The Enchantress of Florence (10 page)

This was the story old Gulbadan had kept secret for so long. “People said Khanzada was the pretty one because she was the eldest and it didn’t do to cross her in any way. But in truth the youngest princess of all was the great beauty, and she had a pretty playmate and maidservant, too, a young slave girl who was just as beautiful and looked so much like her mistress that people started calling her ‘the princess’s mirror.’ And when Khanzada was captured by Shaibani the little princess and the Mirror were captured too, and when Khanzada was liberated by Shah Ismail and sent home to Babar’s court the hidden princess and the Mirror remained in Persia. This is why she was erased from our family history: she preferred life among foreigners to an honored place in her own home.”

“La Specchia,” the foreigner said suddenly. “The word for ‘mirror’ is a masculine noun, but they made up a feminine for her.
La specchia,
the little mirror girl.”

The story was tumbling out so rapidly now that protocol was forgotten and the stranger was not rebuked for his interjection. It was Gulbadan who did the telling in her high-speed, high-pitched voice. The tale of the hidden princess and her Mirror was insisting on being told.

But Hamida Bano was lost in memories. The queen was young again with a baby boy in her arms and with her husband Humayun in the hour of his defeat she was fleeing from the most dangerous men in the world: his brothers. It was so cold in the badlands of Kandahar that when she poured soup from a pot into a bowl it froze at once and could not be drunk. One day they were so hungry that they killed a horse and had to cut it up so that pieces of meat could be cooked in a soldier’s helmet, which was their only pot. And then they were attacked, and she had to flee, and leave her baby boy behind, her baby boy, to take his chances in a combat zone, her baby boy, to be raised by another woman, the wife of Askari, her husband’s brother and enemy, Sultanam Begum, who did what Hamida Bano could not do for her son, the emperor, her son.

“Forgive me,” she whispered (“…me,” said Bibi Fatima), but the emperor wasn’t listening, he was rushing on with Princess Gulbadan into unknown waters. “The hidden princess did not return with Khanzada because—yes!—she was in love.” In love with a foreigner, so besotted that she was prepared to defy her brother the king and to scorn his court, which was where her duty and her higher love should have reminded her she belonged. In his fury Babar the Beaver cast his younger sibling out of history, decreeing that her name be stricken from all records and never spoken again by any man or woman in his realm. Khanzada Begum herself obeyed the order faithfully in spite of her great love for her sister, and slowly the memory of the hidden princess and her Mirror faded. So they became no more than a rumor, a story half heard in a crowd, a whisper on the wind, and from that day until this one there had been no further word.

“The Persian king, in turn, was defeated by the Osmanli, or Ottoman, Sultan,” the foreigner continued. “And in the end the princess reached Italy in the company of a mighty warrior. Argalia and Angelica were their names. Argalia bore enchanted weapons, and in his retinue were four terrifying giants, and by his side rode Angelica, the princess of Cathay and India, the most beautiful woman in the world, and an enchantress beyond compare.”

“What
was
her name?” the emperor asked, ignoring him. The queen mother shook her head. “I never heard it,” she said. And Princess Gulbadan said, “She had a nickname that’s on the tip of my tongue, but her real name has faded from my memory completely.”

“Angelica,” said the foreigner. “Angelica was her name.”

Then from behind the screen he heard Princess Gulbadan say, “It’s a good story, and we should find out how the fellow learned it, but there is a problem, and I do not know if he can solve it to our satisfaction.”

Birbal had understood, of course. “It is a question of dates,” he said. “Of dates, and people’s ages.”

“If Khanzada Begum were alive today,” said Princess Gulbadan, “she would be one hundred and seven years old. Her youngest sister, eight years Babar’s junior, would perhaps be ninety-five. This foreigner who stands here telling us the story of our buried past is no more than thirty or thirty-one. So if the hidden princess reached Italy, as the fellow says, and if he is her son, as he further asserts, then at the time of his birth she would have been approximately sixty-four years of age. If that miraculous act of childbearing did indeed occur, then he would surely be Your Majesty’s uncle, the son of your grandfather’s sister, and would merit recognition as a prince of the royal house. But it is impossible, obviously.”

The foreigner felt the grave yawning at his feet and knew he would not be listened to much longer. “I told you I knew nothing of dates and places,” he cried. “But my mother was beautiful, and young. She was no sexagenarian crone.”

The women behind the screen were silent. His fate was being decided in that hush. Finally Gulbadan Begum spoke again. “It is a fact that he has told us things which have been buried very deep. Had he not spoken up then we old women would have taken the story to our graves. So he deserves the benefit of a little doubt.”

“But as you have shown us,” the emperor objected, “no conceivable doubt remains.”

“On the contrary,” Princess Gulbadan said. “There are two possible explanations.”

