The emperor, listening to Mogor dell’Amore as he told his story, understood that the lands of the West were exotic and surreal to a degree incomprehensible to the humdrum people of the East. In the East men and women worked hard, lived well or badly, died noble or ignoble deaths, believed in faiths that engendered great art, great poetry, great music, some consolation, and much confusion. Normal human lives, in sum. But in those fabulous Western climes people seemed prone to hysterias—such as the Weeper hysteria in Florence—that swept through their countries like diseases and transformed things utterly without warning. Of late the worship of gold had engendered a special type of this extreme hysteria, which had become their history’s driving force. In his mind’s eye Akbar pictured Western temples made of gold, with golden priests inside, and golden worshippers coming to pray, bringing offerings of gold to placate their golden god. They ate gold food and drank gold drinks and when they wept the molten gold ran down their shining cheeks. It was gold that had driven their sailors even further west across the Ocean Sea in spite of the danger of falling off the edge of the world. Gold, and also India, which they believed to contain fabulous hoards of gold.
They did not find India, but they found…a further west. In this further west they found gold, and searched for more, for golden cities and rivers of gold, and they encountered beings even less probable and impressive than themselves, bizarre, unknowable men and women who wore feathers and skins and bones, and named them Indians. Akbar found this offensive. Men and women who made human sacrifices to their gods were being called Indians! Some of these otherworld “Indians” were little better than aborigines; and even the ones who had built cities and empires were lost, or so it seemed to the emperor, in philosophies of blood. Their god was half bird, half snake. Their god was made of smoke. Theirs was a vegetable god, a god of turnips and corn. They suffered from syphilis and thought of stones and the rain and stars as living beings. In their fields they worked slowly, even lazily. They did not believe in change. To call these people Indians was in Akbar’s emphatic opinion a slight to the noble men and women of Hindustan.
The emperor knew that he had reached a kind of boundary in his mind, a frontier beyond which his powers of empathy and interest could not journey. There were islands here that afterward metamorphosed into continents, and continents that proved to be mere islands. There were rivers and jungles and promontories and isthmuses and to the devil with them all. Maybe there were hydras in those climes, or griffins, or dragons guarding the great treasure heaps that reputedly lay in the jungles’ depths. The Spanish and the Portuguese were welcome to it all. It had begun to dawn on these foolish exotics that they had not discovered a route to India but somewhere entirely other, neither East nor West, somewhere that lay between the West and the great Gangetic Sea and the fabled isle of treasures, Taprobane, and beyond that the kingdoms of Hindustan and Cipangu and Cathay. They had discovered that the world was larger than they believed it to be. Good luck to them as they wandered in the Islands and Terra Firma of the Ocean Sea and died of scurvy, hookworm, malaria, consumption, and yaws. The emperor was tired of them all.
And yet this was where she had gone, the delinquent princess of the house of Timur and Temüjin, Babar’s sister, Khanzada’s sister, blood of his blood. No woman in the history of the world had made a journey like hers. He loved her for it and admired her too, but he was also sure that her journey across the Ocean Sea was a kind of dying, a death before death, because death too was a sailing away from the known into the unknown. She had sailed away into unreality, into a world of fantasy which men were still dreaming into being. The phantasm haunting his palace was more real than that flesh-and-blood woman of the past who gave up the real world for an impossible hope, just as she had once given up the natural world of family and obligation for the selfish choices of love. Dreaming of finding her way back to her point of origin, of being rejoined to that earlier self, she was lost forever.
The way east was closed to her. The corsairs in the waters made the sea passage too risky. In the Ottoman world, and in the kingdom of Shah Ismail, she had burned her boats. In Khorasan she feared capture by whoever had filled the gap left by Shaibani Khan. She did not know where Babar was, but the way back to him was barred. In Genoa, at the home of Andrea Doria by the water’s edge, where she had asked Ago Vespucci to take her, she decided she could not go back the way she had come. Nor, fearing the wrath of Florence, could she stay. The grizzled old sea-dog Doria, who was frankly shocked by, but forbore to remark upon, the new, mannish appearance of Qara Köz and her Mirror, gallantly made them welcome—for Qara Köz was still capable of inducing gallantry in men, even men with reputations for callousness and brutality—and assured them that while they were under his protection no Florentine harm could come to them. Doria was the one who first mentioned the possibility of making a new life across the Ocean Sea.
“If I didn’t have so many Barbary pirates to kill,” he said, “I might consider the trip myself, following in the footsteps of Signor Vespucci’s celebrated cousin.” By this time he had killed quite a few such pirates, and his personal fleet, mostly made up of boats seized from the corsairs, now numbered twelve vessels, whose crews’ loyalty was to nobody but Doria himself. Yet he no longer considered himself a true condottiere, because of his uninterest in fighting on land. “Argalia was the last of us,” he declared. “I’m just a watery hangover.” In his spare time, when he wasn’t at war, he was doing political battle in Genoa with his rivals in the Adorni and Fregosi families, who kept trying to exclude him from power. “But I have the ships,” he said, and added—unable to restrain himself even though there were ladies present—perhaps because the ladies were disguised as young men—“and they don’t even have penises, do they, Ceva?” Ceva the Scorpion, his tattooed ox of a lieutenant, actually blushed before replying awkwardly, “No, Admiral, none that I have ever been able to make out.”
