The Enchantress of Florence (21 page)

“Just send him that goblet of yours,” she said, “the one made with the skull of Shaibani Khan, to warn him what will happen if he does not remember his place.”

She found his vanity seductive. She was in love with his faults. A man who believed himself to be a god was perhaps the man for her. Perhaps a king was not enough. “Very God!” she cried when he took her. “Absolute Doer!” He liked that, of course, and being susceptible to praise he did not consider the autonomy of her great beauty, which no man could own, which owned itself, and which would blow wherever it pleased, like the wind. Though she had abandoned everything for him, had changed her world in a single glance, leaving sister, brother, and clan to travel west in a handsome stranger’s company, Shah Ismail in the immensity of his self-love thought such a radical act perfectly natural, for, after all, it had been done for him. As a result he did not see the wandering thing in her, the unrooted thing. If a woman turned so easily from one allegiance she might just as readily turn away from the next.

There were days when she wanted badness: his badness and her own. In bed she whispered to him that she had another self inside her, a bad self, and when that self took over she was no longer responsible for her actions, she might do anything, anything. This aroused him beyond endurance. She was more than his equal in love. She was his queen. In four years she had not given him a son. No matter. She was a banquet for the senses. She was what men killed for. She was his addiction and his teacher. “You want me to send Bayezid the Shaibani goblet,” he said thickly, as if intoxicated. “To send him another man’s skull.”

“For you to drink out of your enemy’s skull is a great victory,” she whispered. “But when Bayezid drinks from the head of your enemy’s defeated foe it will put fear in his heart.” He understood that she had placed a spell of terror on the goblet. “Very well,” he said. “We will do as you suggest.”

Argalia’s forty-fifth birthday had come and gone. He was a tall pale man, and in spite of the years of war his skin was as white as a woman’s; men and women alike marveled at its softness. He was a lover of tulips, and had them embroidered onto his tunics and cloaks, believing them to be bringers of good fortune, and of the fifteen hundred varieties of Stamboul tulip six in particular were to be found thronging his palace rooms. The Light of Paradise, the Matchless Pearl, the Increaser of Pleasure, the Instiller of Passion, the Diamond’s Envy, and the Rose of the Dawn: these were his favorites, and by them he was revealed as a sensualist beneath his warrior’s exterior, a creature of pleasure hiding inside a killer’s skin, a female self within the male. He had, too, a woman’s taste for finery: when not in battle-dress he lounged in jewels and silks and had a great weakness for exotic furs, the black fox and lynx of Muscovy which came down to Stamboul through Feodosiya in the Crimea. His hair was long and black as evil and his lips were full and red as blood.

Blood, and its shedding, had been his life’s concern. Under Sultan Mehmed II he had fought a dozen campaigns and won every battle in which he raised his arquebus to the firing position or unsheathed his sword. He had drawn a platoon of loyal Janissaries around him like a shield, with the Swiss giants Otho, Botho, Clotho, and D’Artagnan as his lieutenants, and though the Ottoman court was full of intrigues he had foiled seven assassination attempts. After Mehmed’s death the empire came close to civil war between his two sons, Bayezid and Cem. When Argalia learned that the Grand Vizier, in defiance of Muslim tradition, had refused to bury the dead Sultan’s body for three days so that Cem could reach Stamboul and seize the throne, he led the Swiss giants to the Vizier’s quarters and killed him. He led Bayezid’s army against the would-be usurper and drove him into exile. Once that was done he became the new Sultan’s commander-in-chief. He fought the Mamluks of Egypt by land and sea and when he vanquished the alliance of Venice, Hungary, and the papacy his reputation as an admiral equaled his fame as a warrior on dry land.

After that the main problems came from the
qizilbash
peoples of Anatolia. They wore red hats with twelve pleats to show their fondness for Twelver Shiism and as a result they were attracted to Shah Ismail of Persia, the self-styled Very God. Bayezid’s third son Selim the Grim wanted to crush them utterly but his father was more restrained. As a result Selim the Grim began to think of his father as an appeaser and a weakling. When the goblet from Shah Ismail arrived in Stamboul, Selim took it as a mortal insult. “That heretic who calls himself by God’s name should be taught his manners,” he declared. He picked up the cup as a duelist picks up the glove that has struck him in the face. “I will drink Safavid blood from this cup,” he promised his father. Argalia the Turk stepped forward. “And I will pour that wine,” he said.

When Bayezid refused permission for the war, things changed for Argalia. A few days later he and his Janissaries had joined forces with Selim the Grim, and Bayezid was forced from power. The old Sultan was banished into enforced retirement, sent back to his birthplace of Didymoteicho in Thrace, and died of a broken heart on the way, which was just as well. The world had no room for men who had lost their nerve. Selim, with Argalia at his side, hunted down and strangled his brothers Ahmed, Korkud, and Shahinshah, and killed their sons as well. Order was restored and the risk of a coup eliminated. (Many years later, when Argalia told il Machia about these deeds, he justified them by saying, “When a prince takes power he should do his worst right away, because after that his every deed will strike his subjects as an improvement on the way he started out,” and on hearing this il Machia grew silent and thoughtful and, after a time, slowly nodded his head. “Terrible,” he told Argalia, “but true.”) Then it was time to face Shah Ismail. Argalia and his Janissaries were sent to Rum, in north-central Anatolia, arrested thousands of
qizilbash
residents, and slaughtered thousands more. That kept the bastards quiet while the army marched across their land to deliver Selim the Grim’s letter to the Shah. In this message Selim said, “You no longer uphold the commandments and prohibitions of the divine law. You have incited your abominable Shiite faction to unsanctified sexual union. And you have shed innocent blood.” One hundred thousand Ottoman soldiers made camp at Lake Van in eastern Anatolia on the way to push these words down Shah Ismail’s blasphemous throat. Among their ranks were twelve thousand Janissary musketeers under Argalia’s command. There were also five hundred cannons, chained together to form an impassable barrier.

