The Tiger Queens (33 page)

“Run, Fatima,” he whispered, more blood trickling from his lips. “Before the heathens find you. Hide in the cellar—you’ll be safe there.”

I shook my head violently, touching his lips with my fingers and catching the scent of the mint leaves he loved to chew, mixed with the copper tang of blood that made my stomach revolt. “I won’t leave you.”

“You must,” he said, his hand brushing my cheek beneath my veil. “Live for both of us, Fatima, and I’ll meet you in the gardens of Jannah.”

“You won’t,” I sobbed, for, unbeknownst to anyone, I had damned my soul the night my mother died. It was not Mansoor and the gardens of Jannah that I would see in the afterlife, but the hellfires of Jahannam. “Don’t you dare leave me.”

But the life faded from Mansoor’s eyes, his soul gathered into death’s waiting arms to return to Allah’s glorious light. And I was left behind, a widow wearing the blood of both my father and my husband, wreathed by a courtyard full of corpses and dying men.

*   *   *

I hid not in the dankness of our cellar like some hunted vermin, but instead, scarcely able to see through my kohl-stained tears, I stumbled up the steps of the minbar to where the cleric
would lead the faithful in their prayers. The white-bearded imam was still there, his body sprawled facedown on the steps. I muttered my apologies as I stepped over him, then curled into myself at the top of the platform, shielding my ears from the screams of battle and the cries of dying men that filtered through the windows along with the sun. The world had come undone, but I would wait until darkness fell and then wash Mansoor’s and my father’s bodies so they would be prepared to greet Allah.

I wished for sleep, but grief and terror kept my body taut, leaving me to alternate between a terrible numbness and fearful tremors that threatened to crack my teeth. When darkness finally fell I picked my way over the imam to the fountains. Silence shrouded my once-proud city as if it had been abandoned, and the water had stopped for the first time I could remember. The Mongols had been known to divert entire rivers to besiege cities; they must have cut off Nishapur’s water supply.

For a moment I almost despaired—the bodies of my beloved and my father must be washed and arranged before they could greet Allah. Yet gleaming at the bottom of the cheerful turquoise-and-white tiles was water not yet drained or evaporated, still containing the impurities and prayers of men now dead. I removed my head scarf and veil, letting them absorb the
water and grimacing as my husband’s blood seeped from my hands into the water, smoky red tendrils reaching out to brush the sides of the fountain.

I bathed my father and Mansoor as best I could, but none of my ministrations could wash away all the bloodstains and nothing could mend the wound in my father’s neck to make him whole again. I kept the brush that I found in Mansoor’s pocket, its wooden tip marred with sharp grooves where he’d bit it absentmindedly while reconciling accounts only last night. My father’s pocket contained a small silk bag with the last of my mother’s narcissus bulbs. The innocent blossoms would be downy white with a crimson-gold corona, and the fragrance when they bloomed seemed sent by the angels themselves. Yet the bulbs . . .

The bulbs of the poet narcissus were lethal, inducing vomiting with the slightest taste and death with the merest bite. I knew not when I would need them, but I recognized the gift from my parents and from Allah.

There was no linen with which to wrap the bodies, but I rolled my father and Mansoor onto their right sides toward Makkah and tore my veil in half to cover their faces, praying that Allah would forgive the hasty preparations as he’d done for the victims of the ancient Battle of Uhud. My men would have been dead a full day by the time the sun reached its zenith, the longest a body could be left aboveground without facing penalties in the hereafter. Surely Allah would show mercy on their souls.

The din of battle seemed to have died along with the sun, and I swayed on my feet to see the hungry flies gathered on the eyes and wounds of the dead. Standing under the empty dome of the mosque, I threw three handfuls of earth I’d stolen from under the rosebushes in the mosque’s courtyard onto the bodies of my husband and father.

“
Inna lillaahi wa inna ilayhi Raaji‘oon
,” I said, intoning the prayer of death as the black dirt crumbled over their hearts.

To Allah we belong and to Allah we return.

The verse fell empty from my lips, but I repeated it until the words ran together and the leering moon crept from behind a cloud. Still, the words did nothing to lighten the weight of my grief. Trapped within the city walls and unable to leave the men I loved, I took up Mansoor’s calligraphy brush.

