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“This is such a spectacular horse,” I said, “it gives one the urge to pull out a

piece of paper and copy it, and then to draw every last thing.”

“The greatest compliment you can pay a painter is to say that his work has

stimulated your own enthusiasm to illustrate,” said Master Osman. “But now

let’s forget about his talent and try to uncover this devil’s identity. Had

Enishte Effendi, may he rest in peace, ever mentioned the kind of story this

picture was meant to accompany?”

“No. According to him, this was one of the horses that lived in the lands

that our powerful Sultan rules. It is a handsome horse: a horse of the Ottoman

line. It is a symbol that would demonstrate to the Venetian Doge Our Sultan’s

wealth and the regions under his control. But on the other hand, as with

everything the Venetian masters depict, this horse was also to be more lifelike

than a horse born of God’s vision, more like a horse that lived in a particular

stable with a particular groom in Istanbul so that the Venetian Doge might say

to himself, ”Just as the Ottoman miniaturists have come to see the world like

us, so have the Ottomans themselves come to resemble us,“ in turn, accepting

Our Sultan’s power and friendship. For if you begin to draw a horse

differently, you begin to see the world differently. Despite its peculiarities, this

horse was rendered in the manner of the old masters.”

The more we deliberated over the horse, the more beautiful and precious it

became in my eyes. His mouth was slightly open, his tongue visible from

between his teeth. His eyes shone bright. His legs were strong and elegant. Did

a painting become legendary for what it was or for what was said about it?

Master Osman was ever so slowly moving the magnifying lens over the animal.

“What is it that this horse is trying to convey?” I said with naive

enthusiasm. “Why does this horse exist? Why this horse! What about this

horse? Why does this horse excite me?”

“The pictures as well as the books commissioned by sultans, shahs and

pashas proclaim their power,” said Master Osman. “The patrons find these

works beautiful, with their extensive gold leaf and lavish expenditures of labor

and eyesight because they are proof of the ruler’s wealth. An illustration’s

beauty is significant because it is proof that a miniaturist’s talent is rare and

expensive just like the gold used in the picture’s creation. Others find the

picture of a horse beautiful because it resembles a horse, is a horse of God’s

vision or is a purely imaginary horse; the effect of verisimilitude is attributed

to talent. As for us, beauty in illustration begins with subtlety and profusion of

meaning. Of course, to discover that this horse reveals not merely itself, but

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the hand of the murderer, the mark of that devil, this would augment the

meaning of the picture. Then there’s finding out that it’s not the image of the

horse, but the horse itself that’s beautiful; that is, seeing the illustration of the

horse not as an illustration, but as a true horse.”

“If you looked at this illustration as if you were looking at a horse, what

would you see there?”

“Looking at the size of this horse, I could say that this wasn’t a pony but,

judging from the length and curve of its neck, a good racehorse and that the

flatness of its back would make it suitable for long trips. From its delicate legs

we might infer that it was agile and clever like an Arabian, but its body is too

long and large to be one. The elegance of its legs suggests what the Bukharan

scholar Fadlan said of worthy horses in his Book of Equines, that were it to

happen upon a river it’d easily jump it without being startled and spooked. I

know by heart the wonderful things written about the choicest horses in the

Book of Equines translated so beautifully by our royal veterinarian Fuyuzi, and I

can tell you that every word applies to the chestnut horse before us: A good

horse should have a pretty face and the eyes of a gazelle; its ears should be

straight as reeds with a good distance between them; a good horse should have

small teeth, a rounded forehead and slight eyebrows; it should be tall, long-

haired, have a short waist, small nose, small shoulders and a broad flat back; it

should be full-thighed, long-necked, broadchested, with a broad rump and

meaty inner thighs. The beast should be proud and elegant and when it

saunters, it should move as though it were greeting those on either side.”

“That’s our chestnut horse exactly,” I said, looking at the image of the horse

in astonishment.

“We’ve discovered our horse,” said Master Osman with the same ironic

smile, “but unfortunately this doesn’t do us any good when it comes to the

identity of the miniaturist, because I know that no miniaturist in his right

mind would depict a horse using a real horse as a model. My miniaturists,

naturally, would draw a horse from memory in one motion. As proof, let me

remind you that most of them begin drawing the outline of the horse from

the tip of one of its hooves.”

“Isn’t this done so the horse can be depicted standing firmly on the

ground?” I said apologetically.

“As Jemalettin of Kazvin wrote in his The Illustration of Horses, one can

properly complete a picture of a horse beginning from its hoof only if he

carries the entire horse in his memory. Obviously, to render a horse through

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excessive thought and recollection, or even more ridiculous, by repeatedly

looking at a real horse, one would have to move from head to neck and then

neck to body. I hear there are certain Venetian illustrators who are happy to

sell tailors and butchers such pictures of your average street packhorse drawn

indecisively by trial and error. Such an illustration has nothing whatsoever to

do with the meaning of the world or with the beauty of God’s creation. But

I’m convinced that even mediocre artists must know a genuine illustration

isn’t drawn according to what the eye sees at any particular moment, but

according to what the hand remembers and is accustomed to. The painter is

always alone before the page. Solely for this reason he’s always dependent on

memory. Now, there’s nothing left for us to do but use the ”courtesan

method‘ to uncover the hidden signature borne by our horse, which has been

drawn from memory through the quick and skillful movement of the hand.

Take a careful look here.“

He was ever so slowly moving the magnifying lens over the spectacular

horse as if he were trying to discover the location of a treasure on an old map

meticulously rendered on calfskin.

“Yes,” I said, like a disciple overcome by the pressure to make a quick and

brilliant discovery that would impress his master. “We could compare the

colors and embroidery of the saddle blanket to those in the other pictures.”

