“My Enishte, may he rest in eternal peace, was murdered,” Black said rudely.

I caressed Black’s hand, which rested within my own, as if respectfully stroking the tiny hand of a young apprentice who might one day indeed illustrate masterpieces. Quietly and reverently we looked at Bihzad’s masterpiece for a time. Later, Black withdrew his hand from mine.

“We passed quickly over the chestnut horses on the previous page without examining their noses,” he said.

“There’s nothing to them,” I said, and turned back to the previous page so he might see for himself: There was nothing extraordinary about the nostrils of the horses.

“When shall we find the horses with peculiar noses?” Black asked like a child.

But, in the middle of the night, toward morning, when we found Shah Tahmasp’s legendary Book of Kings in an iron chest beneath piles of various shades of green watered silk and drew it forth, Black was curled up fast asleep on a red Ushak carpet, with his well-formed head lying on a velvet pillow embroidered with pearls. Meanwhile, as soon as I laid eyes upon the legendary tome again after so many years, I quickly understood that the day had only just begun for me.

The legendary volume I’d seen only from afar twenty-five years ago was so large and heavy that Jezmi Agha and I had difficulty lifting and carrying it. When I touched the binding, I knew there was wood within the leather. Twenty-five years ago, upon the death of Sultan Süleyman the Magnificent, Shah Tahmasp was so elated to be finally rid of this sultan who’d occupied Tabriz three times, that along with the gift-laden camels he sent to Süleyman’s successor, Sultan Selim, he included a spectacular Koran and this volume, the most beautiful of the books in his treasury. First, a Persian ambassadorial delegation three hundred strong took the tome to Edirne where the new sultan spent the winter hunting; after it arrived here in Istanbul along with the other presents carried on camels and mules, Head Illuminator Black Memi and we three young masters went to see the book before it was locked up in the Treasury. Just like the Istanbulites who would rush to see an elephant brought from Hindustan or a giraffe from Africa, we hurried to the palace where I learned from Master Black Memi that the great Master Bihzad, who’d left Herat for Tabriz in his old age, hadn’t contributed to this book because he’d gone blind.

For Ottoman miniaturists like us who were astonished by ordinary books with seven or eight illustrations, looking through this volume, which contained 250 large illustrations, was like roaming through an exquisite palace while its inhabitants slept. We stared at the incredibly rich pages with a quiet pious reverence as if beholding the Gardens of Paradise that had appeared miraculously for a fleeting moment. And for the following twenty-five years we discussed this book which remained locked in the Treasury.

I silently opened the thick cover of the Book of Kings as if opening a huge palace door. As I turned the pages, each of which made a pleasant rustle, I was overcome by melancholy more than awe.

1. Mindful of the stories suggesting that all the master miniaturists of Istanbul had stolen images from the pages of this book, I couldn’t give my full attention to the pictures.

2. Thinking that I might chance upon a hand drawn by Bihzad in some corner, I couldn’t devote myself wholeheartedly to the masterpieces that appeared in one of every five or six pictures (how decisively and with what grace did Tahmuras lower his mace upon the heads of the demons and giants, who later, in a time of peace, would teach him the alphabet, Greek and various other languages!).

3. The noses of horses and the presence of Black and the dwarf prevented me from surrendering myself to what I saw.

Naturally, I was disappointed to find myself observing more with my mind than with my heart, despite the great luck of having Allah, in His munificence, grant me the chance to have my fill of this legendary book before the velvet curtain of darkness descended over my eyes-the divine grace bestowed upon all great miniaturists. By the time the light of dawn reached the Treasury, which had gradually begun to resemble an icy tomb, I’d gazed upon each of the 259 pictures in this superlative book. Since I looked with my mind, allow me once more to categorize, as if I were an Arab scholar interested only in reasoning:

1. Nowhere could I locate a horse with nostrils that resembled what the wretched murderer had drawn: Not among the variously colored horses that Rüstem encountered while pursuing horse thieves in Turan; not among Feridun Shah’s extraordinary horses which swam the Tigris after the Arab Sultan had denied him permission to do so; not among the gray horses sorrowfully watching Tur’s treachery in beheading his younger brother Iraj, of whom he was jealous because their father, while doling out his territory, gave the best country, Persia, and far away China to Iraj, while leaving only the western lands to Tur; not among the horses of the heroic armies of Alexander that included Khazars, Egyptians, Berbers and Arabs, all equipped with armor, iron shields, indestructible swords and glimmering helmets; not the fabled horse that killed Shah Yazdgird-whose nose bled perpetually as a result of the divine punishment for rebelling against God’s fate-by trampling him on the shores of the green lake whose restorative waters eased his affliction; and not among the hundreds of mythical and perfect horses all drawn by six or seven miniaturists. Yet, there was still more than one entire day ahead of me in which to examine the other books in the Treasury.

2. There’s a claim that has been a persistent topic of gossip among master illuminators for the last twenty-five years: With the express permission of the Sultan, an illustrator entered this forbidden Treasury, found this spectacular book, opened it and by candlelight copied into his sketchbook examples of a number of exquisite horses, trees, clouds, flowers, birds, gardens and scenes of war and love for later use in his work…Whenever an artist created an amazing and exceptional piece, jealousy prompted such gossip from the others, who sought to belittle the picture as nothing but Persian work from Tabriz. Back then, Tabriz was not Ottoman territory. When such slander was directed at me, I felt justifiably angry, yet secretly proud; but when I heard the same accusation about others, I believed it. Now, I sadly realized that in some strange way the four of us miniaturists who’d looked at this book once twenty-five years ago ingrained its images into our memories, and since then, we’ve recalled, transformed, altered and painted them into the books of Our Sultan. My spirits were dampened not by the mercilessness of overly suspicious sultans who wouldn’t take such books out of their treasuries and show them to us, but by the narrowness of our own world of painting. Whether it be the great masters of Herat or the new masters of Tabriz, Persian artists had made more extraordinary illustrations, more masterpieces, than we Ottomans.

Like a lightning flash, it occurred to me how appropriate it’d be if two days hence all my miniaturists and I were put to torture; using the point of my penknife I ruthlessly scraped away the eyes beneath my hand in the picture that lay open before me. It was the account of the Persian scholar who learned chess simply by looking at a chess set brought by the ambassador from Hindustan, before defeating the Hindu master at his own game! A Persian lie! One by one, I scraped away the eyes of the chess players and of the shah and his men who were watching them. Flipping back through the pages, I also pitilessly gouged out the eyes of the shahs who battled mercilessly, of the soldiers of imposing armies bedecked in magnificent armor and of severed heads lying on the ground. After doing the same to three pages, I slid my penknife back into my sash.