“Yes, Shahzrad Magas Mirza,” I said, taking care to use her whole regalia of address.
“You may call me Moth,” she said, with a sweet smile visible through her sheer chador. She indicated the gulsa’at. “This flower dial also tells the hours, but it never has to be turned or refilled. Each kind of flower in that round bed naturally opens at a certain hour of the day or night, and closes at another. They are selected for their regularity of habit, and planted here in proper sequence and—lo! They silently announce each of the twelve hours we count from sunset to sunset.”
I said daringly, “It is a thing as beautiful as you are, Princess Moth.”
“My father the Shah takes a delight in measuring time,” she said. “Yonder is the palace masjid in which we worship, but it is also a calendar. In one wall it has openings so the sun in its rounds shines its light each dawn through one after another to tell the day and the month.”
Somewhat similarly, I was sidling around the girl, to put her between me and the moon, so its light shone through her filmy garments and outlined her delectable body. The old grandmother evidently perceived my intention, for she grinned her gums evilly at me.
“And yonder, beyond,” the Princess continued, “is the anderun where reside all my father’s other wives and concubines. He has more than three hundred, so he can have a different one almost every night of the year if he chooses. However, he prefers my mother, the First Wife, except that she talks all night. So he only takes one of the others to bed when he wishes to have a good night’s sleep.”
Looking at the Shahzrad’s moon-revealed body, I felt my own body again stirring as vivaciously as it had done during the champna. I was glad I was not wearing tight Venetian hose, or I would have bulged them most disgracefully. Dressed as I was in ample pai-jamah, I did not think my arousal could have been visible. But the Princess Moth must have sensed it anyway, for to my shocked amazement she said:
“You would like to take me to bed and make zina, would you not?”
I stammered and stuttered, and managed to say, “Surely you should not speak so, Princess, in the presence of your royal grandmother! I assume she is your”—I did not know the Farsi word, so I said it in French—“your chaperon?”
The Shahzrad made an airy gesture. “The old woman is as deaf as that gulsa’at. Be not concerned, but answer me. You would like to put your zab into my mihrab, no?”
I swallowed and gulped. “I could hardly be so presumptuous … I mean, a Royal Highness …”
She nodded and said briskly, “I believe we can arrange something of the sort. No, do not grab at me. The grandmother can see, if she cannot hear. We must be discreet. I will ask my father’s permission to be your guide while you are here, to show you the delights of Baghdad. I can be a very good guide to those delights. You will see.”
And with that, she drifted away down the moonlit garden, leaving me shaken and shaking. I might say vibrant. When I tottered to my room, Karim was waiting to help me doff the unfamiliar Persian clothes, and he laughed and made noises of admiration and said:
“Surely now the young Mirza will allow me to complete the relaxing champna!” and he poured almond oil into his hand, and he did so with expertness, and I fell languidly into sleep.
The next day I slept late, and so did my father and uncle, for their consultation with Shah Zaman had lasted well into the night. As we ate our breakfast meal, brought by the servants to our suite, they told me that they were contemplating the Shah’s suggestion that we go by sea as far as the Indies. But they would first have to find out if it was practicable. They would each go to one of the Gulf ports—my father to Hormuz, my uncle to Basra—and see if, as the Shah believed, an Arab trader-captain could be persuaded to allow passage to us rival Venetian traders.
“When we have investigated,” said my father, “we will regather here in Baghdad, because the Shah will be wanting us to carry many gifts from him to the Khakhan. So you, Marco, can come along with either one of us to the Gulf, or you can await our return here.”
Thinking of the Shahzrad Magas, but having the good sense not to mention her, I said I thought I would stay. I would take the opportunity to get better acquainted with Baghdad.
Uncle Mafìo snorted. “In the way that you got so well acquainted with Venice when we were last away? Truly, not so very many Venetians get to know the interior of the Vulcano.” To my father he said, “Is it prudent, Nico, to leave this malanòso alone in an alien city?”
“Alone?” I protested. “I have the servant Karim and”—I again refrained from mentioning the Princess Moth—“and the whole palace guard.”
“They are responsible to the Shah, not to you or us,” said my father. “If you should get into trouble again …”
I indignantly reminded him that my most recent trouble had involved my saving them from being slaughtered in their sleep, and they had praised me for it, and that was why I was still in their company, and—
My father sternly interrupted with a proverb, “One sees better backwards than forwards. We are not going to set a warden over you, my boy. But I think it would be a good idea to buy a slave to be your personal servant and see to your best interests. We will go to the bazàr.”
The melancholy Wazir Jamshid walked with us, to interpret for us if our command of Farsi should prove inadequate. Along the way he explained several curious things I was seeing for the first time. For example, in eyeing the other men on the streets, I observed that they did not allow their blue-black beards to go gray or white as they aged. Every elderly man I saw had a beard of a violent pink-orange color, like Shiraz wine. Jamshid told me that it was done with a dye made from the leaves of a shrub called hinna, and he said the hinna was also much used by women as a cosmetic and by carters to adorn their horses. I should mention that the horses used in Baghdad for carriage and cartage are not the fine Arabians used for riding. They are tiny little ponies, not much bigger than mastiff dogs, and they do look very pretty with their flowing manes and tails dyed that brilliant pink-orange color.
There were, on the Baghdad streets, men of many other nations than Persia. Some wore Western clothes and had faces, like ours, that would have been white had they not been sun-darkened. Some had black faces, some brown, some a sort of tan-yellow hue, and there were many whose faces were like weathered leather. Those were the Mongols of the occupying garrison, all dressed in armor of varnished hides or metal chain mail, and striding contemptuously through the street crowds, shoving aside anybody who stepped in their way. Also on the streets were many women, also of various complexions, the Persians only lightly veiled, and others not wearing chador at all, a strange thing to see in a Muslim city. But, even in liberal Baghdad, no woman walked alone; whatever her race or nationality, she was attended either by one or several other women or by a male attendant of considerable bulk and beardless face.
I was so bedazzled by the Baghdad bazàr that I could hardly believe the city had been conquered and plundered and held to tribute by the Mongols. It must have recovered commendably from its recent impoverishment, for it was the richest and most thriving center of commerce I had yet seen, far surpassing every marketplace of Venice in the variety and abundance and value of the goods for sale.
The cloth merchants stood proudly among bales and bolts of fabrics woven of silk and wool and Ankara-goat hair and cotton and linen and fine camel hair and sturdier camelot. There were more exotic Eastern fabrics like mussoline from Mosul and dungri from India and bokhram from Bukhara and demesq from Damascus. The book merchants displayed volumes of fine vellum and parchment and paper, gorgeously engrossed in many colors and gold leaf besides. Most of the books, being copies of the works of Persian authors like Sadi and Nimazi, and of course written in Farsi and rendered in the convulsed-worm Arabic lettering, were incomprehensible to me. But one of them, titled Iskandarnama, I could recognize from its illuminations as being a Persian version of my favorite reading, The Book of Alexander.