“I knew you lived,” she said. She did not mention his wounded arm.
“And you must live too,” he said. “The crowd is growing larger.” He said nothing of the aching of the wound in his right shoulder, or of the flame radiating outward through his body from it. He said nothing of the pounding in his heart when he looked at her. He felt short of breath after his long ride. His white skin felt hot to the touch. He did not use the word “love.” For the last time in his life he wondered if he had wasted his love on a woman who only gave her love until it was time to take it back. He set the thought aside. He had given his heart this once in his life and counted himself blessed to have had the chance to do so. The question of whether she was worthy of his love had no meaning. His heart had answered that question long ago.
“You will protect me,” she said.
“With my life,” he replied. He had begun to shiver a little. When he fell at the battlefield of Cisano Bergamasco his grief at the treason of Konstantin the Serb had been followed swiftly by the realization of his own folly. He had been caught out exactly as he had once caught out Shah Ismail of Persia at the battle of Chaldiran. The swordsman would always fall to the man with a gun. In the age of the matchlock musket and the light, swiftly movable field cannon, there was no room for knights in armor. He was a figure from the past. He had deserved that bullet as the old deserves to be destroyed by the new. He was a little light-headed.
“I could not leave,” she said. There was a note of surprise in her voice, as if she had learned something extraordinary about herself.
“You must leave now,” he replied, panting a little. They did not move toward each other. They did not embrace. She went away and found the Mirror.
“Now, Angelica, let us be ready to die,” she said.
The night was on fire. Flames rose everywhere into the brilliant sky. The moon was full, low on the horizon, tinged with red, huge. It looked like God’s cold, mad eye. The Duke was dead and only rumor ruled. According to rumor the Pope had damned “Angelica” for a murderous whore and was sending a Cardinal to take charge of the city and deal with its wild witch. The memory of the burning at the stake of the three head Weepers, Girolamo Savonarola, Domenico Buonvicini, and Silvestro Maruffi, in the Piazza della Signoria had not faded, and there were those who looked forward to the stench of incandescent female flesh. But it is in the nature of mobs to be impatient. By midnight the crowd had perhaps tripled in size and its mood was uglier. Stones were thrown at the Cocchi del Nero palace. The phalanx of Janissaries under Clotho the Swiss still held the entrance but even Janissaries tire, and some were nursing wounds. Then in the small hours as the mob bayed came fatal news. The militia of Florence, goaded by the unsubstantiated reports of the Pope’s fiat against the witch Angelica, had risen up to join the enraged masses and was marching to the Via Porta Rossa, fully armed. When Clotho heard this he knew that all three of his brothers were now dead, and he decided that he was ready to finish things.
“For the Swiss,” he shouted, and launched himself at the crowd with all his might, swinging a sword with one hand and a spiked ball on the end of a length of chain with the other. His fellow Janissaries looked at him in amazement, because the men in the crowd carried nothing more harmful than sticks and stones, but Clotho could not be stopped. The killing mist was upon him. People fell below his horse’s hoofs and were trampled to death. The crowd was wild with fear and anger, and at first everyone retreated from the maddened albino giant on his horse. Then a strange moment came, a moment of the kind that determines the fate of nations, because when a crowd loses its fear of an army the world changes. All of a sudden the crowd stopped retreating, and right then Clotho on his horse with his sword raised to strike knew that he was done for. “Janissaries, to me,” he shouted, and then the crowd came at them like a flood, thousands upon thousands of screaming voices and grabbing hands and pounding fists, a rain of stones fell upon the soldiers, and men leapt at them like cats, pulling down the horses, dying under the warriors’ lashing weapons, but coming forward still, clawing, dragging, clutching, pulling, until the soldiers were all unhorsed, and still the trampling feet of the people came on, the crushing force of the swollen, swelling crowd, and all the world was blood.
