The Enchantress of Florence (9 page)

Umar the Ayyar visited the crew of the
Scáthach
in their cells, wearing women’s clothing. He was veiled, and his body moved softly, like a woman’s, and the sailors were amazed at a lady’s presence in this place of stone and shadow. “She” did not tell them “her” name or offer any explanation of “her” presence, but only presented them with a stark proposition. The emperor was not convinced of their guilt, the Ayyar said, and was consequently prepared to keep Signor Vespucci under careful surveillance until he betrayed himself, as all criminals eventually did. If they genuinely wished to serve the memory of their dead lord, they would accept the harsh prospect of waiting in the dungeon until the day of Vespucci’s incrimination. If they bowed down before this unkind fate, Umar told them, their innocence would be demonstrated beyond a doubt, and the emperor would pursue Vespucci with all his might, and would surely get his man in the end. But there was no way of knowing whether the wait would be short or long, and the dungeon was the dungeon, that was undeniable; there was no way of sweetening its bitter days. “Nevertheless,” Umar declared, “the only honorable course is to stay.” Alternatively, he continued, he (“she”) had been authorized to arrange for their “escape.” If they chose this path, they would be escorted back to their ship and set free, but it would then become impossible to reopen the Vespucci case, since their flight would be the proof of their guilt; and if they ever returned to the kingdom they would be summarily executed for Lord Hauksbank’s murder. “This is the choice which the emperor offers you in his wisdom,” the eunuch solemnly, and femininely, intoned.

The crew of the
Scáthach
was almost immediately shown to be lacking in honor. “Keep the scurvy murderer,” said Praise-God Hawkins, “we want to go home.” Umar the Ayyar fought down a surge of contempt. The English had no future on this earth, he told himself. A race that rejected the idea of personal sacrifice would surely be erased from time’s record before very long.

By the time the newly renamed Niccolò Vespucci was brought to the emperor’s rooms, wearing his own clothes, and with the leather coat of many colors slung rakishly across his shoulders like a cape, he was entirely restored to himself and grinning mischievously, like a magician who has pulled off an impossible trick, such as making a palace disappear, or walking through a wall of flames unharmed, or making a mad elephant fall in love. Birbal and the emperor were struck by his cockiness. “How did you do it?” the emperor asked him. “Why didn’t Hiran kill you?” Vespucci grinned more widely still. “Sire, it was love at first sight,” he said. “Your elephant has served Your Majesty well, and no doubt he got, from me, so recently your friend and companion, a whiff of familiar perfume.”

Is this what we all do? the emperor asked himself. This habit of the charming lie, this constant embellishment of reality, this pomade applied to the truth. Is the roguishness of this man of three names no more than our own folly writ large? Is the truth too poor a thing for us? Is any man innocent of embellishing it at times, or even of abandoning it entirely? Am “I” no better than he?

Vespucci, meanwhile, was thinking about trust. He, who trusted nobody, had trusted a woman, and she had saved him.
Rescued by a Skeleton,
he thought. A tale of wonder indeed. He took his treasures from their hiding places, the gold regaining its weight as it left the magic overcoat, the jewels heavy in the palm of his hand, and gave them all to her. “Thus I place myself in your power,” he told her. “If you rob me I can do nothing about it.” “You don’t understand,” she answered. “You have gained a greater power over me than I can overthrow.” And in fact he did not immediately understand, and she did not know how to say the word “love,” or how to explain the emotion’s unexpected birth. So it was a mystery that saved him from being proven a thief, and when he was being prepared for the elephant, and had his hands untied, and was left to pray for a moment so that he could be in his Maker’s good graces when he met him, he realized that she had foreseen this possibility as well, and now he drew out of that hiding place where no searcher cares to look the tiny vial of perfume that perfectly synthesized the emperor’s own odor, and fooled the blind old elephant, and saved his life.

The emperor was speaking. The time he had hoped for had come. “Look here, fellow, whatever your name is,” Akbar said. “This hinting and nudging must stop, and your story must at last be told. Out with it quick, before we lose our good mood.”

