Amin Maalouf - Samarkand

As he returned home accompanied by Vartan, Omar inveighed against court life with its snares and time-wasting, promising himself that he would leave Merv as soon as possible; his disciple was not too concerned as it was the seventh time that his master had threatened to leave; as a rule, he was much calmer the next day having taken up his research again, and that was the appropriate time to console him.

That evening, back in his room, Omar wrote in his book a vexed quatrain which ended as follows:

Swap your turban for some wine

And without regrets, put on a woollen hat!

Then he slipped the manuscript into its usual hiding place, between the bed and the wall. When he woke up, he wanted to re-read his rubai since one word seemed to him out of place. He groped about and grasped the book. It was as he opened it that he discovered the letter from Hassan Sabbah which had been slipped between the two pages as he slept.

In an instant Omar recognized the writing and the nomenclature agreed upon between them forty years earlier: The friend from the caravansary at Kashan.’ As he read it he could not help bursting out laughing. Vartan, who was just waking up in his adjoining room came in to see what was amusing his master so much after his ill feelings of the night before.

‘We have just received a generous invitation. We can be lodged, protected and have all our expenses looked after until the end of our lives.’

‘By which great prince?’

‘The prince of Alamut.’

Vartan jumped. He felt guilty.

‘How could the letter have got here? I checked all the doors and windows before I went to lie down!’

‘Do not try to find out. Sultans and Caliphs themselves have given up protecting themselves. When Hassan decides to send you a message or a dagger’s blade, you can be certain of receiving it whether your doors are wide open or padlocked.’

The disciple held the letter to his moustache, sniffed it noisily and then read and re-read it.

‘That demon may well have a point,’ he concluded. ‘It is indeed at Alamut that your safety would be best assured. After all, Hassan is your oldest friend.’

‘For the moment, my oldest friend is the new wine of Merv!’

With childish glee, Omar set to tearing up the sheet of paper into a multitude of little pieces which he threw up in the air. As he watched them flutter down, he started to speak again:

‘What do we have in common, this man and I? I worship life and he worships death. I write: “If you cannot love, what use is the rising and the setting of the sun?” Hassan demands his men to give no heed to love, music, poetry, wine or the sun. He despises the most beautiful things in all creation, yet he dares pronounce the name of the Creator — and to promise people paradise! Believe you me, if his fortress were the gateway of paradise, I would renounce paradise! I shall never set foot in that den of pious shams.’

Vartan sat down and had a good scratch of his neck before saying, in the most exhausted of voices:

‘If that is your response then the time has come for me to reveal to you a secret which has been kept too long. Have you never wondered why the soldiers let us pass through so easily when we fled from Isfahan?’

‘It has always intrigued me, but since I have seen nothing but loyalty, devotion and filial affection from you for years, I have not wished to stir up the past.’

‘That day, the officers of the Nizamiya knew that I was going to save you and leave with you. That was part of a strategy which I had drawn up.’

Before carrying on, he served his master, and himself, a useful glass of grenadine wine.

‘You do know that the list of outlaws set up by Nizam al-Mulk contained the name of one man whom we had never managed to reach — Hassan Sabbah. Was he not the man principally responsible for the assassination? My plan was simple: to leave with you in the hope that you would take refuge in Alamut. I would have accompanied you, asking you not to reveal my identity and I would have found an occasion to rid the Muslims and the entire world of that demon. However, you have stubbornly refused to set foot in the dark fortress.’

‘Yet you stayed by my side all this time.’

‘At the beginning I thought I would just have to be patient and that when you had been chased out of fifteen cities in succession you would resign yourself to taking the road to Alamut. Then, as the years passed, I grew attached to you, my companions have been dispersed to the four corners of the empire and my determination has wavered. See now how Omar Khayyam has saved Hassan Sabbah’s life a second time.’

‘Do not bewail it — it may well be your life that I have saved.’

‘In truth he must be very well protected in his hideout.’

Vartan could not suppress all traces of bitterness, which amused Khayyam.

‘Having said that, if you had revealed your plan to me, doubtless I would have led you to Alamut.’

The disciple jumped out of his seat.

‘Is that the truth?’

‘No. Sit yourself down! I only said that to give you cause for regret! In spite of all the evil Hassan has managed to commit, if I were to see him drowning in the River Murghab I would offer him my hand in help.’

‘Well I would shove his head down under the water! However, your attitude gives me some comfort, and it is just because you are capable of such words and acts that I chose to stay in your company. And I do not regret that.’

Khayyam gave his disciple a long hug.

‘I am happy that my doubts about you have been dispelled. I am old now and need to know that I have a trusty man at my side — because of the manuscript. That it is the most precious thing I possess. In order to take on the world Hassan Sabbah has built Alamut, whereas I have only constructed this minuscule paper castle, but I choose to believe that it will outlive Alamut. Nothing frightens me more than to think that upon my death my manuscript could fall into careless or malevolent hands.’

In an almost offhand manner he held the secret book out to Vartan:

‘You may open it, since you will be its guardian.’

The disciple was moved.

‘Would anyone else have had this privilege before me?’

‘Two people. Jahan, after a quarrel in Samarkand, and Hassan when we were living in the same room upon our arrival in Isfahan.

‘You trusted him to that extent?’

‘To tell you the truth, I did not. However, I often wanted to write and he ended up noticing the manuscript. I preferred to show it to him myself since, anyhow, he could have read it behind my back. Moreover, I deemed him capable of keeping a secret.’

‘He really does know how to keep a secret — the better to use it against you.’

Henceforth the manuscript would spend its night in Vartan’s room. At the slightest noise the former officer would be bolt upright, brandishing his sword, his ears pricked up; he would check every room in the house and then go out to make a round of the garden. Upon his return he would not always be able to fall asleep again and so would light a lamp on his table, read a quatrain which he would memorize and then indefatigably go over it in his head to draw out its most profound meanings and to try and guess under what circumstances his master had been able to write it.

At the end of a string of disturbed nights, an idea took shape in his thoughts which received Omar’s hearty approval: to write the manuscript’s history in the margins of the Rubaiyaat and through this device the history of Khayyam himself, his childhood in Nishapur, his youth in Samarkand, his fame in Isfahan, his meetings with Abu Taher, Jahan, Hassan, Nizam and many others. Thus it was, under Khayyam’s supervision, and sometimes with him dictating the words, that the first pages of the chronicle were written. Vartan threw himself into it, writing each phrase down ten or fifteen times on a loose sheet before transcribing it, in a thin, angular and laborious hand — which, one day, was brutally interrupted in the middle of a phrase.