Shadow Princess (32 page)

“Your Highness,” he said.

“So you have come.”

At the sound of her voice, he felt a flutter of discomfort. It had been many months since he had heard her speak, but the music of her laughter and her words had been seared into his brain. This was not the same woman, he thought, then dismissed that notion as soon as it came, for who else could she be?

“Will you turn to look at me?” he said, greatly daring, “or have I offended you? I flatter myself that you would not have honored me with this summons if I had. It was an error on my part, one I am greatly ashamed of, one I should not have given credulity to.”

“What have you heard, Mirza Najabat Khan?”

This time he had to lean forward to hear her. “Nothing I can talk about, your Highness. It was women’s talk.” He laughed. “I mean that it came to me from my
zenana,
and stupid as it was, I believed it. But I know you . . . in that short space of time we spent together I came to know you better than I know my wives. If I say that they mean nothing to me, and you . . . everything, would you believe it? That which we set in motion on the night we played
chaugan
together will not be stopped again, by any person’s doing.”

She took a deep breath, and he watched her shoulders straighten and collapse under the quivering furs on her back. “And what of my Bapa?” she asked.

“I respect his Majesty,” he said, “but I do not agree with his injunctions that you must not marry. If it is to be so, and we are bound to obey his wishes,
this
must suffice for us, your Highness.”

The woman swung around then, the furs of her cloak whispering on the floor. Najabat moved toward her, up one step, his right arm out to clasp her hand. His fingers fell upon her sleeve, and he felt the softness of the velvet band around it just as he looked into her face. The light of the
baradari
glowed upon her skin and the dark frame of hair shimmering with pearls. Something, even in her moving to meet him, had struck him as unusual, but when he saw her he found himself looking at a strange woman, not the one who had dwelt in his thoughts for all these days. He stepped back, almost slipping and falling in his attempt to get away from her.

“Did you expect my sister?” she said. “Why, though, Mirza Najabat? You were amenable enough when we met in your tent on the way to Agra.”

“Your Highness,” he said, bowing in the
taslim,
his hand falling to the ground and up again four times almost automatically. “I was mistaken, forgive me.” Thoughts jostled in his mind, her words finally coming to rest in clarity.
She
was the first woman he had seen, Princess Roshanara Begam; the second one, who had splendidly trounced him in
chaugan,
was Jahanara. The rumors were about Jahanara, and when he glanced up again at the spite drawing up her eyebrows and at the sneer around her lush mouth, he recognized clearly that Roshanara had created the gossip about Princess Jahanara. He felt helpless standing there, his arms hanging loosely by his sides, thinking only of her deceit in calling him to Shalimar Bagh on the pretext of being her sister. He could barely remember what he had said to her, how he had begged to be forgiven, how he had shown his love for Jahanara to this woman. He felt a little cold touch on his cheek and looked up to see a few snowflakes mist gently into the gardens.

“This is not a game, your Highness,” he said, intensely furious. “You have deliberately lied to me. The letter came in Jahanara Begam’s name, and—”

“Not in her name, Mirza Najabat Khan.” Her voice was sharp. “If you had only stopped to read it carefully, you would have seen that it was not signed.”

“But it was her seal.”

“Would you have come if I had written?”

“No,” he said quietly. “For you I would not have come. You committed a folly in visiting me in my tent, put my reputation in jeopardy, knowing that, if we were caught, it would be my head loosened from my neck and not yours.”

“And what did the Begam Sahib do later?”

“That was different, your Highness. I could not dare to think of you in such . . . terms; my affections lie with your sister.”

She waved a hand in his direction, a slew of gold bangles tinkling with the movement. “Go, Mirza Najabat Khan. I have heard enough of your insults. But remember,” she said as he turned and began walking down the pathway, “that I will recall your words for the rest of my life.”

“If I have insulted you, your Highness,” he said, stopping once to look back, “then you have deserved every word.”

“I will tell Bapa,” Roshanara said in an undertone, and so he did not hear her. Even if he had, he would not have cared; he just wanted to get away.

