The Steel Seraglio

by Mike Carey

  She tried to explain to Jamal the functioning of a device she called a centrifuge, but the words mostly washed over him. Watching her speak, but not really listening, he was amazed at how she had changed from the silent and tentative creature they had saved in the desert. Where had this confidence, this eloquence, come from?

  Wherever it had come from, it was resistant to reason. It was the antithesis of reason, in most respects: the concatenation of words in defence of nonsense and error. But to rebut her required more effort and persistence than he could sustain, and it would have served no purpose in any case, even if his words were as sharp as caltrops. The whole city was moving, on a vector he could deplore but not alter: you could throw caltrops in front of a man on a galloping camel, but not in front of a city.

  By this time, Jamal was living in a single room above the street of the silversmiths. Most of its extent was taken up by his bed roll, and the rest, by a few scrolls, a few amphoras of wine, a brace of swords and two of daggers, the sling with which he had once saved Zuleika’s life, and whatever girl he was currently sleeping with. The source of his income—and the reason for his lodgings—was a mass of silver plates and goblets, exquisitely worked, that he had taken from the palace on the day of its sacking and now sold at a judicious rate. Because he did not take any of his lovers into his trust, the silver was hidden in the roof space above the apartment’s ceiling, covered with a rotting curtain.

  He seemed to be the only one of the desert company who had been reduced to such degrading circumstances. The bastard princelings and their bastard half-sisters had mostly thrown themselves into the service of the new state with great enthusiasm. Jamal saw them sometimes, striding through the streets with letters in their hands and purposeful looks on their faces, or reading proclamations in the streets about some or other piece of newly minted morality: no citizen to be beaten, whether by employer, husband or guard; selling of brides to be outlawed; price of grain to be fixed by strict tariff, and public granaries to be maintained against times of famine. It was an industry. They were industrious. He was anything but.

  His real link to the world—to a world that still moved and meant—was Zuleika. She would visit him once every few days, drink a glass or two of wine with him, and tell him about the many trials involved in folding the remnants of the old palace guard and the many raw recruits into a new citizen militia; turning human ploughshares into swords; weeding out Ascetic cells still loyal to Hakkim; squeezing money for new fortifications from an appropriations committee more interested in schools and lazarets.

  He listened, commiserated with her complaints, laughed at her jokes, and told her nothing in return about his own life—because what there was to tell was what she could see all around her. There was no more.

  One night, finally, after more of these chaste visits than Jamal could count and more (it seemed) than he could endure, he yielded to half-drunken desire and kissed her. She didn’t resist, but neither did she respond. When he broke the contact, looking at her for some clue as to whether or not he should continue, she put her hand to his cheek and met his gaze in silence for a few seconds.

  “It wouldn’t work,” she said at last.

  “Why not?” Jamal blurted, both hurt and piqued by her indifference. “You were a concubine. I presume you know how.”

  Zuleika nodded. “Oh yes. But I was bedded by your father. And I knew you when you were a child. There’s a line of poetry somewhere . . . How does it go? We do not sow the flower, or eat the seed.”

  “It’s sow the rose,” Jamal corrected her coldly. “And I’m hardly a seed. And in any case, since when do you quote poetry? I thought the only poetry you made was with something sharp in your hands.”

  “A stylus is sharp,” Zuleika said. She said it lightly, smiling, but some distance had fallen between them. Jamal knew that it would take more than words to bridge it, but her rejection had closed off all other options. Words would have to do.

  “I feel a kinship with you,” he told her, urgently. “I’ve felt it ever since we met. Ever since the desert. I think if I had you, I could be happy even here.”

  She raised an eyebrow. “Even here?”

  He raised both hands to indicate the room, the contents of the room, the narrow confines of his life. But he meant more than that, and he knew that she had read more into it.

  Zuleika drained her glass and stood. “Better get back to the barracks,” she said. “If there’s anything left of it by this time.”

  “Very well,” Jamal said stiffly. “I’ll see you.”

  She took up her sword belt from where it lay on the floor beside her, and put it on. She always removed it when she sat with him—a gesture which (given that this was Zuleika) had about it a thrilling intimacy.

  “I’ll see you,” she echoed him.

  But she did not return, either that week or the next. Then the dark of the moon came and went without her visiting him. Jamal knew that his kiss—or else his words, or else some combination of both—had precipitated a crisis, and that it had resolved in the wrong way for him. Sleepless in his narrow bed, he replayed the embrace and the conversation again and again, both as it had happened and with more satisfactory outcomes. Sometimes he forced Zuleika and she yielded to him, at first reluctantly but then with ever-increasing ardour; sometimes he did not kiss her at all. Either way, the world he rose to the next morning was one in which he was alone on a mattress drenched not with the sweat of love but with that of summer insomnia.

  Jamal was prey to his own obsessions: he had no work to shield him from their heat. He went to the barracks, and walked endlessly past its closed doors in the hope that he might accidentally meet her coming out. Then he asked a soldier where she lodged, and was given an address near the spice market. So he went and loitered there instead.

