The Enchantress of Florence (3 page)

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 astonished 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

A
t 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.

No city is all palaces. The real city, built of wood and mud and dung and brick as well as stone, huddled beneath the walls of the mighty red stone plinth upon which the royal residences stood. Its neighborhoods were determined by race as well as trade. Here was the silversmiths’ street, there the hot-gated, clanging armories, and there, down that third gully, the place of bangles and clothes. To the east was the Hindu colony and beyond that, curling around the city walls, the Persian quarter, and beyond that the region of the Turanis and beyond that, in the vicinity of the giant gate of the Friday Mosque, the homes of those Muslims who were Indian born. Dotted around the countryside were the villas of the nobles, the art studio and scriptorium whose fame had already spread throughout the land, and a pavilion of music, and another for the performance of dances. In most of these lower Sikris there was little time for indolence, and when the emperor came home from the wars the command of silence felt, in the mud city, like a suffocation. Chickens had to be gagged at the moment of their slaughter for fear of disturbing the repose of the king of kings. A cartwheel that squeaked could earn the cart’s driver the lash, and if he cried out under the whip the penalty could be even more severe. Women giving birth withheld their cries and the dumb show of the marketplace was a kind of madness: “When the king is here we are all made mad,” the people said, adding, hastily, for there were spies and traitors everywhere, “for joy.” The mud city loved its emperor, it insisted that it did, insisted without words, for words were made of that forbidden fabric, sound. When the emperor set forth once more on his campaigns—his never-ending (though always victorious) battles against the armies of Gujarat and Rajasthan, of Kabul and Kashmir—then the prison of silence was unlocked, and trumpets burst out, and cheers, and people were finally able to tell each other everything they had been obliged to keep unsaid for months on end.
I love you. My mother is dead. Your soup tastes good. If you do not pay me the money you owe me I will break your arms at the elbows. My darling, I love you too.
Everything.

Fortunately for the mud city, military matters often took Akbar away, in fact he had been away most of the time, and in his absences the din of the clustered poor, as well as the racket of the unleashed construction workers, daily vexed the impotent queens. The queens lay together and moaned, and what they did to distract one another, what entertainment they found in one another in their veiled quarters, will not be described here. Only the imaginary queen remained pure, and it was she who told Akbar of the privations the people were suffering because of the desire of overzealous officials to ease his time at home. As soon as the emperor learned this he countermanded the order, replaced the minister of works with a less dour individual, and insisted on riding through the streets of his oppressed subjects crying out, “Make as much racket as you like, people! Noise is life, and an excess of noise is a sign that life is good. There will be time for us all to be quiet when we are safely dead.” The city burst into joyful clamor. That was the day on which it became clear that a new kind of king was on the throne, and that nothing in the world would remain the same.

The country was at peace at last, but the king’s spirit was never calm. The king had just returned from his last campaign, he had slapped down the upstart in Surat, but through the long days of marching and war his mind wrestled with philosophical and linguistic conundrums as much as military ones. The emperor Abul-Fath Jalaluddin Muhammad, king of kings, known since his childhood as Akbar, meaning “the great,” and latterly, in spite of the tautology of it, as Akbar the Great, the great great one, great in his greatness, doubly great, so great that the repetition in his title was not only appropriate but necessary in order to express the gloriousness of his glory—the Grand Mughal, the dusty, battle-weary, victorious, pensive, incipiently overweight, disenchanted, mustachioed, poetic, oversexed, and absolute emperor, who seemed altogether too magnificent, too world-encompassing, and, in sum, too
much
to be a single human personage—this all-engulfing flood of a ruler, this swallower of worlds, this many-headed monster who referred to himself in the first person plural—had begun to meditate, during his long, tedious journey home, on which he was accompanied by the heads of his defeated enemies bobbing in their sealed earthen pickle-jars, about the disturbing possibilities of the first person singular—the “I.”

