The Enchantress of Florence Read online

  “Beware these lackeys of your Rival! Make alliance with us, and we will defeat all foes. For I know I have the body of a weak and feeble woman, but I have the heart and stomach of a King, and of a king of England too, and I think foul scorn that any Pope in Rome should dare dishonor me, nor my allies neither. For I have not only my own auctoritas, but potestas as well, and that potency will make me the victor in the fight. And when they are all destroyed and blown to the four winds, then will you be glad you made common cause with England.”

  When the “ambassador” finished reading, the emperor realized that he had fallen in love for a second time within the space of a few minutes, because now he was possessed by a great desire for the author of the letter, England’s queen. “Abul Fazl,” he cried, “shall we not marry this great lady without delay? This virgin queen, Rani Zelabat Giloriana Pehlavi? We think we must have her at once.”

  “Excellent idea,” said the “ambassador” Mogor dell’Amore. “And here in this locket is her picture, which she sends you with her affectionate regard, and which will bewitch you with her beauty, which surpasses even the beauty of her words.” With a flourish of the lace cuffs at his wrist he produced the golden charm, which Abul Fazl took with a look of profound suspicion. Abul Fazl was seized by the conviction that they were getting into deep water, and that the consequence of this Mogor’s presence among them would be immense, and not necessarily to their benefit, but when he attempted to caution his master against this new involvement the world’s most frightening man (with no exceptions) waved his worries away.

  “The letter is charming and so is he who bears it,” Akbar said. “Bring him to our private rooms tomorrow so that we can speak further.” The audience was over.

  The sudden infatuation of the emperor Zelabdin Echebar with his female mirror image Queen Zelabat Giloriana the First resulted in a stream of love letters which were carried to England by accredited royal messengers, and never answered. The rhapsodic letters bore the emperor’s personal seal and were of an emotional intensity and sexual explicitness that was unusual in the Europe (and the Asia) of the period. Many of these letters failed to reach their destination because the messengers were waylaid by enemies along the way, and from Kabul to Calais these intercepted outpourings provided rich amusement for nobles and princes delighted by the Emperor of India’s crazy declarations of undying affection for a woman he had never met, as well as his megalomaniac fantasies of creating a joint global empire that united the eastern and western hemispheres. Those letters that did arrive at Whitehall Palace were treated as forgeries, or the work of a pseudonymous crank, and their carriers were given short shrift, many of them ending up in jail as their poor reward for a long and dangerous journey. After a time they were simply refused admission and those who managed to limp back across the world to Fatehpur Sikri returned with embittered words. “That queen is a virgin because no man would wish to lie with so cold a fish,” they reported, and after a year and a day Akbar’s love vanished as swiftly and mysteriously as it had appeared, perhaps because of the revolt of his queens, who united for once behind his nonexistent beloved to threaten the withdrawal of their favors unless he stopped sending fancy letters to that Englishwoman whose silence, coming after her own initial blandishments had aroused the emperor’s interest, proved the insincerity of her character and the folly of attempting to understand such an alien and unattractive personage, especially when so many more loving and desirable ladies were so much closer to hand.

  Near the end of his long reign, many years after the time of the charlatan Mogor dell’Amore had passed, the aging emperor nostalgically remembered that strange affair of the letter from the Queen of England, and asked to see it again. When it was brought to him and translated by a different interpreter much of the original text had disappeared. The surviving document was found to contain no references to his own infallibility or the Pope’s; nor did it ask for an alliance against common foes. It was in fact no more than a plain request for good trading terms for English merchants, accompanied by some routine expressions of respect. When the emperor learned the truth he understood all over again how daring a sorcerer he had encountered on that long-ago morning after the dream of the crow. By then, however, the knowledge was of no use to him, except to remind him of what he should never have forgotten, that witchcraft requires no potions, familiar spirits, or magic wands. Language upon a silvered tongue affords enchantment enough.

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  When the sword of the tongue is drawn

  When the sword of the tongue is drawn, the emperor thought, it inflicts deeper cuts than the sharpest blade. If he needed proof it was to be found in the war of the philosophers that took place each day in this very place: the embroidered and mirrorworked Tent of the New Worship. There was a constant hubbub here, the noise of the kingdom’s finest thinkers gashing one another dreadfully with their words. Akbar had kept the vow he had made on the day he chopped up the insolent Rana of Cooch Naheen, and had created a debating chamber in which the adoration of the divine was reimagined as an intellectual wrestling match in which no holds were barred. He had invited Mogor dell’Amore to accompany him to the Tent so that he could show off his new invention, impress upon the newcomer the splendid originality and progressiveness of the Mughal court, and, not incidentally, demonstrate to the Jesuits sent by Portugal that they were not the only Westerners to have access to the imperial ear.