“My master miniaturists wouldn’t even deign to lower a brush to these

designs. Apprentices draw the clothes, carpets and blankets in the pictures.

Perhaps the late Elegant Effendi might’ve done them. Forget them.”

“What about the ears?” I said in a fluster. “The ears of the horses…”

“No. These ears haven’t changed form since the time of Tamerlane; they’re

just like the leaves of reeds, which we well know.”

I was about to say, “What about the braiding of the mane and the

depiction of every strand of its hair,” but I fell silent, not at all amused by this

master-apprentice game. If I’m the apprentice, I ought to know my place.

“Take a look here,” said Master Osman with the distressed yet attentive air

of a doctor pointing out a plague pustule to a colleague. “Do you see it?”

He’d moved the magnifying lens over the horse’s head and was slowly

pulling it away from the surface of the picture. I lowered my head to better see

what was being enlarged through the lens.

The horse’s nose was peculiar: its nostrils.

“Do you see it?” said Master Osman.

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To be certain of what I saw, I thought I should center myself right behind

the lens. When Master Osman did likewise, we met cheek to cheek just behind

the lens that was now quite a distance from the picture. It momentarily

alarmed me to feel the harshness of the master’s dry beard and the coolness of

his cheek on my face.

A silence. It was as if something wondrous were happening within the

picture a handspan away from my weary eyes, and we were witnessing it with

respect and awe.

“What’s wrong with the nose?” I was able to whisper much later.

“He’s drawn the nose oddly,” said Master Osman without taking his eyes

off the page.

“Did his hand slip, perhaps? Is this a mistake?”

We were still examining the peculiar, unique rendering of the nose.

“Is this the Venetian-inspired ”style‘ everyone, the great masters of China

included, has begun talking about?“ asked Master Osman mockingly.

I succumbed to resentment, thinking that he was mocking my late Enishte:

“My Enishte, may he rest in peace, used to say that any fault arising not from

lack of ability or talent, but from the depths of the miniaturist’s soul, ought

not be deemed fault but style.”

However it came about, whether by the miniaturist’s own hand or the

horse itself, there was no clue other than this nose as to the identity of the

blackguard who murdered my Enishte. For, let alone making out the nostrils,

we were having difficulty identifying the noses of the smudged horses on the

page found with poor Elegant Effendi.

We spent much time searching for horse pictures that Master Osman’s

beloved miniaturists had made for various books in recent years, looking for

the same irregularity in the horse’s nostrils. Because the Book of Festivities, still

being completed, depicted the societies and guilds marching on foot before

Our Sultan, there were few horses among its 250 illustrations. Men were

dispatched to the book-arts workshop, where certain figure books, some

notebooks of standard forms and newly finished volumes were stored, as well

as to the private rooms of the Sultan, and the harem so that they could bring

back any books that hadn’t been securely locked up and hidden in the palace

treasury, all of this, naturally, with the permission of Our Sultan.

In a double-leaf illustration from a Book of Victories found in the quarters of

a young prince, which showed the funeral ceremonies of Sultan Süleyman the

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Magnificent who’d died during the siege of Szegetvar, we first examined the

chestnut horse with a white blaze, the gazelle-eyed gray pulling the funeral

carriage and the other melancholy horses fitted with spectacular saddle

blankets and gold embroidered saddles. Butterfly, Olive and Stork had

illustrated all these horses. Whether the horses were pulling the large-wheeled

funeral carriage or standing at attention with watery eyes trained on their

master’s body covered with a red cloth, all stood with the same elegant stance

borrowed from the old masters of Herat, that is, with one foreleg proudly

extended and the other firmly planted on the ground beside it. All their necks

were long and curved, their tails bound up and their manes trimmed and

combed, but none of the noses had the peculiarity we sought. Neither was this

peculiarity evident in any of the hundreds of horses that bore commanders,

scholars and hojas, who’d participated in the funeral ceremony and now

stood at attention on the surrounding hilltops in honor of the late Sultan

Süleyman.

Something of the sadness of this melancholy funeral passed to us as well. It

upset us to see that this illustrated manuscript, upon which Master Osman

and his miniaturists labored so much, had been ill-treated, and that women of

the harem, playing games with princes, had scribbled and marked various

places on the pages. Beside a tree under which Our Sultan’s grandfather

hunted, written in a bad hand were the words, “My Exalted Effendi, I love you

and am waiting for you with the patience of this tree.” So, it was with our

hearts full of defeat and sorrow that we pored over the legendary books,

whose creation I’d heard about, but none of which I’d ever seen.

In the second volume of the Book of Skills, which had seen the brush strokes

of all three master miniaturists, we saw, behind the roaring cannon and the

foot soldiers, hundreds of horses of every hue including chestnuts, grays and

blues, clattering along in mail and full panoply, bearing their glorious

scimitar-wielding spahi cavalrymen, as they crossed over pink hilltops in an

orderly advance, but none of their noses was flawed. “And what is a flaw after

all!” Master Osman said later, while examining a page in the same book,

which depicted the Royal Outer Gate and the parade ground where we

happened to be at that very moment. We also failed to discover the mark we

were searching for on the noses of the horses of various hues mounted by

guards, heralds and Secretaries of the Divan Council of State in this

illustration, which depicted the hospital off to the right, the Sultan’s Royal

Audience Hall, and the trees in the courtyard on a scale small enough to fit

into the frame yet grand enough to match their importance in our minds. We

watched Our Sultan’s great-grandfather Sultan Selim the Grim, during the

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time he declared war on the ruler of the Dhulkadirids, erect the imperial tent

along the banks of the Küskün river and hunt scurrying red-tailed black