  And there, on the third night, he saw her. It was very late; after moonrise. He was leaning in a doorway, in deep shadow, half-dozing, when the sound of footsteps echoing on stone roused him. Looking up, he saw her coming towards him. She was only a silhouette, lit from behind by the light of a watchman’s brazier, but she was still unmistakeable: nobody else walked with such a mixture of unselfconscious grace and predatory alertness. A shorter and slighter figure walked beside her, and now rested his head upon Zuleika’s shoulder in a way that made Jamal’s pulse stammer unpleasantly.

  They stopped almost directly opposite him, at the door of the house: so close that he could have leaned forward and touched them.

  “I think you’re drunk,” Zuleika told her companion.

  “On a single glass of wine!” the other protested. Jamal knew the voice, but the street was lighter here and he had already recognized her: it was the librarian.

  “Perhaps you’re one of those people who can’t handle their drink,” Zuleika said. They were facing each other now, and very close.

  “I haven’t sobered up since I met you,” Rem said, and pulled her closer still. There was no kiss: he might have fled or cried out or attacked them if there had been a kiss. But the librarian merely laid her cheek alongside Zuleika’s cheek, and for a moment or two, in silence, they breathed the same air.

  “Stay with me tonight,” Zuleika suggested.

  “I can’t,” Rem whispered. “I’ve got two bills to write for tomorrow’s session.”

  “But you write the agenda, too.”

  “So?”

  “So put them last.”

  Rem laughed, scandalised, compromised, surrendering. They went inside together and Jamal stepped out of the dark as though drawn after them on a string: stepped up to the closed door and laid his palms against it. The wood was hot under his hands. Just the day’s heat locked in the wood, for the building faced west, but he imagined for a dizzying moment that it was the heat of their bodies he felt, radiating outwards through the substance of the building.

  Jamal had a
vision, then. His mind filled with images and ideas, which—though they broke and reformed like the glitter of light on wind-whipped water—all seemed inextricably and profoundly connected: the city; his father; the usurper; Gursoon; the last embrace his mother had given him, and the knife he had wielded to make Hakkim Mehdad’s body unfit for paradise; Zuleika’s lips, and the stone he had fired in the desert. He looked inward, and saw his destiny written where it had always been, upon the vaulted inner surfaces of his own skull.

  When at last he turned away from the door, he did so with the slow, exploratory steps of a man carrying a heavy weight that threatened to overbalance him. It seemed as though fate and history bore in upon him from either side, and he had to balance their opposed forces with each rise and fall of his own encumbered feet.

  Jamal would describe, later, a dream he had that night. In the dream he wandered a vast desert, with a blindfold upon his eyes and his hands bound before him at the wrists. Then a voice—he thought it was his father’s—spoke in his ear. “You are not bound,” it said, “if you choose to be free.”

  Whereupon the ropes and the blindfold fell away. And from the tears of his eyes, an oasis sprang. And cradled in his hands, when he opened them, was a city, which grew to fill his vision. And he laughed, even as he slept, because he knew in his innermost heart that this was no dream at all but a vision, like the visions vouchsafed to marabouts and madmen. It was ordained: in the fullness of time, Bessa would be his.

  All of this was true: and when Jamal spoke of it, the truth spilled from his eyes as the water had spilled in the dream, so that few found the will to doubt him. But whenever he retold this, he omitted one detail. In his vision, when he entered the gates of the city and walked in triumph through its streets, he found it peopled only with the dead—and though they bowed and salaamed to him, they did so in a dread and intimidating silence.

  From the next day, Jamal began the process of recruiting an army, his purpose being to reclaim the city of his forefathers from the concubines who had stolen it.

  He made slow progress at first. The memory of Hakkim’s rule was fresh in people’s minds, and most were well aware that the state in which they lived now—the rule of all, through the messy and wondrous mechanism of the Jidur—was far better than that which they had known before. It’s hard to foment revolution in a time of peace and plenty.

  Hard, but not impossible. Even in Heaven there will be malcontents, and Bessa (though the concubinate strove mightily and continuously) was not Heaven. Some men who were bemused by the prominence of women’s voices in the Jidur found in this anomaly a plausible explanation for the failure of their own enterprises, whether romantic or commercial. Some had done well out of the old regime—that is to say the old, old regime of Al-Bokhari—and wanted it restored. Some were drawn in by Jamal’s eloquence, or by the suasion of their friends, or by a love of adventure and intrigue for their own sake. Some, no doubt, wished only to make mischief, or hoped to thrive on the chaos that war brings in its wake.

  So, by inches and ounces, Jamal filled out his muster, and began to cut and shape them to the great purpose of revolution. Most were thwart and unpromising, it must be said, but revolutions require dry tinder as well as flame. And there was flame enough in some of those who signed on with him to make of Bessa a furnace: the crucible into which the present, being cast, sighs forth its dross and so becomes the future.

  The garnering of funds, the procuring of a base of operations in a disused cloaca, the purchase and smuggling in of weapons, the drilling of his cohorts in the use of said weapons, the reconnoitring and planning, the assignment of tasks and responsibilities, all things were spun out of Jamal’s relentless will as a spider spins silk out of its innards. Nothing happened without his word. All things bore his imprint, and in their turn they imprinted him.

