The Enchantress of Florence (5 page)

She had never left the palaces in which she had been born a decade earlier, born an adult, to the man who was not only her creator but her lover. It was true: she was both his wife and his child. If she left the palaces, or so she had always suspected, the spell would be broken and she would cease to exist. Perhaps she could do it if he, the emperor, were there to sustain her with the strength of his belief, but if she were alone she wouldn’t have a chance. Fortunately, she had no desire to leave. The labyrinth of walled and curtained corridors that connected the various buildings of the palace complex afforded her all the possibilities of travel she required. This was her little universe. She lacked a conqueror’s interest in elsewhere. Let the rest of the world be for others. This square of fortified stone was hers.

She was a woman without a past, separate from history, or, rather, possessing only such history as he had been pleased to bestow upon her, and which the other queens bitterly contested. The question of her independent existence, of whether she had one, insisted on being asked, over and over, whether she willed it or not. If God turned his face away from his creation, Man, would Man simply cease to be? That was the large-scale version of the question, but it was the selfish, small-scale versions that bothered her. Was her will free of the man who had willed her into being? Did she exist only because of his suspension of disbelief in the possibility of her existence? If he died, could she go on living?

She felt a quickening of her pulse. Something was about to happen. She felt herself strengthen, solidify. Doubts fled from her.
He was coming.

The emperor had entered the palace complex and she could feel the power of his approaching need. Yes. Something was about to happen. She felt his footfall in her blood, could see him in herself, growing larger as he walked toward her. She was his mirror because he had created her that way but she was herself as well. Yes. Now that the act of creation was complete she was free to be the person he had created, free, as everyone was, within the bounds of what it was in their nature to be and do. How strong she suddenly was, how full of blood and rage. His power over her was far from absolute. All she had to be was coherent. She had never felt more coherent. Her nature rushed into her like a flood. She was not subservient. He did not like subservient women.

She would scold him first. How could he stay away so long? In his absence she had had to combat many plots. All was untrustworthy here. The very walls were filled with whispers. She fought them all and kept the palace safe against the day of his return, defeating the small, self-serving treacheries of the domestic staff, confounding the spying lizards hanging on the walls, stilling the scurry of conspiratorial mice. All this, while she felt herself fading, while the mere struggle for survival required the exercise of almost the full force of her will. The other queens…no, she would not mention the other queens. The other queens did not exist. Only she existed. She too was a sorceress. She was the sorceress of herself. There was only one man she needed to enchant and he was here. He was not going to the other queens. He was coming to what pleased him. She was full of him, of his desire for her, of the something that was about to happen. She was the scholar of his need. She knew everything.

The door opened. She existed. She was immortal, because she had been created by love.

He was wearing a cockaded golden turban and a coat of gold brocade. He was wearing the dust of his conquered land like a soldier’s badge of honor. He was wearing a sheepish grin. “‘I’ wanted to get home faster,” he said. “‘I’ was delayed.” There was something awkward and experimental about his speech. What was the matter with him? She decided to ignore his uncharacteristic hesitancy and proceed as she had planned.

“Oh, you ‘wanted,’” she said, standing upright, in her ordinary day clothes, pulling a silken headscarf across the lower portion of her face. “A man doesn’t know what he wants. A man doesn’t want what he says he wants. A man wants only what he needs.”

He was puzzled by her refusal to acknowledge his descent into the first person, which honored her, which was supposed to make her swoon with joy, which was his newest discovery and his declaration of love. Puzzled, and a little put out.

“How many men have you known, that you are so knowledgeable,” he said, frowning, approaching her. “Did you dream up men for yourself while ‘I’ was away, or did you find men to pleasure you, men who were not dreams. Are there men that ‘I’ must kill.” Surely this time she would notice the revolutionary, the erotic newness of the pronoun? Surely now she would understand what he was trying to say?

She did not. She believed she knew what aroused him, and was thinking only of the words she had to say to make him hers.

“Women think less about men in general than the generality of men can imagine. Women think about their own men less often than their men like to believe. All women need all men less than all men need them. This is why it is so important to keep a good woman down. If you do not keep her down she will surely get away.”

She hadn’t dressed up to receive him. “If you want dolls,” she said, “go over to the dollhouse where they’re waiting for you, prettifying and squealing and pulling one another’s hair.” This was a mistake. She had mentioned the other queens. His brow furrowed and his eyes clouded over. She had made a false move. The spell had almost broken. She poured all the force of her eyes into his and he came back to her. The magic held. She raised her voice and continued.

