The Hakawati (75 page)

The mourning army returned to Cairo with little fanfare. Forty days after the burial of the king, the council met to elect the new prince of the faithful. The Kurds still argued for the king’s lineage. The Turkomans nominated a vizier by the name of Aybak. They fought the entire day and drew their weapons three times before Shajarat al-Durr, King Saleh’s widow, sent her servant to the diwan once more to announce that she was fit to rule. The Kurds and Turkomans decided she would be an acceptable compromise.

The coronation of Shajarat al-Durr, an exquisite affair, lasted only a little less time than her reign. Once the news of her ascent to the
throne reached the land of Hijaz, the sharif of Mecca wrote to the council berating them for not following the traditions of the faith. He warned that if the queen’s reign continued, the tribes of Hijaz would no longer heed the calls of Cairo. The queen read the letter and announced, “I will step down, for the good of the kingdom.”

The diwan reconvened. Every side argued. Antipodal positions were assumed. The council was exhausted. Finally, the vizier Aybak was elected in a straw vote. To ensure that his reign would last longer than Shajarat al-Durr’s, he married her.

Aybak’s plan, joining the lines of two claimants to the throne, worked, but only briefly. All supported his rule and heeded his commands. Not everything, however, was aligned with Aybak’s ambition. Fate had no use for him, could not bear him, and dismissed him rather cruelly, by gifting him with the source of every man’s fall from grace: the great desire.

He saw her while promenading with his courtiers. She was a young Bedouin girl of a beauty that pierced his heart. He called to her, “O most glorious, whose daughter are you?”

The king sought out her father, received his permission, returned to the diwan, and called on his engineers to build a magnificent palace for his new betrothed. The king spent one month in bed with his beloved. He did not show up at the diwan, and he never once visited Shajarat al-Durr or his first wife, Umm Ahmad. Prince Baybars paid the king a visit and said, “You have been neglecting your duties. You must return to the diwan and handle the affairs of state.”

The king replied, “Queen Shajarat al-Durr is furious with me, and unless someone calms her down, I will not venture out of these chambers to be nagged and berated by that harpy.”

Baybars went to the queen and begged her to forgive her king. He spoke honeyed words to her, he lauded her generosity, he praised, until she finally relented. “Tell him to pay me a visit,” the queen said. Baybars sent a message to the king that the great queen had forgiven him.

The following morning, the king made his appearance at the diwan, and that evening, he visited Shajarat al-Durr. She greeted him warmly and fawned over him, and the happy king said, “Let us relive the good times. Bathe me.” Shajarat al-Durr led her husband to the bath. She undressed him and began to undress herself.

“Does your Bedouin girl have hair more luxurious than mine?” The queen smiled flirtatiously. “Skin more white? Lips more full?”

“My wife, you are beautiful, tribes from the deserts to the seas sing of your loveliness, but you are old. The girl is fourteen. Do you expect to compete with that?”

Shajarat al-Durr, who once ruled the world, knelt down and washed her husband’s hair. She soaped it thoroughly, until lather built. She took out a dagger and slit the king’s throat from carotid to carotid. She watched disloyal blood flow upon the bath’s marble before she plunged the dagger into her own heart.

And the Kurds said, “The kingdom should return to the line of true kings. King Issa Touran Shah had a boy. He is seven and goes by the name of Ala’eddine. He shall be king.”

The boy was made king and one of his Kurdish cousins was elected regent. Fate had no use for this king, either, and sent him the Mongols.

Hovik’s face was that of a man who hadn’t had a good night’s sleep in quite a while. His mustache needed a trim. His distress was comforting. Apparently, he genuinely loved my father; then again, perhaps his concern was for his pregnant wife and coming son. He tiptoed into the room, carrying Salwa’s handbag, her coat, and a gray chamois sack that might seem amorphous to an untrained eye. Mine recognized the danger. Nothing was in that bag if not a small oud.

I felt the veins in the back of my hand pulse.

My sister recognized the bag and raised questioning eyebrows.

“I don’t want it,” my niece said softly. “I couldn’t play it. I tried so many times.”

“But it’s a memento,” my sister replied.

“It’s a constant reminder of how talentless I am.”

My sister asked Hovik to stay in the room and led her daughter and me to the balcony. She lit a cigarette, expelled the smoke toward the sky. My niece took the cigarette from her mother’s lips and threw it over the balcony. “I’ll get you a patch,” Salwa said.

“This isn’t the right time,” my sister said.

“This is nothing if not the right time.”

“Listen. Are you sure you want to give Osama the oud? It’s not as if he’s going to pick it up and start playing after all this time. I’m not sure the instrument is playable. We all have a family heirloom, and this one is yours. She wanted you to have it.”

“Who wanted her to have it?” I asked.

“Our grandmother,” Lina replied. “I thought you knew that. She gave it to me on her deathbed to give to my daughter. How old was I then, seven—eight? I couldn’t even conceive of the idea that I’d have a daughter. This is our great-grandmother’s oud.”

“My god,” I gasped. “I didn’t know this thing existed. Does it still play?”

“Check it out,” Salwa said. “I had it restrung. It plays adequately, considering that no one has played it in over a hundred and twenty years.”

“A hundred and fourteen,” my sister and I said in unison.

I delicately removed the oud from the chamois bag. The workmanship was beyond anything I had seen in years and years—the inlaid ivory carved in miniature arabesque detail, wood of invaluable cedar, splendid tear-shaped mother-of-pearl (genuine, not sister-of-polystyrene) lining the neck. And my great-grandmother gave up this exquisiteness for the love of her husband. “A sultan’s gift,” I said.

