“Where are you off to this time?”
“I will not be long, I assure you. It is just a short trip from here.”
“You cannot be leaving the castle, dressed in a beggar’s outfit. You are the queen of the land.”
“Yes. But I am also a servant of God. Please. Allow me to reach out to your less fortunate subjects. I cannot walk among them looking like a queen.”
“But why would you have to go? I can send others.”
“It will not do. I have had many sleepless nights, and I have one particular neighborhood in my mind.”
“You have kept away from all social gatherings for months now. Dignitaries from Europe to China have visited, weddings and celebrations have taken place, and all the time you have kept to yourself.”
“What I have undertaken is of far greater importance to me than all those social gatherings.”
Although Shahrokh reluctantly conceded to her departure as she took a public stagecoach to reach her destination, he immediately sent three of his best cavalrymen to pursue her without her knowledge. He then summoned the Hakeem.
“My wife dresses as a beggar and walks the streets of the capital to find the needy,” Shahrokh stated, looking dejected.
“That is the most compassionate act that I have ever heard of, sir,” the Hakeem calmly replied.
“How can I allow her to continue this path? I am the king, the heir to the throne of Tamerlane.”
“And she is a pure-hearted human being, reaching out to others who are in need. She is going to bring a good name to your dynasty.”
Shahrokh was at a loss for words. When he tried to repay the Hakeem with numerous coins, the physician refused to accept it.
“It has been my greatest honor to have served my lady. She is among the most unique women that ever walked upon this earth. Our nation is proud to have such a munificent sovereign.”
Lady Goharshad asked the coachman to stop when she reached her destination. As she dismounted, she noticed a woman, dressed in rags, standing in the middle of the main alley that led to the old bazaar. She intended to reach out to the poor thing on that day, for she had heard from her neighbors that the woman faced eviction.
The cold, damp, slippery pavement must have sent chills up the young woman’s bare feet. The wind blew through the torn layers of rags that covered her body. Her thin lips had turned crimson, and the tip of her nose was red. So too were her cheeks. It was not the healthy, rosy glow of youth, but the feverish redness of illness and affliction. The woman looked like she could no longer maintain her balance and collapsed on the stone pavement.
A crowd began to hover around the unconscious woman who had hit her head on the curb when she fell. People stood around, but no one made an effort to prevent the fall. When Lady Goharshad reached her, she noticed that the woman’s skull was broken like a fragile vase. Blood began to gush out of the fracture as color drained from her face, leaving her brown eyes the opaque blue-green color of a slaughtered lamb.
Her children began wailing hysterically, clearly without understanding what had happened to their only protector. Lady Goharshad watched the scene with horror. She knew the mother was beyond help. Her three tiny girls had huddled together, sobbing for a loss their little hearts could not bear. Their mother looked like a broken doll that could never be fixed.
The youngest girl with light brown curls and big brown eyes was a mere toddler. Her face was dirty, and she was clothed in rags that must have belonged to earlier generations for she was not old enough to have worn them to shreds. She was sucking her tiny thumb. The other two, not much older, wailed and cried. The landlady of the deceased woman discretely went inside her hovel, leaving the poor lasses to the mercy of the streets. Lady Goharshad stared at her with contempt before she closed her door.
As if willpower and wisdom had left her head simultaneously, Lady Goharshad dropped to her knees and gently brought the three sobbing cherubs into her loving embrace. She had learned of their mother’s predicament and had every intention of reaching out to her before the eviction, but she had not arrived in time.
The children began tugging at her worn rag of a chador like victims of a shipwreck clinging to driftwood, causing her chador to slip off her head. Before she could collect herself, her regal attire became exposed, leaving all who had gathered around her in awe. Although fully clothed in an emerald green dress and veil, her damask outfit and particularly her bracelet, a wedding gift from her husband, shone like a thousand stars. Covered with bits of diamonds; at the center of the bracelet lay the famous Mongol emblem. The spectators, whose number had grown by the minute, turned their attention from the dead mother to the beautiful noblewoman before them.
“Now what do we have here?” a stout, sinister-looking man in his fifties said who looked like a butcher in dirty clothes and a blood-stained faded apron. A few other fellows began to move closer to her.
Just at that moment, she heard the sounds of hooves fast approaching. The captain of the special guards, his sword slashing the skies, appeared as in a dream. Lady Goharshad rose, thanking the captain, knowing without having to ask that he was sent by her husband to shadow her movements. He bowed and then to the great amazement of everyone, including the fat butcher, lifted her like a feather by her belt, mounting her in one incredibly swift motion on a spare white horse he had brought with him.
“No,” she begged, “I cannot leave them,” pointing to the three children who had stopped crying, looking stunned by all that was happening. Obviously realizing that this was no place for an argument, the captain asked two breathless cavalrymen who had just caught up with him on horseback, to carry the children to the castle as well.
The landlady, as if suddenly aware of the opportunity of a lifetime passing her by, flung open the door of her hovel from which she had evicted her tenants. She then loudly announced that those children were the light of her eyes, and that for a small payment—bracelets would certainly be acceptable—she would care for them all her life. All Lady Goharshad had to do was point to her ragged chador for the landlady to recall that she had been a witness to her earlier attempt to desert the children.
