by Amin Maalouf
This work of Khayyam’s was completed at Samarkand and dedicated to his protector: ‘We are the victims of an age in which men of science are discredited and very few of them have the possibility of committing themselves to real research. The little knowledge that today’s intellectuals have is devoted to the pursuit of material aims. I had thus despaired of finding in this world a man as interested in the scientific as the mundane, a man preoccupied by the fate of mankind, until God accorded me the favour of meeting the great qadi, the Imam Abu Taher. His favours permitted me to devote myself to these works.’
That night, when he went back toward the belvedere which was serving him as a house, Khayyam did not take a lamp with him, telling himself that it was too late to read or write. However, his path was only faintly illuminated by the moon, a frail crescent at the end of the month of shawwal. As he walked further from the qadi’s villa, he had to grope his way along. He tripped more than once, held on to the bushes and took the grim caress of a weeping willow full in the face.
He had hardly reached his room when he heard a voice of sweet reproach. ‘I was expecting you earlier.’
Had he thought about this woman so much that he now believed he could hear her? As he stood in front of the door, which he slowly closed, he tried to make out a silhouette. In vain, for only the voice broke through again, audible yet hazy.
‘You are keeping quiet. You refuse to believe that a woman could dare to force her way into your room like this. In the palace our eyes met and lit up, but the Khan was there as well as the qadi and the court and you averted your eyes. Like so many men, you chose not to stop. What good is it to defy fate, what good is it to attract the wrath of a prince just for a woman, a widow who can only bring you as a dowry a sharp tongue and a dubious reputation?’
Omar felt restrained by some mysterious power and could neither move nor loosen his lips.
‘You are saying nothing,’ commented Jahan with gentle irony. ‘Oh well, I’ll go on speaking on my own, and anyway I am the only one who has made the move so far. When you left the court, I asked after you and learned where you live. I gave out that I was going to stay with a cousin who is married to a rich Samarkand merchant. Ordinarily when I move about with the court, I go and sleep with the harem where I have some friends who appreciate my company. They devour the stories I being them. They do not see me as a rival as they know that I have no desire to be a wife to the Khan. I could have seduced him, but I have spent too much time with kings’ spouses for such a fate to tempt me. Life, for me, is so much more important than men! As long as I am someone else’s wife, or no one’s, the sovereign loves to show me off in his diwan with my verses and my laughter. If ever he dreamt of marrying me, he would start by locking me up.’
Emerging with difficulty from his torpor, Omar had grasped nothing of Jahan’s words, and, when he decided to utter his first words, he was speaking less to her than to himself, or to a shade:
‘How often, as an adolescent, or later, have I received a look or a smile. At night I would dream that that look became corporeal, turned into flesh, a woman, a dazzling sight in the dark. Suddenly, in the dark of this night, in this unreal pavilion, in this unreal city, you are here – a beautiful woman, a poetess moreover, and available.’
She laughed.
‘Available! How do you know? You have not even touched me, you have not seen me, and doubtless you will not see me since I shall depart well before the sun chases me away.’
In the dense darkness there was a disorderly rustle of silk and a whiff of perfume. Omar held his breath, his body was aroused. He could not help asking with the naïveté of a schoolboy:
‘Are you still wearing your veil?’
‘The only veil I am wearing is the night.’
CHAPTER 6
A woman and a man. The anonymous painter imagined them in profile, stretched out and intertwined. He took away the walls of the pavilion, gave them a bed of grass with a border of roses and made a silvery brook flow at their feet. He gave Jahan the shapely breasts of a Hindu deity. Omar caresses her hair with one hand and holds a goblet in the other.
Every day at the palace their paths would cross, but they avoided looking at each other lest they give themselves away. Every evening Khayyam would dash back to the pavilion to await his beloved. How many nights had fate granted them? Everything depended on the sovereign. When he decamped Jahan would follow. He never announced anything in advance. One morning this nomad’s son would jump up onto his charger and set out for Bukhara, Kish or Panjikent and the court would be thrown into panic trying to catch up with him. Omar and Jahan dreaded this moment and their every kiss carried with it a taste of farewell, their every embrace a breathless flight.
On one of the most oppressive summer nights, Khayyam had gone out to wait on the terrace of the belvedere, when he heard the qadi’s guards laughing from what seemed very close by and he became uneasy, but for no reason, since Jahan arrived and reassured him that no one had noticed her. They exchanged a first furtive kiss, followed by another more intense. That was how they rounded off a day during which they belonged to others and started off on a night which belonged to them.
‘In this city how many lovers do you think there are who at this very moment are being united like us?’ Jahan whispered impishly. Omar adjusted his nightcap learnedly and puffed out his cheeks and spoke wistfully:
‘Let us consider this carefully: if we exclude bored spouses, obedient slaves, street girls selling or hiring themselves out and sighing virgins, how many woman are there left, how many women are there being united with the man they have chosen? In the same fashion, how many men will sleep next to a woman they love, a woman who gives herself to them for some reason other than that they have no choice? Who knows, tonight in Samarkand there is perhaps only one such man and one such woman. Why you and why me, you will say? Because God has made us fall in love just as he has made certain flowers poisonous.’
