The Tiger Queens (34 page)

Later it would be said that seventy thousand of our brave soldiers lost their lives at Nishapur, akin to washing away all the grains of sand on a beach. Al-Altun left nothing alive inside Nishapur, for the Mongol swords cut down even the cats and dogs. I doubt the heathens left even a rat breathing within those walls.

Unable to do anything else, I beat my fists into the earth and screamed one question at Allah.

Why?

*   *   *

The next morning, the djinn
from the walls roused me from the filthy blanket I’d fallen asleep on in her tent, dragging me from my nightmares of Mansoor’s dying eyes and my father’s broken body to a reality worse than any dream. Toregene had tried to press the woolen outfit of a Mongol slave on me, but I’d informed her that I’d rather die than leave my home dressed as a heathen, half hoping she’d order me killed where I stood. Instead, she’d arched an eyebrow and ordered Shigi to find me a set of
Persian clothes. Alone in her tent, I set aside my ruined attire and stood naked for a moment, then ripped a part of the sleeve stained with Mansoor’s blood from my old robe and tucked it into the pocket of my new clothes. That dark stain and his writing brush were all I had left from my husband, a bag of narcissus bulbs all that remained from my mother and father. And around my neck I wore something new: the silver medallion imprinted with Toregene’s symbol of a tiger that branded me her slave.

I donned the robe and trousers, cringing at the inferior silk and almost gagging at the veil’s smell of cheap violet perfume. Like the meanest
darvıˉsh
, I would learn humility, although unlike the pungent ascetics with their vows of poverty, I did not choose this.
I had no kohl with which to paint my eyes, and my lashes were stiff with dried tears, but I took a deep breath and stepped outside under the same warm sun that had witnessed such slaughter only the day before.

Toregene was waiting for me, dressed as a warrior queen in an iron helm ruffed with black sable and a gleaming cutlass at her hip. “Follow me,” she said. “And I’d suggest you keep your eyes on the ground.”

But I couldn’t ignore the death throes of my city. My courage had fled yesterday, but today I would bear witness to what had happened here. I would remember, for so many others could not.

Just as I’d been debased, Nishapur’s towering gates had been stripped of their turquoise and precious metals so only the battered wooden planks remained. My city was a skeleton now, and corpses and the carcasses of horses littered the plains outside the exposed gates. The earth was greasy with human fat, and mountains of decapitated heads stood taller than the walls, their skin already rotting and shrinking in the sun with a stench that made me sway on my feet. The jaws hung open, frozen in silent screams as we passed.

Swarms of bowlegged soldiers finished pillaging Nishapur, loading our famed white oxen and the docile asses, each worth thirty marks of silver, with our remaining silk, steel swords, and filigreed books. One day, caravans would pass our broken city, its majestic mosques still bearing carved bands of calligraphy and arabesque, but robbed of its fabled treasures and deserted of its people. Would travelers pause inside our barren houses and ponder our stories? Would some linger and take up plows in our abandoned fields,
or would our ruined city waste away, worn by the winds until it crumbled to sand?

I had never walked—or, more accurately, been carried in our curtained sedan—far enough from Nishapur that I couldn’t turn and see its reassuring sprawl. Now I would leave behind forever its familiar skyline of minarets and turquoise-tiled domes that guided travelers from the Silk Road to us like an oasis. So, too, would I leave behind the graves of loved ones so that my heart shriveled now into some black, misshapen thing, saved from annihilation only by the glowing ember of revenge that burned deep in my breast under the silver slave’s medallion.

My knees threatened to buckle, but Toregene’s hand on my arm propelled me forward. I was reminded of Omar Khayyám’s famous poem as my scalp prickled with the accusing stares of tens of thousands of sightless skulls.

Whether at Nishapur or Babylon,

Whether the Cup with sweet or bitter run,

The Wine of Life keeps oozing drop by drop,

The Leaves of Life keep falling one by one.

Toregene beckoned to where Shigi held the reins of a sleek brown stallion and a disreputable gray mare. Most of the Mongols walked bandy-legged, as if they were incomplete without a horse between their thighs. I, however, had never ridden one of the stinking beasts in my life.

Thus began my next ordeal.

“Surely the horse should carry something more important than a slave,” I said, failing to sound demure as I’d hoped. “I shall ride in a cart.”