Even before the militia arrived, the crowd parting like the sea to allow the armed men through, the Janissaries outside the Palazzo Cocchi del Nero were no more, and with the axes taken from the fallen warriors the crowd was attacking the three great wooden doors of the palace. In the courtyard behind those doors, Argalia the Turk and his remaining fighters, mounted on their horses and wearing full battle armor, had set themselves to make their last stand. “The greatest shame of all is to die at the hands of men you have captained in war,” Argalia thought, “but at least my oldest companions will die with me, and there’s honor in that.” Then matters of honor and shame fled from his mind because Qara Köz was leaving, and it was time for last words to be spoken.
“It’s lucky that mobs are so stupid,” she said, “otherwise Ago and the Mirror wouldn’t have been able to get to the back door down the lane. It’s lucky that I took your friend Niccolò’s advice, or there would be no plan, and nobody would be outside with empty wine barrels to hide us in and a cart and fresh horses to take us away.”
“In the beginning there were three friends,” said Argalia the Turk, “Antonino Argalia, Niccolò ‘il Machia,’ and Ago Vespucci. And at the end, too, there were three. Il Machia will have faster horses waiting for you. Go.” The fever had taken hold of him now, and the pain of the wound was very great. He had begun to shake. The end would not be slow in coming. It would be hard to remain mounted very long.
She paused. “I love you,” she said. Die for me.
“And I you,” he answered. I am already dying, but I will die for you.
“I have loved you like no other man,” she said. Die for me.
“You have been the love of my life,” he replied. My life is almost gone, but what remains I give up for you.
“Let me stay,” she said. “Give me up. That will end it all.” Again, in her voice, the note of surprise at what she was allowing herself to say, to offer, to feel.
“It’s too late for that,” he said.
The last fight of the Invincibles of Florence, their final defeat and destruction in the Riot of the Via Porta Rossa, took place in the courtyard of what was afterward known as the Bloody Palace. By the time the battle was over the witch and her assistant were long gone, and when the people of Florence discovered their flight their anger seemed to vanish, and like men waking from a dreadful dream they lost their appetite for death. They came to themselves, and were no longer a mob, but a crowd of individual sovereign entities, all of whom went mumbling back to their homes, looking ashamed, and wishing they didn’t have blood on their hands. “If she has flown,” somebody said, “then begone to her and goodbye.” There was no attempt at pursuit. There was only shame. When the Pope’s Regent arrived in Florence the Palazzo Cocchi del Nero was locked and shuttered, and the seal of the city was placed upon it, and no one lived there for over one hundred years. And once Argalia the Turk had fallen, rendered unconscious by the septicemia blazing through his body, once he had been stabbed through the neck, as he lay dying of the infection, by a militiaman’s ignoble pike, the age of the great condottieri came to an end.
And the River Arno, as if cursed by a witch, remained dry for a year and a day.
“She had no child,” the emperor observed. “What do you say to that?”
“There’s more,” the other replied.
Niccolò saw Ago in the distance as the dawn was breaking, Ago at the reins of the cart with the two wine barrels on the back, and he gave up his plan of catching thrushes, set down the birdcages, and went to prepare the horses himself. He could ill afford the gift of two horses, but he would make it nevertheless, and without regret. Maybe this was how he would be remembered, as the man who assisted in the escape from her pursuers of the Lady of the Mogor,
the princess of the blood royal of the house of Tamerlane and Genghis Khan, the erstwhile enchantress of Florence. He shouted upstairs to his wife and told her to prepare food and wine at once, and to pack more that could be eaten on a journey; and, hearing the note of crisis in his voice, she leapt out of bed, did as he asked, and did not argue, even though it was not pleasant to be woken from an unusually deep sleep and given unceremonious orders. Then Ago clattered up in front of the Machiavelli house, breathless, frightened. Argalia was not with him. Silently il Machia’s eyebrows interrogated Ago Vespucci, who drew a finger across his neck, and then burst into tears of fear, excitement, and grief. “Open the barrels, for God’s sake,” Marietta Corsini came out of doors to say. “They must be bruised half to death inside there.”