“The first one being,” the queen mother, Queen Hamida Bano, found herself saying, “that the hidden princess truly was a supreme enchantress, and learned the occult secrets of eternal youth, so that she was still a young woman in body and mind when she gave birth, even though she was almost seventy years old.”

The emperor pounded his fist against a wall. “Or perhaps you have all lost your minds, and that is the reason why you credit such arrant nonsense,” he bellowed. Princess Gulbadan hushed him as one hushes a small child. “You have not heard my second explanation,” she said.

“Very well then,” the emperor growled. “Speak up, aunt.” Gulbadan Begum said, with pedantic emphasis, “Let us suppose that the fellow’s story is true, and that the hidden princess and her warrior went to Italy long ago. It may also then be true that this fellow’s mother was not the warrior’s royal mistress…”

“…but the princess’s daughter,” Akbar understood. “But who, then, was his father?”

“Thereby,” replied Birbal, “I do believe, hangs the tale.”

The emperor turned to the foreigner with a sigh of resigned curiosity. His unexpected affection for the stranger was soured by the distaste of emperors for outsiders who know too much. “The Hindustani storyteller always knows when he loses his audience,” he said. “Because the audience simply gets up and leaves, or else it throws vegetables, or, if the audience is the king, it occasionally throws the storyteller headfirst off the city ramparts. And in this case, my dear Mogor-Uncle, the audience is indeed the king.”

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9
}

In Andizhan the pheasants grew so fat

I
n Andizhan the pheasants grew so fat that four men could not finish a meal cooked from a single bird. There were violets on the banks of the Andizhan River, a tributary of the Jaxartes or Syr Darya, and tulips and roses bloomed there in the spring. Andizhan, the Mughals’ original family seat, was in the province of Ferghana
“which lay,”
his grandfather had written in his autobiography,
“in the fifth clime, on the edge of the civilized world.”
The emperor had never seen the land of his forefathers but he knew it from Babar’s book. Ferghana stood on the great Silk Road in Central Asia to the east of Samarkand, north of the mighty peaks of the Hindu Kush. There were fine melons and grapes for wine, and you could feast on white deer and pomegranates stuffed with almond paste. There were running streams everywhere, good pasture meadows in the nearby mountains, red-barked spirea trees whose wood made excellent whip-handles and arrows, and turquoise and iron in the mines. The women were considered beautiful, but such things, the emperor knew, were always a matter of opinion. Babar the conqueror of Hindustan had been born there, and Khanzada Begum as well, and also (though all records of her birth had been obliterated) the princess without a name.

When he first heard the story of the hidden princess Akbar summoned his favorite painter Dashwanth to meet him at the Place of Dreams by the Best of All Possible Pools. When Akbar came to the throne at the age of not-quite-fourteen Dashwanth had been an apparently ignorant and shockingly gloomy boy of his own age whose father was one of the emperor’s palanquin bearers. Secretly, however, he was a great draftsman whose genius was bursting out of him. At night when he was sure nobody was looking he covered the walls of Fatehpur Sikri with graffiti—not obscene words or images, but caricatures of the grandees of the court so cruelly accurate that they all became determined to hunt him down as soon as possible and cut off those satirical hands. Akbar called Abul Fazl and the first master of the royal art studio, the Persian Mir Sayyid Ali, to meet him at the Place of Dreams. “You’d better find him before his enemies, whoever he is,” he told them, “because we do not want such a talent extinguished by an angry nobleman’s sword.” A week later Abul Fazl returned, holding a small, dark, scrawny youth by the ear. Dashwanth was wriggling and protesting loudly, but Abul Fazl dragged him up to Akbar while the emperor was playing human pachisi. Mir Sayyid Ali followed close behind the miscreant and his captor, managing to look simultaneously delighted and grim. The emperor glanced briefly away from his human pieces, the pretty black slave girls standing on the pachisi board, commanded Dashwanth to join the imperial art studio immediately, and forbade any person in the court to do him harm.

Not even the emperor’s wicked aunt and chief nurse Maham Anaga dared plot against Dashwanth in the face of such an order, even though the portrait he had drawn of her and her son Adham had been not only the most cruel but the most prophetic of all his works. The caricature of Maham Anaga appeared on the outside wall of the Hatyapul brothel. She was depicted to the general approval of the common people as a cackling blue-faced hag surrounded by bubbling potions, while the sniveling, murderous Adham was drawn as a reflection in one large glass retort, falling from the castle ramparts onto his head. Six years later, when Adham, in a delirious bid for power, physically attacked Akbar and was sentenced by the emperor to be hurled headfirst to his death off the city walls, the monarch remembered Dashwanth’s prophecy with amazement. But Dashwanth said he didn’t recall doing it, and the picture had been cleaned off the brothel wall long before, so the emperor was left to question his memory and wonder how much of his waking life had been infected by dreams.

