The City of Silk and Steel Read online

  To our fellow artists, Davey and Ben, with all our love.

  MIKE CAREY, LINDA CAREY AND LOUISE CAREY

  GOLLANCZ

  LONDON

  Contents

  Cover

  Dedication

  Title Page

  Prologue

  Rem Speaks of These Matters

  Book the First

  Bokhari Al-Bokhari and His Three Hundred and Sixty-Five Concubines

  Fireside Story

  The Tale of the Dancing Girl

  The Cup Lands Upright, Part the First

  The Tale of the Girl, her Father, her Two Suitors and the King of Assassins

  The Cup Lands Upright, Part the Second

  How Hakkim Found His Enemy

  The Tale of the Librarian of Bessa

  The Tale of the Librarian of Bessa

  A Landmark in the Desert

  The Fate of Those Who Search for Truth

  In the Mountains of the North

  The Tale of the Assassin Who Became a Concubine

  Tales Whose Application Is Mostly Tactical: Bethi

  The Tale of the Poisoned Touch

  Tales Whose Application Is Mostly Tactical: Anwar Das

  The Tale of the Man Who Deserved Death No Fewer Than Three Times

  Reading Lessons, Part the First

  The Council of War

  Givers of Gifts

  Reading Lessons, Part the Second

  The Taking of Bessa, Part the First

  The Cook’s Story

  The Taking of Bessa, Part the Second

  Bessa, at Once and Ever

  Book the Second

  The Tale of Anwar Das and the Gold He Brought to Bessa

  The Tale of the War That Was Not

  The Tale of Jamal

  In the Fullness of Time

  Correspondence

  The Tale of the Lion of the Desert

  The Making Ready

  Mushin’s Tale

  Seven Days of Siege

  The Storm

  How the City Was Unmade

  The Tale of a Man and a Boy

  The Tale of the Book

  The Tale of Tales

  Acknowledgements

  Copyright

  Prologue

  Once there was a city of women.

  Little remains of it now but its name; the few accounts that survive are incomplete and contradictory. Most suggest that it was inaccessible, in a far desert region, beyond the reach of common travellers. But all the stories begin with ‘Once . . .’: the city’s remoteness was, perhaps, a matter of time rather than distance. Be that as it may, in the stories that have come down to us few narrators have anything to say of the city’s whereabouts; fewer still claim to have seen it in person. This is the tale of one man who made that claim.

  The young adventurer had been raised since childhood on legends of far-off lands and the treasures of gold and knowledge to be won there. Among others he heard of the City of Women, described to him in hushed tones as a prodigy of nature. Its rulers were women, he was assured, as were its judges and advisers. Female architects had laid out its streets and houses, and female masons had raised them. Its army was well equipped and well trained, for the city had many enemies – though the old storytellers differed as to who these enemies might be, or the cause of their enmity. They agreed, however, that its arts and sciences had flourished – and perhaps still did. For in the city’s heyday there had appeared strange and exquisite jewels, pots and tapestries, scrolls of poetry and silk paintings, which circulated among the wealthy and earned exorbitant prices for any merchant lucky enough to get hold of one; and from where else could they have come? Words and images to equal those of the masters, but no master laid claim to them, and where the master’s imprint should be there would appear a woman’s name: Maysoon, Noor, Farhat; or an unfamiliar symbol of feather, leaf or flower. And, the stories maintained, such treasures would still appear in the marketplace from time to time, if one knew where to look.

  After a drink or two, still wilder claims might be made. It was said that there were women physicians there with the skill to cure all diseases, even (though some called the notion blasphemous) women philosophers, scholars and divines. And a few went further – in that city, they said, was the source of wisdom itself: a book containing all knowledge.

  It was this rumour that prompted our adventurer to set out, without any map or more directions than could be found in drunken travellers’ tales, to search for the City of Women. A book of all knowledge! What long-tormenting questions could be answered, what hidden treasures discovered! And, he concluded, if this book of knowledge could confer such benefits on a gaggle of women, what vistas of opportunity might it open to a hero?

  He took only two camels and travelled for many months, at first confidently, following the hints and directions of the old men’s stories into the deep desert. When the landmarks failed and the sun began to scorch his eyes, he slept by day and found his way by the stars. One camel dropped in its harness and died, then the other. And there came a day when his last skin of water was empty, and, wandering on an endless plain of sand and rocks which was unmarked by so much as a thistle, he came at last upon his own tracks. The horizon was a vast circle around him: ochre and dun on all sides, pitiless blue above. The heat pressed him downwards. He fell to his knees, and then onto his face beneath the unblinking sun.

  He awoke to a gentle rocking motion and a glare of light that dazzled his eyes. He was being carried on a litter by four black-robed figures, while a fifth walked beside him. As he blinked upwards this one held a little flask to his lips, bending towards him solicitously as he drank. Above her veil, her eyes shone black as olives. The drink was sweet and searingly strong, and the traveller spluttered and tried to rise, but his companion laid a hand on his arm and told him to be still. We have carried you for two days, she said. If you give us no more trouble we can reach the city by nightfall.

