Equal of the Sun (47 page)

I looked at Balamani’s thick, knotted fingers and thought about how those very hands had carried the order for my father’s death. Yet the same hands had also massaged my temples when I was ill with a fever and had intervened for me whenever I needed help. Blaming him would be like attacking a messenger who happened to bring bad news.

“Balamani, I owe you nothing but thanks,” I said in a congested voice. “How can I ever repay you for so many years of kindness, oh wise, fearless, and loving friend! You have taught me what it means to be a complete man.”

Tears sprang to Balamani’s eyes. He rinsed his face with the bathwater, his broad shoulders shaking. How lucky I had been that God had sent me to him!

The heat of the bath was making my head swim; the steam in the room obscured my vision. I felt as if I couldn’t breathe. Easing my legs out of the tub, I called to the bath attendant to bring my clothes and handed him a generous tip.

“Javaher, are you all right?” Balamani asked.

“I need air.”

As I left the hammam, I felt a strong urge to visit my father’s grave. I hadn’t been there in years, and now the things I had learned made my spirit long to commune with his.

I passed through the Ali Qapu gate and turned down the Promenade of the Royal Stallions toward my old family home, remembering the day my father’s body had arrived wrapped in a bloody cotton sheet. I didn’t know who lived in the house now and didn’t want to know. After leaving the Friday mosque behind me, I arrived at the cemetery at the southern outskirts of town where my father was buried. At the entrance, I bought rose water from a peddler and went in search of my father. The cemetery had grown since the last time
I had visited, and it took me time to find the granite slab marking his grave.

I called one of the graveside attendants to sweep away the dirt and wash the slab with buckets of water. While he did his work, I heard the cry of birds above me. I looked up and saw a flock of white geese that were leaving on the vanguard of winter for warmer climes.

An old man in a tattered cotton robe approached me. “Shall I recite the Qur’an for you?” he asked in a hoarse voice.

“No, thank you, I will do it myself,” I replied, and gave him a coin anyway.

“Blessings on you and all your children.”

“Thanks, but I don’t have any.” I heard the bitterness in my own voice.

“Trust in God, my good fellow. You shall.”

He sounded so sure of it I almost believed him.

Once he and the grave washer had gone, I closed my eyes and recited prayers for the dead, losing myself in the rhythm and the rhyme of the words. They rolled off my tongue in the crisp air, softening my heart and everything around me.

I crouched on my heels and gazed at my father’s gravestone. He had only been about ten years older than me when he was murdered. It was one thing to be felled by God, through illness or an accident, which we all expect one day or another; it was quite another to be felled by a man.

I sprinkled the rose water on the stone. “May your soul rise to heaven, and may you revel in the reward you deserve,” I whispered.

The flock of geese soared overhead again, crying out as they passed. Looking up at their pure white bodies, I was filled with lightness, as if my father’s soul had just then been freed. In the vastness of the sky, I could feel his warm brown eyes smiling on me.

I heard the call to prayer from a nearby mosque and felt moved to communicate with God. I beckoned to the grave washer and asked for water, a prayer mat, and a tablet of clay from Mecca. After spreading out the mat near my father’s grave, I washed my hands, face, and feet. As I bent low to pray, my heart was full of more things
than I could say. I thanked God for His protection and prayed for His judgment on my soul to be light. I asked Him to look kindly on me because I was a strange creature, one that He had not designed and perhaps did not countenance. Feeling the caress of the tablet of dried earth against my forehead, I prayed for the tenderness and mercy that He showed all his creatures, even the most humbled.

In the bazaar there were always strange creatures like the one-eyed goat that were derided and jeered at, yet I always tried to stroke their noses for a moment or two, because how could they have come to be, without God’s hand? Soldiers returned from wars with missing parts—limbs torn off or eyes gouged out. The old lost the powers they had had as youths, becoming as gnarled as branches and as sedentary as trees. My mother developed a fissure in her heart and was felled by sorrow. God had created perfection in man, but time on earth ate away at him, part by part, until finally nothing remained and he vanished into spirit. Yet there was glory in being half, not whole, glory in the task of it. I thought of a blind man who had recited poetry at court and how he cried out the lines of the
Shahnameh
as if they were seared into his heart, as if the loss of his eyes had allowed him to see more clearly into the soul of the words. He spoke true, truer than a man with eyes could ever speak, and he cracked open the hearts of those who heard his call.

The lines of a poem suddenly blazed within me:

    
Praise, oh praise! Praise for the not-whole

    
Praise for those who stumble along

    
Though wounded in body or soul

    
Praise for the one-legged man

    
Who runs races in his mind

    
Praise for he who sees truth as clear

    
As light, though he is blind

    
Praise for the deaf man who hears nought

    
But the voice of God all the time

    
Praise for the woman forced to trade

    
Her dearest possessions for bread

    
Praise for all who have been cut or lamed

    
Twisted, wrenched, battered, or torn

    
Within or without, whatever the wound

    
Oh praise! For when the soul’s mirror is cleaned

    
Then man becomes spirit while still man.

