The Enchantress of Florence (8 page)

Because Akbar was so interested in this untold secret he behaved as if it did not matter, and found many ways to delay its telling. He kept the stranger close, but made sure they were never alone. He strolled with him to the pigeoncotes to inspect the royal racers, and allowed him to walk beside the imperial palanquin, next to the imperial parasol-bearer, as he rode down to the edge of the luminous lake. It was true that he was troubled in spirit. Not only was there this business of an undivulged secret that had crossed the world to find him, but also, in last night’s lovemaking with his beloved Jodha, he had found himself less aroused than usual by the wife who had never failed him before, and had even found himself wondering whether the company of some of the prettier concubines might be preferable for a change. And then there was the matter of his growing disillusion with God. This was more than enough. It was time to float for a while.

As a gesture of nostalgia he had preserved and refurbished four of his grandfather Babar’s favorite boats and given them the run of the lake. Ice from Kashmir came across the water on the largest boat, the flat-decked transportation vehicle named the Capacity,
Gunjayish,
passing the last leg of its quotidian journey from the high Himalayas to the drinking glasses of the court aboard the craft that had once been his namesake Sultan Jalaluddin’s gift to the cruel, nature-loving First Mughal King. Akbar himself preferred to travel in the Comfort, or
Asayish,
with the little courier-skiff the
Farmayish,
or Command, in close attendance, to ferry orders and visitors back and forth from the shore. The fourth boat, the ornate
Arayish,
or Decoration, was a boat for romantic pleasures, only to be used at night. Akbar led Mogor dell’Amore into the main cabin of the
Asayish
and let out a low sigh of pleasure, as he always did when the subtleties of water replaced the banality of solid ground beneath his feet.

The foreigner looked as full of the unborn child of his secret as a woman on the verge of parturition, and as afraid of the dangers of the act. Akbar tormented his guest a little longer by asking the boat’s crew to scurry around them performing a series of acts dictated by court protocol, procedures involving cushions, wine, and books. Any drink had to be tasted for poison three times before it reached the emperor’s lips, and though the practice bored the emperor he did not gainsay it. As regarded books, however, Akbar had changed the protocol. According to the old ways, any book that reached the imperial presence had to be read by three different commentators and pronounced free of sedition, obscenity, and lies. “In other words,” the young king had said on ascending the throne, “we are only to read the most boring books ever written. Well, that won’t do at all.” Nowadays all sorts of books were permitted, but the three commentators’ reviews were relayed to the emperor before he opened them, because of the overarching, supreme protocol regarding the inappropriateness of royal surprise. And as for cushions, each of them had to be tested in case an ill-wisher had concealed a blade within. All this the emperor suffered to be done. Then, at last, he allowed himself to be with the foreigner out of earshot of any aide.

“Sire,” said Mogor dell’Amore, and his voice seemed to tremble just a little as he spoke, “there is a matter I beg leave to reveal to you, and you alone.”

Akbar burst into a great shout of laughter. “We think if we had made you wait any longer you might have died of it,” he chuckled. “For over an hour now you have looked like a boil that needed to burst.”

The foreigner colored brightly. “Your Majesty knows everything,” he said, bowing. (The emperor had not invited him to sit.) “However, I venture to believe that the nature of my information cannot be known to you, even though its existence plainly is.” Akbar composed himself and looked grave. “Well, get on with it, man,” he said. “Let’s have whatever it is you have to give.”

“So be it, sire,” began the foreigner. “There was once, in Turkey, an adventurer-prince named Argalia or Arcalia, a great warrior who possessed enchanted weapons, and in whose retinue were four terrifying giants, and he had a woman with him, Angelica…”

From the skiff
Farmayish,
which was racing toward the
Asayish
with Abul Fazl and a small crowd of men aboard, came a loud cry—“Beware! Save the emperor! Beware!”—and at once the crew of the king’s boat rushed into the royal cabin and seized Mogor dell’Amore without ceremony. There was a thickly muscled arm around his throat, and three swords pointed at his heart. The emperor had risen to his feet and he, too, was quickly encircled by armed men, to defend him from harm.