Ago had put cushions and bolsters inside the barrels and made hinged doors in their sides, and little ventilation holes, but in spite of his efforts the two women emerged from their hiding places in bad shape, red-faced, gasping and in pain. They accepted water gratefully but refused food on account of the effects of the journey on their stomachs. Then without further ado they asked for a room where they could change their clothes, and Marietta showed them into the main bedchamber. The Mirror followed Qara Köz, carrying a small bag, and when the two women emerged half an hour later they were men, dressed in short tunics—red and gold for Qara Köz, green and white for the Mirror—with belts knotted around their waists, wearing woolen hose for riding, and boots of chamois leather. Their hair had been hacked short and tucked under close-fitting skull-caps. Marietta breathed in sharply when she saw their legs in the tight hose, but said nothing about it. “Will you not eat a little before you go?” she asked, but they would not. They thanked her for the bag of bread, cheese, and cold meat she had prepared for them. Then they went outdoors and found il Machia and Ago waiting. Ago still sat up on his cart. The barrels were no longer aboard, but the two chests of the ladies’ possessions were there, and another bag, containing Ago’s clothes and all the money he had had to hand, including several large-denomination bills of exchange. “I’ll get more when we reach Genoa,” he said. “I have my checks.” He looked Qara Köz in the eyes. “You ladies can’t travel alone,” he said. Her eyes widened. “So,” she replied, “at a moment’s notice, when asked for your help, and seeing our predicament, you are ready to step away from your home, your work, your life, and flee with us into an unknown future, out of one peril and, who knows, into many others?” Ago Vespucci nodded. “Yes, I am.” She went over to him and took his hands in hers. “Then, sir,” she said, “we are yours now.”
Il Machia said goodbye to his old companion. “In the beginning there were three friends,” he said, “Antonino Argalia, Niccolò ‘il Machia,’ and Ago Vespucci. Two of the three loved to travel, the third loved to stay at home. Now, of the two travelers, one has gone forever, and the other is marooned. My horizons have shrunk and I have only endings to write. And it’s you, my beloved Ago, you, the homebody, who are setting out to find a new world.” Then he reached out his hand and put three soldi into Ago’s palm. “I owe you these,” he said. A few minutes later, as the two riders and the man in the cart disappeared round a bend in the road, the early morning sunlight kissed Ago Vespucci’s hair, which was so thin now, so white. But in that yellow light it looked as if he possessed once again the golden hair of boyhood, when he and il Machia first went hunting in the Caffagio oak wood, and the vallata grove near Santa Maria dell’Impruneta, and also in the forest around the castle of Bibbione, hoping to find a mandrake root.
{ 19 }
He was Adam’s heir, not Muhammad’s
He was Adam’s heir, not Muhammad’s or the caliph’s, Abul Fazl told him; his legitimacy and authority sprang from his descent from the First Man, the father of all men. No single faith could contain him, nor any geographical territory. Greater than the king of kings who ruled Persia before the Muslims came, superior to the ancient Hindu notion of the Chakravartin—the king whose chariot wheels could roll everywhere, whose movements could not be obstructed—he was the Universal Ruler, king of a world without frontiers or ideological limitations. What followed from this was that human nature, not divine will, was the great force that moved history. He, Akbar, the perfect man, was the engine of time.
The sun had not yet risen, but the emperor was up and about. Sikri in shadow seemed to embody the great mysteries of life. It felt to him like an elusive world of questions to which he must find responses. This was his time of day for meditation. He did not pray. Once in a while he would go to the great mosque he had built around Chishti’s shrine, for appearances’ sake, to still the gossip of sharp tongues. Badauni’s tongue. The tongue of the Crown Prince, who was even less godly than his father but who allied himself with the god-botherers just to spite him. Mostly, however, the emperor liked to use these early hours, before the sun came to heat the stones of Sikri and the emotions of its citizens, to think things through, the high things, not the low quotidian irritations like Prince Salim. He meditated again at noon, and in the evening, and at midnight, but the early meditation was the one he liked best. Musicians came to play religious hymns quietly in the background. Often he waved them away and allowed the silence to caress him. The silence broken only by the dawn cries of the birds.
