The Enchantress of Florence (18 page)

While you were anesthetized to the tragedy of your life you were able to survive. When clarity was returned to you, when it was painstakingly restored, it could drive you mad. Your reawakened memory could derange you, the memory of humiliation, of so much handling, of so many intrusions, the memory of men. Not a palace but a brothel of memories, and behind those memories the knowledge that those who loved you were dead, that there was no escape. Such knowledge could make you come to your feet, gather yourself, and run. If you ran fast enough you might be able to escape your past and the memory of everything that had been done to you, and the future as well, the inescapable bleakness ahead. Were there brothers to rescue you? No, your brothers were dead. Perhaps the world itself was dead. Yes, it was. To be a part of the dead world it was necessary that you die as well. It was necessary that you run as fast as possible until you reached the edge between the worlds and then you didn’t stop you ran on across that border as if it wasn’t there as if glass was air and air was glass, the air shattering around you like glass as you fell. The air slicing you to pieces as if it were a blade. It was good to fall. It was good to fall out of life. It was good.

“Argalia, my friend,” Niccolò said to the phantom of the traitor, “you owe me a life.”

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14
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After Tansen sang the song of fire

A
fter Tansen sang the song of fire, the
deepak raag,
and made lamps at the House of Skanda run by the Skeleton and Mattress burst into flame by the power of his music, he was found to be suffering from serious burns. In the ecstasy of the performance he hadn’t noticed his own body beginning to show scorch marks as it heated up under the fierce blaze of his genius. Akbar sent him home to Gwalior in a royal palanquin, telling him to rest and not return until his wounds had healed. In Gwalior he was visited by two sisters, Tana and Riri, who were so distressed by his injuries that they began to sing
megh malhar,
the song of the rain. Soon a gentle drizzle began to fall on Mian Tansen even though he was lying in the shade. Nor was this any ordinary rain. As Riri and Tana sang they removed the bandages from his wounds and as the rain washed his skin it became whole again. All Gwalior was agog with the story of the miracle of the rain-song and when Tansen returned to Sikri he told the emperor about the marvelous girls. At once Akbar dispatched Birbal to invite the sisters to the court and sent them gifts of jewels and clothes to thank them for their feat. But when Tana and Riri met Birbal and heard what he wanted they grew solemn and withdrew to discuss the matter, refusing all the emperor’s gifts. After a time they emerged and told Birbal they would give him their reply the next morning. Birbal spent the night feasting and drinking as the guest of the Maharajah of Gwalior in his great fortress but when he returned to Tana and Riri’s house the next day he found everyone plunged into deep mourning. The sisters had drowned themselves in a well. As strictly observant Brahmins they had not wanted to serve the Muslim king, and feared that if they refused then Akbar would treat the rebuff as an insult and their families would suffer the consequences. To avoid such an outcome they had preferred to sacrifice their own lives.

The news of the suicide of the sisters with the enchanted voices plunged the emperor into a deep depression, and when the emperor was depressed the whole city held its breath. In the Tent of the New Worship the Water Drinkers and Wine Lovers found it impossible to continue with their arguments and the royal wives and concubines stopped squabbling as well. When the heat of the day had passed Niccolò Vespucci who called himself Mogor dell’Amore waited outside the royal quarters as he had been directed but the emperor was not in the mood for his tales. Then near sunset Akbar burst from his rooms accompanied by guards and punkah-wallahs and headed toward the Panch Mahal. “You,” he said when he saw Mogor, in the voice of a man who has forgotten about his visitor’s existence, and then, turning away, “Very well. Come on.” The bodies of the men guarding the emperor’s person moved apart a little and Mogor was drawn into the circle of power. He had to walk quickly. The emperor was moving at speed.