Doria took his guests into his library and showed them a thing which none of them had ever seen, not even Ago, whose blood relation it concerned: the Cosmographiae Introductio by the Benedictine monk Waldseemüller of the monastery of St. Dié-des-Vosges, which came with a vast map that unfolded to cover the floor, a map whose name was almost as big, the Universalis Cosmographia Secundum Ptholoemaei Traditionem et Americi Vespucii Aliorumque Lustrationes, the Geography of the World According to the Tradition of Ptolemy and the Contributions of Amerigo Vespucci and Other People. On this map Ptolemy and Amerigo were depicted like colossi, like gods gazing down upon their creation, and upon a large segment of Mundus Novus there appeared the word America. “I see no reason,” Waldseemüller wrote in his Introductio, “why anyone could properly disapprove of a name derived from that of Amerigo, the discoverer, a man of sagacious genius.”
When Ago Vespucci read this he was deeply moved and understood that destiny in the form of his cousin must have been leading him toward the new world all his life, even though he had always been a stick-in-the-mud who thought of wild Amerigo as a hot-air merchant whose accounts of himself needed to be taken with a pinch of salt. He had not known Amerigo very well and had never really tried to know him better, for they had had little in common. But now the voyaging Vespucci was a sagacious genius and had put his name to a new world, and that was worthy of respect.
Slowly, shyly, with much trepidation, and repeating many times that he was not by nature a traveling man, Ago began to discuss his cousin’s voyages of discovery with Admiral Doria. The words Venezuela and Vera Cruz were spoken. In the meanwhile Qara Köz had been studying the map of the world. She reacted to the new place names as if she were hearing an incantation, a charm that could bring her her heart’s desire. She wanted to hear more, more. Valparaiso, Nombre de Dios, Cacafuego, Rio Escondido, Ago said. He was down on his hands and knees, reading. Tenochtitlán, Quetzalcoatl, Tezcatlipoca, Montezuma, Yucatán, Andrea Doria added, and also Española, Puerto Rico, Jamaica, Cuba, Panama. “These words which I have never heard,” said Qara Köz, “are te
lling me my way home.”
Argalia was dead—“At least he died in his hometown, defending what he loved,” Doria said by way of a gruff epitaph, and raised a glass of wine in salute. Ago was a poor substitute for such a man, but Qara Köz knew he was all she had. It was Ago with whom she would make her last journey, Ago and the Mirror. These would be her last guardians. They learned from Doria of the conviction of most westward mariners, and of the rulers of Spain and Portugal too, that a passage to India would soon be found, an opening, suitable for shipping, through the landmasses of Mundus Novus into the Gangetic Sea. Many people were urgently searching for this middle passage. In the meanwhile the colonies of Española and Cuba were safe to live in, and the new place, Panama, was probably getting safer. In these places the Indians were for the most part under control, one million of them in Española, over two million in Cuba. Many of them were Christian converts even though they spoke no Christian tongue. The coastlines were secure at any rate, and even the interiors were being opened up. It was possible, if one had the money, to obtain a cabin on a caravel leaving from Cadiz or Palos de Moguer.
“Then I will go,” announced the princess, gravely, “and wait. And the opening in the new world, for which so many fine men are searching so hard, will undoubtedly be found.” She stood upright with her arms turned outward at the elbows, and her face was illumined by an unearthly light, so that she reminded Andrea Doria of Christ himself, the Nazarene performing His miracles, Christ multiplying loaves and fishes or raising Lazarus from the dead. On Qara Köz’s face was the same strained expression it had acquired in the time of her enchantment of Florence, darkened further by grief and loss. Her powers were failing but she intended to exercise them one last time as they had never been exercised before, and force the history of the world into the course she required it to take. She would enchant the middle passage into being by the sheer force of her sorcery and her will. Andrea Doria looked at the young woman in her olive-green tunic and hose, her cropped black hair standing out from her head like a dark halo, and was overcome. He fell to his knees before her and bent down to touch his hand to her chamois leather boot and remained there with bowed head for a minute or perhaps more. In the years that followed, Doria, who lived to a great old age, thought every single day about what he had done, and was never certain whether he had knelt to receive a blessing or to give one, whether he had felt the need to worship her or protect her, to admire her in her last glory or to seek to dissuade her from her doom. He thought of Christ in Gethsemane and how He must have looked to His disciples as He prepared Himself to die.
“My ship will carry you to Spain,” he said.
