The Enchantress of Florence

  Again, at once, he was mired in contradictions. He did not wish to be divine but he believed in the justice of his power, his absolute power, and, given that belief, this strange idea of the goodness of disobedience that had somehow slipped into his head was nothing less than seditious. He had power over men’s lives by right of conquest. That was the inevitable conclusion to which any realistic prince must come, that might was right and all the rest, this endless meditation on virtue, for example, was decoration. The victor was the man of virtue, that was all that needed to be said. Difference existed, there would be executions and suicides, but discord could be quelled, and it was his fist that could quell it. But what, then, of the voice within, that whispered every morning about harmony, not the foolish all-men-are-one nostrums of the mystics, but this stranger idea. That discord, difference, disobedience, disagreement, irreverence, iconoclasm, impudence, even insolence might be the wellsprings of the good. These thoughts were not fit for a king.

  He thought of the faraway dukes in the foreigner’s tale. They did not claim a divine right to their lands either, but only the right of the victor. Their philosophers too portrayed the human being standing at the center of his time, his city, his life, his church. But foolishly they ascribed man’s humanity to God, they required divine sanction to support their case in this matter, the higher matter of Man, even though they dispensed with the need for such a sanction in the lower matter of power. How confused they were and how little they were too, ruling a mere city in Tuscany and a Roman bishopric to go with it, and how much they thought of themselves. He was the ruler of the frontierless universe and he saw more clearly than they. No, he corrected himself, he did not, and was indulging in mere bigotry if he asserted it. Mogor had been right. The curse of the human race is not that we are so different from one another, but that we are so alike.

  Daylight spilled across the carpeted floor and he stood up. It was time to show himself at the jharokha window and accept the adoration of the people. The people were in celebratory mood today—this, too, they had in common with the populace of that other city whose streets he walked in dreams, this talent for merrymaking—because it was their emperor’s solar birthday, the fifteenth of October, and His Majesty would be weighed, twelve times each, against, among other things, gold, silk, perfumes, copper, ghee, iron, grain, and salt, and the ladies of the harem would send each household its share of the largesse. The breeders of livestock would each receive as many sheep, goats, and chickens as the king had years. A quantity of other animals, intended for the slaughterhouse, would be freed to run wild and take their chances. Later, in the harem, he would take part in the ceremony of the tying of the knot in the string of his life, the string that kept the record of his age. And today, also, he had a decision to make, concerning the foreigner who claimed to be a “Mughal of Love.”

  The emperor had experienced many feelings concerning this individual: amusement, interest, disappointment, disillusion, surprise, amazement, fascination, irritation, pleasure, perplexity, suspicion, affection, boredom, and increasingly, it was necessary to admit it, fondness and admiration. One day he understood that this was also the way in which parents responded to their children, except that in his own sons’ case his moments of fondness were rare, while disappointment, disillusion, and suspicion were constants. The Crown Prince had been plotting against him almost from the cradle, and all three boys were degenerates, but the man with the story of Qara Köz to tell was invariably respectful, undeniably intelligent, plainly fearless, and he wove quite a yarn. Of late Akbar had begun to entertain an almost scandalous notion concerning this increasingly amiable Vespucci, who had settled in so well to court life at Sikri that almost everyone now treated him as if he belonged there by right. Prince Salim loathed him, and so did the religious fanatic Badauni, whose secret book of poisonous attacks on the emperor grew fatter and fatter every day while its author grew thinner and thinner, but those enmities redounded greatly to his credit. His mother and Queen Mariam-uz-Zamani, his senior, actually existing wife, detested him too, but they lacked imagination and opposed all intrusions of dream-worlds into the real.

