by Mike Carey
Sitting a little aside from the fire, with En-Sadim’s tent directly in their view, they discussed various plans before settling on the simplest. The sun sank slowly behind the horizon as they talked, and Zuleika stared with unblinking eyes at the entrance to the legate’s pavilion, knowing full well that if any man entered, all bets were off—in that case she would leap up, kill the nearest guard and take his sword. What happened after that would be whatever the Increate willed, but it would certainly involve widespread slaughter.
Briefed and prepared, the women went to their places.
The guards who were actually on duty, and therefore stood alone at their stations, were targeted first. Each was approached by one of the women and told a tearful story about a snake in one of the tents which might or might not be venomous. Happy to take the role of rescuer, and to show off in front of these beautiful but inaccessible ladies, the man would usually need little persuasion to leave his post for a moment or two and step into the nearby tent—where Zuleika, standing inside the door with dark-adjusted eyes, drew a sword across his throat. Two or three of the women then helped her to hold the man immobile and silent while he died, and two or three more added the corpse to the growing pile at the back of the tent. Some of the women wept after the first and second killings, but by the third they were inured to the work and put their backs into it quietly and efficiently.
There were now two groups of enemies to consider: the knot of a dozen or so off-duty soldiers who were talking and dicing around their own fire, and the sentries who had previously been despatched by Captain Numair to remoter distances from the camp’s perimeter.
The sentries had to come first, Zuleika decided. They would certainly see and hear any disturbance in the camp, and would have far too many options as to how to react; whether they took flight to Bessa, came riding in to attack or simply fired on the women from the dark, all Hell would be out for noon.
Zuleika was hampered by not knowing how many sentries there were, but she had a very good memory and made a rough guess based on the faces that were missing from around the fire. She armed her assistants with swords and daggers, but instructed them to keep the weapons well hidden. They should only be used if the relaxing guards ventured into En-Sadim’s tent, discovered its grisly contents and came armed against them. She hoped that she would return before that could happen.
Walking quickly through the deepening dark, Zuleika headed out from the camp and then circled it at a half-mile’s distance. She had tried, while the sun was still up, to locate by sight the best places for sentries to be posted, and she headed for these first. She was lucky three times, finding her quarry each time before he found her, and despatching him quickly. A prolonged search failed to find a fourth. She returned to camp, carrying with her three bows and three quivers of arrows.
The silent combat now entered its final stage. She handed two of the bows to two of her assistants. The rest were already armed with bows taken from the men who had been despatched in the tent. The last bow Zuleika kept for herself.
The women dispersed and took up their positions in the darkness around the guards’ campfire, fifty yards or so away from it in all directions. Zuleika counted the men still seated around the fire: there were fourteen, tightly grouped. She drew back the bowstring, took careful aim, and fired.
Her first arrow took a luckless soldier through the throat. She nocked a second immediately and fired again, but the first death was the signal and now arrows were whistling in on the men from all sides. Most went wide, but that didn’t matter—the important thing was to let the guards know that they were surrounded, so that they’d kick out the fire and take up defensive positions. This would have been indubitably the right thing to do if they were indeed facing a hostile host sitting out in the dark of the desert, but Zuleika, firing from right on their doorstep, killed three more while they were doing it.
The extinguishing of the fire was the second signal. The waiting women raised a fearful noise, filling the air with high-pitched battle cries. The soldiers, embattled and terrified, returned fire with bows and slings, though they could see no enemy. Zuleika, meanwhile, drew sword and dagger and walked among them.
The dark was almost absolute. The women’s fire, a little way off, was still lit, but nobody had been tending it and it had died down to a red glow. The desert night was moonless, and the stars hoarded their glimmer for themselves. Zuleika’s blades flicked at throats and poked at hearts: man after man fell, seeing her only when it was too late.
The last three fights were the hardest. The men’s eyes had accommodated to the dark by this time, and they’d realised that they were facing a single opponent close to hand as opposed to an army firing from a distance. The three men threw themselves on Zuleika at once, and she was so busy defending herself against their flashing blades that she could make no headway against them. She saw an opening, leaped in and stabbed one of the three through the throat, but a sword hilt smacked her in the side of the head and she fell. The body of the man she had just killed fell across her, pinning her.
She saw the sword reversed in its owner’s hand and raised above her, ready to plunge into her chest.
Something shot out of the night, like a darker line drawn across the darkness: the soldier fell, with a small grunt of surprise.
The sole surviving guard might still have pressed his attack and slain her, but finding himself alone he turned and ran. Zuleika’s dagger took him low in the back.
Climbing to her feet, still a little groggy from the blow to her temples, she examined the corpse of the man who had almost killed her. In a deep wound in his forehead she found the slingshot stone, still embedded in the hole it had made in his skull.
The boy Jamal stepped out of the darkness, his sling in his hand, and stared down at his handiwork. Triumph fought with sick horror in his face.
“You have my thanks,” said Zuleika quietly.
