The Enchantress of Florence Read Online Free Page A

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