The Tiger Queens Page 33

  I tucked a stray tendril of hair beneath my head scarf and settled into Mansoor’s favorite chair, vacillating between reading the illuminated verses of Nishapur’s famous poet Omar Khayyám and dabbling with my brushes and ink while I waited for my men to return. The book and my writing remained untouched as my eyelids grew heavy and I drifted toward dreams, seeing Mansoor walking away from me with a sad smile on his face. My hold on the inkpot loosened, and the glass bottle fell and shattered, fingers of black ink spreading across the turquoise tiles. I stood to summon a slave to clean the mess but started as a feral scream rent the air, gooseflesh rolling down my skin as the terrible sound crescendoed like the trumpet blast that would herald the Day of Arising.

  Heart pounding, I ran to the edge of the balcony. Our home sat near the city walls, perfectly situated to capture the cool mountain breezes in the summer, but now the streets were choked with people fleeing toward the center of town, veiled mothers tucking precious children under their arms and wives clutching their husbands’ hands as they stumbled away from certain death.

  Mongol horsemen, multiplied like locusts, swarmed over the hills.

  And the walls.

  Last winter we’d watched the Mongol hordes descend upon us as the trees shed their last leaves. The heathen warlords had demanded our empire’s surrender before they shed our blood, but the sultan ordered the massacre of their first emissaries, and their second envoys were humiliated by having their beards shaved in the streets and the Khan’s gifts of camels and silver seized. The third messenger from Genghis Khan bore only a letter of four words:

  You have chosen war.

  Still, we did not worry, for the Khwarazmian Empire was ancient and strong, surely more powerful than a group of filthy soldiers dressed in squirrel skins and reeking of horses. Then came the news that Genghis Khan had captured and executed the governor of Otrar, dragging him screaming from the city’s citadel and pouring molten silver down his nose and throat. The Mongols had arrived at Nishapur soon after and demanded our surrender outside the great Gate of the Silversmiths with its massive panels of beaten metal and turquoise studs. During those tense hours, the words of Omar Khayyám’s famous poem Rubáiyát had replayed over and over in my mind.

  Awake! For morning in the Bowl of Night

  Has flung the stone that puts the stars to flight:

  And Lo! The Hunter of the East has caught

  The Sultan’s Turret in a Noose of Life.

  At our refusal of their terms, the sun had swallowed the moon in a ring of fire and one of our soldiers launched the fateful arrow that lodged in the heart of a young Mongol general bedecked in a horsehair helmet. We learned later that he was the husband of Al-Altun, Genghis Khan’s youngest daughter from a lesser wife, but the swarms of dreaded horsemen fled after his fall, leaving us in stunned peace. Afterward, Father claimed we should leave the city in case the Khan of Khans ordered the heathens to return, but Mansoor’s position as vice-governor of Nishapur required his presence. I refused to abandon my husband or the city of my birth, to forsake my mother’s grave and the memories of walking with her to the bazaar to buy saffron for the ash-e soup my father adored.

  Nishapur had celebrated after the Mongols fled, people filling the streets and claiming that the moon was like the Mongol hordes, too small to swallow the sun of our turquoise city. We didn’t realize then that the ring of sun fire wasn’t a sign of our victory, but an omen of our impending doom.

  My knees buckled as I realized we were under attack for a second time, and for a moment I thought to hide. Instead, I hesitated, running downstairs to order in a calm voice that the slaves go to the cellar. Then I vacillated over whether I should try to find Mansoor or bar the doors against the barbarian invaders. I moaned aloud to think of the Mongols in our house, stealing our silver candelabra, tramping across the silken carpets, and tearing apart the leather-bound Qur’an passed down through the generations of Mansoor’s family.

  But none of that would matter if I died. Or if Mansoor died.

