The Steel Seraglio (15 page)

She and Nabeeb took it in turns to run round to the mouth of the alley and peek into the main square, to see how the situation was progressing. When Rem saw that the sultan’s standard was on fire, she knew their time was up. “They’ve breached the palace,” she said, rounding the corner and helping Nabeeb load his bundle into the hearse. “We don’t have time to take any more, but I would appreciate it if you could do one last favour for me.”

Convincing the First and Second Librarians that their lives were in danger was fairly easy. Fear was rife in Bessa, and the sight of the hordes of black-cloaked figures swarming round the palace gates made Warid’s lips go white, and his father tremble.

“Nabeeb here is taking some of our scrolls out of the city to Perdondaris,” Rem told the two men. “I would strongly advise that you go with him.” She turned to Nabeeb, her voice dropping into a swift murmur. “If you go now, you will be able to make it before the Ascetics take the city gates. The sultan’s men have fled, so there will be no one guarding them at the moment. Hurry, and go in safety.”

Nabeeb stared at her. “Aren’t you coming too?”

“I can’t. The Library is not yet empty.” He opened his mouth to speak, but she saw the intention as he formed it, and firmly shook her head. “No. You need to drive the hearse. They”—jerking her head at the First and Second Librarians—“don’t know the way to Perdondaris. They wouldn’t even make it out of the city. You need to go.”

“But they’ll catch you if you stay! Why won’t you come with me?” Nabeeb’s eyes were glistening. Rem knew, with the knowledge that was her gift, what was in his mind. She could taste all the flavours her words had for him: confusion, grief, and beneath these the bitter tang of spurned affection. Nabeeb had thought throughout that Rem was a young man, and wished to flee with him to a place where they could both read and love without the fear of oppression.

“Nabeeb,” she said, as gently as she could, “I must stay with the friends I cannot save.”

He saw her resolve and nodded, began to turn away. Rem caught his hand and kissed him, just once, on the cheek. Let him make of that what he wanted; she could give him no more.

She waited until she was sure they were gone before she allowed the tears to come. When they flowed at last, they left dark tracks down her face like smudged kohl, staining her pristine uniform with dark patches. Tears of black ink. Her second dubious gift, and the reason why she never cried in public. When she was younger, Rem had sometimes imagined herself as a scroll, with all her words securely wrapped inside her. They must be very sombre words, if they only escaped when she cried.

Behind her, the Library’s heavy wooden doors shuddered in their frame, rocked by the impact of some heavy object. The Ascetics were charging them with a battering ram, but they were sturdy, and would hold for the time being. Rem wiped her tears away hastily with the hem of her shirt: another distinctive thing about them was that, once dry, they would not fade. She had about an hour, she guessed, and a good third of the Library was still full. She had put up a good fight, but there really was nothing more to be done. Well, there was one thing. Rem headed for the First Librarian’s office, to prepare for her last stand.

When the great doors finally shattered, and the Ascetics poured inside, the first man to step across the Library’s threshold was greeted by a silver stylus in his chest. He staggered backwards, the men to either side of him starting in surprise. They were confronted by the sight of a naked woman, her body covered in curling, cursive script, the ink jet black. Some of the words they did not understand—they appeared to have been written in a language they could not decipher, though the characters belonged to their own tongue.
The distances of space and time were one, and swans far off were swans to come
ran snakingly up the length of the woman’s left arm, but none of the Ascetics had ever seen a swan, or even knew what it was.

“I am a scroll,” the woman said, her fierce eyes gleaming at them, a pointed stylus in each hand. “Burn me!”

Even as they overcame her, bound her hands behind her back and dragged her down the front steps; even they carried her towards the palace, while still more of them swarmed into the Library, Rem was laughing. What more could the bastards do?

