Samarkand (5 page)

‘I understand your words,’ stuttered Abu Taher, rather at sea. ‘However you would not dedicate to a
qadi
of the Shafi ritual poems which smack of wine!’

In fact, Omar would be able to appear conciliatory and grateful. He would water down his wine, so to speak. During the following
months, he undertook to compile a very serious work on cubic equations. To represent the unknown in this treatise on algebra,
Khayyam used the Arabic term
shay
, which means thing. This word, spelled
xay
in Spanish scientific works, was gradually replaced by its first letter, x, which became the universal symbol for the unknown.

This work of Khayyam’s was completed at Samarkand and dedicated to his protector: ‘We are the victims of an age in which men
of science are discredited and very few of them have the possibility of committing themselves to real research. The little
knowledge that today’s intellectuals have is devoted to the pursuit of material aims. I had thus despaired of finding in this
world a man as interested in the scientific as the mundane, a man preoccupied by the fate of mankind, until God accorded me
the favour of meeting the great
qadi
, the Imam Abu Taher. His favours permitted me to devote myself to these works.’

That night, when he went back toward the belvedere which was serving him as a house, Khayyam did not take a lamp with him,
telling himself that it was too late to read or write. However, his path was only faintly illuminated by the moon, a frail
crescent at the end of the month of
shawwal
. As he walked further from the
qadi’s
villa, he had to grope his way along. He tripped more than once, held on to the bushes and took the grim caress of a weeping
willow full in the face.

He had hardly reached his room when he heard a voice of sweet reproach. ‘I was expecting you earlier.’

Had he thought about this woman so much that he now believed he could hear her? As he stood in front of the door, which he
slowly
closed, he tried to make out a silhouette. In vain, for only the voice broke through again, audible yet hazy.

‘You are keeping quiet. You refuse to believe that a woman could dare to force her way into your room like this. In the palace
our eyes met and lit up, but the Khan was there as well as the
qadi
and the court and you averted your eyes. Like so many men, you chose not to stop. What good is it to defy fate, what good
is it to attract the wrath of a prince just for a woman, a widow who can only bring you as a dowry a sharp tongue and a dubious
reputation?’

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.

The night before the feast, this night when every wish is granted, was a night of agony, tears and prayers spent by thousands
of families in the precarious shelter of mosques, and the mausoleums of saints.

In the citadel, there was now a stormy discussion raging between the Seljuk brothers. Tchagri shouted that his men had not
been paid for months, and that they had only agreed to fight because they had been promised a free hand in this opulent city,
that they were on the verge of revolt and that he, Tchagri, could no longer hold them back.

Tughrul spoke another language:

‘We are only at the start of our conquests. There are so many cities to take, Isfahjan, Shiraz, Ray, Tabriz and others further
on. If we pillage Nishapur after it has surrendered, after all our promises, no other gate will open for us, no other garrison
will show any weakness.’

‘How will we be able to conquer all those cities of which you are dreaming if we lose our army and our men abandon us? The
most loyal are already complaining and threatening.’

The two brothers were surrounded by their lieutenants and the elders of the clan who unanimously confirmed Tchagri’s words.
Encouraged by this, he rose and decided to bring things to a conclusion:

‘We have spoken too much. I am going to tell my men to do as they wish with the city. If you wish to restrain your men, do
so. To each of us his own troops.’

Caught on the horns of a dilemma, he did not move. Suddenly he sprang away from them and grabbed a dagger.

Tchagri, for his part, had also unsheathed his sword. No one knew whether to intervene or, as was the custom, let the Seljuk
brothers settle their difference with blood, when Tughrul called out:

‘Brother, I cannot force you to obey me. I cannot restrain your
men, but if you set them on the city I will plant this dagger in my heart.’

As he said that he clutched the handle of the dagger with both hands and pointed the blade down toward his chest. His brother
hesitated little, but walked toward him with his arms open and gave him a long embrace, promising not to go against his will.
Nishapur was saved, but it would never forget the Great Fear of Ramadan.

‘That is how the Seljuks are,’ Khayyam observed. ‘Uneducated looters and enlightened sovereigns who are capable of great meanness
and sublime gestures. Tughrul Beg above all had the temperament of an empire builder. I was three years old when he took Isfahan
and ten years old when he conquered Baghdad, imposing himself as the protector of the Caliph and wheedling out of him the
title of ‘Sultan, King of the East and West’ and at seventy marrying the Prince of the Believers’ very own daughter.’

Omar recounted in a tone of admiration, perhaps with even a touch of solemnity, but Jahan let out a very irreverent laugh.
He was offended and gave her a sharp look, unable to understand this sudden hilarity. She excused herself and explained:

‘When you mentioned the marriage, I remembered what they told me in the harem.’

Omar vaguely remembered the episode whose every detail Jahan had greedily retained.

When he received the message from Tughrul demanding the hand of his daughter Sayyida, the Caliph had become wild with rage.
The emissary of the Sultan had hardly withdrawn before he exploded:

‘This Turk who has just stepped out from his yurt! This Turk whose fathers in the very recent past were still worshipping
some idol or another and who painted pigs’ snouts on their standards!
How dare he demand in marriage the daughter of the Prince of the Believers, descendant of the most noble lineage?’

If he was trembling so violently in all his august limbs it was because he knew that he could not deflect the claim. After
months of hesitation and two messages of appeal, he ended up by formulating a reply. One of his old counsellors was charged
with conveying it and he left for the city of Ray, whose ruins are still visible in the area of Teheran. Tughrul’s court was
there.