PROLOGUE:

First there wasn't and then there was. Before God, no one was.

Once there was a village woman who longed for a child. She tried everything--praying, taking herbs, consuming raw tortoise eggs, and sprinkling water on newborn kittens--but nothing helped. Finally, she voyaged to a distant cemetery to visit an ancient stone lion, and there she rubbed her belly against its flank. When the lion trembled, the woman returned home filled with hope that her greatest wish would be fulfilled. By the next moon, she had conceived her only child.

From the day she was born, the girl was the light of her parents' eyes. Her father took her on mountain walks every week, treating her as if she were the son he always wanted. Her mother taught her to make dyes from orange safflowers, cochineal bugs, pomegranate rinds, and walnut shells, and to knot the dyed wool into rugs. Before long, the girl knew all her mother's designs and was deemed the best young knotter in her village.

When the girl turned fourteen, her parents decided it was time for her to marry. To earn money for the dowry, her father worked hard in the fields, hoping for a large harvest, and her mother spun wool until her fingers grew rough, but neither brought in enough silver. The girl knew she could help by making a carpet for her dowry that would dazzle the eyes. Rather than using ordinary village reds and browns, it should glow turquoise like a summer sky.

The girl begged Ibrahim the dye maker to reveal the secret of turquoise, and he told her to climb a hillock in search of a plant with jagged leaves, and then to search for something inside herself. She didn't know what he meant by that, but she gathered the leaves and boiled them into a dye, which was a dirty purple color. When her mother saw the liquid, she asked what the girl was doing. The girl replied in a halting voice, watching her mother's eyebrows form a dark, angry line across her forehead.

"You went to Ibrahim's dye house alone?"

"Bibi, please forgive me," the girl replied. "I left my reason with the goats this morning."

When her father came home, her mother told him what the girl had done. "If people start talking, her chances of finding a husband are finished!" she complained. "Why must she be so rash?"

"Always has been!" roared her father, and he chastised her for her error. The girl kept her head bent to her mending for the rest of that evening, not daring to meet her parents' eyes.

For several days, her Bibi and her Baba watched her closely as she tried to unlock the riddle of the dye. One afternoon, when the girl was in the mountains with her goats, she hid behind a boulder to relieve herself and a surprising thought struck her. Could Ibrahim possibly have meant . . . that? For it was something inside herself.

She returned home and made another pot of the purple dye. That afternoon, when she went to the latrines, she saved some of the liquid in an old pot, mixed it with the dull purple dye and the wool, and left it overnight. When she lifted the lid on the dye pot the next morning, she cried out in triumph, for the dye had paled into a turquoise like the pools of paradise. She took a strand of turquoise wool to Ibrahim's dye house and tied it around the knocker on his door, even though her father had forbidden her to go there alone.

The girl sold her turquoise carpet to a traveling silk merchant named Hassan who desired it so much that he paid silver while it was still unfinished on the loom. Her mother told the other village women about her daughter's success, and they praised the skill of her hands. Now that she had a dowry, the girl could be married, and her wedding celebration lasted three days and three nights. Her husband fed her vinegared cucumbers when she was pregnant, and they had seven sons in as many years. The book of her life had been written in the brightest of inks, and Insh'Allah, would continue that way until--

"That's not how the story goes," I interrupted, adjusting the rough blanket around my shoulders as the wind howled outside. My mother, Maheen, and I were sitting knee to knee, but I spoke quietly because the others were sleeping only a few paces distant.

"You're right, but I like to tell it that way," she said, tucking a lock of her gray hair into her worn scarf. "That's what we were expecting for you."

"It's a good ending," I agreed, "but tell it the way it really happened."

"Even with all the sad parts?"

"Yes."

"They still make me weep."

"Me, too."

"Voy!" she said, her face etched with distress. We were quiet together for a moment, remembering. A drop of freezing rain struck the front of my cotton robe, and I moved closer to my mother to avoid the leak in the roof. The small oil lamp between us gave off no heat. Only a few months before I had worn a thick velvet robe patterned with red roses, with silk trousers underneath. I had painted my eyes with kohl, perfumed my clothes with incense, and awaited my lover, who had torn the clothes from my body in a room kept as warm as summer. Now I shivered in my thin blue robe, which was so threadbare it looked gray.

My mother coughed from deep in her lungs; the sound ripped at my heart, and I prayed that she would heal. "Daughter of mine, I can't get all the way to the end," she said in a thick voice. "It's not over yet."

I took a deep breath. "Thanks be to God!" I replied, and then I had an idea, although I wasn't certain I should ask. My mother had always been the one with a voice like mountain honey. She had been famous in our village for spinning tales about Zal the white-haired who was raised by a bird, Jamsheed who invented the art of weaving, and the comical Mullah Nusraddin, who always made us think.

"What if--what if I told the story this time?"

My mother considered me for a moment as if seeing me anew, and then relaxed her body more deeply against the old cushions that lined the walls of the room.

"Yes, you are grown now," she replied. "In the last few months, I believe you have grown by years. Perhaps you would never have changed so much if you hadn't done what you did."

My face flushed and then burned, although I was chilled to the bone. I was no longer the child I had once been. I would never have imagined that I could lie and, worse yet, not tell the whole truth; that I could betray someone I loved, and abandon someone who cared for me, although not enough; that I could strike out against my own kin; and that I would nearly kill the person who loved me the most.

My mother's gaze was gentle and expectant. "Go ahead, you tell it," she said.

I swallowed a mouthful of strong tea, sat up straight, and began speaking.

Chapter ONE

In the spring of the year that I was supposed to be married, a comet launched itself over the skies of my village. It was brighter than any comet we had ever seen, and more evil. Night after night, as it crawled across our skies spraying its cold white seeds of sorrow, we tried to decipher the fearsome messages of the stars. Hajj Ali, the most learned man in our village, traveled to Isfahan to fetch a copy of the chief astronomer's almanac so we would know what calamities to expect.

The evening he returned, the people of my village began assembling outside to listen to the predictions for the months ahead. My parents and I stood near the old cypress, the only tree in our village, which was decorated with strips of cloth marking people's vows. Everyone was looking upward at the stars, their chins pointing toward the sky, their faces grave. I was small enough to see under Hajj Ali's big white beard, which looked like a tuft of desert scrub. My mother, Maheen, pointed at the Sunderer of Heads, which burned red in the night sky. "Look how Mars is inflamed!" she said. "That will add to the comet's malice."

Many of the villagers had already noticed mysterious signs or heard of misfortunes caused by the comet. A plague had struck the north of Iran, killing thousands of people. An earthquake in Doogabad had trapped a bride in her home, suffocating her and her women guests moments before she was to join her groom. In my village, red insects that had never been seen before had swarmed over our crops.

Goli, my closest friend, arrived with her husband, Ghasem, who was much older than we were. She greeted me with a kiss on each cheek.

"How are you feeling?" I asked. Her hand flew to her belly.

"Heavy," she replied, and I knew she must be worried about the fate of the new life inside her.

Before long, everyone in my village had gathered, except for the old and the infirm. Most of the women were wearing bright bell-shaped tunics over slim trousers, with fringed head scarves over their hair, while the men were attired in long white tunics, trousers, and turbans. But Hajj Ali wore a black turban, indicating his descent from the Prophet Mohammad, and carried an astrolabe wherever he went.

"Good villagers," he began, in a voice that sounded like a wheel dragging over stones, "let us begin by heaping praise on the first followers of the Prophet, especially upon his son-in-law Ali, king of all believers."

"May peace be upon him," we replied.

"This year's predictions begin with poor news for our enemies. In the northeast, the Ozbaks will suffer an infestation of insects so fierce it will destroy their wheat. In the northwest, troop desertions will plague the Ottomans, and even farther west, in the Christian kingdoms, inexplicable diseases will disarrange the lips of kings."

My father, Isma'il, leaned toward me and whispered, "It's always good to know that the countries we're fighting are going to have miserable luck." We laughed together, since that's how it always was.

As Hajj Ali continued reading from the almanac, my heart skipped as if I were climbing a mountain. I was wondering what he would say about marriages made during the year, which was what I cared about the most. I began fiddling with the fringe on my head scarf, a habit my mother always urged me to break, as Hajj Ali explained that no harm would come to paper, books, or the art of writing; that earthquakes would occur in the south but would be mild; and that there would be battles great enough to tinge the Caspian Sea red with blood.

Hajj Ali waved the almanac at the crowd, which is what he did when the prediction he was about to read was alarming. His assistant, who was holding an oil lamp, jumped to move out of his way.

"Perhaps the worst thing of all is that there will be large and inexplicable lapses in moral behavior this year," he read, "lapses that can only be explained by the influence of the comet."

A low murmur came from the crowd as people began discussing the lapses they had already witnessed in the first days of the New Year. "She took more than her share of water from the well," I heard Zaynab say. She was Gholam's wife, and never had a good word to say about anyone.

Hajj Ali finally arrived at the subject that concerned my future. "On the topic of marriages, the year ahead is mixed," he said. "The almanac says nothing about those that take place in the next few months, but those contracted later this year will be full of passion and strife."

I looked anxiously at my mother, since I expected to be married at that time, now that I was already fourteen. Her eyes were troubled, and I could see she did not like what she had heard.

Hajj Ali turned to the last page in the almanac, looked up, and paused, the better to capture the crowd's attention. "This final prophecy is about the behavior of women, and it is the most disquieting of all," he said. "Throughout the year, the women of Iran will fail to be acquiescent."

"When are they ever?" I heard Gholam say, and laughter bubbled around him.

My father smiled at my mother, and she brightened from within, for he loved her just the way she was. People always used to say that he treated her as tenderly as if she were a second wife.

"Women will suffer from their own perverse behavior," Hajj Ali warned. "Many will bear the curse of sterility, and those who succeed in giving birth will wail in unusual pain."

My eyes met Goli's, and I saw my own fear reflected in hers. Goli was worried about childbirth, while I was troubled by the thought of a disorderly union. I prayed that the comet would shoot across the firmament and leave us undisturbed.

Seeing me shiver, my father wrapped a lamb's wool blanket over my shoulders, and my mother took one of my hands between hers and rubbed it to warm me. From where I stood in the center of my village, I was surrounded by the familiar sights of home. Not far away was our small mosque, its dome sparkling with tile; the hammam where I bathed every week, steamy inside and dappled with light; and the scarred wooden stalls for the tiny market that sprang up on Thursdays, where villagers traded fruit, vegetables, medicines, carpets, and tools. A path led away from the public buildings and passed between a cluster of mud-brick homes that sheltered all two hundred souls in my village, and it ended at the foot of the mountain and the rutted paths where my goats roamed for food. All these sights filled me with comfort, so that when my mother squeezed my hand to see how I was feeling, I squeezed back. But then I pulled my hand away because I didn't want to seem like a child.

"Baba," I whispered to my father in a small voice. "What if Hajj Ali's predictions about marriage come true?"

My father couldn't hide the concern in his eyes, but his voice was firm. "Your husband will pave your path with rose petals," he replied. "If at any time, he fails to treat you with honor . . ."

He paused for a moment, and his dark eyes looked fierce, as if what he might do were too terrible to imagine. He started to say something, but then stopped himself.

". . . you can always come back to us," he finished.

Shame and blame would follow a wife who returned to her parents, but my father didn't seem to care. His kind eyes crinkled at the corners as he smiled at me.

Hajj Ali concluded the meeting with a brief prayer. Some of the villagers broke off into family groups to discuss the predictions, while others started walking back to their homes. Goli looked as if she wanted to talk, but her husband told her it was time to go home. She whispered that her feet ached from the weight in her belly and said good night.

My parents and I walked home on the single mud lane that pierced the village. All the dwellings were huddled together on either side for warmth and protection. I knew the path so well I could have walked it blind and turned at just the right moment to reach our house, the last one before our village gave way to sand and scrub. My father pushed open our carved wooden door with his shoulders, and we entered our one-room home. Its walls were made of packed mud and straw brightened with white plaster, which my mother kept sparkling clean. A small door led to an enclosed courtyard where we enjoyed the sun without being seen by other eyes.

My mother and I removed our head scarves and placed them on hooks near the door, slipping off our shoes at the same time. I shook out my hair, which reached my waist. For good luck, I touched the curved ibex horns that glowed on a low stand near the door. My father had felled the ibex on one of our Friday afternoon walks. Ever since that day, the horns had held a position of pride in our household, and my father's friends often praised him for being as nimble as an ibex.

My father and I sat together on the red-and-brown carpet I had knotted when I was ten. His eyes closed for a moment, and I thought he looked especially tired.

"Are we walking tomorrow?" I asked.

His eyes flew open. "Of course, my little one," he replied.

He had to work in the fields in the morning, but he insisted he wouldn't miss our walk together for anything other than God's command. "For you shall soon be a busy bride," he said, and his voice broke.

I looked away, for I couldn't imagine leaving him.

My mother threw dried dung in the stove to boil water for tea. "Here's a surprise," she said, bringing us a plate of fresh chickpea cookies. They were fragrant with the essence of roses.

"May your hands never ache!" my father said.

They were my favorite sweets, and I ate far too many of them. Before long, I became tired and spread out my bedroll near the door, as I always did. I fell asleep to the sound of my parents talking, which reminded me of the cooing of doves, and I think I even saw my father take my mother in his arms and kiss her.

THE NEXT AFTERNOON, I stood in our doorway and watched for my Baba as the other men streamed back from the fields. I always liked to pour his tea for him before he walked in the door. My mother was crouched over the stove, baking bread for our evening meal.

When he didn't arrive, I went back into the house, cracked some walnuts and put them in a small bowl, and placed the irises I had gathered in a vessel with water. Then I went out to look again, for I was eager to begin our walk. Where was he? Many of the other men had returned from the fields and were probably washing off the day's dust in their courtyards.

"We need some water," my mother said, so I grabbed a clay jug and walked toward the well. On my way, I ran into Ibrahim the dye maker, who gave me a peculiar look.

"Go home," he said to me. "Your mother needs you."

I was surprised. "But she just told me to fetch water," I said.

"No matter," he replied. "Tell her I told you to go back."

I walked home as quickly as I could, the vessel banging against my knees. As I approached our house, I spotted four men bearing a limp bundle between them. Perhaps there had been an accident in the fields. From time to time, my father brought back stories about how a man got injured by a threshing tool, suffered a kick from a mule, or returned bloodied from a fight. I knew he'd tell us what had happened over tea.

The men moved awkwardly because of their burden. The man's face was hidden, cradled on one of their shoulders. I said a prayer for his quick recovery, for it was hard on a family when a man was too ill to work. As the group approached, I noticed that the victim's turban was wrapped much like my father's. But that didn't mean anything, I told myself quickly. Many men wrapped their turbans in a similar way.

The front bearers got out of step for a moment, and they almost lost hold of the man. His head lolled as though it were barely attached to his body, and his limbs had no life in them. I dropped the clay vessel, which shattered around my feet.

"Bibi," I whimpered. "Help!"

My mother came outside, brushing flour from her clothes. When she saw my father, she uttered a piercing wail. Women who lived nearby streamed out of their houses and surrounded her like a net while she tore the air with her sorrow. As she writhed and jumped, they caught her gently, holding her and stroking the hair away from her face.

The men brought my father inside and laid him on a bedroll. His skin was a sickly yellow color, and a line of saliva slid out of the corner of his mouth. My mother put her fingers near his nostrils.

"Praise be to God, he's still breathing!" she said.

Naghee, who worked with my father in the fields, didn't know where to look as he told us what had happened. "He seemed tired, but he was fine until this afternoon," he said. "Suddenly he grabbed his head and fell to the ground, gasping for air. After that, he didn't stir."

"May God spare your husband!" said a man I didn't recognize. When they had done all they could to make him comfortable, they left, murmuring prayers for good health.

My mother's brow was furrowed as she removed my father's cotton shoes, straightened his tunic, and arranged the pillow under his head. She felt his hands and forehead and declared his temperature normal, but told me to fetch a blanket and cover him to keep him warm.

The news about my father spread quickly, and our friends began arriving to help. Kolsoom brought the water she had collected from a spring near a saint's shrine that was known for its healing powers. Ibrahim took up a position in the courtyard and began reciting the Qur'an. Goli came by, her boy asleep in her arms, with hot bread and stewed lentils. I brewed tea to keep the warmth in everyone's body. I knelt near my father and watched his face, praying for a flutter of his eyelids, even a grimace--anything that would assure me life remained in his body.

Rabi'i, the village physician, arrived after night had fallen with cloth bags full of herbs slung on each shoulder. He laid them near the door and knelt to examine my father by the light of the oil lamp, which flickered brokenly. His eyes narrowed as he peered closely at my father's face. "I need more light," he said.

I borrowed two oil lamps from neighbors and placed them near the bedroll. The physician lifted my father's head and carefully unwound his white turban. His head looked heavy and swollen. In the light, his face was the color of ash, and his thick hair, which was flecked with gray, looked stiff and ashen, too.

Rabi'i touched my father's wrists and neck, and when he did not find what he was looking for, he laid his ear against my father's chest. At that moment, Kolsoom asked my mother in a whisper if she would like more tea. The physician lifted his head and asked everyone to be silent, and after listening again, he arose with a grave face and announced, "His heart beats, but only faintly."

"Ali, prince among men, give strength to my husband!" my mother cried.

Rabi'i collected his bags and removed bunches of herbs, explaining to Kolsoom how to brew them into a heart-enlivening medicine. He also promised to return the next morning to check on my father. "May God rain His blessings on you!" he said as he took his leave. Kolsoom began stripping the herbs off their stalks and throwing them into a pot, adding the water my mother had boiled.

As Rabi'i left, he stopped to talk with Ibrahim, who was still in the courtyard. "Don't halt your praying," he warned, and then I heard him whisper the words "God may gather him tonight."

I tasted something like rust on my tongue. Seeking my mother, I rushed into her arms and we held each other for a moment, our eyes mirrors of sorrow.

My father began to make wheezing sounds. His mouth was still slack, his lips slightly parted, and his breath rasped like dead leaves tossed by the wind. My mother rushed away from the stove, her fingers green from the herbs. She leaned over my father and cried, "Voy, my beloved! Voy!"

Kolsoom hurried over to peer at my father and then led my mother back to the stove, for there was nothing to be done. "Let us finish this medicine to help him," said Kolsoom, whose ever-bright eyes and pomegranate cheeks testified to her powers as an herbalist.