“…Angelica, the princess of India and Cathay…” the foreigner struggled to continue. The arm tightened around his windpipe. “…The most beautiful…” he added, painfully, and the grip on his throat tightened again; whereupon Mogor dell’Amore lost consciousness, and said no more.

{
7
}

In the dark of the dungeon his chains

I
n the dark of the dungeon his chains weighed on him like his unfinished story. There were so many chains winding around him that he could imagine, in the darkness, that he had somehow been encased inside a larger body, the body of a man of iron. Movement was impossible. Light was a fantasy. The dungeon had been carved out of the living rock of the hill beneath the imperial palaces and the air in his cell was a thousand years old, and so perhaps were the creatures crawling over his feet and through his hair and into his groin, the albino roaches, the blind snakes, the transparent rats, the phantom scorpions, the lice. He would die without telling his story. He found this thought intolerable and so it refused to leave him, it crawled in and out of his ears, slid into the corners of his eyes and stuck to the roof of his mouth and to the soft tissue under his tongue. All men needed to hear their stories told. He was a man, but if he died without telling the story he would be something less than that, an albino cockroach, a louse. The dungeon did not understand the idea of a story. The dungeon was static, eternal, black, and a story needed motion and time and light. He felt his story slipping away from him, becoming inconsequential, ceasing to be. He had no story. There was no story. He was not a man. There was no man here. There was only the dungeon, and the slithering dark.

When they came to get him he did not know if a day had passed, or a century. He could not see the rough hands that loosened his chains. For a time his hearing too was affected, and his powers of speech. They blindfolded him and took him naked to another place where he was scoured and scrubbed. As if he were a corpse being readied for burial, he thought, a dumb corpse who could not tell his tale. There were no coffins in this unchristian land. He would be sewn into a shroud and flung without a name into a hole in the ground. That, or burned. He would not rest in peace. In death as in life he would be full of unspoken words and they would be his Hell, tormenting him through all eternity. He heard a sound.
There was once.
It was his own voice.
There was once a prince.
He felt his heart begin to beat again, his blood to flow. His tongue was thick but it could move. His heart boomed like a cannon in his chest.
Who possessed enchanted weapons.
He had a body again, and words. They removed the blindfold.
Four terrifying giants and a woman.
He was in another cell but in this place there was a candle burning and a guard in the corner.
The most beautiful woman.
The story was saving his life.

“Save your strength,” the guard said. “Tomorrow you stand trial for murder.”

There was a question he was trying to ask. The words would not form. The guard took pity on him and answered it anyway.

“I don’t know the name of the man who accuses you,” he said. “But he is a godless foreigner like yourself, and he lacks an eye and half a leg.”

The first trial of Mogor dell’Amore took place in the house of the sandstone banana tree, and his judges were the greatest grandees of the court, all nine of the Nine Stars, whose presence had been commanded by an exceptional imperial decree: Abul Fazl the wise and obese, Raja Birbal of the lightning wit, the finance minister Raja Todar Mal, Raja Man Singh the army chief, the unworldly mystic Fakir Aziauddin and the rather more worldly priest Mullah Do Piaza who preferred cookery to prayer and was accordingly a favorite of Abul Fazl’s, the great poets Faizi and Abdul Rahim, and the musician Tansen. The emperor sat on the top of the tree as usual, but his mood was most unusual. His head was bowed, giving him the most unimperial appearance of an ordinary mortal suffering the misery of a dreadful personal calamity. For a long time he did not speak, but allowed the trial to take its course.

The crew of the pirate vessel
Scáthach
stood to one side in a tight, grumbling bunch, close behind the macabre figure of the one-legged, eyepatched doctor who was their appointed spokesman. This was not Praise-God Hawkins as the accused remembered him, the weepy cuckold whom he had so effortlessly bent to his will. This Hawkins was smartly dressed and grim of countenance, and when he saw the prisoner enter this courthouse he pointed at him and cried in a ringing voice, “There he stands, the vile Uccello, who murdered the ambassador for his gold!”

