The Enchantress of Florence (37 page)

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.

And as Akbar rode past the crater where the life-giving lake of Sikri had been he understood the nature of the curse under which he had been placed. It was the future that had been cursed, not the present. In the present he was invincible. He could build ten new Sikris if he pleased. But once he was gone, all he had thought, all he had worked to make, his philosophy and way of being, all that would evaporate like water. The future would not be what he hoped for, but a dry hostile antagonistic place where people would survive as best they could and hate their neighbors and smash their places of worship and kill one another once again in the renewed heat of the great quarrel he had sought to end forever, the quarrel over God. In the future it was harshness, not civilization, that would rule.

“If that is your lesson for me, Mughal of Love,” he silently addressed the departed foreigner, “then the title you gave yourself is false, for in this version of the world there is no love to be found anywhere.”

But that night in his brocade tent the hidden princess came to him, Qara Köz, her beauty like a flame. This was not the mannish shorn-haired creature she had become to escape from Florence, but the hidden princess in all her youthful glory, the same irresistible creature who had entranced Shah Ismail of Persia and Argalia the Turk, the Florentine Janissary, Wielder of the Enchanted Lance. That night of Akbar’s retreat from Sikri she spoke to him for the first time.
There is a thing,
she said,
about which you were wrong.

She was barren. She had been the lover of a king and a great warrior and there had been no issue in either case. So she had not given birth to a young girl in the new world. She had had no child.

Who was the foreigner’s mother, then, the emperor in wonder demanded. On the walls of the brocade tent the mirrorwork panels caught the candlelight and the reflections danced in his eyes. I had a Mirror, the hidden princess said. She was as like to me as my own reflection in water, as the echo of my voice. We shared everything, including our men. But there was a thing she could be that I could never become. I was a princess but she became a mother.

The rest of it was much as you imagined, said Qara Köz. The Mirror’s daughter was the mirror of her mother and of the woman whose mirror the Mirror had been. And there were deaths, yes. The woman who stands before you now, whom you have brought back to life, was the first. After that the Mirror raised her child to believe she was the thing she was not, the woman the girl’s mother had once reflected and also loved. The blurring of generations, the loss of the words
father
and
daughter,
the substitution of other, incestuous words. And the thing you dreamed her father did, yes, that was so. Her father who became her husband. The crime against nature was committed, but not by me, and no infant of mine was thus defiled. Born of sin, she died young, not knowing who she was. Angelica, Angelica, yes. That was her name. Before she died she sent her son to find you to ask for what was not his to demand. The criminals remained silent by her deathbed, but when the Mirror and her master went to stand before their God, then all their deeds were known.

So the truth of it is this. Niccolò Vespucci who was raised to believe that he was born of a princess was the child of a Mirror’s child. Both he and his mother were innocent of all deception. They were the deceived.

The emperor fell silent and considered the injustice he had done, for which the ruination of his capital city had been his punishment. The curse of the innocent had been visited upon the guilty. Humbled, he bowed his head. The hidden princess, Qara Köz, Lady Black Eyes, came to sit at his feet, and softly touched his hand. The night fled. A new day was beginning. The past was meaningless. Only the present existed, and her eyes. Under their irresistible enchantment, the generations blurred, merged, dissolved. But she was forbidden to him. No, no, she could not be forbidden. How could what he felt be a crime against nature? Who would dare forbid the emperor what the emperor permitted himself? He was the arbiter of the law, the law’s embodiment, and there was no crime in his heart.

He had raised her from the dead and granted her the freedom of the living, had freed her to choose and be chosen, and she had chosen him. As if life was a river and men its stepping stones, she had crossed the liquid years and returned to command his dreams, usurping another woman’s place in his
khayal,
his god-like, omnipotent fancy. Perhaps he was no longer his own master. What if he tired of her?—No, he would never tire of her.—But could she be banished in her turn, or could she alone decide to stay or go?

“I have come home after all,” she told him. “You have allowed me to return, and so here I am, at my journey’s end. And now, Shelter of the World, I am yours.”

Until you’re not,
the Universal Ruler thought.
My love, until you’re not.

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A NOTE

This is not a complete list of the works I consulted. If I have inadvertently omitted any source from which material has been used in the text, I apologize. Any such omissions will be rectified in future editions if I’m notified.