When Hiran the elephant had placed the foreigner on his back as if he were a Mughal prince, the rider had suddenly understood how he had to begin. A man who always tells his story in the same words is exposed as a liar who has rehearsed his lie too well, he thought. It was important to begin in a different place. “Your Majesty,” he said, “king of kings, Shelter of the World. I have the honor to inform you that I…” The words died on his lips and he stood before the king like a man struck dumb by the gods. Akbar was irritated. “Don’t stop there, man,” he said. “Once and for all, spit the damned thing out.” The foreigner coughed, and began again.

“That I, my lord, am none other than…”

“What?”

“My lord, I find I cannot say it.”

“But you must.”

“Very well—though I fear your response.”

“Nevertheless.”

“Then, my lord, know now that I am, in fact…”

“Yes?”

(A deep breath. Then, the plunge.)

“Your relative by blood. In point of fact: your uncle.”

{
8
}

When life got too complicated for the men

W
hen life got too complicated for the men of the Mughal court they turned to the old women for answers. No sooner had “Niccolò Vespucci” who called himself “Mogor dell’Amore” made his remarkable claim of kinship than the emperor sent messengers to the quarters of his mother Hamida Bano and Gulbadan Begum, his aunt. “As far as we know,” he said to Birbal, “we have no uncles unaccounted for, on top of which this claimant to the title is ten years our junior, yellow-haired, and with no Chaghatai in him that we can perceive—but before we take the next step we will ask the ladies, the Keepers of the Tales, who will let us know for sure.” Akbar and his minister fell into deep discussion in a corner of the room and ignored the probable impostor so thoroughly that he felt his sense of his own existence beginning to waver. Was he really there, in the presence of the Grand Mughal, claiming a tie of blood, or was this some opium hallucination from which he would be well advised to awake? Had he escaped an elephantine death only to commit suicide a few moments later?

Birbal said to Akbar, “The warrior Argalia or Arcalia the fellow has mentioned bears a name I do not know, and
Angelica
is a name of the foreigner’s people, not of ours. Nor are we yet apprised of their part in this tall story, this ‘golden tale.’ But let us not write off these persons on account of their names, for a name, as we know, can be changed.” Raja Birbal had begun his life as a poor Brahmin boy called Mahesh Das, and it was Akbar who had brought him to court and made a prince of him. While the two friends waited for the great ladies they fell into reminiscence, and were young again, and Akbar was hunting, and had lost his way. “Hey! Little fellow! Which of these roads goes to Agra?” the emperor cried, and Birbal, once again six or seven years old, replied gravely, “Sir, none of the roads goes anywhere.” “That is impossible,” Akbar chided him, and little Birbal grinned. “Roads do not move, so they go nowhere,” he said. “But people, traveling to Agra, usually go down this one.” This joke brought the boy to court and gave him a new name, and a new life.

“An uncle?” said Akbar, thoughtfully. “Our father’s brother? Our mother’s brother? The husband of our aunt?” “Or,” said Birbal, in the interests of fairness, “to stretch it a little, the son of your grandfather’s sibling.” There was a merriment beneath their apparent gravity and the foreigner understood that he was being toyed with. The empire was at play while it decided his destiny. Things did not look well.

Crisscrossing the sprawling area of the imperial residences were curtained passageways down which the ladies of the court might move unobserved by inappropriate eyes. Along one such passage, the queen mother Queen Hamida Bano and the senior lady of the court, Princess Gulbadan, were gliding like two mighty boats passing through a narrow canal, with the queen’s intimate confidante Bibi Fatima close behind. “Jiu,” the queen said (it was her pet name for her older sister-in-law), “what madness is little Akbar up to now? Does he need more family than he already has?” “He already has,” repeated Bibi Fatima, who had acquired the bad habit of becoming her mistress’s echo. Princess Gulbadan shook her head. “He knows that the world is still mysterious,” she said, “and the strangest story may turn out to be true.” This remark was so unexpected that the queen fell silent and the two women and the servant floated to the emperor’s rooms without exchanging another word.