The king had yet to see the three girls, but their arrival in the royal court had occupied his mind since the previous evening when he heard the news. He broached the subject as soon as his queen sat down at the breakfast table.
“We have two sons of our own who are now eight and ten years of age,” Shahrokh said. “The idea of adopting three children straight from the ghettos into the castle baffles me.”
Lady Goharshad remained silent, so her husband went on with his argument, which sounded more and more convincing to him with the passage of time. He finally gave up and smiled when the three little girls came to sit at the family breakfast table, all washed up and dressed, looking as if they always belonged to the royal family.
“Do you even know their names?” he asked, addressing his wife in a much kinder tone.
“No,” she replied as she swallowed a gulp of tea, the enormity of the task she had undertaken obvious from her expression. “The eldest looks about four years old and says her name is Soo Soo which is a sound, not a name,” she whispered. She then looked up after examining her saucer as if she had seen it for the first time and said, “Let us name them after celestial bodies; how about Soraya meaning ‘sky’, Setareh meaning ‘star’, and . . . Sahar ‘dawn.’”
Shahrokh laughed at the suggestion and recalled the days when the Mongols worshiped such astronomical forms. Unlike his father, he detested bloodshed and dismissed some of his predecessor’s beliefs and practices as mere superstition. “Let us have a celebration in honor of our extended family and familiarize the girls with their new environment.”
Chapter Four
The Mosque
Autumn arrived, gracing the world with ruffles of silver, gray and blue visible against the sky. At the fabric shop
in the old bazaar, a middle-aged woman chose a floral cotton fabric that suited her best for a chador. The shopkeeper held one end of the fabric on the left side of his prodigious nose and stretched it out from there to the tip of his extended right hand’s thumb to roughly measure one length. Measuring four such stretches of fabric, he assured the woman that the amount would be more than sufficient for a chador and maybe there would be enough left to make a small veil out of it too. The price, however, was more than the woman could afford, so the disappointed customer left the shop complaining about the high prices of commodities. The shop owner, equally disappointed, loudly complained that his kids did not consume fabric for food, and he had to pay the same high price for their daily bread.
That particular shop had attracted Lady Goharshad’s attention, for she noticed a woman leaving in a hurry looking as if she was about to burst into tears. “Why did she leave so distraught?” Lady Goharshad asked the shopkeeper as soon as she walked in.
“Well, she was hoping to purchase some fabric at a discount, but even at that reduced price, she could not afford the material.”
Lady Goharshad looked at the fabrics stacked in rolls on the store’s numerous shelves. Most of them were cotton prints of varying colors, beautiful yellows, and blues, and pinks. “You do like a bargain, do you not?” she asked as she placed a black velvet pouch upon the counter and opened its silk ribbon tie, disclosing numerous dinars. “If you can manage to find her and give her that roll of fabric free of charge, I will purchase the entire inventory of your store.”
“Upon my eyes, madam!” The man who had been staring at the precious coins finally spoke.
“Run,” she said and watched as he sprinted out of the shop, dragging the roll of fabric with him.
He returned breathless, apparently not just from the exertion; the presence of such a wealthy customer in his humble shop must have been enough to send his heart racing.
“How will you carry them, Your Eminence?” he asked, words stumbling out of his mouth.
“I will not,” she replied, stressing the first-person pronoun. “You will be carrying them in camel loads to the castle tomorrow morning, and the guards will reward you for your services.”
The king had spent the day in utter agony. The Treasury had informed him during their weekly session at noon that the Beyt-ul-Mal or the House of Wealth, a depository of public funds—from collected taxes to income from trade—was virtually empty. The Treasurer placed the blame for the shortage of funds entirely on the queen and her extensive, or as he described it “never-ending” renovations, throughout the kingdom.
“To put it simply, these projects, as benevolent as they may seem, just cannot go on,” the Treasurer, who was known for his long white beard and bald head, had said while looking up from his papers with his beady eyes securely resting above his hooked nose.
Shahrokh tried to drink his tea but had a hard time erasing the self-righteous expression of the Treasurer from his mind. The sun was about to set over the minarets when Lady Goharshad finally came in.
“Where were you?” Shahrokh asked with irritation.
“I spent the day at a Shia mausoleum. The place barely accommodates the many who visit the site on a regular basis to pay their respect. There needs to be a structure, a mosque erected right next to the burial grounds, and I intend to build a magnificent one.”
“This idea of building a structure next to some sort of sacred site for our Shia subjects perplexes me when our dynasty is a Sunni one,” her husband interjected.
“And how much more pertinent that makes it,” she replied.
“My dear wife, you have a generous heart, and I have learned to appreciate your caring attitude toward our subjects. But the Treasury’s wealth has its limit, and that limit has already been reached in the rebuilding projects you advocated and moving the capital from Samarkand to Herat.”
