The Enchantress of Florence (31 page)

Il Machia said goodbye to his old companion. “In the beginning there were three friends,” he said, “Antonino Argalia, Niccolò ‘il Machia,’ and Ago Vespucci. Two of the three loved to travel, the third loved to stay at home. Now, of the two travelers, one has gone forever, and the other is marooned. My horizons have shrunk and I have only endings to write. And it’s you, my beloved Ago, you, the homebody, who are setting out to find a new world.” Then he reached out his hand and put three
soldi
into Ago’s palm. “I owe you these,” he said. A few minutes later, as the two riders and the man in the cart disappeared round a bend in the road, the early morning sunlight kissed Ago Vespucci’s hair, which was so thin now, so white. But in that yellow light it looked as if he possessed once again the golden hair of boyhood, when he and il Machia first went hunting in the Caffagio oak wood, and the
vallata
grove near Santa Maria dell’Impruneta, and also in the forest around the castle of Bibbione, hoping to find a mandrake root.

{
19
}

He was Adam’s heir, not Muhammad’s

H
e was Adam’s heir, not Muhammad’s or the caliph’s, Abul Fazl told him; his legitimacy and authority sprang from his descent from the First Man, the father of all men. No single faith could contain him, nor any geographical territory. Greater than the king of kings who ruled Persia before the Muslims came, superior to the ancient Hindu notion of the Chakravartin—the king whose chariot wheels could roll everywhere, whose movements could not be obstructed—he was the Universal Ruler, king of a world without frontiers or ideological limitations. What followed from this was that human nature, not divine will, was the great force that moved history. He, Akbar, the perfect man, was the engine of time.

The sun had not yet risen, but the emperor was up and about. Sikri in shadow seemed to embody the great mysteries of life. It felt to him like an elusive world of questions to which he must find responses. This was his time of day for meditation. He did not pray. Once in a while he would go to the great mosque he had built around Chishti’s shrine, for appearances’ sake, to still the gossip of sharp tongues. Badauni’s tongue. The tongue of the Crown Prince, who was even less godly than his father but who allied himself with the god-botherers just to spite him. Mostly, however, the emperor liked to use these early hours, before the sun came to heat the stones of Sikri and the emotions of its citizens, to think things through, the high things, not the low quotidian irritations like Prince Salim. He meditated again at noon, and in the evening, and at midnight, but the early meditation was the one he liked best. Musicians came to play religious hymns quietly in the background. Often he waved them away and allowed the silence to caress him. The silence broken only by the dawn cries of the birds.

Sometimes—for he was a man of many desires—his high considerations were interrupted by images of women: dancing girls, concubines, even the royal wives. In the old days, he had most often been distracted by thoughts of Jodha, his imaginary queen; her sharp tongue, her beauty, her sexual expertise. He was not a perfect man, he knew that in his heart, but for a long time he had thought of her as his perfect woman. Companion, helpmeet, erotic tiger, no man could wish for more. She was his masterpiece, or so he had thought for a long time, a dream made flesh, a traveler from the world of
khayal,
fancy, whom he had brought across the frontier of the real. Lately, however, things had changed. Jodha no longer had the power to interrupt his musings. A different woman visited him instead. Qara Köz, Lady Black Eyes, the hidden princess: for a long time he refused to recognize her, refused to understand in which direction his heart was being drawn, for it was leading him toward an impossibility, a passion that could never be consummated, that was, in every sense of the word, improper. He was bent on the sounds of the future and she was an echo from the distant past. Perhaps that was what lured him, her nostalgic gravity; in which case she was indeed a dangerous sorceress, who would drag him backward in time, and consequently backward in every way, in his ideas, his beliefs, his hopes.

She would be bad for him. She would entice him into the delirium of an impossible love and he would sink into her and away from the world of law and action and majesty and destiny. Maybe she had been sent to do this. Perhaps Niccolò Vespucci was an enemy—the queen mother Hamida Bano was one of the proponents of this theory—an agent of the Christian otherworld from which he had emerged, an assassin sent to destroy him by planting this scarlet woman, this deracinated renegade, in his mind. No man could capture Sikri by force of arms but the hidden princess could perhaps defeat him from within himself. She was bad for him. Yet she was the one who came, more and more often, and there were things she understood that Jodha had never grasped. She understood, for example, silence. When the hidden princess came to him she did not speak. It was not her way to chide or tease. She did not speak or giggle or sing. She brought with her a scent of jasmine, and simply sat down beside him, did not touch him, and watched the day begin, until the eastern horizon was rimmed with red, and a sweet breeze got up, and in that instant they became a single person, he was united with her as he had never been with any woman, and then, with infinite delicacy, she left him, and he waited alone for the first, loving touches of the dawn.