Najabat fled down the terrace and the stairs to the middle level and the bottom one, where his
shikara
waited for him. He was deeply distressed and did not notice that the first few flurries of snow had thickened as they talked, and the flakes were now pouring down upon him, coating his bare head and his shoulders even as he ran. He came to rest at the pier, winded, shaking with rage. His
shikara
was nowhere to be seen, and the copious falling snow had killed all noise; even the sound of his harsh breathing seemed to be somewhere in the distance. The light of the night sky had almost turned into day with the snow a sheer blue, and he could see down the canal, the trees on its banks canting over in black streaks. And then he noticed the
shikara
pulled up along the edge of the pier, its trappings of gold and gilt dusted with snow. A woman sat under the shelter of the gold-tasseled awning, clad in white, a hand on the boat’s rim, snow laid over her exposed skin. She had long fingers, fine and shapely, and Najabat saw the glint of diamonds on her rings.

Her unremitting gaze was upon him, her eyes dark, lips purple in the cold. She was shivering. He crossed his arms and watched her—snow piling upon his eyebrows and his eyelashes, whitening his beard—waiting for the smallest movement from Princess Jahanara Begam that he could take as an invitation to leap to her side.

The princess should be married to the chief general at the court, whose name was Nezabet Can
(Najabat Khan)
, a man descended from the royal family of Balq
(Balkh)
. He was brave and well-proportioned; but Shaista Khan, brother-in-law of Shahjahan . . . said to him
(Shahjahan)
that it was not advisable to make such a marriage, because when married to the said princess the husband would necessarily have to be placed in the same rank as any other prince.

—
WILLIAM IRVINE
(trans.)
Storia do Mogor, or Mogul India, by Niccolao Manucci 1653–1708

Kashmir

Thursday, April 13, 1634

15 Shawwal
A.H
. 1043

U
ntil the end of his life, Najabat Khan would never recall how he had boarded the
shikara
on the pier outside Shalimar Bagh—whether the princess had beckoned to him in the still blue luminescence created by the softly falling snow, or if he had made the first move. He did remember that a eunuch had steadied the boat as he climbed in and handed him a pair of oars. The eunuch had actually let the oars clatter to the floor of the
shikara,
but neither Najabat nor Jahanara paid heed to his temper. It must have been Ishaq Beg, Najabat thought later; no other man who considered his neck precious would dare to display his displeasure in front of an
amir
of the court and a royal princess.

Najabat thrust the
shikara
from the dock and turned the craft around, his back to the lake as they went down the canal. He sensed, rather than saw, four other boats detach themselves from the bank around the Bagh and follow them, and as he rowed, four more materialized in front. Eunuchs filled the guard boats, seated with their backs to Jahanara and Najabat, spears held aloft, daggers folded into their cummerbunds.

They went thus in a scattered procession and swung out into the wide expanse of the lake at the end of the canal. The snowstorm, if it could be called that, had subsided as inaudibly as it had come into a flutter of white in the sky. Even in that short time, the half hour it had taken for Najabat to row them to the lake, snow had piled on the mountains, whitening their peaks; the houses on the edge of the lake had mantles of white on their wood roofs; the branches of the trees were carved out against the darkness. Only the lake glimmered indigo and black, seemingly untouched by the late-season snow. And around them, lights glowed gold from the houses, boats, and piers.

All the way down, they had been subdued themselves, as though not trusting their voices, with only the mellifluous and rhythmic dip of the oars to keep them company. At first, Jahanara had searched Najabat’s face with her intense gaze, and then, perhaps a blush had come over her skin—he could not tell—and she had turned to the banks of the canal to present him with her profile. Najabat had not taken his eyes off her, except to rest them upon the slender line of her neck, the unseen hands folded now in a fox fur muff in her lap, the sway of her shoulders as the
shikara
rocked. When they broke into the lake, the skies opened up above them, still gray with snow-bearing clouds. Their escort spread out into the waters, at enough of a distance now that the boats were mere specks.

“Are we not to speak, your Highness?” Najabat said finally, resting his aching arms and allowing the
shikara
to drift.

