Omar Khayyam - a life (2 page)
Presently Omar appeared and stopped to drink from his hand. He had no books, he was arguing with no friends, and he saluted Yasmi gravely.
"Eh, say," she remarked instantly, before he could pass.
'What shall I say?"
She considered, fearful that he would go on his way. "My father says you are a mocker. Why do you come to a bad end?"
Omar looked at her as if she had been a parrot that had suddenly given tongue.
"It is much better," she hurried on, "to be sweet to people, and not to mock them—then they give you candy at times. How old are you? What do you do when you are not at the school, or thinking, or sitting with Rahim?"
"Well," Omar smiled, "I am seventeen years old. Sometimes I visit the shop of my father, who was of the tentmakers' guild. Now he is dead. But Rahim—Rahim is going away."
Yasmi wriggled with interest. She looked up at the boy shyly and made room for him to sit on the rock beside her. "Tell me," she said impulsively, "what you would like to do? What you do in your mind, when you aren't carrying water or children, or washing cloths——— "
With dismay she realized that a student who contradicted masters at the school and chanted verses from the Koran that he knew by heart had other occupations than her humble self. But her mistake proved fortunate because Omar sat down.
"I would like," he meditated, "to have an observatory."
She did not know what this might be, but she was careful not to make a second slip. "And then what?"
"Oh, a globe of the sky-sphere, and a copy of Ptolemy's star tables."
There was a lot more, it seemed, needed to complete an observatory. Yasmi perceived that what Omar longed for was a tower of seclusion that would belong to him—something like the pavilion with the white swans of her own dreams.
"I know!" she nodded. You want to be a conjurer like Sidi Ahmed, and read fate in the stars."
The older women of her house patronized Sidi Ahmed, the soothsayer.
Omar was not pleased. His brows drew together and he gritted his teeth. "The father of fools, the braying donkey—with his abracadabra mumblings, and his horoscopes!"
It appeared that Omar did not believe in soothsayers. What he wanted to do was vague in Yasmi's agile mind. He wanted to use his observatory to measure Time. Yasmi's notion of Time began with sunrise and the first of the five prayers, and it ended with starlight. There was the moon, of course, to mark the months.
Omar, however, was not content with the moon. The moon went on its way and left many hours of Time behind each year. Why should men lose these hours from the year? The moon was to blame, but they would not forsake the moon to make a true count of the hours.
Yasmi nodded wisely, thinking of other things. If Omar could have his observatory, and if—and if he could love her a little, she would sweep it out and wash his turban cloths for him, and embroider his slippers. The two of them would live all their hours in the observatory.
Because Yasmi no longer wanted to go home. She wanted to listen to the voice of the son of Ibrahim, to watch the shadows flecking his smooth skin, while his eyes flashed and darkened. Without Omar, she would be empty and nothing—nothing would please her, ever. She edged a little closer to him, clutching the rose that she had picked to try in her hair.
'"Would you like this?" she said faintly, when he had exhausted the misdemeanors of the moon.
"What? Oh, that! Why——" He took it in his fingers and smelled it. "It is yours?"
"But I want you to take it," she said urgently, "and keep it."
(Once her sister had thrown such a rose from the lattice of the balcony, and Yasmi had seen a youth of Baghdad pick it up and press it to his heart.) The son of Ibrahim merely looked at his rose; his mind was off somewhere with the moon. Yasmi brought it back to earth and herself again.
"When you have your observatory——" Yasmi thought it must be something like the round tower of the Castle. "I——I will be glad."
Then Omar smiled. "How old are you, Yasmi?"
"Almost thirteen," she whispered. She had heard her mother and the other wives say that a girl could be married at thirteen.
"When you are thirteen I will send you roses, lots of them."
He went away then, wondering how he had come to say so much to that child in the striped dress with the hungry eyes. But Yasmi sat where she was, her eyes dark with excitement. Her whole body ached with delight. She heard the jingling of donkey bells and the cries of men as if from some remote place. All the street had altered, all these men were strangers. And she had a feeling deep within her that they would never change back to ordinary things again . . . She did not mind when the women slapped her for dawdling with the water at the fountain.
After a while she ran out and picked herself a rose from the same hedge, and she carried it with the gray kitten to her sleeping quilt that night.
