I tell you Rabka’s story because every tree has a branch that rots.
The stars were in great disharmony at the moment of her birth. The houses of the zodiac declared war, and the astrological signs faced one another in opposition. When you are born at such a discordant moment, you can either overcome your misfortune or become chained to it. Rabka chose to embrace the dissonance and, over the course of her life, to allow her spirit’s light to dim.
Her father, Ahmar, was a prodigy at the Academy of Gundeshapur and came to Baghdad at Caliph Harun’s invitation. Ahmar, a linguist, philosopher, and scientist, could read and write fluently in over six languages. Caliph Harun needed such men to help run his new empire.
Harun’s grandfather, al-Mansur, founded the new capital of the Abbasid Empire: Baghdad, the City of Peace. It was built in a perfect circle to reflect the harmony of Euclidian geometry. Euclid was an ancient scholar from Alexandria whose theorems had created a whole new system of mathematical thought. He had mastered plane geometry and the geometry of the three-dimensional world using intuitive axioms to show the properties of physical reality.
The caliph’s most astute astrologist had studied Euclid. He chose the city’s precise location, and the palace and mosque were constructed at the center of the circle to symbolize this new nexus of power. When the time came for al-Mansur’s grandson, Harun, to rule, Baghdad had become the jewel of the world.
Harun believed educated men ranked after God and angels. So he beckoned them to Baghdad, and Ahmar embraced this opportunity. The Academy of Gundeshapur, like a candle battered by the wind, was waning. Ahmar carried its light to Baghdad, along with his wife and young daughter, Rabka. He brought other graduates with him and three hundred camels to carry their books.
In Baghdad, the ink of a scholar was considered holy. Chinese papermaking had made its way to the capital, creating a flourishing new market for the written word. Scholars made up the new aristocracy, and within this elite Ahmar flourished.
Rabka was raised in luxury within the walls of Caliph Harun’s palace and surrounded by opulent gardens and pavilions that surpassed most people’s dreams of paradise. Crafted by the finest artists of the day, the palace’s vast rooms were filled with entire landscapes built to enchant the senses. Rabka had a gift with words and wrote poems describing the palace’s splendor, its fantastical forests, bridges, and waterfalls. Her poems centered on court life as well, announcing births, weddings, or other social events.
“Very few women have this talent, Rabka. I will not dissuade you from your writing,” her father said.
Very few women were allowed the opportunity to discover their talents, Rabka thought, but she kept that opinion to herself. “One day I will become as exalted as Ulayya,” she boasted. Ulayya, Caliph Harun’s sister, was a celebrated poet and musician, a rare feat for a woman. “One day I will be the same.”
Rabka’s father would only nod and smile, obviously disagreeing, but he did allow her to recite poems to the rawi who worked for him. Rawis memorized poems and performed them for large audiences, since many people could not read or write. A good rawi had over two thousand poems memorized at any given time and could recite them all at once.
When Caliph Harun died, Rabka composed her first madih, a poetic tribute to their new patron, al-Ma’mun, gaining her the attention of the court. Baghdad had undergone a civil war after Harun’s death as his two sons struggled for the caliphate, and al-Ma’mun emerged victorious. The position of Rabka’s family was secure once more, for al-Ma’mun loved learning above all else.
Rabka grew into an alluring young woman and adorned herself with as many jewels as Harun’s most beloved wife, Zubaidah. Zubaidah wore so much jewelry that two servants had to help her stand. She had thirty servants just to care for her pet monkey, and one hundred slave girls to recite the Koran at all hours to prove her piety. She would only eat off plates of precious metal and drink from golden goblets. Witnessing such excess only fueled Rabka’s passion and twisted her desires as the time neared for her to marry.
Soon she would no longer have the protection of her father. Rabka prayed every day and night for a good match, for someone who would allow her to stay in her beloved palace and write poems for the court. Her family had obtained immense wealth through her father’s accomplishments, and Rabka expected even greater glory with her future husband.
* * *
On the day of al-Ma’mun’s wedding to the vizier’s daughter, Rabka had her first premonition and saw the answer.
“Who is he?” she asked her servant, Aadila. Rabka motioned to the man across the hall in deep conversation with al-Ma’mun.
“Khalid al-Amin. A rising star, that one.”
“Is he a scholar?” Rabka asked, anxious.
Aadila nodded. “He has already been appointed the caliph’s most trusted nadim.”