  The almost scandalous notion concerning Vespucci had nagged at Akbar for some time now, and to put it to the test he had started involving the foreigner in matters concerning affairs of state. The yellow-haired “Mughal” had mastered, almost at once, the complex details of the mansabdari system by which the empire was governed and upon which its survival depended, the pyramid of rank-holders who were expected to maintain troops and horses according to their seniority and who received, in return, personal fiefdoms which were the source of their wealth. Within days he had memorized the names of every mansabdar in the empire—and there were thirty-three ranks of these officers, from the royal princes who commanded ten thousand men to the lowly commanders of ten—and, in addition, he had briefed himself on the rank-holders’ performance, and put himself in a position to advise the emperor on which mansabdars merited promotion and which of them were failing in their tasks. It was the foreigner who proposed to Akbar the fundamental change in the structure of the system that would guarantee the stability of the empire for a hundred and fifty years. Originally most of the mansabs were either Turanis, Central Asians of Mughal ethnic stock whose family origins lay in the vicinity of Ferghana and Andizhan, or else Persians. Persuaded by Mogor, however, Akbar began to include large numbers of other peoples, Rajputs, Afghans, and Indian Muslims, until no group formed a majority. The Turanis were still the largest group but after the great reform they held only one-quarter of the posts. As a result no single group could dictate terms to the rest, and all of them were obliged to get along and co-operate. Sulh-i-kul. Complete peace. It was all a question of organization.

  So he was a man with talents other than magic tricks and storytelling. The emperor, very favorably impressed, began to test the young man’s athletic and military skills, and discovered that he could ride a horse bareback, hit a target with an arrow, and wield a sword with more than adequate aplomb. Off the fields of play and combat, his gift of tongues was already renowned, and he rapidly became an expert at the court’s most popular indoor games, such as the board game chandal mandal, and the card game of ganjifa, which he enlivened by trying to identify the color cards with the grandees of Sikri. Ashwapati, the Lord of Horses, the highest card in the game, must of course be the emperor himself. Dhanpati, the Lord of Treasures, was obviously the finance minister Raja Todar Mal, and Tiyapati, the Queen of Ladies, was, naturally, Jodha Bai. Raja Man Singh was Dalpati, the Lord of Battle, and Birbal, beloved above all others, first among equals, should probably be Garhpati, Lord of the Fort. Akbar was hugely amused by these conceits. “And you, my Mughal of Love,” he said, “you must be Asrpati, I think.” That was the Lord of the Genii, the magicians’ and sorcerers’ king. Then the foreigner dared to say, “And Ahipati, the Lord of Snakes, Jahanpanah…might that be the Crown Prince, Salim?”

  In short, this was a man with qualities, which was the first requirement for becoming a man of quality. “Stories can wait,” the emperor told him. “You need to improve your knowledge of how things are around here.” So Mogor dell’Amore was apprenticed first to Raja Todar Mal and then to Raja Man Singh, to be initiated into the mysteries of finance and governance, and when Birbal rode west toward the fortresses of Chittorgarh and Mehrangarh, Amer and Jaisalmer, to check up on the empire’s subjects and allies in those parts, the foreigner accompanied him in the role of a senior aide, and returned wide-eyed with wonder at the emperor’s power, having seen those impregnable fortress palaces whose princes had all bowed the knee to the king of kings. As the months lengthened into years it became clear to everyone that the tall yellow-haired man was no longer to be considered a foreigner. The “Mughal of Love” had become the Grand Mughal’s adviser and confidant.

  “Look out for that snake lord, by the way,” the emperor warned Mogor. “The knife he dreams of planting in my back may find its way into yours.”

  T
hen Birbal died.

  The emperor blamed himself for acquiescing in his friend’s wish to be given a military command. But Birbal had taken the uprising of the Raushanai cult, the Afghan Illuminati, surprisingly personally—on, so to speak, the emperor’s behalf. Their leader, Bayazid the Prophet, had stirred Hinduism and Islam together and come up with a pantheist stew of amorality. Birbal was disgusted. “Because God is in everyone and everything, it follows that all acts are divine acts, and therefore, because all acts are godly, there is no difference between right and wrong, good deeds and evil ones, and so we may do exactly as we please?” he scoffed. “Jahanpanah, forgive me, but this petty warlord is laughing at you. He has taken the beauty of your desire to find the one faith within all faiths, and turned it into ugliness, to taunt you. For that temerity alone he should be brought down, even if he were not pillaging and plundering like a barbarian. Plunder, of course, is in his opinion permissible—ha!—because the Raushanai are the chosen people, destined by God to inherit the earth, so if they want to grab their inheritance a little ahead of time, who can say they are not entitled?”