She looked up, lifted her hand and placed it upon her neck where an elaborate necklace of diamonds and emeralds shone. “I will sell this,” she replied as the King stared at her in disbelief.
Chapter Five
The Sun Descending
“Come on dearies!” The old lady said as she crumbled a piece of bread and spread it for the doves that frequented her house. “This fresh bread was meant for you because you got here first. Otherwise, I would have finished it before you came.” The birds chirped as if thanking her for the delicious morsels, the pitter-patter of their feet breaking the silence on the sundrenched mud-brick windowsill.
“Go on. Eat them all up. The stale bread would do for me. You are special birds, aren’t you? You have the honor of flying over the dome of the mausoleum, never dirtying it. Always clean, always clean.”
She turned from her window to look at the mature white-as-snow housecat purring behind her. “Don’t you go chasing after my beauties,” she said. The tomcat was too chubby and too well-fed to bother chasing after the birds. He seemed to have his eyes on a tiny mouse, though, that showed up once in a while in the kitchen, but even it appeared to require more than he could muster for the chase.
The old lady had been living in that house for more than a decade since her husband died; her devoted spouse was a believer who had spent all his life saving to buy the house closest to the mausoleum. Every brick in that odd-shaped two-story building held cherished memories of days gone by. The wider upper floor, where two bedrooms were located, seemed to have been placed on top of the lower one by a very clumsy builder, for the two levels had little in common. It stood like an oversized hat on top of the lower floor, which contained a small kitchen and family room and had a much smaller window next to a very narrow entry door. Offers were made to her to purchase the place at a high price because of its location, but she had always refused.
“How on earth would they expect me to sell this little piece of heaven?” she said, thinking of her wedding that took place so long ago in the very same building but addressing the doves pecking on the morsels as if nodding their approval. “They say it is odd-shaped, but not for me. It is perfect, and my birds love it too. Here I lay safe every night knowing that I am on blessed soil, close to the Sacred One. Here no one will harm me.”
She tried to push away the dark shadows of concern that had lately been bothering her. This one man keeps pestering me, saying that he is here on behalf of the king or somebody important, insisting that I must sell the place because they are building something here. He says that his words are as good as his master’s, and it cannot be refused. He offers me these ridiculous sums, but what am I to do with all that money? I have everything I need right here. My life is like the sun that descends along the rooftop, but I intend to live here to my last breath.
Noticing that the pecking of the birds had stopped, she crumbled the last piece of fresh bread for them. “This is where I want to live, near the Blessed One,” she said, wrapping an old shawl tight around her shoulders, “for here no one will harm me, and I can sleep at night knowing that I will be safe and looked after.”
Although Lady Goharshad benevolently auctioned her heirloom necklace to a wealthy merchant from her hometown to benefit the construction of the mosque, such sacrifice proved to be unnecessary. Soon people from all corners of the world, even as far away as China, flocked to see for themselves the magnificent kingdom of the son of Tamerlane. The land had enjoyed the tranquility of peace since Shahrokh came to power, and the revenue stemming from such visits and the trades that ensued filled the coffers of the king in no time.
The fabrics Lady Goharshad had ordered were brought to the castle and laid on sofas outside the chamber of the queen. She intended to have them made into different size outfits to be distributed among orphanages throughout the country, a present from an unknown donor.
Lady Goharshad began to move the fabrics around thoughtfully, juxtaposing them, and putting contrasting and matching colors in the vicinity of one another. As she played
around with the fabrics, an idea began to take shape in her head. What if, she thought as a chambermaid announced the arrival of the Architect.
“About the design of the interior, my lady, what are your suggestions?” the Architect abruptly said as he entered. The forty-year-old stout man with curly black hair seemed nearly out of patience and humor after waiting a full hour to see Lady Goharshad. “We are at your service, Madam. We have artisans who have ideas about how it should be designed, and maybe you can look at some of their outstanding sketches.”
Lady Goharshad gave no answer. After a pause he added, “The structure is being built according to schedule, and we have installed the multiple vaulted ceiling as you requested, but we don’t know what type of tilework to use for the interior.”
“I think I have an idea for that,” she said, smiling and turning her face toward the fabrics. “How is that for a design,” she pointed to the fabrics laid on top of one another in a geometric pattern.
The Architect stared for a moment, then said, “that is the most beautiful idea. The design will be unique. Could we have the fabrics, Madam?”
“No, they belong to others, but you are welcome to have a painter depict them on paper before the fabrics are made into outfits.”
“We have other issues,” he added before leaving. “There is an old lady that absolutely refuses to sell her odd-shaped house which is within the expanded plan of the structure we are constructing.”
“Well then make it less expanded. Let the poor woman be.”
“Your Majesty, you don’t understand. Avoiding that area, meaning the home of the old lady, would be tantamount to redesigning the entire structure in a way that would not appear balanced and proportioned.”
“No sir, you don’t understand. My purpose is to refrain from exploitation. You are working on sacred land. The structure cannot be built on oppression and abuse. I intend to visit the lady, not to force her off her property—far from it. I would like to see if there is anything I could do to assist her.”
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