The Enchantress of Florence Read online

  “Until just now,” Khanzada replied, “I was not only a sister but also a mother and a wife. Since you have destroyed two-thirds of me the last part may as well go home.” After nine years as Wormwood Khan’s queen and eight as the mother of a prince, her heart was torn to pieces. But at no time did Khanzada Begum allow her face or voice to betray her true emotions, so that she struck Shah Ismail as unfeeling and cold. At twenty-nine she was a great beauty, and the Persian was greatly tempted to look behind her veil, but, restraining himself, he turned to the younger girl instead. “And you, madame,” he said with as much courtesy as he could muster, “what do you have to say to your liberator?”

  Khanzada Begum took her sister by the elbow as if to lead her away. “Thank you, my sister and I are of one mind,” she said. But Qara Köz shook off her sister’s hand, threw off her veil, and looked the young king right in the face.

  “I would like to stay,” she said.

  There is a weakness that comes over men at the battle’s end, when they become aware of the fragility of life, they clutch it to their bosoms like a crystal bowl they almost dropped, and the treasure of life scares away their courage. At such a time all men are cowards, and can think of nothing but women’s embraces, nothing but the healing words only women can whisper, nothing but the joy of losing themselves in the fatal labyrinths of love. In the grip of this weakness a man will do things which unravel his best-laid plans, he can make promises which change his future. So it was that Shah Ismail of Persia drowned in the seventeen-year-old princess’s black eyes.

  “Then stay,” he replied.

  “The need for a woman to cure the loneliness of murder,” the emperor said, remembering. “To wipe away the guilt of victory or the vainglory of defeat. To still the tremble in the bones. To dry the hot tears of relief and shame. To hold you while you feel the ebbing tide of your hatred and its replacement by a form of higher embarrassment. To sprinkle you with lavender to hide the scent of blood on the fingertips and the gore stinking in the beard. The need for a woman to tell you that you are hers and to turn your mind away from death. To quell your curiosity about how it might be to stand at the Judgment Seat, to take away your envy of those who have gone before you to see the Almighty plain, and to soothe the doubts twisting in your stomach, about the existence of the afterlife and even of God Himself, because the slain are so utterly dead, and no higher purpose seems to exist at all.”

  Afterward, when he had lost her forever, Shah Ismail spoke of sorcery. There was an enchantment in her gaze that was not wholly human, he said; a devil was in her, and had goaded him to his doom. “That a woman so beautiful should not be tender,” he said to his deaf-mute body-servant, “this I did not expect. I did not expect her to turn away from me so casually, as if she were changing a shoe. I expected to be the beloved. I did not expect to be majnun-Layla, driven mad by love. I did not expect her to break my heart.”

  When Khanzada Begum returned to Babar in Qunduz without her sister she was greeted with a great celebration of soldiery and dancers, of trumpets and song, and Babar himself on foot to embrace her as she descended from her litter. But in private he was incensed, and it was at this time that he ordered the removal of Qara Köz from the historical record. For a time, however, he allowed Shah Ismail to believe that they were friends. He minted coins with Ismail’s head on them to prove it, and Ismail sent troops to help him drive the Uzbegs out of Samarkand. Then suddenly he could bear it no more, and told Ismail to take his troops and go home.

  “This is interesting,” said the emperor. “For our grandfather’s decision to send the Safavid army home after the recapture of Samarkand has always been a mystery. It was at this time that he stopped writing the book of his life, which he did not take up again for eleven years, so his own voice is silent on the topic. After the Persians departed he at once lost Samarkand again and was obliged to flee into the East. We had thought his rejection of Persian assistance was because he didn’t care for Shah Ismail’s religious bombast: his interminable proclamations of his own divinity, his Twelver Shiite aggrandizements. But if Babar’s slow anger about the hidden princess was the real reason, then how many great matters have followed from her choice! For it was because he lost Samarkand that Babar came into Hindustan, and established his dynasty here, and we ourselves are third in that line. So if your story is true, then the beginning of our own empire is the direct consequence of the willfulness of Qara Köz. Should we condemn or praise her? Was she a traitor, forever to be held in contempt, or our genetrix, who shaped our future?”