Rabka felt her heart bloom. Her father had been Caliph Harun’s nadim. As a nadim, Khalid would visit the caliph several times a week to debate science, philosophy, and religion, to tell stories, to play chess or backgammon. In return the caliph would grant Khalid an enormous salary, the highest status, and private apartments within the palace.
Rabka continued to scrutinize her husband-to-be, for she had foreseen their marriage as clearly as if Allah had handed her a mirror of the future. Khalid would be remembered as one of the greatest minds in Baghdad—a gifted scholar, orator, translator, and jurist—and become even more exalted than her father. With Khalid, Rabka would be royalty in all but blood.
Aadila watched Rabka and flashed her a wicked smile. “So you’ve set your sights on that one?” The old woman had served many in the course of her life and understood Rabka’s heart well. Rabka didn’t answer, but her eyes shone with greed. Like all women, she didn’t have a say in whom she would marry, but Rabka was certain she could steer her father toward Khalid.
Aadila clucked her tongue. “’Tis a shame he is to marry in three months. He’ll have a First Wife.”
Rabka’s eyes turned to slits of anger. She looked at her servant, twisted one of the sapphire and diamond rings off her finger, and placed it in Aadila’s hand. “No, he won’t,” she said. The two women understood each other perfectly.
Al-Ma’mun’s wedding celebration lasted seventeen days and was the most extravagant anyone could remember. Over a thousand tables were set to accommodate the guests, and a hundred dishes were served each day. Rabka made sure Khalid noticed her during the festivities. She dressed in brocade tunics gilded in precious stones and silk trousers that moved like liquid gold. She looked like a glittering al-‘Uzza, the ancient Goddess of the Morning Star.
“Khalid al-Amin is the man I should marry,” she instructed her father in private. “He is the only man who can carry on your legacy.” She knew exactly how to sway an arrogant man like her father, who wanted nothing more than to be revered forever. For good measure, she persuaded her father’s rawi to recite a ghazal she had written for the wedding couple. It was a romantic poem, nostalgic and complex with perfect meter and rhythm. The ghazal surpassed anything she had ever composed, and its delivery was her greatest triumph. By the end of the applause, Khalid had eyes for no other.
On the last day of the celebration, Aadila snuck into the bedroom of Khalid’s future wife and cut off the girl’s nose. She put poison on the end of the janbiya to make certain the blade would be deadly. The bride-to-be died a week later and no one ever knew Rabka had been the one to strike. Now free of obligation, Khalid married Rabka, and the future unfolded as she foresaw it.
Rabka should have been happy that she had obtained her desires, but she had not divined that she would have to move out of the palace. When Khalid told her, she broke every mirror and bottle of perfume in her bedroom. The smell of frankincense lingered with her grief for weeks. She raged to Rusa, the goddess of fate, and recited incantations of ancient sorcery in an attempt to change her future’s course, but the talismans and spells were useless.
Khalid tried to assuage her. “The caliph has gifted this house to us. It is the finest in the city.”
“I despise the city!” She sobbed, her eyes swollen from days of crying. “Am I to live with the stink?”
Outside the palace the city was a melting pot. Over a million people—Arabs, Persians, Jews, Christians, Indians, rich and poor alike—lived together in the capital.
“But the mansion has the finest architecture, equal to the palace!”
The design included wind ventilation and there was also running water on the walls to keep the house cool. Its front doors were made of ebony and precious metal. But when Rabka walked through them she hated every room. Only simple flowers—lilac, jasmine, and violets—lined the inner courtyards, and the trees weren’t plated in gold. Even the roof, which transformed into a grand bedroom under the stars on the hottest of nights, did not appease her. Rabka was a queen without a palace, a poet without a court.
When she gave birth to her first child, a daughter, she wrote a poem, one she never shared, about a wife who was secretly the mythical dragon, Azhi Dahāka, ready to breathe fire until her bones turned to ash. By the poem’s end, the wife stood beside the ruins of her former self, unable to return to the girl she was once was. It was the last poem Rabka ever wrote.
As they settled into married life away from the palace, Khalid tried to ignore Rabka’s misery. They had three daughters, not the son Khalid desired. But still Khalid never took another wife, for he was unable to fathom the thought of more Rabkas. Instead he devoted himself to his work.
* * *
Caliph al-Ma’mun had dreamed that Aristotle visited his bedside. When he awoke he realized what it meant: that it was his duty to build the largest treasury of books yet so he could safeguard the knowledge of the world. This new center of learning, Bayt al-Hikmah, the House of Wisdom, would be both a library and an academy. He appointed Khalid to be one of the directors.
