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The day the Mongols annex Tus, Sitara and Fatima remain loyal to their silence as they watch Prince Tolui’s broad back recede with Euclid’s Elements.
But just out in the courtyard, after leafing through the book a few times over, the prince has a moment to wonder whether his princess is able to decipher, let alone comprehend, Arabic. Of course, she never requested a copy in a familiar language, so perhaps it alone is plenty to send him home complacent. But he knows his wife well enough to foresee the curio might eventually pique her interest in a scholar accompanying the book.
Supposing that taking the initiative to fetch one would save her the trouble of asking, he dispatches Shira to return to the young women in search of someone familiar with the contents.
Shira interrogates the pair, but the trembling lips and chin of Fatima’s ashen-white face offer no answer. Witlessly, Sitara blurts, “I know all about it,” in a proprietorial tone. When Shira claims her hand and shepherds her back to his general, the slave exchanges a frightened parting look with her mistress.
Under sunlight made intermittent by masses of soot and dust, Shira releases his master’s property and sends her drifting a few steps ahead of the boy. The prince marches up to Sitara, who looks up, up, craning her neck to meet his gaze. Forgiving her impudence, he leans in so close that she might reach out to seize the book cradled in his arm. Sitara resists the urge. Tolui scans her features, tilting his head this way and that like a curious falcon until something seems to click in his head: “Ah… From good words come good fortune.”
Sitara can hardly make out Shira’s translation, let alone reply, “What?” before Tolui pulls her by the wrist, close enough to hook an arm around her leg, and tosses her over his shoulder like a sheaf. Suddenly, she’s lighter than air, and for a moment, the vertigo fogs Sitara’s brain; she wriggles, kicks, and beats his back with her fists despite knowing better. All Sitara can register in response is the almost painful cinch of thew tightening around her stomach.
She’s perched before him on horseback as they depart, then once again when he returns to his brothers to brandish his tokens of affection: a glossy, exotic book and a doll-faced, exotic girl. With about the same attitude of the eldest leafing through the pages does a dopey, elder prince prod at the stuporous specimen’s baby-fat cheeks and open out her eyes. “What a high forehead,” he drawls, “long hair, clear skin, evidently cosseted… A rarity indeed.” Another dryly calls her the very substitute for the kitten his wife just lost. “You were smart to search a loftier household for one of these than pick up another urchin.”
Unable to find her mistress between the prisoners of war, Sitara hopes against hope that her uncle, Anis, and Zumurrud have waited out the attack and returned to find their lady. Really, the girl has no way to determine as much until she should return to Tus. Until then, lying about her previous station has proved lucrative; since joining the Princess’s harem a winter and summer ago, Fatima’s tent grows to feel like her namesake’s chambers.
The southward entrance is veiled by a thick felt curtain embroidered with birds, vines, and deers. Lifting it reveals a wall coated in Song silk hangings and carpets that remind Fatima of home. Facing the door is the holy Qur’an in a stand, as well as Fatima’s wool prayer rug. To the west rest musical instruments. To the east gathers Fatima’s bed by the heavy, ornate wooden chest storing her new clothing of rabbit fur.
On its lid sits the lacquered cosmetic box containing her face powder, rouge, and hair oils. Much of these cosmetics become the playthings of Princess Sorghaghtani; between lessons, it’s in her wont and whim to spontaneously push into this room and make a dress-up doll of her lady-in-waiting. During one of these sessions on a winter night, the princess and scholar alike await Prince Tolui to fetch the former a deer. The princess is running a bamboo comb coated in thyme extract through Fatima’s hair, discussing the names she might give the little one.
Fatima, who usually makes a talisman of her namesake’s memory, tries not to think of that woman now. As she listens, she instead appraisingly tilts in her hand a Kharazmian dagger with a bone hilt and Islamic calligraphy carved into its curved iron blade. Sorghaghtani had put in the request to Tolui on her tutor’s behalf, which doesn’t clear her of Fatima’s suspicion that any act of kindness until now has been compelled by the princess’s need to match her beliefs of herself as a sovereign.
Such displays of warm-heartedness might be retracted at the first show of ingratitude, and so, Fatima says she likes the sound of ‘Nukau’ best. Still, this deep into banter, she is emboldened to then request permission to join, the next morning, a band of wagons and carts leaving for tribute and revenue collection in Tus.