  “She was a beautiful, willful girl,” said Mogor dell’Amore. “And her power over men was so great that perhaps even she did not at first know the force of her enchantments.”

  Qara Köz: see her now in the Safavid capital city of Tabriz, caressed by the Shah’s fine carpets, like Cleopatra rolled in Caesar’s rug. In Tabriz even the hills were carpeted, for it was on the hillsides that the great rugs were spread out to dry in the sun. In her royal chambers Lady Black Eyes rolled over and over on the rugs of Persia as if they were the bodies of lovers. And always in a corner a samovar, steaming. She ate voraciously, chicken stuffed with prunes and garlic, or shrimp with tamarind paste, or kebabs with fragrant rice, and yet her own body remained slender and long. She played backgammon with her maidservant the Mirror and became the greatest player in the Persian court. She played other games with the Mirror too; behind locked doors in her bedchamber the two girls giggled and shrieked and many courtiers believed them to be lovers, but no man or woman dared say as much, for it would have cost the gossip a head. When she watched the young king at polo Qara Köz sighed a sigh of erotic ecstasy each time he swung his stick and people began to believe that these grunts and cries actually placed an enchantment on the ball, which inevitably found its way to the goal while the sticks of defenders flailed forlornly at empty air. She bathed in milk. She sang like an angel. She did not read books. She was twenty-one years old. She had not conceived a child. And one day when her Ismail spoke of the growing strength of his rival to the west, the Ottoman Sultan Bayezid II, she murmured deadly advice.

  “Just send him that goblet of yours,” she said, “the one made with the skull of Shaibani Khan, to warn him what will happen if he does not remember his place.”

  She found his vanity seductive. She was in love with his faults. A man who believed himself to be a god was perhaps the man for her. Perhaps a king was not enough. “Very God!” she cried when he took her. “Absolute Doer!” He liked that, of course, and being susceptible to praise he did not consider the autonomy of her great beauty, which no man could own, which owned itself, and which would blow wherever it pleased, like the wind. Though she had abandoned everything for him, had changed her world in a single glance, leaving sister, brother, and clan to travel west in a handsome stranger’s company, Shah Ismail in the immensity of his self-love thought such a radical act perfectly natural, for, after all, it had been done for him. As a result he did not see the wandering thing in her, the unrooted thing. If a woman turned so easily from one allegiance she might just as readily turn away from the next.

  There were days when she wanted badness: his badness and her own. In bed she whispered to him that she had another self inside her, a bad self, and when that self took over she was no longer responsible for her actions, she might do anything, anything. This aroused him beyond endurance. She was more than his equal in love. She was his queen. In four years she had not given him a son. No matter. She was a banquet for the senses. She was what men killed for. She was his addiction and his teacher. “You want me to send Bayezid the Shaibani goblet,” he said thickly, as if intoxicated. “To send him another man’s skull.”

  “For you to drink out of your enemy’s skull is a great victory,” she whispered. “But when Bayezid drinks from the head of your enemy’s defeated foe it will put fear in his heart.” He understood that she had placed a spell of terror on the goblet. “Very well,” he said. “We will do as you suggest.”


  Argalia’s forty-fifth birthday had come and gone. He was a tall pale man, and in spite of the years of war his skin was as white as a woman’s; men and women alike marveled at its softness. He was a lover of tulips, and had them embroidered onto his tunics and cloaks, believing them to be bringers of good fortune, and of the fifteen hundred varieties of Stamboul tulip six in particular were to be found thronging his palace rooms. The Light of Paradise, the Matchless Pearl, the Increaser of Pleasure, the Instiller of Passion, the Diamond’s Envy, and the Rose of the Dawn: these were his favorites, and by them he was revealed as a sensualist beneath his warrior’s exterior, a creature of pleasure hiding inside a killer’s skin, a female self within the male. He had, too, a woman’s taste for finery: when not in battle-dress he lounged in jewels and silks and had a great weakness for exotic furs, the black fox and lynx of Muscovy which came down to Stamboul through Feodosiya in the Crimea. His hair was long and black as evil and his lips were full and red as blood.