  The Mongols had already cut a bloody swath through Nishapur by the time I finally tripped down the stairs and burst barefoot into the chaos. The burly baker from the shop down the street knocked me into the wall, his arms coated with flour and eyes ravaged with shock and grief. I gasped to see his wife’s broken body in his arms, her veil torn away and glazed eyes open in death. A boy stumbled past, holding his stomach as if about to be sick. He stopped, eyes unseeing as he grabbed my arm and bent double to cough. The spray of crimson that spattered my own veil matched the blood seeping between his fingers. I shook him off and fought against the current of terror to elbow my way toward the mosque.

  Screams came from inside the tiled walls. I jumped back when the iron gates were flung open, and men in prayer caps were cut down by wild-eyed Mongols dressed in filthy furs and leather vests stained with years of blood. Pages of the Qur’an fluttered in the air, its sacred verses shredded by swords and spattered with crimson. I fell to the ground, feigning death despite my pounding heart, while men around me screamed to Allah and the Mongols barked unintelligible commands. I dared not move and give myself away. It seemed an eternity before the sounds of pounding hooves and swords against bone finally moved on and I was able to stumble to the gates amidst the groans of dying men. Inside, the sacred grounds were trampled with sacrilegious dirt and blood.

  So much blood.

  I recoiled from the unholy sight. Men lay sprawled on their prayer mats, limbs splayed, with arrows and spear shafts embedded in their chests. One man rolled in agony, frothy red bubbles at his mouth as he clutched his abdomen. A quarrel with spotted feathers protruded from his stomach, but his blood-slicked hands slipped as he tried to pull it away. I could feel the life draining from him, his tortured soul straining to greet Allah.

  “Help me,” he moaned. “Please.”

  I turned away, making the sign against the evil eye with one hand. I was a coward, unwilling to speed a dying man to his death. Instead, I ran through the mosque, my bare feet leaving a trail of red footprints in my wake, further desecrating the holy ground.

  Every step brought me to a new body; every stranger’s face twisted with death gave me hope that my father and Mansoor had escaped the carnage. Something caught my eye at the base of the mihrab, the tall arched niche directing the faithful toward Makkah and closer to Allah.

  The dull gleam of red silk on the floor, interwoven with gold.

  An animal moan escaped my lips and I fell to my knees, crawling toward the precious bare head scattered with brown spots and wisps of gray hair. My father’s prayer rug was drenched with blood, his body laid out as if awaiting a shroud. The flesh at his neck had been sliced open so that his blood wrapped around his neck like a winter scarf and his unseeing eyes still stared in shock at the face of his killer. I pressed my fist to my lips, muffling my howl as I crouched low and rocked on my heels.

  “Fatima.”

  I gasped and looked to the crumpled form that uttered my name. Mansoor lay curled on his side, face pale and body shaking. I crawled to my beautiful husband and pulled his head into my lap, my fingers fluttering against his chest. We had sat like this only days ago in the garden, a moment of everyday happiness among the jasmine and tulips. Now a nightmare surrounded us.

  “I tried to help him,” Mansoor said, “but it happened so fast—”

  He was wracked with coughing, flecks of shiny blood spraying my yellow robe. An alarming trickle of red slipped down his lips to his chin, the same lips that had kissed me so tenderly only that morning.

  “Everything will be all right.” I glanced around frantically, but Mansoor’s hand closed on mine, cold and clammy. I recognized the unmistakable brush of death from my mother’s last moments.

  “Run, Fatima,” he whispered, more blood trickling from his lips. “Before the heathens find you. Hide in the cellar—you’ll be safe there.”

 
I shook my head violently, touching his lips with my fingers and catching the scent of the mint leaves he loved to chew, mixed with the copper tang of blood that made my stomach revolt. “I won’t leave you.”

  “You must,” he said, his hand brushing my cheek beneath my veil. “Live for both of us, Fatima, and I’ll meet you in the gardens of Jannah.”

  “You won’t,” I sobbed, for, unbeknownst to anyone, I had damned my soul the night my mother died. It was not Mansoor and the gardens of Jannah that I would see in the afterlife, but the hellfires of Jahannam. “Don’t you dare leave me.”

