The Taster of Isfahan

Chapter One: The Tower in the Snow

The snow came down so thickly that afternoon that Tamar did not hear the horses until they were in the lower orchard.

She was in the store-room under the tower, counting jars. It was the last week of January and the valley of Kvishara had been shut in by weather since Epiphany, which was how her father liked it. Nothing came up the gorge in deep winter, he said. Not tax farmers, not priests, not the Shah's men. Tamar had counted forty-one jars of quince, eleven of pickled bean, and was writing the numbers on the inside of the door with a piece of charcoal when her brother's feet came hammering down the stairs.

"Tamar." Giorgi's face was white above his collar. He was twelve and still had the habit of hanging on doorframes. "Soldiers. In the orchard. Father says come up."

She put down the charcoal. Afterwards she would remember the smallness of that gesture, the neatness of it, as though she had believed the numbers on the door would still matter in the evening.

The courtyard of the tower-house was already loud. Their father, Ioane Eristavi, lord of a valley eleven miles long and nothing else in this world, stood at the top of the outer stair with his sword still in its sheath and his beard full of snow. Below him the yard was filling with men in mail and quilted coats, and the horses were steaming, and the snow was going to slush and mud under so many hooves.

The officer who spoke did not dismount. He read from a paper, and he read in Persian, and then a second man read the same words in Georgian in a flat voice, the way a man reads a list.

Two years of tribute withheld. Sixty horses, four hundred loads of silk, and the tax on the church lands. And the sheltering of the rebel Levan Eristavi, who had cut down a tax convoy at the ford in the autumn and vanished into the high pastures.

"My brother is not here," Ioane said.

"That is not the accusation," the Georgian-speaker said. "The accusation is that he was."

Her father talked. He was a good talker; he had talked his way out of two feuds and one excommunication. He offered forty horses now and the rest at Easter. He offered his own son as a pledge, and Tamar heard him say it, and heard Giorgi make a small noise beside her, and she reached back and gripped her brother's wrist without turning her head.

She never learned which of the soldiers moved first. There was a shifting in the yard, a horse pushing sideways, a shout in Persian that sounded like a name, and then the flat ugly sound of iron going through a man's collarbone. Her father sat down on the stair. That was what it looked like: a tired man sitting down. Then he went over sideways and the snow around him began to change colour and Tamar was screaming and did not know it, because her ears were full of a high whining that had nothing to do with sound.

After that the tower burned.

They did it methodically, with straw and pitch and the tapestries her grandmother had woven, and it burned from the second floor upward because the ground floor was stone. Tamar was on the second floor. She had gone up for two things and she got both of them: her mother's walnut herb chest with its thirty-one small drawers, and the stitched book of remedies written in her mother's hand in the old script, which Tamar had been adding to since she was fourteen. Then the stair filled with smoke the colour of wet wool and she sat down on the floor of the passage with the chest in her arms and understood, calmly, that she was going to die there, and that it did not seem as terrible as it should.

A hand took her under the arm and lifted.

"Get up," a voice said. "Get up, girl, the roof's going."

It was Georgian. Not her Georgian — a harder mountain accent, the vowels bitten off, the way they talked four ridges east where the shepherds came from. She was so astonished to hear it in that place, in that smoke, that she got up.

He half carried her down and out through the byre, and the cold hit her face like water, and she stood in the yard with her mother's chest against her chest and looked at the man who had pulled her out. He was young — twenty-four, twenty-five — in the quilted coat and gilt belt of the Shah's slave-guard, with a helmet under his arm and soot in his eyebrows. He had the wide cheekbones and pale eyes of the eastern valleys.

"You're Georgian," she said.

"I was." He looked away from her, toward the fire. "Sit there. Don't run. If you run they'll shoot you, and I'll be the one they send to bring you back."

"My father—"

"I know."

"Say his name," Tamar said. "You know it, you read it off your paper. Say it."

The young officer looked at her then, properly, and she saw something move in his face that she would spend three years trying to name.

"Ioane Eristavi," he said. "Sit down. Please."

She sat down in the trampled snow beside a dead man's foot and did not weep, because the cold had got into her and weeping needs a certain warmth. Around her the tower of Kvishara made its long groaning noise and dropped its roof into itself, and sparks went up into the falling snow, and the snow put them out one by one.

They were three days in the valley. The soldiers took the horses and the stored silk and the church plate, and they killed no one else, which Tamar came to understand was a kind of mercy and a kind of accounting: dead peasants pay no tribute. A clerk sat in the priest's house with a brazier and a ledger and wrote everything into columns.

On the third morning he wrote Tamar and Giorgi into a column of their own.

"Hostages of state," the Georgian-speaker translated. "You are not slaves. Understand the difference and hold onto it. You are the pledges of your family's obedience. You will be fed, you will be clothed, you will be housed in the household of the Shah of Shahs, and you will not come home."

"For how long?" Giorgi asked. His voice cracked in the middle of it.

"For as long as your family is obedient," the clerk said, in Persian, and did not look up.

Tamar was allowed to keep the chest. She thought at the time that this was luck. Later she understood that the young officer had spoken to someone, because on the second night he had found her sitting with the chest open on her knees, sorting by touch in the dark — mullein, coltsfoot, valerian, the dried monkshood root wrapped in three layers of linen and marked with a cross scratched into the wood, because that one killed wolves and men without much preference.

"What's in it?" he had asked.

"Medicine."

"All of it?"

She had closed the lid. "Ask me in Persian and I'll pretend I don't understand."

He had laughed — one short surprised breath — and gone away, and in the morning nobody took the chest from her.

On the fourth day they went south. Tamar walked out of her valley between a string of her father's horses and a mule loaded with her grandmother's copper, and she did not look back at the black shell of the tower, because Giorgi was looking at it and someone had to be watching the road.

At the mouth of the gorge, where the track turned and the whole valley lay behind them white and folded like a cloth, her brother put his hand in hers, which he had not done since he was seven.

"We'll come back," he said.

"Yes," Tamar said.

It was the first thing she ever lied to him about, and it took forty-three years to become true.