When the herbs had been boiled and cooled, Kolsoom poured the liquid into a shallow bowl and brought it to my father's side. While my mother raised his head, Kolsoom gently spooned the medicine into his mouth. Most of it spilled over his lips, soiling the bedroll. On the next try, she got the medicine into his mouth, but my father sputtered, choked, and for a moment appeared to stop breathing.

Kolsoom, who was usually so calm, put down the bowl with shaking hands and met my mother's eyes. "We must wait until his eyes open before we try again," she advised.

My mother's head scarf was askew, but she didn't notice. "He needs his medicine," she said weakly, but Kolsoom told her that he needed his breath more.

Ibrahim's voice was starting to sound hoarse, and Kolsoom asked me to attend to him. I poured some hot tea and served it to him with dates in the courtyard. He thanked me with his eyes but never stopped his reciting, as if the power of his words could keep my father alive.

On the way back into the room, I bumped against my father's walking stick, which was hanging on a hook near the door to the courtyard. I remembered how on our last walk, he had taken me to see a carving of an ancient goddess that was hidden behind a waterfall. We had inched our way along a ledge until we found the carving under the flow of water. The goddess wore a tall crown that seemed to be filled with clouds. Her shapely bosom was covered by a thin drapery, and she wore a necklace of large stones. You could not see her feet; her clothing seemed to swirl into waves and streams. She stretched out her powerful arms, as big as any man's, which looked as if they were conjuring the waterfall at will.

My father had been tired that day, but he had marched up the steep trails to the waterfall, panting, to show me that wondrous sight. His breath sounded even more labored now; it crackled as it left his body. His hands were beginning to move, too, like small, restless mice. They crawled up his chest and scratched at his tunic. His long fingers were brown from working in the fields, and there was a line of dirt under the nails that he would have removed before entering the house, had he been well.

"I promise to devote myself to tending to him, if only You will leave him with us," I whispered to God. "I'll say my prayers every day, and I will never complain about how hungry I am during the fasting month of Ramazan, even silently."

My father began clutching at the air, as if he were fighting his illness with the only part of his body that still had vigor. Kolsoom joined us by the bedroll and led us in prayers, while we watched my father's hands and listened to his anguished breath. I told my mother how tired he had seemed during our walk in the mountains, and asked if it had weakened him. She put her hands on either side of my face and replied, "Light of my eyes, it probably gave him strength."

In the blackest hour of the night, my father's breathing quieted and his hands stopped doing battle. As my mother arranged the blanket over him, her face looked calmer.

"He will get some rest now," she said with satisfaction.

I went into the courtyard, which adjoined our neighbor's house, to bring more tea to Ibrahim. He had moved to a cushion near my turquoise carpet, which was unfinished on my loom. My mother had recently sold the carpet to a traveling silk merchant named Hassan, who was planning to return later to claim it. But the source of the turquoise dye that had pleased Hassan's eyes was still a tender subject between me and my father, and my face flushed with shame when I remembered how my visit alone to Ibrahim's dye house had troubled him.

I returned to the vigil at my father's side. Perhaps this terrible night was nearly over, and daylight would bring a joyful surprise, like the sight of my father's eyes opening, or of him being able to swallow his medicine. And then, one day when he was better, we would take another walk in the mountains and sing together. Nothing would be sweeter to me than hearing him sing out of tune.

Toward morning, with no other sound than Ibrahim's river of prayers, I felt my eyelids grow heavy. I don't know how much time passed before I awoke, observed that my father's face was still calm, then fell asleep again. At dawn, I was comforted by the sound of sparrows breaking the silence with their noisy calls. They sounded like the birds we had heard on our walk, and I began dreaming about how we had stopped to watch them gather twigs for their nests.

A wheeled cart creaked outside, and I awoke with a start. People were beginning to emerge from their homes to begin their chores at the well, in the mountains, or in the fields. Ibrahim was still saying prayers, but his voice was dry and hoarse. My mother was lighting an oil lamp, which she placed near the bedroll. My father had not moved since he had fallen asleep. She peered at his face and placed her fingers under his nostrils to feel his breath. They lingered there, trembling, before they drifted down to his slack mouth. Still searching, they returned to his nose and hovered. I watched my mother's face, awaiting the contented expression that would tell me she had found his breath. My mother did not look at me. In the silence, she threw back her head and uttered a terrible wail. Ibrahim's prayers ceased; he rushed to my father's side and checked his breath in the same way before dropping to a squat and cradling his head in his hands.

My mother began wailing more loudly and tearing out her hair in clumps. Her scarf fell off and lay abandoned near my father. It was still tied and kept the shape of her head.

I grabbed my father's hand and squeezed it, but it was cold and still. When I lifted his heavy arm, his hand dangled brokenly at the wrist. The lines in his face looked deeply carved, and his expression seemed aggrieved, as if he had been forced to fight an evil jinn.

I uttered one short, sharp cry and collapsed onto my father. Kolsoom and my mother let me remain there for a few moments, but then Kolsoom gently pulled me away.

My father and I had both known that our time together must soon come to an end, but I had always thought I would be the one to leave, festooned with bridal silver, with his blessings alive in my ear.

THE DAYS AFTER my father died were black, but they became blacker still.

With no man to harvest the fields that summer, we received little grain from my father's share of the planting, although his friends tried to be generous with theirs. And with little grain, we had little to barter for fuel, for shoes, or for dyes for wool. We had to trade our goats for grain, which meant no more cheese. Every time we gave up a goat, my mother cried.

Toward the end of the long, warm days, our supplies started to diminish. In the mornings, we ate the bread my mother made with cheese or yogurt brought by kind neighbors, but it was not long before our evening meals became less and less plentiful. Soon there was no question of eating even a morsel of meat. My mother began trading my father's belongings for food. First went his clothes, then his shoes, then his turbans, and finally his precious walking stick.

Other people would have turned to their family for help, but my mother and I were unfortunate in having no elders. All of my grandparents had died before I was old enough to remember them. My mother's two brothers had been killed in a war with the Ottomans. My father's only relative, a distant half brother named Gostaham, was the child of my father's father and his first wife. Gostaham had moved to Isfahan when he was a young man, and we hadn't heard from him in years.

By the time it started to become fiercely cold, we were living on a thin sheet of bread and pickled carrots left over from the previous year. I felt hungry every day, but knowing that there was nothing my mother could do, I tried not to speak about the pains in my belly. I always felt tired, and the tasks that used to seem so easy to me, like fetching water from the well, now seemed beyond my ability.

Our last valuable possession was my turquoise rug. Not long after I finished knotting its fringes, Hassan the silk merchant returned to pick it up and pay us what he owed. He was startled by our black tunics and black head scarves, and when he learned why we were in mourning, he asked my mother if he could help us. Fearing that we would not survive the winter, she asked him if he would find our only relative, Gostaham, when he returned to Isfahan, and tell him about our plight.

About a month later, a letter arrived for us from the capital, carried by a donkey merchant on his way to Shiraz. My mother asked Hajj Ali to read it aloud, since neither of us had learned our letters. It was from Gostaham, who wrote that he felt great sorrow over the losses we had endured and was inviting us to stay with him in the capital until our luck improved.

And that's how, one cold winter morning, I learned that I would be leaving my childhood home for the first time in my life and traveling far away. If my mother had told me we'd been sent off to the Christian lands, where barbarian women exposed their bosoms to all eyes, ate the singed flesh of pigs, and bathed only once a year, our destination could hardly have seemed more remote.

Word of our upcoming departure spread rapidly through the village. In the afternoon, women began arriving at our home with their smallest children. Pulling off their head scarves, they fluffed their hair and greeted the others in the room before arranging themselves in clusters on our carpet. Children who were old enough to play gathered in their own corner.

"May this be your final sorrow!" said Kolsoom as she came in, kissing my mother on each cheek in greeting.

Tears sprang to my mother's eyes.

"It was the comet," Kolsoom added sympathetically. "Mere humans couldn't defeat a power that great."

"Husband of mine," my mother said, as if my father were still alive. "Why did you announce that life was going so well? Why invite the comet's wrath?"

Zaynab made a face. "Maheen, remember the Muslim who traveled from Isfahan all the way to Tabriz to try to outrun the angel of death? When he arrived, Azraeel thanked him for meeting him there on time. Your husband did nothing wrong; he just answered God's command."

My mother's back bent a little, as it always did when she felt grief. "I never thought I would have to leave my only home," she replied.

"God willing, your luck will change in Isfahan," said Kolsoom, offering us the wild rue she had brought to protect us from the Evil Eye. She lit the herb with a coal from the oven, and soon its acrid smell purified the air.

My mother and I served tea to our guests and offered the dates that Kolsoom had brought, for we had nothing of our own to serve. I brought a cup of tea to Safa, the eldest villager, who was sitting in a corner of the room with a water pipe. It bubbled as she drew in smoke.

"What do you know of your new family?" she asked as she exhaled.

It was such an embarrassing question that it quieted the room for a moment. Everyone knew that my grandfather had married my father's mother many years ago while he had been visiting friends in our village. My grandfather was already married to his first wife, and lived with her and Gostaham in Shiraz. After my grandmother bore my father, he visited occasionally and sent money, but the families were understandably not close.

"I know very little," replied my mother. "I haven't seen Gosta-ham for more than twenty-five years. I met him only once, when he stopped by our village on his way to visit his parents in Shiraz, the city of poets. Even then, he was becoming one of the exalted carpet designers in the capital."

"And his wife?" asked Safa, her voice tight from the smoke in her lungs.

"I know nothing of her, except that she bore him two daughters."

Safa exhaled with satisfaction. "If her husband is successful, she will be running a grand household," she said. "I only hope she is generous and fair in her division of work."

Her words made me understand that we would no longer be mistresses of our lives. If we liked our bread baked dark and crisp but she didn't, we would have to eat it her way. And no matter how we felt, we'd have to praise her name. I think Safa noticed my distress, because she stopped smoking for a moment to offer a consolation.

"Your father's half brother must have a good heart, or he would not have sent for you," she said. "Just be sure to please his wife, and they will provide for you."

"Insh'Allah," said my mother, in a tone that sounded unconvinced.

I looked around at all the kind faces I knew; at my friends and my mother's friends, women who had been like aunts and grandmothers to me while I was growing up. I could not imagine what it would be like not to see them: Safa, with her face crinkled like an old apple; Kolsoom, thin and swift, renowned for her wisdom about herbs; and finally Goli, my truest friend.

She was sitting next to me, her newborn daughter in her arms. When the baby started to cry, she loosened her tunic and put the child to her breast. Goli's cheeks glowed pink like the baby's; the two of them looked healthy and contented. I wished with all my heart that my life were like hers.

When the baby had finished nursing, Goli placed her in my arms. I breathed in her newborn smell, as fresh as sprouting wheat, and whispered, "Don't forget me." I stroked her tiny cheek, thinking about how I would miss her first words and her first halting steps.

Goli wrapped her arms around me. "Think of how big Isfahan is!" she said. "You'll promenade through the biggest city square ever built, and your mother will be able to choose your husband from thousands upon thousands!"

I brightened for a moment, as if my old hopes were still possible, before remembering my problem.

"But now I have no dowry," I reminded her. "What man will take me with nothing?"

The whole room became quiet again. My mother fanned the rue, the lines in her forehead deepening. The other women began speaking all at once. "Don't worry, Maheen-joon! Your new family will help you!"

"They won't let such a fine young girl get pickled!"

"There's a healthy stud for every mare, and a lusty soldier for every moon!"

"Shah Abbas will probably desire your daughter for his harem," said Kolsoom to my mother. "He'll fatten her up with cheese and sugar, and then she'll have bigger breasts and a rounder belly than all of us!"

At a recent visit to the hammam, I had caught my reflection in a metal mirror. I had none of the ripeness of nursing mothers like Goli, who were so admired at the hammam. The muscles in my forearms stood out, and my face looked pinched. I was sure I could not be moonlike to anyone, but I smiled to think of my thin, bony body in such a womanly form. When Zaynab noticed my expression, her face twisted with mirth. She laughed so hard she began pitching forward over her stomach, and her lips wrapped back over her teeth until she looked like a horse fighting its bit. I flushed to the roots of my hair when I understood that Kolsoom had only been trying to be kind.

IT DIDN'T TAKE us long to pack our things, since we had so very few. I put one change of black mourning clothes into a hand-knotted saddlebag along with some heavy blankets to sleep in, and filled as many jugs as I could find with water. The morning of our departure, neighbors brought us gifts of bread, cheese, and dried fruit for the long journey. Kolsoom threw a handful of peas to divine whether it was an auspicious day for travel. After determining that it was excellent, she raised a precious copy of the Qur'an and circled our heads with it three times. Praying for a safe journey, we touched our lips to it. Just as we were setting off, Goli took a piece of dried fruit out of my bag and slipped it into her sleeve. She was "stealing" something of mine to make sure that one day, I would return.

"I hope so," I whispered to her as we said good-bye. It pained me to leave her most of all.

My mother and I were traveling with a musk merchant named Abdul-Rahman and his wife, who escorted travelers from one city to another for a fee. They often journeyed all the way to the northeastern borders of our land, looking for musk bladders from Tibet to sell in big cities. Their saddlebags, blankets, and tents smelled of the fragrance, which commanded princely prices.

The camel that my mother and I shared had soft black eyes that had been lined with protective kohl, and thick, bushy hair the color of sand. Abdul-Rahman had decorated his pretty nose with a strip of woven red cloth with blue tassels, a kind of bridle. We sat on his back atop a mountain of folded rugs and sacks of food, and held on to his hump. The camel lifted his feet delicately when he walked but was ill-tempered and smelled as rotten as one of the village latrines.

I had never seen the countryside north of my village. As soon as we stepped away from the mountains' life-giving streams, the land became barren. Pale green shrubs struggled to maintain a hold on life, just as we did. Our water jugs became more precious than the musk bladders. Along the way, we spotted broken water vessels and sometimes even the bones of those who had misjudged the length of their trip.

Abdul-Rahman pushed us onward in the early-morning hours, singing to the camels so they would pace themselves to the cadence of his voice. The sun glinted off the land, and the bright white light hurt my eyes. The ground was frozen; the few plants we saw were outlined with frost. By the end of the day, my feet were so cold I could no longer feel them. My mother went to sleep in our tent as soon as it was dark. She couldn't bear to look at the stars, she said.

After ten days of travel, we saw the Zagros Mountains, which signaled our approach to Isfahan. Abdul-Rahman told us that from somewhere high in the mountains flowed the very source of Isfahan's being, the Zayendeh Rood, or Eternal River. At first, it was just a pale blue shimmer, with a cooling breath that reached us from many farsakhs away. As we got closer, the river seemed impossibly long to me, since the most water I had ever seen before had been in mountain streams.

After arriving at its banks, we dismounted from our camels, for they were not permitted in the city, and gathered to admire the water. "May God be praised for His abundance!" cried my mother as the river surged past us, a branch flowing by too quickly to catch.

"Praise is due," replied Abdul-Rahman, "for this river gives life to Isfahan's sweet melons, cools her streets, and fills her wells. Without it, Isfahan would cease to be."

We left our camels in the care of one of Abdul-Rahman's friends and continued our journey on foot on the Thirty-three Arches Bridge. About halfway across, we entered one of its archways to enjoy the view. I grabbed my mother's hand and said, "Look! Look!" The river rushed by as if excited, and in the distance we could see another bridge, and another gleaming beyond that one. One was covered in blue tiles, another had teahouses, and still another had arches that seemed like infinite doorways into the city, inviting travelers to unlock its secrets. Ahead of us, Isfahan stretched out in all directions, and the sight of its thousands of houses, gardens, mosques, bazaars, schools, caravanserais, kebabis, and teahouses filled us with awe. At the end of the bridge lay a long tree-lined avenue that traversed the whole city, ending in the square that Shah Abbas had built, which was so renowned that every child knew it as the Image of the World. My eye was caught by the square's Friday mosque, whose vast blue dome glowed peacefully in the morning light. Looking around, I saw another azure dome, and yet another, and then dozens more brightening the saffron-colored terrain, and it seemed to me that Isfahan beckoned like a field of turquoise set in gold.

"How many people live here?" my mother asked, raising her voice so it could be heard above the din of passersby.

"Hundreds of thousands," replied Abdul-Rahman. "More than in London or Paris; only Constantinople is bigger."

My mother and I said "Voy!" at the same time; we could not imagine so many souls in one place.

After crossing the bridge, we entered a covered bazaar and passed through a spice market. Burlap bags overflowed with mint, dill, coriander, dried lemon, turmeric, saffron, and many spices I didn't recognize. I distinguished the flowery yet bitter odor of fenugreek, which set my mouth watering for a lamb stew, for we had not tasted meat in many months.

Before long, we reached a caravanserai run by Abdul-Rahman's brother. It had a courtyard where donkeys, mules, and horses could rest, surrounded by a rectangular arcade of private rooms. We thanked Abdul-Rahman and his wife for escorting us, wished them well, and paid for our lodgings.

Our room was small, with thick windowless walls and a strong lock. There was clean straw on the floor, but nothing else for bedding.

"I'm hungry," I said to my mother, remembering the lamb kebab I had seen grilling near the bridge.

She untied the corners of a dirty piece of cloth and looked sadly at the few coins remaining there. "We must bathe before seeking out our family," she replied. "Let's eat the last of our bread."

It was dry and brittle, so we endured the emptiness in our bellies and lay down to sleep. The ground was hard compared with the sand of the desert, and I felt unbalanced, for I had become used to the gentle tipping motion of my camel. Still, I was weary enough from our long journey to fall asleep not long after putting my head down on the straw. In the middle of the night, I began dreaming that my Baba was tugging on my foot to wake me for one of our Friday walks. I jumped to my feet to follow him, but he had already passed through the door. I tried to catch up; all I could see was his back as he advanced up a mountain path. The faster I ran, the faster he climbed. When I screamed his name, he didn't stop or turn around. I awoke in a sweat, confused, the straw prickling my back.

"Bibi?"

"I'm here, daughter of mine," my mother replied in the darkness. "You were calling out for your Baba."

"He left without me," I mumbled, still caught in the web of my dreams.

My mother pulled me to her and began stroking my forehead. I lay next to her with my eyes closed, but I couldn't sleep. Sighing, I turned first this way, then the other. A donkey began braying in the courtyard, and it sounded as if he were weeping over his fate. Then my mother began speaking, and her voice seemed to brighten the gloom:

First there wasn't and then there was. Before God, no one was.