  The idea of pillage becoming a religious duty, by means of which the elect acquired that which was theirs by divine gift, appealed strongly to the tribes in the Afghan mountains, and the cult grew rapidly. Then Bayazid suddenly died and was replaced as the leader of the Raushanai by the sixteen-year-old Jalaluddin, his youngest son. Birbal’s anger at this development was uncontrollable, for “Jalaluddin” was also the emperor Akbar’s given name, which coincidence greatly compounded the insolence of the Raushanai. “Jahanpanah, it is time to answer these insults as they deserve to be answered,” he said. Akbar, amused by such nonmilitary rage, agreed that Birbal could have his way. But the foreigner Mogor dell’Amore did not accompany Birbal. “He’s not ready for an Afghan war,” the emperor pronounced, to general laughter, in the House of Private Audience. “He should be here, at court, keeping us company.”

  However, the uprising was no joke. The mountain routes had become well-nigh impassable. And not long after Birbal arrived in the region to teach the Illuminati a lesson he was ambushed in the Malandrai Pass. There were malicious stories afterward about how the great minister tried to save his skin by running away from his troops, but the rumors the emperor believed spoke of betrayal. He suspected that the Crown Prince had somehow been involved but was never able to prove it. Birbal’s body was never found. Eight thousand of his men were slaughtered.

  After the calamity of the Malandrai Pass the emperor was wretchedly miserable for a long time, refusing food and drink, utterly bereft. He wrote a verse in his fallen friend’s honor. You gave the helpless whatever you could, Birbal. Now I am helpless, but you have nothing left for me. He wrote for the first and last time in the first person, not as a king would, but as a man singing a lament for his beloved. And while he mourned Birbal he sent first Todar Mal and then Man Singh to bludgeon the Raushanai into submission. In the palaces of Sikri he saw voids everywhere, empty spaces where three of his Nine Jewels had been, and which no lesser men could fill. He drew Abul Fazl ever closer and relied on him more and more. And then he had his notion, the almost scandalous notion which he was still weighing carefully eight months after Birbal’s death, on the day of his forty-fourth solar birthday, when he himself was on his way to the royal balance to be weighed.

  This was the question to which he was trying to find the answer: should he make the foreigner, Mogor dell’Amore, also known as Niccolò Vespucci, the teller of tall tales who outrageously claimed to be his uncle, who was proving himself to be such an adept administrator and counselor, and to whom he had taken such an unexpected liking, into his honorary son? The rank of farzand was among the least-bestowed, most-coveted honors in the empire, and anyone who was awarded the title was at once admitted into the emperor’s inner circle. Was this young rogue, who was more like his younger brother than his child (or his uncle), worthy of so great an accolade? And—just as important—how would such an appointment be received?

  He showed himself at the jharokha and the crowd cheered mightily. This Mughal of Love, Akbar reflected, was also popular with the masses. His popularity, the emperor suspected, had as much to do with the success of his house of courtesans down by the lake, the House of Skanda where the Skeleton and Mattress held sway, as with the tale of Qara Köz, but it was undeniably the case that the story of the hidden princess had become part of the lore of the capital, and the people’s interest in it refused to fade away. The people knew, too, that the king’s sons were a disappointment. The future of the dynasty was consequently a problem. According to legend the Mughals’ ancestor Timur, at the time a minor bandit, was traveling in the guise of a camel-herder when he was accosted by a mendicant faqir and asked for food and water. “If you give me nourishment, I’ll give you a kingdom,” promised the faqir, a fellow who had renounced Islam in favor of Hinduism. Timur gave him what he wanted, whereupon the faqir threw his cloak over him and began to spank Timur on the behind with the palm of his hand. After eleven blows Timur cast off the cloak in anger. “If you had tolerated more spanking,” the faqir said, “your dynasty would have lasted longer. Instead, it will end with your eleventh descendant.” The emperor Akbar was the eighth descendant of Timur the Lame, so, if the legend was to be believed, the Mughals were safe on the throne of Hindustan for three generations more. But the ninth generation was a difficulty. At eighteen, fifteen, and fourteen they were all drunkards, and one of them had the falling sickness, and the Crown Prince, what was there to say about the Crown Prince, he was a horror, that was all.

