The Enchantress of Florence Read online

  “In Italy we say, Mogor,” the young prestidigitator told him. “In the unpronounceable tongues of the land itself,” Lord Hauksbank rejoined, “who knows how the word may be twisted, knotted, and turned.”

  A book sealed their friendship: the Canzoniere of Petrarch, an edition of which lay, as always, by the Scottish milord’s elbow on a little pietra dura tabletop. “Ah, mighty Petrarca,” “Uccello” cried. “Now there is a true magician.” And striking a Roman senator’s oratorical pose he began to declaim:

  “Benedetto sia ’l giorno, et ’l mese, et l’anno,

  et la stagione, e ’l tempo, et l’ora, e ’l punto,

  e ’l bel paese, e ’l loco ov’io fui giunto

  da’duo begli occhi che legato m’ànno…”

  Whereupon Lord Hauksbank took up the sonnet’s thread in English:

  “…and blessed be the first sweet suffering

  that I felt in being conjoined with Love, and the bow,

  and the shafts with which I was pierced,

  and the wounds that run to the depths of my heart.”

  “Any man who loves this poem as I do must be my master,” said “Uccello,” bowing. “And any man who feels as I do about these words must be my drinking companion,” returned the Scot. “You have turned the key that unlocks my heart. Now I must share a secret that you will never divulge to anyone. Come with me.”

  In a small wooden box concealed behind a sliding panel in his sleeping quarters Lord Hauksbank of That Ilk kept a collection of beloved “objects of virtue,” beautiful little pieces without which a man who traveled constantly might lose his bearings, for too much travel, as Lord Hauksbank well knew, too much strangeness and novelty, could loosen the moorings of the soul. “These things are not mine,” he said to his new Florentine friend, “yet they remind me of who I am. I act as their custodian for a time, and when that time is ended, I let them go.” He pulled out of the box a number of jewels of awe-inspiring size and clarity which he set aside with a dismissive shrug, and then an ingot of Spanish gold which would keep any man who found it in splendor for the rest of his days—“’tis nothing, nothing,” he muttered—and only then did he arrive at his real treasures, each carefully wrapped in cloth and embedded in nests of crumpled paper and shredded rags: the silk handkerchief of a pagan goddess of ancient Soghdia, given to a forgotten hero as a token of her love; a piece of exquisite scrimshaw work on whalebone depicting the hunting of a stag; a locket containing a portrait of Her Majesty the Queen; a leather-bound hexagonal book from the Holy Land, upon whose tiny pages, in miniature writing embellished with extraordinary illuminations, was the entire text of the Qur’n; a broken-nosed stone head from Macedonia, reputed to be a portrait of Alexander the Great; one of the cryptic “seals” of the Indus Valley civilization, found in Egypt, bearing the image of a bull and a series of hieroglyphs that had never been decoded, an object whose purpose no man knew; a flat, polished Chinese stone bearing a scarlet I Ching hexagram and dark natural markings resembling a mountain range at dusk; a painted porcelain egg; a shrunken head made by the denizens of the Amazon rain forest; and a dictionary of the lost language of the Panamanian isthmus whose speakers were all extinct except for one old woman who could no longer pronounce the words properly on account of the loss of her teeth.

  Lord Hauksbank of That Ilk opened a cabinet of precious glassware that had miraculously survived the crossing of many oceans, took out a matched pair of opalescent Murano balloons, and poured a sufficiency of brandy into each. The stowaway approached and raised a glass. Lord Hauksbank breathed deeply, and then drank. “You are from Florence,” he said, “so you know of the majesty of that highest of sovereigns, the individual human self, and of the cravings it seeks to assuage, for beauty, for value—and for love.” The man calling himself “Uccello” began to reply, but Hauksbank raised a hand. “I will have my say,” he continued, “for there are matters to discuss of which your eminent philosophers know nothing. The self may be royal, but it hungers like a pauper. It may be nourished for a moment by the inspection of such cocooned wonders as these, but it remains a poor, starving, thirsting thing. And it is a king imperiled, a sovereign forever at the mercy of many insurgents, of fear, for example, and anxiety, of isolation and bewilderment, of a strange unspeakable pride and a wild, silent shame. The self is beset by secrets, secrets eat at it constantly, secrets will tear down its kingdom and leave its scepter broken in the dust.