I was still writing when dawn warmed the sky and footsteps entered the mosque, my delicate calligraphy made of their blood decorating the tiles around their bodies with the stories of their lives. Terrible laughter bubbled in my throat several times as I thought of how I must appear, my hair wild while I painted with blood, but I had nowhere else to go, nothing else to do. I stood on the precipice of madness, unsure whether to stay where I was or to jump into the yawning abyss.

The footsteps stopped behind me, but I cared little if a Mongol heathen stood poised to loose an arrow at me. I thought of Mansoor’s final words, and at that moment, I knew not whether I wanted to live or to die.

The intruder hovered behind me and my every muscle tensed, waiting for the inevitable blow.

Instead, the man spoke to me in my native Farsi. “Stand,” he ordered.

I didn’t move. I recalled stories of cities vanquished by the Mongol horsemen, of the men slaughtered and women and children distributed as wives and slaves. The heathen repeated himself, but still I didn’t move. It wasn’t until the sharp tip of his hooked lance prodded my ribs that I turned.

There was not one man, but two, although the second was scarcely more than a boy, with his lanky arms and faint shadow of a mustache. The fur ruff on the first man’s helmet stood motionless in the mosque’s foul air, but the hoops in his ears and the golden ring in his nose gleamed in the moonlight. He poked me again and motioned toward the arched entrance.

“Come,” he said, glancing at the two bodies behind me. “There’s nothing more you can do for them now.”

I looked down at my father and Mansoor, thinking to throw myself on the man’s lance, but my insides turned to water at the thought of feeling the weapon lodge itself in my belly, the soldier yanking it out covered in my blood, laughing as I died.

I was a coward.

Panic threatened to bring me to my knees at the thought of leaving the men I loved, but the Mongol prodded me more gently. Later I would wonder whether it was the instinct to survive that moved me or whether divine grace—or perhaps punishment—kept me on my feet.

The soldier herded me into a deserted alley, but the younger one’s face lacked conviction when he pointed his curved sword at me. A waterfall of early jasmine blossoms poured from a white balcony overhead, an oasis of beauty amidst the bloody chaos. At the end of the alley, another Mongol released his waters in a foul yellow stream, grinning widely.

He urinated on the body of a slain Persian woman.

The foul beast glanced at me and licked his lips over two rows of crooked teeth before he turned and continued urinating. The tall soldier pushed me out of the alley and into the soft spring sunshine, so at odds with the carnage all around me in the streets.

Bodies. The sight of bodies filled my vision, their blank eyes staring at me and skin shining like wax in the early sunlight.

I almost stumbled over a broken old man with limbs bent at wrong angles. I wondered fleetingly if some had managed to escape, but the images of the dead overwhelmed me so I could no longer think.

I looked to the sky then, letting the soldier prod me through the streets, past the blue-domed roof of the tomb of famed poet-astronomer Omar Khayyám, and up the steps to the city walls, snippets of prayers tumbling through my mind. My life was in Allah’s hands now, as it had ever been.

We walked along the ramparts, the breeze lashing my tangled hair about my face and heavy with the smell of rain soon to come. We drew to a halt above the Gate of the Silversmiths, still studded with the scaling ladders the Mongols had used to penetrate the walls. Before me stood two commanders, their backs to us as they gestured to the plain before the city, situated between Mount Binalud in the distance and the pear and apricot orchards that bordered the walls. I saw then where the survivors had gone, not escaped but herded like beasts awaiting slaughter. The Mongols had taken Nishapur, but they weren’t finished with it, or its people.

The soldier behind me spoke again, addressing the generals, and I would have gaped had I not already been so battered by the events of the day. These were no ordinary commanders, but women dressed as soldiers. One was scarcely more than a child, with high cheekbones and full lips, yet her belly was swollen in the final months of pregnancy and her eyes were hard under her furred helmet. The other was slight and closer to my
mother’s age, but I felt as if death wrapped its hand around my heart when she leveled her mismatched eyes at me; it was akin to staring into the gaze of an angry djinn.

The soldier repeated himself, but the pregnant one turned her back to us. The other lifted my hands to inspect my fingers, stained with blood.