My mother had comforted me with tales ever since I was small. Sometimes they helped me peel a problem like an onion, or gave me ideas about what to do; other times, they calmed me so much that I would fall into a soothing sleep. My father used to say that her tales were better than the best medicine. Sighing, I burrowed into my mother's body like a child, knowing that the sound of her voice would be a balm on my heart.

Once there was a peddler's daughter named Golnar who spent her days toiling in her family's garden. Her cucumbers were praised for being crisp and sweet; her squashes for growing into large, pleasing shapes dense with flesh; and her radishes for their fragrant burn. Because the girl had a passionate love of flowers, she begged her father to allow her to plant a single rosebush in a corner of the garden. Even though her family was poor and needed every morsel of food she grew, her father rewarded her by granting her wish.

Golnar traded some vegetables for a cutting from a rich neighbor's bush and planted it, uprooting a few cucumber plants to make room. In time, the bush pushed forth extravagantly large blossoms. They were bigger than a man's fist and as white as the moon. When a warm wind blew, the rosebush swayed, dancing as if in response to the nightingales' song, her white buds opening like a twirling skirt.

Golnar's father was a liver-kebab seller. One afternoon, he returned home and announced that he had sold the last of his kebabs to a saddle maker and his son. He had bragged about what a good worker his daughter was--not a girl who would fall ill at the rancid fumes of tanning leather. It wasn't long before the boy and his family paid a visit to the liver seller and his daughter. Golnar was not pleased: The boy's shoulders and arms were thin, and his small, beady eyes made him look like a goat.

After some tea and an exchange of compliments, the girl's parents urged her to show the boy her garden. Reluctantly, she led him outside. The boy praised her healthy vegetables, fruits, and herbs and admired the rosebush's beauty. Softening, she begged him to accept a few blossoms for his family and cut several long stems with her shears. As the two reentered the house, their arms filled with white blossoms, their parents smiled and imagined them on their wedding day.

That night, after the boy and his family had left, Golnar was so tired that she fell into a deep sleep rather than visiting her roses. The next morning, she arose with a feeling of alarm and rushed outside. The rosebush drooped in the early-morning sun, its flowers a dirty shade of white. The garden was silent, for all the nightingales had flown away. Golnar pruned the heaviest flowers tenderly, but when she removed her hands from the thorny bush, they were streaked with blood.

Penitently, the girl vowed to take better care of the bush. She poured a bloody bucket of water she had used to clean her father's kebab knives onto the soil around the bush, topping it with a special fertilizer made of tiny pearls of liver.

That afternoon, a messenger arrived with a marriage proposal from the boy's family. Her father told her that a better boy could not be found, and her mother whispered to her coyly about the children they would make together. But Golnar wept and rebuffed the offer. Her parents were angry and puzzled, and although they promised to send a letter of refusal, they secretly sent a message to the boy's family asking for time for reflection.

Early the next morning, Golnar arose to the sweet music of nightingales and discovered that once again her roses stood large and proud. A wealth of blossoms had opened, nourished by the organ meat; they shone in the still-dark sky like stars. She clipped a few flowers from the bush, tentatively at first, and the plant caressed the tips of her fingers with its silky petals, exuding a musky perfume as if it desired her touch.

On the morning of the family's annual picnic to celebrate the New Year, the girl had so much to do that she failed to water her rosebush. She helped her mother prepare and pack a large picnic, and then the family walked to a favorite spot near a river. While they were eating, they happened to see the boy and his parents, who were picnicking, too. The father invited them to drink tea and share a meal of sweetmeats. The boy passed the finest pastries to Golnar, a kindness that surprised her now that she had rebuffed him (or so she believed). At their parents' urging, the two took a walk together near the river. When they were out of sight, the boy kissed the tip of her index finger, but Golnar turned and ran away.

When she and her family returned home, it was already dark. Golnar ventured into the garden to give the thirsty rosebush a drink. As she bent forward with a bucket of well water, a sudden wind whipped up and tangled her hair in the bush's stems; the bush embraced her and held her tight in its long, thin arms. The more she struggled, the tighter its thorns gripped her, slashing her face. Screaming, she tore herself out, blinded by blood, and crawled back to the house.

At the sight of her in the doorway, her parents howled as if she were an evil jinn. At first the girl refused to let them touch her. Her father grabbed her flailing arms and held them down so her mother could treat her wounds. To their horror, they discovered a fat black thorn lodged in her index finger as firmly as a nail. When her mother pulled it out, it left a hole that bled like a fountain.

With a great roar of rage, her father rushed out of the house. Within moments came the sound of an ax as it struck the bush, cracking it at its core. With each blow, Golnar shuddered and tore at her own hair in the fury of her grief. Her mother put her to bed, where she stayed for several days, burning with fever and crying out in delirium.

At her parents' insistence, she was married two weeks later to the boy who looked like a goat. The two lived together in a room in his parents' house, and the boy came home every afternoon stinking of the blood and rot of the tannery. When he reached for Golnar, she turned her face away from him, shuddering at his touch. Before long, she became pregnant and bore him a son, followed by two daughters. Every day, she arose in darkness, dressed herself in old garments, and clothed her children in hand-me-downs even more ragged than her own. She never had time to grow her own flowers again. But sometimes, when she passed the walled garden where she used to tend her rosebush, she would close her eyes and remember the smell of its blossoms, sweeter than hope.

When my mother stopped speaking, I rolled this way and that to free my legs and back from the prickling straw, but I couldn't get comfortable. I felt as distressed as if a buzzing bee had gotten stuck in my ear.

My mother took my face in her hands. "What is it, daughter of mine?" she asked. "Are you ill? Are you suffering?"

An unhappy sound escaped my lips, and I pretended I was trying to sleep.

My mother said, as though thinking aloud, "I'm not sure why I told you that story. It poured out of me before I remembered what it was about."

I knew the tale, for my mother had told it once or twice in our village. Back then, it hadn't troubled me. I had been anticipating a life with a husband who paved my path with rose petals, not with a boy who smelled of rotting cowhides. I had never thought that my fate might be like Golnar's, but now, in the darkness of a strange room in a strange city, the story sounded like a prophecy. My father could no longer protect us, and no one else was duty-bound to do so. My mother was too old for anyone to want her, and now that we had no money for a dowry, no one would want me. With the first pass of the comet, all my prospects had been ruined.

My eyes flew open; in the wan streaks of light creeping into our chamber, I saw my mother studying me. She looked frightened, which made me feel sadder for her than for myself. I took a sharp breath and forced calm into my face.

"I felt ill for a moment, but now I'm better," I said.

The relief in my mother's eyes was so great that I thanked God for giving me the strength to say what I did.

Chapter TWO

We arose the next morning to the sound of travelers loading up their mules for the day's journey. My black trousers and tunic were stiff with dust and sweat, as I had been wearing them for more than a week. With the last of our money, my mother paid for us to enter a nearby hammam, where we scrubbed the grime off our bodies and washed our hair until it squeaked. When we were clean, we performed the Grand Ablution, submerging our bodies in a tank large enough for twenty women. The bath attendant rubbed my back and legs until I felt all the tightness from our long journey dissolve. As she worked, I cast my eyes over my bony ribs, my concave stomach, my callused fingers, and my stringy arms and legs. In my daydreams, I had imagined myself as a pampered woman, my hips and breasts round like melons. But it was no use: Nothing had changed except for the color of my face and hands, which to my dismay had darkened after all the days of travel.

When we were clean, we dressed in fresh black clothes and black head scarves and went in search of Gostaham at the Image of the World, which Shah Abbas had built after naming Isfahan his new capital. We entered the square through a narrow gateway that gave no hint of its vastness, but once inside we halted in our tracks, astonished.

"Our whole village . . .!" I began to say. My mother finished the sentence, for she was thinking the same thing.

". . .could fit in this square two times over. No wonder people say Isfahan is half the world!"

The square was so large that the people at either end looked like figures in a miniature painting. The minarets of the Friday mosque were so long, thin, and tall that when I looked up at them, I felt dizzy, for they seemed to vanish into the sky. The mosque's huge turquoise dome appeared to be suspended in space; surely the hand of man must have been aided by God to make clay seem so light! The tall gateway to the bazaar was surmounted by a mural--the first I had ever seen--of a battle, which looked as real as if the men were fighting before our eyes. Everything about the square seemed to defy the ordinary laws of possibility.

"Khanoom, please move forward," cried a man behind us, using the respectful term for a married woman. We apologized and stepped away from the entrance. Looking back as he passed, he added with a smile, "First time? I still enjoy seeing the wonder on visitors' faces."

Wonder was right. On the shorter sides of the square, Shah Abbas's blue-and-gold palace faced his private yellow-domed mosque, which glowed like a tiny sun. On the longer sides, the gateway to the Great Bazaar faced the entrance to the vast Friday mosque--a reminder to God-fearing merchants to be honest.

"Power, money, and God, all in one place," remarked my mother, looking at the buildings around us.

"And chogan," I replied, noticing the goalposts for polo at the far ends of the square, which was long enough to host a competition.

From the top of one of the Friday mosque's minarets, the muezzin began the call to prayer, piercing the air with his sweet nasal voice. "Allah-hu-Akbar--God is great!" he cried, his voice drifting above us.

As we walked into the square, I noticed that most of the buildings were tiled in the purest colors of sun and sky. The dome of the Friday mosque looked all turquoise from afar, but up closer I could see it was enlivened with swirling vines in yellow and white. Garlands of white and turquoise blossomed on the dome of the Shah's lemon-colored mosque. The arched gateways to the mosques sprouted a profusion of tiled white flowers that looked like stars sparkling in the blue of twilight. Every surface of every building glittered with ornament. It was as if a master goldsmith had selected the most flawless turquoise, the rarest of blue sapphires, the brightest yellow topaz, and the purest of diamonds, and arranged them into an infinity of shimmering patterns that radiated color and light.

"I have never seen anything so wonderful," I said to my mother, forgetting for a moment the sadness that had brought us here.

My mother hadn't forgotten. "It's all too big," she replied, gesturing at the wide square, and I understood that she missed our tiny village, where she knew everyone she saw.

The square was full of people. Young boys zoomed around us, balancing cups of hot, dark liquid, yelling, "Coffee!" "Coffee!" which I had never tasted but which smelled as rich as a meal. Two jugglers performed a swift exchange of balls, begging the audience to be generous with their coins. Hawkers stopped us a dozen times, asking us to examine cloth, kohl, and even the tusk of an elephant, an enormous animal from India with legendary powers of memory.

After a few minutes of walking, we reached the Shah's palace. Compared with the Friday mosque, it seemed modest. It was only a few stories high, and it was protected by a pair of thick, carved wooden doors, eight brass cannon, and a row of guards armed with swords. My mother approached one of the guards and asked how we could find Gostaham the carpet maker.

"What is your business with him?" asked the guard with a frown.

"He told us to seek him out," said my mother. The guard smiled scornfully at the sound of her long village vowels.

"He invited you?"

"He is part of my husband's family."

The guard looked as if he doubted her word. "Gostaham is a master in the Shah's carpet-making workshop, which is behind the palace," he said. "I will tell him you are here."

"We are the dust beneath your feet," said my mother, and we went back into the square to wait. Nearby, there was a bazaar of metal beaters, and we watched the smiths pound the shapes of birds and animals into teapots, cups, and spoons.

Before long, the guard found us and led us to meet Gostaham, who was waiting near the palace door. I was surprised by how little he and my father resembled each other. It was true that they were only half brothers, but while my father had been tall with features cut as cleanly as if with a knife, Gostaham was short and as round as a potato, with drooping eyes, a nose curved like a falcon's beak, and a large gray beard. He greeted us kindly and welcomed us to Isfahan. Beaming at me, he grabbed my two hands between his. "Well, then!" he exclaimed. "So you're Isma'il's child. You've got his walnut color and his straight black hair, and I would know those tiny, perfect hands anywhere!"

He made a show of examining my hands, which made me laugh, and compared them with his own. They were very small for a man and, like mine, narrow with long fingers.

"The family resemblance is obvious," he said. "Do you make rugs?"

"Of course," said my mother. "She's the best knotter in our village." And she told him the story of how we had sold my turquoise rug while it was still on my loom.

"May the hand of Ali always be with you!" said Gostaham, looking impressed.

He asked my mother for news of home. As we followed him out of the square, she began telling him about my father. The words poured out of her as if they had been bottled up for too long, and she told the story of his death with so much feeling, it brought tears to his eyes.

We left the Image of the World through a narrow gateway and walked for a few minutes through a district called Four Gardens to get to Gostaham's home. The district was divided into pleasure parks, which were barren now that it was winter. A cedar tree marked the beginning of Gostaham's street. From the outside, all the houses looked like fortresses. They were situated behind tall, thick walls that protected the inhabitants from prying eyes.

Gostaham led us through thick wooden gates, and we stood for a moment looking at the outside of his home. It was so large we didn't know where to go at first. Gostaham entered a narrow corridor, walked up a few steps, and led us into the birooni, or outside rooms, where he entertained male guests. His Great Room had long glass windows depicting two green swans drinking blue water from either side of a fountain. Carved white plaster flowers and vines adorned the ceiling and the walls. Ruby-colored carpets, made with the tightest knots I had ever seen, supported thick cushions in warm crimson tones. Even on this cold winter day, the room seemed to radiate warmth.

Gostaham lifted the windows, which opened all the way to the ground, and we stepped out into the large courtyard. It had a pool of water shaded by two poplars. I thought of the single tree in my village, a large cypress. For one family to have its own shade and greenery seemed to me the greatest of luxuries.

We met Gordiyeh, Gostaham's wife, in the courtyard. She was an ample woman, with large round hips and heavy breasts, who advanced slowly to kiss us on both cheeks. One of her servants had just boiled water, and I watched him make tea out of previously used leaves. It was strange that a household this grand would use its leaves twice. The tea was as tasteless as water, but we thanked Gordiyeh and said, "May your hands never ache."

"How old are you?" she asked me.

"Fifteen."

"Ah! Then you'll have to meet Naheed. She's fifteen, too, and is the daughter of a woman who lives nearby."

She turned to my mother. "Naheed comes from a very good family. I have always hoped that they might commission a carpet from us, but they haven't yet."

I wondered why she hoped to sell more carpets, since to my eyes she already had everything a family could want. But before I could ask any questions, Gordiyeh suggested that we must be tired, and led us through the courtyard to a tiny room squeezed between the kitchen storerooms and the latrine. There was nothing in it but two bedrolls, blankets, and cushions.

"My apologies that the room is so unworthy of your presence," Gordiyeh said, "but all the others are occupied."

My mother struggled to keep the dismay from her face. The walls were dingy, and the floor was streaked with dust. Gostaham's house was a palace compared to our little village home, but the tiny room we were to share was more humble.

"Not at all," replied my mother politely, "your generosity far exceeds what we deserve."

Gordiyeh left us for the afternoon rest. I straightened my bedroll, raising dust, which brought on a fit of coughing. After a few moments, I heard one of the house servants enter a room next to ours, while another opened the door to the latrines, releasing a thick, earthy smell even more pungent than the odor of our camel.

"Are we servants now?" I asked my mother in alarm. She was stretched out on a bedroll, her eyes wide open.

"Not yet," she replied, but I could see that she was worried about that very question.

AFTER SLEEPING, we arose and joined Gordiyeh and Gostaham in the birooni for the evening meal. What a feast was laid on cloths before us! I had not seen such food even at weddings, yet for Gordiyeh and Gostaham it seemed to be everyday fare. There was a chilled yogurt soup with dill, mint, green raisins, walnuts, and rose petals, cold and refreshing on the tongue; stewed chicken with tart sweetened barberries; tender eggplant cooked with garlic and whey; saffron rice with a crunchy brown crust; tangy sheep's cheese; hot bread; and a plate of radishes, fresh mint, and bitter greens for good digestion. I ate too much the first evening, as if to make up for the times in my village when we hadn't had enough.

When we were all sated, my mother began to speak. "Exalted hosts," she said, "we are honored that you have taken us into your household and fed us as if it were only yesterday that we last parted. And yet, I haven't seen you, honorable Gostaham, for more than twenty-five years. In that time, you have risen faster than the highest star. How did you come to be here, in this grand house, with all the good fortune that a man could desire?"

Gostaham smiled and put his hands on his large stomach. "Indeed, sometimes when I arise in the morning and look around, I can't believe it myself. And then when I see Gordiyeh beside me, I know my dreams have become real, and I thank God for my many blessings."

"May they be forever plentiful," replied my mother.

"It wasn't always like this, though. Long before you were born," Gostaham said to me, "my father realized that if he was to remain in his village, he would always be poor. Knowing there would be little to inherit, he moved to Shiraz to test his fortune. We were so poor that I had to help by making rugs. When I was twelve, I discovered that I could knot faster than almost anyone."

"Just like my daughter," my mother said proudly.

"Our home was so small that there was no space for a loom. When the weather was fine, I set up my loom outside, just as you must have done," Gostaham said to me. "One day I was knotting a rug with such speed that a small crowd gathered to watch. It was my good fortune that one of the passersby owned the largest rug workshop in Shiraz. He never looked for apprentices outside the workshop--why should he, when he could just train his workers' sons? But when he saw me, he offered to hire me, for my speed would increase his profits.

"The next few years were the harshest of my life. The workshop owner made his demands according to ability, not age. Because I was fast, I was required to finish rugs more quickly than anyone else. Once, when the owner caught me away from the loom, he told one of his bullies to throw me onto my back and beat the soles of my feet until I screamed. No one but a fool would destroy a knotter's hands, but what did he care if I couldn't walk?"

His story made me shiver. I had heard of children younger than me, mostly orphans, who had been forced to spend long hours at the loom. Sometimes, at the end of their day, they couldn't unbend their legs to stand up, and their caretakers had to bear them home on their backs. After they spent years laboring with folded legs, their bones grew twisted and their heads seemed too large for their bodies. When they tried to walk, they tottered like old people. I was glad I had grown up in a village where no one would allow a loom to break a child's body. Even so, when I was working at my loom on a warm spring day, I used to envy the birds and even the scrawny dogs, who were free to roam as they liked. To be young and have to sit quietly and work, when your blood is racing and you long to be chattering and laughing--that will make a child grow old quickly.