  It was a mystery. He had seemed to himself for years now, ever since the day of the concubines’ triumphant return, a man made out of shadow. He had hoped that Zuleika might make him real again, and in a sense she had—but only by rejecting him. His project of violence and insurrection was now become the solid core of him, a knot of purpose intertwined endlessly with the knot of his grief and the knot of his unspoken love.

  The day was set, and the plans laid. Some of Jamal’s lieutenants had seen the Jidur as the main target, and had assumed that their primary goal would be to occupy and hold it. He told them to dismiss it from their minds: not only was the great square, with so many arteries opening off it, almost impossible to defend, it was also completely irrelevant, except as a symbol—and symbolism could wait.

  The targets for the first phase of the day’s action, he told them, would be the former bakers’ shop where the lawmakers met and the headquarters and satellite stations of the city militia—in that order.

  At the house of the lawmakers they would find Gursoon, along with most or perhaps all of her inner circle of planners and advisers: isolating them would ensure that there would be no citywide response to his insurrection until it was too late. The librarian would be there too, of course, but that was a matter of far less importance. For all her arcane knowledge and unsettling insights, Rem spoke seldom. Her role in the business of state was mostly as a recorder, and today, Jamal mused pleasantly, he would provide plenty of matter for her pen.

  Zuleika’s well-drilled militia squads, meanwhile, would respond with speed to any threat: Jamal had factored that readiness and efficiency into his plans. The rebels would set up plausible crises—fires, vandalism, random affrays—in many parts of the city. The sites for these provocations had been carefully chosen; when the militia units responded, they would find themselves trapped in blind alleys or other indefensible spaces. Archers and slingmen would pin them down, and slaughter them if they refused to drop their weapons and yield.

  The second phase would be to secure the palace—the guards there were mostly volunteers, with a purely symbolic function, and they would offer no resistance. Jamal would install himself there, and from that beachhead he would send messengers abroad to reassure the citizenry. He wanted no general riot, and as few civilian casualties as could be managed. The guards aside, he wanted this to be a bloodless coup. He saw it in his mind’s eye as an act of surgery, a therapeutic intervention into the city’s life, and a surgery could not be counted successful if—in the course of excising a cancer, say—the patient died. No doubt, too, he was mindful of his dream, and wished to avoid the direst of its predictions, the transformation of Bessa into a citywide mausoleum populated only by the dead.

  The day came. Jamal and his lieutenants met for the last time, and he gave them the word for which they waited so long: “Begin.” They went forth, each man (he had chosen to recruit no women) to his separate station. Jamal remained behind at his headquarters, from where he would communicate with his lieutenants by means of swift runners; in the second phase, he would command the composite force that attacked the palace, but in the first place, when there were so many separate actions to orchestrate, he kept aloof from all so that he could command and amend any one at need.

  The preordained moment was the start of the fifth watch, when shadows having lengthened start to join and the sun dips his head into the bowl of night to be washed clean for the morrow morn. That moment came and went in silence, as of course it would: the decimation of the city guard and the mass arrest of the lawmakers were now in train, but they were happening in other parts of the city. Jamal felt a prickling in his scalp and at the nape of his neck as he watched the last grains of sand slide through the hourglass, and as he picked it up to turn it. The hour just ended was the last of the old dispensation: the hour whose first grains were now starting to spill was the first of a new age.

  There were eight runners, four of whom had remained behind with Jamal while the other four went with the most important of the ambush parties. This arrangement seemed to Jamal to offer the maximum flexibility, allowing him to s
end an immediate response to any situation that arose, while still allowing the incoming runner a few moments’ respite before requiring him to take to his feet again.

  But the minutes passed, the sand trickled down through the glass, and no runners came. At first, Jamal was encouraged by this: it seemed to vindicate the excessive detail of his planning. But soon doubts began to assail him. It was inconceivable that everything should have gone off without a single setback or complication; much more likely that his lieutenants had broken discipline and were improvising on the fly rather than using the runners to report to him and take instruction.

  In the end, his restlessness and curiosity got the better of him; he couldn’t just sit there while the battles were being fought, and his fate decided, in scattered places throughout the city. He sent the runners to four of his ambush squads to tell them that he would be with the fifth, at the Eastern Gate. Then he set off through the darkening streets at a rapid walk.

  Long before he drew near his destination, Jamal knew for certain that something was wrong. The people walking by in the street were too calm, and too intent upon their own business. By now, the rumours of armed clashes, of fires, of mayhem and murder, should have begun to spread. Panic or prurience, away from the violence or towards it, there should be no movement that was not full of purpose. The heartbeat of the city was healthful and measured, when it should be pounding like a war drum.

  At the Eastern Gate there was nothing. Jamal’s ambush squad was nowhere to be seen, and he could see no evidence that they had ever been there. The shed they were meant to have torched stood untouched, still stacked with tinder and barrels of oil.