"It is time," one of the women observed the next day, "that Yasmi wore the veil and kept to the
anderun
. My soul—she was seen hanging around a beardless student for an hour at the fountain."
"No longer shall she wait in the shop," her mother agreed.
Yasmi said nothing. This was to be expected. At last she would wear the veil of a marriageable woman. She felt sure that walls and lattices would not keep her love penned up.
But Omar went away.
A serai in the mountains by the great Khorasan road, three weeks' journey of a laden camel train to the west of Nisapur.
No one slept during the first watch of the night, because no one could sleep. Fires of thorn bush crackled in the open courtyard; camels grunted and sighed in their kneeling places; horses munched dried grass in the corners, while beggars went about with their bowls and their endless
"Ya hu ya hak!"
Around the empty stew pots men sat licking the last of the grease and rice from their fingers, pausing to toss dried fruit or copper coins into the beggars' bowls. They were in a charitable mood because they were bound on a journey, a dangerous journey, and the giving of alms was a pious propitiation of fate.
The serai keeper alternately cried out that he was not Moses to provide water where the last of the water had been used up, and counting the coins in his wallet on the sly. These were hectic days for the resthouse on the Khorasan road; even now, in midwinter, hundreds were riding in daily, all bound west to join the army.
Men had spread their sheepskins upon every foot of the covered gallery around the courtyard. Some were burning charcoal in braziers and the glow lighted up rings of bearded faces. Khorasanis, Persians, and Arabs huddled in quilted coat or furs, smiling and arguing—glad of the rest after enduring the bitter mountain wind. Only the smooth Turkish faces with small eyes and high cheekbones were impassive. Cold was nothing new to these hardy riders from the steppes of mid-Asia; they were accustomed to war and wandering, and they talked little in any case.
Rahim Zadeh, son of the Nisapur landowner, fortunately possessed a brazier, and he kept himself warm in a fine khalat lined with sable skins.
He had heard the cry of a fanatical Hanbalite one night in Nisapur when he had been drinking wine behind a locked door, and it had seemed to him to be a voice of warning. Rahim, usually indolent except where amusement was to be had, felt that he must draw his sword in this war, and he had come with his milk-brother Omar of the Tentmakers and a score of armed retainers to join the armed host of the Sultan, Alp Arslan, in the far west.
"At least,' he observed, "it will be more exciting than chasing antelope on the plain."
Rahim's family belonged to the old Persian nobility, the Iranian aristocracy, more ancient than the Greeks. He had faultless manners, a taste for sugared wine. He played backgammon and polo well but he soon tired of a game.
"Aiwallah,"
murmured one of his followers, "it is cold."
Rahim yawned. It was cold enough, and muddy. Moreover, bugs had got into his sleeping skins. He glanced up as the serai keeper appeared at his shoulder and did not go away.
"May it please the noble young lord," the fellow whispered, "we have women travelers in the house behind the serai."
The noble young lord gave no sign of displeasure, and the keeper bent closer. "Some of the girls are from Baghdad, very pleasant and well-trained." He dropped the fiction that the inmates of the other house were also travelers. "If the Amir of Swordsmen cares for amusement——"
Rahim hesitated and then got to his feet. "Say to the son of Ibrahim," he ordered his servants, "that I am gone awhile to—to talk with friends."
"On my head," muttered the man who was cold.
Enviously the men-at-arms looked after Rahim as he followed the serai keeper toward the stairs. There were no women here for the common born, but if Allah willed it, after the battle with the infidels, slaves would be hawked about for all. After warming themselves at the brazier they went to sleep.
It was late when Rahim came back, stepping over the prostrate forms shrouded like the dead. He was tired and out of humor.
Omar, kneeling on the sleeping robes, fanned the brazier red again and made room for his milk-brother. "Where wert thou?"
"May the breed of innkeepers go to all the seven hells and burn," muttered Rahim. "May they eat dirt!" He threw himself down, glad that Omar was awake to complain to. "Where wert thou?"
"Looking about. Oh, there is life upon this road." Omar smiled, because the highroad and above all the desert road always stirred him, who was desert born, with the blood of Arab wanderers in him. "Yonder is a great camp, and in the camp a tent as large as the Nisapur
kala't
. And the place full of Turks in armor with gold upon their helmets. I understand their talk a little. Some prince halted there the night. I saw him."