  Inside the Tent the participants reclined on carpets and bolsters, grouped into two camps, the Water Drinkers and the Wine Lovers, who faced each other across a nave which was empty except for the seats of the emperor and his guest. The manqul party containing the religious thinkers and mystics drank only water, while their opponents the ma’qul celebrated pure philosophy and the sciences and poured wine down their throats all day long. Abul Fazl and Raja Birbal were here today, both seated as usual among the wine fanciers. Prince Salim, too, was visiting, a surly teenage presence alongside the puritanical water-only leader Badauni, a thin line of a man—one of those young men who seemed to have been born old—who detested the older Abul Fazl and was heartily loathed by that spherical worthy in return. Arguments raged between them, in terms so intemperate (“Fat sycophant!” “Tedious termite!”) that the emperor found himself wondering how such discord could ever lead to the harmony he sought; was freedom indeed the road to unity, or was chaos its inevitable result?

  Akbar had decided that this revolutionary temple would not be a permanent building. Argument itself—and no deity, however multilimbed or almighty—would here be the only god. But reason was a mortal divinity, a god that died, and even if it was subsequently reborn it inevitably died again. Ideas were like the tides of the sea or the phases of the moon; they came into being, rose, and grew in their proper time, and then ebbed, darkened, and vanished when the great wheel turned. They were temporary dwellings, like tents, and a tent was their proper home. Mughal tent-makers were geniuses in their own way, creating collapsible houses of great complexity and beauty. When the army marched it was accompanied by a second army of two and a half thousand men (to say nothing of elephants and camels) who raised and lowered the little tent-city in which the king and his men resided. These portable pagodas, pavilions, and palaces had even inspired the stonemasons of Sikri—but a tent was still a tent, a thing of canvas, cloth, and wood that well represented the impermanence of the things of the mind. One day, a hundred years from now when even his great empire was no more—yes! in this place he was willing to foresee even the destruction of his own creation!—his descendants would see the tent pulled down and all his glory vanish. “Only when we accept the truths of death,” the emperor declared, “can we begin to learn the truths of being alive.”

  “Paradox, sire,” Mogor dell’Amore answered cheekily, “is a knot that allows a man to seem intelligent even as it is trussing his brain like a hen bound for the pot. ‘In death lies the meaning of life!’ ‘A man’s wealth engenders his soul’s poverty!’ And so violence may becom
e gentleness, and ugliness beauty, and any blessed thing its opposite. This is indeed a hall of mirrors, full of illusions and inversions. A man may wallow in the bogs of paradox until his last day without ever thinking a clear thought worthy of the name.” The emperor felt within him a surge of the same blind fury that had caused him to tear off the Rana of Cooch Naheen’s offensive mustache. Had his ears deceived him?—By what right did this foreign scoundrel…?—How did he dare…? The emperor realized that his face had purpled and that he had begun to spit and splutter in his wrath. The gathering fell into a silent terror, for Akbar in a rage was capable of anything, he could tear down the sky with his bare hands or rip out the tongues of everyone within hearing distance to make sure they could never talk about what they had witnessed or he could suck out your soul and drown it in a bowl of your bubbling blood.

  It was Prince Salim, urged on by Badauni, who broke the scandalized silence. “Do you understand,” he said to the interloper in the strange hot overcoat, “that you could die for what you have just said to the king?” Mogor dell’Amore looked (though perhaps he did not entirely feel) unabashed. “If I can die for such a thing in this city,” he replied, “then it’s not a city worth living in. And besides, I understood that in this tent it was reason, not the king, that ruled.” The silence thickened like curdled milk. Akbar’s face blackened. Then all of a sudden the storm passed, and the emperor began to laugh. He slapped Mogor dell’Amore on the back and nodded vigorously. “Gentlemen, an outsider has taught us a great lesson,” he said. “One must stand outside a circle to see that it is round.”

  Now it was the turn of the Crown Prince to feel the rage of public rebuke, but he sat down without saying anything. The look on his rival Badauni’s face pleased Abul Fazl so much that he began to warm toward the yellow-haired foreigner who had so unexpectedly charmed the king. As for the newcomer, he understood that his gamble had succeeded, but that in bringing off the feat he had made a powerful enemy, who was all the more dangerous for being an immature and evidently petulant adolescent. The Skeleton is hated by the prince’s lady and now the prince hates me, he thought. This is not a quarrel that we are likely to win. However, he allowed none of his qualms to show, and accepted, with the most flamboyant bows and flourishes he could muster, Raja Birbal’s offer of a glass of fine red wine.

  The emperor too was thinking about his son. What a joy his birth had been! But perhaps after all it had been unwise to place him in the care of the mystics, the followers and successors of Sheikh Salim Chishti after whom the prince had been named. The boy had grown up to be a tangled mass of contradictions, a lover of the delicacy and care of gardening but also of the indolence of opium, a sexualist among the puritans, a pleasure lover who quoted the most diehard thinkers and derided Akbar’s favorites, saying, seek not for light from the eyes of the blind. Not his own line of course. The boy was a mimicking mynah bird, a puppet capable of being used against him by whoever got hold of his strings.