On the caliph’s orders, Khalid sent scholars to the four corners of the earth to bring back all the ancient texts they could find—the first expedition ever of its kind. For years Khalid oversaw the translations of lost and forgotten manuscripts from Greek, Persian, and Sanskrit into Arabic in an attempt to unify what distance had divided. As Rabka foresaw so many years before, Khalid became the most honored scholar in all of Baghdad. But his star ascended without her.
Even so, his spirit grew restless. Of Khalid’s three daughters, only the youngest, Maisara, noticed. One night after the servants had cleared the table, Khalid sat thinking, his mind so far away his body may as well have not been in the room. For twenty years he had been faithful to Caliph al-Ma’mun, helping him build his legacy with the House of Wisdom, but he no longer found solace in his work.
He saw his daughter watching him. “I am covered in dust, Maisara,” he said in a tired voice. He motioned toward his chest and his head. “This heart and mind are covered. Perhaps the time has come for me to go walk in the desert and brush off the sand.”
“What do you mean, Father?” Maisara asked, trying to understand.
Her father smiled and beckoned her to his study.
She followed with growing excitement for she had never been invited there before. She waited while he unlocked the cabinet where he kept his most treasured possessions. He pulled out a long scroll and unrolled the parchment.
“What is it?” Maisara whispered in awe. She had never seen anything like it.
“A map of the entire world,” Khalid said with satisfaction. Caliph al-Ma’mun had tasked geographers with traveling the globe and taking measurements to create the most accurate map of all time. Khalid possessed one of the few copies. They were priceless.
“Here is the circle of the city, the breadth of the empire, and all that lies beyond our borders.” He showed her how the oceans created one body of water. He showed her the seas, the great rivers, and the deserts.
She listened, almost afraid to breathe lest her father stop talking. He had never spoken to her of such things; in fact, he rarely spoke to her at all. But that night he showed her the vastness of the world.
“This is the journey I will make.” He traced the path to the desert with his finger.
Maisara made a silent promise that one day she would do the same.
* * *
Caliph al-Ma’mun died unexpectedly a month later. Khalid risked the dragon’s fire and told Rabka he was leaving for the Arabian Desert to follow the way of the Sufi. He needed to see beyond the constraints of earthly life.
Rabka erupted with the rage of a thousand storm demons. She screamed and called him the vilest names ever to cross a woman’s lips. But still Khalid left with only the robes he was wearing and a case the size of a scroll on his back. Maisara knew it surely held the map.
After Khalid had gone, Rabka grew silent, now a whirlwind without force. Her daughters were terrified. In an instant, their world had broken. Rabka sat down in Khalid’s chair at the head of the table and laughed so hard tears watered her eyes. She had seen everything but the ending.
They had no income and no male to protect them and, with the caliph’s passing, no relationship with the new ruler. Soon they would be destitute.
At first they survived by selling Khalid’s prized belongings. Rabka sold off his library. He had thousands of books and rare works, including copies of the Vedas Scripts from ancient India, alchemy books written by Babylonian priests, and original texts from the Chaldean and Median Empires.
Rabka wanted none of it. Her most important task was securing her daughters’ futures. With Asma, the eldest, Rabka worried there might be difficulty. The girl had ugly teeth, a wandering eye that could be disconcerting, and her father’s bulbous nose. After months trying to find her a husband, Rabka gave up in despair. Then a new opportunity presented itself.
One of the only female trades was the textile industry. Rabka found Asma employment as a fabric dyer and spinner in nearby Baqdara, working alongside other women and children.
“The wages will be poor,” she informed Asma, “but at least there are wages.”
“Please, please let me stay,” Asma begged.
Rabka turned deaf ears to her pleading and ordered her remaining daughters to sort through Asma’s belongings to see what could be sold at market. She didn’t think a fabric dyer needed much.
Rabka sold her own beloved gowns and jewels to pay their exorbitant taxes and buy food. No longer could they afford pears from Nahavand, figs from Hulwan, or limes from Egypt. They couldn’t serve grilled lamb with Rabka’s favorite pomegranate sauce, or grilled anything for that matter. Meat was too expensive. Olive oil from Syria and honey from Mosul soon became distant memories.