  Her voice, though sweet, was full of command, and her hand was strong. The traveller obeyed her, and as he lay and listened to the quiet talk of his bearers, it came to him that all five were women, though they carried him along with no more trouble or ceremony than a sick child. He could not make out their speech, or his delirium prevented him from understanding them. He lay still, shielding his face against the sun’s dazzle and watching the women’s slender figures out of the corners of his eyes. Many times he slept and woke again; his bearers disturbed him only to give him water. It was darkening towards evening when the women finally slowed, and the horizon burned with sunset. He strained to see the position of the sun, but it was behind him, or else cut off by the shapes of buildings that rose like a mirage all around him.

  They entered the city as night was falling, and its walls blazed like gold in the low sun and in the light of a thousand torches. Two women pulled the heavy gates closed behind them; the traveller saw with wonder that both were uncovered: bare-headed and bare-armed. And his escorts, after setting his litter on the ground and helping him to rise, took off their own veils. At first shame overcame him and he could not look at them – but was he not a hero? Had he not faced death itself to gain this place? Taking courage, he raised his eyes to the woman nearest to him, who returned his gaze gravely. Her face was of surpassing loveliness, though her hair was threaded with grey.

  Is this . . . he asked her, and his voice was a dry chirp like a cricket’s. Is this the city of fair ladies, of which I have heard in legend?

  This is Bessa, she answered. As to what you have heard in legend, I cannot tell.

  Bessa was one of the names the traveller had heard from his drunken informants. In his head the book of knowledge was already opening its pages to him, but he mana
ged to guard his tongue and asked only that he might see something of the city. His voice was still harsh with lack of use, and his compliments and courtesies sounded strained in his own ears. But his hosts seemed unconcerned, and one of their number stepped forward and offered to lead him. The girl’s mouth made the traveller think of rose petals, and for some time he found it hard to look away from her face at the marvels around them. But they were marvels that she showed him.

  He saw domes and towers there, he swore afterwards; gushing fountains, houses hung with vines and gardens of jewelled fruit. The torch-lit streets were filled with a cheerful din of voices, like the marketplaces of the towns he knew at home, with merchants, citizens, idlers each holding on to the last light of the day and a little beyond, to drink one last cup, make one last bargain before going home. But here the voices were all of women. He saw them packing up stalls, leading camels, selling wine and drinking it at outdoor booths: women of all ages and kinds. Some were round-breasted and slender; some stately, as tall as himself. All were uncovered; all, to the traveller’s fevered eyes, as beautiful as the stars. Yet they were dressed plainly, some in desert robes, others in what seemed men’s working clothes. There were silver-haired matrons, young mothers with babes, small children who giggled and pointed at the stranger.

  How do you come by children, in a city of women? he asked his guide. (Like many heroes, he was a man of little discretion.) The young woman laughed, but gave him no reply.

  She took him further into the city, and his wonder grew as he walked. She told him a little of this and that: Here is our square for dancing or disputing, there the schoolhouse. This garden is reserved for those who need to rest their spirits.

  But no word of what he had come so far to find. At length he could bear the uncertainty no more, and he stopped and asked his guide outright. But the book, he said, the book of all knowledge. Where do you keep that?

  She stopped too, looking not angered at his rudeness but thoughtful, and perhaps also amused. With a courteous gesture she turned, retracing some of their path, and led him into what seemed the outskirts of the city, to a low stone house set apart from the others. Gesturing to him to wait, she slipped inside, and he heard quiet voices. This is what you seek, she told him when she reappeared.

  He had to duck beneath the arch of the door. His guide drew the curtain behind him and left him there. The room was cooler than the warm evening, darker than the torch-lit night outside. A lamp cast its small circle of light, and in the light sat a thin woman with a book in her hands. His heart leaped at the sight. It was a small volume, but thick and richly bound: as she turned a page its cover glinted with the colours of jewels. An urge seized him to take the book now, grab it and run into the night. He had taken a step forward when the reader, who till now had not seemed to notice his presence, lifted her hand in a gesture of welcome.

  Sit down if you wish, she said, without raising her eyes from the book.

  There was a second stool by her own: he took it and risked a glance over her shoulder. The book was in no language he had ever seen: even the characters were strange to him. He could not make out a single word. He sat motionless, at the end of his road, while the woman read quietly beside him. After a while she sighed, closed the book and looked at him. Her eyes were black as ink, and as unreadable as the characters in the book.

  You have come a long way, she said at last.

  At that, all his frustration burst from him. And all for nothing! he cried, leaping to his feet. What use is a book that cannot be read?

  She smiled and laid the book aside, and he saw on the low table beyond her a heap of other volumes. She gestured into the darkness around them, and he saw for the first time that the room was lined with cabinets, each one filled with scrolls, tablets, leather-bound spines.

  Not for nothing, maybe. I am the librarian of Bessa, she said. And I am also the book you seek; there is no other.