On a morning of white mist the Cadolin, the legendary corsair fighting ship, set sail from her new master Andrea Doria’s dock at Fassolo with three passengers and Ceva the Scorpion at the helm, and flying the flag of Genoa, the Cross of St. George. When he was saying his farewells Andrea Doria had managed to hold back the emotion that had earlier brought him to his knees. “The library of a man of action is little used,” he told Qara Köz, “but you have given meaning to my books.” He had the feeling that after reading the Cosmographiae Introductio and inspecting Waldseemüller’s great map the princess was actually entering the book, moving out of the world of earth, air, and water and entering a universe of paper and ink, that she would sail across the Ocean Sea and arrive not at Española in Mundus Novus but in the pages of a story. He was sure he would never see her again in this world or the new one because death was sitting on her shoulder like a falcon, death would travel with her for a while until it grew impatient and tired of the journey.
“Goodbye,” she said, and faded into white. Ceva brought the Cadolin back to Fassolo in due course, looking as if the last vestiges of joy had just left his life forever. Almost two years later Doria heard the news of Magellan’s discovery of a stormy strait that would allow lucky sailors to pass around the southern tip of the new world. He had nightmares in which the beautiful princess perished in Magellan’s strait along with her companions. No definite news of her whereabouts or fate was ever received in Genoa during his long lifetime. However, fifty-four years after the hidden princess set sail from Italy, a young yellow-haired rogue, no more than twenty years of age, presented himself at the gate of the Villa Doria, claiming to be her son. By this time Andrea Doria had been dead for thirteen years, and the house was owned by his great-nephew Giovanni, prince of Melfi, founder of the great house of the Doria-Pamphilii-Landi. If Giovanni had ever known the story of the lost princess of the house of Timur and Temüjin, he had long forgotten it, and had the ragamuffin chased away from his door. After that the young “Niccolò Antonino Vespucci,” named after his father’s two best friends, set forth to see the world, taking ship hither and yon, sometimes as a member of the crew, on other occasions as a carefree stowaway, learned many languages, acquired a wide variety of skills, not all of them within the boundaries of the law, and accumulated his own tales to tell, tales of escapes from cannibalism in Sumatra and of the egg-sized pearls of Brunei and of fleeing from the Great Turk up the Volga to Moscow in winter and of crossing the Red Sea in a dhow held together with string and of the polyandry of that part of Mundus Novus where women had seven or eight husbands and no man was allowed to marry a virgin and of making the pilgrimage to Mecca by pretending to be a Muslim and of being shipwrecked with the great poet Camoens near the mouth of the Mekong River where he saved the Lusiads by swimming ashore naked with the pages of Camoens’s poem held in one hand above his head.
About himself he would only say to the men and women he met on his voyages that his story was stranger by far than any of these tales, but that it could only be divulged to one man on earth, whom he would face one day in the hope of being given what was his by right, and that he was protected by a mighty spell that blessed all those who aided him and cursed those who did him harm.
“Shelter of the World, the plain fact is that on account of the variability of chronological conditions in Mundus Novus,” he told the emperor Akbar by the waters of the Anup Talao, “which is to say, on account of the unsettled nature of time in those parts, my mother the enchantress was able to prolong her youth, and might have lived for three hundred years had she not lost heart, had she not lost her belief in the possibility of a homecoming, and permitted herself to catch a fatal sickness so that she could at least join her deceased family members in the hereafter. A falcon flew in through her window and settled on her deathbed as she drew her last breaths. It was her final enchantment, the manifestation in the new world of this glorious bird from across the Ocean Sea. When the falcon flew out of the window we all understood that it was her soul. I was nineteen and a half years old at the time of her death and as she slept she looked more like my older sister than my parent. But my father and the Mirror had continued to age normally. Her magic was no longer strong enough to help them resist the temporal forces, just as it was not strong enough to change the geography of the earth. No middle passage was found, and she was trapped in the new world until she decided to die.”
The emperor was silent. His mood was impenetrable. The waters of the Anup Talao continued to be disturbed.
“This finally is what you ask us to believe,” the emperor said at length, heavily. “At last, and after everything, this. That she learned how to arrest time.”
“In her own body,” the other replied, “and for herself alone.”
“That would indeed be a prodigious feat, if it were possible,” Akbar told him, and rose, and went indoors.
That night Akbar sat alone on the topmost story of the Panch Mahal and listened to the darkness. He did not believe the foreigner’s tale. He would tell himself a better one instead. He was the emperor of dreams. He could pluck the truth from the darkness and bring it into the light. He had lost patience with the foreigner, and was left, in the end, as always, with himself. He sent his fancy across the world like a messenger bird and in the end the answer came. This was his story now.
Twent
y-four hours later he summoned Vespucci back to the Best of All Possible Pools, whose waters still roiled in perplexity. Akbar’s expression was grim. “Sir Vespucci,” he asked, “are you familiar with camels? Have you had a chance to observe their ways?” His voice was like low thunder rolling across the troubled waters of the pool. The foreigner was at a loss for words.