The Enchantress of Florence (35 page)

Slowly, shyly, with much trepidation, and repeating many times that he was not by nature a traveling man, Ago began to discuss his cousin’s voyages of discovery with Admiral Doria. The words
Venezuela
and
Vera Cruz
were spoken. In the meanwhile Qara Köz had been studying the map of the world. She reacted to the new place names as if she were hearing an incantation, a charm that could bring her her heart’s desire. She wanted to hear more, more.
Valparaiso, Nombre de Dios, Cacafuego, Rio Escondido,
Ago said. He was down on his hands and knees, reading.
Tenochtitlán, Quetzalcoatl, Tezcatlipoca, Montezuma, Yucatán,
Andrea Doria added, and also
Española, Puerto Rico, Jamaica, Cuba, Panama.
“These words which I have never heard,” said Qara Köz, “are telling me my way home.”

Argalia was dead—“At least he died in his hometown, defending what he loved,” Doria said by way of a gruff epitaph, and raised a glass of wine in salute. Ago was a poor substitute for such a man, but Qara Köz knew he was all she had. It was Ago with whom she would make her last journey, Ago and the Mirror. These would be her last guardians. They learned from Doria of the conviction of most westward mariners, and of the rulers of Spain and Portugal too, that a passage to
India
would soon be found, an opening, suitable for shipping, through the landmasses of
Mundus Novus
into the Gangetic Sea. Many people were urgently searching for this middle passage. In the meanwhile the colonies of Española and Cuba were safe to live in, and the new place, Panama, was probably getting safer. In these places the
Indians
were for the most part under control, one million of them in Española, over two million in Cuba. Many of them were Christian converts even though they spoke no Christian tongue. The coastlines were secure at any rate, and even the interiors were being opened up. It was possible, if one had the money, to obtain a cabin on a caravel leaving from Cadiz or Palos de Moguer.

“Then I will go,” announced the princess, gravely, “and wait. And the opening in the new world, for which so many fine men are searching so hard, will undoubtedly be found.” She stood upright with her arms turned outward at the elbows, and her face was illumined by an unearthly light, so that she reminded Andrea Doria of Christ himself, the Nazarene performing His miracles, Christ multiplying loaves and fishes or raising Lazarus from the dead. On Qara Köz’s face was the same strained expression it had acquired in the time of her enchantment of Florence, darkened further by grief and loss. Her powers were failing but she intended to exercise them one last time as they had never been exercised before, and force the history of the world into the course she required it to take. She would enchant the middle passage into being by the sheer force of her sorcery and her will. Andrea Doria looked at the young woman in her olive-green tunic and hose, her cropped black hair standing out from her head like a dark halo, and was overcome. He fell to his knees before her and bent down to touch his hand to her chamois leather boot and remained there with bowed head for a minute or perhaps more. In the years that followed, Doria, who lived to a great old age, thought every single day about what he had done, and was never certain whether he had knelt to receive a blessing or to give one, whether he had felt the need to worship her or protect her, to admire her in her last glory or to seek to dissuade her from her doom. He thought of Christ in Gethsemane and how He must have looked to His disciples as He prepared Himself to die.

“My ship will carry you to Spain,” he said.

On a morning of white mist the
Cadolin,
the legendary corsair fighting ship, set sail from her new master Andrea Doria’s dock at Fassolo with three passengers and Ceva the Scorpion at the helm, and flying the flag of Genoa, the Cross of St. George. When he was saying his farewells Andrea Doria had managed to hold back the emotion that had earlier brought him to his knees. “The library of a man of action is little used,” he told Qara Köz, “but you have given meaning to my books.” He had the feeling that after reading the
Cosmographiae Introductio
and inspecting Waldseemüller’s great map the princess was actually entering the book, moving out of the world of earth, air, and water and entering a universe of paper and ink, that she would sail across the Ocean Sea and arrive not at Española in
Mundus Novus
but in the pages of a story. He was sure he would never see her again in this world or the new one because death was sitting on her shoulder like a falcon, death would travel with her for a while until it grew impatient and tired of the journey.

“Goodbye,” she said, and faded into white. Ceva brought the
Cadolin
back to Fassolo in due course, looking as if the last vestiges of joy had just left his life forever. Almost two years later Doria heard the news of Magellan’s discovery of a stormy strait that would allow lucky sailors to pass around the southern tip of the new world. He had nightmares in which the beautiful princess perished in Magellan’s strait along with her companions. No definite news of her whereabouts or fate was ever received in Genoa during his long lifetime. However, fifty-four years after the hidden princess set sail from Italy, a young yellow-haired rogue, no more than twenty years of age, presented himself at the gate of the Villa Doria, claiming to be her son. By this time Andrea Doria had been dead for thirteen years, and the house was owned by his great-nephew Giovanni, prince of Melfi, founder of the great house of the Doria-Pamphilii-Landi. If Giovanni had ever known the story of the lost princess of the house of Timur and Temüjin, he had long forgotten it, and had the ragamuffin chased away from his door. After that the young “Niccolò Antonino Vespucci,” named after his father’s two best friends, set forth to see the world, taking ship hither and yon, sometimes as a member of the crew, on other occasions as a carefree stowaway, learned many languages, acquired a wide variety of skills, not all of them within the boundaries of the law, and accumulated his own tales to tell, tales of escapes from cannibalism in Sumatra and of the egg-sized pearls of Brunei and of fleeing from the Great Turk up the Volga to Moscow in winter and of crossing the Red Sea in a dhow held together with string and of the polyandry of that part of
Mundus Novus
where women had seven or eight husbands and no man was allowed to marry a virgin and of making the pilgrimage to Mecca by pretending to be a Muslim and of being shipwrecked with the great poet Camoens near the mouth of the Mekong River where he saved the
Lusiads
by swimming ashore naked with the pages of Camoens’s poem held in one hand above his head.