He laughed and she let her tears flow.
‘Let us go in and shut the door. They will be able to hear our happiness.’
Many caresses later, Jahan sat up, half covered herself and gently extricated herself from her lover’s embrace.
‘I must pass on to you a secret which I have from the Khan’s senior wife. Do you know why he is in Samarkand?’
Omar stopped her, thinking it would be some harem tittle-tattle.
‘The secrets of princes do not interest me. They burn the ears of those who listen to them.’
‘Just hear me out. This secret affects us too, since it can disrupt our lives. Nasr Khan has come to inspect the fortifications. At the end of the summer, when the intense heat has subsided, he is expecting an attack by the Seljuk army.’
The Seljuks, Khayyam knew them. They peopled his first memories of childhood. Well before they became the masters of Muslim Asia, they had laid into the city of his birth and left behind, for generations, the memory of the Great Fear.
That had taken place ten years before he was born. The people of Nishapur had woken up one morning to find their city completely encircled by the Turkish warriors, headed by two brothers, Tughrul Beg the Falcon and his brother Tchagri Beg the Hawk, sons of Mikhael son of Seljuk, at the time obscure nomadic chieftains who had only recently been converted to Islam. A message came to the city’s notables: ‘It is told that your men are proud and that you have sweet water running in underground canals. If you attempt to resist us, your canals will soon be open to the heavens and your men will be in the ground.’
This was the type of bragging which was frequent at the time of a siege. The notables of Nishapur nevertheless made speed to capitulate in return for a promise that the inhabitants’ lives would be spared and that their goods, houses and canals would be safe. But of what value are the promises of a conqueror? When the horde entered the city, Tchagri wanted to loose his men in the streets and the bazaar. Tughrul was of a different opinion, wanting the month of Ramadan to be honoured, during which period of fasting a
city of Islam could not be pillaged. This argument won the day, but Tchagri was not disarmed and he resigned himself to waiting until the population was no longer in a state of grace.
When the citizens got wind of the dispute between the two brothers and realized that at the beginning of the coming month they would be handed over to be pillaged, raped and massacred, that was start of the Great Fear. Worse than rape is the announcement of impending rape, combined with a passive and humiliating wait for the unavoidable. The stalls emptied, men went to ground and their wives and daughters saw them bewail their impotence. What could they do, how could they flee, by what route? The occupier was everywhere. Soldiers with braided hair lurked in the bazaar of the Grand Square, the various districts of the city and its suburbs, the area around the Burnt Gate. They were constantly drunk and on the lookout for ransom or plunder, and their disorderly hordes infested the neighbouring countryside.
Does one not usually desire the fast to come to an end and the feast day to arrive? That year they wanted the fast to go on forever and hoped that the Feast of Breaking would never come. When the crescent moon of the new month was spotted, no one thought to rejoice or to slit the throat of a lamb. The whole city felt like a gigantic lamb fattened for slaughter.
The night before the feast, this night when every wish is granted, was a night of agony, tears and prayers spent by thousands of families in the precarious shelter of mosques, and the mausoleums of saints.
In the citadel, there was now a stormy discussion raging between the Seljuk brothers. Tchagri shouted that his men had not been paid for months, and that they had only agreed to fight because they had been promised a free hand in this opulent city, that they were on the verge of revolt and that he, Tchagri, could no longer hold them back.
Tughrul spoke another language:
‘We are only at the start of our conquests. There are so many cities to take, Isfahjan, Shiraz, Ray, Tabriz and others further on. If we pillage Nishapur after it has surrendered, after all our promises, no other gate will open for us, no other garrison will show any weakness.’
‘How will we be able to conquer all those cities of which you are dreaming if we lose our army and our men abandon us? The most loyal are already complaining and threatening.’
The two brothers were surrounded by their lieutenants and the elders of the clan who unanimously confirmed Tchagri’s words. Encouraged by this, he rose and decided to bring things to a conclusion:
‘We have spoken too much. I am going to tell my men to do as they wish with the city. If you wish to restrain your men, do so. To each of us his own troops.’
Caught on the horns of a dilemma, he did not move. Suddenly he sprang away from them and grabbed a dagger.
Tchagri, for his part, had also unsheathed his sword. No one knew whether to intervene or, as was the custom, let the Seljuk brothers settle their difference with blood, when Tughrul called out:
‘Brother, I cannot force you to obey me. I cannot restrain your men, but if you set them on the city I will plant this dagger in my heart.’
As he said that he clutched the handle of the dagger with both hands and pointed the blade down toward his chest. His brother hesitated little, but walked toward him with his arms open and gave him a long embrace, promising not to go against his will. Nishapur was saved, but it would never forget the Great Fear of Ramadan.
CHAPTER 7
‘That is how the Seljuks are,’ Khayyam observed. ‘Uneducated looters and enlightened sovereigns who are capable of great meanness and sublime gestures. Tughrul Beg above all had the temperament of an empire builder. I was three years old when he took Isfahan and ten years old when he conquered Baghdad, imposing himself as the protector of the Caliph and wheedling out of him the title of ‘Sultan, King of the East and West’ and at seventy marrying the Prince of the Believers’ very own daughter.’