The interminable days of slow equestrian progress encouraged many languid wonderings in a man of speculative temperament, and the emperor pondered, as he rode, such matters as the mutability of the universe, the size of the stars, the breasts of his wives, and the nature of God. Also, today, this grammatical question of the self and its Three Persons, the first, the second, and the third, the singulars and plurals of the soul. He, Akbar, had never referred to himself as “I,” not even in private, not even in anger or dreams. He was—what else could he be?—“we.” He was the definition, the incarnation of the We. He had been born into plurality. When he said “we,” he naturally and truly meant himself as an incarnation of all his subjects, of all his cities and lands and rivers and mountains and lakes, as well as all the animals and plants and trees within his frontiers, and also the birds that flew overhead and the mordant twilight mosquitoes and the nameless monsters in their underworld lairs, gnawing slowly at the roots of things; he meant himself as the sum total of all his victories, himself as containing the characters, the abilities, the histories, perhaps even the souls of his decapitated or merely pacified opponents; and, in addition, he meant himself as the apogee of his people’s past and present, and the engine of their future.

This “we” was what it meant to be a king—but commoners, he now allowed himself to consider, in the interests of fairness, and for the purposes of debate, no doubt occasionally thought of themselves as plural, too.

Were they wrong? Or (O traitorous thought!) was he? Perhaps this idea of self-as-community was what it meant to be a being in the world, any being; such a being being, after all, inevitably a being among other beings, a part of the beingness of all things. Perhaps plurality was not exclusively a king’s prerogative, perhaps it was not, after all, his divine right. One might further argue that since the reflections of a monarch were, in less exalted and refined form, doubtless mirrored in the cogitations of his subjects, it was accordingly inevitable that the men and women over whom he ruled also conceived of themselves as “we”s. They saw themselves, perhaps, as plural entities made up of themselves plus their children, mothers, aunts, employers, co-worshippers, fellow workers, clans, and friends. They, too, saw their selves as multiple, one self that was the father of their children, another that was their parents’ child; they knew themselves to be different with their employers than they were at home with their wives—in short, they were all bags of selves, bursting with plurality, just as he was. Was there then no essential difference between the ruler and the ruled? And now his original question reasserted itself in a new and startling form: if his many-selved subjects managed to think of themselves in the singular rather than plural, could he, too, be an “I”? Could there be an “I” that was simply oneself? Were there such naked, solitary “I”s buried beneath the overcrowded “we”s of the earth?

It was a question that frightened him as he rode his white horse home, fearless, unvanquished, and, it must be conceded, beginning to be fat; and when it popped into his head at night he did not easily sleep. What should he say when he saw his Jodha again? If he were to say simply, “I’m back,” or, “It is I,” might she feel able to call him in return by that second person singular, that
tu
which was reserved for children, lovers, and gods? And what would that mean? That he was like her child, or godlike, or simply the lover of whom she too had dreamed, whom she had dreamed into being just as eagerly as he had dreamed her? Might that little word, that
tu,
turn out to be the most arousing word in the language? “I,” he practiced under his breath.
Here “I” am. “I” love you. Come to “me.”

One final military engagement disturbed his contemplation on the homeward road. One more upstart princeling to slap down. A diversion into the Kathiawar peninsula to quell the obstinate Rana of Cooch Naheen, a young man with a big mouth and a bigger mustache (the emperor was vain about his own mustache, and took unkindly to competitors), a feudal ruler absurdly fond of talking about freedom. Freedom for whom, and from what, the emperor harrumphed inwardly. Freedom was a children’s fantasy, a game for women to play. No man was ever free. His army moved through the white trees of the Gir forest like a silently approaching plague, and the pathetic little fortress of Cooch Naheen, seeing the advent of death in the rustling treetops, broke its own towers, ran up a flag of surrender, and begged abjectly for mercy. Often, instead of executing his vanquished opponents, the emperor would marry one of their daughters and give his defeated father-in-law a job. Better a new family member than a rotting corpse. This time, however, he had irritably torn the insolent Rana’s mustache off his handsome face, and had chopped the weakling dreamer into garish pieces—had done it personally, with his own sword, just as his grandfather would have, and had then retreated to his quarters to tremble and mourn.

The emperor’s eyes were slanted and large and gazed upon infinity as a dreamy young lady might, or a sailor in search of land. His lips were full and pushed forward in a womanly pout. But in spite of these girlish accents he was a mighty specimen of a man, huge and strong. As a boy he had killed a tigress with his bare hands and then, driven to distraction by his deed, had forever forsworn the eating of meat and become a vegetarian. A Muslim vegetarian, a warrior who wanted only peace, a philosopher-king: a contradiction in terms. Such was the greatest ruler the land had ever known.