"The truth is, the owner of the workshop was right," Gostaham continued. "I tried to shirk my duties because I didn't want to remain a knotter. Whenever I could, I spent time with his master designer and master colorist. The designer allowed me to copy some of his patterns, and the colorist took me with him to the bazaar to show me how he selected shades of wool. Secretly, I learned all I could."

It had never occurred to me that it was possible to be more than just a knotter. Although I was sleepy from the large meal, I listened to Gostaham's tale with care.

"My husband didn't need much teaching," Gordiyeh burst in. "His eye for color is better than any man's."

Gostaham leaned back into the cushions with a smile, enjoying his wife's praise. "I was so ambitious that I told the master designer I wanted to make a carpet of my own. He offered me a design on paper that he wasn't using anymore and allowed me to copy it. Taking all my earnings, I went to the bazaar and bought the best wool I could afford. I spent hours choosing the colors, taking so long at it that the merchants yelled at me to buy something or leave their shops. But I had to be certain beyond certainty that I was choosing the right hues.

"By then I was seventeen, and it took me nearly a year to knot that carpet outside of working hours. It was the best I had ever made. My mother was pleased with me, for it would bring money into our household. But then I took the biggest risk of my life, which is the reason you see me here today in this fine home, with a wife who outshines the brightest stars of the age."

I sat up straighter, eager to learn how he had made such a fortune.

"I heard that Shah Abbas the Great was coming to Shiraz and would be holding audiences for his subjects every afternoon. I finished the rug, rolled it up, and carried it to his palace on my back. Presenting it to one of his guards, I explained that it was a gift. The guard unrolled it, making sure there were no assassins, animals, poisons, or the like hidden within--and promised to place it before his eyes."

"How bold to part with your only treasure!" exclaimed my mother.

"The rug was presented to the Shah after he heard testimony from a servant accused of stealing and ordered him to be punished with a beating," Gostaham continued. "I think he was ready to enjoy some sweeter news. When my carpet was unrolled before him, he flipped over a corner to check the tightness of the knots. I worried that he was simply going to tell his servants to carry it away, but then he asked that its maker make himself known.

"Looking at me with eyes that seemed to understand my poverty and my ambition, the Shah said, 'Every day, kings offer me gifts of gold, but not one compares with the sacrifice you have just made.' It was my great fortune that he had just started the royal rug workshop in Isfahan to make the finest rugs for his palaces and to sell to rich men. He liked my carpet enough to invite me to join the workshop for a year's trial. My mother almost beat me when she heard I had given away the carpet. When I told her how my fortunes had changed, she praised the Shah's name."

"That is a story beyond stories!" said my mother.

"There was a long road yet ahead," said Gostaham. "When I started at the royal rug workshop, I was the lowliest of the low. I was lucky because all of us were paid an annual salary, and even though mine was the smallest, it was enough for me to live on and send money to my family. Conditions were much better at the Shah's workshop than in Shiraz. We worked from dawn until midday, but then we were at liberty to work for ourselves. In the afternoons, I freely learned from the masters with the approval of the Shah."

"So you have come to know him?" I asked with wonder, for the Shah was second only to God.

"Just as his humble servant," said Gostaham. "He takes great interest in carpets and knows how to knot them himself. From time to time he stops by the workshop, which is, after all, adjacent to his palace, to see how the carpets are progressing, and sometimes we exchange a few words. But to return to my story, one of his chief colorists took an interest in me and trained me to master the way hues are combined in a carpet. That has been my job for nearly twenty years, and after my dear mentor went to meet God, I became one of the assistant masters for color."

"They are second only to the master," said Gordiyeh proudly. "And perhaps he will one day become master of the whole workshop."

"There is no certainty in that," Gostaham said. "I have a strong competitor in Afsheen, the assistant master designer, and I believe the Shah is more impressed by designers than colorists. Still, I wouldn't change anything about the course of my life. Because it was that very colorist--the one who made me his apprentice--who taught me everything I know, and who also gave me his daughter as his wife." And here he smiled at Gordiyeh with so much affection and desire that it reminded me of the way my father used to look at my mother. My mother noticed, too, and for a moment her eyes filled.

"What kind of rugs do you make in the royal workshop?" I asked quickly, hoping Gostaham would stop smiling at his wife.

"The finest carpets in the land," he said. "Carpets that require an army of specialists. Carpets that the Shah keeps rolled up and stored in dark rooms so they will never be ruined by light. Carpets ordered by foreign kings with their coat of arms depicted in silver-wrapped thread. Carpets that will be treasured long after we're all dust."

"May God rain His blessings on Shah Abbas!" exclaimed Gor-diyeh.

"If not for him, I would still be a knotter in Shiraz," agreed Gostaham. "He is responsible not only for the rise in my own fortunes, but for exalting the craft of rug making above others."

It was getting late. My mother and I said good night and went to sleep in our little room. As I pulled the blankets around me, I thought about how for some families, good fortune rains down with no end. Perhaps now that we were in Isfahan with a fortunate family, our luck would finally change, despite what the comet had foretold.

THE NEXT DAY, Gordiyeh sent a messenger to Naheed's mother to tell her that I was her daughter's age and was visiting from the south. Her mother sent back an invitation for us to visit them that afternoon. When Gordiyeh told me it was time to go, I smoothed my hair behind my scarf and announced that I was ready.

"You can't leave the house like that!" she said, sounding exasperated.

I looked down at my clothes. I had dressed in my long-sleeved robe, a long tunic, and loose trousers, all black because I was still in mourning. I patted the hair at my temples, pushing back the locks that had strayed out of my scarf. My clothing had always been thought modest enough for my village.

"Why not?"

"It's different in the city," she replied. "Women from good families keep fully covered!"

I was speechless. Gordiyeh took my hand and led me into her quarters. She opened a trunk stuffed with cloth and rummaged through it until she found what she needed. Pulling me in front of her ample body, she removed my scarf and smoothed my hair on both sides of my head. It was unruly, I could tell. Then she wrapped a lightweight white cloth around my head and fastened it under my chin.

"There!" she said. "Now you'll look like Naheed and other girls when you're at home or visiting."

She held up a metal mirror so I could see. The cloth shielded my hair and neck, but I didn't like how exposed and fleshy my face looked. The days in the desert sun had made my face darker, especially against the whiteness of the scarf.

I looked away from the mirror, thanking her and turning to go.

"Wait, wait!" protested Gordiyeh. "Let me finish."

She shook out a hood and placed it expertly over the top of my head. Even though the hood was white, it was dark and airless inside.

"I can't see!" I complained.

Gordiyeh adjusted the hood so that a portion of lace covered my eyes. The world was visible again, but only as if looking through a net.

"That's your picheh," said Gordiyeh. "You should wear it when you're outside." It was hard to breathe, but once again I thanked her, relieved that we were done.

"Oh, but you are a funny little one!" said Gordiyeh. "Small, quick as a hare, and just as nervous. What's your hurry? Wait while I find you everything you need!"

She moved slowly, sorting through the cloths until she found a large white length of fabric. She draped it over my head and showed me how to hold it closed by clutching the fabric in my fist right under my chin.

"Now you look as you should, all snug inside your chador," she said.

I led the way out of her room, feeling as if I were carrying around a nomad's tent. Although I could see well enough if I looked straight out through the lace, I had no side vision. I was not used to holding a chador around me except at the mosque, and I tripped on it until I learned to position it above my ankles.

As I walked unsteadily down the hallway, Gordiyeh said, "For now, everyone will be able to tell that you are not from the city. But very soon, you will learn how to move as quietly and gently as a shadow."

When we returned to the birooni, Gostaham congratulated me on my new attire, and even my mother said she wouldn't recognize me in a crowd. Gordiyeh and I walked together to Naheed's house, which was a few minutes away through the Four Gardens district. It was a refreshing walk, for Shah Abbas had built a grand avenue through the district, lined by gardens and narrow canals of water. The road was wide enough for twenty people to stroll side by side, and it was filled with plane trees, whose hand-shaped leaves would form a shady green canopy in spring and summer. The road led to the Eternal River and the Thirty-three Arches Bridge, and had a view of the Zagros Mountains, whose jagged tips were covered with snow. The homes we passed had gardens as large as parks and seemed like palaces compared with the tiny, clustered dwellings in my village.

Hidden by my picheh I felt free to stare at those around me, since no one could see where I was looking. An old man who was missing part of his leg begged for alms under the cedar tree near Gostaham's house. A girl dallied aimlessly, her eyes darting around as if she were seeking something too embarrassing to name. On my left, the turquoise dome of the Friday mosque hovered over the city like a blessing, seemingly lighter than air.

Shortly after Thirty-three Arches Bridge came into view, we turned down a wide street toward Naheed's house. As soon as we stepped inside the door, we removed our chadors and pichehs and gave them to a servant. I felt lighter after relinquishing them.

Naheed reminded me of the princesses in the tales my mother liked to tell. She wore a long robe of lavender silk with an orange undergarment that peeked out at the neck, the sleeves, and the ankles. She was tall and thin, like a cypress tree, and her clothing swayed loosely when she moved. She had green eyes--the gift of her Russian mother, Ludmila--and her long hair, partially covered by an embroidered white head cloth, was wavy. Two loose tresses lay on her bosom. In back, her hair was in wefts that reached almost to her knees. The wefts were held by orange silk ties. I wanted to talk to her, but both of us had to sit quietly while our elders exchanged greetings. Naheed's mother noticed our eagerness and said to her, "Go ahead, joonam--soul of mine--and show your new friend your work."

"I'll be glad to," said Naheed. As she led me into her small, pretty workroom, whose carpet was made in soothing shades of gray and blue, she whispered, "At last we can talk without the old folks!" Her irreverence delighted me.

Naheed opened a trunk full of paper with black marks on it and pulled out a sheet to show me. I stared at it for a moment before I realized what she could do.

"God be praised!" I said. "You can write!" Not only was she beautiful, but a scholar, too. Almost no one in my village could read or write; I had never even met a girl who knew how to use a pen.

"Do you want me to show you how I do it?"

"Yes!"

Naheed dipped a reed pen into a vessel of black ink and brushed off the excess. Taking a fresh piece of paper, she wrote a word in large letters with the ease of long practice.

"There!" she said, showing me the page. "Do you know what that says?"

I clicked my tongue against my teeth.

"It's my name," said Naheed.

I stared at the graceful letters, which had a delicate dot on top and a dash below. It was the first time I had ever seen anyone's name recorded in ink.

"Take it--it's for you," she said.

I pressed the paper to my chest, not realizing it would leave a wet mark on my mourning clothes. "How did you learn?"

"My father taught me. He gives me a lesson every day." She smiled at the mention of him, and I could see that she was very close to her Baba. I felt a pang in my heart and I looked away.

"What's the matter?" Naheed asked. I told her why we had come to Isfahan from so far away.

"I'm sorry your luck has been so dark," she said. "But now that you're here, I'm sure things will change for you."

"God willing."

"You must miss your friends back home," she said, searching my face.

"Just Goli," I replied. "We have been friends since we were small. I would do anything at all for her!"

Naheed had a question in her eyes. "If Goli told you a secret, would you keep it quiet?" she asked.

"To the grave," I replied.

Naheed looked satisfied, as if an important concern about my loyalty had been addressed.

"I hope we can be good friends," she said.

I smiled, surprised by her swift offer of friendship. "Me, too," I replied. "Can I see more of your writing?"

"Of course," she said. "Here--take the pen yourself."

Naheed showed me how to make a few basic letters. I was clumsy and spilled pools of ink on the paper, but she told me everybody did that at first. After I had practiced for a while, Naheed stoppered the vessel of ink and put it away. "Enough writing!" she said imperiously. "Let's talk about other things."

She smiled so invitingly, I guessed what she wanted to talk about. "Tell me: Are you engaged?"

"No," I said sadly. "My parents were going to find a husband for me, but then my Baba--"

I couldn't finish the thought. "How about you?" I asked.

"Not yet," said Naheed, "but I plan to be soon."

"Who is the man your parents have chosen?"

Naheed's smile was victorious. "I've found someone myself."

"How can you do that?" I asked, astonished.

"I don't want some old goat that my parents know, not when I've already seen the most handsome man in Isfahan."

"And where did you find him?" I asked.

"Promise you won't tell?"

"I promise."

"You must swear that you will never breathe a word, or I'll put a curse on you."

"I swear by the Holy Qur'an," I said, frightened by the idea of a curse. I didn't need any more bad luck.

Naheed sighed with pleasure. "He's one of the best riders in the polo games at the Image of the World. You should see him on a horse!" She arose and imitated him taming a bucking stallion, which made me laugh.

"But Naheed," I said with concern, "what if your mother finds out?"

Naheed sat down again, slightly breathless. "She must never find out," she said, "for she would refuse a man of my own choice."

"Then how will you ensnare him?"

"I'll have to be very clever," she said. "But I'm not worried. I always find ways to make my parents do what I want. And most of the time, they think it's their own idea."

"May Ali, prince among men, fulfill all your hopes!" I replied, surprised by her boldness.

Few girls were as confident about their future as Naheed. I admired her for her certainty, just as I was dazzled by her smooth white skin, her green eyes, her lavender silk tunic, and her skill with the pen. I couldn't understand why she wanted to be my friend, as I was just a poor village girl and she was a learned child of the city, but it seemed that Naheed was one of those girls who could make or break rules as she liked.

ON THE NEXT DAY, Friday, my mother and I arose before the sun and went to the kitchen, looking for breakfast. A pretty maid named Shamsi gave us hot bread and my first vessel of coffee. The rich taste of it brought tears of pleasure to my eyes. No wonder everyone talked about the wonder of the bean! If tea enlivened the appetite, coffee was rich enough to quench it. It was sweet, but I stirred in another spoonful of sugar when no one was looking. I began chattering with my mother about nothing in particular. Her cheeks were flushed, and I noticed that she, too, was chirping like a bird.

While we were eating, Gordiyeh stopped by and told us that her daughters would be visiting with their children, as they did on every holy day, and that everyone would be needed to help make the festive midday meal. It would be a large task, as the household was even grander than it looked at first. There were six servants: Cook; Ali-Asghar, who was responsible for men's jobs like slaughtering animals; two maids, Shamsi and Zohreh, who scrubbed, polished, and cleaned; a boy named Samad whose only job was to make and serve coffee and tea; and an errand boy, Taghee. All these people would have to be fed, plus my mother and I, Gordiyeh and Gostaham, their daughters and their children, and anyone else who happened to visit.

Ali-Asghar, a small, wiry man with hands as big as his head, had already killed a lamb in the courtyard that morning and suspended it to let the blood flow out of its body. While we peeled eggplant with sharp knives, he stripped off its skin and chopped the body into parts. Cook, a thin woman who never stopped moving, threw the meat into a cauldron over a hot fire, adding salt and onions. My mother and I cut the eggplant into pieces and salted them to make the sour black juice erupt.

Gordiyeh appeared from time to time to check on the preparations. Looking at the eggplant, which had only just begun to sweat, she told my mother, "More salt!"

I could feel words behind my mother's lips, but she didn't speak them. She sprinkled more salt and then paused.

"More!" Gordiyeh said.

This time, my mother poured until the eggplant was nearly buried and Gordiyeh told her to stop.

After the sourness had drained out, we rinsed the chopped eggplant in cool water, and my mother fried it in a pot bubbling with hot oil. When each piece was cooked, I patted it with a cloth to remove the grease, and put it aside. The eggplant would be laid on top of the lamb just before serving to allow it to marry the meat juices.

Since the meal was still hours away, Gordiyeh told us to make a large vessel of vegetable torshi, a spicy relish that added flavor to rice. Cook's recipe called for eggplant, carrots, celery, turnips, parsley, mint, and garlic by the basketload, all of which we had to wash, peel, and chop. Then Cook measured out the vinegar she had made and mixed everything together. By the time we had finished, my hands were tired and raw.

Gordiyeh's daughters, Mehrbanoo and Jahanara, arrived and dropped in to the kitchen to see what we were cooking. Mehrbanoo, the eldest at twenty-two, had two daughters, who were dressed and groomed like little dolls, in yellow and orange tunics with gold earrings and gold bracelets. Jahanara was a year younger and had one son, Mohammad, a three-year-old child who seemed small for his age and who had a runny nose. Both of the women lived with their husbands' families but came to visit their parents at least once a week. I was introduced to them as their father's half brother's daughter--"a distant relative," Gordiyeh said.

"How many of those do we have?" Mehrbanoo asked her mother, with a big laugh that revealed several rotten teeth. "Hundreds?"

"Too many to count," said Gordiyeh.

I was taken aback by this airy dismissal. As if in explanation, Gordiyeh said to my mother, "Our family is so large that my girls can't keep up."

Shamsi entered the kitchen just then and said to Gordiyeh, "Your revered husband has arrived."

"Come, girls, your father is always hungry after Friday prayers," Gordiyeh said, ushering them out of the room.

The whole kitchen began to bustle. "Hurry!" Cook hissed, handing me a few cotton spreads. "Lay these over the carpets in the Great Room. Don't delay!"

I followed Gordiyeh and her daughters, who had arranged themselves on the cushions and were chatting without paying me the least attention. I was eager to sit and eat with them, but Cook called me back to the kitchen and handed me a tray of hot bread and a dish of goat cheese and mint; she followed with the plate of honor, heaped with eggplant and herbs, while Zohreh tottered under the weight of the rice. My mother emerged with a large vessel containing a cool drink she had made of rose water and mint.

Back in the kitchen, Cook said, "We may as well begin the washing," although we hadn't eaten yet. She handed me a rag and a greasy pot encrusted with eggplant. I stared at them, wondering when we'd be called in to dine. My mother pushed a strand of hair back into her scarf and began cleaning the rice pot. Surely we'd be asked to join the family soon! I tried to catch my mother's eye, but her head was bowed over her task and she didn't seem to be expecting anything.

After we had completed most of the cleanup, Cook sent me back to the Great Room with a vessel of hot water so the family could wash their hands. Everyone had finished eating and was reclining comfortably against the cushions, their bellies large with food. My stomach growled, but no one seemed to notice. Zohreh and Shamsi collected the platters, and then Cook divided the remaining food among the six members of the household staff and the two of us. Ali-Asghar, Taghee, and Samad ate together outside in the courtyard, while we women ate in the kitchen.

