The City of Silk and Steel Read online

  So he made his offer to Jamal – an offer that Jamal obligingly refused – and then he rode away, back to the ranks of the Bessan refugees. They turned again, setting Bessa at their backs, and began their long march. At first they were followed by Jamal’s scouts, but after a few hours these fell away and they were alone.

  Their goal was the mountains and the caves of the bandits which they had left so many years before. But that was only a staging post on a much longer journey.

  Jamal did not at first understand what it was that Zuleika had said. But then certain thoughts and images cohered in his mind in a sudden, abstract wash of thought, and enlightenment came. He knew, then, why the streets were so empty, and why the Bessan defenders had failed, at the end, to fall back to the palace and bar themselves in. There were too few left, by then, to maintain a line as they retreated, or to cover each other’s backs as they crossed open squares and piazzas. All they could do was run, and they had not run far.

  He knew, too, who it was he had spoken to out on the plain on the morning after the storm, how he had been fooled into allowing the people of Bessa to escape the siege unmolested – and how, therefore, he had come to inherit, as in his nightmare of yesteryear, a city of the dead, with no populace, no farmlands and no safe water.

  He had won the war, and at the same time defeated himself utterly: grasped after the substance and caught the shadow.

  All that was left of his victory was Zuleika. And Zuleika was still smiling. It was not a deliberate taunt – she was thinking of her lover, safe and away and two days gone; of the city of women turned into a seed on the wind, that might take root elsewhere. She smiled because she was not a concubine any more, nor yet an assassin, but a soldier who had done her duty and could now hope to rest.

  But to Jamal, the smile was salt in wounds both old and new. He kicked out in a rage, sending Zuleika sprawling to the ground, and then he kicked her again and again as she lay. When she raised her right arm to ward off the blows, his foot connected with the arrow that had transfixed her right hand, and the shaft snapped in two.

  Around him, his troops watched the beating in stolid silence, without much interest. But Nussau, arriving then, viewed it with irritation. He had found to his horror that the spoils on which he and his men had placed such store were not to be had. Bessa had been emptied not only of its people but of most of its portable wealth. The granaries were empty, the shops and warehouses – those that had not been burned in previous incursions – stripped down to bare wood and cool stone. Bessa hosted nothing, now, save corpses and ruin.

  In dark mood, therefore, and impatient of Jamal’s self-indulgence, the barbarian captain drew his sword and stepped in to finish Zuleika with a single sword-thrust. To his annoyance, Jamal laid a hand on his sword-arm and shook his head.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘She’s mine.’

  ‘We need to talk about payment,’ Nussau said brusquely. ‘And provisioning.’

  ‘We will talk,’ Jamal told him. ‘But this must come first.’

  With curt gestures, he made the watching soldiers back away. ‘Nobody is to intervene,’ he ordered. ‘Nobody touches her, but me. Nobody speaks to her, but me.’ Then he stood over Zuleika and nudged her with the toe of his boot. At first she did not stir, but finally she raised her head – her lips split and bleeding, one eye already swelling shut from the beating he had given her. With the other eye alone, she met his gaze.

  ‘Fight me,’ he invited her. ‘You heard what I told them. Fight me and win, and you’ll be free. That’s all you have to do.’

  He waited. He was not a patient man, but for this, and this alone, he found an unexpected reserve of patience in the fervid cauldron of his soul.

  Slowly – terribly slowly – Zuleika gathered herself. She struggled up onto her knees, using her left arm to support her weight. Once on her knees, she was able to grasp her sword in her left hand and then to rise to her feet, though she staggered and almost fell again.

  ‘It will be here,’ Jamal told her, ‘and it will be now.’

  She nodded, acknowledging the remembered words.

  Jamal’s sword flicked from side to side as he moved in toward her, and Zuleika raised her own blade to block him, but there was no strength left in her. Jamal swept the sword aside with a tremendous stroke and stabbed her in the stomach. He didn’t drive the sword in deeply; he did not wish, just yet, to deliver a killing blow. An inch or two only, then out and up, en garde, as he stepped back from a counter-attack that didn’t come.