Sorghaghtani denies her; “Where would I be without you?” White-knuckling her dagger, Fatima fancies shearing the princess’s braids off.
The tent flaps open to reveal Tolui staggering in with Nukau slung over his shoulders and dead. His skin is dangerously sallow, and his clothes are blackened stiff with a mixture of dried, frozen blood.
Between violent shivers, he mutters something incoherent, yet his unfocused eyes seem fueled purely by excitement and regal pride to bring his prize home. The moment Tolui pushes another pace into the yurt’s warmth, and safety embraces him, his body surrenders to the shock of exhaustion.
As he collapses into semi-consciousness, Sorghaghtani rushes to strip Tolui’s frozen clothes—her hands nimble with the familiar motions—and orders Fatima to summon camp physicians.
They arrive to find the prince wrapped in dry sheepskin furs, move him to the central hearth, and identify a deep thigh laceration. With his head in his princess’s lap, Tolui alleges in a slur that, after killing the deer, he kneeled to gut it with fingers numb from the winter cold, and his heavy hunting knife slipped on the frozen hide then sliced deep into his leg. The revelation that Sorghaghtani wanted it alive to begin with earns a defeated, “Oh.”
A physician speculates that trekking göröms upon göröms back to camp tore the wound open. She cauterizes the gash with hot iron, packs it with a poultice of dried herbs and animal fat, and stitches it with horsehair. Fatima can’t bear to look at him but also can’t help sucking a breath through teeth when she dares a glance. All the while, the princess is peppering her foolish hero’s face with kisses that make her tutor’s stomach turn; she would prefer to watch Sorghaghtani’s pet be skinned and butchered just outside.
The physicians predict he will have to hole up in his wife’s harem for days until the flesh knits enough for horseback combat, and so they recede from Fatima’s yurt to prepare that of Sorghaghtani’s for his stay.
When peace settles tentatively again, the princess returns to braiding Fatima’s hair. The camp outside echoes with the thud of axes separating bone, the scraping of knives against hide, and the celebratory chatter of women overjoyed that their sovereign has brought home a winter feast.
Tolui is lounging on his side, propped up on and elbow and watching his wife warily. Now that he’s able to see them, Fatima considers reaching for her hijab but fears interrupting her mistress’s leisure. The girl supposes she might count Tolui as a member of the household controlling her, which makes him—not unlike family—halal.
Perhaps he senses the princess would not make his ideal conversationalist while her pet is being diced for dinner. So, he rasps, “Is this shaping up to be anything like your home in Khwarazm?”
When Fatima registers in time that he’s addressing her, she hopes the princess doesn’t catch the hairs at the nape of her neck standing on end. She considers her options, then zeroes in on the ideal outcome of this exchange: “If I may be frank with His Highness?”
“By all means.”
“I’ve developed thicker skin here since my…untaxing, sedentary life, a lifetime ago.”
His eyes narrow to pull the scholarly household into focus; all the raided homes blur into one. “Why, how did your last room look?”
“I slept under glowing lanterns with a vested baboon, by a canopy through which my horse from Merv could greet me in the morning before it’s off to the races.” Tolui’s eyes defocus as though taking in the scenery beyond the walls of her yurt. “For the summer, my parents kept my damasks light and my turquoise headdresses heavy.”
“What were your parents like?”
“We hosted feasts every night for the artists Mama and Baba commissioned for illustrated manuscripts.” Fatima thinks briefly of her namesake’s narcissus scent, and wonders if a ‘Baba’ would smell of jasmine like her uncle, if his embrace would tender a snatch of the same relief. Knowing bleak weather denied the Mongols grape viticulture, she adds, “Wine flowed freely from gold ewers into their cups, even if we had none ourselves.” At the conjured illustration, the Prince licks his lips.
Fatima falls silent as the princess paints hers, though she’ll soon mar the rouge when this coddled young lady’s romantic fairy tale earns her, at Tolui’s whim, the deer’s doughy rump.
Sorghaghtani turns Fatima towards Tolui, frames her face for him between cold palms, and asks, “Isn’t she beautiful?”
