I could’ve located this place even without the brilliance of the falling snow, for this spot, razed by fire, was where I’d ended the life of my companion of twenty-five years. Now, snow covered and erased all the clues that might have been interpreted as signature, proving that Allah concurred with Bihzad and me on the issue of style and signature. If we actually committed an unpardonable sin by illustrating that book-as that half-wit had maintained four days ago-even if we had done so unawares, Allah wouldn’t have bestowed this favor upon us miniaturists.

That night, when Elegant Effendi and I came here, the snow hadn’t yet begun to fall. We could hear the howling of mongrels echo in the distance.

“Pray, for what reason have we come here?” the unfortunate one had asked. “What do you plan to show me out here at this late hour?”

“Just ahead lies a well, twelve paces beyond which I’ve buried the money I’ve been saving for years,” I said. “If you keep everything I’ve explained to you secret, Enishte Effendi and I will see that you are happily rewarded.”

“Am I to understand that you admit you knew what you were doing from the beginning?” he said in agitation.

“I admit it,” I lied obligingly.

“You acknowledge the picture you’ve made is in fact a desecration, don’t you?” he said innocently. “It’s heresy, a sacrilege that no decent man would have the gall to commit. You’re going to burn in the pits of Hell. Your suffering and pain will never diminish-and you’ve made me an accomplice.”

As I listened to him, I sensed with horror how his words had such strength and gravity that, willingly or not, people would heed them, hoping that they would prove true about miserable creatures other than themselves. Many rumors like this about Enishte Effendi had begun to fly due to the secrecy of the book he was making and the money he was willing to pay-and because Master Osman, the Head Illuminator, despised him. It occurred to me that perhaps my brother gilder, Elegant, had with sly intent used these facts to buttress his false accusations. To what degree was he being honest?

I had him repeat the claims that pitted us against each other, and as he spoke, he didn’t mince his words. He seemed to be provoking me to cover up a mistake, as during our apprentice years, when the goal was to avoid a beating by Master Osman. Back then, I found his sincerity convincing. As an apprentice, his eyes would widen as they did now, but back then they hadn’t yet dimmed from the labor of embellishing. But finally I hardened my heart; he was prepared to confess everything to everyone.

“Do listen to me,” I said with forced exasperation. “We make illuminations, create border designs, draw frames onto pages, we brightly ornament page after page with lovely tones of gold, we make the greatest of paintings, we adorn armoires and boxes. We’ve done nothing else for years. It is our calling. They commission paintings from us, ordering us to arrange a ship, an antelope or a sultan within the borders of a particular frame, demanding a certain style of bird, a certain type of figure, take this particular scene from the story, forget about such-and-such. Whatever it is they demand, we do it. ”Listen,“ Enishte Effendi said to me, ”here, draw a horse of your own imagining, right here.“ For three days, like the great artists of old, I sketched hundreds of horses so I might come to know exactly what ”a horse of my own imagining“ was. To accustom my hand, I drew a series of horses on a coarse sheet of Samarkand paper.”

I took these sketches out and showed them to Elegant. He looked at them with interest and, leaning close to the paper, began to study the black and white horses in the faint moonlight. “The old masters of Shiraz and Herat,” I said, “claimed that a miniaturist would have to sketch horses unceasingly for fifty years to be able to truly depict the horse that Allah envisioned and desired. They claimed that the best picture of a horse should be drawn in the dark, since a true miniaturist would go blind working over that fifty-year period, but in the process, his hand would memorize the horse.”

The innocent expression on his face, the one I’d also seen long ago, when we were children, told me that he’d become completely absorbed in my horses.

“They hire us, and we try to make the most mysterious, the most unattainable horse, just as the old masters did. There’s nothing more to it. It’s unjust of them to hold us responsible for anything more than the illustration.”

“I’m not sure that’s correct,” he said. “We, too, have responsibilities and our own will. I fear no one but Allah. It was He who provided us with reason that we might distinguish Good from Evil.”

It was an appropriate response.

“Allah sees and knows all…” I said in Arabic. “He’ll know that you and I, we’ve done this work without being aware of what we were doing. Who will you notify about Enishte Effendi? Aren’t you aware that behind this affair rests the will of His Excellency Our Sultan?”

Silence.

I wondered whether he was really such a buffoon or whether his loss of composure and ranting had sprung out of a sincere fear of Allah.

We stopped at the mouth of the well. In the darkness, I vaguely caught sight of his eyes and could see that he was scared. I pitied him. But it was too late for that. I prayed to God to give me one more sign that the man standing before me was not only a dim-witted coward, but an unredeemable disgrace.

“Count off twelve steps and dig,” I said.

“Then, what will you do?”

“I’ll explain it all to Enishte Effendi, and he’ll burn the pictures. What other recourse is there? If one of Nusret Hoja’s followers hears of such an allegation, nothing will remain of us or the book-arts workshop. Are you familiar with any of the Erzurumis? Accept this money so that we can be certain you won’t inform on us.”

“What is the money contained in?”

“There are seventy-five Venetian gold pieces inside an old ceramic pickle jar.”

The Venetian ducats made good sense, but where had I come up with the ceramic pickle jar? It was so foolish it was believable. I was thereby reassured that God was with me and had given me a sign. My old companion apprentice, who’d grown greedier with each passing year, had already started excitedly counting off the twelve steps in the direction I indicated.

There were two things on my mind at that moment. First of all, there were no Venetian coins or anything of the sort buried there! If I didn’t come up with some money this buffoon would destroy us. I suddenly felt like embracing the oaf and kissing his cheeks as I sometimes did when we were apprentices, but the years had come between us! Second, I was preoccupied with figuring out how we were going to dig. With our fingernails? But this contemplation, if you could call it that, lasted only a wink in time.

Panicking, I grabbed a stone that lay beside the well. While he was still on the seventh or eighth step, I caught up to him and struck him on the back of his head with all my strength. I struck him so swiftly and brutally that I was momentarily startled, as if the blow had landed on my own head. Aye, I felt his pain.

Instead of anguishing over what I’d done, I wanted to finish the job quickly. He’d begun thrashing about on the ground and my panic deepened further.

Long after I’d dropped him into the well, I contemplated how the crudeness of my deed did not in the least befit the grace of a miniaturist.