“Justice!” cried the sailors and, less nobly, “We want the money back!” The accused, wearing only a long white shirt, and with his hands tied behind him, took in the ominous scene—the emperor, the nine judges, the accusers, and the small gallery of lesser courtiers who had crowded into the small building to bear witness to the trial, among whom, distinctive in their black Jesuit garb, were the two Christian priests, Father Rodolfo Acquaviva and Father Antonio Monserrate, there to ensure that the men of the West received the justice and, perhaps, the money they had come so far to demand. The accused understood the size of his miscalculation. It had not occurred to him that this rabble would pursue him once their master was dead, and so he had not tried to cover his tracks. A tall yellow-haired man standing up in a bullock-cart in a leather coat of variegated colors was not a common sight on Indian roads. And they were many and he was one, and his case was doomed to fail. “In this place,” Abul Fazl was saying, “he goes by a different name.”

Father Acquaviva was permitted to speak through his Persian interpreter. “This
Mogor dell’Amore
is no name at all,” he said, damningly. “It means,
a Mughal born out of wedlock.
It is a name that dares much and will offend many. By assuming it he implies that he wishes to be thought of as an illegitimate prince.”

This statement caused consternation in the court. The emperor’s head sank lower, until his chin was resting on his chest. Abul Fazl turned to face the accused. “What is your name?” he demanded. “For I am sure this ‘Uccello’ is only another disguise.”

The prisoner remained silent. Then all of a sudden the emperor roared from above.

“Your name,” he shouted, sounding like a more stentorian version of Praise-God Hawkins lamenting the infidelity of his Portuguese lady love. “The devil with it! Your name,
farangi,
or your life.”

The prisoner spoke. “I am called Vespucci,” he said quietly. “Vespucci, Niccolò.”

“Another lie,” Father Acquaviva interjected through his interpreter. “Vespucci, indeed.” He laughed loudly, a vulgar Occidental laugh, the laugh of a people who believed they were the keepers of the world’s laughter. “This is indeed a shameless, lying thief, and this time he has stolen a great Florentine name.”

It was at this point that Raja Birbal intervened. “Sir,” he said to the Jesuit, “we are grateful for your earlier remark, but spare us, please, these exclamations. A strange case is here before us. A Scottish nobleman is dead, that much is verified, and much regretted by all. The letter he bore for His Majesty has been delivered by the accused; this, too, we know, but a postman does not become a murderer by delivering a dead man’s mail. The ship’s crew states that after much research they located seven hidden chambers in the captain’s cabin, and that all seven were empty. But who emptied them? We cannot say. Perhaps they contained gold, or jewels, but then again, perhaps they were empty to begin with. The ship’s doctor Hawkins has given sworn deposition that he now believes the late milord to have suffered from the fatal consequence of laudanum poisoning, but as he himself tended to the sick man day and night until the hour of his death, he may be accusing another to cover his own guilt. The accusers hold the prisoner guilty of theft, yet he has faithfully delivered the one thing we know for certain that he removed, the parchment from the English queen; and as for gold, there is no sign of that, or of laudanum, among his effects.” He clapped his hands and a servant entered, carrying the prisoner’s clothes, including the lozenged leather coat. “We have searched his garments, and the bag he left at the Hatyapul house of ill fame, and we have found a trickster’s hoard—playing cards, dice, deceptions of all sorts, even a living bird—but no great fortune in jewels or in gold. What then are we to think? That he is a skilled thief who has concealed his stolen goods; that he is not a thief, for there was nothing to steal; or that the thieves stand here, accusing an innocent man. These are our choices. The weight of numbers is against him, but if many accuse him, many may be rogues.”

The king spoke heavily from on high. “A man who lies about his name will lie about much besides,” he said. “We shall let the elephant decide.”

Again, a loud murmuring in the room: a shocked, expectant hum. Raja Birbal looked distressed. “
Jahanpanah,
” he said, “Shelter of the World, consider this: do you recall the famous tale of the goatherd boy and the tiger?”