“Carts are for invalids and old women,” Toregene said, stepping into the iron stirrup with one foot and throwing her other leg over the wooden saddle, embellished with tooled leather and geometric bronze castings. “The mare is old enough for the stewpot; even a child could control her.”

I prayed Toregene wasn’t serious about cooking the horse, but the gray mare snorted and threw its head. The animal seemed more likely to trample me at any moment, and I’d not yet mounted her.

I struggled to maneuver my curved boot into the flat stirrup, then attempted to swing my leg up as Toregene had done. I flushed to my hairline when Shigi had to boost me over, his hands touching my waist and backside.

“This is your first time on a horse?” he asked, the corner of his lip quirking in amusement.

“It is.”

“May your god protect you, then,” he said.

I looked down my nose at him as he rifled through a nearby cart, then returned with something hidden behind his back. He revealed a small satin pillow with a gleam in his eye. “Mongolian saddles are comfortable for the horse, but not for the rider. You may soon find this more precious than gold.”

I sniffed at his implication that I was somehow weak, but no matter how I shifted in the saddle, I could find no ease. I took the pillow and laid it in my lap, staring straight ahead.

“Where is Al-Altun?” I asked, although the name of my city’s murderer was so bitter I could scarcely utter it.

“The Khatun of the Uighurs departed with her plunder while we slept,” Toregene said. “She returns to govern her husband’s lands.”

And so, like a thief in the night, Al-Altun stole Nishapur’s artisans and engineers, crates of pistachios and saffron, and skeins of silk embroidered with birds and beasts, also taking the opportunity for my revenge.

I swore in that moment that I would wait for her, that I would find her one dark day and watch the light leave her eyes just as it had faded from my husband’s.

Thus we began our journey east, leaving my home and the splendid life I’d once lived. The stirrups were short—I’d later learn they were designed for riders who stood in the saddle while launching arrows—so my knees were bent at an awkward angle that already made my legs ache. We’d scarcely descended the first hill when my demon mare jerked to the left at a gallop, and I sailed into a bush of thorns, scraping the side of my face and narrowly avoiding the powerful hooves that threatened to crush my skull.
The thin silk of my veil hadn’t protected my skin, so the flesh of my cheek wept blood, but the thick robe had protected my arms from the worst of the brambles.

“One end bites and the other kicks.” Shigi offered me the reins of my ill-behaved horse from atop his mount. The triumphant mare snorted and grazed on dried brambles. I hoped she’d choke on them.

Toregene laughed again. “Just imagine how good this horse will taste in your soup when we return home to the steppes. Revenge is sweet, or in this case, it will be when flavored with salt and garlic.”

My stomach turned at the thought of eating horse stew, and my eyes stung as I pressed my fingers against the scratches on my cheek, but I clenched the reins to gain control of myself. I longed for a lunch of courgette blossoms stuffed with soft cheese or veal served with olives and preserved lemons, but now I’d survive off whatever these heathens ate. Likely gristle and fermented blood.

I managed to mount again, this time with the pillow Shigi had given me, and Toregene distracted me by pointing out rocks and birds and teaching me their Mongol translations. The fresh-faced soldier from the mosque—Boyahoe—joined us, although he was interested only in the Farsi translations for weaponry.

“Boyahoe is my sister Alaqai’s son and has spent these past years learning war from the Khan,” Toregene said. “He was a reluctant warrior when he came to us.”

“No longer.” Boyahoe grinned, a chipped tooth marring the smile, but he sobered at my pained expression. “Being a soldier has taught me courage. I was skittish as a desert fox before the Khan took me in.”

Shigi chuckled. “What Boyahoe means is that he’d have been killed when his people revolted. Alaqai rescued him from certain death, but we don’t hold it against him.”

Boyahoe’s rather large ears turned red and he offered a sheepish smile. “I’m happy to learn from the Khan of Khans, despite these two brutes.”

The three of them settled into conversation, but I reflected on Boyahoe’s lesson. I, too, would learn from these Mongols, study their strengths
and root out their weaknesses so that one day I might wield them as weapons.