  Blood, and its shedding, had been his life’s concern. Under Sultan Mehmed II he had fought a dozen campaigns and won every battle in which he raised his arquebus to the firing position or unsheathed his sword. He had drawn a platoon of loyal Janissaries around him like a shield, with the Swiss giants Otho, Botho, Clotho, and D’Artagnan as his lieutenants, and though the Ottoman court was full of intrigues he had foiled seven assassination attempts. After Mehmed’s death the empire came close to civil war between his two sons, Bayezid and Cem. When Argalia learned that the Grand Vizier, in defiance of Muslim tradition, had refused to bury the dead Sultan’s body for three days so that Cem could reach Stamboul and seize the throne, he led the Swiss giants to the Vizier’s quarters and killed him. He led Bayezid’s army against the would-be usurper and drove him into exile. Once that was done he became the new Sultan’s commander-in-chief. He fought the Mamluks of Egypt by land and sea and when he vanquished the alliance of Venice, Hungary, and the papacy his reputation as an admiral equaled his fame as a warrior on dry land.

  After that the main problems came from the qizilbash peoples of Anatolia. They wore red hats with twelve pleats to show their fondness for Twelver Shiism and as a result they were attracted to Shah Ismail of Persia, the self-styled Very God. Bayezid’s third son Selim the Grim wanted to crush them utterly but his father was more restrained. As a result Selim the Grim began to think of his father as an appeaser and a weakling. When the goblet from Shah Ismail arrived in Stamboul, Selim took it as a mortal insult. “That heretic who calls himself by God’s name should be taught his manners,” he declared. He picked up the cup as a duelist picks up the glove that has struck him in the face. “I will drink Safavid blood from this cup,” he promised his father. Argalia the Turk stepped forward. “And I will pour that wine,” he said.

  When Bayezid refused permission for the war, things changed for Argalia. A few days later he and his Janissaries had joined forces with Selim the Grim, and Bayezid was forced from power. The old Sultan was banished into enforced retirement, sent back to his birthplace of Didymoteicho in Thrace, and died of a broken heart on the way, which was just as well. The world had no room for men who had lost their nerve. Selim, with Argalia at his side, hunted down and strangled his brothers Ahmed, Korkud, and Shahinshah, and killed their sons as well. Order was restored and the risk of a coup eliminated. (Many years later, when Argalia told il Machia about these deeds, he justified them by saying, “When a prince takes power he should do his worst right away, because after that his every deed will strike his subjects as an improvement on the way he started out,” and on hearing this il Machia grew silent and thoughtful and, after a time, slowly nodded his head. “Terrible,” he told Argalia, “but true.”) Then it was time to face Shah Ismail. Argalia and his Janissaries were sent to Rum, in north-central Anatolia, arrested thousands of qizilbash residents, and slaughtered thousands more. That kept the bastards quiet while the army marched across their land to deliver Selim the Grim’s letter to the Shah. In this message Selim said, “You no longer uphold the commandments and prohibitions of the divine law. You have incited your abominable Shiite faction to unsanctified sexual union. And you have shed innocent blood.” One hundred thousand Ottoman soldiers made camp at Lake Van in eastern Anatolia on the way to push these words down Shah Ismail’s blasphemous throat. Among their ranks were twelve thousand Janissary musketeers under Argalia’s command. There were also five hundred cannons, chained together to form an impassable barrier.

  The battlefield of Chaldiran was to the northeast of Lake Van, and there the Persian forces made their stand. Shah Ismail’s army was only forty thousand men strong, almost all of them cavalrymen, but Argalia surveying their battle array knew that superior numbers did not always decide a fight. Like Vlad Dracula in Wallachia, Ismail had used a scorched earth strategy. Anatolia was bare and charred, and the advancing Ottomans marching from Sivas to Arzinjan found little to eat or drink. Selim’s army was tired and hungry when it camped by the lake after its long march, and such an army is always beatable. Afterward, when Argalia was with the hidden princess, she told him why her erstwhile lover had been bested.

  “Chivalry,” she said. “Foolish chivalry, and listening to some stupid nephew of his and not to me.”