Sometimes—for he was a man of many desires—his high considerations were interrupted by images of women: dancing girls, concubines, even the royal wives. In the old days, he had most often been distracted by thoughts of Jodha, his imaginary queen; her sharp tongue, her beauty, her sexual expertise. He was not a perfect man, he knew that in his heart, but for a long time he had thought of her as his perfect woman. Companion, helpmeet, erotic tiger, no man could wish for more. She was his masterpiece, or so he had thought for a long time, a dream made flesh, a traveler from the world of khayal, fancy, whom he had brought across the frontier of the real. Lately, however, things had changed. Jodha no longer had the power to interrupt his musings. A different woman visited him instead. Qara Köz, Lady Black Eyes, the hidden princess: for a long time he refused to recognize her, refused to understand in which direction his heart was being drawn, for it was leading him toward an impossibility, a passion that could never be consummated, that was, in every sense of the word, improper. He was bent on the sounds of the future and she was an echo from the distant past. Perhaps that was what lured him, her nostalgic gravity; in which case she was indeed a dangerous sorceress, who would drag him backward in time, and consequently backward in every way, in his ideas, his beliefs, his hopes.
She would be bad for him. She would entice him into the delirium of an impossible love and he would sink into her and away from the world of law and action and majesty and destiny. Maybe she had been sent to do this. Perhaps Niccolò Vespucci was an enemy—the queen mother Hamida Bano was one of the proponents of this theory—an agent of the Christian otherworld from which he had emerged, an assassin sent to destroy him by planting this scarlet woman, this deracinated renegade, in his mind. No man could capture Sikri by force of arms but the hidden princess could perhaps defeat him from within himself. She was bad for him. Yet she was the one who came, more and more often, and there were things she understood that Jodha had never grasped. She understood, for example, silence. When the hidden princess came to him she did not speak. It was not her way to chide or tease. She did not speak or giggle or sing. She brought with her a scent of jasmine, and simply sat down beside him, did not touch him, and watched the day begin, until the eastern horizon was rimmed with red, and a sweet breeze got up, and in that instant they became a single person, he was united with her as he had never been with any woman, and then, with infinite delicacy, she left him, and he waited alone for the first, loving touches of the dawn.
No, she was not bad for him, and he would defy all who said so. He could not see evil in her, or in the man who had brought her here. How could such an adventuresome spirit be condemned? Qara Köz was a woman such as he had never met, a woman who had forged her own life, b
eyond convention, by the force of her will alone, a woman like a king. This was a new dream for him, an undreamed vision of what a woman might be. It alarmed him, aroused him, intoxicated him, possessed him. Yes, Qara Köz was extraordinary; and so, the emperor believed, was Vespucci, or Mogor dell’Amore. The emperor had tested him and found great merit there. He was not an enemy. He was a favorite. He deserved to be praised, not blamed.
Akbar forced his thoughts back onto their proper path. He was not a perfect man, that was a flatterer’s phrase, and Abul Fazl’s flatteries led him into what Mogor dell’Amore had called the webs of paradox. To elevate a man to near-divine status, and to allow him absolute power, while arguing that human beings and not gods were the masters of human destinies contained a contradiction that would not survive much examination. Besides, the evidence of the interference of faith in human affairs was scattered all around him. He had not been able to forget the suicide of the angel-voiced sisters Tana and Riri for whom death had been preferable to compromising their faith. He did not wish to be divine. If there had never been a God, the emperor thought, it might have been easier to work out what goodness was. This business of worship, of the abnegation of self in the face of the Almighty, was a distraction, a false trail. Wherever goodness lay, it did not lie in ritual, unthinking obeisance before a deity but rather, perhaps, in the slow, clumsy, error-strewn working out of an individual or collective path.