  Three more times he repeated this: advancing on Zuleika, beating down her defence with ease and then wounding her lightly before withdrawing. The wounds bled freely, and the areas of saturated cloth spread and merged until Zuleika was robed in red. That she managed to keep her footing was something of a marvel to the men watching, who already knew of the Demon and had extended her their grudging admiration.

  ‘Finish it,’ Nussau grunted in something like disgust.

  Jamal did not wish to do so, did not relish the thought of turning from this cathartic killing to the other, more problematic aspects of his victory. But he bowed to the inevitable. Attacking once more, he stepped inside Zuleika’s guard, turned his blade deftly and raised it in a lateral flick that severed the tendon of Zuleika’s left arm. She dropped her sword again, the arm now even more useless than the right.

  He waited for her to fall, but she did not fall. No matter. He backed away a step and readied his blade for the coup de grâce. But he could not forbear from one final taunt. ‘You see where you are?’ he asked her, indicating with his sword-tip the blazing building at their backs. ‘Your heroic last stand was in a brothel. Your life came full circle, my lady, and you ended where you were always meant to be. A house of copulation. By such means does the Increate teach us our lessons.’

  He made ready to strike, and then realised that Zuleika was still staring over his shoulder at the inferno which the House of Pleasant Fires had become. He turned to look in the same direction, standing away from her as he did so in case this was some trick – even without a weapon, even dying on her feet, Zuleika presented a clear and present danger.

  But it was not a trick. Haloed by flames, a figure stood in the doorway of the burning house, as though fire was her home. She was very slight, and the intensity of the light behind her ate into the edges of her silhouette, making her slighter still – superhumanly attenuated into the merest ribbon of flesh between the fire and the fire.

  ‘Imir Nussau,’ the figure said. ‘Min he Shara insulleh han mu’neana kulheyin. B’rabatha me kuth imal han. Drueh in neru keli mu’neana ha.’

  The words were low and harsh, throat-spoken. Nussau stiffened, his eyes opening a little wider. It had taken Jamal thus far to recognise the dialect of the northern tribes, though the captain and his officers spoke it to each other each night around the campfires, as did the common soldiers on the few occasions when he walked among them.

  ‘What is she saying?’ he demanded, unsettled not by the apparition nor by her words, but by Nussau’s reaction of hackles-up surprise.

  Still speaking, or perhaps reciting, the figure came forward a few paces. She was still backlit, her features invisible, but she looked more human now – to Jamal, at least. Clearly the soldiers around him were less reassured.

  This was because they could understand her speech, as Jamal could not.

  ‘Captain Nussau,’ she had said. ‘Your wife, Shara, writhes and screams now in childbirth. Half out of her, half in, your son hangs between life and death. The Increate watches you, and His hand is poised.’

  Nussau had left his wife in the fifth month of her pregnancy, and he could count as well as the next man; he knew that her time was now upon her. His gaze was fixed on the half-invisible figure as she walked out of the fire directly towards him.

  ‘The Increate watches, and His hand has fallen. Born into death, your son’s eyes never open. The next child, a girl, lives to be six, dies then by drowning. There is no third. Yo
ur name dies with you.’

  An explosive gasp escaped from Nussau’s chest.

  The fire-woman spoke next unto the sergeant – a man so solid, a man of such girth and sinew, you’d think to see him standing still that he had never moved. ‘Sergeant Drutha,’ she called. ‘The blood in your shit is an omen of death. By winter you are shrivelled to a husk, eaten from within like a cankered fruit. The poison is in your veins and crawling toward your heart.’

  The sergeant swore and drew his sword. The firewoman didn’t even turn to acknowledge him. But the soldier standing nearest to the sergeant ran toward her with a spear pointed at her breast.

  ‘You die now,’ she told him, still without turning. And he did, though none saw what killed him. He just fell to his knees and then full length, and lay forlornly at the woman’s feet – an unintended tribute, which she ignored utterly.