Omar recounted in a tone of admiration, perhaps with even a touch of solemnity, but Jahan let out a very irreverent laugh. He was offended and gave her a sharp look, unable to understand this sudden hilarity. She excused herself and explained:
‘When you mentioned the marriage, I remembered what they told me in the harem.’
Omar vaguely remembered the episode whose every detail Jahan had greedily retained.
When he received the message from Tughrul demanding the hand of his daughter Sayyida, the Caliph had become wild with rage. The emissary of the Sultan had hardly withdrawn before he exploded:
‘This Turk who has just stepped out from his yurt! This Turk whose fathers in the very recent past were still worshipping some idol or another and who painted pigs’ snouts on their standards! How dare he demand in marriage the daughter of the Prince of the Believers, descendant of the most noble lineage?’
If he was trembling so violently in all his august limbs it was because he knew that he could not deflect the claim. After months of hesitation and two messages of appeal, he ended up by formulating a reply. One of his old counsellors was charged with conveying it and he left for the city of Ray, whose ruins are still visible in the area of Teheran. Tughrul’s court was there.
The Caliph’s emissary was first of all received by the Vizir who confronted him with these words:
‘The Sultan’s patience is running out and he is harassing me. I am happy that you at last have arrived with a reply.’
‘You will be less happy when you hear it: the Prince of Believers begs you to excuse him for not being able to accede to the demand which has been put to him.’
The Vizir did not seem particularly concerned. He continued to finger his jade worry-beads.
‘And so,’ he said, ‘you are going to walk down this corridor and go through that tall doorway and announce to the master of Iraq, Fars, Khorassan and Azerbaijan, to the conqueror of Asia, the sword who defends the true Religion, to the protector of the Abbassid throne: “No, the Caliph will not give you his daughter!” Very well. This guard will show you the way.’
The latter presented himself and the emissary arose to follow him, when the Vizir added innocuously:
‘I assume, wise man that you are, that you have paid your debts, shared out your fortune among your sons and married off all your daughters!’
The emissary sat back down, suddenly exhausted.
‘What do you advise me to do?’
‘Did the Caliph give you no other directive, no other way of settling affairs?’
‘He told me that if there was really no way of escaping from this marriage, he wished for three hundred thousand gold dinars as compensation.’
‘There we have already a better way of proceeding. However, I do not think it is reasonable for him to ask for compensation after all that the Sultan has done for the Caliph, after he had brought him back to the city whence the Shiites had chased him, after he had restored to him his wealth and his territory. We could reach the same result without offending Tughrul Beg. You will tell him that the Caliph offers him his daughter’s hand, and I, for my part, will make use of the moment of intense satisfaction to suggest that he gives a gift of dinars commensurate to such a personage.’
That was what happened. The Sultan, in a state of excitement, put together a great convoy comprising the Vizir, several princes, dozens of officers and dignitaries, and aged female relatives with hundreds of guards and slaves who carried to Baghdad for him presents of great value – camphor, myrrh, brocade and boxes full of gems as well as a hundred thousand pieces of gold.
The Caliph held an audience for the principal members of the delegation and exchanged polite but amorphous greetings. Then, during his talk with the Sultan’s Vizir, he told him bluntly that the marriage did not have his consent and that if they tried to coerce him he would leave Baghdad.
‘If that is the stance of the Prince of Believers, why did he propose an arrangement in dinars?’
‘I could not simply turn him down with a single “no”. I hoped that the Sultan would understand by my attitude that he could not obtain such a sacrific
e from me. I can tell you that no other Sultans, be they Turks or Persians, have ever demanded such a thing from a Caliph. I must defend my honour!’
‘Several months ago, when I felt that your response might be negative, I tried to prepare the Sultan. I explained to him that no one before him had ever dared to formulate such a request, that it was untraditional and that people would be surprised. I could never dare to repeat what he replied to me.’
‘Speak. Fear not!’
‘May the Prince of Believers excuse me, for those words can never cross my lips.’
The Caliph lost his patience.
‘Speak, I order you. Hide nothing!’
‘The Sultan started by insulting me and accusing me of siding with the Prince of Believers against him … He threatened to have me put in irons …’
The Vizir stuttered deliberately.
‘Get to the point. Tell me what Tughrul Beg said?’
‘The Sultan yelled: “What a strange clan those Abbassids are! Their ancestors conquered the best half of the world, they built the most flourishing cities and just look at them today! I take their empire and they put up with that. I take their capital and they are happy, they shower me with presents and the Prince of Believers says to me, ‘I give you all the lands which God has given to me and I place in your hands all the believers whose fate He has entrusted to me.’ He begs me to put his palace, his person and his harem under my protection. However, if I ask for his daughter, he rises up and wishes to defend his honour. Is the only territory for which the Sultan is ready to fight the thighs of a virgin?”’
The Caliph choked and could not utter a word. The Vizir made the most of this to conclude the message.
‘The Sultan added, “Go and tell them that I will take that girl the way I took this empire, the way I took Baghdad!”’