  But the life faded from Mansoor’s eyes, his soul gathered into death’s waiting arms to return to Allah’s glorious light. And I was left behind, a widow wearing the blood of both my father and my husband, wreathed by a courtyard full of corpses and dying men.

  * * *

  I hid not in the dankness of our cellar like some hunted vermin, but instead, scarcely able to see through my kohl-stained tears, I stumbled up the steps of the minbar to where the cleric would lead the faithful in their prayers. The white-bearded imam was still there, his body sprawled facedown on the steps. I muttered my apologies as I stepped over him, then curled into myself at the top of the platform, shielding my ears from the screams of battle and the cries of dying men that filtered through the windows along with the sun. The world had come undone, but I would wait until darkness fell and then wash Mansoor’s and my father’s bodies so they would be prepared to greet Allah.

  I wished for sleep, but grief and terror kept my body taut, leaving me to alternate between a terrible numbness and fearful tremors that threatened to crack my teeth. When darkness finally fell I picked my way over the imam to the fountains. Silence shrouded my once-proud city as if it had been abandoned, and the water had stopped for the first time I could remember. The Mongols had been known to divert entire rivers to besiege cities; they must have cut off Nishapur’s water supply.

  For a moment I almost despaired—the bodies of my beloved and my father must be washed and arranged before they could greet Allah. Yet gleaming at the bottom of the cheerful turquoise-and-white tiles was water not yet drained or evaporated, still containing the impurities and prayers of men now dead. I removed my head scarf and veil, letting them absorb the water and grimacing as my husband’s blood seeped from my hands into the water, smoky red tendrils reaching out to brush the sides of the fountain.

  I bathed my father and Mansoor as best I could, but none of my ministrations could wash away all the bloodstains and nothing could mend the wound in my father’s neck to make him whole again. I kept the brush that I found in Mansoor’s pocket, its wooden tip marred with sharp grooves where he’d bit it absentmindedly while reconciling accounts only last night. My father’s pocket contained a small silk bag with the last of my mother’s narcissus bulbs. The innocent blossoms would be downy white with a crimson-gold corona, and the fragrance when they bloomed seemed sent by the angels themselves. Yet the bulbs . . .

  The bulbs of the poet narcissus were lethal, inducing vomiting with the slightest taste and death with the merest bite. I knew not when I would need them, but I recognized the gift from my parents and from Allah.

  There was no linen with which to wrap the bodies, but I rolled my father and Mansoor onto their right sides toward Makkah and tore my veil in half to cover their faces, praying that Allah would forgive the hasty preparations as he’d done for the victims of the ancient Battle of Uhud. My men would have been dead a full day by the time the sun reached its zenith, the longest a body could be left aboveground without facing penalties in the hereafter. Surely Allah would show mercy on their souls.

  The din of battle seemed to have died along with the sun, and I swayed on my feet to see the hungry flies gathered on the eyes and wounds of the dead. Standing under the empty dome of the mosque, I threw three handfuls of earth I’d stolen from under the rosebushes in the mosque’s courtyard onto the bodies of my husband and father.

  “Inna lillaahi wa inna ilayhi Raaji‘oon,” I said, intoning the prayer of death as the black dirt crumbled over their hearts.

  To Allah we belong and to Allah we return.

  The verse fell empty from my lips, but I repeated it until the words ran together and the leering moon crept from behind a cloud. Still, the words did nothing to lighten the weight of my grief. Trapped within the city walls and unable to leave the men I loved, I took up Mansoor’s calligraphy brush.

  I was still writing when dawn warmed the sky and footsteps entered the mosque, my delicate calligraphy made of their blood decorating the tiles around their bodies with the stories of their lives. Terrible laughter bubbled in my throat several times as I thought of how I must appear, my hair wild while I painted with blood, but I had nowhere else to go, nothing else to do. I stood on the precipice of madness, unsure whether to stay where I was or to jump into the yawning abyss.

