The Enchantress of Florence (32 page)

“Look out for that snake lord, by the way,” the emperor warned Mogor. “The knife he dreams of planting in my back may find its way into yours.”

Then Birbal died.

The emperor blamed himself for acquiescing in his friend’s wish to be given a military command. But Birbal had taken the uprising of the Raushanai cult, the Afghan Illuminati, surprisingly personally—on, so to speak, the emperor’s behalf. Their leader, Bayazid the Prophet, had stirred Hinduism and Islam together and come up with a pantheist stew of amorality. Birbal was disgusted. “Because God is in everyone and everything, it follows that all acts are divine acts, and therefore, because all acts are godly, there is no difference between right and wrong, good deeds and evil ones, and so we may do exactly as we please?” he scoffed. “
Jahanpanah,
forgive me, but this petty warlord is laughing at you. He has taken the beauty of your desire to find the one faith within all faiths, and turned it into ugliness, to taunt you. For that temerity alone he should be brought down, even if he were not pillaging and plundering like a barbarian. Plunder, of course, is in his opinion permissible—ha!—because the Raushanai are the chosen people, destined by God to inherit the earth, so if they want to grab their inheritance a little ahead of time, who can say they are not entitled?”

The idea of pillage becoming a religious duty, by means of which the elect acquired that which was theirs by divine gift, appealed strongly to the tribes in the Afghan mountains, and the cult grew rapidly. Then Bayazid suddenly died and was replaced as the leader of the Raushanai by the sixteen-year-old Jalaluddin, his youngest son. Birbal’s anger at this development was uncontrollable, for “Jalaluddin” was also the emperor Akbar’s given name, which coincidence greatly compounded the insolence of the Raushanai. “
Jahanpanah,
it is time to answer these insults as they deserve to be answered,” he said. Akbar, amused by such nonmilitary rage, agreed that Birbal could have his way. But the foreigner Mogor dell’Amore did not accompany Birbal. “He’s not ready for an Afghan war,” the emperor pronounced, to general laughter, in the House of Private Audience. “He should be here, at court, keeping us company.”

However, the uprising was no joke. The mountain routes had become well-nigh impassable. And not long after Birbal arrived in the region to teach the Illuminati a lesson he was ambushed in the Malandrai Pass. There were malicious stories afterward about how the great minister tried to save his skin by running away from his troops, but the rumors the emperor believed spoke of betrayal. He suspected that the Crown Prince had somehow been involved but was never able to prove it. Birbal’s body was never found. Eight thousand of his men were slaughtered.

After the calamity of the Malandrai Pass the emperor was wretchedly miserable for a long time, refusing food and drink, utterly bereft. He wrote a verse in his fallen friend’s honor.
You gave the helpless whatever you could, Birbal. Now I am helpless, but you have nothing left for me.
He wrote for the first and last time in the first person, not as a king would, but as a man singing a lament for his beloved. And while he mourned Birbal he sent first Todar Mal and then Man Singh to bludgeon the Raushanai into submission. In the palaces of Sikri he saw voids everywhere, empty spaces where three of his Nine Jewels had been, and which no lesser men could fill. He drew Abul Fazl ever closer and relied on him more and more. And then he had his notion, the almost scandalous notion which he was still weighing carefully eight months after Birbal’s death, on the day of his forty-fourth solar birthday, when he himself was on his way to the royal balance to be weighed.

This was the question to which he was trying to find the answer: should he make the foreigner, Mogor dell’Amore, also known as Niccolò Vespucci, the teller of tall tales who outrageously claimed to be his uncle, who was proving himself to be such an adept administrator and counselor, and to whom he had taken such an unexpected liking, into his honorary son? The rank of
farzand
was among the least-bestowed, most-coveted honors in the empire, and anyone who was awarded the title was at once admitted into the emperor’s inner circle. Was this young rogue, who was more like his younger brother than his child (or his uncle), worthy of so great an accolade? And—just as important—how would such an appointment be received?

