The Steel Seraglio (11 page)

Zuleika was breathing heavily, and her face glistened with sweat. She might have disguised these things, but instead she exaggerated them: under the circumstances, they would be seen as signs of passion rather than clues to murder. She looked like a woman who had just surfaced from the most abandoned and extreme throes of love. She met the gaze of each guard in turn, without shame, before finally and belatedly bowing her head—the wanton, reassuming the demure look of a respectable woman. She shuddered as though the cooling evening air, hitting her super-heated flesh, caused an involuntary chain reaction.

“They are discussing,” Zuleika said, her voice thick, “things. Important things. They don’t want to be disturbed.”

She held the pose a moment longer. Her hands smoothed the fabric of her dress, as though unaware that in doing so they emphasised the curve of waist and thigh.

She walked away, swaying her hips in age-old and unambiguous provocation. Every eye was on her, and every thought was “lucky bastard!”

So much for the circus. It would hold for a while, but not for long. Sooner or later, some situation would arise that compelled one or other of the guards to seek his captain’s approval for something, or to take orders from the legate, or consult his wishes in some trifle. Zuleika had to be done before any of those things happened.

She went to Gursoon, who was talking to the children at the campfire—telling them another story, perhaps. There was really no other choice. Perhaps there were other women in the harem who were Gursoon’s equal in intelligence, but there were none who carried so much authority. Only Gursoon could make the other women act within the narrow window that they had.

The older woman saw Zuleika approaching, and moved up a little to make room for her at the fire, but Zuleika did not sit. She handed Gursoon the letter. “I think you should read this,” she said.

Gursoon unwound the scroll and read it in silence. Zuleika waited.

It was impossible to tell, from the woman’s face, how she felt about the letter’s contents. She remained impassive; her expression and her breathing did not change. When she had reached the bottom, she read it again, the second time more quickly with her eyes flicking from line to line.

Finally she rolled the letter up again and tapped it against her knee.

“Yes,” she said. “Thank you for showing me, Zuleika. That’s interesting news indeed. Soraya, it’s time for bed now. Take the younger children to their tents and see them settled in.”

Zuleika could never tell the children apart, but the young girl Gursoon was addressing identified herself by being the first to protest. “But you didn’t finish the story, auntie! And the sun is still up!”

“The sun will go down soon enough,” Gursoon said, grimly. “Do as you’re told, dear. Now. And tomorrow . . . well, tomorrow we’ll see how it all came out.”

The children were gathered up and led away. All but one—a skinny whippet of a boy with a face of almost feminine beauty, who was staring at the two women with naked suspicion in his eyes.

“What’s happening?” he demanded.

“Nothing,” said Zuleika. “Go away, boy.”

The brat stayed where he was.

“Jamal,” Gursoon said, a little more gently, “go and look after the little ones. They’re still afraid, and it will comfort them to see you watching over them.”

The boy hesitated a few moments longer, his gaze flicking from one of the women to the other, and Zuleika pondered the wisdom of sending him running with a smack around the head. But he left of his own accord at last, and she turned her attention back to Gursoon.

“Where did you get this?” Gursoon asked her, holding up the letter.

“From En-Sadim,” Zuleika said, “who had just received it from the sultan’s messenger. I killed them both—along with the guard captain. As things stand right now, nobody but you and me knows what’s in that letter.”

Gursoon nodded slowly, her brow creased in thought. “If the bodies are found . . .” she said.

“. . . then we’re all lost. Yes. We can’t go on, and we can’t go back. Only death waits in either direction. The guards have to die, and we have to leave. To go where they can’t find us.”

Gursoon was silent for a few moments longer. Zuleika also said nothing, allowing the older woman time to check her logic.

“You’re right,” Gursoon said at last. She shot Zuleika a shrewd glance. “A question, dear, before we begin. How does a young woman kill three armed men?”

“Clean living and regular exercise, auntie. Also, five years of training in the arts of murder.”

Gursoon smiled thinly, mulling over the holes in this answer. “And can you kill the rest of them?” she asked at last.

Zuleika didn’t bother to boast or dissemble. “Only if they have no idea what’s happening. These are trained soldiers, and some of them have bows and slings as well as swords. The last one has to fall before the first knows what’s happening. That’s the only way.”

Gursoon immediately rattled off some names. “Nafisah. Rihan. Firdoos. Dalal. Umayma. Zeinab. These women will be the most useful to you. But I don’t know whether they’d be able to do any of the killing themselves. What we need, I think, is a stratagem which allows you to kill one man at a time, while keeping the others in ignorance of his fate.” A thought occurred to her, and she looked up at the setting sun. “There’s no way that this can be done until darkness falls,” she said. “That gives us half an hour. Come. Let’s spread the news and build our trap.”

Each of the named women, and three more besides, was approached and recruited. All were distraught and terrified when they heard the news—Rihan fainted, and Umayma vomited out of pure shock and terror—but all declared their willingness to help. Gursoon was no fool, and had factored into her choice the fact that all these women had children in the caravan. She knew they’d fight to the death, if necessary.

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.

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.