Amin Maalouf - Samarkand

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.’

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.