Free The Enchantress of Florence by Salman Rushdie Page A

emperor, his lord.
    Abul Fazl stood in profile like a king and did not turn to look at the newcomer. He remained silent for so long that it became plain that an insult was intended. The ambassador of Queen Elizabeth understood that this was the first test he had to pass. He too remained silent and in that dreadful hush each man learned much about the other. “You think you are telling me nothing,” the traveler thought, “but I see from your magnificence and rudeness, from your corpulence and stern visage, that you are the exemplar of a world in which hedonism coexists with suspicion, violence—for this silence is a form of violent assault—walks hand in hand with the contemplation of beauty, and that the weakness of this universe of overindulgence and vindictiveness is vanity. Vanity is the enchantment in whose spell you are all held captive, and it is through my knowledge of that vanity that I will achieve my goal.”
    Then the most frightening man in the world (with one exception) spoke at last, as if in reply to the other’s thoughts. “Excellency,” he said, sardonically, “I perceive that you have perfumed yourself with the fragrance devised for the seduction of kings, and I deduce that you are not entirely innocent of our ways—in fact, not an innocent at all. I did not trust you when I first heard about you some moments ago, and now that I have smelled you I trust you even less.” The yellow-haired Mogor dell’Amore intuited that Abul Fazl was the original author of the spell-book of unguents whose formulas Mohini the Skeleton had become adept at using, so that these olfactory enchantments had no power over him, and as a result they lost their influence over everyone else as well. The guards with goofy grins at the four entrances to the House of Private Audience suddenly came to their senses, the veiled slave girls waiting to serve the august company lost their air of dreamy eroticism, and the newcomer understood that he was like a man stripped naked beneath the all-seeing gaze of the king’s favorite, and that only the truth, or something as convincing as the truth, would save him now.
    “When the ambassador of King Philip of Spain came to visit us,” Abul Fazl reflected, “he brought a full retinue, and elephants laden with gifts, and twenty-one gift horses of finest Arab stock, and jewels. By no means did he show up on a bullock-cart and spend the night in a whorehouse with a woman so thin that one can wonder whether she is a woman at all.”
    “My master, Lord Hauksbank of That Ilk, unfortunately joined God and his angels as we made landfall at Surat,” the newcomer replied. “On his deathbed he bade me fulfill the duty with which Her Majesty had charged him. Alas, the ship’s company was swarming with rogues, and before his body was cold they commenced to plunder and ransack his quarters in search of whatever of value my good master may have possessed. I confess that it was only by good fortune that I escaped with my life and the queen’s letter as well, for, knowing me to be my master’s honest servant, they would have cut my throat had I stayed to defend Lord Hauksbank’s property. I fear, now, that his remains may not receive a Christian burial, but am proud to have arrived at your great city to discharge his responsibility, which has become mine.”
    “The Queen of England,” Abul Fazl mused, “has been, I believe, no friend to our friend the illustrious King of Spain.”
    “Spain is a philistine bully,” the other improvised swiftly, “whereas England is the home of art and beauty and of Gloriana herself. Do not be blinded by the blandishments of Philip the Dull. Like must speak to like, and it is Elizabeth of England who is the true reflection of the emperor’s greatness and style.” Warming to his theme, he explained that the faraway redhead queen was nothing less than the Western mirror of the emperor himself, she was Akbar in female form, and he, the Shahanshah, the king of