No, she was not bad for him, and he would defy all who said so. He could not see evil in her, or in the man who had brought her here. How could such an adventuresome spirit be condemned? Qara Köz was a woman such as he had never met, a woman who had forged her own life, beyond convention, by the force of her will alone, a woman like a king. This was a new dream for him, an undreamed vision of what a woman might be. It alarmed him, aroused him, intoxicated him, possessed him. Yes, Qara Köz was extraordinary; and so, the emperor believed, was Vespucci, or Mogor dell’Amore. The emperor had tested him and found great merit there. He was not an enemy. He was a favorite. He deserved to be praised, not blamed.

Akbar forced his thoughts back onto their proper path. He was not a perfect man, that was a flatterer’s phrase, and Abul Fazl’s flatteries led him into what Mogor dell’Amore had called the webs of paradox. To elevate a man to near-divine status, and to allow him absolute power, while arguing that human beings and not gods were the masters of human destinies contained a contradiction that would not survive much examination. Besides, the evidence of the interference of faith in human affairs was scattered all around him. He had not been able to forget the suicide of the angel-voiced sisters Tana and Riri for whom death had been preferable to compromising their faith. He did not wish to be divine. If there had never been a God, the emperor thought, it might have been easier to work out what goodness was. This business of worship, of the abnegation of self in the face of the Almighty, was a distraction, a false trail. Wherever goodness lay, it did not lie in ritual, unthinking obeisance before a deity but rather, perhaps, in the slow, clumsy, error-strewn working out of an individual or collective path.

Again, at once, he was mired in contradictions. He did not wish to be divine but he believed in the justice of his power, his absolute power, and, given that belief, this strange idea of the goodness of disobedience that had somehow slipped into his head was nothing less than seditious. He had power over men’s lives by right of conquest. That was the inevitable conclusion to which any realistic prince must come, that might was right and all the rest, this endless meditation on virtue, for example, was decoration. The victor was the man of virtue, that was all that needed to be said. Difference existed, there would be executions and suicides, but discord could be quelled, and it was his fist that could quell it. But what, then, of the voice within, that whispered every morning about harmony, not the foolish all-men-are-one nostrums of the mystics, but this stranger idea. That discord, difference, disobedience, disagreement, irreverence, iconoclasm, impudence, even insolence might be the wellsprings of the good. These thoughts were not fit for a king.

He thought of the faraway dukes in the foreigner’s tale. They did not claim a divine right to their lands either, but only the right of the victor. Their philosophers too portrayed the human being standing at the center of his time, his city, his life, his church. But foolishly they ascribed man’s humanity to God, they required divine sanction to support their case in this matter, the higher matter of Man, even though they dispensed with the need for such a sanction in the lower matter of power. How confused they were and how little they were too, ruling a mere city in Tuscany and a Roman bishopric to go with it, and how much they thought of themselves. He was the ruler of the frontierless universe and he saw more clearly than they. No, he corrected himself, he did not, and was indulging in mere bigotry if he asserted it. Mogor had been right.
The curse of the human race is not that we are so different from one another, but that we are so alike.

Daylight spilled across the carpeted floor and he stood up. It was time to show himself at the
jharokha
window and accept the adoration of the people. The people were in celebratory mood today—this, too, they had in common with the populace of that other city whose streets he walked in dreams, this talent for merrymaking—because it was their emperor’s solar birthday, the fifteenth of October, and His Majesty would be weighed, twelve times each, against, among other things, gold, silk, perfumes, copper, ghee, iron, grain, and salt, and the ladies of the harem would send each household its share of the largesse. The breeders of livestock would each receive as many sheep, goats, and chickens as the king had years. A quantity of other animals, intended for the slaughterhouse, would be freed to run wild and take their chances. Later, in the harem, he would take part in the ceremony of the tying of the knot in the string of his life, the string that kept the record of his age. And today, also, he had a decision to make, concerning the foreigner who claimed to be a “Mughal of Love.”