  ‘Manasih Rey,’ she continued, still advancing on the soldiers step by measured step. ‘Your betrothed fucks another in the bed you built for her. And the man she ruts with is mad, and kills her for the money in her purse. For three gold pieces she lies torn and opened – not now, but two months hence. However quickly you run back along the line of your marching, she’s dead and stinking when you open your front door. The sight will never leave you.

  ‘Qusid Apheli, your family is well, but you don’t see them again. Running from this place, you’re knocked aside by a stronger man and your skull breaks when you hit the ground. Uncaring, comrades kick and trample you. When all is done, your body is a smear like the smear of a dog crushed by many cartwheels.

  ‘Adir Beg, death does not even have to stoop to pick you up. The despair you carry inside you is his doorway, and the dagger at your waist is his key. You slit your wrists, three years from now, just as your older brother Yushif did before you. Your corpse lies at the side of a road until some stranger, passing by, drags it to a ravine and rolls it over the edge. Kites eat your body. Jackals fight for the bones.’

  It must have been the voice that did it. The details were circumstantial enough that every man addressed knew what he was hearing for the truth, and was struck dumb by it, but for the others . . . it was the voice. They heard the blade of a relentless fate grinding against their souls as against a strop, and they feared to be there when the blade was finally raised to chastise them.

  They fled.

  Only a few at first, but a few is all it takes. Seeing their comrades running, others ran too. The sergeant was the last to move, Captain Nussau among the first. Within seconds the soldiers were barging and climbing over each other in their haste to reach the gates again and get out of this cursed city. Qusid was not the only one who was trampled in that panicked flight, but his fate was exactly as the woman had told him it would be.

  Within a few seconds only Jamal remained. The voice was as forbidding to him as to any man, but the words were gibberish, and the silhouette was close enough and clear enough now that he recognised it. This was Rem, the librarian: he knew her too well to fear her. Moreover, he knew her as the woman who had won Zuleika when he had desired her himself.

  He strode toward her, his sword drawn back, his mouth fixed in a rictus snarl.

  The two blows that killed him came simultaneously.

  Rem had been carrying a crossbow, low down at her side. Zuleika had drilled her in the weapon’s use during long hours. She knew that one must hold it as level as possible when firing, and pull on the trigger with a single, coaxing movement of the index finger, removing the sear cleanly from the string. Her aim was true, and her hand did not falter.

  Zuleika, for her part, had taken advantage of Rem’s prophetic tirade to grip in her teeth the shaft of the arrow that had pierced her right hand. Jamal’s kick had snapped off the head, so she was able to draw it through her wounded flesh. Of the three daggers in her belt, she chose the heaviest, because it would fly straight despite the trembling of her hand and the spasming of her muscles.

  The quarrel entered Jamal’s heart. The dagger, which was hiltless, buried itself to the fullness of its length in the back of his neck.

  He continued to move toward Rem, his own momentum carrying him. She stepped aside, and he fell at her feet, face down.

  His death removed him from the future, as a factor that might touch Rem or be touched by her. Instantly, in the kaleidoscope of her inward sight, he went from blurry incoherence into pin-sharp focus. She saw the lives he might have lived, and how few of them were good. A wasteland had surrounded him from birth. It would have taken a much stronger man to find a way across it.

  ‘Oh, Jamal,’ she murmured, her voice thick with tears.

  On the cusp of death, he heard those words. The pity in them filled him with a horror greater than the dark into which he fell.

  Kneeling quickly by Zuleika’s side, Rem pulled off her shirt and tore it into strips to dress her beloved’s wounds. Zuleika had slipped by this time into a shallow unconsciousness, barely aware of what was happening to her.

  Rem, conscious of everything, gazed down at her in something like envy.

  She had managed a full day’s march away from Bessa, and every moment of that day had been a torment.

  The future broke into the present like a tidal wave infinitely renewed and sustained. With each breath, it brought a fresh lading of ruin. She was aware of every death, every ending: the unmaking of the city, the labour of all those years uncannily and cruelly reversed.