“As we recall it,” Akbar replied, “the lying goatherd had falsely cried
tiger
so often, simply to annoy his village, that when the tiger truly attacked him no man came to his defense.” “
Jahanpanah,
” said Birbal, “that is the story of a group of ignorant villagers. I am sure the king of kings would not wish a boy to be eaten by a tiger even if he was an untruthful, misbegotten rogue.”

“Perhaps not,” the emperor petulantly replied, “but on this occasion we would be glad to see him crushed beneath our elephant’s feet.”

Birbal, understanding that the emperor was behaving like a man whose beloved has proved unworthy of his love, was marshaling further arguments for clemency when the accused made a statement that placed him beyond salvation. “Before you kill me, great emperor,” the foreigner boldly said, “I must warn you that if you do so you will be cursed, and your capital city will crumble, because a powerful wizard has placed a blessing upon me, which brings prosperity to my protectors, but rains down desolation upon any who do me harm.”

The king looked at him as a man regards a slow insect he is about to squash. “That’s very interesting,” he replied, “because, Sir Uccello or Mogor or Vespucci, we have built this mighty city around the shrine of Sheikh Salim Chishti, the greatest saint in all India, and
his
blessing protects
us,
and rains down desolation upon
our
enemies. We wonder whose power is the greater, your wizard’s or our saint’s?”

“Mine was the most powerful enchantress in all the known world,” the foreigner said, and at that the entire assembly could not restrain its laughter.

“Ah, a woman,” the emperor said. “That is terrifying indeed. Enough of this! Throw the bastard to the mad elephant and let’s see what his woman’s wiles can do.”

The second trial of the man with three names took place in the Garden of Hiran. It had been the emperor’s whim to name his favorite elephant after a
hiran,
a deer, and maybe that was why after years of noble service the poor beast lost his mind and had to be restrained, because names were things of power, and when they did not fit the thing named they acquired a malign force. Even after the elephant went mad (and then blind) the emperor refused to allow him to be killed. He was kept and cared for in a place of honor, a special stall with padded walls to prevent him from harming himself in his rages, and from time to time he was brought out, upon the emperor’s whim, to serve in a two-in-one capacity, as judge and executioner.

It was appropriate that a man who falsified his name should be judged by an elephant driven insane by his own whimsical naming. Hiran the mad blind elephant was tethered in the garden of judgment, prevented from running amok by a stout rope passing through a hole in a stone buried in the grass. He trumpeted and bellowed and kicked his legs and the tusks on his head flashed like swords. The court assembled to watch what happened to the man with three names, and the public, too, was admitted, and so there were many who witnessed the miracle. The man’s hands were no longer tied behind his back, but their renewed freedom was not intended to save him, only to allow him to die with more dignity than a parcel. But he stretched out his hand toward the elephant, and all who were present saw the elephant become absolutely quiet and calm, and allow the man to caress him; all who were present, high-born and low, gasped aloud as the elephant tenderly wound his trunk around the prisoner and raised him up. Everyone saw the yellow-haired foreigner being set down like a prince upon Hiran’s ample back.

The emperor Akbar observed the miracle from the five-storied pavilion called the Panch Mahal, with Raja Birbal by his side, and both men were greatly moved by what had occurred. “It is we who have been mad and blind and not our poor elephant,” Akbar told his minister. “Arrest that crew of scoundrels right away and bring their innocent victim to our chambers as soon as he gets properly washed and dressed.”

“The elephant did not kill him, it’s true,” Birbal said, “but does that mean he is innocent,
Jahanpanah
? Would the sailors have come all the way from the sea to accuse him if they themselves were the guilty ones? Would they not have been better advised simply to sail away?”

“Always rowing against the tide, eh, Birbal,” Akbar replied. “Until a moment ago you were the fellow’s prime advocate. Now that he is exonerated, your doubts move against him. Here, then, is an argument you will not be able to refute. The elephant’s judgment is multiplied in potency if the emperor endorses it. If Akbar agrees with Hiran, then the elephant’s wisdom is multiplied until it exceeds even yours.”