*   *   *

We passed the towering green-and-white Solitary Tree where Alexander the Macedonian and King Darius had fought, before fording countless rivers and continuing to chase the rising sun. The endless expanse of the steppes made me feel lost and insignificant—something I’d never experienced before these Mongols came crashing into my life—cast adrift in these wild lands like a snowflake in a vast desert. The clouds hung heavy, like smudges of charcoal across a sodden sky, as if Allah had turned his back on this heathen world, and on me.

Many times I wished I’d died in Nishapur, especially when I lay shivering on my cold pallet at night and recalled the evenings I’d fallen asleep warm in Mansoor’s arms, and when my hands grew brown and calloused from the reins I clasped tight every day, so I was beyond grateful for Shigi’s gifted pillow, which allowed me to walk each night I dismounted. I almost fainted the first time I watched the Mongols eat, slurping their rehydrated milk paste and cramming their gullets full of raw meat tenderized under their saddles after a day of riding. One careless soldier lost his leather flask during a long gallop, and he remedied his thirst by piercing a vein in his horse’s neck, drinking the blood straight from the animal, and then leering at me with teeth stained scarlet.

Each day was a punishment worthy of the meanest traitor on the Day of Judgment. And each morning I opened my eyes to live it once again.

We kept a brutal pace, for I soon learned that the harder a Mongol rides, the more he sweats and the less often he needs to empty his bladder. Each night I stumbled from my horse to the traveling tent I shared with Toregene, its thin felt walls replacing the elegant cornices and domes I’d once known. Often I woke to find her pallet empty, and I would set about boiling water for her salt tea, a skill she and Shigi had laughingly taught me the first morning on the trail. My cheeks had flared at the insult, but they had sobered to see my humiliation, both at the fact that I knew not how to boil water and because I’d been reduced to performing such menial tasks.

“Life isn’t a placid lake, unchanging with the years and seasons,” Toregene said, lifting the iron cauldron onto the metal spider while Shigi stoked the meager flames below. They shared a glance then, one that I might have called tenderness had it not been for the tears that blurred my vision.

“It’s more like a river,” Shigi said, straightening. “Sometimes frozen in winter, but more often diving and plunging over rocks, engorged with spring rains.” He smiled and touched my shoulder, dropping his hand at my recoil. “Rivers change their course, Fatima of Nishapur, just as your life has changed its course.”

Yet I wished and prayed for only one thing: the return of my old life.

We passed mounds of boulders that were littered with horse skulls—ancient burials, according to Shigi—and primitive stone steles carved to resemble men and scrawled with crude images of deer, before finally arriving at the base of the Altun Mountains. A camp of circular white tents lay cradled among the foothills, situated along a clear river filled with massive fish like overgrown eels that Toregene claimed no self-respecting Mongol would ever eat. She declared this was one of the most beautiful spots in all of Mongolia, but to me it was simply another desolate plain.

“Home awaits, whether we wish it or not.” Toregene breathed a deep sigh worthy of an old crone’s death rattle. “It will be good to see my sons again, especially my eldest, Güyük.”

She spurred her horse ahead so I had no choice but to follow and weave my way through the labyrinth of ragged tents and mongrel dogs, past a dusty boy wearing only shoes and chewing on the end of a bone. I swallowed a screech of fear and clutched the pommel of my saddle. “What in the name of Allah is that?”

Toregene followed my gaze to where a herd of strange black-and-white beasts stood, the size of small elephants but covered with shaggy hair three hands long. She gave a low chuckle. “Yaks,” she said. “They’re the ugliest of the southern Five Snouts, but their hair is softer than silk.”

But silk didn’t share the same stench of dung and rotting hay.

Grinning fathers left our caravan to toss squealing children—some with bare bottoms streaked with mud and who knew what else—into the air, and teary wives with wide cheeks embraced husbands long feared
dead. A few hopeful women searched in vain as the final carts creaked into view, but the bodies of their dead men had been left to rot aboveground, another savage custom I couldn’t fathom. How could one leave a father, husband, or son exposed for wild dogs and vultures to tear apart?

I often doubted whether these Mongols were fully human; this was yet another proof that they were not.

I encountered still more evidence when a hunchbacked woman shook out an exquisite silk prayer rug, then trampled it with her muddy boots. I waited for Allah to smite her where she stood, but there were no bolts of lightning or sudden chasms opening below her.