basur said, his voice like a knife in a sheath. He stared at the girl again. “You think a man’s life is to be bought with such an amount?”

“Two men,” Zuleika said. “I need two men killed.”

There was a moment of strained silence, but then Imad-Basur laughed—a near-silent heave of chuckles that shook his frame, and went on and on until Zuleika almost screamed. This wasn’t an answer! This wasn’t anything!

“Two men,” Imad-Basur agreed. “Of course. So long as the intended targets live close together, cut rates can usually be arranged. Who are they, if I may be permitted to ask?”

“My father,” Zuleika said, relieved that they were getting down to specifics now. “He’s the innkeeper here. And the saddler who lives across the yard.”

“And what have they done to deserve death?” Imad-Basur pursued.

“My father wants to whore me out, and the saddler wants to marry me.”

“Contradictory goals,” said the assassin.

“No. They’ve sealed the bargain already.”

Imad-Basur crossed to the girl, took her hand and pressed the coins into it. “Go to bed, child,” he said. “This will be our secret. I think it might go hard with you if your father found out you had spoken to me in this wise. But he won’t. Go to bed. Sleep. Tomorrow is another day.”

Zuleika stayed where she was. This was a blow, but she was not ready to admit defeat.

“So you won’t take the commission?” she asked the assassin.

Imad-Basur chuckled again, his face no longer blank and bland but creased with amusement. “No. I won’t take the commission.”

“But you train assassins, too, don’t you?”

“I’ve trained many.”

“Then would this money be enough to buy a lesson?”

The smile slowly left Imad-Basur’s face: he looked at the young girl with a sort of puzzlement. “No,” he said. “But even if it were, I didn’t come here to teach. And the first lesson wouldn’t help you. Nor the second.”

“Then give me the third lesson,” Zuleika suggested.

Imad-Basur slowly shook his head. “No.”

Zuleika opened her mouth to speak again, but the assassin king raised his hand in a forbidding gesture. “No more words,” he said. “I have to meditate, and then I have to work—and after that, I intend to sleep. There’s nothing I can do for you tonight.”

Defeated, patronised, shamed, Zuleika strove to keep at least a little of her dignity. She nodded, bowed, and turned to the door.

When her hand was on the latch, Imad-Basur called out to her. “Wait.”

Zuleika waited, her gaze still on the floor.

“Kill them yourself,” Imad-Basur said. “Both of them. In different ways.”

“And then?” Zuleika asked, her heart in her mouth.

“Then come to me, at my school in the mountains north of Perdondaris, and tell me how you achieved it. If the story pleases me . . .”

“Yes?”

“Then I may teach you some of the rudiments of the craft, although being a girl, you couldn’t formally enrol as a student.”

Zuleika looked up, and met the assassin’s gaze one last time. “Thank you,” she said.

“You’re welcome.”

The footing of their relationship seemed to have changed, in a way that defied definition. Zuleika struggled with various formulas of farewell.

“I pray the Increate smiles on your business here,” she said at last.

Imad-Basur bowed to her. “And on yours,” he said gravely.

Retiring to her room, Zuleika immediately set her mind to the task before her. She spared not a moment of compassion or doubt for her father. Her years of unpaid servitude quit any debt she owed him for her birth, and his coldblooded bartering over her body, as though it housed no soul, sealed his fate. For the saddler, she had some slight qualm, but it passed when she remembered his leering wink. Fuck him, and the dog that had sired him—this was about survival.

It was about a lot of other things, too, though, and the more Zuleika looked at the problem, the more intractable it seemed. She believed she could cut a throat, if she were brought to it, but to carry out two murders by two different methods was a problem of a different order. She knew, of course, why Imad-Basur had made that stipulation; it would be proof that she could approach the task of killing with the proper professional detachment. Anyone could kill in hot blood, without reasoned thought. But reasoned thought was what the assassin king insisted on.

Reason told Zuleika that she was unlikely to succeed in two assaults against men much bigger and stronger than she was.

So she lengthened the odds, and went for four.

She began with Sasim. The next night, for the first time in a week, she left the shutter of her window unbolted. She thought it might take more than that, but it was like putting out a bowl of jam to attract honey bees: Sasim hauled himself over her sill a little after midnight and stood looking down at her with a mixture of wariness and arrogance.

Zuleika beckoned him to her, and gave him what he’d come for. Then, when they lay spent in each other’s arms, she told him about the saddler across the yard. “He wants to marry me, and he was boasting that I wouldn’t need a dowry because he has so much wealth already. Sasim, he showed me a bag bigger than his belly—too heavy for me to lift, although a strong man like you could lift it. He said it was full of gold!”

Sasim was very excited at this news, and begged Zuleika to tell him where in the saddler’s house the bag was hidden. “He didn’t let me see where he took it from,” she told him. “But I thought I’d go to him and ask to see the bag again—and this time, I’ll spy on him when he goes to fetch it. And I’ll make absolutely sure it’s full of gold. Would that be a good thing to do?”

“An excellent thing!” Sasim assured her, and he embraced her warmly.

Got you, you avaricious little rodent
, Zuleika thought—but she was overwhelmed by a sense of loss and longing when she thought of how she’d loved him and believed in him. Of the four, his death was the saddest for her to contemplate.

All that remained now was to wait. On the day before the moon’s dark, Zuleika’s father gave her the weekly bribe for sergeant Rhuk. She put the purse in her pocket and went to see, not the sergeant, but the saddler. He was hard at work in his shop, tanning hides in a vat as big around as a millwheel. He was astonished to see her, and even more astonished when she confessed to him, shyly and with many comely blushes, that she could not wait until the year was out. She had to be with him.

The saddler was both flattered and delighted—but saw the downside of this suggestion at once. “What about your father, though?” he grunted. “He’ll be furious if you lose your maidenhead, and there’ll be no dowry.”

Zuleika reminded him that a woman and a man, if they are so minded, can disport themselves in many ways that offer no harm to a hymen. The saddler’s mind filled at once with incandescent, carnal visions.

Zuleika said that she would slip away—alas, not that night, because she had too much work to do at the Blue Wheel; but the next night, for certain. She told him to leave his door unlocked at midnight, and to expect her soon after—and before she left, she made him show her how to find her way, in the dark, from the door to his bed. The saddler was minded to put the bed to good use right there and then, but Zuleika slipped out of his grasp. “I’m still a maiden,” she reminded him, demurely but firmly. “I’d blush to take off my dress and stand naked in a full light. Put a candle by the street door tomorrow night, beloved, but make sure there’s no lamp in your chamber!” Then she took to her heels.