The Steel Seraglio (48 page)

“What has he done?” Gursoon asked Zuleika. Her voice was tight with repressed anger.

“He’s despoiled the body,” Zuleika explained. “Hakkim killed his father and his mother. There was a blood-debt to be paid.”

Gursoon frowned. “I had meant to give the body to his followers,” she said. “It would have been the best way to soothe their feelings, and might have headed off further bloodletting. Now we can’t even let them see him, and they’ll know why.”

“There was a blood-debt,” Zuleika repeated.

“And now there’ll be more of them.”

“Perhaps. Yes.”

Jamal’s next duty, he decided, should be to oversee the execution of the Ascetics and palace guards who had been taken alive. He said as much, as soon as he felt sure that his voice would not shake. But here he came up against Gursoon’s will in a more direct way, and he did not carry it.

“There’ll be no massacres,” the older woman told him, grimly. “We didn’t come here for that. And we didn’t cast Hakkim down so that we could become Hakkim in our turn.” She looked to Zuleika, as though she expected to be challenged. Zuleika only shrugged: she had her own opinions, clearly, but she did not voice them.

The question of what to do with the prisoners was shelved, for the time being. That left Jamal’s address to his loyal subjects, and here, too, he was overruled.

“Why would you wish to speak to them?” Gursoon asked him. “What do you think has happened here?”

“The usurper has been cast down,” Jamal said. “The bloodline has been restored. Why? What do you think has happened?”

Surprisingly, it was not Gursoon but Zuleika who answered him. “Bessa has been liberated,” she said. “It belongs to no one now, but only to itself. That is what we said we’d do, and that is what we’ve done. Jamal, there is no bloodline. There is no sultan. Nobody here wants to invent one.”

On some level, he had already known this. It was a forlorn and weak part of him that had hoped—or rather pretended—that the past could somehow be restored. It couldn’t: the past was dead, along with so much else. He made no protest, and indeed no answer at all. In any event, no answer seemed to be required. Gursoon and the armed women with her went on with their task of securing the palace compound, which they intended to use as a base. They paid Jamal no further heed.

Zuleika went with him to find his parents’ graves, and he was grateful to her for that, but it was a gratitude that held itself—by necessity—aloof. He couldn’t permit himself to depend on her any more, as he had in the desert. It was not clear to him yet what he would become, in this new morning that smelled of blood and spilled incense. Himself, of course—but he had a child’s intuition that there might be many versions of him, a breath or a thought away from incarnation, and that any commitments he might make now would be voided when one or other of these Jamals was born. Better to look inwards, and wait.

In the event, there were no graves. Whatever Hakkim had done with the bodies of Bokhari Al-Bokhari, his wives, and the royal princes and princesses, he had left no trace. There was a fire pit, too far from the kitchen to be of any practical use in cooking, and it had seen extensive use; there was nothing else, and the bones in the pit had been smashed into pieces so small that they might have been anything.

“I’m sorry,” Zuleika said.

Jamal bowed his head, and she let her hand rest on his shoulder. He wanted to tell her how he had felt, first when he watched her fighting in the desert, a storm of violent possibilities discharging in such a narrow space, and then again, later, when he saw her naked in the water. But this was not the time. So he stood in silence, mourning his mother more than his father, and perhaps himself more than either of them. Finally Zuleika left him there, to work through the logic of his grief.

He had plenty of time to do this, in the five years that followed, but in many ways the project evaded him. It was as though his feelings remained in that state of suspension which his twelve-year-old self had thought was momentary: as though he still stood beside the fire pit, staring at bones which told no tales and cast no auguries. Alone among those who had fled into the desert—or at least, so it seemed to him—Jamal found no point of attachment to this new Bessa to which they had returned. He could not seem to find a map of it within his mind.

Discouraged and even a little shamed by that incapacity, he sank into a kind of depression, or a paralysis which was not quite depression because within it all emotions, even grief, seemed dulled and unreal. His life had stopped, and it was clearly in no hurry to resume. He even contemplated suicide, and purchased from a former Ascetic a poison of such potency—allegedly—that a single drop of it would kill a great multitude. But Jamal’s will was paralysed. All he ever did with the poison was to take it out and look at it from time to time, touch his lips to the glass and tilt the bottle so that it seemed as though he was sipping from it. A man cannot die from such things; in their default, he dies from other things that work more slowly.

In the wider world around Jamal, many things of great import happened. The concubines formed a government, which considered by its own lights did reasonably well—it took a chaotic situation and introduced a modicum of order into it. But that was all it could do, ultimately. It could not remove the chaos, because it depended on the arbitrary interplay of too many different personalities. The women refused to nominate a leader: worse, whether naively or knowingly, they instituted rules and customs which prevented a leader from emerging.

Jamal tried to explain this once, to the librarian, Rem, who chronicled the debates in the Jidur and composed the wording of the written laws on which the women placed such fanatical emphasis. Rem seemed to understand what Jamal was trying to say, but not to sympathise.

“So you’re talking about a model where one person gets to run the state and embodies its laws?”

“Yes.”

“Sorry, Jamal. It’s shit. It happens a lot, but it’s shit every time. The trouble is, the one person who gets to run things is just as conflicted—just as big a mess—as any random man or woman you pass in the street. You say committees lead to chaos? Well, every one of us is a committee inside—lots of desires and instincts and ideas and unexamined beliefs, all pulling in different directions. Every king is a committee. The trick isn’t to eliminate the conflict, it’s to make a machine—a state—that allows every idea to be fed into the hopper and somehow winnows out the ones that are crazy or sick or stupid or unworkable. That’s what the Jidur is. What we want it to be, anyway.”

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.