She didn’t flatter him. “You already look like an old man,” she said. “Your sons will imagine you’re their grandfather.” She didn’t congratulate him on his victories. “If history had gone down a different path,” she said, “then the old gods would still rule, the gods you have defeated, the many-limbed many-headed gods, full of stories and deeds instead of punishments and laws, the gods of being standing beside the goddesses of doing, dancing gods, laughing gods, gods of thunderbolts and flutes, so many, many gods, and maybe that would have been an improvement.” She knew she was beautiful and now, dropping the thin silk veil, she unleashed the beauty she had kept hidden and he was lost. “When a boy dreams up a woman he gives her big breasts and a small brain,” she murmured. “When a king imagines a wife he dreams of me.”

She was adept at the seven types of unguiculation, which is to say the art of using the nails to enhance the act of love. Before he left on his long journey she had marked him with the Three Deep Marks, which were scratches made by the first three fingers of her right hand upon his back, his chest, and on his testicles as well: something to remember her by. Now that he was home, she could make him shudder, could actually make his hair stand on end, by placing her nails on his cheeks and lower lip and breasts, without leaving any mark. Or she could mark him, leaving a half-moon shape upon his neck. She could push her nails slowly into his face for a long time. She could make long marks on his head and thighs and, again, his always sensitive breasts. She could perform the Hopping of the Hare, marking the areolas around his nipples without touching him anywhere else on his body. And no living woman was as skilled as she at the Peacock’s Foot, that delicate maneuver: she placed her thumb on his left nipple and with her four other fingers she “walked” around his breast, digging in her long nails, her curved, clawlike nails which she had guarded and sharpened in anticipation of this very moment, pushing them into the emperor’s skin until they left marks resembling the trail left by a peacock as it walks through mud. She knew what he would say while she did these things. He would tell her how, in the loneliness of his army tent, he would close his eyes and imitate her movements, would imagine his nails moving on his body to be hers, and be aroused.

She waited for him to say it, but he didn’t. Something was different. There was an impatience in him now, even an irritation, an annoyance she did not understand. It was as if the many sophistications of the lover’s art had lost their charms and he wished simply to possess her and be done with it. She understood that he had changed. And now everything else would change as well.

As for the emperor, he never again referred to himself in the singular in the presence of another person. He was plural in the eyes of the world, plural even in the judgment of the woman who loved him, and plural he would remain. He had learned his lesson.

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His sons riding their horses at speed

H
is sons riding their horses at speed, aiming lances at tent-pegs in the ground; his sons, still on horseback, excelling at the game of
chaugan,
swinging long sticks with curved feet and striking a ball into a netted goal; his sons playing polo at night with a luminous ball; his sons on hunting parties, being initiated into the mysteries of leopard shooting by the master of the hunt; his sons taking part in the “game of love,”
ishqbazi,
an affair of racing pigeons…how beautiful they were, his sons! How mightily they played! See the Crown Prince Salim, at only fourteen already so expert an archer that the rules of the sport were being rewritten to accommodate him. Ah, Murad, Daniyal, my gallopers, the emperor thought. How he loved them, and yet what wastrels they were! Look at their eyes: they were already drunk. They were eleven and ten years old and they were already drunk, drunk in charge of horses, the fools. He had given strict instructions to the staff, but these were princes of the blood, and no servant dared gainsay them.

He was having them spied on, of course, so he knew all about Salim’s opium habit and nightly feats of perverted lechery. Perhaps it was understandable that a young fellow in the first flush of his potency should develop a fondness for sodomizing wenches, but a word in his ear would soon be necessary, because the dancing girls were complaining, their bruised rears, their vandalized pomegranate buds, made it harder for them to perform, the little whores.

O, alas, alas for his debauched children, flesh of his flesh, heir to all his failings and none of his strengths! Prince Murad’s falling sickness had thus far been concealed from the populace at large, but for how long? And Daniyal seemed good for nothing, seemed to not have any personality at all, though he had inherited the family good looks, an achievement in which he could take no legitimate pride, although, in his preening vanity, he did. Was it harsh to judge a ten-year-old boy in this way? Yes, of course it was, but these were not boys. They were little gods, the despots of the future: born, unfortunately, to rule. He loved them. They would betray him. They were the lights of his life. They would come for him while he slept. The little assfuckers. He was waiting for their moves.

The king wished, today as he did every day, that he could trust his sons. He trusted Birbal and Jodha and Abul Fazl and Todar Mal but he kept the boys under close surveillance. He longed to trust them so that they could be the strong supports of his old age. He dreamed of relying on their six beautiful eyes when his own grew dim, and on their six strong arms when his own lost their power, acting in unison at his behest, so that he would truly become as a god, many-headed, multilimbed. He wanted to trust them because he thought of trust as a virtue and wished to cultivate it, but he knew the history of his blood, he knew that trustworthiness was not his people’s habit. His sons would grow up into glittering heroes with excellent mustaches and they would turn against him, he could already see it in their eyes. Among their kind, among the Chaghatai of Ferghana, it was customary for children to plot against their crowned sires, to attempt to dethrone them, to imprison them in their own fortresses or on islands in lakes, or to execute them with their own swords.

