The Steel Seraglio (60 page)

There was no question of moving Zuleika: she was far too weak. They cleaned and dressed her wounds, as gently as they could, then used a carpet as a travois to carry her into a neighbouring house.

They lived in the city of the dead for the three weeks that followed. Anwar Das foraged each day for water, taking it from jugs and bottles in already ransacked kitchens. When these supplies ran low, he supplemented them with wine.

In those days, while Zuleika reclaimed by tiny increments the strength she had had before, Rem and Anwar Das went around the city with a wagon and collected the bodies of the defenders. They brought them to the Jidur, where Imtisar already lay along with the soldiers who had unwillingly joined her in her final libation. They built a pyre, using mostly the doors and shutters from surrounding buildings, and the oil from a thousand lamps.

They spoke in the silence of their hearts what prayers they were able to muster. And they burned the bodies, friend and enemy alike.

While they burned, Rem walked to the city gate. The acrid smoke that came to her on the wind stung her eyes and made her weep, which was all to the good. Standing to the right of that great arch, she dipped her index finger in the tears that coursed down her cheek and began to write upon the white stone the names of those who had died in Bessa’s defence. The task took her four hours, but the blaze and her tears lasted long enough for the task. When she paused at last, the names were spread across twenty yards of stonework. Because of the hot sun, and because of the ash that had fallen down from the sky to blot it, the ink on that strange memorial was already dry. No amount of weathering would ever erase it.

The day came at last when Zuleika was able to stand, and then to walk, and then to ride. They provisioned themselves as well as they could and set off from Bessa just before dawn. Zuleika rode on one of the two camels, and the other held their supplies. Rem and Anwar Das both walked.

It was a clear day, and cool at first, though it would be fiercely hot later. At the top of a rise, some half a mile from the city walls, they turned to look back on the city. The first rays of the sun were by then touching its towers, and it looked like any city about to wake: held in the stillness not of death but of anticipation. It seemed that at any moment a marabout or a market trader might begin to cry his wares, and the business of the city, both secular and sacred, would resume.

Tears coursed down the cheeks of the two women and of the man as they watched, and remembered.

Mushin returned to Ibu Kim, where his mother berated him bitterly both for leaving without telling her and for returning without any gold from the pillaging of so great a city as Bessa.

She reproached him, too, for bringing back another mouth to feed, in the form of the boy, Abidal. Only her son, she lamented, would walk past pavilions of gold and jewels and snatch a child—and a mute child, at that. If it were raining money, she opined, Mushin would somehow contrive to stay dry.

Mushin endured these verbal batterings without complaint, so thankful was he to be home again. In any case, they did not last. In his mother’s fearsome bullying and hectoring there was a thread of great kindness, and she responded to the sorrow and fear she read in Abidal’s eyes as to a challenge: she would make him feel happy and safe if it killed the both of them.

She made him oat porridge to fatten him and honey cake to delight his palate. She told him stories of djinni and foreign kings, to which Abidal listened with fascination disguised as indifference. She took him to the bazaar and bought him whatever he chanced to pick up there, or if she could not afford it, stole it for him. In short, she did everything for this unwished-for stepson that she had never done for the fruit of her own womb, and seemed to take a huge amount of pleasure in the doing of it.

After two years of this benign tyranny, Abidal remembered how to speak. Scenes of great rejoicing followed, and Mushin’s mother showed the lad off as proudly as if he had mastered some astonishing and exacting discipline.

When the initial fuss had died down, Mushin asked the child, with as much trepidation as curiosity, what his real name was. The boy seemed mystified by the question. “Abidal,” he said with a shrug.

Mushin was not a brave man; in many ways, he was an abject coward. That was as far as he took his questioning. But he drew from the boy’s answer a hope that he might have forgotten, along with his given name, some of the details of how they had first met.

Whether he was right or wrong in this belief, only the Increate may say. But man and boy lived long together, bullied and cosseted respectively by the old lady, who when asked would introduce them both as her sons.

Some centuries after the time of Rem the Archivist there lived, in a cold northern city, a young woman of learning. This was an unusual thing in her place and time; but her mother had grown up in the desert lands, in a family which placed as much importance on the education of daughters as sons. Accordingly, the woman taught her daughters to read, both in her native tongue and in that of the land where her husband, an enterprising merchant, had taken her to live. The merchant loved his wife, and since his business prospered he was in a position to indulge her whims. So the girls learned languages, and the elder—who had a particular gift for the study—could write, by the time she was twelve, in a fine flowing hand.

Her father’s prosperity did not last. By the time the three sons were set up in trades of their own, there was no money left for dowries, and the elder daughter did not have beauty enough to make a dowry unnecessary. Furthermore, the family’s acquaintances agreed, she lacked those qualities of humility and obedience that make an ideal wife. So after her mother died, her father placed her in an enclosed order of nuns. For this life too, some financial settlement is usually made by the postulant’s family, but here they were lucky: the very learning that had proved a barrier to the girl’s marriage was a recommendation. The convent owned a library which had recently been swollen by a behest from a scholar’s widow, and the nuns were in need of scholars and scribes.

So the girl became a nun. After her grief for her mother’s death had abated, she did not repine at her fate—the convent was small but rich, and the work to which she was put suited both her talents and her disposition. When her younger sister, who was fair-faced, was married to one of their father’s business friends, she sent the couple a passage of scripture that she had written out and decorated with her own hand:
a good wife is worth more than rubies
, she wrote. But she secretly considered that she had had the better end of the bargain.