Under the little cupola at the apex of the Panch Mahal the Emperor of Hindustan looked out over Sikri’s golden lake. To his rear there were body-servants wielding large feathered fans, and beside him stood the yellow-haired European man who wanted to tell him a tale about a lost princess. “You speak only of the love of lovers,” the emperor said, “but we are thinking of the love of the people for their prince, which we confess we much desire. Yet these girls died because they preferred division to unity, their gods to ours, and hatred to love. We conclude, therefore, that the love of the people is fickle. But what follows from that conclusion? Should we become a cruel tyrant? Should we act in such a way as to engender universal fear? Does only fear endure?”

“When the great warrior Argalia met the immortal beauty Qara Köz,” Mogor dell’Amore replied, “a story began which would regenerate all men’s belief—your belief, grand Mughal, husband of husbands, lover of lovers, king of kings, man of men!—in the undying power and extraordinary capacity of the human heart for love.”

By the time the emperor descended from the top of the Panch Mahal and retired for the night the cloak of sadness had slipped from his shoulders. The city let out a collective sigh and the stars shone a little more brightly overhead. The sadness of emperors, as everyone knew, threatened the safety of the world, because of its capacity for metamorphosis into weakness, or violence, or both. The emperor’s good mood was the best guarantee of an uneventful life, and if it was the stranger who had restored Akbar’s spirits then much credit was due to him, and he had earned the right to be thought of as a friend in need. The stranger, and perhaps also the subject of his story, the Lady Black Eyes, Princess Qara Köz.

That night the emperor dreamed of love. In his dream he was once again the caliph of Baghdad, Harun al-Rashid, wandering incognito, this time, through the streets of the city of Isbanir. All of a sudden he, the caliph, developed an itch that no man could cure. He returned swiftly to his palace in Baghdad, scratching himself all over throughout the twenty-mile journey, and when he got home he bathed in asses’ milk and asked his favorite concubines to massage his whole body with honey. Still the itch drove him mad and no doctor could find the cure, though they cupped him and leeched him until he was at the very gates of death. He dismissed those quacks and when he regained his strength decided that if the itch was incurable the only thing to do was to distract himself so thoroughly that he stopped noticing it.

He summoned the most famous comedians in his realm to make him laugh, and the most knowledgeable philosophers to stretch his brain to the limit. Erotic dancers aroused his desires and the most skillful courtesans satisfied them. He built palaces and roads and schools and race tracks and all of these things served well enough but the itching continued without the slightest sign of improvement. He had the whole city of Isbanir placed in quarantine and fumigated its gutters to try to attack the itching plague at its source but the truth was that very few people seemed to be itching as badly as he was. Then on another night when he went cloaked and secret through the streets of Baghdad he saw a lamp at a high window and when he looked up he glimpsed a woman’s face illuminated by the candle so that she seemed to be made of gold. For that single instant the itching stopped completely but the moment she closed her shutters and blew out the candle it returned with redoubled force. It was then that the caliph understood the nature of his itch. In Isbanir he had seen that same face for a similar instant looking down from another window and the itching had begun after that. “Find her,” he told the vizier, “for that is the witch who has hexed me.”

Easier said than done. The caliph’s men brought seven women a day before him on each of the next seven days, but when he obliged them to bare their faces he saw at once that none of them was the one he sought. On the eighth day, however, a veiled woman came to the court unbidden and asked for an audience, saying she was the one who could ease the caliph’s pain. Harun al-Rashid had her admitted right away. “So you are the sorceress,” he cried. “I am nothing of the sort,” she answered him. “But ever since I caught a glimpse of a man’s hooded face in the streets of Isbanir I have been itching uncontrollably. I even left my hometown and moved here to Baghdad hoping the move would ease my affliction, but it was no use. I have tried to occupy myself, to distract myself, and have woven great tapestries and written volumes of poetry, all to no avail. Then I heard that the caliph of Baghdad was looking for a woman who made him itch and I knew the answer to the riddle.”

With that she boldly cast off her veiling garment and at once the caliph’s itches disappeared completely and were replaced by an entirely different sentiment. “You too?” he asked her and she nodded. “No more itching. Something else instead.” “And that, too, is an affliction no man can heal,” said Harun al-Rashid. “Or, in my case, no woman,” the lady replied. The caliph clapped his hands and announced his forthcoming marriage; and he and his Begum lived happily ever after, until the coming of Death, the Destroyer of Days.