It was a breezy day and the elaborately worked cloths shielding them from men’s eyes flapped like anxious sails. Their own ornate garments, the wide skirts, the long shirts, the cloths of modesty wound around their heads and faces, were likewise teased by the wind. The closer they got to Akbar the more powerful the wind became.
Perhaps this is an omen,
the queen thought.
All our certainties are being blown away and we must live in Gulbadan’s universe of mystery and doubt.
Hamida Bano, a fierce, commanding woman, was not attracted to the concept of doubt. It was her opinion that she knew what was what, had been brought up to know it, and it was her duty to convey that information to everyone as clearly as possible. If the emperor had lost sight of what was what then his mother was on her way to remind him. But Gulbadan seemed—oddly—to be of a different mind.

Since Gulbadan’s return from the pilgrimage to Mecca she had seemed less certain of things than before. It was as though her faith in the fixed and unchanging truths of the divine cosmos had been weakened rather than strengthened by her mighty journey. To Hamida Bano’s mind the women’s
hajj,
organized by Gulbadan and composed almost entirely of the older ladies of the court, was itself an indication of the undesirably revolutionary nature of her son’s monarchic style. A women’s
hajj
? she had asked her son when the subject was first raised by Gulbadan. How could he permit such a thing? No, the queen had told him, she would not join it in any circumstance, most certainly not. But then her co-queen Salima had gone, and Sultanam Begum the wife of Askari Khan, who had saved Akbar’s life when his parents abandoned him and went into exile—Sultanam who had been more of a mother to the child Akbar than Hamida herself; and Babar’s Circassian wife, and Akbar’s stepcousins, and Gulbadan’s granddaughter, and various servants and such. Three and a half years away in the holy places! The queen’s long Persian exile had more than satisfied her desires in the travel department, and three and a half years away was horrifying even in the contemplation. Let Gulbadan go to Mecca! The queen mother would reign on at home.

It was certainly the case that during those three and a half years of peace and quiet without Gulbadan’s interminable chatter to put up with Hamida Bano’s own influence over the king of kings had been without rival or hindrance. When women were required to broker a marriage or a peace she was the only great lady to hand. Akbar’s own queens were just girls, except for the Phantom, of course, that ghostly sexpot who had memorized all the dirty books, and there was no need to think overmuch about
her.
But then Gulbadan had returned, and was now Gulbadan the Pilgrim, and there had been a shift in the balance of power. Which made it all the more irritating that the old princess spoke very little about God nowadays, and a good deal more about women, their untapped powers, their ability to do anything they chose, and how they should no longer accept the limitations men placed upon them but arrange their lives for themselves. If they could perform the
hajj
they could climb mountains and publish poetry and rule the world alone. It was a scandal, obviously, but the emperor loved it, any novelty was a delight to him, it was as if he had never stopped being a child and so fell in love with any shiny new notion as if it were a silver rattle in a nursery and not the serious stuff of a proper adult life.

Still: Princess Gulbadan was her senior in age, and the queen mother would always pay her the respect she was due. And oh, all right, it was impossible to dislike Gulbadan, she was always smiling and telling funny stories about some crazy cousin or other, and her heart was a good loving heart, even if her head was full of this new independent stuff. Human beings were not singular creatures, Hamida Bano would tell Gulbadan, they were plural, their lives were made up of interdependent forces, and if you willfully shook one branch of that tree who knew what fruit might fall on your head. But Gulbadan would just smile and go her own way. And everybody liked her. The queen mother liked her too. That was the most irritating thing. That, and Gulbadan’s body of a young woman, as slender and lithe in its old age as it had been in its youth. The queen mother’s body had succumbed comfortably and traditionally to the years, expanding to keep pace with her son’s empire, and now it, too, was a continent of sorts, a realm with mountains and forests and above it all the capital city of her mind, which had not sagged, not at all. My body is what an old woman’s body should be like, Hamida Bano thought. It is
usual.
Gulbadan’s insistence on continuing to look young was further proof of her dangerous lack of respect for tradition.

They entered the emperor’s rooms by the women’s door and seated themselves as usual behind the filigreed walnut screen with marble inlays, and old Gulbadan, inevitably, got things going in the wrong way entirely. She should not have spoken directly to the stranger, but having heard that he spoke their language she insisted on getting right to the point. “Hey! Foreigner!” she shouted in a sharp, high voice. “Now then! What’s this fairy tale you’ve crossed half the world to tell?”