The emperor had experienced many feelings concerning this individual: amusement, interest, disappointment, disillusion, surprise, amazement, fascination, irritation, pleasure, perplexity, suspicion, affection, boredom, and increasingly, it was necessary to admit it, fondness and admiration. One day he understood that this was also the way in which parents responded to their children, except that in his own sons’ case his moments of fondness were rare, while disappointment, disillusion, and suspicion were constants. The Crown Prince had been plotting against him almost from the cradle, and all three boys were degenerates, but the man with the story of Qara Köz to tell was invariably respectful, undeniably intelligent, plainly fearless, and he wove quite a yarn. Of late Akbar had begun to entertain an almost scandalous notion concerning this increasingly amiable Vespucci, who had settled in so well to court life at Sikri that almost everyone now treated him as if he belonged there by right. Prince Salim loathed him, and so did the religious fanatic Badauni, whose secret book of poisonous attacks on the emperor grew fatter and fatter every day while its author grew thinner and thinner, but those enmities redounded greatly to his credit. His mother and Queen Mariam-uz-Zamani, his senior, actually existing wife, detested him too, but they lacked imagination and opposed all intrusions of dream-worlds into the real.

The almost scandalous notion concerning Vespucci had nagged at Akbar for some time now, and to put it to the test he had started involving the foreigner in matters concerning affairs of state. The yellow-haired “Mughal” had mastered, almost at once, the complex details of the
mansabdari
system by which the empire was governed and upon which its survival depended, the pyramid of rank-holders who were expected to maintain troops and horses according to their seniority and who received, in return, personal fiefdoms which were the source of their wealth. Within days he had memorized the names of every
mansabdar
in the empire—and there were thirty-three ranks of these officers, from the royal princes who commanded ten thousand men to the lowly commanders of ten—and, in addition, he had briefed himself on the rank-holders’ performance, and put himself in a position to advise the emperor on which
mansabdars
merited promotion and which of them were failing in their tasks. It was the foreigner who proposed to Akbar the fundamental change in the structure of the system that would guarantee the stability of the empire for a hundred and fifty years. Originally most of the
mansabs
were either Turanis, Central Asians of Mughal ethnic stock whose family origins lay in the vicinity of Ferghana and Andizhan, or else Persians. Persuaded by Mogor, however, Akbar began to include large numbers of other peoples, Rajputs, Afghans, and Indian Muslims, until no group formed a majority. The Turanis were still the largest group but after the great reform they held only one-quarter of the posts. As a result no single group could dictate terms to the rest, and all of them were obliged to get along and co-operate.
Sulh-i-kul.
Complete peace. It was all a question of organization.

So he was a man with talents other than magic tricks and storytelling. The emperor, very favorably impressed, began to test the young man’s athletic and military skills, and discovered that he could ride a horse bareback, hit a target with an arrow, and wield a sword with more than adequate aplomb. Off the fields of play and combat, his gift of tongues was already renowned, and he rapidly became an expert at the court’s most popular indoor games, such as the board game
chandal mandal,
and the card game of
ganjifa,
which he enlivened by trying to identify the color cards with the grandees of Sikri.
Ashwapati,
the Lord of Horses, the highest card in the game, must of course be the emperor himself.
Dhanpati,
the Lord of Treasures, was obviously the finance minister Raja Todar Mal, and
Tiyapati,
the Queen of Ladies, was, naturally, Jodha Bai. Raja Man Singh was
Dalpati,
the Lord of Battle, and Birbal, beloved above all others, first among equals, should probably be
Garhpati,
Lord of the Fort. Akbar was hugely amused by these conceits. “And you, my Mughal of Love,” he said, “you must be
Asrpati,
I think.” That was the Lord of the Genii, the magicians’ and sorcerers’ king. Then the foreigner dared to say, “And
Ahipati,
the Lord of Snakes,
Jahanpanah
…might that be the Crown Prince, Salim?”

In short, this was a man with qualities, which was the first requirement for becoming a man of quality. “Stories can wait,” the emperor told him. “You need to improve your knowledge of how things are around here.” So Mogor dell’Amore was apprenticed first to Raja Todar Mal and then to Raja Man Singh, to be initiated into the mysteries of finance and governance, and when Birbal rode west toward the fortresses of Chittorgarh and Mehrangarh, Amer and Jaisalmer, to check up on the empire’s subjects and allies in those parts, the foreigner accompanied him in the role of a senior aide, and returned wide-eyed with wonder at the emperor’s power, having seen those impregnable fortress palaces whose princes had all bowed the knee to the king of kings. As the months lengthened into years it became clear to everyone that the tall yellow-haired man was no longer to be considered a foreigner. The “Mughal of Love” had become the Grand Mughal’s adviser and confidant.