The Enchantress of Florence

  “Why such a question, Jahanpanah?” he asked, and the emperor’s eyes flashed at him angrily.

  “Do not presume to question us, sir. We ask again, are there camels in the new world, camels such as we have here in Hindustan, are camels to be found among all those griffins and dragons?” Akbar asked, and seeing the other shake his head, held up a silencing hand and went on, his voice gathering force as he spoke. “The physical freedom of the camel, we have always thought, offers a lesson in amorality to mere human beings. For between camels nothing is forbidden. A young male camel, soon after he is born, will seek to fornicate with his mother. An adult male will feel no qualms about impregnating his daughter. Grandchildren, grandparents, sisters, brothers, all these are fair game when a camel seeks a partner. The term incest has no meaning to this animal. We, however, are not camels, isn’t that right? And against incest there are ancient taboos, and harsh penalties are levied against couples who disregard them—rightly levied, as we hope you will agree.”

  A man and a woman sail into the mists and lose themselves in a formless new world where nobody knows them. In all the world they have only each other and the servant girl. The man is a servant too, the servant of beauty, and the name of his journey is love. They arrive in the place whose name does not matter just as their names do not. The years pass and their hopes die. All around them are energetic men. A wild world to the south and another to the north are slowly, slowly being tamed. Shape, law, form is being given to what was inchoately unchanging, but the process will be long. Slowly, slowly, the conquest moves ahead. There are advances, retreats, and again advances, small victories, small defeats, and then again larger gains. No man asks whether this is a good process or a bad one. It is not a legitimate question. God’s work is being done, and gold is being mined as well. The greater the hubbub around them, the more dramatic the victories, the more dreadful the defeats, the bloodier the revenge of the old world upon the new, the stiller they become, the three unimportant people, the man, the woman, the servant. Day by day, month by month, year by year they grow smaller and less significant. Then illness strikes and the woman dies, but she leaves behind a child, a baby girl.

  The man has nothing on earth now except the child and the servant, his dead wife’s mirror. Together they raise the child. Angelica. The magic child. The servant’s name has become Angelica too. The man watches the girl grow up and become a second mirror, the image of her mother, her mother to the life. The servant as she ages sees the uncanny likeness in the growing girl, the rebirth of the past, and sees, in addition, the father’s burgeoning desire. How lonely they are, the three of them, in this world that has not yet fully taken shape, in which words can mean what you wish them to mean, and so can deeds; in which new lives must be made as best they can. There is complicity between the man and the servant for in the old days they used to lie together, the three of them, and they miss the departed third. The new life, the life reincarnate, grows to fill the hollow in the air where the old life used to be.

  Angelica, Angelica. There is a point at which the language they use is changed, a point beyond which certain words lose their meaning, the word father, for instance, is forgotten, as are the words my child. They live in a state of nature, a state of grace, an Eden in which the fruit of the tree has not been eaten, and so good and evil are unknown. The young woman grows up between the man and the servant and what happens between them, naturally happens, and feels pure, and she is happy. She is a princess of the blood royal of the house of Timur and Temüjin and her name is Angelica, Angelica. One day a passage will be found and with her beloved husband she will enter into her kingdom. Until then they have their invisible home, their anonymous lives, and this bed, in which they move, so sweetly, so often, for so long, the three of them, the man, the servant, and the girl. Then a child is born, their child, the offspring of three parents, a boy with yellow hair like his father. The man names his son after his closest companions. Once there were three friends. By bringing their names across the Ocean Sea, he feels, he has brought them across also. His son is his friends reborn. The years move on. The girl sickens for reasons unknown. Something is wrong with her life. Something amiss with her soul. She becomes delirious. Who is she, she asks. In her last conversation with her son she tells him to find his family, to be rejoined, to remain joined always to what he is and never leave it, never after that set forth into the world for love or adventure or self. He is a prince of the blood royal of the Mughal house. He must go and tell his story. A falcon flies in through the window and flies out with her soul. The young man with the yellow hair goes down to the harbor to look for a ship. The old man and the servant stay behind. They are not important anymore. Their deed is done.

