The Enchantress of Florence

by Salman Rushdie

  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.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I would like to thank Vanessa Manko for her help in compiling the bibliography, and also for her invaluable assistance with the research for this novel, which was made possible, in part, by a Hertog Fellowship at Hunter College, New York. My gratitude, too, to my editors Will Murphy, Dan Franklin, and Ivan Nabokov; to Emory University; and to Stefano Carboni, Frances Coady, Navina Haidar, Rebecca Kumar, Suketu Mehta, Harbans Mukhia, and Elizabeth West. Also to Ian McEwan, with whom, many years ago, I improvised a song called “My Sweet Polenta.”

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  SALMAN RUSHDIE is the author of nine previous novels: Grimus; Midnight’s Children (which was judged to be the “Booker of Bookers,” the best novel to have won that prize in its first twenty-five years); Shame (winner of the French Prix de Meilleur Livre Etranger); The Satanic Verses (winner of the Whitbread Prize for Best Novel); Haroun and the Sea of Stories (winner of the Writers Guild Award); The Moor’s Last Sigh (winner of the Whitbread Prize for Best Novel); The Ground Beneath Her Feet (winner of the Eurasian section of the Commonwealth Prize); Fury (a New York Times Notable Book); and Shalimar the Clown (a Time Book of the Year). He is also the author of a book of stories, East, West, and three works of nonfiction—Imaginary Homelands, The Jaguar Smile, and The Wizard of Oz. He is co-editor of Mirrorwork, an anthology of contemporary Indian writing.