The Enchantress of Florence (34 page)

After the death of Abul Fazl the emperor became stern. It fell to him to define how his people should live and for too long he had been derelict in carrying out that duty. He banned the sale of liquor to the common people unless it was prescribed by a doctor. He moved against the great prostitute swarms buzzing around the capital like locusts and had them all taken to an encampment called Deviltown some distance away and ordered that any man going to the devil should be obliged to write down his name and home address before entering that zone. He discouraged the eating of cow meat, onions, and garlic, but recommended that people eat tiger to gain courage from its flesh. He declared that religious observance was to be free of persecution irrespective of the religion being observed, temples could be built and
lingams
washed, but he was less tolerant of beards, because beards drew their nourishment from the testicles, which was why eunuchs didn’t have them. He forbade child marriages and disapproved of widow-burning and slavery. He told people not to bathe after having sex. And he summoned the foreigner to the Anup Talao, whose waters had grown choppy and uncalm even though there was no breeze, an augury which meant that things that should have been at peace had become disturbed.

“There are still too many mysteries around you,” the emperor said, irritably. “We can’t rely on a man whose life story doesn’t add up. So tell us everything, let’s have it all out in the open right now, and then we can decide what’s to be done with you, and which way your destiny leads, up to the stars or down into the dust. Clearly, now. Leave nothing out. Today is judgment day.”

“It may be that what I have to say will not find favor, sire,” Mogor dell’Amore replied, “because it concerns
Mundus Novus,
the New World, and the erratic nature, in that half-uncharted territory, of Time.”

Across the Ocean Sea in
Mundus Novus
the ordinary laws of space and time did not apply. As to space, it was capable of expanding violently one day and then shrinking the next, so that the size of the earth seemed either to double or halve. Different explorers brought back radically different accounts of the proportions of the new world, the nature of its inhabitants, and the way in which this new quadrant of the cosmos was prone to behave. There were accounts of flying monkeys and snakes as long as rivers. As for time, it was completely out of control. Not only did it accelerate and slow down in utterly wanton fashion, there were periods—though the word “periods” could not properly be used to describe such phenomena—when it did not move at all. The locals, those few who mastered European languages, confirmed that theirs was a world without change, a place of stasis,
outside time,
they said, and that was the way they preferred it to be. It was possible, and there were philosophers who argued the point vociferously, that time had been brought to
Mundus Novus
by the European voyagers and settlers, along with various diseases. This was why it didn’t work properly. It had not yet adapted to the new situation. “In time,” people in
Mundus Novus
said, “there will be time.” For the present, however, the fluctuating nature of new world clocks simply had to be accepted. The most alarming effect of this chronological uncertainty was that time could run at different speeds for different people, even within families and households. Children would age faster than their parents until they looked older than their progenitors. For some of the conquerors, sailors, and settlers there never seemed to be enough time in the day. For others, there was all the time in the world.

The emperor, listening to Mogor dell’Amore as he told his story, understood that the lands of the West were exotic and surreal to a degree incomprehensible to the humdrum people of the East. In the East men and women worked hard, lived well or badly, died noble or ignoble deaths, believed in faiths that engendered great art, great poetry, great music, some consolation, and much confusion. Normal human lives, in sum. But in those fabulous Western climes people seemed prone to hysterias—such as the Weeper hysteria in Florence—that swept through their countries like diseases and transformed things utterly without warning. Of late the worship of gold had engendered a special type of this extreme hysteria, which had become their history’s driving force. In his mind’s eye Akbar pictured Western temples made of gold, with golden priests inside, and golden worshippers coming to pray, bringing offerings of gold to placate their golden god. They ate gold food and drank gold drinks and when they wept the molten gold ran down their shining cheeks. It was gold that had driven their sailors even further west across the Ocean Sea in spite of the danger of falling off the edge of the world. Gold, and also
India,
which they believed to contain fabulous hoards of gold.

They did not find
India,
but they found…a further west. In this further west they found gold, and searched for more, for golden cities and rivers of gold, and they encountered beings even less probable and impressive than themselves, bizarre, unknowable men and women who wore feathers and skins and bones, and named them
Indians.
Akbar found this offensive. Men and women who made human sacrifices to their gods were being called
Indians!
Some of these otherworld “Indians” were little better than aborigines; and even the ones who had built cities and empires were lost, or so it seemed to the emperor, in philosophies of blood. Their god was half bird, half snake. Their god was made of smoke. Theirs was a vegetable god, a god of turnips and corn. They suffered from syphilis and thought of stones and the rain and stars as living beings. In their fields they worked slowly, even lazily. They did not believe in change. To call these people
Indians
was in Akbar’s emphatic opinion a slight to the noble men and women of Hindustan.