When I stood up from prayer, my heart finally felt at ease for the first time in twelve years. No doubt it had been my fate to become a eunuch. If I hadn’t, I would never have gotten close enough to Isma‘il Shah to avenge my father.

CHAPTER 8

A STAR PLUMMETS

When Faranak heard that her son had unseated Zahhak, I am certain she threw herself down in prayer and thanked God for his blessings. No doubt she opened her home to the less fortunate and offered a feast to them every day for a week.

If I had been present at the festivities, I would have called the crowd to attention and said this: “Kind Khanoom, there is more to this story than you in your modesty have revealed. If you had not been clever enough to find the cowherd and his glorious cow, Fereydoon would have perished before he started to walk. If you had not taken him to India to be trained by a sage, he would have failed to learn wisdom. If you had not demanded justice for the murder of his father, he would not have burned for revenge. If you had not prevented him from attacking Zahhak before he was ready, he would have been killed. If you had neglected to share your kind heart with him, he would never have learned mercy. Praise, oh praise for Faranak the wise!”

W
ord was sent to Mohammad Khodabandeh in Shiraz that he had been chosen as the new shah. Like Isma‘il, he didn’t believe it at first. He had been under house arrest for so many months, it was no surprise he thought it was a trick to test his loyalty to his brother. At first, he ordered that the envoy be executed to avoid the plot he was certain was being laid for him, but the envoy saved himself by suggesting that he merely be imprisoned for a few days until the truth about Isma‘il’s death could be verified. Eventually, when the evidence was overwhelming, the envoy was released and Mohammad agreed to come to Qazveen and take up his new post.

At the palace, no serious attempt was made to discover who had poisoned Isma‘il. After the physician’s final report deemed the cause of death unclear, Mirza Salman had worked hard to convince the amirs that running the country was more important than chasing a plot that may not have existed. Since it was uncertain what had killed the Shah, he argued, it was senseless to seek reprisal. They had enough to do.

Naturally, I was relieved when it became clear that no one would be punished, yet surprised the men relinquished their duties so easily. They seemed to me to be the worst kind of cowards: cringing under their leader’s demands, mouthing the right words to win his approbation, hating him in their hearts, yet doing nothing to stop his evil deeds while he was alive—nothing. These were the nobles of our land, the men whose presence had filled me with adulation when I was a child. Now I knew that despite all their gold and titles and weapons, they quaked with fear. Brave men were rare indeed.

After three days of mourning, the noblemen were summoned to the princess’s house for their first meeting with her. On the appointed day, her servants set up the blue velvet curtain that would conceal her
from the men at her home. Pari secreted herself behind the curtain, and we tested whether I could hear her voice from every corner of the room, just as we had long ago. But this time, she delighted me by reciting a section from the
Shahnameh
about how the great hero Rostam had tamed his ferocious steed, who became his most loyal companion. From every point I listened, her voice was loud and strong.

Soon after the cannon boomed, everyone sat down to their first meal of the day, as it was still Ramazan. Hands reached eagerly for drinks, and once the first wave of thirst was satisfied, we settled down to enjoy bread, cheese, nuts, and fruit. I was still chewing my food in the company of Pari’s other eunuchs when Shamkhal Cherkes arrived. I leapt to my feet to attend to the princess.

After greeting Pari, Shamkhal said, “I came early to ask if you wish me to be your representative to the men, as before.”

The princess thought about it for a moment and then said, “Thank you, Uncle, but you won’t be needed.”

Shamkhal looked as if he wished he could fold into his own large body. In that moment, the cowardice shown by Pari’s own kin struck me with full force. Court life had made them fearful and changeable. Even as they swore loyalty, they were peering over their shoulder to see who could boost them higher.

“Are you certain?” he asked.

“I have been on my own all this time, haven’t I?”

He looked chastened. “If I may assist you, I will do so gladly.”

“Perhaps another time.”

I had never seen her look more like a princess than at that moment.

“Actually,” she added all of a sudden, “I have already asked Javaher to lead the meeting.”

She hadn’t asked, but I was pleased by the faith she showed in me. Of course I wanted to represent her to the nobles.

Before the men began to arrive, Pari seated herself behind the curtain. I was gratified to see a dozen of the leading noblemen and palace officials, notably Amir Khan Mowsellu, Pir Mohammad Khan, Anwar Agha, Khalil Khan—who had been Pari’s guardian when she was a child—Morshad Khan, Mirza Salman, and several
others take their places according to rank. They were as quiet and respectful as if meeting with the Shah. How different from when the princess had called them to order before Isma‘il had arrived!

Standing on the platform in front of her curtain, I looked out with confidence on the sober nobles, their silk robes impeccable, red batons erect in the qizilbash’s turbans. “Prepare to pay heed to the princess, lion of the Safavis, lord of orders,” I instructed them in a firm voice.