Rahim sighed. Whatever Omar did, he did with all his intensity, plunging into things, getting messed up in them. Warfare was something new to the son of Ibrahim, and he went out of his way to look at strange horsemen, to ask questions at the halting places and even to examine the baggage bales offloaded from the camels. Omar found adventure in crossing a river, whereas he, Rahim, merely got wet. "Who?" he asked.
"I did not hear. The lord was sitting on a red cloth by the fire in the tent, talking with some doctors of the law, his tutors. He is two years younger than thou, and he wears a white ermine kaftan. The doctors told him that a certain star he had seen was Suhail, but I knew it was not. No man can see Suhail from this spot at this hour——"
"I know," Rahim lied hastily. "Isn't there a proverb——"
'That the sight of Suhail is fortunate—yes."
"Thou hast dared to speak before the Turks? But how?"
"In Arabic," explained Omar, amused. "The boy
tarkhan
went from the tent with me, to be shown the constellations. Those doctors were fools, mouthing folly——"
"Nay, scatterbrain, thou wert a greater fool to gainsay them. Wilt never learn not to deny the word of one who can set his slipper on thy lips?" Rahim was half-provoked, half-fearful. "What said the prince?"
"He asked if the stars held any portent for the war."
"Ah, and do they?"
The young student was silent, tracing signs absently with a dagger sheath in the dried mud. "If we knew, Rahim," he responded quietly, "we would be wiser than the Magi. If we could read human fate! And still——I showed the boy where the planets stood in their houses——"
"Thou hast no need to show me," cried his foster-brother impatiently. "How stands the omen?"
Omar shook his head. "Harken to Zarathustra! Two kings are going into battle and the heavens declare that the destiny of the king in the east is rising, and that of the monarch of the west is falling. But—listen to the prophecy—the portent of death hangs over both of them." Suddenly he laughed. "It's nonsense, to say that. But the lion cub stared as if he had seen a ghost."
"The lion cub!" Rahim's eyes opened wide. "What——"
"The prince, the one with the white coat. At least they called him that."
"My fathers beard!" Rahim sighed. "Hast thou never heard of the Lion Cub?"
"Nay."
"May Allah the Compassionate befriend thee. There is but one! He is the eldest son of our Sultan, of Alp Arslan, the Valiant Lion. Thou hast prophesied victory to the prince-royal."
"I did not know him."
"Would any one believe? And more, thou hast foretold the death of his father, which"—Rahim's agile mind delved into possibilities—"no soothsayer in his senses would do, in public, anyway. Still, it means the throne to the Lion Cub. What said he?"
"He asked my name, and I told him. He asked whom I served, and I said no one, being a student of the Nisapur
madrasse
."
"Hmm. Well, if I know these Turks our masters, and if Alp Arslan dies, thou mayest go to this same Lion's Cub and claim the post of astrologer to the King. Then appoint me thy carpet spreader, at a rich salary."
Omar shook his head.
"I think," Rahim insisted, "the making of a fine soothsayer is in thee, scatterbrain. Everyone believes thee. Oh, Yarmak——" He kicked at one of his sleeping servants. "Yarmak, fetch me the jar in the leather case. A goblet."
It was wine that Yarmak poured out into the cup that Rahim held. Forbidden wine. Rahim, who craved it, whispered that such a small sin would not count against the sanctity they would attain by fighting in the holy war. Omar, who cared little for it but who loved his foster-brother, would not gainsay him.
"Still," he pointed out as he took the cup, "we may lose the battle."
"Not we," cried Rahim. "Our Turkish Sultan may be a common soldier, but he wins all his battles. That, at least, was a sound prophecy."
The sweet wine refreshed him and he took a second cup. He fancied himself at the battlefield, riding recklessly in advance of the Sultan's red banner, mounted on his big black horse—sweeping forward between the lines of the two armies, and meeting hand-to-hand a chosen hero of the Christians, some knight in splendid armor. He visioned himself cutting down the infidel champion, while the Moslems shouted his praise. He thought of taking the head of his enemy and casting it down before the horse of his Sultan . . .
"Hark to this, Omar," he urged.
But the milk-brother lay rolled up in the camel hair rug, sleeping as soundly as though combat and glory and royal favor did not exist.