Tolui blesses his wife's deft hands. In Fatima’s chest, she feels as though those clammy hands, his included, are folding warmly over her heart in fond squeezes until it should give out.
In Tolui’s absence, Fatima burns oud in a brass vessel to expel her yurt of his stench. After her final daily prayer, she recites the verses of refuge to expel her bedroom of his evil. Though tempted to supplicate for the wicked prince to be struck down, her uncle’s reminder that such curses are forbidden to Muslims stills her tongue. So, for fear of incurring God’s wrath, Fatima settles on praying for ‘justice’ however God deems fit. Hellfire, for instance. In bed, she hardly sleeps so much as wear her nails down between teeth and dream of the beast laying several tents away at the most vulnerable to her he’s ever been: bare, she supposes, and in final throes so euphoric he could die.
Accustomed to years of being woken by Anis and Zummurud for dawn prayers, Fatima alone learned to mark the appropriate hour, without so much as an astrolabe, by watching the horizon for a spread of true dawn after false dawn. Outside, pink clouds hang over dashes of blue mountains, and brown undergrowth peeks in patches across a glittering, white blanket. Eventually, the sun rises without Sorghaghtani and Tolui, who are surely savoring the vestiges of the night.
At least, Fatima imagines this (not in detail, with great effort) when Sorghaghtani doesn’t summon her. The girl kneels at her rug and utters her salutations and supplications, before turning her head to wish peace upon her righthand angel (thereabouts played a princess) then lefthand angel (thereabouts sprawled a big body). As she returns to the earthly realm, try as she might to ward off the image of that insatiable lover pulling his princess back for seconds and thirds, Fatima hopes to God that it’s real, that he won’t have his fill until she’s long gone with the oxen.
Though determined to travel unburdened by souvenirs of her stay, Fatima tucks the light, pretty dagger into the sash around her waist. Day breaks late enough this season that she hides in lilac shadows to evade slaves who might recognize her, passing yurt after yurt. But once the wagons are in sight, caution be damned; she can taste homecoming and her pace picks up into a sprint.
In passing an outer yurt, one of the stray braids riding on a breeze is pinned to a wool wall. Only when Fatima’s heart picks up again in double-speed does she register the preceding shriek of a single arrow that had flown past her.
Her ears carry on ringing as her plummeting blood pressure throws the world in a spotty haze, so that even as Fatima’s eyes flicker up at the arrow’s addresser, the man could have been anyone. In those furs, at that size, he could’ve been a bear.
But before Fatima can summon the courage for a double take, she registers that the arrowhead is a narrow bone for small game, and that sense of play is unmistakable. Tugging on her caught braid to wrest it loose, she hears the metrical rustle or crunch of his slow approach. Her eyes water at the certainty she’s cornered, but Fatima manages to sacrifice only a clump of torn locks and Sorghaghtani’s work before she’s darting back into the labyrinth of tents. The runaway slave uses the doors and slant of shadows to track the cardinal direction of her every turn, but passing around a corner, Fatima almost rams into a fur-clad mass and falls onto her backside.
Her heart goes out to the deer whose fat she dined on last night. The gloom under Tolui’s eyes is suggestive of a sleepless night with Sorghaghtani. Nonetheless, the shadow between his brows is smoothed out by the hilarity of the display, and amusement bares canines in a foggy huff. “Indeed. My wife joked you’d miss the glowing lanterns this much.” He kneels by her, hooks an arm under her legs, and gathers her like a rolled-up Persian rug.
Fatima twists and squirms the whole way to Sorghaghtani.
Ākhiru-n-Nahr. Āshiyānah. Suhayl. These are the names of the stars hanging over the second wave of carriages about to journey to Tus. As temperatures drop with the Sun, Fatima feels her skin tighten and dry on the path from her yurt to her lady’s. For all of the disappointment in the princess’s eyes, Fatima wonders why sentries haven’t yet been installed outside her tent to monitor her at least until all hope is lost. She wonders if Tolui, left restless by last night’s hunt, is daring her to play his game.
Presently, the only game Fatima can watch him play within his wife’s yurt is Dembee. Round after round, Tolui’s ineptitude for mental math fills his bowl with fermented mare’s milk while his bright, nimble princess comes first with hardly a sip. Most of the ladies-in-waiting cheer, clap, and sustain the beat of the game through the melody of their choral singing besides Fatima. Hoping it isn’t too late, she waits just before the tiebreaker to slip between her exhilarated colleagues out the southern exit.