“You should have told me,” the boy said, his tone cold. “They’re all traitors and jackals. I wish I could have killed more of them.”
Then he burst into tears.
When the other women ventured to approach at last and view the outcome of the skirmish, they found Zuleika cradling the wildly weeping boy to her breast, her face—for the first time in all of this—betraying something like alarm.
The Tale of the Librarian of Bessa
There was once a young woman who—having a deep and strong affinity for the written word—disguised herself as a boy and petitioned the chief librarian of the city of Bessa for paid employment.
The work that was available was menial at best, consisting mainly of the sweeping of floors and the refilling of ink wells in the Library’s scriptorium, but the woman was more than satisfied with this. She was of a solitary nature, and often uncomfortable or embarrassed around other people. This natural reticence was made worse by the fact that she had been blessed with the gift of foreknowledge, the sight. She could not remain long in peoples’ company without her senses being assailed by the tangled webs of their past, and the myriad branching roads of their possible futures.
In the company of books, by contrast, she felt a serenity which she could hardly describe: as though all the contradictory forces which she experienced when she was forced to interact with those around her reached a perfect and timeless equilibrium.
She had come to the city of Bessa along with her mother, who had since died, leaving the young woman not quite destitute but certainly with few and straitened resources. So the work at the Library was in many ways
No, this won’t do at all. It doesn’t feel right.
It’s so much harder to tell this story than the others. That’s ridiculous, I know it is, but the sense of solidity, of purpose and direction that I find in other people’s lives is gone in an instant when I contemplate my own. It feels as though I’m describing patterns of light in water, that change a hundred
times in the space of a heartbeat.
But let me draw breath, for a moment or two, and try again.
The Tale of the Librarian of Bessa
The Library sometimes reminded Rem of a city deep underground. It was cool, hushed, lit by far distant skylights: a city of labyrinthine streets through which she moved in reverential silence, the sole human citizen, a city of towering shelves thronged with scrolls which leaned over her as she walked, watching her progress with infinite, aged patience.
Now, she strode swiftly beneath their comforting gaze. Her gait, the way she carried herself, had changed since she first came to the Library. She had arrived awkward and shuffling, dressed in the shabby grey garments of a sweeper boy. It was ten years since that day; now, Rem wore the red sash and cap of the Third Librarian, and walked with an unassuming pride.
She reached the end of a long avenue of shelves, turned right, and instantly came upon a prone figure on the floor. She had grown used to encountering the Second Librarian, Warid, stretched out and semi-comatose after a night of heavy drinking, in odd places in the Library’s corridors and reading rooms. In earlier days, she used to trip over him, earning an easily dodged swipe and a string of curses for her carelessness. She had soon learnt, however, to check the path before her for his presence. Now she stepped neatly round him, giving him as wide a berth as she could manage. He gave a gentle groan as she walked past, and rolled over.
He was a decent man really, aside from his gambling and drinking, and although he did no good to the Library ostensibly under his care, at least he could not be said to do it any harm. On the whole, Rem had grown rather fond of him—he was a rare human companion in her world of parchment and stone and, more importantly, a wonderfully quiet one, making few demands on her conversational skills.
And his incompetence was a blessing to her. Every duty in which he failed was one where she could succeed in his stead, every task he neglected one which she could fulfil. His complete lack of professional pride had delivered the entire Library into her care. She was its custodian. Sometimes, even now, the joy of that thought would well up in her so strongly, she had to fight back the urge to laugh. Rem was a Librarian, and the title fitted her perfectly, the knowledge of it becoming as intimate to her as her own name, her own skin.
She continued past the Second Librarian, walking on until she came to a small, ornately carved wooden door. Here she gave a respectful knock, then entered without waiting for an answer—it was always a long time coming. The First Librarian hadn’t even noticed that she had come in. He was bent over his rare scrolls as usual, attempting to conquer his trembling hands long enough to patch their torn parchment. Rem coughed politely as she approached, and he looked up at her with his watery eyes folded in wrinkled skin. “Ah, Rem.” He paused, as if collecting his thoughts, but then slowly bent his head back to his work, seeming to forget her presence entirely.
Rem coughed again, gently. “Sir,” she said, “I see you have finished repairing the embossed and illuminated scrolls which arrived last month from Ard-al-Raqib. I’ve come for the key to the Rare Texts room, to replace them there.”
The First Librarian appeared to consider this pronouncement. “Mmmmm . . . You know, Rem, the Third Librarian is not supposed to have access to the Rare Texts room. That sort of responsibility is a little above your station yet, I think . . . good initiative, lad, very good. But I think this task falls to my son, rather than you. Still, still . . . I am glad you reminded me. You just run along and ask him to sort it out now, yes?”
“Sir,” Rem replied promptly, “it is your son who has just sent me to you with the order that I should retrieve the key and give it to him. He is at the market currently, considering the purchase of some new inks reputed to be uncommonly resistant to fading, but he would like to start moving the scrolls immediately on his return. You know,” she added after a short hesitation, wondering if this was not going too far, “how dutiful the Second Librarian is in his work, and the pains he takes to complete everything in a timely fashion.”