This was the story as he had been told it, the foreigner swore. His mother was a princess of the true Chaghatai blood, a direct descendant of Genghis Khan, a member of the house of Timur, and the sister of the First Mughal Emperor of India, whom she called “the Beaver.” (When he said this Gulbadan Begum sat up very straight behind the screen.) He knew nothing of dates or places, but only the tale as he had been told it, which he was honestly repeating. His mother’s name was Angelica and she was, he insisted, a Mughal princess, and the most beautiful woman anyone had ever seen, and an enchantress without compare, a mistress of potions and spells of whose powers all were afraid. In her youth her brother the Beaver King had been besieged in Samarkand by an Uzbeg warlord named Lord Wormwood, who had demanded that she be given up to him as the price of the Beaver’s safe conduct out of the city when he surrendered it. Then, to insult her, Lord Wormwood briefly gave her as a gift to his young water-carrier Bacha Saqaw, to use as he desired. Two days later Bacha Saqaw’s body began to grow boils in every part, plague buboes hanging from his armpits and groin, and when they burst, he died. After that nobody tried to lay a finger on the witch—until at last she yielded to Wormwood’s gauche amours. Ten years passed. Lord Wormwood was defeated by the Persian King Ishmael, in the battle of Marv by the shores of the Caspian Sea. Princess Angelica was once again a spoil of war.

(Now Hamida Bano too felt a quickening of the pulse. Gulbadan Begum leaned toward her and whispered a word in her ear. The queen mother nodded, and tears filled her eyes. Her servant Bibi Fatima cried as well, just to be supportive.)

The Persian king, in turn, was defeated by the Osmanli, or Ottoman, Sultan…

The women behind the screen could no longer be contained. Queen Hamida Bano was no less excited than her more readily excitable sister-in-law. “My son, come to us,” she commanded loudly—“to us,” Bibi Fatima echoed—and the king of kings obeyed. Then Gulbadan whispered in his ear and he became very still. Then he turned to Birbal, looking genuinely surprised. “The ladies confirm,” he reported, “that a part of this story is already known.
Baboor,
which is to say ‘Babar,’ is an old-fashioned Chaghatai word for beaver, and this ‘Wormwood’ similarly translates into Shiban or Shaibani Khan, and the sister of my grandfather Babar, who was known to one and all as the greatest beauty of her age, was captured by Shaibani after Babar’s defeat by that warlord at Samarkand; and Shaibani a decade later was defeated by Shah Ismail of Persia near the town of Marv, and Babar’s sister fell into Persian hands.”

“Excuse me,
Jahanpanah,
” said Birbal, “but that was Princess Khanzada, if I make no mistake? And of course Princess Khanzada’s story is known. As I myself have learned, Shah Ismail returned her to Babar Shah as an act of friendship, and she lived with great respect in the bosom of the royal family until her sad demise. It is indeed remarkable that this foreigner has learned her story, but he cannot be her descendant. It is true she bore Shaibani a son, but the boy perished on the same day as his father, at the hands of the Persian Shah. And thus this fellow’s story is disproved.”

At this the royal ladies behind the screen shouted together,
“There was a second princess!”
And the servant echoed,
“…cess!”
Gulbadan composed herself. “O radiant king,” she said, “in our family’s story there is a hidden chapter.”

The man who had named himself “Mogor dell’Amore” stood quietly in the heart of the Mughal empire while its most exalted women rehearsed the genealogy of their line. “Allow me to remind you, O all-knowing king, that there were various princesses born to various wives and other consorts,” Gulbadan said. The emperor sighed a little; when Gulbadan started climbing the family tree like an agitated parrot there was no telling how many branches she would need to settle on briefly before she decided to rest. But on this occasion his aunt was almost shockingly concise. “There was Mihr Banu and Shahr Banu and Yadgar Sultan.” “But Yadgar’s mother Agha was not a queen,” Queen Hamida interrupted haughtily. “She was only a concubine.” “…ncubine,” said Bibi Fatima dutifully. “However,” the queen added, “it must be conceded that even though Khanzada was first in years she was by no means first in looks, even though it was officially declared that she was. Some of the concubines’ girls were prettier by far.” “O most luminous king,” Gulbadan continued, “I must inform you that Khanzada, alas, was always the jealous type.”