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Chapter 1
Chapter One: The Furnace
Arash ben Kaveh worked by heat he trusted more than men. The furnace breathed like an animal, white in its belly, with an iron hunger that softened sand into honey. He rolled a clear bubble on the end of the blowpipe, turned, blew, and the world of the bazaar murmured beyond the workshop walls: hawkers calling figs and salt, mule bells, a child laughing, the clop of hooves through dust.
“Steady,” he told his apprentice, Hamid, who held the punty rod out like an offering. “Turn with me. Keep the center.”
They pivoted together, the molten globe lengthening, thinning, then bulging into a gourd shape. Arash kissed his breath into it; the glass blushed. When it was ready, he angled the opening and the top flared into a lip that would catch light like an eyelid.
On a low table, the gilded enamel paints waited in shells: malachite green, lapis blue, cinnabar red. He would lay the verses tonight, when the piece had cooled and could bear his hand. A band of praise—the usual nonsense—on the neck, a vine of pomegranates and hunting leopards below. And between the praise and the leopards, a series of dots, tiny stars, and flourishes only he and a few could read.
Hamid watched the glass swing. “Master,” he said, “the saffron-seller was here. He said the governor’s steward wants one of your large vases for a banquet.”
Arash glanced at the opening lamp where moths scuffed their wings. “For the governor?”
“For the governor to give to a noyan.”
Arash’s mouth dried. Mongol warlord. There were many now, moving like lions through the folds of Azerbaijan, hard eyes, felt tents, iron stirrups. They loved gifts that shone. They loved the way craftsmen bowed.
Hamid lowered his voice to a breath balanced on the turn of the rod. “Should we refuse?”
Arash smiled without teeth. “We are not bakers with a choice to burn the bread. We craft what is asked. The kiln eats what we give it.”
“And the rebels?” Hamid looked at the paints and the stacks of vases drying in their padded cradles.
Arash’s hand trembled only when the hot glass hissed in water. He set the vessel on the wool-lined bench, listening to its cooling song of tiny cracking sighs. “We do both,” he said. “We work, and we remember. A gift can carry more than it weighs.”
He turned to the window that saw the slope of the bazaar. Beyond the roofs and the twisting alleys, the camp of the noyan had sprouted on the plain, a city of round white felt with horse-guarded paths between. Smoke rose from cooking fires. In the far haze, the winter mountains sat with a patience that men never had.
Arash wiped sweat from his brow. Tomorrow, he would paint praise in a hand so devout it would make scribes nod. He would fold, among the looped letters, a path to a place where men waited with blades. And he prayed no Mongol eyes would ever count the stars he would dot between the verses.