He showed himself at the
jharokha
and the crowd cheered mightily. This Mughal of Love, Akbar reflected, was also popular with the masses. His popularity, the emperor suspected, had as much to do with the success of his house of courtesans down by the lake, the House of Skanda where the Skeleton and Mattress held sway, as with the tale of Qara Köz, but it was undeniably the case that the story of the hidden princess had become part of the lore of the capital, and the people’s interest in it refused to fade away. The people knew, too, that the king’s sons were a disappointment. The future of the dynasty was consequently a problem. According to legend the Mughals’ ancestor Timur, at the time a minor bandit, was traveling in the guise of a camel-herder when he was accosted by a mendicant
faqir
and asked for food and water. “If you give me nourishment, I’ll give you a kingdom,” promised the
faqir,
a fellow who had renounced Islam in favor of Hinduism. Timur gave him what he wanted, whereupon the
faqir
threw his cloak over him and began to spank Timur on the behind with the palm of his hand. After eleven blows Timur cast off the cloak in anger. “If you had tolerated more spanking,” the
faqir
said, “your dynasty would have lasted longer. Instead, it will end with your eleventh descendant.” The emperor Akbar was the eighth descendant of Timur the Lame, so, if the legend was to be believed, the Mughals were safe on the throne of Hindustan for three generations more. But the ninth generation was a difficulty. At eighteen, fifteen, and fourteen they were all drunkards, and one of them had the falling sickness, and the Crown Prince, what was there to say about the Crown Prince, he was a horror, that was all.

The emperor on his birthday, seated in the scales of life, being weighed twelve times in rice-milk, contemplated the future. Later he visited the art workshops but his mind was elsewhere. Even in the harem where the women closed around him, their softnesses engulfing him, he was distracted. He felt that he had arrived at a turning point, and that this decision about the foreigner was somehow at its heart. To allow him into the family would be a sign that he was indeed pursuing Abul Fazl’s idea of becoming the World-King, that he could incorporate into his line—into himself—persons, places, narratives, possibilities from lands as yet unknown, lands which might, in their turn, also be subsumed. If one foreigner could become a Mughal then so, in time, could all foreigners. Additionally, it would be a further step in the creation of a culture of inclusion, that very culture which the Raushanai cult satirized merely by existing: his true vision come to life, in which all races, tribes, clans, faiths, and nations would become part of the one grand Mughal synthesis, the one grand syncretization of the earth, its sciences, its arts, its loves, its differences, its problems, its vanities, its philosophies, its sports, its whims. All of which encouraged him to conclude that to honor Mogor dell’Amore with the title of
farzand
would be an act of strength.

Yet might it not also look like weakness? Like sentimentality, self-deception, gullibility? To fall for a smooth-talking stranger about whom nothing was known save what he himself proffered as the incomplete, chronologically problematic tale of himself? For to give him official standing would be, in effect, to say that the truth was no longer considered significant, that it no longer mattered if his tale was just a clever lie. Should not a prince avoid making his contempt for the truth so clear? Should he not defend that value, and then lie when it suited him under cover of that defense? Should not a prince, in short, be colder, less susceptible to fantasies and visions? Perhaps the only vision he should allow himself was power. Did the elevation of the foreigner serve the emperor’s power? Maybe it did. And maybe not.

And beyond these questions lay deeper inquiries still, questions from that world of magic which everyone lived in as passionately as they inhabited the world of tangible materials. When Akbar was glimpsed each day at the
jharokha
window he was feeding this belief; there were devotees below him, members of a burgeoning Cult of the Glimpse, who afterward began to spread stories of miracles. The sick, the dying, the injured were brought there each day, and if Akbar’s eye fell upon them, if he Glimpsed them even as they Glimpsed him, then a cure was the inevitable result. Glimpsing transferred the emperor’s potency to the Glimpsed. Magic invariably flowed from the more magical person (the emperor, the necromancer, the witch) to the lesser: that was one of its laws.