Although the meal had been served, Cook couldn't seem to quit her labors. She'd take a bite, then rise to clean a serving spoon or return a stopper to a vessel. The flavors in her food achieved an exceptional marriage, but her nervousness dulled the pleasure of it. The moment we finished, Cook told each one of us what to do to finish the cleanup. When the kitchen was spotless again, she dismissed us for our afternoon rest.

I threw myself onto my bedroll, my limbs aching. Our room was so small that my mother and I were nose to nose and foot to foot.

"I have nothing left," I said, with a large yawn.

"Me, neither," my mother replied. "Did you like the food, light of my eyes?"

"It was fit for a shah," I said, adding quickly, "but not as good as yours."

"It was better," she replied. "Who'd have thought they would eat meat every week! A person could live on the rice alone."

"God be praised," I replied. "Hasn't it been a year since we've eaten lamb?"

"At least."

It had felt good to eat as much as I wanted for two days in a row.

"Bibi," I said, "what about the eggplant? It was too salty!"

"I doubt that Gordiyeh has had to cook in many years," my mother replied.

"Why didn't you tell her it was too much?"

She closed her eyes. "Daughter of mine, remember that we have nowhere else to go."

I sighed. Safa had been right; we were not our own mistresses now. "I thought Gordiyeh would have invited us to share the meal with them again," I said.

My mother looked at me with pity. "Oh daughter, whom I love above all others," she said, "a family like this one keeps to itself."

"But we are their family."

"Yes, and if we had arrived with your father, bearing gifts and good fortune, it would have been different," she said. "But as the poor relatives of your grandfather's second wife, we are not good news."

Feeling more tired than I could remember, I closed my eyes and slept as if dead. It seemed only moments before Cook knocked on our door and asked for help. The family would be up and about soon, she said, and they'd be anxious for their coffee, fresh fruit, and sweetmeats.

"What a honeyed existence!" I muttered under my breath, but my mother did not reply. She was asleep, her eyebrows knitted together in a furrow of worry. I couldn't bear to wake her, so I told Cook I'd work for two.

TWICE A YEAR, Isfahan's Great Bazaar was closed to men so that the ladies of the royal harem could shop in freedom. All the shopkeepers' wives and daughters were sent in to run the stores for three days, and all the women, whether buyers or sellers, were allowed to walk around the bazaar without their heavy chadors.

Gostaham kept an alcove in the bazaar with a few rugs on display, not so much for sale but to remind people such as the royal courtesans that he was available for commissions. Since these could be the most lucrative of jobs, and since they improved his contacts within the harem, he always put his most fashionable wares on display for the women.

Gostaham normally sent his daughter Mehrbanoo to run his shop during the harem's visit, but she became ill the night before. Gordiyeh was sent to sell the carpets instead, and I begged Gostaham to let me accompany her. I had heard stories about the Shah's women, who were gathered like flowers from every region of our land to adorn him. I wanted to see how beautiful they were and admire their silken clothes. I had to promise I would be as quiet as a mouse if Gordiyeh was making a sale.

On the first day of the harem's visit, we walked to the Image of the World just before dawn. The vast square, normally so busy with nut sellers, hawkers, musicians, and acrobats, was now the province of girls and pigeons. All men had been ordered away under penalty of death, lest they catch a glimpse of the unveiled women. The empty square looked even larger than before. I wondered how the Shah made his way between the palace and his private mosque on the other side of the square. It seemed a long way for royalty to walk in public.

"How does the Shah go to pray?" I asked Gordiyeh.

"Can you guess?" she asked, pointing to the ground beneath us. It looked like ordinary dirt to me, and I had to think for a moment.

"An underground passageway?" I asked, incredulous, and she dipped her chin in assent. Such was the ingenuity of the Shah's engineers that they had thought of his every convenience.

When the sun rose, the burly bazaar guards opened its gates and permitted us to enter. We waited near the doors until the women of the harem began to stream in, mounted on a procession of richly decorated horses. They held their chadors closed with one hand and the reins in the other. Not until all the horses and horsemen had disappeared did they shed their wraps and pichehs, throwing them off with merriment and frivolity. They lived in palaces only a few minutes' walk away, but such ladies were not allowed to travel on foot.

There were thousands of shops in the bazaar to answer every desire, whether for carpets, gold jewelry, silk and cotton cloth, embroidery, shoes, perfume, trappings for horses, leather goods, books, or paper, and on normal days, all kinds of foodstuffs. The two hundred slipper makers alone would occupy the women for some time. Although we could hear their chattering and their laughter, it wasn't until the end of the day that we spoke to any of them.

I had imagined that all the women of the harem would be beauties, but I was wrong. The Shah's four wives were in the fifth or sixth decade of life. Many of the courtesans had been in his harem for years and were no longer beautiful. And most of them weren't even ample. One pretty girl caught my eye because I had never seen hair like hers, the color of a flaming sunset. She looked lost among her sisters, though, and I realized that she didn't speak our language. I felt sorry for her, for she had probably been captured in battle.

"Look!" said Gordiyeh in a tone of awe. "There's Jamileh!"

She was the Shah's favorite. She had black curls surrounding her tiny white face and lips like a rosebud. She wore a lacy undershirt slit from the throat to the navel, which showed the curve of her breasts. Over it, she had chosen a long-sleeved silk sheath dyed a brilliant saffron. Flowing loosely on top was a red silk robe, which opened at her throat to reveal a golden paisley pattern on the reverse side. She had tied a thick saffron sash around her hips, which swayed as she walked. On her forehead pearls and rubies hung from a circlet of gold, which shimmied when she turned her head.

"She's the very image of a girl the Shah loved when he was a young man," Gordiyeh said. "They say she spends her days in the harem quizzing the older women about her dead predecessor."

"Why?"

"To curry favor with the Shah. She pinches her own cheeks all the time now, because the other girl's always bloomed with pink roses."

By the time Jamileh and her entourage reached our alcove, Gordiyeh was as nervous as a cat. She bowed practically to the ground, inviting the ladies to have something to drink. I fetched hot coffee, hurrying so that I wouldn't miss anything. When I returned, the white-cheeked Jamileh was flipping up a corner of each rug with her index finger and examining the knots.

After I served her coffee, she sat down, explaining that she was refurnishing the Great Room in her part of the harem. She would need twelve new cushions for reclining against the wall, each of which was to be about as long as my arm and knotted with wool and silk.

"To make him comfortable, you know," she said significantly.

Hiring Gostaham to design cushion covers was like paying a master architect to design a mud hovel, but Jamileh would have only the best. A fluent stream of flattery poured from her lips about his carpets, "the light of the Shah's workshop, by any measure."

Gordiyeh, who should have been immune to such flattery, melted as quickly as a block of ice in the summer sun. When the two began bargaining, I knew she was doomed. Even her first price for the work was too low. I calculated that it would take one person three months of knotting to make the cushion covers, not including the work on the design. But whenever Jamileh arched her pretty eyebrows or pinched her small white cheeks, Gordiyeh slashed a few more toman off the price or made another concession.

Yes, she would make some of the knots out of silver-wrapped thread. No, the cushions would look nothing like her predecessor's. Yes, they would be ready in three months. By the time the bargaining was over, a sly expression had stolen into Jamileh's eyes, and she looked for a moment like the village girl she had once been. No doubt she would make the ladies of the harem laugh out loud over the tale of what a good deal she had made on this day.

One of the Shah's eunuchs wrote up two copies of the agreement and stamped them with the Shah's elaborate wax seal. The deal was done.

When dusk fell, we returned home and Gordiyeh went straight to bed, complaining of a headache. The house was unusually quiet as though awaiting a catastrophe. Indeed, when Gostaham came home and read the receipt, he went straight to Gordiyeh's room and yelled at her for breaking his back.

The next day, Gordiyeh retaliated by staying in bed, leaving him to manage the household and all the visitors on his own. In desperation, Gostaham sent my mother to run his shop, and I went with her. He couldn't have made a better choice: My mother knew the value of every knot. This was a surprise to the junior harem women with limited shopping allowances who had heard of Jamileh's triumph. All day, my mother drove hard bargains with these women, who whined over her stiff prices but nonetheless agreed to pay them because they, too, wanted carpets from the same maker used by the Shah's favorite courtesan.

That evening, when Gostaham looked at the receipts, he praised my mother for her skill with money.

"You have earned us a fine profit, despite Jamileh's wiles," he said. "Now what can I offer you as a fitting reward?"

My mother said she'd like a new pair of shoes, for hers were frayed and dirty from our journey through the desert.

"Two pairs of new shoes, then, one for each of you," Gostaham said.

I had been waiting for a chance to ask Gostaham for what I really wanted, and this seemed the most auspicious moment.

"Shoes are very nice," I blurted out, "but instead, will you take me to see the royal rug workshop?"

Gostaham looked surprised. "I didn't think any young girl could resist a pair of shoes, but no matter. I'll take you after the bazaar returns to normal."

My mother and I went to bed that night filled with glee. As we spread out our bedrolls, we began whispering together about the peculiarities of the household we were fated to live in.

"Now I understand why Gordiyeh reuses the tea leaves," my mother said.

"Why?" I asked.

"She's a bad manager," she replied. "She loses her head in one situation, then tries to make it up in another."

"She'll have to reuse a lot of tea to make up for the loss she took on Jamileh's cushions," I said. "What a funny woman."

"Funny is not the word for it," my mother replied. "We'll need to show Gordiyeh that we're working hard instead of draining her household. After all, Gostaham hasn't said how long we can stay."

"But they have so much!"

"They do," said my mother, "but what does it matter if you have seven chickens in a shed when you believe you have only one?"

My parents had always taken the opposite approach. "Trust God to provide," my father used to say. It may have been equally uncertain, but it was a much sweeter way to live.

A FEW WEEKS later, after I had covered myself in my picheh and chador, Gostaham and I left the house and walked to his workshop near the Image of the World. It was a mild day, and signs of spring were alighting on the Four Gardens district. The trees had their first shimmer of green, and purple and white hyacinths were blooming in the gardens. The first day of the New Year was only a week away. We would celebrate it on the vernal equinox at twenty-two minutes past five in the morning, the precise moment when the sun crossed the celestial equator.

Gostaham was looking forward to the New Year because he and his workers would take a two-week holiday. He began telling me about the latest projects. "We're working on a rug right now that has seventy knots per radj," he said proudly.

I stopped so suddenly that a mule driver with a cargo of brass pots yelled at me to move out of the way. A radj was about the length of my middle finger. My own rugs might have had as many as thirty knots per radj, but no more. I could hardly imagine wool fine enough to produce so many knots, or fingers nimble enough to do so.

Gostaham laughed at my astonishment. "And some are even finer than that," he added.

The royal rug workshop was located in its own airy building near the Great Bazaar and the Shah's palace. The main workroom was large, with a high ceiling and plenty of light. Two, four, or even eight knotters were busy at each loom, and many of the carpets in process were so long they had to be rolled up at the foot of the loom to allow the workers to keep knotting.

The men looked surprised to see a woman in the shop, but when they saw I was with Gostaham, they averted their eyes. Most were small in stature--everyone knows that the best knotters are small--but they all had larger hands than I did, and still they formed knots that could hardly be seen. I wondered if I could learn to make even smaller ones.

The first carpet we looked at reminded me of Four Gardens, the parklike district near Gostaham's home. The carpet showed four square gardens divided by canals of water, with roses, tulips, lilies, and violets as beautiful as real ones. Floating above them, a single peach tree with white blossoms gave life to seedlings in each garden. It was like watching nature at work, feeding and renewing her own beauty.

At the next loom we stopped to admire, the carpet was so dense with patterns that my eyes couldn't follow them at first. The most visible design was a red sunburst, which gave birth to tiny turquoise and indigo blossoms edged with white. Somehow, unbelievably, the knotters had made a separate layer of curved vines and another simultaneous layer of arabesques, as delicate as breath. Despite the intricacy of these patterns, none interfered with another, and the carpet seemed to pulse with life.

"How do they make it so fine?" I asked.

Gostaham laughed at me, but it was a kind laugh. "Touch one of the skeins," he said.

I stood on my toes to reach a pale blue ball hanging from the top of the loom. Each thread was thinner and softer than the wool I used at home.

"Is it silk?" I asked.

"Yes."

"Where does it come from?"

"Long ago, a couple of Christian monks who wanted to curry favor with our Mongol conquerors smuggled some cocoons into Iran. Now it's our biggest export, and we sell more of it than the Chinese," he finished with a chuckle.

Iraj, the man in charge of the sunburst rug, called his workers to their labors. After they settled on their cushions, he assumed a crouching position behind the loom and began reciting the sequence of colors needed for a blue-and-white flower. Because the carpet was symmetrical, the knotters could work on a similar flower at opposite ends of the loom. Every time Iraj called out a color change, two pairs of hands reached simultaneously for the silk and made the knot. The men held a knife loosely in their right hands, which they used to separate the knot from its connection to the skein.

"Abdullah," said Iraj abruptly, "go back. You missed the change to white."

Abdullah uttered an oath and slashed at a few knots with his blade. The other man stretched while he corrected his mistake. Then the chant started up again, and they were off.

From time to time, I saw Iraj look at a sheet of paper to refresh his memory of what came next.

"Why do they use a design on paper instead of in their heads?" I asked.

"Because it is an exact guide to where every knot and every color should appear," Gostaham replied. "The results are as close to flawless as any human can attain."

In my village, I always knotted my patterns from memory, inventing little details as I went along. I had been used to thinking of myself as an accomplished knotter, even though my rugs weren't perfectly symmetrical, and curved shapes like birds, animals, or flowers often looked more square than round. But now I had seen what master craftsmen could do, I wanted to learn everything they knew.

Before returning home, Gostaham decided to check on sales at his alcove in the bazaar. As we twisted and turned through the bazaar's alleys, we passed hammams, mosques, caravanserais, schools, endowed wells, and markets for everything, it seemed, that man had ever made or used. The smells told me which section we were passing, from the nose-tingling spice market redolent of cinnamon, to the richness of leather used by the slipper makers, to the blood of freshly slaughtered lamb in the meat market, to the crispness of flowers that would soon be distilled into essences. "I've worked here for twenty years," a rug merchant told me, "and there are still many parts of the bazaar I've never set foot in." I didn't doubt his word.

After Gostaham picked up his receipts, we looked at rugs on display in other merchants' shops. Suddenly, I noticed a carpet that made me cry out.

"Look!" I said. "There's the rug I sold to the merchant my mother was telling you about!"

It was hanging at the entrance of a shop. Gostaham approached and checked it with expert fingers. "The knots are nice and tight," he said. "It's a fine piece, though it shows its village roots."

"The design is a little crooked," I admitted. Its flaws were obvious to me now that I had seen better things.

Gostaham stood looking at the design for some time. "What were you thinking when you chose the colors?" he asked.

"I wanted it to be unusual," I said. "Most of the carpets from my village use only camel, red, or white."

"I see," he said. The look on his face made me afraid that I hadn't chosen wisely.

Gostaham asked the merchant to name his price. Upon hearing his answer, I was speechless for a moment.

"What's the matter?"

"It's so expensive, it's as if they're asking for my father's blood," I said angrily. "Perhaps we could have survived in my village if we had been paid such a large amount."

He shook his head sadly. "You deserved much more."

"Thank you," I said, "but now that I've seen your workshop, I know how much more there is to learn."

"You are still very young," he replied.

My blood rushed to my head, for I knew exactly what I wanted and hoped that Gostaham would understand. "Will you teach me?" I asked.

He looked surprised. "What more do you want to know?"

"Everything," I said. "How you make such beautiful designs and color them as if they were images from heaven."

Gostaham considered for a moment. "I never had a son that I could train to carry on my work," he said. "Neither of my daughters ever needed to learn. What a pity you're not a boy! You're the right age to apprentice in the workshop."

I knew there was no possibility of working among all those men. "Perhaps I could help you on your projects at home--if you found I was good enough," I said.

"We'll see," he replied.

His answer wasn't as encouraging as I had hoped. He himself had once begged his master to let him learn, but he seemed to have forgotten what that was like.

"May I watch you design Jamileh's cushions?" I prompted. "I promise you, you won't even know I'm there. I'll fetch you coffee when you're tired and help in any way I can."

Gostaham's face softened into a smile, which made his kindly eyes droop even further. "If you're truly interested, you must ask Gordiyeh if you will have time outside of your household duties," he replied. "And don't feel too badly about your rug. Things are much more expensive in the city. Just remember, it's a sign of appreciation that the price was so high, and the rug displayed so boldly."

His words soothed me and gave me an idea. I could make another rug to sell, and perhaps I would earn all the money that Hassan had pocketed for himself.

THAT AFTERNOON, I found Gordiyeh in her rooms looking through bolts of silk velvet brought by a visiting merchant. He had never seen her, of course; he conveyed the fabric through her servants and waited in the birooni while she made her selections.

Gordiyeh's fingers were lingering on a bolt patterned with leaves in autumn shades of red and yellow.

"Look at this!" she said. "Won't it make a beautiful long robe for cooler weather?"

Staring at my black mourning clothes, I could only imagine how it would feel to wear something so beautiful. After admiring the thick silk, I told Gordiyeh about my visit to the workshop and asked if I might be permitted to observe Gostaham when he worked at home. Having seen how Gordiyeh had melted under Jamileh's flattery, I spiced my request with awe over Gostaham's carpet-making mastery.

"Why do you want to spend your time that way?" Gordiyeh asked, reluctantly putting aside the bolt of silk. "You will never be allowed to learn in a workshop full of men, nor will you be able to do such fine work without an army of specialists."

"Still, I want to learn," I said stubbornly, feeling my top and bottom teeth pressing against each other. My mother said I always looked like a mule when I didn't get my way.

Gordiyeh looked doubtful. Remembering my mother's words from a few nights before, I added quickly, "Perhaps I might one day become good enough to help Gostaham with small tasks for his commissions. That way, I would relieve some of the burden on him and on your household."

That idea seemed to please Gordiyeh, but she wasn't prepared to say yes. "There is always more work in the kitchen than there are hands," she replied.

I was ready with an answer. "I promise to do everything for Cook that I always do. Nothing will change in how much I help."

Gordiyeh turned back to her bolts of silk. "In that case," she said, "since my husband has given his approval, you may learn from him, but only if you don't shirk your other duties."

I was so jubilant that I promised to work harder than usual, though I believed I was already doing as much as any maid could.