Hakkim waited until the morning of the following day to pass sentence. The night had been taken up with other things. Rem was not the only one in Bessa who had angered him, and in the immediate aftermath of the coup there had been those whose sentences were in more pressing need of execution. Now, he stood on the Library steps, surveying the crowd gathered in the main square, and spoke with a tone of dire warning. “The light of the One Truth burns with a baleful fire. Where does its anger fall? It falls upon those who will not feed its flames. It falls upon those who follow lesser lights, who glut themselves on deceit!”

He held up a scroll. Rem, held behind him on the steps by two strong guards, her hands and feet bound, strained and struggled. He was standing by a pile of them, stacked on the ground in front of him. There was something wrong with them. They glistened as if wet, though there had been no rain.

“Yes, deceit, deceit such as is contained in this scroll,” he spat the word, “that I hold up before you now. This scroll of lies claims that the pleasures of the world are not to be abhorred. It holds the love of woman to be a
sacred
love, it cries that the lust for food and wine are
healthy
desires. It is a polluted thing. You see before you the woman who tried to protect this lie, and others like it. She would use it to corrupt us all. Yet she shall not succeed!”

Rem felt dizzy with his shouting and the closeness of the crowd, and something else, some foul smell in the air, sharp and metallic. Suddenly, she felt outside herself, looking out on the scene with a sickening helplessness as Hakkim flung the scroll back onto the pile at his feet.

“She shall not succeed,” he roared again, and now he was taking something from a fold in his robes, a dull grey box, and a piece of flint.

“All that oppose the fire of the One Truth will be consumed by it!” He was raising the box now, and Rem knew what he was about to do and tried to start forward, but she was too far away, and the guards were too strong, and the frenzied shouting of the crowd too loud, and it all blended into a solid wall of sound and spit and hatred as Hakkim struck the flint against the tinder box, the spark leapt, and the scrolls ignited, their oil-soaked parchment catching light immediately, irrevocably.

Rem was overcome by a wave of nausea. She vomited, again and again. The flames in front of her eyes began to turn black. She was losing consciousness, the awful smell sapping her of any energy. The last thing she felt before she collapsed was the guards lifting her onto their shoulders, the cold steel of Hakkim’s voice as he pronounced her sentence. “She lived for this hubbub of lies. Now, she will die for it.”

In the kingdom of Bessa, thirty years after the death of the prophet Al-Mutassin, there lived a scholar by the name of Hakkim Mehdad.

Hakkim was not in the first instance a scholar by his own choosing, but he seemed predestined by nature to pursue such a calling—he puzzled and alarmed his parents, an elderly shoemaker and his much younger wife, by refusing to speak until his fifth birthday, and even thereafter could seldom be coaxed into uttering more than two or three words together; but it was clear even to the casual observer that Hakkim’s silence was not the silence of vacancy. On the contrary, he would spend hours in silent reverie, or tracing abstract figures in the dust by the door lintel with the end of a stick.

This thoughtful demeanour was accompanied by a singular aversion to action. When his older siblings bullied or berated him, which was often, Hakkim would stand with head bowed and face grimly set, as if he hoped by extreme stillness to merge into his surroundings and be forgotten. His retaliations, such as they were, would come later, when a favourite tunic, or doll, or stick-and-ball, belonging to one of his tormentors would be found mangled and broken, the subject of some sublimated assault.

Hakkim’s father was only a humble cobbler, and so had never had the opportunity to pursue learning for its own sweet sake. He took these signs for what they were, evidence that his son lived far more in the fastnesses of his own mind than in the everyday ruck of two over-crowded rooms over a narrow shop in the narrowest of Bessa’s teeming streets. It must also be said that young Hakkim showed no skill in his father’s trade, and could not be used in the workshop even in relatively simple tasks such as waxing leather or punching eyelets. Any pair of shoes he touched was unlikely to survive the acquaintance, no matter where in the process of manufacture their paths crossed.

Over his wife’s tearful protests, Hakkim’s father therefore determined to place his youngest son in service with a local holy man, the bargain being that Hakkim would tend house, cook and clean, fetch and carry, and would in return be granted both ineffable wisdom and a daily meal of bread and beans.