Dashwanth quickly became one of the brightest stars of Mir Sayyid Ali’s studio and made his name painting bearded giants flying through the air on enchanted urns, and the hairy, spotted goblins known as
devs,
and violent storms at sea, and blue and gold dragons, and heavenly sorcerers whose hands reached down from the clouds to save heroes from harm, to satisfy the wild, fantastic imagination—the
khayal
—of the youthful king. Over and over again, he painted the legendary hero Hamza on his three-eyed fairy horse overcoming improbable monsters of all types, and understood better than any other artist involved in the fourteen-yearlong Hamza cycle which was the atelier’s pride and joy that he was painting the emperor’s dream-autobiography into being, that although his hand held the brush it was the emperor’s vision that was appearing on the painted cloths. An emperor was the sum of his deeds, and Akbar’s greatness, like that of his alter ego Hamza, was not only demonstrated by his triumphs over enormous obstacles—recalcitrant princes, real-life dragons,
devs,
and the like—it was actually created by those triumphs. The hero in Dashwanth’s pictures became the emperor’s mirror, and all the one hundred and one artists gathered in the studio learned from him, even the Persian masters, Mir Sayyid Ali and Abdus Samad. In their collaborative paintings of the adventures of Hamza and his friends, Mughal Hindustan was literally being invented; the union of the artists prefigured the unity of the empire and, perhaps, brought it into being. “Together we are painting the emperor’s soul,” Dashwanth told his collaborators sadly. “And when his spirit leaves his body it will come to rest in these pictures, in which he will be immortal.”

In spite of all his artistic achievements, Dashwanth’s depressive personality never changed for the better. He never married, lived the celibate life of a
rishi,
and as the years passed his moods darkened further and there were long periods when he was unable to work at all, but sat in his little cubicle at the art studio staring for hours at an empty corner, as if it contained one of the monsters he had depicted with such mastery for so many years. In spite of his increasingly odd behavior, however, he continued to be recognized as the finest of the Indian painters who had learned their trade under the two Persian masters who had accompanied Akbar’s father Humayun home from exile years earlier. So it was Dashwanth whom Akbar summoned when he had his idea about undoing his grandfather’s harsh deed and restoring the hidden princess to the history of her family at last. “Paint her into the world,” he exhorted Dashwanth, “for there is such magic in your brushes that she may even come to life, spring off your pages, and join us for feasting and wine.” The emperor’s own life-giving powers had been temporarily exhausted by the immense effort of creating and then sustaining his imaginary wife Jodha, and so in this instance he was unable to act directly, and had to rely on art.

Dashwanth at once began to paint the life of Akbar’s lost great-aunt in a series of extraordinary folios that put even the Hamza pictures in the shade. All Ferghana sprang to life: the three-gated, water-swallowing fortress of Andizhan—nine streams flowed into it but none flowed out—and the twelve-peaked mountain above the neighboring town of Osh, and the desert wilderness where the twelve dervishes lost each other in a fierce wind, and the region’s many snakes, bucks, and hares. In the very first picture Dashwanth completed he showed the hidden princess as a beautiful four-year-old girl wandering with a little basket in the gorgeous woodlands of the Yeti Kent mountains, collecting belladonna leaves and roots, to add brilliance to her eyes and perhaps also to poison her enemies, and also discovering large expanses of the mythical plant the locals called
ayïq otï,
otherwise known as the mandrake root. The mandrake—or “man-dragon”—was a relative of the deadly nightshade and looked quite like it above ground; but below the earth its roots had the shapes of human beings and they screamed when you pulled them up into the air just as human beings would scream if you buried them alive. Its powers of enchantment needed no explanation and everyone who saw that first painting realized that Dashwanth’s exceptional powers of intuition were revealing the hidden princess as a born Enlightened One, who instinctively knew what to do to protect herself, and also to conquer men’s hearts, which so often turned out to be the same thing.

The painting itself worked a kind of magic, because the moment old Princess Gulbadan looked at it in Akbar’s private rooms she remembered the girl’s name, which had been weighing down the tip of her tongue for days and making it difficult for her to eat. “Her mother was Makhdum Sultan Begum,” Gulbadan said as she bent low over the glowing page, speaking so softly that the emperor also had to bend down to hear. “Makhdum, yes, that was the mother’s name, the last true love of Umar Sheikh Mirza. And the girl was Qara Köz!—Qara Köz, that was it!—and Khanzada hated her poisonously, until, of course, she decided to love her instead.”