  The footsteps stopped behind me, but I cared little if a Mongol heathen stood poised to loose an arrow at me. I thought of Mansoor’s final words, and at that moment, I knew not whether I wanted to live or to die.

  The intruder hovered behind me and my every muscle tensed, waiting for the inevitable blow.

  Instead, the man spoke to me in my native Farsi. “Stand,” he ordered.

  I didn’t move. I recalled stories of cities vanquished by the Mongol horsemen, of the men slaughtered and women and children distributed as wives and slaves. The heathen repeated himself, but still I didn’t move. It wasn’t until the sharp tip of his hooked lance prodded my ribs that I turned.

  There was not one man, but two, although the second was scarcely more than a boy, with his lanky arms and faint shadow of a mustache. The fur ruff on the first man’s helmet stood motionless in the mosque’s foul air, but the hoops in his ears and the golden ring in his nose gleamed in the moonlight. He poked me again and motioned toward the arched entrance.

  “Come,” he said, glancing at the two bodies behind me. “There’s nothing more you can do for them now.”

  I looked down at my father and Mansoor, thinking to throw myself on the man’s lance, but my insides turned to water at the thought of feeling the weapon lodge itself in my belly, the soldier yanking it out covered in my blood, laughing as I died.

  I was a coward.

  Panic threatened to bring me to my knees at the thought of leaving the men I loved, but the Mongol prodded me more gently. Later I would wonder whether it was the instinct to survive that moved me or whether divine grace—or perhaps punishment—kept me on my feet.

  The soldier herded me into a deserted alley, but the younger one’s face lacked conviction when he pointed his curved sword at me. A waterfall of early jasmine blossoms poured from a white balcony overhead, an oasis of beauty amidst the bloody chaos. At the end of the alley, another Mongol released his waters in a foul yellow stream, grinning widely.

  He urinated on the body of a slain Persian woman.

  The foul beast glanced at me and licked his lips over two rows of crooked teeth before he turned and continued urinating. The tall soldier pushed me out of the alley and into the soft spring sunshine, so at odds with the carnage all around me in the streets.

  Bodies. The sight of bodies filled my vision, their blank eyes staring at me and skin shining like wax in the early sunlight.

  I almost stumbled over a broken old man with limbs bent at wrong angles. I wondered fleetingly if some had managed to escape, but the images of the dead overwhelmed me so I could no longer think.

  I looked to the sky then, letting the soldier prod me through the streets, past the blue-domed roof of the tomb of famed poet-astronomer Omar Khayyám, and up the steps to the city walls, snippets of prayers tumbling through my mind. My life was in Allah’s hands now, as it had ever been.

  We walked along the ramparts, the breeze lashing my tangled hair about my face and heavy with the smell of rain soon to come. We drew to a hal
t above the Gate of the Silversmiths, still studded with the scaling ladders the Mongols had used to penetrate the walls. Before me stood two commanders, their backs to us as they gestured to the plain before the city, situated between Mount Binalud in the distance and the pear and apricot orchards that bordered the walls. I saw then where the survivors had gone, not escaped but herded like beasts awaiting slaughter. The Mongols had taken Nishapur, but they weren’t finished with it, or its people.

  The soldier behind me spoke again, addressing the generals, and I would have gaped had I not already been so battered by the events of the day. These were no ordinary commanders, but women dressed as soldiers. One was scarcely more than a child, with high cheekbones and full lips, yet her belly was swollen in the final months of pregnancy and her eyes were hard under her furred helmet. The other was slight and closer to my mother’s age, but I felt as if death wrapped its hand around my heart when she leveled her mismatched eyes at me; it was akin to staring into the gaze of an angry djinn.

  The soldier repeated himself, but the pregnant one turned her back to us. The other lifted my hands to inspect my fingers, stained with blood.