Equal of the Sun (25 page)

“But he is incompetent!”

“Don’t you understand? Your business now is rehabilitating yourself.” His tone was kind but patronizing, as if he were addressing a child. How the power between them had shifted!

Pari was silent for a long time. Desperation entered her eyes. Even though her uncle was right, it disturbed me to see her suffer. I had to stifle an urge to interrupt their meeting.

“Uncle, my father honored you after I advocated for you. Now you must help me as I helped you.”

“I will,” he said, “but not right away. Our shah doesn’t feel secure. That is why I visit him every day and do whatever he asks of me. That is why I have even offered him my best Circassian soldiers as his personal guards.”

“Why didn’t you defend me at the meeting?” Pari’s back was pressed against her cushion as if she were trying to draw support from it.

“Because he is like unexploded gunpowder: One must not set him off.”

Shamkhal reached for one of her hands and held it between his old bearlike paws.

“I will help you as soon as I can,” he said. “Trust me.”

That is what everyone said to Pari, yet who, in fact, could she trust?

“Daughter of my sister, I took a risk by coming to see you today. Isma‘il would object if he knew, even though we are kin. For this reason, I am not going to visit again unless absolutely necessary. It is silly to fuel his anger right now.”

Pari looked crestfallen; her long, thin frame seemed fragile compared to his robust one. “So you, too, are abandoning me?”

“Not abandoning you,” he said. “Waiting quietly until we have a chance to pounce.”

“Insh’Allah,” she said softly, but when she sought the comfort of his gaze, his eyes flicked away.

After we discussed Shamkhal’s advice, Pari finally admitted to the need to repair her relationship with Isma‘il Shah. Together we drafted a letter to him begging forgiveness for any transgression and requesting a meeting to show her contrition. It was a fine document, filled with flowery language and deep submission. As Pari wrote it out in her excellent hand, she grimaced now and again. But it had its intended effect: The Shah summoned us to a meeting a few days later.

I put on the “head-to-toe” that Pari had sent to me right after I had accepted my new appointment. Although such garments always accompanied a big promotion, they were finer than I had expected. The dark blue silk robe was patterned with small pale blue irises on golden stems. The robe was brightened by a pale gold shirt, a blue and gold sash, and a golden turban striped pink, black, and blue. Dark leather shoes printed with gold arabesques completed the outfit. The fineness of the head-to-toe shouted out my new rank.

“As your new acting vizier,” I said, enjoying the sound of the words, “I must remind you that the greatest humility will be required to move Isma‘il’s heart in your favor.”

“I know, I know,” she said impatiently.

We walked through the gardens and entered an elegant courtyard with a long rectangular pool of water flanked by caged parrots, which filled the air with their chattering. We stood by the pool until a eunuch arrived and showed us into a more secluded waiting room. After a while, we were summoned into Isma‘il’s private sanctum, the room where I imagined he met with Khadijeh and feasted on her beauty before taking her to his bedchamber to perform his nightly work. I tore my eyes away from the carved wooden door that led into his private quarters and tried not to think of how the servants outside would listen to the symphony of their grunts and cries. The bitterness of my feelings twisted in my belly and made me wonder whether I could ever love another woman. How could I let myself, knowing that she would one day push me aside?

When Pari and I were ushered into the room, I bowed with my hand on my heart. Sultanam was just leaving, but when the princess introduced me as her acting vizier, she congratulated me and greeted me as “the shining light of Pari’s sword of wisdom.” I thought of my father. How I hoped he was looking down on his son with pride!

The ceiling and the walls of the room were decorated with tiny mirrors arranged in patterns. Light came through a window in the roof and was reflected a hundred times into each shard of mirror, so that the room seemed to shimmer. Looking more closely, I saw a spot of darkness in the mirrors and realized it was the Shah’s eye, shattered into prisms of darkness that were reflected a thousand times around us, as if he were watching our every pore.

The Shah lay reclined against silken cushions, his legs sprawled out in front of him, his jewel-studded turban flung to the side. With his balding head exposed, he looked like an ordinary man, as subject as anyone to the cruelties of nature. On a silver tray in front of him, tea steamed in glasses, accompanied by a six-sided inlaid ivory box.

“Come sit down,” he said, his tone gentler than it had been during our last meeting.

The princess did so, while I hugged the wall at the back of the room to be close in case she needed anything.

“Light of the universe, I am here to do your bidding as your loyal sister,” she said, her voice soft, her gaze averted.

He offered her a glass of tea, which she accepted, and took one himself. Opening the box in front of him, he removed a confection and placed it in his mouth but didn’t offer one to Pari.

“I hope you are sincere in that desire,” he replied. “I haven’t seen evidence of it so far.”

Pari stiffened but made an effort to be polite. “My brother, perhaps you haven’t heard the details of what I have done on your behalf. It was I who gave my uncle the key to the harem so that he could lead his men onto the grounds and defeat those who supported Haydar.”

“I have heard,” he replied, “but of course, it was the will of God that I should come to power.”

“And I was His instrument,” she said, her voice low and soft. “I did what I could to assist you, and all I have wished for since then is to be your ally.”

“My ally?” he replied. “You can’t be my ally if you insist on going your own way. Your actions have proved to me that you are willful.”

“What actions?”

“Funding an army.”

My legs tensed in alarm. Pari didn’t deny the charge, which would have been dangerous. Her cheeks bloomed with color, but her voice remained quiet.

“Do you think I can stand by and watch the disintegration of the momentous treaty our father fought for? What kind of daughter of the Safavis would I be?”

Isma‘il looked away. “I have seen to that problem by appointing a new subgovernor of Azerbaijan, who will be responsible for investigating the problems in Khui.”

