Free The Enchantress of Florence by Salman Rushdie

given, and he now had the authority to invite the visitor to enter the palace quarters. The visitor was asked, inevitably, for his name, and he answered without hesitation.
    “You may call me Mogor,” he said in immaculate Persian. “Mogor dell’Amore, at your service. A gentleman of Florence, presently on business for England’s queen.” He was wearing a velvet hat with a white feather in it, held in place by a mustard-colored jewel, and doffing this hat he bent down in a low bow that showed everyone watching (for he had attracted a substantial crowd, whose dreamy-eyed, grinning faces proved once again the omniscient power of the Skeleton’s work) that he possessed a courtier’s skill, politeness, and grace. “Mr. Ambassador,” said the adjutant, bowing in return. “This way, please.”
    Yet a third fragrance had now been released as the earlier scents faded away, and this one filled the air with fantasies of desire. As he walked through the red world of the palaces the man who now went by the name of Mogor dell’Amore noticed the fluttering movements behind curtained windows and latticed screens. In the darkness of the windows he imagined that he could make out a host of shining almond eyes. Once he saw a jeweled hand making an ambiguous gesture that might have been an invitation. He had underestimated the Skeleton. In her way she was an artist to rival any that could be found in this fabled city of painters, poets, and song. “Let us see what she has in store for the emperor,” he thought. “If it’s as seductive as these early scents then I’m home and dry.” He held on tightly to the Tudor scroll and his stride lengthened as his confidence grew.
    At the center of the main chamber of the House of Private Audience was a red sandstone tree from which there hung what seemed to the visitor’s untutored eye to be a great bunch of stylized stone bananas. Wide “branches” of red stone ran from the top of the tree trunk to the four corners of the room. Between these branches hung canopies of silk, embroidered in silver and gold; and under the canopies and bananas, with his back to the thick trunk of the stone tree, stood the most frightening man in the world (with one exception): a small, sugary man of enormous intellect and girth, beloved of the emperor, hated by envious rivals, a flatterer, a fawner, an eater of thirty pounds of food each day, a man capable of ordering his cooks to prepare one thousand different dishes for the evening meal, a man for whom omniscience was not a fantasy but a minimum requirement of life.
    This was Abul Fazl, the man who knew everything (except foreign languages and the many uncouth tongues of India, all of which eluded him, so that he cut an unusual, monoglot figure in that multitongued Babel of a court). Historian, spymaster, brightest of the Nine Stars, and second-closest confidant of the most frightening man in the world (with no exceptions), Abul Fazl knew the true story of the creation of the world, which he had heard, he said, from the angels themselves, and he knew, too, how much fodder the horses in the imperial stables were allowed to eat each day, and the approved recipe for biryani, and why slaves had been renamed
disciples,
and the history of the Jews, and the order of the heavenly spheres, and the Seven Degrees of Sin, the Nine Schools, the Sixteen Predicaments, the Eighteen Sciences, and the Forty-two Unclean Things. He was also apprised, through his network of informants, of every single thing that went on in every language within the walls of Fatehpur Sikri, all the whispered secrets, all the treacheries, all the indulgences, all the promiscuities, so that every person within those walls was also at his mercy, or at the mercy of his pen, of which King Abdullah of Bokhara had said that it was more to be feared than even Akbar’s sword: saving only the most frightening man in the world (with no exceptions), who was afraid of nobody, and who was, of course, the