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with a tiny waist and the feet of a porcelain doll. She had dark skin, tear-shaped eyes, and a halo of reddish-brown hair that flew about her like a wild sunset. She came to Juyy Bar without money or a friend— running, she claimed, from a massacre in the Tabriz ghetto, at the heart of the province of Azerbaijan. She spoke a language that was a mixture of Persian and Turkish, and understood little of the dialect in Juyy Bar. She arrived when the weather was gentle, and on her footsteps she brought the cold air of Tabriz—turning the summer in Esfahan into a winter of blizzards and frozen snow.
    “I have run before the Plague," she told Noah with her voice that was as cool and soothing as the wind she had brought, "from beyond the mountains of Elburz, and on my way I have seen a world of wonders."
    Noah the Gold took Qamar into his room and did not let her go. He kept her in his own light, clung to her as if for every breath. He touched her skin, inhaled the smell of pine trees and rain in her hair. Qamar's hands were calm and undemanding, her eyes never probed, her tongue— patient and calm—left a cool trace everyplace it touched. Weeks later, enraged at the scandal of a man and woman sleeping together without being married, Yehuda the Just forced his way into Noah's house and performed the rites of marriage between him and Qamar. Even then, they would not stop holding each other. They made love at noon, in a darkened room with the wind howling at their doorstep. At night, when the house was calm, they sat in the moonlight and talked with their faces close to each other. Against the columns of red mud that surrounded the courtyard, their shadows moved softly—like two figures dancing to a silent tune that only they could hear—and all those who saw them then believed they were creatures of a charmed life.
    In the summer of 1834, Fath Ali Shah went to Es-fahan. One night in the palace, he stood surrounded by his Royal Dressers, donning a bejeweled gown that he would wear at dinner. Suddenly he dropped to the ground.
    Twenty years after he had faced Esther the Soothsayer in the Hall of Mirrors of the Palace of Roses, Fath Ali Shah died. He left behind three hundred sons, and more than a thousand grandchildren.
    Immediately upon the Shah's death, war broke out in Tehran: the Shah's three hundred sons all claimed a right to the throne. Each contender was backed by a different segment of the aristocracy, or another foreign power. Fath Ali Shah's Crown Prince, Abbas Mirza, had predeceased his father. Abbas's son, Muhammad Khan, was at last pushed at the throne with the intervention of the British military mission in Azerbaijan. The Russians, too, gave the King their blessing; he was a feeble man—in body and spirit alike— and he promised not to resist the foreigners in their endeavors in Persia.
    Muhammad Shah's Prime Minister, Hajji Mirza Aghassi, recognized that the King had inherited his grandfather's belief in mystical powers, and immediately set out to use them for his own advantage: instead of ordering a new search for Esther the Soothsayer, Aghassi indoctrinated the Shah in the principles of Sufism, and from then on spent most of his time performing spiritual exercises with the King. The late Abbas Mirza's Vizir, Qa'im Maqam, recognized the danger of a ruler who had lost touch with reality and the world, and tried to warn the King against the ruse of his minister. He wrote letters to Muhammad Shah, lecturing at him as if he were still a schoolchild, enumerating all of the nation's ills without adding even a flavoring of pleasant lies. He told the Shah that he was making a fool of himself before the entire nation, that the two men at the head of the nation—the Shah and his Prime Minister—were being called ''the two dervishes of Persia." He claimed that Aghassi had indoctrinated the Shah in the path of asceticism only to render him powerless. Muhammad Shah was annoyed and angered by the letters: Qa'im Maqam, he