A suitable holy man was duly found. His name was Rasoul, and he was an Inviate, which is to say a cryptotheist: the core of his belief was that the Most Holy deliberately obscures His path so that humankind may not sully His greatness by approaching near it with their lowly understanding. Alone among the sects, then, the Inviates do not pray for enlightenment; they pray to reassure God that they’re not going through his trash (that is to say, the created cosmos) in order to find out what he’s up to.

Hakkim’s soul was fervent, primed for belief. He progressed quickly in his studies, and astonished his master with the retentiveness of his memory. By the age of ten, he could recite all the three-hundred-thirty-and-three Inviate prayers (most of which are variations on “we’re not peeking”) without a pause or a stammer, accompanying each with its prescribed repertoire of hand movements and postural shifts.

For most of his eleventh year, too, young Hakkim continued to take pleasure and pride in these accomplishments. Such feats of will and memory were a playground for his intellect, which hitherto (like his skinny, wiry body) had lived within the straitest of bounds. Then, gradually and inexorably and very much to his own surprise, that delight began first to lessen and then to be seasoned with irritation. Probing the tender place, the young adept found that there were passages in the Inviate scriptures on which his mind, though not his facile tongue, faltered.

In particular, he questioned the Inviate stance towards the supreme being. Why show such exaggerated respect for God, Hakkim wondered in the privacy of his heart, when so much about His programme and His motives had to be taken on trust? It seemed to him both craven and sycophantic to thank the deity for undoubted benefits—sentience and reason—whose use was then so hedged about with prohibitions that they might just as well not have been bestowed in the first place. It was as if the Almighty had given him a sword, perfectly balanced and ecstatically sharp, and bid him in recompense to keep it in its sheath at all times.

When Hakkim tasked his master with these troubling thoughts, the pious old man was ready with a cogent and unanswerable argument: he beat his errant disciple with a switch made from supplest cedar wood, until the lad could scarcely walk.

“Your questions are heresies both in and of themselves, Hakkim,” he pointed out gently, when his aching muscles finally compelled him to lay down the cane. “You must cleanse yourself of them. Come, and I will show you how.”

He went out into the courtyard behind his house, with Hakkim limping respectfully along three paces behind him. There was a well out there, with a stone coping, and a small mound of loose stones left over from the making of the well. Most of the stones were negligible in size, but one was a dull grey boulder as big and broad about as a festival loaf.

“This,” said Rasoul, pointing to the grey stone, “is the burden of negative thought. Carry it across the courtyard, and set it down beside the gate.”

Hakkim obeyed, with great difficulty. The wounds of his beating had not yet begun to scab over, and his blood made the heavy stone slick, so that it was hard to hold onto as he hefted its considerable weight and staggered across the dusty courtyard to its further end.

“Now bring it back again to the well,” Rasoul commanded.

Again, the lad did as he was told, though his sinews cracked and his heart fluttered like a pennant in a gale.

“One hundred times must you bear your burden thither,” the holy man told his novice, “and one hundred times bear it hither again. And when you are done, this burden will pass from you. Go to it, my child.”

Verily, this was an ordeal. It would have been a big ask even if the boy had been hale; stiff and sore as he was from the beating, it was an endless labyrinth of torment. He could have walked away from it, perhaps, if he had been a different boy. But he was who he was, and so he obeyed.

Through the watches of the night, he bore the stone hither and thither. The first ten journeys he was able to count, and the ten after that still had some separate and definable existence. After that, and with surprising abruptness, they merged into a terrifying totality. Possibly the beating he had received made him feverish—possibly the hidden God sniped at him from cover, petty and implacable. He had always carried the stone, and always would. He could no longer remember picking it up, and could not imagine putting it down. It seemed a part of him: the anchor to which he clung, the spine that kept him upright, the whirling planet in whose soil his feet were rooted. When he realised that he had lost count, he started again from one.