Gulbadan Begum remembered the tales of the vanity of Khanzada Begum. Every morning as Lady Khanzada arose for the day (she told the emperor) her chief lady-in-waiting was instructed to say, “Lo, she wakes, Khanzada Begum; the most beautiful woman in the world opens her eyes and regards her beauty’s domain.” And when she went to pay her respects to her father Umar Sheikh Mirza, “Lo, she is come, your daughter, the most beautiful woman in the world,” the heralds cried, “she is come, who rules in beauty as you rule in might,” and on entering her mother’s boudoir, Khanzada heard something similar from that dragon-queen herself; Qutlugh Nigar Khanum, breathing fire from her eyes and smoke from her nose, trumpeted her firstborn child’s arrival. “Khanzada, most beautiful daughter in the world, come to me and let me feast my poor fading eyes.”

But then the youngest princess was born to Makhdum Sultan Begum. From the day of her birth she was nicknamed Qara Köz, which was to say Black Eyes, on account of the extraordinary power of those orbs to bewitch all upon whom they gazed. From that day forward, Khanzada noticed a change in the timbre of her daily adorations, which began to contain a higher level of insincerity than was acceptable. In the years that followed there were a number of murder attempts on the little girl, none of which was ever traced back to Khanzada. There was poison in a cup of milk which Lady Black Eyes drank down; she was unharmed, but her lapdog, to whom she gave a final few sips, died instantly, writhing with pain. Later there was another drink to which someone had added a quantity of crushed diamonds, to inflict on the beautiful child the dreadful death known as “drinking fire,” but the diamonds passed through her without harming her and the murder attempt only came to light when a nursemaid slave, cleaning the royal toilet, found the stones twinkling in the princess’s feces.

When it became plain that Lady Black Eyes was the possessor of superhuman powers the murder attempts ceased, and Khanzada Begum, swallowing her pride, decided to change her tactics and began to coddle and cosset her infant rival instead. It wasn’t long before the older half-sister had fallen under the younger girl’s spell. It began to be said in the court of Umar Sheikh Mirza that his youngest daughter might be the reincarnation of the legendary Alanquwa, the Mongol sun-goddess who was the ancestor of Temüjin or Chingiz or Genghis Khan, and who, because she controlled all light, could also make the spirits of darkness subservient to her by threatening to enlighten, and so obliterate, the shadows where they hid. Alanquwa was the mistress of life and death. A religious cult of sun-worshippers began to spring up around the growing child.

It didn’t last long. Her beloved father the
padishah
or king soon met with a cruel fate. He had gone to the Akhsi fortress near Andizhan—ah, Akhsi, where the delicious
mirtimurti
melons grew!—Akhsi, painted by Dashwanth as being built on the very edge of a deep ravine—and while he was visiting his pigeons in their pigeoncote the ground gave way beneath his feet and the
padishah,
the pigeons, and the pigeoncote all tumbled into the ravine and were lost. Lady Black Eyes’ half-brother Babar became king at the age of twelve. She herself was still only four years old. In the midst of family tragedy and the chaos that followed it, the subject of Qara Köz’s power of occult Enlightenment was forgotten. Alanquwa the sun-goddess retreated once again to her proper place in the sky.

The fall of Umar Sheikh Mirza, the great-grandfather of the king of kings, was depicted with panache in one of Dashwanth’s finest works. The
padishah
was shown upside down against the blackness of the ravine, its stone walls rushing past him on either side, with the details of his life and character woven into the intricately abstract borders of the image: a short, fat man, good-natured and talkative, a backgammon player, a just man, but also a man who picked fights, a scarred paladin who knew how to punch, and, like all his descendants, like Babar, Humayun, Akbar, and Akbar’s sons Salim, Daniyal, and Murad, a man excessively fond of wine and hard liquor, and of the candy or sweetmeat called
majun
that was made from the cannabis plant and had led to his sudden demise. In a
majun
haze he had chased a pigeon too close to the edge of the cliff and then down he went, to that netherworld in which it mattered not if you were short or fat or good-natured or talkative or just, in which there were no backgammon partners or opponents to fight, and where the delirious haze of
majun
could surround a man through all eternity.

Dashwanth’s picture looked deep into the abyss and saw the demons waiting to welcome the king to their kingdom. The image was plainly an act of
lèse-majesté,
because even to suggest that the emperor’s ancestor might have fallen into the inferno was a crime punishable by death, containing as it did the suggestion that His Majesty might be headed the same way, but when Akbar saw the picture he simply laughed and said, “Hell sounds like a much more enjoyable place to me than all that tedium of angels by the side of God.” When the Water Drinker Badauni was told about this saying he concluded that the Mughal empire was doomed, because God would surely not tolerate a monarch who was turning into a Satanist before their very eyes. The empire survived, however, not forever, but for long enough; and so did Dashwanth, but for a much shorter time.