  “I see I am perplexing you,” he sighed, “so I will show myself plainly. The secret you will never divulge to anyone is not hidden in a box. It lies—no, it does not lie, but tells the truth!—in here.”

  The Florentine, who had intuited the truth about Lord Hauksbank’s concealed desires sometime before, gravely expressed proper respect for the heft and circumference of the mottled member that lay before him upon his lordship’s table smelling faintly of fennel, like a finocchiona sausage waiting to be sliced. “If you gave up the sea and came to live in my hometown,” he said, “your troubles would soon be at an end, for among the young gallants of San Lorenzo you would easily find the manly pleasures you seek. I myself, most regrettably…”

  “Drink up,” the Scottish milord commanded, coloring darkly, and putting himself away. “We will say no more about it.” There was a glitter in his eye which his companion wished were not in his eye. His hand was nearer to the hilt of his sword than his companion would have liked it to be. His smile was the rictus of a beast.

  There followed a long and lonely silence during which the stowaway understood that his fate hung in the balance. Then Hauksbank drained his brandy glass and gave an ugly, anguished laugh. “Well, sir,” he cried, “you know my secret, and now you must tell me yours, for certainly you have a mystery in you, which I foolishly mistook for my own, and now I must have it plain.”

  The man calling himself Uccello di Firenze tried to change the subject. “Will you not honor me, my lord, with an account of the capture of the Cacafuego treasure galleon? And were you—you must have been—with Drake at Valparaiso, and Nombre de Dios, where he took his wound…?” Hauksbank threw his glass against a wall and drew his sword. “Scoundrel,” he said. “Answer me directly, or die.”

  The stowaway chose his words carefully. “My lord,” he said, “I am here, I now perceive, to offer myself to you as your factotum. It is true, however,” he added quickly, as the blade’s point touched his throat, “that I have a more distant purpose too. Indeed, I am what you might call a man embarked on a quest—a secret quest, what’s more—but I must warn you that my secret has a curse upon it, placed there by the most powerful enchantress of the age. Only one man may hear my secret and live, and I would not wish to be responsible for your death.”

  Lord Hauksbank of That Ilk laughed again, not an ugly laugh this time, a laugh of dispersing clouds and revenant sunshine. “You amuse me, little bird,” he said. “Do you imagine I fear your green-faced witch’s curse? I have danced with Baron Samedi on the Day of the Dead and survived his voodoo howls. I will take it most unkindly if you do not tell me everything at once.”

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

  “Stop,” said Lord Hauksbank of That Ilk, clutching at his brow. “You’re giving me a headache.” Then, after a moment, “Go on.” “…Angelica, a princess of the blood royal of Genghis Khan and Tamerlane…” “Stop. No, go on.” “…the most beautiful…” “Stop.”

  Whereupon Lord Hauksbank fell unconscious to the floor.

  The traveler, almost embarrassed about the ease with which he had inserted the laudanum into his host’s glass, carefully returned the little wooden box of treasures to its hiding place, drew his particolored greatcoat about him, and hurried onto the main deck calling for help. He had won the coat at cards in a hand of scarabocion played against an as
tonished Venetian diamond merchant who could not believe that a mere Florentine could come to the Rialto and beat the locals at their own game. The merchant, a bearded and ringleted Jew named Shalakh Cormorano, had had the coat specially made at the most famous tailor’s shop in Venice, known as Il Moro Invidioso because of the picture of a green-eyed Arab on the shingle over its door, and it was an occultist marvel of a greatcoat, its lining a catacomb of secret pockets and hidden folds within which a diamond merchant could stash his valuable wares, and a chancer such as “Uccello di Firenze” could conceal all manner of tricks. “Quickly, my friends, quickly,” the traveler called in a convincing display of concern. “His lordship has need of us.”

  If, among this hardy crew of privateers-turned-diplomats, there were many narrow-eyed cynics whose suspicions were aroused by the manner of their leader’s sudden collapse, and who began to regard the newcomer in a manner not conducive to his good health, they were partly reassured by the obvious concern shown by “Uccello di Firenze” for Lord Hauksbank’s well-being. He helped to carry the unconscious man to his cot, undressed him, struggled with his pajamas, applied hot and cold compresses to his brow, and refused to sleep or eat until the Scottish milord’s health improved. The ship’s doctor declared the stowaway to be an invaluable aide, and on hearing that the crew went muttering and shrugging back to their posts.