All through the next week, I worked long hours alongside my mother, Shamsi, Zohreh, and Cook in preparation for the New Year. We scrubbed the house from top to bottom and aired out all the blankets. We lifted the bedrolls, cleaning and polishing underneath them. We filled the house with vases of flowers and with mountains of nuts, fruit, and pastries. We cleaned what seemed like a field of greens for the traditional New Year's dish of whole whitefish cooked with mint, coriander, and parsley.

On New Year's Day, my mother and I were awakened in the dark by the bustle in the household. At twenty-two minutes past five, we kissed each other's cheeks and celebrated with coffee and rosewater pastries. Gostaham and Gordiyeh gave their children gold coins and presented every member of the household with a small gift of money. I said a prayer of thanks to God for permitting us to survive the year, and for guiding us to a household with so much to teach me.

GOSTAHAM'S WORKROOM at home was located in the birooni. It was a simple place with carpets and cushions on the floors and alcoves for paper, ink, pens, and books. He drew his designs sitting cross-legged on a cushion with a wooden desk propped on his lap. I joined him the day he began the design for Jamileh's cushions and watched him sketch a vase of tulips partially encircled by a garland of other flowers. I marveled at how natural his flowers looked and how quickly they sprang from his pen.

Gostaham decided that the blossoms were to be pink and yellow, with pale green leaves, against a black background. Touches of silver-wrapped silk thread would outline the blossoms, as Gordiyeh had promised. When I commented on how quickly he designed the cushions, he only said, "This is one commission that has already cost me far more than it's worth."

The following day, he laid out a piece of paper that had been ruled by one of his assistants with a grid. With great care, he drew the finished tulip design on top of the grid and painted it with watercolors. The grid underneath remained visible, dividing the design into thousands of tiny colored squares, each of which stood for a knot. With this guide in hand, the designer could call out the colors or the knotter could read it himself, like a map that tells a traveler where to go.

When he was finished, I begged him to give me a task to practice on my own. The first thing he taught me was to draw a grid. I took pen and ink to my little room and practiced on the floor. In the beginning, I had trouble managing the flow of ink. It pooled and smudged, and my lines were crooked and irregular. But before long, I learned how to dip the pen exactly, brush off the excess, and make a clean, straight line, usually while holding my breath. It was tedious work; one sheet of paper took me the better part of an afternoon, and when I stood up, my legs were stiff and cramped.

When I was able to make a proper grid, Gostaham rewarded me with my very own pen. It had been cut from a reed in the marshes near the Caspian Sea. Although it weighed little more than a feather, to me it was better than a gift of gold. From then on, Gostaham entrusted me with preparing the grids he used to make the final designs for private commissions. He also began giving me assignments to improve my drawing skills. He would toss off sketches of flowers, leaves, lotus blossoms, clouds, and animals, and tell me to copy them exactly. I especially liked to copy complicated designs that looked like flowers within flowers within flowers.

Much later, when I had gained more confidence, Gostaham gave me the pattern he had designed for Jamileh's cushions and told me to reverse it, so that the bouquet of tulips leaned to the right instead of the left. Larger carpets often had patterns that went first one way, then the other, so a designer needed to know how to draw both. Every afternoon, during the hours when the household was sleeping, I practiced drawing. I sang folk songs from my village while I worked, happy to be learning something new.

WHENEVER I HAD TIME, I visited Naheed. We were becoming close quickly, now that we shared not just one secret, but two.

After my first experience of seeing her name in ink, I had asked Naheed to teach me to write. She gave me lessons in her workroom whenever I visited. If anybody came to talk with us, I was to pretend I was just drawing. It was not common for a village girl to learn to write.

We started with the letter alef. It was simple to draw, a heartbeat and the letter was done.

"It is long and tall like a minaret," said Naheed, who always thought of shapes that would help me remember the letters.

Alef. The first letter in Allah. The beginning of everything.

I filled a page with tall, straight strokes, watching Naheed out of the corner of my eye. Sometimes I added a curving top to the letter to give it a long, low sound in the throat. When my efforts had met with Naheed's approval, she taught me the letter beh, which was curved like a bowl with a dot underneath. This letter was much trickier. My beh's looked graceless and childish compared with hers. But when she looked over my labors, she was satisfied.

"Now put the two together, alef and beh, and you make the most blessed thing in our land," said Naheed.

I wrote them together and mouthed the word ab: water.

"Writing is just like making rugs," I said.

"What do you mean?" asked Naheed, with a touch of scorn in her voice. She had never made a rug.

I put down my pen to explain. "Words are made letter by letter, in the same way that rugs are formed knot by knot. If you combine different letters, they make different words, and the same is true when you combine colors to make different patterns," I said.

"But writing is from God," objected Naheed.

"He gave us thirty-two letters," I replied, proud that I knew this now, "but how do you explain that He gave us more colors than we can count?"

"I suppose that's true," said Naheed, in a tone that made it clear that she thought letters were superior, like most everyone did.

Naheed took a deep breath and sighed. "I should be working on my writing exercises," she said. Her father had given her a book of calligraphic drills she was supposed to copy before attempting to pen a lion that spelled Allah-hu-Akbar: God is great. "But I can't sit anymore," she added, her green eyes jumping around the room. "My mind is too full."

"Could this have something to do with a handsome polo player?" I said.

"I found out his name: Iskandar," Naheed said, pronouncing it with obvious delight.

"And what about his family?"

She looked away. "I don't know."

"And does he know who you are?" I asked, feeling jealous.

Naheed smiled her prettiest smile. "I think he's starting to know," she said.

"How?"

"Last week, I went to the Image of the World with a friend to watch the polo game. Iskandar scored so many goals for his team that the spectators roared with excitement. After the game, I walked to where the players were being congratulated and pretended to carry on a conversation with my friend until I was sure he noticed us. Then I flipped up my picheh as if I needed to adjust it and let him see my face."

"You didn't!"

"I did," Naheed said triumphantly. "He stared, and it was as if his heart had turned into a bird that had found the right spot for its nest. He couldn't stop looking, even after I had covered my face."

"But now how will he find you?"

"I shall have to keep going to the games until he knows who I am."

"Be careful," I said.

Naheed looked at me with slightly narrowed eyes, as if she wasn't sure she could trust me. "You would never tell anyone, would you?"

"Of course not: I'm your friend!"

Naheed looked unconvinced. Abruptly, she turned away and called for a servant, who returned soon with refreshments. Naheed offered me a vessel of coffee and a plate of dates. I refused the fruit a few times, but since it would have been impolite to insist, I selected a small date and placed it in my mouth. It took all my spirit to prevent myself from making a childish face of disgust. I swallowed the date quickly and ejected the pit.

Naheed was watching me closely. "Was it good?"

One of the stock phrases rushed to my lips--"Your hospitality shames me, your obedient servant"--but I couldn't say it. I shifted on my cushion and gulped a mouthful of coffee while I tried to think of what to say.

"It's sour," I said finally.

Naheed laughed so hard that her slender body shook like a cypress in the wind. "You are so much yourself!" she said.

"What else could I say but the truth?" I asked.

"So many things," she replied. "Yesterday, I served the same dates to friends, including the girl I took to the polo game. She ate one and said, 'The dates of paradise must be like these,' and another girl added, 'But these are sweeter.' I tasted a date after they left and discovered the truth."

Naheed sighed. "I'm tired of such ta'arof," she said. "I wish people would just be honest."

"People from my village have a reputation for being plain-spoken," I replied, not knowing what else to say.

"That's one of the things I like about you," she replied.

Right before I rose to go, Naheed asked if I would grant her a special favor.

"It's about the polo games," she said. "My friend is too afraid to accompany me any longer, so will you come instead?"

I imagined that the games would be full of young men who assembled in packs and shouted for their favorite teams. Even though I was new to the city, I knew it was not a place for two girls of marriageable age to go alone.

"Aren't you worried about what your parents would think?"

"Don't you understand?--I have to go," she said with a pleading look in her eyes.

"But how will we do it without our families knowing?"

"I'll say that I'm visiting you, and you'll tell your family you're visiting me. We'll be wrapped up in our chadors and our pichehs, so no one will recognize us once we leave the house."

"I don't know," I said doubtfully.

A look of disdain clouded Naheed's eyes, and I thought I must seem spineless. I didn't want her to think of me that way, so I agreed to accompany her and help her ensnare her beloved.

NAHEED HAD SURPRISED me with her boldness in showing a glimpse of herself to a man she admired. Only a few days later, I revealed myself to a man I had never seen before. It was a Thursday afternoon, and I was returning from the hammam with my hair still wet. As soon as I passed through the tall, heavy door that led into Gostaham's home, I tore off my chador, my picheh, and my head scarf and shook my hair free. I failed to notice a stranger waiting to be shown in to see Gostaham; a servant must have just gone to announce him. He wore a multicolored turban shot with golden thread, and a blue silk robe over a pale orange tunic. I caught a faint, fresh whiff of grass and horses. I was so startled I said, "Ya, Ali!"

If the stranger had been polite, he would have looked away. Instead, he kept his eyes fixed on me, enjoying every minute of my surprise and discomfiture.

"Well, don't just stand there looking!" I snapped, walking quickly to the andarooni, the part of the house where women were safe from male eyes. Behind me, he burst out laughing. Who was this insolent fellow? There was no one around to ask. To find out, I flew up to the second floor of the house, which was little more than a passage to the roof. We used it to go outside and hang laundry. Like all the women of the house, I had discovered that there was a tiny nook off the stairwell where I could hide and observe events occurring in the Great Room. The plaster flowers and vines that adorned the walls formed a lattice through which I could see and hear.

Peering into the room, I saw the well-dressed stranger sitting in the place of honor and heard Gostaham saying ". . . deeply honored to be the instrument of your desires."

I had never heard him talk so respectfully to anyone, particularly not to a man half his age. I hoped I hadn't insulted anyone too important. I took a more careful look at the visitor. His slim waist, erect bearing, and sun-darkened skin made me suspect that he was a trained horseman. He had thick, fuzzy eyebrows that met perfectly above his nose, dominating eyes shaped like half-moons. His long nose curved toward his lips, which were plump and very red. He wore a beard cropped close to his skin. He was not handsome, yet he had a powerful beauty like a leopard's. While Gostaham spoke, the visitor sucked on a water pipe, narrowing his eyes with pleasure as he inhaled. Even from my perch I could smell the sweet tobacco cured with fruit, which made the inside of my nose tingle.

Gostaham made sure that his guest felt welcome by inviting him to converse about his recent travels. "The whole town is talking of the army's exploits in the north," he said. "We would be most honored if you would tell us yourself what happened."

The visitor recounted how one hundred thousand Ottomans had bombarded a fortress that guarded the country's northwestern frontier. Hidden in tunnels, they had hurled cannonballs at its gates. "For many days, we thought that God had chosen to give victory to the other side," he said.

From inside the fortress, he led a team of men through Ottoman lines to bring back supplies that helped the army withstand the siege. After two and a half months, the Ottomans began to starve. About forty thousand soldiers were dead by the time their army began its retreat.

"The men inside the fortress were starving as well," said the visitor. "Toward the end, we were eating nothing but bread made out of flour crawling with bugs. After a six-month campaign, I am grateful every time I eat hot bread cooked in my own oven."

"As any man would be," said Gostaham.

The visitor paused, drawing smoke from the water pipe.

"Of course, a man never knows what will happen while he is at battle," he said. "I have a three-year-old daughter, dearer to me than my own eyes. She grew ill with cholera while I was gone and has survived only through the grace of God."

"Al'hamd'Allah."

"As her father, I am bound to give alms in thanks for her survival."

"It is the act of a true Muslim," agreed Gostaham.

"The last time I visited the Seminary of the Four Gardens," said the visitor, "I noticed that some of their floor coverings had become threadbare."

He sucked on the water pipe and exhaled slowly, while we waited and hoped.

"But even as I consider commissioning a carpet to glorify God, I have a special desire," he continued. "This carpet is to be made to give thanks for my daughter's health, and I want it to contain talismans to protect her in the future."

"With God's grace," said Gostaham, "your child shall always be free of illness."

At that moment I heard Gordiyeh calling my name, so I had to go. I hoped she might tell me more. I found her in the courtyard examining several donkeyloads of pistachios from Kerman, which Ali-Asghar was unloading into the storerooms. They needed another hand.

"Who is our visitor?" I asked her.

"Fereydoon, the son of a wealthy horse trader," she said. "We could do nothing better for our future than appeal to his heart."

"Is he . . . very wealthy?" I asked, trying to gauge how important he was.

"Yes," she replied. "His father breeds some of the finest Arabian stallions in the land on farms in the north. He used to be just a country farmer, but he has made a lot of money now that everyone wants to own a horse of status."

No one in my village had a horse of status, for even a nag cost more than most people could afford. I supposed she meant the high-class families of Isfahan.

"Fereydoon's family is buying houses all over the country, and each one will need rugs," Gordiyeh continued. "If we can please Fereydoon, we could earn a fortune from his family alone."

Gordiyeh handed me a few pistachios to eat while we were unloading the heavy sacks. I loved pistachios, but I felt discomfited inside. Too often, my tongue leapt out ahead of me. Now that I was in a new city, I must learn to be more careful, for I hardly knew a man of power from a servant.

Later, Gordiyeh told me that Fereydoon had commissioned a rug and had promised to pay a very good price. I was so relieved that I offered to help Gostaham in any way I could. In celebration of the day's good fortune, Gordiyeh freed me from most of my household tasks, and I went to visit Naheed.

AFTER FEREYDOON'S VISIT, Gostaham pushed aside all his other commissions and began working on the new design, and I joined him in his workroom and watched him sketch. I was expecting the design to emerge as easily as it had with Jamileh's cushions, but now it was as if a demon had possessed his pen. He worked at the design for hours before flipping over the sheet of paper and starting over. When he didn't like the new design any better, he balled up the paper and threw it across the room.

Gostaham's hands became black with ink, and soon the workroom was littered with abandoned designs. When Shamsi tried to clean it, he roared, "How can I finish my work if you keep bothering me?" From time to time, he got up and picked through the discarded sheets of paper, searching for an idea.

The only reason he tolerated my presence was that I kept quiet. When he needed more paper, I prepared a new piece of the right size, and when his ink was running low, I refilled his bottle. If he looked tired, I fetched coffee and dates to revive him.

A few days later, when Gordiyeh saw the mess, she tried another tactic, complaining about the cost of the paper. "Woman of mine," Gostaham bellowed, "stay clear! This is not just any carpet for any man!"

While Gostaham was preoccupied with his drawings, I thought about the talismans Fereydoon had requested in his rug. In my village, we used to knot in all manner of symbols, like roosters to encourage fertility or scissors as protection against evil spirits. But village symbols would have looked peculiar in a city rug, and in any case, a rug designed for a religious school must show no living creatures except for trees, plants, and flowers, to avoid the worship of idols.

One afternoon, when Gostaham had cast aside yet another sheet of paper and left the room in a rage, I put my hand to my neck and touched a piece of jewelry that my father had given me as protection against the Evil Eye. It was a silver triangle with a holy carnelian in its center, and I often touched it for blessings. Even though I knew I shouldn't, I picked up Gostaham's pen and paper and began to draw. I was not thinking very hard, just enjoying the feeling of the pen sliding across the page, and I watched it make the shape of a triangle with a circle in its center, just like my necklace. At the bottom of the triangle, I attached delicate hanging shapes resembling beads, coins, and gems.

Gostaham returned to the room, looking tired. "What are you doing?" he asked, as I dipped the pen in his ink.

"Just playing," I said apologetically, returning the reed to the pen rest.

Gostaham's face seemed to grow bigger under his turban, which looked as if it might explode off his head. "Your father is a dog!" he shouted. "No one touches my pen without my permission!"

Gostaham reclaimed the pen and ink with an angry look. I sat as still as a loom, fearing he would yell at me again. He quickly became preoccupied once again by the problem of the design, but I could see from his furrowed brow that he didn't like what came forth. With an exasperated sigh, he got up and walked around the room, passing near me. He snatched the paper I had been working on, mumbling that he might as well use the other side.

Then he stared at the page. "What's this?" he asked.

I flushed as Gostaham returned to his cushion. "It's a talisman," I said, "like Fereydoon wanted."

Gostaham stared at the paper for a long time, while I kept my peace. Before long, he became absorbed in a new drawing, and his pen seemed to fly over his work. I watched him transform the crude, simple drawing I had made into a thing of beauty. He sketched triangular shapes with hanging beads, coins, and gems, connecting them so that they formed a delicate tiered design. The shapes looked pretty and dainty, which is how I imagined Fereydoon's daughter.

When he was finished, Gostaham looked pleased for the first time in weeks. "Good work on the sketches," he said, but I also saw an ember of anger in his eyes. "Let me make it clearer than daylight that you must never, ever touch my pen again."

Looking down at the carpet, I begged forgiveness for being so bold. Later I told my mother that I had contributed to the design, but not exactly how, for she would have thought me rash.

Not long after, Gostaham took the design to Fereydoon for his approval. He had never seen a design like it before and wanted to know where it had come from. Gostaham was secure enough in his own mastery to tell him that a distant relation had contributed to the dangling gems design.

"It's so delicate, just like my girl," Fereydoon had replied.

"Indeed," Gostaham said, "it is based on women's jewelry from the south."

Fereydoon had imitated the southern accent, and Gostaham had laughed and told him that was how his visiting niece talked. Remembering the way I had snapped at Fereydoon in that very accent, I realized that he now knew exactly who I was. I consoled myself that he must not have taken offense at my abrupt words, for he had accepted the design.

After his meeting with Fereydoon, Gostaham praised me and told my mother I had been a loyal helper. As a reward, he promised to take me to see a special rug, which he described as one of the lights of the age.

BECAUSE FEREYDOON'S COMMISSION was so important, Gostaham decided to have the wool for the carpet dyed to his specifications. He favored a dyer named Jahanshah who had a shop on the banks of the Eternal River, and he allowed me to accompany him one morning to see how he commissioned indigo, that most coveted of colors, whose recipe is cloaked in secrecy.

Jahanshah had thick white eyebrows, a white beard, and ruddy cheeks. He greeted us near his metal pots, which were full of water. Since the pots were cool, I thought he had forgotten about our visit.

"Her first time?" Jahanshah asked Gostaham.

"Yes."

"Ah!" he replied, with a broad smile. "Watch closely."

He wet a few skeins of wool and put them gently into a pot. The water inside was a strange greenish color, and when I peered at the wool, it looked unchanged.