It was important not to offend against the laws of magic. If a woman left you it was because you did not cast the right spell over her, or else because someone else cast a stronger enchantment than yours, or else because your marriage was cursed in such a way that it cut the ties of love between husband and wife. Why did So-and-so rather than Such-and-such enjoy success in his businesses? Because he visited the right enchanter. There was a thing in the emperor that rebelled against all this flummery, for was it not a kind of infantilization of the self to give up one’s power of agency and believe that such power resided outside oneself rather than within? This was also his objection to God, that his existence deprived human beings of the right to form ethical structures by themselves. But magic was all around and would not be denied, and it would be a rash ruler who pooh-poohed it. Religion could be rethought, re-examined, remade, perhaps even discarded; magic was impervious to such assaults. This, finally, was why the story of Qara Köz had so easily possessed the imagination of the people of Sikri. She had taken her magic, “their” magic, into other worlds, worlds with their own occultisms, and her sorcery had proved more potent than theirs. Her sorcery. Which not even he, the emperor, could resist.

The magical issues regarding the foreigner Niccolò Vespucci, the self-styled Mughal of Love, could be stated as follows: was his presence among them a blessing or a curse? Would his elevation to high rank result in the empire being blessed, or would it, by offending against some dark law of Fortune, bring down disaster upon the realm? Was foreignness itself a thing to be embraced as a revitalizing force bestowing bounty and success upon its adherents, or did it adulterate something essential in the individual and the society as a whole, did it initiate a process of decay which would end in an alienated, inauthentic death? The emperor had taken advice from the guardians of the unseen realms, the palmists, astrologers, soothsayers, mystics, and assorted divines who were in plentiful supply in the capital, particularly in the vicinity of Salim Chishti’s tomb, but their advice had been contradictory. He had not asked the foreigner’s fellow Europeans Fathers Acquaviva and Monserrate for their opinions, for their hostility to the storyteller was well known. And Birbal, oh, his beloved, wise Birbal was gone.

He was left, in the end, with himself. Only he could choose.

The day ended. He had not decided. He was meditating at midnight beneath a crescent moon. She came to him, all in silver, silently, and shone.

Things had reached the point at which Jodha had become invisible to many people. The household staff allocated to her service could see her, naturally, because their livelihoods depended upon it, but the other queens, who had always resented her presence, could no longer make her out. She knew something bad was happening to her, and was filled with fear. She felt fainter, and even, from time to time, intermittent, as if she came and went, as if the candle of her being were being snuffed out, relit, then snuffed out and relit again. Birbal was dead, and she was fading, she thought. The world was changing for the worse. The emperor visited her much less these days and when he did he seemed distracted. When he made love to her she had the impression that he was thinking about somebody else.

The spying eunuch, Umar the Ayyar, who could see everything, including some things that hadn’t happened yet, found her resting in the heat of the afternoon in the Chamber of the Winds, the breezy second-story room which had
jalis,
stone filigree-work screens, filling three of the four walls. It was the day after the emperor’s birthday and there was a curious urgency about his movements. Normally he was all languid grace and fluid gestures. Today, however, he was almost flustered, as if the news he had to impart was bouncing around inside him and knocking him off balance. “Okay,” he announced, “a big moment for you. Mary of Eternity and Mary of the Mansion—the wife and mother of the Divine Caliph, the Unique Jewel, and the Khedive of the Age—are personally coming to call.”

Mary of Eternity was Mariam-uz-Zamani, Prince Salim’s real mother, Rajkumari Hira Kunwari, a Kachhwaha Rajput princess of Amer. Mary of the Mansion, Mariam Makani, was the emperor’s mother Hamida Bano. (The Caliph, the Jewel, and the Khedive were all the emperor himself.) If these two great ladies, who had never given the nonexistent queen the time of day before, were coming to see her in her private rooms, something of great significance was afoot. Jodha gathered herself and stood in the position of humility, with folded hands and downcast eyes, to await their arrival.