“Ah! Very well, very well. That’s commendable . . . splendid. Here is the key . . .”
The old man reached hesitantly for a drawer in the front of his desk, and drew out a thin copper key with shaking fingers. Rem took it smoothly from his hands and, bowing slightly, turned and marched out.
This kind of deception came naturally to her now; nothing would ever get done without it. It was the same when she travelled to Perdondaris and Gharia in search of new texts, acquisitive missions supposedly reserved for the Second Librarian alone.
In other respects she lied by omission—neither of the other Librarians were aware that she was slowly putting the scrolls into alphabetical order by section. Nor did they know that many of her own stories and poetry now had a place in the Library, their bright new parchment glowing conspicuously amongst the swathes of ancient, yellowed scrolls.
They certainly did not know that Rem slept in the Library every night. She had done this for the first time one night a few months after her mother died. She placed her bedroll at the end of a small cul-de-sac of shelves devoted to sacred texts. They surrounded her as she slept, a sensation she found oddly comforting.
It was after this that it occurred to her that the Library was a city, and she felt herself for the first time to be one of its true inhabitants. Scholars came and went. The First and Second Librarians arrived in the morning and departed in the evening to the small house they shared on the edge of Bessa. Only Rem wandered the Library’s passageways at night, when the stillness was alive with the whispers of the scrolls as they rustled soft messages to one another in the dark.
She stopped paying the rent on the room she used to share with her mother. She never slept there again. Increasingly, she began to notice that after a trip to the market or the Jidur, where she went sometimes to listen to the debates, a subtle change would come over her on returning to the Library. Her shoulders would relax, almost imperceptibly. She would release a breath she did not know she held, or feel a lightening in her step. She did not recognize this change at first; she had not experienced it since she was very young. Later on, much later, it came to her that it was a homecoming she felt, as she pushed open the great doors and slipped into the cool and quiet of the Library once more. She felt as if she was coming back to a place where she absolutely, unquestioningly belonged.
Lately, however, her homecomings had an urgency to them, each one heralded by a sweet and desperate relief. Returning to the Library now, Rem felt that it was a sanctuary as well as a home, suddenly wonderful not only for itself, but for the protection it seemed to offer from the world outside it. That world was changing in rapid and sinister ways.
It had all begun a few months before, with the appearance of a new speaker in the Jidur. His name was Hakkim Mehdad. The doctrine of Asceticism which he preached had never been particularly welcome in Bessa before, its inhabitants being too fond of their brothels and drinking houses to embrace any philosophy of abstinence. Bessan preachers tended to focus their attention on more exciting religions, ones that would be likely to draw a large following. The listeners in the Garden of Voices, however, would never embrace a creed on its own merits alone, valuing a convincing performance above all moralising and painstaking argument. The teachings declaimed in the Jidur soared and fell on the voices of their speakers. And, though it had never happened before, the odious doctrine of Asceticism was now placed in the mouth of one whose voice could kindle it into beauty.
The evening she first saw Hakkim in the flesh, Rem was walking through the crowds of people gathered in the square on her way back to the Library. She noticed as she passed a group of men dressed in long black robes, an unusual sight in Bessa at any time, and especially in the oppressive heat of summer. They were clustered around a tall, wiry man, also cloaked in black, who had just mounted the podium. They seemed to be his disciples, and were watching him with rapt attentio
n. Those standing near them were eyeing the dark figures a little uneasily. At first, Rem barely registered any of this, perceiving Hakkim as merely another actor in the street theatre of the debates. Then he began to speak.
“Consider the desert Nihareem,” he said. “These evil sprites confuse the weary traveller, turning him from his path with their bright lights at night. Deceived into thinking he has found a town or caravanserai, he strikes out towards these lights, only to lose himself utterly in the vast desert, to die of thirst or founder in quicksand.”
The man’s voice rang out across the square. Although he did not shout, his words cut through the noise of the Jidur, making the sounds of both crowd and debaters alike appear a dull murmur by comparison. People started to pool around him, drifting away from the other speakers towards this compelling new presence.
The unlucky preachers glared at Hakkim for depriving them of their audience, yet even they listened to him. They were drawn in by his utter conviction, bent around the blunt steel of his certainty, in spite of themselves. Words of refutation or attack died on their lips. Rem, too, was arrested by some indefinable quality in his tone. Passion was in his words like oil in a wick, saturating them with dormant fire.
“These lights are beautiful. They are full of promise. Yet it is their very beauty which reveals their deception. It is their very promise which warns the wise to shun and fear them. So is it with the pleasures of this world. Wine, gambling, naked flesh, these are base desires, the lesser lights which blind us to our proper path. They are snares! Only by turning from their poisoned glow may we perceive unhindered the safe and uncorrupted path!”