The library of the convent was chiefly famed for its antiquity. Indeed several of its books were scrolls, some of them in scripts too old or too faint to be deciphered. The Abbess did not consider this a reason to discard them. On the contrary, she reasoned, their very age made them precious, for one day some great scholar might learn from them the lost wisdom of the ancients. They were kept in the very heart of the convent’s main building, where the air was driest and the temperature most constant. Meanwhile, it had to be admitted, the harvest of wisdom, old or new, to be garnered from the library was small. The most valuable books had long ago been taken for safekeeping to the houses of one of the men’s enclosed orders, where the buildings were more secure; likewise the more weighty volumes of theology and philosophy, so that they could be pored over by doctors and divines. The books that were left were something of a ragbag: apocrypha, chronicles, old tales, songs and household saws; accounts, receipts and remedies, sometimes all bound together in the same codex. Many were in languages unknown to the nuns, and it was these that the young woman was first set to study, to copy if they were faint and to translate if she could.

Sitting in the close darkness, poring over her lines of text by the light of a lamp, she came across a book one day that seemed to her unlike any of the others. It was one of the oldest she had seen: though a bound volume, the script—or scripts, for it was in several hands—were clearly so ancient that no one had been able to read it. She had found it at the bottom of a pile of similarly obscure books, carefully stacked but covered in dust. The volume was small, thick and undistinguished-looking, with no illustration save for a single symbol at the very end. It was made up of sheets of different weights and thicknesses, roughly sewn together, and the ink in which it was written was unusual. In each of the different hands, firm or spidery, it was the same colour—far blacker and more distinct than it should be in such an ancient document.

The young woman’s interest was piqued. Though the book’s script was archaic, she did not at once lay it aside, and a more careful study revealed that some of the characters were familiar to her from her mother’s teaching: this was a language from the lands of the south and east. Other discoveries quickly followed; she was able to make out words, and guess at whole sentences. Sometimes the layout of a page would help her. As in other books, there were lists of materials and prices; poems; recipes. But most of the volume seemed to be made up of tales, of a group of women lost and wandering in the desert, of wars and bandits, and a lost city.

She studied the book into the night, missing the evening meal and arriving late for prayer, for which she earned a severe reproof, tempered only slightly by the Abbess’s respect for the pursuit of knowledge. After that the little volume became her pastime. She wrapped it in a cloth and laid it at the back of her desk, and sometimes when the day’s work was done and the other women left to walk for a while in the chill evening air, she would remain in her place and carry out a little more of her translation.

She understood the outlines of the language very rapidly; its details came more slowly, and it took her many months, drawing on other texts for comparison, before she had fully completed her translation of the first of the stories. The chief speaker in the book, the writer of more than half the pages, was a woman, in some ways very like the scribe herself: she declared that she never married, and chose to spend her life among books. But she was also, it had to be said, mad. She wrote wildly of demons and monsters, of visions of the future, of a world in which people flew in the bellies of iron dragons and lived in towers of glass which reached to the clouds. She claimed to have dressed in men’s clothes, to have survived death by vultures in the desert, to have killed a tyrant single-handed. Clearly, the scribe realised, the tales in this book were of a profane nature, of no spiritual value to her sisters in the convent. She could not translate it as part of her daily work. And yet the book exerted a hold on her. It reminded her strongly of the stories she had heard from her mother as a child.

And the work helped to speed her in her official duties; as she mastered its language, she found she was able to decipher a number of texts which had never been read by the nuns before, and uncovered treasures including a physician’s book of remedies and a treatise on astronomy. She became known as an expert on arcane languages, and the other scribes began to come to her with their own perplexities. And whenever she brought a translation to a close, or finished a job of copying, she would allow herself an hour or two to work on the little book of stories.

After some two years of study, she was satisfied she could read it all. By then she had been promoted to chief scribe, and with the authority this brought her she took it on herself to translate the book for the library. It could not be a full translation. For all her work, there were some passages that still made no sense to her—she was certain that she understood each of the words, but not what they meant together. For each of these passages she did her best to produce a possible meaning, and added a footnote giving the original phrase, to aid better scholars who might come after her. Other passages were indecent, or spoke of commerce with demons, and these she regretfully omitted, since their discovery by certain dignitaries might cause both the translation and its original to be destroyed.

The stories that gave her the most trouble portrayed women who acted in unwomanly ways: they met unchaperoned with men to trade in the markets, chose or rejected husbands, even fought as soldiers. One, it seemed, took money for committing murders, and was never punished, or even blamed. After much thought she left out the tale of the murderess, but retained most of the others, adding a note to remind her readers that these tales told of heathen times and lives long gone.

She showed the finished work to her sister scribes, and was relieved to find that they were neither shocked nor disgusted by it. They laughed at the stories of the women who tricked a cave-full of bandits, and the young man who won his life back with a tall tale. Some even wept at the final story, in which many of the women fought and died defending their city against the invader who destroyed it. The stories of the city of women became part of their daily conversation when they were alone in the scriptorium. The women in the tales were brazen and violent: the nuns talked of them with giggles, as people who could not exist in real life. But every now and then, there was a note in their voices of something like envy.

When their own troubles came, the nuns were anything but warlike in their response. Barbarians invaded their city. They came at night and sacked the convent, took away the great silver cross and chalices and burned the building to the ground. By then the women were long gone; they had known about the invasion for months, and had received warning two days before that the hordes were close.

They did not stay to fight. They packed all the belongings they could carry on carts, and joined the procession leaving the city. The most valuable books, the Bibles and tomes of theology, were packed in great brass-and-wood chests, as befitted their importance. But the chief scribe carried a package of her own, holding the profane volumes that she would not leave behind: the treatises on the stars and on medicine, some volumes of songs and poetry, and the book of the City of Women, with her translation.