The emperor knew that he had reached a kind of boundary in his mind, a frontier beyond which his powers of empathy and interest could not journey. There were islands here that afterward metamorphosed into continents, and continents that proved to be mere islands. There were rivers and jungles and promontories and isthmuses and to the devil with them all. Maybe there were hydras in those climes, or griffins, or dragons guarding the great treasure heaps that reputedly lay in the jungles’ depths. The Spanish and the Portuguese were welcome to it all. It had begun to dawn on these foolish exotics that they had not discovered a route to
India
but somewhere entirely other, neither East nor West, somewhere that lay between the West and the great Gangetic Sea and the fabled isle of treasures, Taprobane, and beyond that the kingdoms of Hindustan and Cipangu and Cathay. They had discovered that the world was larger than they believed it to be. Good luck to them as they wandered in the Islands and Terra Firma of the Ocean Sea and died of scurvy, hookworm, malaria, consumption, and yaws. The emperor was tired of them all.

And yet this was where she had gone, the delinquent princess of the house of Timur and Temüjin, Babar’s sister, Khanzada’s sister, blood of his blood. No woman in the history of the world had made a journey like hers. He loved her for it and admired her too, but he was also sure that her journey across the Ocean Sea was a kind of dying, a death before death, because death too was a sailing away from the known into the unknown. She had sailed away into unreality, into a world of fantasy which men were still dreaming into being. The phantasm haunting his palace was more real than that flesh-and-blood woman of the past who gave up the real world for an impossible hope, just as she had once given up the natural world of family and obligation for the selfish choices of love. Dreaming of finding her way back to her point of origin, of being rejoined to that earlier self, she was lost forever.

The way east was closed to her. The corsairs in the waters made the sea passage too risky. In the Ottoman world, and in the kingdom of Shah Ismail, she had burned her boats. In Khorasan she feared capture by whoever had filled the gap left by Shaibani Khan. She did not know where Babar was, but the way back to him was barred. In Genoa, at the home of Andrea Doria by the water’s edge, where she had asked Ago Vespucci to take her, she decided she could not go back the way she had come. Nor, fearing the wrath of Florence, could she stay. The grizzled old sea-dog Doria, who was frankly shocked by, but forbore to remark upon, the new, mannish appearance of Qara Köz and her Mirror, gallantly made them welcome—for Qara Köz was still capable of inducing gallantry in men, even men with reputations for callousness and brutality—and assured them that while they were under his protection no Florentine harm could come to them. Doria was the one who first mentioned the possibility of making a new life across the Ocean Sea.

“If I didn’t have so many Barbary pirates to kill,” he said, “I might consider the trip myself, following in the footsteps of Signor Vespucci’s celebrated cousin.” By this time he had killed quite a few such pirates, and his personal fleet, mostly made up of boats seized from the corsairs, now numbered twelve vessels, whose crews’ loyalty was to nobody but Doria himself. Yet he no longer considered himself a true
condottiere,
because of his uninterest in fighting on land. “Argalia was the last of us,” he declared. “I’m just a watery hangover.” In his spare time, when he wasn’t at war, he was doing political battle in Genoa with his rivals in the Adorni and Fregosi families, who kept trying to exclude him from power. “But I have the ships,” he said, and added—unable to restrain himself even though there were ladies present—perhaps because the ladies were disguised as young men—“and they don’t even have penises, do they, Ceva?” Ceva the Scorpion, his tattooed ox of a lieutenant, actually blushed before replying awkwardly, “No, Admiral, none that I have ever been able to make out.”

Doria took his guests into his library and showed them a thing which none of them had ever seen, not even Ago, whose blood relation it concerned: the
Cosmographiae Introductio
by the Benedictine monk Waldseemüller of the monastery of St. Dié-des-Vosges, which came with a vast map that unfolded to cover the floor, a map whose name was almost as big, the
Universalis Cosmographia Secundum Ptholoemaei Traditionem et Americi Vespucii Aliorumque Lustrationes,
the Geography of the World According to the Tradition of Ptolemy and the Contributions of Amerigo Vespucci and Other People. On this map Ptolemy and Amerigo were depicted like colossi, like gods gazing down upon their creation, and upon a large segment of
Mundus Novus
there appeared the word
America.
“I see no reason,” Waldseemüller wrote in his
Introductio,
“why anyone could properly disapprove of a name derived from that of Amerigo, the discoverer, a man of sagacious genius.”

When Ago Vespucci read this he was deeply moved and understood that destiny in the form of his cousin must have been leading him toward the new world all his life, even though he had always been a stick-in-the-mud who thought of wild Amerigo as a hot-air merchant whose accounts of himself needed to be taken with a pinch of salt. He had not known Amerigo very well and had never really tried to know him better, for they had had little in common. But now the voyaging Vespucci was a sagacious genius and had put his name to a new world, and that was worthy of respect.