  “That is not what happened,” said Mogor dell’Amore. “My mother was Qara Köz, your grandfather’s sister, the great enchantress, and she learned how to stop time.”

  “No,” said the emperor Akbar. “No, she did not.”

  Lady Man Bai, niece of Mariam-uz-Zamani, sister of Raja Man Singh, married her long-time sweetheart Crown Prince Salim on the date specified by the court astrologers, the fifteenth of Isfandarmudh of that year according to the new solar calendar introduced by the emperor, which is to say the thirteenth of February, at her family’s fortress palace of Amer, in the gracious presence of His Majesty the padishah Akbar, the Shelter of the World. When she was alone with her husband on their wedding night, after the usual application of unguents and massaging of the princely member, she made two stipulations before she allowed him to enter her. “In the first place,” she said, “if you ever visit that whore the Skeleton again you had better start sleeping with your penis encased in armor every night, because you won’t know which will be the night of my revenge. And in the second place, you need to attend to the yellow-haired foreigner, the Skeleton’s poxy lover, because while he’s in Sikri your father might just be crazy enough to give him what by right belongs to you.”

  After the events at the Anup Talao the emperor gave up the idea of raising Niccolò Vespucci to the rank of farzand or honorary son. Firmly convinced of, and a little disgusted by, the correctness of his version of the foreigner’s story, he concluded that such a child, the offspring of an amoral liaison, could not be recognized as a member of the royal family. In spite of Vespucci’s own obvious innocence in the matter, and indeed his ignorance of his true origins, and no matter how great his charms or talents, that one word, incest, placed him beyond the pale. Work could certainly be found for so able a person at Sikri if he wanted it, and the emperor issued instructions for such employment to be identified and offered, but their own intimacy would have to come to an end. As if to confirm the rightness of these decisions the waters of the Anup Talao resumed their habitual serenity. Niccolò Vespucci was informed by Umar the Ayyar that he was permitted to remain at the capital, but must immediately cease to refer to himself by the sobriquet “Mogor dell’Amore.” The ease of access to the emperor’s person that he had enjoyed was also, he should understand, a thing of the past. “From today,” the Ayyar informed him, “you will be considered a common man.”

  Of the vindictiveness of princes there is no end. Even so great a fall from grace as Vespucci’s did not satisfy Lady Man Bai. “If the emperor’s mind can move this swiftly between fondness and rejection,” she reasoned, “it can swing back in the other direction just as fast.” While the foreigner remained in the capital the succession of Prince Salim was not guaranteed. But to her great vexation the Crown Prince did not move against his fallen rival, who had refused the bureaucratic post found for him by Akbar’s functionaries, choosing instead to remain in the House of Skanda with the Skeleton and Mattress, and devoting himself to the pleasure of its guests. Man Bai was contemptuous. “If you could kill a great man like Abul Fazl without a qualm, what’s stopping you from dealing with this pimp?” she demanded. But Salim feared his father’s displeasure, and stayed his hand. Then Man Bai gave him a son, Prince Khusraw, and that changed things. “Now it??
?s your heir’s future you need to safeguard as well as your own,” said Lady Man Bai, and this time Salim had no answer for her.

  And Tansen died. The music of life was stilled.

  The emperor took his friend’s body back to his hometown of Gwalior, buried him next to the shrine of his master, the faqir Sheikh Mohammed Ghaus, and returned to Sikri in despair. One by one his bright lights were going out. Maybe he had wronged his Mughal of Love, he mused on his journey home, and Tansen’s death was his punishment. A man was not responsible for the misdeeds of his progenitors. Moreover, Vespucci had proved his loyalty to the emperor by refusing to move away. So he was not simply a traveling opportunist. He had come to stay. More than two long years had passed. Perhaps it was time to rehabilitate him. As the emperor’s procession moved past the Hiran Minar and up the hill toward the palace compound he made up his mind, and sent a runner to the House of Skanda to ask the foreigner to present himself at the pachisi courtyard the next morning.