“Who is it?”

“You will wait until I announce it to everyone at once.”

He sat up on his cushion, his back straight and angry, as if responding to her unspoken charge. I suspected the Shah had not selected anyone, and Pari looked as if she thought the same.

“What about naming Ali Khan Shamlu? He is loyal,” she pressed.

“Pari, you know as well as I do that we can’t have two governments. Not even our father, who loved you so much, would have permitted you that.”

Pari sat up until she and Isma‘il appeared to be of equal height.

“I don’t want two governments,” she said. “I only wish to ensure our success in governing. Brother of mine, you were young once, and I think you felt as I do. When you were sent away to the fortress at Qahqaheh, it was because of your great zeal. Your mother told me that you wanted to score such a decisive victory against the Ottomans that they would leave us alone for generations. You took it upon yourself to raise an army for the good of your country, though some called it a rebellion.”

“That is true.”

“With zeal similar to your own, I instructed Ali Khan Shamlu to enforce the Treaty of Amasiyeh, and I spent my own money with the sole purpose of protecting our land. Isn’t it almost the same as what you did? Don’t we share the same royal blood?”

She opened her palms to the ceiling to emphasize her point, and it was as if she were offering her open heart at the same time.

“The same blood—but not the same purpose. It was stupid of our father to sign that treaty when I could have led us to victory.”

“But that’s all in the past now!” Pari protested. “Brother, I beg you to let me help you,” she added in a pleading tone that made me hope for the best. “I advised our father for years, and I could be as useful to you as I was to him.”

“You didn’t move a muscle without his approval,” he replied. “Yet you have tried to move a fighting force without my say. I am a military man, while you have never even seen a battlefield. The fact that you dare to employ such grandiose tactics can be explained by only one thing: pride.”

He tapped two fingers against his box of confections to emphasize his last few words.

“Pride? But this is what I have trained for all my life,” Pari protested. “I didn’t learn by my father’s side for so many years for nothing.”

“I differ from our father on this point,” Isma‘il replied. “He didn’t wish you to marry and leave him.”

“Nor did I wish to marry.”

“I suspect you didn’t know who you were getting when I became shah,” he said. “If you had wanted to rule through someone, you should have thrown yourself behind Haydar.”

“Haydar didn’t have the makings of a shah,” Pari said. “But if for some reason he and his soldiers had won, my support for you would have meant my death at his hands. You have shown courage on the battlefield, and I have tried to show my mettle here at the palace. I thought—I hoped—you would be pleased by my fealty.”

The edges of Pari’s silk robe trembled.

“Your fealty?” His laugh sounded as ghastly as the howl of jackals at night. “Whatever do you mean? You once said that as a child you loved me, but where is the truth in that?”

Pari stared at him, perplexed. “You doubt the love that I bore you as a little girl? Surely you must have felt how I wanted to burst with joy when you spent time with me.”

“And I loved you as if you were my own daughter,” he said, and the truth of his feelings clouded his eyes. “I would have done anything for you.”

“And I for you,” Pari replied.

He laughed again. “If only I could believe that were true.”

“What makes you doubt it?”

“If you loved me so much, what did you do to release me from prison when you had our father’s ear?”

“Release you from prison? I was a child of eight when you were taken away!”

“You weren’t a child forever. You could have urged our father to set me free. Did you ever speak in my favor?”

“You don’t understand. Our father turned yellow at the very mention of your name, sometimes even at the mention of another man with the same name as yours. I remember that when one of the nobles referred to his own father as a donkey, the Shah reached over and struck him in the face. The man was lucky to escape with his life. Another time, he asked his children to recite poetry to him, and I began reciting a tale from the
Shahnameh
about how two of the sons of the legendary king Fereydoon had rebelled against him and tried
to destroy him, although he had given them most of his kingdom. Our father began to look very ill, and without warning, he vomited in front of everyone. I didn’t understand why until I was older and realized that what he saw as your rebellion tormented him every day. Even your mother couldn’t change his mind, although she begged him so often that he refused to see her or visit her bed. How could I, as a child, hope to calm such wrath?”

“Did you ever try?” he repeated, his small black eyes fierce.

Pari remained silent.

“That is what I thought,” he said. “And why would you? By the time you were fourteen, you had his ear to yourself. If you had succeeded in bringing me home, I would have usurped your place. I was the golden son, beloved by all, and the warrior who had led the country to victory. How could you have competed with that? You would have married Badi al-Zaman and lived in some far-flung province for the rest of your life.”

“That was never in my plans,” she replied. “It never occurred to me that I could gain some advantage through your disgrace.”

“And yet you did,” he replied. “You were my father’s companion while I wasted my youth. For this reason I am just now trying to beget sons as an old man, and I have shriveled in body and in mind. It is a wonder I didn’t become a madman, locked away as I was! But what happened to me is ugly enough.”

His eyes burned with anger as if he thought Pari was responsible for everything he had endured. For the first time, I understood the extent to which the fortress at Qahqaheh had imprisoned Isma‘il’s soul, darkened his heart, and blackened his vision. It was chilling to see his feelings so nakedly displayed.

“I was not the shah to make such decisions about your fate,” Pari replied staunchly. “Our father sent away his own mother and punished his own brother when they rebelled. On the heels of that, how could I convince him of your innocence?”

Isma‘il snorted. “Sultanam told me you did everything you could to shut her out. You pushed all the royal women away and took the place that belonged to me.”

“I could never hope to be you, brother of mine,” she said.

Isma‘il bucked impatiently against his cushion, and the tiny mirrors in the room reflected his movement a thousand times before becoming calm again.