  She saw Rihan and Firdoos fall, back to back, and she saw horsemen trample them – Rihan still alive for a few moments as the hooves pounded her.

  She saw Umayma shooting arrow after arrow until none were left; saw her take an arrow herself in the heart, another in the belly, and then saw her scream Zufir’s name as she threw herself from the battlements onto the head of a startled soldier below, killing him even as she died.

  She saw old Issi split a man’s skull with a thrown axe; gentle Halima embed a slingshot stone in the socket of a cavalryman’s eye; stolid Dalal scream like a berserker as she hacked at the top of a scaling ladder and sought to topple it on the heads of the enemy who climbed it. And in each case, she saw the death that followed: the extinguishing, as Zuleika had said, of all hope and all possibility.

  Imtisar’s end she also saw. Equivocating to the last, the old politician had set a banquet for herself in the Jidur, on a carpet she, Jumanah and Najla hauled laboriously from her own house. Wine and fruit there was, and honeyed cake. She took a tearful farewell of the younger women, who would die together at the wall an hour later, and settled herself on the most comfortable of the seats. When the soldiers arrived she was eating a piece of cake. She raised her eyes and greeted them with a level gaze.

  ‘I enjoy our plenty to the last,’ she told them sternly. ‘But all you locusts will eat is dust.’

  The nearest man clubbed her down with the pommel of his sword. Another man ran her through with a spear, and she died there, on the spot where she had made so many speeches. Her blood ran as freely as her words had run, and had its own eloquence.

  The soldiers ignored the fruit, but stopped to share the jug of wine – which Imtisar had diluted with water freshly drawn from a well by the Western Gate. By the time they flung the jug down to shatter on the pink stones, the gripes had already begun in their stomachs and some had fallen to their knees. They died in the same place as their victim, but in a manner more protracted.

  All these things Rem saw, with the clarity of certain fact. But Zuleika’s death she could not see: a veil hung over it, as it hung over all things that were too close to Rem’s own fate to be disentangled from it. The thought that Zuleika might be dying right then, and she herself walking away from her, her face resolutely set in the opposite direction, was like the heated tip of a poker in her mind, stirring her thoughts into burning steam.

  She had reasoned it out. Zuleika needed to know that her beloved was safe, and would be made stronger by that knowledge. For that reason alone, Rem had agreed to leave. But the belief
would bolster Zuleika just as well if it were false; and if Zuleika were to die as she purposed, the world could afford Rem no better comfort than to die in the same place, as soon afterwards as was possible, and so to lie with the woman she loved in death as she had lain with her in life.

  So at the end of that first day, when the refugee column had made camp beside the oasis known as Al Teif, Rem slipped away. She intended to walk back to Bessa, and to do so alone, but she had not gone a hundred paces from the camp when she realised that she was followed.

  Turning, she saw Anwar Das. He held the reins of two camels.

  ‘My part in this is played,’ he said gravely. ‘I’m not needed here. And like you, lady, I find it hard to walk away from a fight before it’s finished. Will it please you to take the larger of these two beasts? Despite appearances, he is also the more placid of temperament.’

  They rode through the night, sleepless, making up in three hours the distance that had taken them a day to march. From the dunes to the west of Bessa they watched the siege’s last hours, but could not gain entrance until the walls fell and Jamal’s soldiery moved from the plain into the city. Then they crept down, having tethered their camels to the remains of one of the attacking army’s ruined war machines, and made their ingress through the Water Gate (which had now been breached for the second time).

  Anwar Das had no clear goal in mind. He meant to help the defenders if he could, and to stand by their side. Finding no defenders left, he was uncertain how to proceed. But Rem headed at a run to the square where Zuleika was, and Das followed her at a distance. His dagger it was that took through the heart the man who tried to kill Rem at spear-point. The brightness of the flames concealed both his blade and his position.

  And at last, when Nussau and his men had fled, and the two women were alone, he came out and joined them.