  Whereas, by contrast, and on the other hand, behold this foreigner so in love with argument that he dared fling a rationalist’s taunt at the emperor’s amazed face, and to do it in public, which was worse. Here, perhaps, was a man a king might talk to in ways that his own flesh and blood would not understand, or would be bored by. When he killed the Rana of Cooch Naheen he had wondered if he had murdered the only man who might have understood him and whom he might have been able to love. Now fate, as if in answer to his grief, had perhaps offered him a second such confidant, perhaps even an improvement on the first, for this was not merely a talker but an adventurer too. A man of reason who in reason’s name took unreasonable risks. A paradoxical fellow who disparaged paradox. The rogue was no less contradictory than Prince Salim—no less contradictory, perhaps, than any man alive—but these were contradictions that the emperor could enjoy. Could he open his heart to this Mogor and tell him things that he had never said, not even to Bhakti Ram Jain the deaf flatterer, or Birbal the wit, or omniscient Abul Fazl? Was this his confessor at last?

  For there were so many things he wanted to talk about, things not even Abul Fazl or Birbal would fully understand, things he was not yet prepared to air in the open debate of the Tent of the New Worship. He wanted, for example, to investigate why one should hold fast to a religion not because it was true but because it was the faith of one’s fathers. Was faith not faith but simple family habit? Maybe there was no true religion but only this eternal handing down. And error could be handed down as easily as virtue. Was faith no more than an error of our ancestors?

  Maybe there was no true religion. Yes, he had allowed himself to think this. He wanted to be able to tell someone of his suspicion that men had made their gods and not the other way around. He wanted to be able to say, it is man at the center of things, not God. It is man at the heart and the bottom and the top, man at the front and the back and the side, man the angel and the devil, the miracle and the sin, man and always man, and let us henceforth have no other temples but those dedicated to mankind. This was his most unspeakable ambition: to found the religion of man. In the Tent of the New Worship the Winemen and the Waterers were calling one another heretics and fools. The emperor wanted to confess his secret disappointment in all mystics and philosophers. He wanted to sweep the whole argument aside, to erase the centuries of inheritance and reflection, and allow man to stand naked as a baby upon the throne of heaven. (If man had created god then man could uncreate him too. Or was it possible for a creation to escape the power of the creator? Could a god, once created, become impossible to destroy? Did such fictions acquire an autonomy of the will that made them immortal? The emperor did not have the answers, but the questions themselves felt like answers of a kind.) Could foreigners grasp what his countrymen could not? If he, Akbar, stepped outside the circle, could he live without its comforting circularity, in the terrifying strangeness of a new thought?

  “We will go,” he told his guest. “We have heard enough great thoughts for one day.”

  Because an eerie illusion of calm spread over the imperial complex as it shimmered in the heat of the day it became necessary to seek the true nature of the times in signs and auguries. When the daily shipment of ice was delayed it meant that there was trouble in the provinces. When green fungus clouded the clear water of the Anup Talao, the Best of All Possible Pools, it meant there was treason brewing at court. And when the king left his palace and rode in his palanquin down to the Sikri lake it was a sign that his spirit was troubled. These were all water portents. There were also auguries of air, fire, and earth, but the water prophecies were the most reliable. Water informed the emperor, it bore the truth to him upon its tides, and it also soothed him. It ran in narrow channels and broad pathways around and across the courtyards of the palace quarter and cooled the stone buildings from below. True, it was a symbol of abstemious puritans like Badauni’s manqul party, but the emperor’s relationship with the life-sustaining liquid was deeper than any religious bigot’s.

  Bhakti Ram Jain brought the king a steaming bowl of water for his ablutions each morning and Akbar would look deep into the rising steam and it would reveal to him the best course of action for the day. When he bathed in the royal hammam he leaned his head back and floated for a while like a fish. The hammam water whispered in his submerged ears and told him the innermost thoughts of everyone else who had taken a bath anywhere within a three-mile radius. Stationary water’s powers of information were limited; for long-distance news it was necessary to immerse oneself in a river. However, the hammam’s magic was not to be underestimated. It was the hammam that had told him, for example, about the hidden journal of the narrow-minded Badauni, a book so critical of the emperor’s ideas and habits that if Akbar had admitted he knew of its existence he would have been obliged to execute Badauni at once. Instead he kept his critic’s secret as close to his chest as any of his own, and each night when Badauni was asleep the emperor would send his most trusted spy, Umar the Ayyar, to the embittered author’s study, to find and
memorize the latest pages of the secret history of the emperor’s reign.

  Umar the Ayyar was as important to Akbar as water—so important that he was unknown to anyone except the emperor himself. Not even Birbal knew of his existence, and nor did Abul Fazl the master of spies. He was a young eunuch so slender and hairless of face and body that he could pass for a woman and so, at Akbar’s command, he lived anonymously in the harem cubicle and pretended to be a humble servitor of the concubines he so strongly resembled. That morning, before Akbar took Mogor dell’Amore to the Tent of the New Worship, Umar had entered Akbar’s chambers through the hidden door whose existence was unknown even to Bhakti Ram Jain, and informed his master of a murmur he had heard in the air, a faint wisp of a rumor emanating from the Hatyapul brothel. It was that the yellow-haired newcomer had a secret to tell, a secret so astonishing that it could shake the dynasty itself. Umar had not managed to find out what the secret was, however, and looked so ashamed of himself, so girlishly downcast, that the emperor had to console him for several minutes to make sure he didn’t embarrass himself further by bursting into tears.