Salim, bless him, the bloodthirsty wretch, was already dreaming up ingenious methods of killing people.
If anyone betrays me, papa, I will slaughter an ass and have the traitor sewn up inside the animal’s freshly flayed wet skin. Then I will sit him backward on a donkey and parade him through the streets at noon and let the hot sun do its work.
The cruel sun which would dry the carcass so that it slowly contracted, so that the enemy within died slowly of a strangled suffocation. Where did you come up with an idea as nasty as that? the emperor asked his son.
I made it up,
the boy lied.
And who are you to speak of cruelty, papa. I myself saw you draw your sword and cut off the feet of that man who stole a pair of shoes.
The emperor knew the truth when he heard it. If there was a darkness in Prince Salim, then it had been inherited from the king of kings himself.

Salim was his favorite son, and his most likely assassin. When he was gone these three brothers would fight like dogs in the street over the meaty bone of his power. When he closed his eyes and listened to the galloping hoofs of his children at play he could see Salim leading a rebellion against him, and failing like the puny runt he was.
We will forgive him, of course, we will let him live, our son, so fine a horseman, so shiny, with such a kingly laugh.
The emperor sighed. He did not trust his sons.

The question of love was rendered more mysterious by such matters. The king loved the three boys galloping before him on the maidan. If he were to die at their hands, he would love the arm that delivered the fatal blow. However, he did not plan to let the young bastards do him in, not while there was breath in his body. He would see them in Hell first. He was the emperor, Akbar. Let no man trifle with him.

He had trusted the mystic Chishti whose tomb stood in the courtyard of the Friday Mosque, but Chishti was dead. He trusted dogs, music, poetry, a witty courtier, and a wife he had created out of nothing. He trusted beauty, painting, and the wisdom of his forebears. In other things, however, he was losing confidence; in, for example, religious faith. He knew that life was not to be trusted, the world was not to be relied on. On the gate of his great mosque he had carved his motto, which was not his own, but belonged, or so he had been told, to Jesus of Nazareth.
The world is a bridge. Pass over it but build no house upon it.
He didn’t even believe his own motto, he scolded himself, for he had built not just a house, but an entire city.
Who hopes for an hour hopes for eternity. The world is an hour. What follows is unseen.
It’s true, he acknowledged silently, I hope for too much. I hope for eternity. An hour’s not enough for me. I hope for greatness, which is more than men should desire. (That “I” felt good when he said it to himself, it made him feel more intimate with himself, but it would remain a private matter, one that had been resolved.) I hope for long life, he thought, and for peace, for understanding, and a good meal in the afternoon. Above all these things I hope for a young man I can trust. That young man will not be my son but I will make him more than a son. I will make him my hammer and my anvil. I will make him my beauty and my truth. He will stand upon my palm and fill the sky.

That very day a yellow-haired young man was brought before him wearing an absurd long coat made up of particolored leather lozenges, and holding a letter from the Queen of England in his hand.

In the early morning Mohini the sleepless whore of the Hatyapul brothel awoke her foreign guest. He came awake quickly and twisted her roughly into his arms, conjuring a knife from thin air and holding it against her neck. “Don’t be stupid,” she said. “I could have killed you a hundred times last night, and don’t think I didn’t think about it while you were snoring loud enough to wake the emperor in his palace.” She had offered him two rates, one for a single act, the other, only slightly higher, for the whole night. “Which is better value?” he asked her. “People always say it’s the all-night rate,” she replied gravely, “but most of my visitors are so old or drunk or opium-stupid or incompetent that even doing it once is beyond a lot of them, so the rate for a single will almost certainly save you money.” “I’ll pay you double the all-night rate,” he said, “if you promise to stay beside me all night. It’s a long time since I spent the whole night with a woman, and a woman’s body lying beside me sweetens my dreams.” “You can waste your money if you want, I won’t stop you,” she said cold-heartedly, “but there hasn’t been any sweetness left in me for years.”

She was so thin that her name among the other whores was Skeleton, and those clients who could afford it often hired her together with her antithesis, the obese whore called Mattress, in order to enjoy the two extremes of what the female form had to offer, first the unyielding dominance of bone and then the flesh that engulfed. The Skeleton ate like a wolf, greedily and fast, and the more she ate the fatter Mattress became, until it was suspected that the two whores had made a pact with the Devil, and in Hell it would be Skeleton who was grotesquely overweight for all eternity while Mattress rattled bonily around with the nipples on her flat chest looking like little wooden plugs.