  The extraordinary fact is that the enchantress of Persia, along with her slave the Mirror, was present on the command hill above the field of battle, her thin veiling garment blowing against her face and breasts in the breeze so suggestively that when she stood outside the king’s tent her body’s beauty turned the Safavid soldiers’ thoughts entirely away from war. “He must have been mad to bring you,” Argalia told her when blood-filthy and kill-sick he found her abandoned at the death-heavy end of the day. “Yes,” she said, matter-of-factly, “I drove him mad with love.”

  However, in the matter of military strategy not even her enchantments could make him heed her. “Look,” she cried, “they are still building their defensive fortifications. Attack now, when they aren’t ready.” And, “Look,” she cried, “they have five hundred cannons chained in a line and twelve thousand riflemen behind. Don’t just gallop at them head-on or you’ll be cut down like fools.” And, “Don’t you have guns? You know about guns. For pity’s sake, why didn’t you bring any guns?” To which the Shah’s nephew Durmish Khan, the fool, answered, “It would not be sportsmanlike to attack them when they are not ready to fight.” And, “It would not be noble to send our men to attack them from the rear.” And, “The gun is not a weapon for a man. The gun is for cowards who do not dare to fight at close quarters. Yet however many guns they have we will take the fight to them until it is hand-to-hand. Courage will win the day, not—ha!—these ‘arquebuses’ and ‘muskets.’” She turned to Shah Ismail in a kind of laughing despair. “Tell this man he is an idiot,” she commanded him. But Shah Ismail of Persia answered, “I am not a caravan thief to go skulking in the shadows. Whatever is decreed by God will occur.”

  She refused to watch the battle, sitting, instead, inside the royal tent with her face turned away from the door. The Mirror sat beside her and held her hand. Shah Ismail led a charge down the right wing that smashed the Ottoman left but the enchantress had turned away her face. Both armies suffered terrible losses. The Persian cavalry cut down the flower of the Ottoman horsemen, the Illyrians, the Macedonians, the Serbians, the Epirots, Thessalians, and Thracians. On the Safavid side, the commanders fell one by one and as they died the enchantress in her tent murmured their names. Muhammad Khan Ustajlu, Husain Beg Lala Ustajlu, Saru Pira Ustajlu, and so on. As if she could see everything without looking. And the Mirror reflected her words, so that the names of the dead seemed to echo in the royal tent. Amir Nizam al-Din Abd al-Baqi…al-Baqi… but the name of the Shah who believed himself to be God was not spoken. The Ottoman center held, but the Turkish cavalry was on the verge of panic when Argalia ordered the artillery to be brought up. “You bastards,” he screamed at his own Janissaries, “if any of you try to run I’ll turn the fucking cannons on you.
” The Swiss giants, armed to the teeth, ran on foot along the Ottoman battle line to add emphasis to Argalia’s threats. Then the thunder of the guns began. “The storm has started,” the enchantress said, sitting in her tent. “The storm,” the Mirror replied. There was no need to look as the Persian army died. It was time to sing a sad song. Shah Ismail was alive, but the day was lost.

  He had fled the battlefield, wounded, without coming for her. She knew it. “He has gone,” she told the Mirror. “Yes, he has gone,” the other assented. “We are at the enemy’s mercy,” the enchantress said. “Mercy,” the Mirror replied.

  The men posted outside the tent to guard them had run away as well. They were two women alone upon a field of dreadful blood. That was how Argalia found them, sitting unveiled and straight-backed and alone, facing away from the door of the royal tent at the end of the battle of Chaldiran, and singing a sad song. The princess Qara Köz turned to face him, making no attempt to shield the nakedness of her features from his gaze, and from that moment on they could only see each other and were lost to the rest of the world.

  He looked like a woman, she thought, like a tall, pale, black-haired woman who had glutted herself on death. How white he was, as white as a mask. Upon which, like a bloodstain, those red, red lips. A sword in his right hand and a gun in his left. He was both things, swordsman and shootist, male and female, himself and his shadow as well. She abandoned Shah Ismail as he had abandoned her and chose again. This pale-faced woman-man. Afterward he would claim her and her Mirror as spoils of war and Selim the Grim would agree, but she had chosen him long before, and it was her will that moved everything that followed.