We sat on stools overlooking the river. While the men discussed the rising price of lamb's wool, I watched pedestrians cross the old Shahrestan Bridge, with its thick pilings, built four centuries before I was born. Older still were the swordlike Zagros Mountains, which thrust their pointed tips heavenward as if to carve the sky. No one had ever climbed to the top of those mysterious peaks, not even shepherds.

A gust of wind lifted off the water, threatening to pull off my head cloth. I held the ends down and waited impatiently for Jahanshah to add the magical indigo, but he seemed in no hurry. We drank tea while he languidly stirred the wool.

Nearby, another dye maker was hard at work over his boiling pots. He poured in a bag of dried yellow larkspur flowers, which danced their way into the liquid and whirled into a bright streak of yellow. I watched him drop in the skeins of white wool. They licked up the shade, transforming into the color of sunshine.

I wanted to observe more closely, but Jahanshah handed me a pronged tool and said, "Lift out one of my skeins."

I dipped the tool into his pot and fished until I caught a skein, which I raised in the air. It had turned an unappealing shade of green, like the puddles left behind by a sick horse.

I turned to Jahanshah, puzzled. "Aren't you going to add the indigo?" I asked.

He burst out laughing, and Gostaham joined him while I stood holding the dripping skein. I couldn't see any reason for their great mirth.

"Don't take your eyes off the wool," Gostaham said.

For some reason, the skein didn't look as sickly as before. I blinked, feeling like one of those weary travelers who imagine greenery in the desert. But blinking didn't change what I saw: The skein now bore the color of a pale emerald. After a few moments, it changed into an intense green like the first leaves of spring, which deepened into a blue-green, perhaps like the Caspian Sea, and then became deeper still, like the color at the bottom of a lake. I thrust the prong toward Jahanshah and exclaimed, "May God protect us from the tricks of jinn!"

Jahanshah laughed again and said, "Don't worry, it is only one of the tricks of man."

The skein was now such a rich blue that it brought joy to my eyes with its boundlessness and depth. I watched it, amazed, and then I demanded, "Again!"

Jahanshah let me pull out another skein and observe its transformation through a rainbow of green and blue hues until it became a rich lapis lazuli.

"How?" I asked, astonished.

But Jahanshah only smiled. "That has been a family secret for a little more than a thousand years," he said, "ever since the Prophet Mohammad led his followers to Medina, home of my ancestors."

Gostaham wanted the wool to be a slightly darker hue, so Jahanshah immersed it again until Gostaham was satisfied. Then he cut a strand of it for Gostaham and kept the rest for himself, so both men would be able to verify the color of the order.

When we arrived home, I had hardly removed my outdoor coverings before I asked Gostaham what I could do next.

He looked surprised. "Don't you want to rest?"

"Not even for a moment," I said, for seeing the magic of indigo had made me eager.

Gostaham smiled and put me to work on another grid.

From then on, the more I begged Gostaham to allow me to help him, the more he wanted me by his side. There was always something to do: grids to be drawn, colors to be mixed, paper to be sized. Before long, he let me copy the simplest parts of his designs onto the master grid. Sometimes, he even snatched me away from kitchen work. I relished those moments, for I despised the long hours of cleaning and chopping. When he beckoned to me, I relinquished my knife or mortar and pestle gratefully to join him. The other servants mumbled with indignation behind me, especially Cook, who asked sarcastically if the deer and onagers I was learning to draw would fill my belly at the evening meal. Gordiyeh didn't like it, either. "With so many mouths to feed, everyone has to help," she once said, but Gostaham ignored her. With my assistance, he was starting to complete his commissions more quickly, and I think he enjoyed my company during the long hours of design work, for no one could have been more keen.

Things were not as easy in Isfahan for my mother. She remained in the kitchen at Gordiyeh's mercy and had to do the jobs I left behind. Gordiyeh always corrected her work as if scornful of our village ways. I believe she felt my mother's resistance to her and tried to break it whenever she could. She must rinse the rice six times, no more or less, to remove the starch; must cut the radishes lengthwise instead of into roses; must make chickpea cookies with extra pistachio chips on the outside; yet for the heavenly sharbat, must use less fruit and more rose water. My mother, who had been mistress of her own household since she was my age, was being ordered around like a child.

One day, during the afternoon rest, my mother burst into our little room so angry that I could feel the heat burning off her skin.

"Ay, Khoda," she said, calling on God for mercy, "I can't bear it anymore!"

"What is it? What happened?"

"She didn't like the pastries I made," replied my mother. "She wanted squares, not ovals! I had to throw all the dough to the dogs and make it again."

That kind of waste would have been unimaginable in my village, but Gordiyeh demanded perfection.

"I'm sorry," I said, feeling guilty. I had spent the day with Gostaham, and my work had been pleasant and light.

"It's not just the pastry," my mother said. "I'm tired of being a servant. If only your father were alive, we could be in our own home again, doing things our own way!"

I tried to console her, for I loved what I was learning. "At least now we eat well and have no fear of starving."

"Unless she throws us out."

"Why would she do that?"

My mother snorted in exasperation. "You have no idea how much Gordiyeh would like to be rid of us," she said.

She was exaggerating, I thought. "But look at how much we do for the household!"

She kicked off her shoes and collapsed on her bedroll. Her feet were bright red from standing so long while making the pastry. "Oh, how they ache!" she moaned. I arose and put a cushion underneath them.

"In Gordiyeh's mind, we are draining this household, yet we're not hired help that she can dismiss whenever she likes. She told me today that dozens of Isfahani women would give one of their eyes to work in her kitchen. Women who are young and who can work long and hard without complaint. Not women who want to spend valuable kitchen time learning about rugs."

"What can we do?" I asked.

"We can only pray for a husband for you so that you can start a household of your own," she said. "A good man who will consider it his duty to care for your mother."

I had thought the discussions about my marriage had ended now that we had nothing to offer.

"Without a dowry, how am I to find such a husband?"

My mother stretched her feet to release the pain. "What an unkind comet, to have taken him away before you were settled!" she complained. "I have decided to make herbal remedies and sell them to neighbors to help build a dowry for you. We must not wait much longer," she added, in a tone of warning.

It was true that I was getting old. Everyone I knew had been married by the age of sixteen, and most were married well before.

"I will start another carpet for my dowry," I promised.

"Marrying you is the only way we can hope to live on our own again," said my mother. She turned away and fell asleep almost immediately. I wished there were a way to make her life sweeter. I turned toward Mecca and prayed for a speedy end to the evil influences of the comet.

ONE EVENING, when I didn't have anything to do, I picked up a large piece of paper Gostaham had thrown away and took it to the room I shared with my mother. Hunching under an oil lamp, I began drawing a design for a carpet that I hoped would grace a wealthy man's guest room and make his other rugs blush. My design was filled with all the motifs I had been learning--I managed to fit in every one of them. I sketched leaping steeds, peacocks with multicolored tails, gazelles feeding on grasses, elongated cypress trees, painted vases, pools of water, swimming ducks, and silver fish, all connected by vines, leaves, and flowers. While I was working, I thought about an unforgettable carpet I had seen in the bazaar. It showed a magnificent tree, but rather than sprouting leaves, its branches ended in the heads of gazelles, lions, onagers, and bears. The merchant called it a "vaq-vaq tree," and it illustrated a poem in which the animals discussed humans and their mysterious ways. I thought that such a tree could gossip all night about the mysteries of our new household.

I waited until Gostaham seemed in a cheerful mood before asking if I could show him the design. He seemed surprised by the request, but beckoned me to follow him into his workroom. We sat on cushions, and he unrolled the paper onto the floor in front of us. It was so quiet in the room that I could hear the last call to prayer from the Friday mosque. The evening caller, who sat high in the minaret, had a clear, sweet voice that always filled me with happiness and hope. I thought his call might be a good omen.

Gostaham glanced at the design for only a moment. "What's the meaning of all this?" he asked, looking at me.

"W-well," I stammered, "I wanted to make something very fine, something that. . ."

An unpleasant silence fell on the room. Gostaham pushed aside the paper, which curled up and rolled away. "Listen, joonam," he said, "you probably think that carpets are just things--things to buy, sell, and sit down on. But once you become initiated as a rug maker, you learn that their purpose is much greater, for those who care to see."

"I know that," I said, although I didn't grasp what he meant.

"You think you know," said Gostaham. "So tell me--what do all these patterns have in common?"

I tried to think of something, but I couldn't. I had drawn them because they were pretty decorations. "Nothing," I finally admitted.

"Correct," said Gostaham, sighing as if he had never had to work quite this hard before. He tugged at one side of his turban as if trying to pull out a thought.

"When I was about your age," he said, "I learned a story in Shiraz that affected me deeply. It was about Tamerlane, the Mongolian conqueror who limped his way toward Isfahan more than two hundred years ago and ordered our people to surrender or be destroyed. Even so, our city revolted against his iron hand. It was a small rebellion with no military might behind it, but in revenge Tamerlane had his soldiers run their swords through fifty thousand citizens. Only one group was spared: the rug makers, whose value was too great for them to be destroyed. Even after that calamity, do you think the rug makers knotted death, destruction, and chaos into their rugs?"

"No," I said softly.

"Never, not once!" replied Gostaham, his voice rising. "If anything, the designers created images of even more perfect beauty. This is how we, the rug makers, protest all that is evil. Our response to cruelty, suffering, and sorrow is to remind the world of the face of beauty, which can best restore a man's tranquillity, cleanse his heart of evil, and lead him to the path of truth. All rug makers know that beauty is a tonic like no other. But without unity, there can be no beauty. Without integrity, there can be no beauty. Now do you understand?"

I looked at my design again, and it was as if I were seeing it through Gostaham's eyes. It was a design that tried to cover its ignorance through bold patterns, one that would sell only to an unwashed farangi who didn't know better. "Will you help me make it right?" I asked in a meek voice.

"I will," said Gostaham, reaching for his pen. His corrections were so severe that there was almost nothing left of my design. Using a fresh sheet of paper, he chose to draw just one of the motifs that I had selected: a teardrop-shaped boteh called a mother and daughter because it had its own progeny within it. He drew it neatly and cleanly, intending for there to be three across the carpet and seven down. That was all; and yet it was far more beautiful than the design I had made.

It was a sobering lesson. I felt as if I had more to learn than I had time on earth. I leaned back in the cushions, feeling tired.

Gostaham leaned back, too. "I've never known someone as eager to learn as you," he said.

I thought perhaps he had--himself. Yet I felt ashamed; it was not a womanly quality to be so eager, I knew. "Everything changed after my father . . ."

"Indeed, it was the worst luck for you and Maheen," Gostaham said gravely. "Perhaps it's not such a bad thing for you to distract yourself by learning."

I had more than distraction on my mind. "I was hoping that with your permission, I might make the carpet you just designed for use as my dowry . . . in case I ever need one."

"It's not a bad idea," said Gostaham. "But how will you afford the wool?"

"I would have to borrow the money," I replied.

Gostaham considered for a moment. "Though it would be simple compared with the carpets we make at the royal workshop, it would certainly be worth many times more than the cost of the wool."

"I would work very hard," I said. "I promise I won't disappoint you."

Gostaham was looking at me in a fixed fashion, and for a moment he didn't say anything. All of a sudden, he jumped off his cushion as if he had been startled by a jinn.

"What is it?" I asked, alarmed.

Gostaham uttered a big sigh and settled back into the cushions. "For a moment," he said, "I had the strangest feeling that I was sitting next to my younger self."

I smiled, remembering his story. "The young man who gave his finest possession to a shah?"

"The very one."

"I would have done the same thing."

"I know," said Gostaham. "And therefore, as a tribute to all the good fortune that has come to my door, I will give you my permission to make the rug. When you finish it, you can keep what you earn after paying me back for the wool. But remember: You are still responsible to Gordiyeh for your household duties."

I bent and kissed Gostaham's feet before going to tell my mother the good news.

NAHEED DIDN'T HAVE to trouble herself with making her own dowry, but she had other problems. When she knocked at Gostaham's door and invited me to visit her, I knew what she wanted to do. Sometimes we went to her house and I continued my writing lessons under her supervision. Other times, instead of going where we said we would, we took a shortcut to the Image of the World and went to the perch near the bazaar where Naheed had first shown Iskandar a glimpse of her face. I watched in fascination the people milling around during the game--sunburned soldiers with long swords, dervishes with ragged hair and begging bowls, strolling minstrels, Indians with trained monkeys, Christians who lived across the Julfa Bridge, traveling merchants come to trade their wares, veiled women with their husbands. We tried to lose ourselves in the crowd, as if we were attached to the families around us. When the game started, Naheed sought out her beloved and followed his form the way other spectators followed the ball, her body straining toward his.

Iskandar was handsome like Yusuf, who in tales was so renowned for his beauty that he made women lose their reason. I remembered a line that my mother always used: "Blinded by his beauty, the Egyptian ladies merrily sliced their own fingers, their shiny red blood dripping onto the purple plums." They would have done the same for Iskandar, I thought. I was especially drawn to the beauty of his mouth. His white, even teeth sparkled like stars when he smiled. I wondered how it would feel to be a girl like Naheed, who could set her heart on such a man and conquer him. I had no such hopes of my own.

One afternoon, we arrived at the square just before the game started. I noticed that people kept looking toward the Shah's palace with an air of excitement. Suddenly, the royal trumpets blasted and the Shah emerged onto his balcony high above the square. He wore a long dark blue velvet robe embroidered with small golden flowers, a green tunic, and a sash that married layers of green, blue, and gold. His turban was white, with an emerald aigrette; his mustache was long and gray; and even at a distance I could see that most of his teeth were missing.

"Vohhh!" I said in surprise and awe at my first glimpse of royalty. Naheed laughed at me, for she was a child of the city.

The Shah sat upon a low throne placed in the middle of a blue-and-gold carpet. Once he was comfortable, the men in his retinue knelt around him in a semicircle and sat back on their heels. The Shah made a sign with his hand and the game began.

When I had had my fill of staring at him through my picheh, I left Naheed to examine the carpets for sale in the bazaar. I didn't enjoy polo that much, with all the dust and dirt kicked up by the horses, and the people weaving back and forth for a better view and yelling out for their favorites. I checked on the carpet that I had made and discovered that it was no longer hanging in the shop. The merchant told me it had sold the day before to a foreigner. When I returned to Naheed's side to tell her the news, her response was short and full of reproach. She wore her picheh and chador so she couldn't be recognized, but still, she oughtn't to be there at all, and to be seen alone was even worse. She needed me.

Naheed turned back to the game. She was hoping for a sign from Iskandar, even though the square was thronged with spectators. How could he distinguish her tiny, white-shrouded form among hundreds of other women? She was standing in the same corner where she had shown him her face. That afternoon, we watched him score three goals in a row and drive the spectators into a frenzy of delight. After the game, he was called back to ride to each of the four corners and salute the crowd. When he arrived at ours, he reached into his belt and drew out a leather polo ball, which he threw in the air. It rose high before dropping straight into Naheed's outstretched hand. It was as if a pari--a fire-born fairy--had brought it right to her.

We lingered as the players were being congratulated and the crowd thinned. Naheed was still holding the ball in the palm of her hand. After a while, a little boy with crooked teeth appeared in front of us and revealed a slip of paper hidden in his sleeve. Naheed took his hand discreetly and slipped the letter into her own sleeve before paying him with a small coin. After concealing the ball under her clothes, she linked her arm through mine and we began walking home. She unfurled the letter when we were away from the crowd, and I peered over her shoulder, wishing I could read.

"What does it say?" I asked eagerly.

"There's just one line, written in haste," she said. "'In a crowd of thousands, no one else shines like you, the brightest star of my heart.' It is signed, 'Your loving servant, Iskandar.'?"

I couldn't see Naheed's face, since she was completely covered in her picheh and chador, but I could hear the excitement in her voice.

"Perhaps your fates are intertwined," I said with amazement.

"I must know if that's possible," said Naheed. "Let's have Kobra tell our fortunes!"

Kobra was an old servant of Naheed's family who was known throughout the neighborhood for the accuracy of her readings. She reminded me of some of the women of my village who could look at the sky or a handful of peas and tell you whether the moment was auspicious for your desires. Her skin was the color of dates, and the fine wrinkles in her forehead and cheeks made her look wise.

Naheed summoned Kobra to her rooms a few moments after we arrived, and she came bearing two vessels of coffee and told us to drink it without disturbing the grounds. We consumed it in one or two gulps so that she could read our future in the remaining froth. First, she peered into Naheed's cup and smiled, showing us her nearly toothless gums. She began describing Naheed's marriage to a handsome young man with lots of money and a body as strong as the hero Rostam's, an event that was to be followed by the birth of more children than she could count. "You'll be spending a lot of time with your feet in the air!" she said.

The prediction was exactly what her mistress wished to hear, which made me wonder about its truth.

When it was my turn, Kobra peered into my cup for a long while. Several times it seemed as if she wished to say something, but then she stared into the cup again as if its message were troubling.

"What does it say?" Naheed prompted.

Looking at the grounds, Kobra mumbled that my future would be exactly like Naheed's. Then she gathered the cups and fled the room, declaring that she had work to do.

"That was strange," I said. "Why didn't she say what she saw?"

"She did!"

"How could my future be the same as yours?"

"Why not?" said Naheed. "You, too, can marry a handsome young man and have plenty of sons."

"But if it was that simple, why did she seem so afraid?"

"Oh, pay no attention to her," said Naheed. "She's old. She probably just needed to visit the latrines."

"I'm afraid the evil comet must still be following me," I said in despair. "It seems as if Kobra thinks my future is fated to be dark!"

"Certainly not," said Naheed. She summoned Kobra again and asked her to tell us more about what she had seen. Kobra clapped both her hands to her chest, one on top of the other.

"There's nothing more I can wring from the grounds," she protested, "but I can tell you the old tale that came to my mind while I was looking at them, although I don't know what it means."

Naheed and I settled back into the cushions and listened to Kobra's story.

First there wasn't and then there was. Before God, no one was.

Once there was a prince whose sleep was troubled almost every night. In his dreams, he saw the image of a woman who was moonlike beyond compare. Her curly hair framed a milk-white face. Beneath her rose silk tunic, the womanly parts of her body swelled like melons. As the prince dreamed more deeply, he could see that she was crying, opening her arms to the sky to show her desperation and helplessness. The prince awoke in a sweat, for he could not bear to see her suffer. He longed to help her, but first he had to find her.