  Lady Man Bai had set up a network of informants in every quarter of the city to guard against just such an eventuality, and within an hour of the runner’s arrival at the Skanda house the wife of the Crown Prince had been informed of the change in the wind. She went immediately to her husband and scolded him as a mother scolds an errant infant. “Tonight,” she told him, “is the night to play the man.”

  Of the vindictiveness of princes there is no end.

  At midnight the emperor sat quietly atop the Panch Mahal and remembered the famous night when Tansen had sung the deepak raag at the House of Skanda and set alight not only the oil lamps but himself as well. At the very moment when this memory was in his mind a red flower of flame sprang up at the water’s edge far below him, and after a dull moment of incomprehension he realized that a house was on fire in the darkness. When he discovered soon afterward that the House of Skanda had been burned to the ground he had a fleeting moment of alarm, wondering if the fire in his mind’s eye had somehow caused this other, more lethal blaze. He was filled with grief by the thought that Niccolò Vespucci must be dead. But when the smoking ruin was searched no trace of the foreigner’s body was found. Nor were the bodies of the Skeleton and Mattress among the charred remains; indeed, all the ladies of the house appeared to have escaped, and their clients too. Lady Man Bai was not the only person in Fatehpur Sikri who kept a precautionary ear close to the ground. The Skeleton had feared her former employer for too long.

  On hearing of the disappearance of the foreigner, of his mysterious dematerialization from the middle of a burning house, which was making many of the capital’s citizens talk about him as a sorcerer, the emperor feared the worst. “Now we will find out,” he reflected, “whether all that talk of curses had anything to it.”

  The morning after the fire the flat-decked ice transportation boat the Gunjayish was found scuttled on the far side of the lake, with a great hole in the bottom created by an angry axe. Niccolò Vespucci the Mughal of Love was gone for good, having escaped by boat not by sorcery, and he had taken his two ladies with him. The ice consignment arrived from Kashmir and there was no boat to take it across the lake to Sikri. The more luxurious royal passenger craft Asayish and Arayish had to be pressed into service, and even the little skiff Farmayish was loaded to the water-line with ice blocks. “He is punishing us with water,” the emperor thought. “Now that he has gone he will leave us thirsty for his presence.” When Prince Salim came to him at Lady Man Bai’s insistence to accuse the vanished trio of having set fire to their own house the emperor saw his son’s guilt sitting on his forehead like a beacon but said nothing. What was done was done. He gave orders for the foreigner and his women to be allowed to depart. He would not have them pursued and brought back to answer for the sunken boat. Let them go. He wished them well. A man in a coat of particolored leather lozenges, a woman as thin as a knife, and another like a bouncing ball. If the world was just it would find a peaceful corner even for people as hard to accommodate as those three. Vespucci’s story was concluded. He had crossed over into the empty page after the last page, beyond the illuminated borders of the existing world, and had entered the universe of the undead, those poor souls whose lives terminate before they stop breathing. The emperor at the lakeside wished the Mughal of Love a gentle afterlife and a painless ending; and turned away.

  Man Bai hated the incomplete nature of what had transpired and howled in vain for blood. “Send men after them to kill them,” she screamed at her husband, but he silenced her, and for the first time in his petty life gave a sign of the excellent king he would grow up to become. The events of recent days had disturbed him profoundly and new things were stirring inside him, the things which would enable him to leave his petulant youth behind and become a fine and cultured man. “My killing days are done,” he said. “From now on I will consider it a greater act to preserve a life than to destroy one. Never ask me to commit such a wrong again.”

  The Crown Prince’s change of heart had come too late. The destruction of Fatehpur Sikri had begun. The next morning the sounds of panic rose early toward the emperor’s bedchamber and when he had had himself carried down the hill past the uproar at the waterworks and the louder cacophony in and around the caravanserai he saw that something had happened to the lake. Slowly, moment by moment, retreating at a man’s walking pace, the water was receding. He sent for the city’s leading engineers but they were at a loss to explain the phenomenon. “The lake is leaving us,” the people were screaming, the golden life-giving lake, which once a traveler arriving at sunset had mistaken for a pool of molten gold. Without the lake the ice blocks from Kashmir could not bring fresh mountain water to the palace. Without the lake the citizens who could not afford Kashmiri ice would have nothing to drink, nothing to wash or cook with, and their children would soon die. The heat of the day was mounting. Without the lake the city was a parched and shriveled husk. The water continued to drain away. The death of the lake was the death of Sikri as well.