  The emperor on his birthday, seated in the scales of life, being weighed twelve times in rice-milk, contemplated the future. Later he visited the art workshops but his mind was elsewhere. Even in the harem where the women closed around him, their softnesses engulfing him, he was distracted. He felt that he had arrived at a turning point, and that this decision about the foreigner was somehow at its heart. To allow him into the family would be a sign that he was indeed pursuing Abul Fazl’s idea of becoming the World-King, that he could incorporate into his line—into himself—persons, places, narratives, possibilities from lands as yet unknown, lands which might, in their turn, also be subsumed. If one foreigner could become a Mughal then so, in time, could all foreigners. Additionally, it would be a further step in the creation of a culture of inclusion, that very culture which the Raushanai cult satirized merely by existing: his true vision come to life, in which all races, tribes, clans, faiths, and nations would become part of the one grand Mughal synthesis, the one grand syncretization of the earth, its sciences, its arts, its loves, its differences, its problems, its vanities, its philosophies, its sports, its whims. All of which encouraged him to conclude that to honor Mogor dell’Amore with the title of farzand would be an act of strength.

  Yet might it not also look like weakness? Like sentimentality, self-deception, gullibility? To fall for a smooth-talking stranger about whom nothing was known save what he himself proffered as the incomplete, chronologically problematic tale of himself? For to give him official standing would be, in effect, to say that the truth was no longer considered significant, that it no longer mattered if his tale was just a clever lie. Should not a prince avoid making his contempt for the truth so clear? Should he not defend that value, and then lie when it suited him under cover of that defense? Should not a prince, in short, be colder, less susceptible to fantasies and visions? Perhaps the only vision he should allow himself was power. Did the elevation of the foreigner serve the emperor’s power? Maybe it did. And maybe not.

  And beyond these questions lay deeper inquiries still, questions from that world of magic which everyone lived in as passionately as they inhabited the world of tangible materials. When Akbar was glimpsed each day at the jharokha window he was feeding this belief; there were devotees below him, members of a burgeoning Cult of the Glimpse, who afterward began to spread stories of miracles. The sick, the dying, the injured were brought there each day, a
nd if Akbar’s eye fell upon them, if he Glimpsed them even as they Glimpsed him, then a cure was the inevitable result. Glimpsing transferred the emperor’s potency to the Glimpsed. Magic invariably flowed from the more magical person (the emperor, the necromancer, the witch) to the lesser: that was one of its laws.

  It was important not to offend against the laws of magic. If a woman left you it was because you did not cast the right spell over her, or else because someone else cast a stronger enchantment than yours, or else because your marriage was cursed in such a way that it cut the ties of love between husband and wife. Why did So-and-so rather than Such-and-such enjoy success in his businesses? Because he visited the right enchanter. There was a thing in the emperor that rebelled against all this flummery, for was it not a kind of infantilization of the self to give up one’s power of agency and believe that such power resided outside oneself rather than within? This was also his objection to God, that his existence deprived human beings of the right to form ethical structures by themselves. But magic was all around and would not be denied, and it would be a rash ruler who pooh-poohed it. Religion could be rethought, re-examined, remade, perhaps even discarded; magic was impervious to such assaults. This, finally, was why the story of Qara Köz had so easily possessed the imagination of the people of Sikri. She had taken her magic, “their” magic, into other worlds, worlds with their own occultisms, and her sorcery had proved more potent than theirs. Her sorcery. Which not even he, the emperor, could resist.