About himself he would only say to the men and women he met on his voyages that his story was stranger by far than any of these tales, but that it could only be divulged to one man on earth, whom he would face one day in the hope of being given what was his by right, and that he was protected by a mighty spell that blessed all those who aided him and cursed those who did him harm.

“Shelter of the World, the plain fact is that on account of the variability of chronological conditions in
Mundus Novus,
” he told the emperor Akbar by the waters of the Anup Talao, “which is to say, on account of the unsettled nature of time in those parts, my mother the enchantress was able to prolong her youth, and might have lived for three hundred years had she not lost heart, had she not lost her belief in the possibility of a homecoming, and permitted herself to catch a fatal sickness so that she could at least join her deceased family members in the hereafter. A falcon flew in through her window and settled on her deathbed as she drew her last breaths. It was her final enchantment, the manifestation in the new world of this glorious bird from across the Ocean Sea. When the falcon flew out of the window we all understood that it was her soul. I was nineteen and a half years old at the time of her death and as she slept she looked more like my older sister than my parent. But my father and the Mirror had continued to age normally. Her magic was no longer strong enough to help them resist the temporal forces, just as it was not strong enough to change the geography of the earth. No middle passage was found, and she was trapped in the new world until she decided to die.”

The emperor was silent. His mood was impenetrable. The waters of the Anup Talao continued to be disturbed.

“This finally is what you ask us to believe,” the emperor said at length, heavily. “At last, and after everything, this. That she learned how to arrest time.”

“In her own body,” the other replied, “and for herself alone.”

“That would indeed be a prodigious feat, if it were possible,” Akbar told him, and rose, and went indoors.

That night Akbar sat alone on the topmost story of the Panch Mahal and listened to the darkness. He did not believe the foreigner’s tale. He would tell himself a better one instead. He was the emperor of dreams. He could pluck the truth from the darkness and bring it into the light. He had lost patience with the foreigner, and was left, in the end, as always, with himself. He sent his fancy across the world like a messenger bird and in the end the answer came. This was his story now.

Twenty-four hours later he summoned Vespucci back to the Best of All Possible Pools, whose waters still roiled in perplexity. Akbar’s expression was grim. “Sir Vespucci,” he asked, “are you familiar with camels? Have you had a chance to observe their ways?” His voice was like low thunder rolling across the troubled waters of the pool. The foreigner was at a loss for words.

“Why such a question,
Jahanpanah
?” he asked, and the emperor’s eyes flashed at him angrily.

“Do not presume to question us, sir. We ask again, are there camels in the new world, camels such as we have here in Hindustan, are camels to be found among all those griffins and dragons?” Akbar asked, and seeing the other shake his head, held up a silencing hand and went on, his voice gathering force as he spoke. “The physical freedom of the camel, we have always thought, offers a lesson in amorality to mere human beings. For between camels nothing is forbidden. A young male camel, soon after he is born, will seek to fornicate with his mother. An adult male will feel no qualms about impregnating his daughter. Grandchildren, grandparents, sisters, brothers, all these are fair game when a camel seeks a partner. The term
incest
has no meaning to this animal. We, however, are not camels, isn’t that right? And against incest there are ancient taboos, and harsh penalties are levied against couples who disregard them—rightly levied, as we hope you will agree.”

A man and a woman sail into the mists and lose themselves in a formless new world where nobody knows them. In all the world they have only each other and the servant girl. The man is a servant too, the servant of beauty, and the name of his journey is love. They arrive in the place whose name does not matter just as their names do not. The years pass and their hopes die. All around them are energetic men. A wild world to the south and another to the north are slowly, slowly being tamed. Shape, law, form is being given to what was inchoately unchanging, but the process will be long. Slowly, slowly, the conquest moves ahead. There are advances, retreats, and again advances, small victories, small defeats, and then again larger gains. No man asks whether this is a good process or a bad one. It is not a legitimate question. God’s work is being done, and gold is being mined as well. The greater the hubbub around them, the more dramatic the victories, the more dreadful the defeats, the bloodier the revenge of the old world upon the new, the stiller they become, the three unimportant people, the man, the woman, the servant. Day by day, month by month, year by year they grow smaller and less significant. Then illness strikes and the woman dies, but she leaves behind a child, a baby girl.

The man has nothing on earth now except the child and the servant, his dead wife’s mirror. Together they raise the child. Angelica. The magic child. The servant’s name has become Angelica too. The man watches the girl grow up and become a second mirror, the image of her mother, her mother to the life. The servant as she ages sees the uncanny likeness in the growing girl, the rebirth of the past, and sees, in addition, the father’s burgeoning desire. How lonely they are, the three of them, in this world that has not yet fully taken shape, in which words can mean what you wish them to mean, and so can deeds; in which new lives must be made as best they can. There is complicity between the man and the servant for in the old days they used to lie together, the three of them, and they miss the departed third. The new life, the life reincarnate, grows to fill the hollow in the air where the old life used to be.