  When they were alone with the insensate man, the doctor confessed to “Uccello” that he was baffled by the aristocrat’s refusal to awake from his sudden coma. “Nothing wrong with the man that I can see, praise God, except that he won’t wake up,” he said, “and in this loveless world it may be that it’s wiser to dream than to awake.”

  The doctor was a simple, battle-hardened individual named Praise-God Hawkins, a good-hearted sawbones of limited medical knowledge who was more accustomed to removing Spanish bullets from his shipmates’ bodies, and sewing up cutlass gashes after hand-to-hand combat with the Spaniard, than to curing mysterious sleeping sicknesses that arrived out of nowhere, like a stowaway or a judgment from God. Hawkins had left an eye at Valparaiso and half a leg at Nombre de Dios, and he sang, every night, mournful Portuguese fados in honor of a maiden on a balcony in the Ribeira neighborhood of Oporto, accompanying himself on some sort of gypsy fiddle. Praise-God wept copiously while he sang, and “Uccello” understood that the good doctor was imagining his own cuckolding, conjuring up, to torture himself, images of his port-wine-drinking beloved in bed with men who were still whole, fishermen stinking of their finny prey, lecherous Franciscan monks, the ghosts of the early navigators, and living men of every variety and hue, Dagos and Englishmen, Chinamen and Jews. “A man under the enchantment of love,” the stowaway thought, “is a man easily distracted and led.”

  As the Scáthach made her way past the Horn of Africa and the isle of Socotra, and while she took on supplies at Maskat and then left the Persian coast to port and, blown along by the monsoon wind, headed southeast toward the Portuguese haven of Diu on the southern shore of the place Dr. Hawkins called “Guzerat,” so Lord Hauksbank of That Ilk slumbered peacefully on, “a sleep so calm, praise God,” according to the helpless Hawkins, “that it proves his conscience is clear and so his soul, at least, is in good health, ready to meet its Maker at any time.” “God forbid,” said the stowaway. “Praise God, let him not be taken yet,” the other readily agreed. During their long bedside vigil “Uccello” often asked the doctor about his Portugee lady love. Hawkins needed little encouragement to discuss the subject. The stowaway listened patiently to adoring paeans to the lady’s eyes, her lips, her bosoms, her hips, her belly, her rump, her feet. He learned the secret terms of endearment she used in the act of love, terms no longer so secret now, and he heard her promises of fidelity and her murmured oath of eternal union. “Ah, but she is false, false,” the doctor wept. “Do you know this for a fact?” the traveler inquired, and when the lachrymose Praise-God shook his head, saying, “It has been so long, and I am now but half a man, so I must assume the worst,” then “Uccello” coaxed him back to gaiety. “Well, let us now praise God, Praise-God, for you weep without cause! She is true, I’m certain of it; and waits for you, I doubt it not; and if you have a leg less, well then, she will have love to spare, the love allocated to that leg can be reassigned to other parts; and if you lack an eye, the other will feast twice as well upon her who has kept faith, and loves you as you love her! Enough! Praise God! Sing joyfully and weep no more.”

  In this fashion he dismissed Praise-God Hawkins nightly, assuring him that the crew would be desolate if they did not hear his songs, and nightly, when he was alone with the unconscious milord, and had waited a few moments, he made a thorough search of the captain’s quarters, seeking out all their secrets. “A man who builds a cabin with one hidden cavity has built a cabin with at least two or three,” he reasoned, and by the time the port of Diu was sighted he had plucked Lord Hauksbank as clean as any chicken, he had found the seven secret chambers in the paneled walls, and all the jewels in all the wooden boxes therein were safely in their new homes in the coat of Shalakh Cormorano, and the seven gold ingots, too, and yet the coat felt light as a feather, for the green-eyed Moor of Venice knew the secret of rendering weightless whatever goods were secreted within that magic garment. As for the other “objects of virtue,” they did not interest the thief. He let them nest where they lay, to hatch what birds they could. But even at the end of his grand pilfering “Uccello” was not content, for the greatest treasure of all had eluded him. It was all he could do to conceal his agitation. Chance had placed a great opportunity within his grasp, and he must not let it slip. But where was the thing? He had looked over every inch of the captain’s quarters, and yet it remained hidden. Damnation! Was the treasure under a spell? Had it been made invisible, to escape him thus?