Sorghaghtani’s tent, nestled within the heart of the camp, leaves Fatima a longer trip to her getaway, of which she takes advantage by devising a route that intercepts her own yurt. Ideally, any onlookers would presume she was tucking herself in for the night, or she could at least offer such an excuse to the suspicious.
But before Fatima passes her tent, the crunches of her footfalls in the snow begin to double. Initially, she chalks these sounds up to the echoes of the valley before daring to throw a glance over her shoulder. Several paces and fathoms away stands the silhouette of a body either about her size and close or much larger and more distant—Fatima cannot yet say. Unable to even identify this person or place where they’re facing in this dark and with her fringe blowing in her eyes, she hopes whoever she’s trying to make out has yet to notice her, then supposes it doesn’t matter so long as she’s on a homeward route.
Fatima supposed too soon; as the distant crunches start up again, the silhouette grows, and as though indifferent to her company, she likewise returns to her path. Quickly do the sounds of snow crushed underfoot catch up to Fatima, who assesses in a second glance she’s being shadowed in long strides. Composure cracking with her façade, she thoughtlessly breaks into a run—as does her hunter with a sudden burst of high, raucous chuckles snapping the tension. Seconds feel like hours, yet it all moves too fast for Fatima to register more than imagined finales to this chase: thud of axes separating bone, scraping of knives against hide, the celebratory chatter of a chorus, a man’s “ha-ha-ha-ha”.
Even when a dull, muffled thud betrays that Tolui has faceplanted in the snow, he hardly flinches enough to buy Fatima time before he’s back on his feet and after her again: zipping, looking so carefree that his quarry almost wonders if she’s been overblowing a drunken game.
But even when Fatima reaches her tent and tries to cross the threshold into safety, she’s seized again by her braid, wrenching a yelp out of her and tears that almost freeze soon as they well up. Insensitive more than oblivious, Tolui carries the rope like a leash and carries on chortling around his shrill, “Gotcha!”
But Fatima loses her sense of anything but her own breaths blooming in the air as the weather enters her chest with the belief that the prince intends to finish her here, and her dead hands slither into her waistband to unsheathe her iron dagger. Though she takes advantage of the proximity to drive at her befuddled target, he catches her wrist with honed instinct and corners her against the southern wall of her yurt.
His knee against her stomach fixes Fatima in place and presses shallower breaths out of her, yet she’s almost relieved by the warmth of their closeness. He juts his chin then, as if to taunt her with the effortlessness, crosses his arms and breathes, “Ah, but…y’knew that that wouldn’t help.” Lower, Tolui slurs, “Sensible as livestock. A waste of Sorgog’s kindness.”
His attempt to wrest the weapon out of his captive’s hand is met with resistance that ends in a spatter of red which Fatima, numb in that weather, fleetingly takes for the prince’s. Only when she registers the sting and involuntarily surrenders the dagger at last does Fatima realize her hand has been gashed.
For all the bloodshed he’s seen on the battlefield, Tolui’s eyes widen on his trifling accident, and his breaths stop blossoming in the breeze. Much to her absurd mortification, Fatima’s hurt hand darts to her mouth for a soothing suckle. The hard grip that tightens around said hand in alarm squeezes a thicker current of blood onto her palate, and the last sight Fatima catches before iron taste makes the world go black is Tolui’s slackening jaw.
Despite paralyzed thoughts, he catches her with enough power left to stagger back into the nearby threshold of her yurt, into the warmth of which they cave and, close enough that they don’t freeze to death, pass out.
Tonight, Sitara dreams of a courtyard in Tus, of catching two songbirds to cage and propagate. Overhead, she thinks she hears Lady Fatima’s voice call her from the loggia, or that of some woman, rousing her from her fantasy.
The girl’s eyes open on the affable face of another Persian slave before she discerns that the lump on which she uncomfortably rests is a big arm. Still dazed, Fatima wriggles to find a more pleasant position against it and smiles back before she registers a look of chagrin and, beyond it, a womanly figure throwing a silhouette over her. Fatima rubs her eyes until into focus come the features of Princess Sorghaghtani.