One day, the prince set out to do battle with a fierce warlord who robbed travelers when they tried to cross a bridge through his territory. The prince and his men stamped across the bridge to invite an ambush, then fought the warlord and his tribe for hours in the midday sun. At one point, the warlord ran his sword through one of the prince's best soldiers before heaving his body off the bridge. With a great roar of rage, the prince jumped on the warlord, vowing to avenge his friend's death. The two clashed swords but the prince was stronger, and he forced the weapon out of his opponent's hands, threw him onto the ground, and sat on his armored chest. Then he drew his dagger, planning to savor the end of the man who had tossed his best man over the bridge like a leaf.

"Stop!" cried the warlord. "You know not what you kill."

"All men beg for mercy in their final moments," said the prince, "but you shall soon be begging before God." He raised his dagger.

"At least let me remove my armor so you can see who I am."

The warlord lifted off his helmet, revealing a face as smooth as a woman's and long, dark curly hair.

The prince was astonished. "What a pity that such a fair youth shall soon be dust! You fought so fiercely, I thought you must be a grown man."

"Not even," said the warlord. He removed his chest armor and raised his tunic to reveal a muscled abdomen and tiny breasts, like red rosebuds in the sun.

The prince's dagger wavered, then dropped. The lust to kill had been replaced by a different kind of lust. He bent forward and kissed the young woman's tender lips.

"What caused you to don armor?" he asked.

The woman's face toughened so that she looked like a warrior again. "My father was a warlord who raised me to kill. After he died, I continued to care for his men and protect his property."

During the next few days, the prince came to know and admire the fierce young woman. She could ride as well as he could, goad him into a sweat when they jousted with swords, and best him in a race up a hill. Her muscles were tight and lean, and she was as agile as a deer. She was nothing like the woman he had dreamed about so often, but before long he was smitten, and he married her.

After a year of happiness, the prince started being troubled again by his dreams. The moonlike woman began appearing to him every night on her knees, her head bent, as if her plight were more severe than ever. One morning, after another disturbed night, he kissed his warrior woman good-bye.

"Where are you going?" she protested.

"I have to find someone," he said. "Insh'Allah, we'll see each other again one day."

He mounted his horse and rode away without looking behind him to see the expression on her face.

The prince traveled for months, describing what he had seen in his dreams to anyone who would listen, only to hear the reply, "There's no one like that in this town." Finally, he came to a city where people wouldn't answer his question, and the prince knew he was in the right place. At night, under a full moon, he walked silently to the town's palace and hid himself outside its walls. Before long, he heard a piteous wail. He scaled the palace walls, landing on the other side as softly as a cat, and observed the woman his heart had longed for. She was kneeling on a roof, her arms stretched toward the heavens, her body shuddering with sobs. Her curly black hair gleamed in the moonlight, and the sight of her rounded form filled him with longing. He called to her from the palace grounds.

"Dear distressed woman, don't make the clouds weep. I have come to help you."

The lovely princess raised her head and looked around, astonished.

"Tell me the source of your suffering, and I will destroy it," said the prince, his muscles flexing with pleasure at the thought.

"Who are you?" she asked suspiciously.

The prince revealed himself in the moonlight, recited his lineage and the great deeds of his family, and repeated his desire to help the princess vanquish her sorrow.

She wiped away her tears. "My maidservant has my father's ear," she said. "By day she serves me; by night she wraps herself around his body. She has threatened to tell my father I have been conspiring against him with his top advisor. I have already given her all my jewelry and money. What if my father should believe her lies? I'll be banished or killed."

The prince hauled himself onto the roof and offered to take the lady away. Revealing his love, which had persisted in his dreams for so many years, he promised to treat her honorably by marrying her. Together they fled the town on horseback, and as soon as they reached a sizable settlement, the prince married his lady under the authority of a mullah. The two spent their first night as man and wife in a caravanserai fit for shahs. The princess was just as the prince had imagined, round and ripe like a summer peach. At last, his dream of many years had been fulfilled.

The prince took his new bride to the house of his first wife, the warrior woman, who bared her teeth at his new acquisition. Nonetheless, all three returned together to his father's house. Much had changed since he had left. He was a married man now and a proven warrior, not the dreamer who had set off on a seemingly impossible quest years before.

His father invited the prince to a special dinner in honor of his return. The warrior woman advised him to be careful about any food that he was served. He took her advice and fed his portion to a cat, who immediately had convulsions and died. His father, who had decided he wanted to take the warrior woman as his own wife, ordered his favorites to tear out his son's eyes and set him loose in the desert.

Left alone, the prince wandered for hours with his eyes in his hands, unable even to cry. When he heard the sound of a spring, he patted the earth until he felt wetness. He drank to satiation and sat down to rest. Leaves fell on him from above, and he crushed them in his palms and rubbed his eye sockets, seeking relief. They immediately stopped burning. The prince took each eye and popped it back in its socket. He could see again!

The prince returned toward the city. At its outskirts, he came upon a full-fledged battle. Even from far away, among the armor-clad soldiers he recognized the lithe figure of his warrior woman, whose sword flew mercilessly through the air. With a great war cry, he joined her in battle, and together they vanquished his father's men.

When the battle was over, the prince and the warrior woman returned to the city. He became shah and installed each of his women in her own lodgings, making sure he visited them equally and gave them the same number of gifts. With his first wife he hunted, jousted, and discussed battle plans; with his second, he explored the art of passion and lived contentedly until the end of his days.

When Kobra finished her story, Naheed and I were both silent. Kobra stood up and returned to her work.

"That was a strange tale," I said. "I've never heard that one before."

"Nor I," said Naheed. "What a lucky talisman that prince must have had, to get everything he wanted!"

She yawned and stretched out on her side on a group of flat cushions, putting her hands under her cheek. I had the feeling Naheed imagined herself as lucky as the prince. I remembered sadly how I used to feel the same way about the tale of a princess who rejected all suitors until the right one wooed her.

Opposite Naheed, I stretched out on my cushions so we faced each other, and put my hands under my cheek to match hers.

"Do you think he told his second wife that he already had a woman?" Naheed asked.

"I hope so."

"I would hate that," said Naheed, looking angry.

"Being a second wife?"

"Or a third, or fourth," she said. "My parents will never let that happen. I'll be the first wife or nothing."

"That's the only good thing about coming from a humble family," I said. "Most suitors of mine wouldn't be able to afford a second wife, or even a concubine."

Naheed raised her eyebrows. "Rich men always seem to have a few," she said. "I think if my husband married another woman, I would try to cause her grief." Her smile had a wicked edge.

I thought about what had happened in my own family. "After my grandfather took his second wife, who was my grandmother, the two families remained apart, and my father and my uncle Gostaham almost never saw each other," I said. "But sometimes it's not like that. When the richest merchant in my village married a younger woman, his first wife loathed her. But then she became ill, and the younger one took such good care of her that they became fast friends."

Naheed shuddered. "Insh'Allah, that will never happen to me."

"I don't want to share, either," I said. "But we don't know what happened to the wives in Kobra's story. She didn't tell us that part."

"That's because the story wasn't really about them," said Naheed. "What man wouldn't want a warrior woman to ride with and a fleshy woman to ride in bed?"

We laughed together, knowing that we could be looser with our language when only the two of us were present.

I had stayed with Naheed much longer than I had intended. Because it was nearly dark, she insisted on having a maid accompany me home. When we arrived, the maid handed me a large parcel, saying it was a gift. It was packed with bright cotton robes in shades of saffron, pink, and red, with matching sheaths to wear underneath and loose embroidered trousers that looked as if they had hardly ever been worn. The most dazzling item was a thick purple robe that fell to the knees, with fur at the cuffs, around the hem, and at the breast. I danced with joy at the sight of the bright clothing, and when I showed it to my mother, she gave me permission to stop wearing my mourning clothes, although she herself planned to wear black for the rest of her life. I was overjoyed; I could hardly believe my luck in having Naheed as a friend.

Chapter THREE

I awoke one summer morning, after we had been in Isfahan for half a year, thinking of a poem my mother often recited, about a beloved with cheeks like roses, hair as black as coal, and a teasing beauty mark near ruby lips.

Look in the face of your beloved,

For in that mirror, you will see yourself.

My beloved was not Naheed's handsome polo player, nor the powerful old Shah, nor any of the thousands of sweet-faced young men who congregated on Isfahan's bridges, smoked in its coffeehouses, or lingered around Four Gardens. The one I loved was more unknowable, more varied, and more marvelous: the city itself. Every day, I bounded out of my bedroll, longing to explore it. No eyes were hungrier than mine, for they had so memorized the buildings, people, and animals in my village that I was eager to feed myself with new sights.

Isfahan's bridges were the perfect place to begin. From there, I could see the mighty Zagros Mountains, the river rushing below me, and the city's domes twinkling like stars amid its earth-colored buildings. One of my favorite spots was the Thirty-three Arches Bridge, our first point of entry into the city. Standing in one of its famed archways, I would stare at the people streaming in and out of Isfahan. Some were from the Gulf, with skin as black as naphtha, while others, from the northeast, had Mongol ancestors who bequeathed them slanting eyes and straight black hair. Sometimes I even saw nomads with legs like tree trunks, for they walked high into the mountains in search of pasture for their lambs, carrying the newborns on their backs.

The city also fed my love of carpets, because everywhere I looked, I saw patterns. I studied the plants, trees, and flowers in Four Gardens to understand how rug designs were modeled on nature; the district itself seemed to me like a garden carpet writ large. For the same reason, I sought out the dead game and trophy animals for sale in the bazaar: the tough, muscled onager, the airy gazelle, even the magisterial lion, whose mane was tricky to draw. "They say you can draw steeds for a hundred years before the animal springs to life under your pen," Gostaham had said.

I also scrutinized the carpets, which hailed from all parts of Iran, and learned to recognize the knots and patterns from each region. Even the buildings in the Image of the World had something to teach me. One day, I was passing the Shah's private mosque when I observed that the tile panels near the doorway were like prayer rugs. They were indigo, with vivid white and yellow flowers surrounded by a field of clover-green. I promised myself that one day, I would learn to make a design just as intricate.

At home, carpets consumed most of my waking thoughts. I was determined to learn what Gostaham knew, and I worked day and night on the projects he gave me. I quickly finished drawing the boteh design and received his approval to make the rug. One of his workers set up a simple loom in our courtyard, which I strung with cotton. Taking the money Gostaham had lent me to buy wool, I went to the bazaar to shop for colors, just as he had as a young man. I had planned to buy simple hues like those we used in my village-- rich camel-brown made from walnut husks, purple from the roots of old madder plants, red made from cochineal bugs, and yellow from safflowers. But in the Great Bazaar, what a richness of shades was at hand! I was enraptured by the sight of thousands of balls of wool hanging like fruit on a tree. Blues ranging from the turquoise radiance of a summer sky all the way to darkest indigo. And that was just blue! I stared at the bolts of wool and imagined different colors side by side in a rug. How about that lime-green with a startling orange? Or wine next to royal blue? I chose twelve hues that delighted my eyes, more colors than I had ever used in a rug. I found myself drawn to the bright colors: baby-chick yellow, grassy green, sunset-orange, pomegranate-red. Taking the brilliant balls of wool home, I attached them to the top of my loom and painted my design with watercolors, so that I would have a guide to knotting the colors I planned to use. I was eager to make the rug, knowing how important it was to prove my worth to the household. While everyone else was sleeping in the afternoons, I knotted for hours, and the rug quickly took shape under my fingers.

While I was consumed by the rug, my mother managed to separate herself from Gordiyeh's supervision by making herbal cures. Medicines were costly, and although my mother had never been adept at brewing them, Gordiyeh agreed to the proposal because she seemed to think that my mother's village origins gave her special powers.

My mother took daylong excursions to the foothills of the Zagros Mountains, where she collected plants, roots, herbs, and insects. She also haunted the apothecaries in the bazaar for information about herbs local to Isfahan. Back in our village, Kolsoom had given her a few recipes for fever medicine when I had been ill, which she still remembered. She also began learning about medicines for headaches and womanly complaints, brewing them over a fire in the courtyard. The resulting concoctions were black and slimy, but Gordiyeh believed in their powers. Once when her head was aching, my mother gave her a liquid that relieved her pain and made her sleep. "Such fine medicines should be made in abundance," Gordiyeh declared. She promised my mother that once she had brewed enough for the household's use, she could sell what remained and keep the money. That gladdened my mother's heart, for now she could preside over her own domain, one that Gordiyeh knew nothing about.

NAHEED VISITED ME one day to see how I looked in her old clothes. I donned her saffron sheath and trousers, which my mother had hemmed, and the dashing purple robe. "You look so pretty!" Naheed said. "Your cheeks are as pink as roses."

"It's nice to wear bright colors after more than a year of black," I replied. "Thank you for your generosity."

"It is yours for the asking," she replied. "And now I hope I may call on yours. Will you come with me to polo?"

I hadn't planned on going to the Image of the World that day, because I had too much work to do. "Naheed-joon, I wish I could, but I have my chores," I replied.

"Please," she begged. "I need your help so much."

"How will I finish all my work?"

"Call in Shamsi," said Naheed, in an authoritative tone. Shamsi arrived wearing a pretty orange head scarf and a cheap beaded necklace from the bazaar. Naheed put a few coins in her hand and whispered to her that there were more coming to her if she took care of my work for the day. Shamsi left jingling the coins, a gleeful smile upon her face.

I still didn't want to go, though. "Aren't you afraid we're going to be caught someday?"

"We never have been before," she said. "Now let's go."

"Only for a short while, then," I said, although I felt apprehensive about leaving. We slipped out when Gordiyeh wasn't looking.

Naheed's purpose this time was to convey a letter to Iskandar revealing her feelings for him. She didn't read it aloud, saying she wanted his eyes to be the first to see it. It professed eternal love and admiration for him in fine sentiments like the poets use, she said. I knew that her elegant calligraphy would make her words go straight to his heart.

The sun beat down without mercy as we walked to the Image of the World. The sky was a blue dome with not a single cloud to shelter us from the sun. Breathing under my picheh was like inhaling fire, and I was sweating through my clothes. When we arrived, the game had already started. The spectators were shouting more than usual, for neither side could win. Dust hung in the air and settled on our garments. I hoped the game would end soon so that I wouldn't be discovered away from my chores. But it went on and on until the players became sluggish and the game was finally called a draw.

Naheed hardly seemed to notice that Iskandar's team had not won. "Did you see how masterfully he played?" she asked. Her voice sounded high-pitched and excited, as it always did after she had watched her beloved. As the crowd began to disperse, she found Iskandar's boy and carefully slipped him her letter and a coin. Then we returned to our homes, parting shortly after we left the square. Because the horses had kicked up a veil of dust that coated my outer clothes, I planned to hide them as soon as I arrived home, but Zohreh was waiting for me at the door under orders to lead me straight to Gordiyeh. That had never happened before. With my heart pounding, I shed the outdoor clothing and balled it up in my arms as I went to her rooms, hoping she wouldn't notice the dust. She was sitting on a cushion and applying henna paste to the tops of her feet. Without a word of greeting, she asked me angrily, "Where have you been?"

"At Naheed's," I said, although the lie stuck to my tongue.

"You were not at Naheed's," said Gordiyeh. "I couldn't find you, and I sent Shamsi to her house to fetch you. You weren't there."

She beckoned me toward her because she didn't want to disturb the henna. "Give me your hand," she said.

I stretched my hand out innocently, and she struck the top of it with the thin wooden paddle she used to apply the henna.

I rocked back on my heels, my hand aflame. I was far too old to be hit like a child.

"Just look at your clothes," she said. "How could they become so dirty if you had stayed inside?"

Afraid of being struck again, I quickly confessed. "We were at the game."

"Naheed doesn't have permission to go to the game," said Gordiyeh. "A girl like her can lose everything if people start to talk--even if she has done nothing."

There was a knock at the door and a servant showed in Naheed's mother. Ludmila entered the room looking as sorrowful as if she had lost her only child. "How could you?" she said to me in a quiet, disappointed tone that was even worse than Gordiyeh's slap. She spoke very slowly in Farsi accented by her native Russian. "What you did was very wrong. You don't understand how much a girl like Naheed can suffer if seen in the wrong places."

"I'm very, very sorry," I said, with my wounded hand behind my back.

Like my mother and me, Ludmila was an outsider to Isfahan. She always reminded me of a delicate bird, flitting around her home as if she didn't belong there, even after twenty years. Because of what she had seen during the wars in her country, she had an aversion to human blood. If a servant cut her finger while chopping meat, she trembled and took to her bed. Sometimes, Naheed told me, she screamed in her sleep about fountains of blood gushing out of men's chests and eyes.

Ludmila's face was white and scared. "Naheed told me how much you love polo and how often you beg her to go to the games. That is very selfish of you. I hope you understand the disruptiveness of your actions."

I must have looked startled, for I couldn't believe Naheed had blamed her misbehavior on me. But I decided to keep silent, knowing she would be in dire trouble if her mother found out what drew her to the games.

"I don't always understand the ways of the city," I said in a meek voice. "I will never do such a thing again."

"As punishment, you are to collect the night soil every morning from all the rooms of the house until the next moon," said Gordiyeh.

It was as if I were the lowliest of servants. To know the state of every person's innards, every day, and to have to pour all the slop into one big basin for the night-soil collectors and then clean all the pans--I could hardly think of the task without feeling as if I might lose what was in my belly.

I was told to go to my room and confess to my mother what had happened. She was not at all sympathetic.

"Bibi, she hit me!" I complained.

"Why did you do such a thoughtless thing?" she asked. "You could have ruined Naheed's reputation in a single day, not to mention your own!"

"You know that I have never liked polo," I said, wanting my mother to take my side. "Naheed was the one who always begged me to go."

"Why?"

I didn't want to reveal Naheed's secret, for that would bring her grave trouble. "It was exciting for her. Her parents keep such a close watch over her otherwise."

"You should have refused," said my mother. "You know better!"

"I'm sorry," I said. "I just wanted to do her a favor."

My mother softened. "I know you were only trying to help," she said. "But since you were wrong, I expect you to take your punishment without complaint."

"I will," I said bitterly.

"Now come here." She rubbed the burning spot on my hand with a poultice made of lamb's fat, which she had concocted from recipes that Kolsoom had once used. The poultice soothed away the sting.

"That's much better," I said.