  Before first light the women who had found him came for him again. They gave him dried dates and all the water he could carry, and two of them led him away from the city. The wind covered their footprints. By dawn they stood on a featureless plain; the women pointed to the south where he could see, many leagues off, the bushes that marked a waterhole, and they watched him as he made towards it.

  He never looked back, he said. He knew as he walked that he would never return to the City of Women, and no persuasion would make him tell any man the way there. Sometimes, when very drunk, he would hint: over such-and-such a mountain; west for three days, or maybe five . . . but no more. Nor would he ever say what he had asked the living book, or what she had told him during their time together. Some wisdom is too precious to be revealed, he said. But for the rest of his life, as he wandered from town to town, he was assured of a drink and a bed everywhere he went, just for the story.

  Rem Speaks of These Matters

  The truth opens gradually, like a flower. Or else it falls on you all at once, like a bag of spanners.

  The City of Women was both greater and less than you imagine.

  I am a book in which the future is written. I am a woman whom you might pass in the street without noticing, and never again be able to call to mind.

  My name is Rem, and I can see the future. It’s my gift. The Increate parted the veils for me and bade me look, which I did. Am doing. Will do. Tenses get a bit confused at that point, as I’m sure you’ll understand, and unravelling them again can be a bitch.

  I can be a bitch, too: I was taught by an expert. Unlike the sight, it’s a gift I’ve come to value more and more as life goes on.

  The sight has its upside and its downside. On the one hand, it gives you a kind of perfect sense of your own location. You can never lose yourself in the ever-branching forest of cause and effect, because you can see the invisible threads that link every effect back to its cause, at one remove and two and three and four, and so on back to the effect that had no cause and caused all things. On the other hand, that very certainty as to where you stand can be paralysing. Any motion you make, any degree of freedom you have, is – from the standpoint of eternity – infinitesimal, so you might as well not move at all.

  I only ever knew one human being of whom that was not true, who seemed to move with perfect freedom, and around whose actions all things wheeled like the tethered tracks of an astrolabe.

  But I’ll speak of those things in their place.

  In the meantime, and for the sake of context, imagine me against a backdrop of dry and baking sand. Shallow waterholes, of the kind called camel-licks, are spaced a hundred miles apart in the desert that seems to have no end: sky-blue eyes that stare up at the Increate in unblinking worship. When those eyes close in summer, the desert is impassable. There are deeper wells too, of course, but these cannot be seen because wherever one was found a caravanserai sprang up, and then a town, and then in some cases a city. Water, for all that it pools and flows and has no shape of its own, is the wheel on which we are shaped. In Bessa, where I was keeper of the books, there is a day of observance when we show our gratitude to Heaven for its liquid bounty by not drinking from sunup to sundown. Our parched lips move in prayer, but the only words we speak are ‘Thank you.’

  It won’t always be like this: the deserts, the scattered cities, the model of a civilisation laid out like a string of pearls across the silent immensity of As-Sahra, the great nothing. One day we’ll be gone, and the sands will close over us. One day the sun will set in the east and rise in the west. Not literally, you understand: that’s just a poetic way of saying that sooner or later the Increate is going to decide to park his car in someone else’s driveway. The power of Persia and Arabia will wane, and the infidel kingdoms will have their day.

  Oh, don’t fret. This will be a whole sackful of centuries from now, and despite the Earth tilting wildly on its geopolitical axis, nothing else is going to change very much. Oh, except magic. Magic just stops working somewhere along the way, more or less overnight. Quantum physics steps into the ga
p, strutting like a rooster.

  What else? In fifteen hundred years someone will figure out a way to squeeze black juice out of the yellow sand, and that will get everyone very excited. Some people who were rich already will get a lot richer, and some people who were poor will be told that they’re rich but will be pretty sure that they’re not.

  A century or so after that, the desert will become a sort of prophet in its own right, preaching to the nations of the world and telling them that to be barren is their inalienable destiny. Into every land the heat will march like an army, build ramparts of baking air, defying humankind to come against it.

  I’m hitting the high points here, you understand, missing out a lot of stuff that’s mostly in a similar vein. And I’d like to make it clear from the outset that despite the male pronoun that slipped past my inner editor earlier on, I don’t really think of the supreme being as a man. It’s just a habit, a linguistic default built into me during the years of my childhood, and even though I lived in a place that came to be called the City of Women that’s still the way my mind works when I slip it into idle and let it coast. I’d like to break the habit, but I’m a realist: I know that if I start off by referring to the Increate as a woman I won’t keep to it, and it’s a pain in the base of the spine to scrape ink (especially the indelible ink in which I write) off limed and scudded calfskin.

  However that might be (and I could write a treatise on equivocation and compromise), sex – sex in all of its senses – is at the centre of this story. It’s at the centre of everything, isn’t it? Assuming you’re of post-pubertal age in your own personal where-and-when, you probably have a few opinions on the subject yourself, and whether they’re for or against I’ll bet good money that they’re intense. Intensity is part of the package. Sooner or later our souls find their centre of gravity in a hot, salt-tasting kiss and a trembling touch. Trembling is a good sign: it means you’re open to a world that knows you’re coming.