Such was the emperor’s dream.

As the story of the hidden princess began to spread through the noble villas and common gullies of Sikri a languid delirium seized hold of the capital. People began to dream about her all the time, women as well as men, courtiers as well as guttersnipes, sadhus as well as whores. The vanished Mughal enchantress of faraway Herat, which her lover Argalia afterward dubbed “the Florence of the East,” proved that her powers were undiminished by the passage of the years and her probable death. She even bewitched the queen mother Hamida Bano, who ordinarily had no time for dreams. However, the Qara Köz who visited Hamida Bano’s sleeping hours was a paragon of Muslim devotion and conservative behavior. No alien knight was allowed to sully her purity; her separation from her people caused her great anguish and was, it had to be said, probably her older sister’s fault. Old Princess Gulbadan, by contrast, had dreamed up a completely different Qara Köz, a free-spirited adventuress whose irreverent, even blasphemous gaiety was a little shocking but entirely delightful, and the tale of her liaison with the most handsome man in the world was simply delicious, Princess Gulbadan would have envied her if she could, but she was having too much fun living vicariously through her several nights a week. For the Skeleton, chatelaine of the lakeside House of Skanda, Qara Köz was the personification of female sexuality and performed impossible gymnastic feats nightly for the courtesan’s voyeuristic pleasure. But not all the dreams of the hidden princess were fond. Lady Man Bai, lover of the heir to the throne, thought of the absurd kerfuffle about the lost lady as a distraction from herself, the next queen of Hindustan, who should by right of youth and destiny be the object of her future subjects’ fantasies. And Jodha, Queen Jodha alone in her chambers, unvisited by her creator and king, understood that the coming of the hidden princess gave her an imagined rival whose power she might not be able to withstand.

Plainly Lady Black Eyes was becoming all things to all people, an exemplar, a lover, an antagonist, a muse; in her absence she was being used as one of those vessels into which human beings pour their own preferences, abhorrences, prejudices, idiosyncrasies, secrets, misgivings, and joys, their unrealized selves, their shadows, their innocence and guilt, their doubts and certainties, their most generous and also most grudging response to their passage through the world. And her narrator, Niccolò Vespucci the “Mughal of Love,” the emperor’s new favorite, swiftly became the city’s most sought after guest. By day all doors were open to him, and by night an invitation to his chosen place of recreation, the House of Skanda, whose two queens, those emaciated and corpulent twin deities, had reached the point at which they could pick and choose among Sikri’s finest, was the most coveted symbol of status to be had. Vespucci’s own monogamous attachment to the bony, inexhaustible Skeleton, Mohini, was considered admirable. She herself found it hard to credit. “Half the ladies of Sikri would open their back doors for you,” she told him, wonderingly. “Can I really be all you desire?” He enfolded her in a reassuring embrace. “What you should understand,” he said, “is that I have not come all this way just to screw around.”

Why, indeed, had he come? It was a question that vexed many of the city’s keenest minds, and some of its most spiteful intelligences as well. The citizenry’s growing interest in the drink-sodden daily life and sex-crazed nocturnal culture of faraway Florence, as Mogor dell’Amore described it over a long series of banquets in aristocratic villas and drinks of rum in the lower order’s recreational dives, led some to suspect a hedonistic conspiracy to weaken the people’s moral fiber and to erode the moral authority of the One True God. Badauni, the puritanical leader of the Water Drinkers and mentor of the increasingly rebellious Crown Prince Salim, had hated Vespucci ever since his twitting by the foreigner in the Tent of the New Worship. Now he began to see him as an instrument of the Devil. “It is as if your increasingly godless father has conjured up this Satanic homunculus to assist him in corrupting the people,” he told Salim, and added, menacingly, “Something must be done, if there is anyone man enough to do it.”