The Enchantress of Florence (20 page)

After the forty days of mourning for Gulbadan were over, Akbar summoned Mogor dell’Amore to the Place of Dreams. “You’re taking too long,” he told him. “You can’t draw this out forever, you know. It’s time you got on with your account. Just tell the whole damn story as fast as you possibly can—and do it, please, without stirring the ladies up all over again.”

“Shelter of the World,” said Mogor, bowing deeply, “there is nothing I desire more earnestly than for my whole tale to be told, for it is what men long for above all things. But to bring the Lady Black Eyes into the embrace of Argalia the Turk, I must first explain certain military developments involving the three great powers standing between Italy and Hindustan, that is to say, Wormwood Khan the Uzbeg warlord, Shah Ishmael or Ismail the Safavid king of Persia, and the Ottoman Sultan.”

“A curse on all storytellers,” said Akbar irritably, drinking deeply from a red and gold goblet of wine. “And a pox on your children too.”

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By the Caspian Sea the old potato witches

B
y the Caspian Sea the old potato witches sat down and wept. Loudly they sobbed and wildly keened. All Transoxiana was in mourning for the great Shaibani Khan, mighty Lord Wormwood, ruler of wide Khorasan, potentate of Samarkand, Herat, and Bukhara, scion of the true bloodline of Genghis Khan, erstwhile vanquisher of the Mughal upstart Babar…

“It is probably not a good idea,” said the emperor gently, “to repeat in our presence that scoundrel’s boasts about our grandfather.”

…Shaibani the hateful, that savage rogue, who fell in the battle of Marv and was slain by Shah Ismail of Persia, who set his skull in a bejeweled, red and gold wine goblet, and sent parts of his body around the world to prove that he was dead. So perished that seasoned, though also appalling, uneducated, and barbaric warrior of sixty: quite appropriately, and humiliatingly, decapitated and dismembered by a green youth of only twenty-four.

“That’s much better,” said the emperor, regarding his own wine goblet with satisfaction. “For it cannot be called skill to kill one’s fellow citizens, to betray friends, to be without faith, without mercy, without religion; by these means one can acquire power, but not glory.”

“Niccolò Machiavelli of Florence could not have said it better,” the storyteller agreed.

Potato witchcraft was born in Astrakhan on the banks of the River Atil, afterward called Volga, brought into being by the apocryphal Witch Mother Olga the First, but its exponents had long since been divided as the world had been divided, so that now on the west coast of the Caspian Sea which they called the Khazar, near Ardabil where Shah Ismail’s Safavid dynasty had its roots in Sufi mysticism, the witches were Shiites and rejoiced in the triumphs of the new Twelver Persian empire, while on the east coast where the Uzbegs lived they were—some of them, poor, misguided wretches!—on the side of Wormwood Khan. Afterward, when Shah Ismail tasted defeat at the hands of the Ottoman army, these Sunni potato witches of the east Khazar Sea claimed that their curses had proved more powerful than the magic of their Shiite sisters in the west.
For the Khorasani potato is omnipotent,
they cried many times, in the words of their holiest creed,
and all things may by it be accomplished.

By proper use of Sunni-Uzbeg potato-based spells it was possible to find a husband, chase off a more attractive love rival, or cause the downfall of a Shiite king. Shah Ismail had fallen victim to the rarely used Great Uzbeg Anti-Shiite Potato and Sturgeon Curse, which required quantities of potatoes and caviar which were not easy to amass, and a unity of purpose among the Sunni witches which was likewise difficult to achieve. When they heard the news of Ismail’s rout, the eastern potato witches wiped their eyes, ceased their wailing, and danced. A pirouetting Khorasani witch is a rare and particular sight, and few who saw the dance ever forgot it. And the Caviar and Potato Curse created a rift between the sisterhood of potato witches which has not been healed to this day.

There may, however, have been more prosaic reasons for the outcome of the battle of Chaldiran: that the Ottoman army greatly outnumbered the Persian; or that the Ottoman soldiers bore rifles, which the Persians thought of as unmanly weapons and refused to carry, so that they were dispatched in large numbers to inevitable but undeniably manly deaths; or that at the head of the Ottoman forces was the invincible Janissary general, slayer of Vlad the Impaler, the Dragon-Demon of Wallachia, namely Argalia the Florentine Turk. Great as Shah Ismail believed himself to be—and he was second to no man in his high opinion of himself—he could not stand for long against the Wielder of the Enchanted Lance.

Shah Ismail of Persia, the self-appointed representative on earth of the Twelfth Imam, was by repute arrogant, egotistical, and a fanatic proselytizer of
Ithna Ashari,
that is to say Twelver Shiite Islam. “I will break the polo sticks of my adversaries,” he boasted, in the words of the Sufi saint Shaykh Zahid, “and then the field will be mine.” Then he made a larger claim, in his own words. “I am Very God, Very God, Very God! Come now, O blind man who has lost the path, behold the Truth! I am the Absolute Doer of whom men speak.” He was called
Vali Allah,
the vicar of God, and to his “red-headed”
qizilbash
soldiers he was indeed divine. Modesty, generosity, kindness: these were not his most renowned characteristics. And yet, when he marched south from the battlefield of Marv, accompanied by the head of Shaibani Khan in a jar of honey, and entered Herat in triumph, those were the exact words used to describe him by the princess whom history forgot, Lady Black Eyes, Qara Köz. Shah Ismail was her first infatuation. She was seventeen years old.

“So it’s true,” the emperor cried. “The foreigner who was the reason for her refusal to return with Khanzada to my grandfather’s court, the reason for her removal from the record by my noble grandfather—the seducer of whom our beloved aunt Gulbadan spoke—was not your Arcalia or Argalia, but the Shah of Persia himself.”

“They were both chapters in her story, O Shelter of the World,” the storyteller replied. “One after the other, the victor and then the victor’s vanquisher. Women are not perfect, one must admit, and it would appear that the young lady had a weakness for being on the winning side.”

Herat, pearl of Khorasan, abode of painter Behzad, the creator of matchless miniatures, and the poet Jami, the deathless philosopher of love, and last resting place of the patroness of beauty, the great Queen Gauhar Shad, which is to say, Happy or Shining Jewel! “You belong to Persia now,” Shah Ismail said aloud as he rode through its conquered streets. “Your history, oasis, baths, bridges, canals, and minarets are all mine.” Watching him from a high palace window were the two captured princesses of the Mughal house. “Now we will either die or be set free,” said Khanzada, not allowing her voice to tremble. Shaibani Khan had made her his wife and she had borne him a son. She beheld the sealed urn being carried behind the conqueror’s horse slung on a common spear and understood what it contained. “If the father is dead,” she said, “then my son is doomed as well.” Her analysis was correct; by the time Shah Ismail presented himself at the princesses’ door the boy had already been dispatched to join his father. The Persian king bowed his head before Princess Khanzada. “You are the sisters of a great brother,” he said, “and so I set you free. I have it in mind to return you with many gifts of friendship to Lord Babar, who is at present in Qunduz; and you ladies will be the greatest gifts of all.”

“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.