  After the Scáthach’s brief landfall at Diu she made haste for Surat, from which city (recently the site of a punitive visit by the emperor Akbar himself ) Lord Hauksbank had intended to embark on his land journey to the Mogol’s court. And on the night that they reached Surat (which lay in ruins, still smoldering from the emperor’s wrath), when Praise-God Hawkins was singing his heart out and the crew was rum-drunk and rejoicing at the end of the long sea voyage, the searcher belowdecks at last found what he was looking for: the eighth secret panel, one more than the magic number of seven, one more than almost any robber would expect. Behind that ultimate door was the thing he sought. Then after one last deed he joined the revelers on deck and sang and drank more heartily than any man aboard. Because he possessed the gift of staying awake when no other man’s eyes could remain open, the time came, in the small hours of the morning, when he was able to slip ashore in one of the ship’s dinghies and disappear, like a phantom, into India. Long before Praise-God Hawkins raised the alarm, having found Lord Hauksbank of That Ilk blue-lipped in his last sea-cot and released forever from the torments of his yearning finocchiona, “Uccello di Firenze” had gone, leaving only that name behind like the abandoned skin of a snake. Next to the nameless traveler’s breast was the treasure of treasures, the letter in Elizabeth Tudor’s own hand and under her personal seal, the missive from the Queen of England to the Emperor of India, which would be his open-sesame, his passe-partout, to the world of the Mughal court. He was England’s ambassador now.

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  At dawn the haunting sandstone palaces

  At dawn the haunting sandstone palaces of the new “victory city” of Akbar the Great looked as if they were made of red smoke. Most cities start giving the impression of being eternal almost as soon as they are born, but Sikri would always look like a mirage. As the sun rose to its zenith, the great bludgeon of the day’s heat pounded the flagstones, deafening human ears to all sounds, making the air quiver like a frightened blackbuck, and weakening the border between sanity and delirium, between what was fanciful and what was real.

  Even the emperor succumbed to fantasy. Queens floated within his palaces like ghosts, Rajput and Turkish
sultanas playing catch-me-if-you-can. One of these royal personages did not really exist. She was an imaginary wife, dreamed up by Akbar in the way that lonely children dream up imaginary friends, and in spite of the presence of many living, if floating, consorts, the emperor was of the opinion that it was the real queens who were the phantoms and the nonexistent beloved who was real. He gave her a name, Jodha, and no man dared gainsay him. Within the privacy of the women’s quarters, within the silken corridors of her palace, her influence and power grew. Tansen wrote songs for her and in the studio-scriptorium her beauty was celebrated in portraiture and verse. Master Abdus Samad the Persian portrayed her himself, painted her from the memory of a dream without ever looking upon her face, and when the emperor saw his work he clapped his hands at the beauty shining up from the page. “You have captured her, to the life,” he cried, and Abdus Samad relaxed and stopped feeling as if his head was too loosely attached to his neck; and after this visionary work by the master of the emperor’s atelier had been exhibited, the whole court knew Jodha to be real, and the greatest courtiers, the Navratna or Nine Stars, all acknowledged not only her existence but also her beauty, her wisdom, the grace of her movements, and the softness of her voice. Akbar and Jodhabai! Ah, ah! It was the love story of the age.

  The city was finished at last, in time for the emperor’s fortieth birthday. It had been twelve hot years in the making, but for a long time he had been given the impression that it rose up effortlessly, year by year, as if by sorcery. His minister of works had not allowed any construction to go forward during the emperor’s sojourns in the new imperial capital. When the emperor was in residence the stonemasons’ tools fell silent, the carpenters drove in no nails, the painters, the inlay-workers, the hangers of fabrics, and the carvers of screens all disappeared from view. All then, it’s said, was cushioned pleasure. Only noises of delight were permitted to be heard. The bells on the ankles of dancers echoed sweetly, and fountains tinkled, and the soft music of the genius Tansen hung upon the breeze. There was whispered poetry in the emperor’s ear, and in the pachisi courtyard on Thursdays there was much languid play, with slave girls being used as living pieces on the checkerboard floor. In the curtained afternoons beneath the sliding punkahs there was a quiet time for love. The city’s sensuous hush was brought into being by the monarch’s omnipotence as much as by the heat of the day.