She was a
doli-arthi
prostitute of the Hatyapul, meaning that the terms of her employment stated that she was literally married to the job and would only leave on her
arthi
or funeral bier. She had had to go through a parody of a wedding ceremony, arriving, to the mirth of the street rabble, on a donkey-cart instead of the usual
doli
or palanquin. “Enjoy your wedding day, Skeleton, it’s the only one you’ll ever have,” shouted one lout, but the other prostitutes poured a chamber pot of warm urine over him from an upstairs balcony, and that shut him up just fine. The “groom” was the brothel itself, represented symbolically by the madam, Rangili Bibi, a whore so old, toothless, and squinty that she had become worthy of respect, and so fierce that everyone was scared of her, even the police officers whose job it theoretically was to close her business down, but who didn’t dare make a move against her in case she gave them a lifetime’s bad luck by fixing them with the evil eye. The other, more rational explanation for the brothel’s survival was that it was owned by an influential noble of the court—or else, as the city’s gossips were convinced, not a noble but a priest, maybe even one of the mystics praying nonstop at the Chishti tomb. But nobles go in and out of favor, and priests as well. Bad luck, on the other hand, is forever: so the fear of Rangili Bibi’s crossed eyes was at least as powerful as an unseen holy or aristocratic protector.

Mohini’s bitterness was not the result of being a whore, which was a job like any other job and gave her a home, and food and clothing, without which, she said, she would be no better than a pye-dog and would in all likelihood die like a dog in a ditch. It was aimed at one single woman, her former employer, the fourteen-year-old Lady Man Bai of Amer, currently residing at Sikri, a young hussy who was already receiving, in secret, the eager attentions of her cousin Crown Prince Salim. Lady Man Bai had one hundred slaves, and Mohini the Skeleton was one of her favorites. When the prince arrived perspiring from the hard work of galloping around killing animals in the heat of the day, Mohini was at the head of the retinue whose task it was to remove all his clothes and massage his pale skin with scented, cooling oils. Mohini was the one who chose the perfume, sandalwood or musk, patchouli or rose, and Mohini it was who performed the privileged function of massaging his manhood to prepare him for her mistress. Other slaves fanned him and rubbed his hands and feet, but only the Skeleton could touch the royal sex. This was because of her expertise in preparing the unguents necessary for the heightening of sexual desire and the prolongation of sexual congress. She made the pastes of tamarind and cinnabar, or dry ginger and pepper which, when mixed with the honey of a large bee, gave a woman intense pleasure without requiring much exertion from the man, and allowed the man also to experience sensations of warmth and a kind of squeezing palpitation that were extremely pleasurable. She applied the pastes sometimes to her mistress’s vagina, sometimes to the prince’s member, usually to both. The results were held by both parties to be excellent.

It was her mastery of the male drugs known as the “ones that made men into horses” that undid her. One day she ordered the castration of a male goat and boiled its testes in milk, after which she salted and peppered them, fried them in ghee, and finally chopped them up into a delicious-tasting mince. This preparation was to be eaten, not rubbed upon the body, and she fed it to the prince on a silver spoon, explaining that it was a medicine that would allow him to make love like a horse, five, ten, or even twenty times without losing his force. In the case of particularly virile young men it could facilitate one hundred consecutive ejaculations. “Delicious,” said the prince, and ate heartily. The next morning he emerged from his mistress’s boudoir, leaving her on the point of death. “Ha! Ha!” he shouted at Mohini on his way out. “That was fun.”

It would be forty-seven days and nights before Lady Man Bai could even think about having sex again, and during that time the prince, when he visited her, was fully understanding of the damage he had wrought, behaved in a manner both contrite and solicitous, and fucked the slaves instead, asking, most often, for the favors of the skinny creature who had endowed him with such superhuman sexual powers. Lady Man Bai could not refuse him but inwardly she raged with jealousy. When it became plain after the notorious night of one hundred and one copulations that Mohini the Skeleton’s tolerance for sex was infinite and that the prince was incapable of breaking her as he had almost broken his mistress, the slave girl’s fate was sealed. The jealousy of Lady Man Bai grew implacable and Mohini was expelled from the household, leaving with nothing but her knowledge of the preparations that drove men mad with desire. She fell a long way, from palace to brothel, but her powers of enchantment served her well and made her the most popular of the women of the bawdy house at the Hatyapul. She hoped, however, for revenge. “If fate ever brings that little bitch into my power I will smear her with a paste so powerful that even the jackals will come to fuck her. She will be fucked by crows and snakes and lepers and water buffaloes and in the end there will be nothing left of her but a few soggy strands of her hair, which I will burn, and that will be the end of it. But she is going to marry Prince Salim, so pay no attention to me. For a woman like myself revenge is an unattainable luxury, like partridges, or childhood.”