“I wonder,” she said, with a deep breath, “if I did right in coming here tonight.”

“If you had not,” he said simply, “I would have had no way of contacting you again.”

“And yet, it was for you to do so.”

“I spoke at great length about my folly to your sister,” he said. “I listened too much, paid too little heed to my own feelings. . . . I was wrong.” He said more, all that he had told Roshanara, even his last words to her and how he had been mistaken in thinking her to have been Jahanara at the encampment.

“So what now?” Princess Jahanara said. She removed her hands from the muff and laid them on the sides of the boat. “What are we to do?”

He wiped his face and chin of the wet, melting snow. “I, a commander of five thousand horses in his Majesty’s service, have been a coward, your Highness. I have been afraid, uncertain of the Emperor’s temper if he were to find out. . . . But I was curious, I admit it readily.” He chuckled. “It is not every day that a royal princess commands an
amir
to her side, and when I began to think of the consequences of being discovered, it weakened my resolve. Now, if you will have me, I will not betray you again.”

Najabat reached forward and took her warm hands into his own. She slipped her hands out of his clasp and held his instead, rubbing her fingers over his frigid skin.

“This is not a game to me, Mirza Najabat Khan,” she said. “I have . . . given my heart to you. Perhaps it sounds foolish, perhaps I ought not to be talking like this either—”

“I know,” he said. “I also know that my heart is yours until I die. If we were other people—more common, less important—we would have had the succor of the rituals of everyday life, a marriage and children. But as it stands, the Emperor will not allow you to be taken from his
zenana
to grace mine, and I understand his sentiments readily; they are no less than I feel myself. But if you will permit me to be your husband, and will let it be our secret . . .” He shook his head in disgust. “I am a soldier, your Highness, with no words within me for courting or poetry. I fear that I do not say what I want to well enough.”

“So we are to live our separate lives,” she said carefully, and Najabat felt an ache in his chest at her words. “And meet every now and then.”

He shrugged. “So it would seem Allah has ordained for us. Little snatches of happiness.”

He picked up the oars again and began to row.

“What will happen after my Bapa dies, Mirza Najabat?” she asked.

“I do not know, your Highness,” he said frankly, glancing over his shoulder as the
shikara
glided through the water. “It depends on who will wear the crown.”

“Dara,” she said decisively. “Why would you doubt that?”

He looked at her in surprise. “I beg your pardon, Highness, but there is no such certainty. Prince Dara Shikoh has his Majesty’s favor, but the nobles at court . . . we all think of Prince Aurangzeb as being more qualified. He has courage, that young man, and an unwavering resolve. And he is polite, well mannered—all that a royal prince should be.” He stopped abruptly, sensing he had said too much. It was not the first time he had heard of Jahanara’s love for Dara, and he had hoped for it to be just a rumor, because Dara was impudent, irreverent, too flighty for them to consider as an Emperor. He was like a well-groomed horse, petted and cared for, and not put through its paces daily. Even Prince Shuja had gone to the Deccan to aid Mahabat Khan in the fight there—a battle they had lost, true, but his mettle had been tested at war. Princes who lived in the soft lap of the imperial court could not rule over an unruly Empire, with its fluid boundaries and its insurgencies within. And yet, though Aurangzeb was also still at court and untried as a soldier, he was vocal and he had tact. After the news of Dara’s insult of Sadullah Khan had spread through the court, Prince Aurangzeb had sent him a magnificently caparisoned elephant and four horses as a gift, supposedly for no reason, in actuality as an apology for his wayward older brother. The
amirs
had spoken of the gift also, though Sadullah Khan had merely acknowledged it and said nothing; it created an aura of goodwill around the young Aurangzeb. That, Najabat thought, and his brashness at the elephant fight nearly a year ago, when Dara had fled and Aurangzeb had faced the raging Sukhdar. The nobles had long memories, and, in the end, the Empire would come to rest only in the safekeeping of the man who had their support—it was a simple and inviolable rule for governing over such a large and unwieldy Empire.