The battlefield of Chaldiran was to the northeast of Lake Van, and there the Persian forces made their stand. Shah Ismail’s army was only forty thousand men strong, almost all of them cavalrymen, but Argalia surveying their battle array knew that superior numbers did not always decide a fight. Like Vlad Dracula in Wallachia, Ismail had used a scorched earth strategy. Anatolia was bare and charred, and the advancing Ottomans marching from Sivas to Arzinjan found little to eat or drink. Selim’s army was tired and hungry when it camped by the lake after its long march, and such an army is always beatable. Afterward, when Argalia was with the hidden princess, she told him why her erstwhile lover had been bested.

“Chivalry,” she said. “Foolish chivalry, and listening to some stupid nephew of his and not to me.”

The extraordinary fact is that the enchantress of Persia, along with her slave the Mirror, was present on the command hill above the field of battle, her thin veiling garment blowing against her face and breasts in the breeze so suggestively that when she stood outside the king’s tent her body’s beauty turned the Safavid soldiers’ thoughts entirely away from war. “He must have been mad to bring you,” Argalia told her when blood-filthy and kill-sick he found her abandoned at the death-heavy end of the day. “Yes,” she said, matter-of-factly, “I drove him mad with love.”

However, in the matter of military strategy not even her enchantments could make him heed her. “Look,” she cried, “they are still building their defensive fortifications. Attack now, when they aren’t ready.” And, “Look,” she cried, “they have five hundred cannons chained in a line and twelve thousand riflemen behind. Don’t just gallop at them head-on or you’ll be cut down like fools.” And, “Don’t you have guns? You know about guns. For pity’s sake, why didn’t you bring any guns?” To which the Shah’s nephew Durmish Khan, the fool, answered, “It would not be sportsmanlike to attack them when they are not ready to fight.” And, “It would not be noble to send our men to attack them from the rear.” And, “The gun is not a weapon for a man. The gun is for cowards who do not dare to fight at close quarters. Yet however many guns they have we will take the fight to them until it is hand-to-hand. Courage will win the day, not—ha!—these ‘
arquebuses
’ and ‘
muskets
.’” She turned to Shah Ismail in a kind of laughing despair. “Tell this man he is an idiot,” she commanded him. But Shah Ismail of Persia answered, “I am not a caravan thief to go skulking in the shadows. Whatever is decreed by God will occur.”

She refused to watch the battle, sitting, instead, inside the royal tent with her face turned away from the door. The Mirror sat beside her and held her hand. Shah Ismail led a charge down the right wing that smashed the Ottoman left but the enchantress had turned away her face. Both armies suffered terrible losses. The Persian cavalry cut down the flower of the Ottoman horsemen, the Illyrians, the Macedonians, the Serbians, the Epirots, Thessalians, and Thracians. On the Safavid side, the commanders fell one by one and as they died the enchantress in her tent murmured their names.
Muhammad Khan Ustajlu, Husain Beg Lala Ustajlu, Saru Pira Ustajlu,
and so on. As if she could see everything without looking. And the Mirror reflected her words, so that the names of the dead seemed to echo in the royal tent.
Amir Nizam al-Din Abd al-Baqi…al-Baqi…
but the name of the Shah who believed himself to be God was not spoken. The Ottoman center held, but the Turkish cavalry was on the verge of panic when Argalia ordered the artillery to be brought up. “You bastards,” he screamed at his own Janissaries, “if any of you try to run I’ll turn the fucking cannons on you.” The Swiss giants, armed to the teeth, ran on foot along the Ottoman battle line to add emphasis to Argalia’s threats. Then the thunder of the guns began. “The storm has started,” the enchantress said, sitting in her tent. “The storm,” the Mirror replied. There was no need to look as the Persian army died. It was time to sing a sad song. Shah Ismail was alive, but the day was lost.

He had fled the battlefield, wounded, without coming for her. She knew it. “He has gone,” she told the Mirror. “Yes, he has gone,” the other assented. “We are at the enemy’s mercy,” the enchantress said. “Mercy,” the Mirror replied.

The men posted outside the tent to guard them had run away as well. They were two women alone upon a field of dreadful blood. That was how Argalia found them, sitting unveiled and straight-backed and alone, facing away from the door of the royal tent at the end of the battle of Chaldiran, and singing a sad song. The princess Qara Köz turned to face him, making no attempt to shield the nakedness of her features from his gaze, and from that moment on they could only see each other and were lost to the rest of the world.

He looked like a woman, she thought, like a tall, pale, black-haired woman who had glutted herself on death. How white he was, as white as a mask. Upon which, like a bloodstain, those red, red lips. A sword in his right hand and a gun in his left. He was both things, swordsman and shootist, male and female, himself and his shadow as well. She abandoned Shah Ismail as he had abandoned her and chose again. This pale-faced woman-man. Afterward he would claim her and her Mirror as spoils of war and Selim the Grim would agree, but she had chosen him long before, and it was her will that moved everything that followed.

“Don’t be afraid,” he said in Persian.

“Nobody in this place knows the meaning of fear,” she replied, first in Persian and then again in Chaghatai, her Turkic mother tongue.

And beneath those words, the real words.
Will you be mine. Yes. I am yours.