The City of Silk and Steel

by Mike Carey

  ‘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, merely 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 washcloths, 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 circle round, 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 obliged them to make their forays across a narrower front, where the walls were weakest. Or perhaps it was because the tall, slender woman 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.

  That night there was muttering. Some among the remaining 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, 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 gap, 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 f
ull 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.

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

  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 the movement of her chest was scarcely visible.

  ‘Zuleika,’ he said to her, gently.

  ‘Jamal,’ she answered, 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 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 they wished to volunteer, or else a cross or some other random mark if they 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 and 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 being 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, 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 Artisans’ 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 who 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 had been 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 came halfway to meet them. The man at his side was a Yeagir, though his speeches were chants in the sing-song nonsense language used by that tribe 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?