Baghdad had the most opulent cuisine in the world, and Rabka had been raised in the caliph’s court watching Harun taste thirty dishes a day with two servants standing beside him. One servant would hold thirty clean spoons so Harun could taste each dish, while the other servant waited to collect the dirty ones.
What heights she had fallen from! She let their chefs go, along with all their servants. Now when food was set on the table, her daughters would snatch it like falcons.
Maisara was the one who cooked and cleaned. She learned how to use each cooking vessel in the kitchen. She would spend hours washing pots and beating them with brick dust, then potash. Her hands became rough from all the labor, but she didn’t complain. She spent hours alone in the kitchen dreaming of how she would leave Baghdad one day. The room became her map as she plotted her escape.
Rabka prohibited her second daughter, Alya, from performing any labor, for in Alya, Rabka saw her best chance. The girl was quite lovely, a gazelle, thin as a willow with high breasts, a long neck, and a curtain of hair that fell to her feet like silk. The son of an esteemed family Rabka knew from her days in court was traveling to China soon as an ambassador for the caliph, and he needed a bride.
“Do not send me so far away to such a strange land! I will die there! I know it!” Alya screeched and threw herself at her mother’s feet.
“Better to die there than in the slums of Baghdad with the beggars and the cripples,” Rabka said with fierce conviction.
Now Maisara was the only daughter who remained. Out of all the sisters, she suffered the most, for poverty led Rabka slowly into madness. Rabka’s worst nightmare had come true. She was destitute.
At night Rabka would recite her poetry in weeping bursts, with only the deaf ears of the city to hear her cries.
Secretly, she began to prepare for her death. Even her funeral would cost money, and she had only one thing of worth left to sell: a deck of beautiful hand-painted picture cards that had been in her family for generations.
“But your mother made you promise to take care of them,” Maisara tried to reason with her. “They belong to us.” Maisara had always hoped the cards would one day be passed to her. She was the only daughter who stayed behind.
“They belong to me!” Rabka hissed. She knew they would fetch a high price, especially with the tale she could spin about their origins. Playing cards had become quite popular in the empire, particularly after the Mamluks brought their card games down from the high steppes of Mongolia. Many scholars had begun to collect cards from Mongolia, India, and the farthest reaches of China. And the collectors paid handsomely.
* * *
Rabka found the perfect merchant. Men like Jamal Azar had helped build the Muslim empire into what it was. He had traveled to Cordoba, Cairo, and explored the sea route to China. He knew every trade route—but he had never seen cards like Rabka’s.
“These cards came from Egypt in the time of Caesar.” Rabka held them out to him. “They survived the Great Fire in Alexandria and have been passed down through my family for centuries. Look at them!” She fanned the cards out on the table. “The artist was the same man who painted the pharaoh’s personal holy books.”
Jamal bent over to study the cards with his optical glass while Maisara looked on wide-eyed at her mother’s story.
“The paint is real gold,” Rabka added, “and worth twice as much.”
Jamal didn’t know if what Rabka said was true, but after careful examination he decided these cards would be a prize in his personal collection, the one he showed others to make his wares seem more expensive. He paid Rabka several gold coins but knew it was a good investment.
When Rabka and Maisara returned home, Rabka lay down on her pallet and Maisara covered her mother with a blanket.
“Was the story true?” Maisara asked.
“How would I know?” Rabka dismissed. “I wasn’t there.”
Rabka stared up at the ceiling for a long while. Then she let out a strange cackle and said, “This is my punishment for taking another woman’s husband.”
That night while Maisara slept Rabka took out a different bundle, one she had kept all these years. She unwrapped the Chinese silk and touched Aadila’s janbiya, the dagger her servant had used to kill Khalid’s betrothed. Rabka fingered the blade with only one regret: no one would witness her final act. Her death would have made a glorious poem.
When Maisara awoke the next morning, she found her mother dead with a Delphic smile on her face. She cradled her in her arms and cried tears so acrid they burned her skin. Now she had no one.
She paid for the burial with the gold coins her mother had fetched for the cards, and keeping the promise she had made to herself, set off for the desert like her father had done so many years before. She would walk the way of the Sufi and brush the sand from her heart.
* * *
With Rabka, my progeny severed our connection to the Oracle’s symbols. Rabka’s daughters went in three different directions, like a disbanded constellation that no astrolabe could measure. I often searched my mind’s eye for those lovely stars, but I never found them.
The cards, however, I could still see.
They left my descendents’ hands and were caught in the current of time like a piece of driftwood. I had to have faith that they would one day find their way to shore.