“Shigi thought we might be interested in you,” she said, her Farsi bent with the guttural consonants of the Mongols. I saw the intricate silver cross of the messiah Isa Ibn Maryam at her throat and wondered which conquered people she had stolen it from. “A Persian woman found writing over the bodies of the dead is a rare treasure indeed.”

I was unaccustomed to such scrutiny from someone so obviously below me in stature, but I tipped my chin and said nothing.

“You have the strength of these mountains in your soul,” she said, holding my chin and tilting it to see my eyes, then gesturing to Mount Binalud to the north. “That will serve you well in the days to come.” The pretty one spoke over her shoulder, and the djinn answered in the mongrel tongue before letting her hand drop. “Al-Altun says I should kill you,” she said to me, so that my heart lurched. “But I have need of a scribe.”

“You mean a slave.” I taunted her with my scalding tone, half hoping she’d stab me through the belly and end my misery. I recognized the name Al-Altun as Genghis Khan’s daughter, the wife of the general who fell during the first Mongol raid against Nishapur earlier in the winter.

“I am Toregene, wife of Ogodei, the third son of Genghis Khan. I don’t eat my slaves, wear their teeth as necklaces, or use their bones to decorate my tent, contrary to what you may have heard.”

I’d heard all those rumors about the Mongols, but I only attempted to look down my nose at her, a difficult feat as we were the same height.

Her gaze flicked beyond me to the orchards and Nishapur’s survivors. “You’ll be treated well,” she said in a tone of dismissal. “Shigi will take you to my tent now.”

“And if I won’t go?”

“You will,” she said, “if only because a woman in your position has no other choice.”

I didn’t know if she meant that this regiment of bloodthirsty heathens wouldn’t hesitate to rape me, or she guessed that, unlike my mother, I lacked the courage to follow my husband and father into the next life. I’d heard stories of the dreaded Khan kidnapping women from other clans, to marry them himself or wed them to his sons, and wondered if perhaps this woman had once been on the losing side of the Mongols’ destruction.

It didn’t matter what trials this woman had once faced. The Mongols were an abomination and deserved to writhe in the flames of Jahannam for eternity.

Toregene pushed past me, pausing long enough to linger at Shigi’s elbow. She murmured something to him in the Mongol tongue, then gave a pointed look at the plains, covered with Nishapur’s gathered sons and daughters.

“What do you say?” I asked, my throat constricting in fear. “What will happen to them?”

Toregene ignored me, and Shigi prodded me with his sword, guiding me down the wall and out the Gate of the Silversmiths. I swayed at the smell and the sight of the carrion crows gorging themselves on the bloated bodies in the moat and tried to keep the stench away with my sleeve, but it burned itself into my soul.

The turtledoves fell silent as I passed the smaller group of the walking dead, mostly women and children, and a few men I guessed to be scholars and artisans from their long beards and ink-stained fingers. The men wore the same vacant eyes and haggard expressions, their clothes spattered with the blood of their loved ones and their cheeks streaked with dried tears. The Mongols and their horses had trampled the ground, stripping the leaves from the apricot trees and tearing the grass from its roots.

Shigi urged me to hurry, but my feet felt like boulders, and we hadn’t yet reached the largest of the white tents beyond the orchards when the screams began.

A gentle rain pattered down, changing the ground to mud. Horsemen pounded behind us, and I turned to watch in horror as people tried to escape, running as if chased by demons, only to be hunted by spears and
stabbed by Mongol swords. Some were beaten back with fists and sword hilts, sometimes worse. I watched dumbstruck, unable to move, as if I was a sparrow in the shadow of a soaring hawk.

The Mongols struck down everyone who served no use to them—Nishapur’s remaining men, the elderly, and the infirm were slaughtered like penned sheep. Shigi tried to push me into Toregene’s tent, but I fought him until he let me stumble to the ground, rendered deaf and mute by the sight before me.

The killings went on until night fell, until the bodies outnumbered the stars in the sky.

Exhausted, I crouched in the mud, listening to the keening around me and wishing I could pray, but my mind was numb. The two women stood on the walls again, surveying the corpse of our once-proud city. Then the young one—Al-Altun—threw her head back and let out a battle cry of victory that chilled my very soul.

This woman had decimated my city, killed my family, and turned my dreams to dust. I knew then what it was to hate, to feel the lust for revenge settle like a vulture in my heart.