“Literally,” my sister said. “From a sultan to us.”

“I can’t take it,” I told my niece. “You could send your son through college with it.”

“I’d trade it for a foot massage right now.” She tried to lift her foot off the floor as Exhibit A, but could barely get it high enough to slip a sheet of paper underneath. “Look, if I ever need it, I’ll take it back. I was just hoping you’d play for him.”

“I can’t play. I haven’t played in so long.” I plucked a string, and then another. The oud’s sound was disappointingly bad. “You don’t just pick up an instrument after all these years and start strumming. This isn’t a fairy tale.”

“He always talked about how well you played,” Salwa said. She stared at the balcony’s glass door, at my father’s bed behind it.

“He didn’t like my playing,” I objected. “He never did.”

“You’re crazy,” my sister snapped. “Did you just say that?”

“It would take me months to be able to play a simple maqâm. Should I force him to go through the torture of listening to me practicing scales again?”

The oud was out of tune. I tightened the top string, and my fingers hurt. The sound was actually atrocious, the wood having aged beyond repair. I pressed my ring finger for an easy note, and the skin at the tip felt like it was about to break. Would my fingers ever relearn what they
had forgotten? Would my hands remember what had been consciously erased? My fingers asked questions I had no answer for. They ached. My whole body ached; my eyes felt as if they were about to shoot out of my head. I slid along the railing and sat on the floor and cried. My sister hesitated, but then slid next to me and burst into tears. Together, side by side, shoulder to shoulder, we bawled. If only the gorgeous oud didn’t sound like a ukulele.

A letter arrived from the mayor of Aleppo, announcing that an army had appeared on the horizon, Mongols, as numerous as locusts, as destructive as termites, as methodical as ants, as cruel as African wasps. A few days later came a letter from Damascus saying that the locust army had conquered Aleppo, Hamah, and Homs and was heading toward Damascus. From the refugees that poured into Egypt the council discovered that the land of Islam was being completely overrun by the foreign hordes. The Mongols reached Gaza.

“They have conquered the cities of my people,” said a Persian. “Shiraz fell, as well as Isfahan.”

“The barbarians burned Baghdad to the ground,” cried an Abassid. “The armies either surrendered or dispersed.”

“King Hethum of Armenia helped the Mongol Hulagu,” said a Syrian. “The Armenian set the great mosque of Aleppo afire himself, and the Mongols encouraged him.”

“Ah, a pox upon Armenia,” said a Turk.

The counsel deliberated for hours. The only army left in the lands was the army of Egypt. The Franks had either sided with the Mongols or chosen to remain neutral. From Baku to Edessa, from Basra to Damascus, the Mongols ruled.

“I will never surrender,” Layla told Othman. “I am Egypt.”

“We will not surrender,” announced the African and Uzbek warriors. “We are Egypt.”

“Why are they deliberating?” asked Aydmur the slave warrior. “Our course is clear,” said the twenty-five Circassians, the twenty-five Georgians, and the twenty-five Azeris.

“I will choose death before surrendering to the fire-worshippers,” Baybars told the diwan. “You have heard the reports of what has happened to our lands. Our enemies kill those who fight and those who
surrender indiscriminately. You cannot willingly give Egypt up to this. I will not allow it, and I am Egypt.”

The king’s regent said, “We cannot fight them. Even God cannot count their numbers.”

“If you cannot trust God to count, you are not fit to rule,” Qutuz the indefatigable spat out. “I will fight even if I am the only one on the battlefield. Shame on any man who chooses life without God over death with Him.”

“You will not fight alone,” Prince Baybars said. “I will follow you.”

“We will follow you,” cried the council.

“I will not serve a baby king,” said the slave warrior Qutuz. “Dethrone him.”

The diwan stripped the boy of his title and elected the great General Qutuz the indefatigable as sultan of Islam, prince of the faithful, the first Mamluke.

Behold. The reign of the magnificent slave kings has begun. Rejoice.

The great jihad was called. The high sheikh of Azhar University wrote a fatwa. Anyone who could wield a weapon and did not fight the enemy was an infidel whose burial would not be in a Muslim cemetery. Anyone who had money and did not spend it to ensure the victory of the army of God was an unbeliever.

And the grand army coalesced, the Berbers from the Sahara, the Africans from Sudan, the tribes from Hijaz, and the Arabs from Tunis. The infidel Mongols were celebrating in Gaza, drinking, whoring, and carousing. Having never lost a battle, they were not expecting anyone to be foolish enough to attack. And attack them the army of innocents did. The Mongols had their first taste of fear. The slave army hit with ferocious force, shattering the Mongol illusion of a conquered world at their feet. The barbarians retreated, and the slave army followed, killing more and more of the straggling invaders. The Mongols stood their ground in the plains of Bissan; they dug in and waited for the attack, but they were in for another surprise. From Anatolia to Persia, from the Caucasus to Andalusia, soldiers and armies arrived heeding the fatwa. The archers of Damascus, the horsemen of Kandahar, the pikers of Baghdad, and the swordsmen of Shiraz joined the slave army. The war of all wars erupted. Dust storms swirled. Swords clashed with shields, spears pierced armor, and many a hero fell. The Mongols were
hit from all sides, but amid all the chaos, Hulagu Khan and his generals noticed that certain of the battalions of Islam never broke rank, never faltered. The Mongols, who had nurtured bedlam and anarchy in war, were encountering their opposite, an army of impeccably trained slaves. Order vanquished disorder. The barbarians had sown fear wherever they trod, and now fearless slaves trod on them. The invaders ran away in terror and were cut down, their dead and dying discarded on the battlefield as feast for the hyenas of the plains.