  Without water we are nothing. Even an emperor, denied water, would swiftly turn to dust. Water is the real monarch and we are all its slaves.

  “Evacuate the city,” the emperor Akbar commanded.

  For the rest of his life the emperor would believe that the inexplicable phenomenon of the vanishing lake of Fatehpur Sikri was the doing of the foreigner he had unjustly spurned, whom he had not decided to take back into his bosom until it was too late. The Mughal of Love had fought fire with water and he had won. It was Akbar’s most shattering defeat; but it was not a fatal blow. Mughals had been nomads before and could be nomads again. The tent army was already assembling, those artists of the collapsible home, two and a half thousand of them, and their camels and elephants too, preparing to march wherever he commanded and build their pavilions of fabric wherever he chose to rest. His empire was too immense, his pockets too deep, his army too strong to be unmade by a single blow, even a blow as powerful as this one. In nearby Agra there were palaces and a fort. In Lahore, another. The wealth of the Mughals was beyond counting. He must abandon Sikri, must leave his beloved red city of shadow and smoke to stand alone in a place made suddenly dry, to stand for all time as a symbol of the impermanence of things, of the suddenness with which a change can overtake even the most potent of peoples and mightiest of men. Yet he would survive. This was what it meant to be a prince, to be able to ride the metamorphoses. And as a prince was only his subjects writ large, a man elevated to the ranks of the near divine, then this too was what it meant to be a man. To ride the metamorphoses and go on. The court would move and many of its servitors and nobles would come too, but for the peasants there was no place on this, the last caravan to leave the caravanserai. For the peasants there was what there always would be: nothing. They would scatter into the immensity of Hindustan and their survival would be their own business. Yet they do not rise up and slaughter us, the emperor thought. They accept their paltry fate. How can that be? How can it be? They see us abandon them, and they serve us still. This, too, is
a mystery.

  It took two days to prepare the grand migration. There was enough water for two days. At the end of that time the lake had emptied and there was only a muddy hollow where once that sweet water had glittered. Even the mud would be caked and dry in two days more. On the third day the royal family and its courtiers departed on the Agra road, the emperor sitting upright on his steed, the queens lustrous in their palanquins. Following the royal procession were the nobles, and after them the immense cavalcade of their servants and dependents. Bringing up the rear were bullock-carts on which the skilled workers had loaded their goods. Butchers, bakers, masons, whores. For such people there was always a place. Skills could be transported. Land could not. The peasants, tied as if by ropes to land that was arid and dying, watched the great procession leave. Then, seemingly determined to have one night of pleasure before the misery of the rest of their lives, the abandoned masses walked up the hill to the palaces. Tonight, for this one night, the common people could play human pachisi in the royal courtyard and sit like the king atop the great stone tree in the House of Private Audience. Tonight a peasant could sit on the highest story of the Panch Mahal and be monarch of all he surveyed. Tonight if they wished they could sleep in the bedchambers of kings.

  Tomorrow, however, they would have to find ways not to die.

  One member of the royal household did not leave Fatehpur Sikri. After the fire at the House of Skanda, Lady Man Bai entered a state of mental confusion, at first shrieking and screaming for blood, and then, after Prince Salim rebuked her, falling into a profound melancholy, a loud grief that abruptly became silent. While Sikri was dying her life ended too. In the confusion of those last days, perhaps overcome by guilt, by her responsibility for the death of the capital of the Mughal empire, she found a moment of solitude, and in a corner of her palace when none of her maids was within sight she ate opium, and died. Prince Salim’s final act before joining his father in grief at the head of the great exodus was to bury his beloved wife. In this way the story of the long enmity of Man Bai and the Skeleton came to a tragic end.