The Holder of the World (22 page)

10

VENN SAYS
, I know what you want me to do: time-travel. Not just to October 29, 1989, but back three hundred years. He and Jay Basu and all the other strategists at MIT are looking for an information formula, an Einsteinian theory that will organize facts, the billions of facts that swarm around us like microbes, like pond scum, into some sort of pattern. He wants facts to grow like a crystal garden, he wants to create a supersaturated medium, a data plasma, in which just a sprinkling of data cues on top will precipitate a forest down below.

Yes, I say, that’ll do.

What’s in it for me? he asks.

How about the most perfect diamond in the world?

THE NIGHT
that Hannah was consigned to the zenana, the women’s rooms, as a wife but no more than a wife, she had a vision. The life inside her compelled it; she would offer her life, if necessary, to end the war. Only a person outside the pale of the two civilizations could do it. Only a woman, a pregnant woman, a pregnant white woman, had the confidence or audacity to try it.

She remembered Tringham’s nose, and the Raja’s reaction to the poor boy’s astonishment. Even the little people think they are gods. Only a person who thought she was God Almighty could have struck out through the jungles of India at night, heading back into Roopconda and the battle tent of the Great Mughal.

That night Hannah dressed herself with care in the dusty regal garments abandoned by the Deccani child-widow when she had been driven out of her prison-palace by the old Queen. Bhagmati tried to dissuade her with stories balladeers told all over Hindustan of the Emperor as father-killer, brother-killer, son-disinheritor, brutal converter of infidels and dedicated desecrator of temples and churches. And when she failed to dissuade, Bhagmati, reluctant guide and stout protector of the foolhardy foreigner, heaved aside the decorative panel in a wall that hid the opening to the secret passage out of the fortified hillock.

For a day and a night the two missionaries followed the debris of war lust through banana groves filled with frightened monkeys and ruined temples crawling with rats, over streams white with the bellies of floating fish and across villages of looted granaries and torched huts, until, on the morning of the second day, they came to the northern periphery of Jadav Singh’s kingdom, and there found Emperor Aurangzeb’s slaves leveling the lush and swampy plain into the foundations of a new fort, mosque and palace. And out as far as the eye could see, the forest was burning faster than woodsmen could cut or elephants could haul. With typical efficiency, the Emperor was building another city, perhaps to celebrate his victory over Devgad. Thousands of men and women carrying bowls of excavated mud trailed into the infinity of forest and grasses, miles away. All of the Coromandel factories, Devgad and Panpur palaces and their outlying fields and villages could be dropped inside this clearing. Only the elephants were of the proper scale; men looked too puny, their efforts almost laughable. Only the elephants looked capable of building the vision.

For years afterward Hannah mesmerized children with her stories of the Emperor’s field guns, swivel guns, brass guns in gaudy horse-drawn carriages; of siege trains and carts loaded with cannonballs weighing up to one hundred and twelve pounds and with gunpowder packed to stay dry in dewy or monsoon weather; of matchlocks together with their forked rest-pieces of heavy wood carried on the backs of anxious men with singed eyelashes and beards; of spears to hurl with great precision from afar, and of maces and sabers for fighting the enemy hand to hand when victory was near. In Hannah’s stories, the Imperial Army was made up of the curious or the conquered from all four corners of the universe and from Hindustan’s every kingdom and
suba:
Sunnis and Shias, Hindu Rajputs and Christians, Jews and Armenians, Turks, Moors, Afghans and Uzbeks, Chinese, Burmese, fuse and form for the pious Aurangzeb, what he described to Hannah as “the battering ram of Allah.”

HANNAH CAME
to negotiate and was instead taken hostage by the Emperor. His spies had alerted him the moment she and Bhagmati had entered the secret passage in the child-queen’s palace in Devgad.

She flounced into the war camp with Bhagmati, demanding and expecting to get an audience with the Emperor at once so that she could free the two warrior-kings from their self-destructive obsession. Instead, the camp commander seized and bound her and hauled her off to the huge tent that housed the haram. There a Tatar slave woman with thick, tattooed arms stripped and scrutinized her for concealed weapons, then handed her over to two Kashmiri slave women who scrubbed and depilated her, hennaed her hair and palms, rubbed rose oil between her breasts and reddened her lips with carmine. The Kashmiri slaves handed her over to three Rajput women who fastened a tight
angya
as a bodice around her breasts, slipped a
pishwaz
over her head that hung like a knee-length dress of the sheerest muslin, squeezed her legs into brocaded
izar
trousers that fitted as snugly as stockings, stuck jewels in her ears and nose, hung more jewels around her neck, ankles, wrists and hair parting, pushed rings up her fingers and toes, then discharged her to eunuchs who escorted her to the Great Mughal.

She had expected grandeur and a display of opulence. The very old man before her, still sharp featured and commanding, fairer than most Indians she had seen, with a long white beard, sat on a gilt throne in need of paint. She noted his fingers, the knuckles grotesquely large, the fingers splayed, unable to flex. The garish rings would have to be cut from his fingers.

She’d known, of course, that he was more than eighty, that he was older than America, older than the Massachusetts Bay Colony, more experienced in conquering and acquiring than anyone but the kings of Spain, France and England. All the same, from the gossip of terrorized villagers in Panpur and Devgad she’d imagined not the frail ascetic before her, but a warrior as virile as Morad Farah, a nobleman as debauched as the Nawab, a demon uglier and wilier than Ravanna. His face was lean and hard. Dignity and self-discipline and probably creeping joint disease had stiffened his spine. His
qaba
was cut from a coarse, cheap cloth she could not imagine Jadav Singh wearing. His only jewelry, apart from the rings, was a spinel-ruby pendant; an emerald secured an aigrette to his turban. He was as somber in manner as any Puritan of the same great age.

In this tent of informal audiences, he had allowed himself just one stark symbol of power. A mobile fit for an emperor who had seized all other empires contained in the universe, a globe of gold cupped in the cradle of a perfect golden replica of Aurangzeb’s hands, was suspended from the roof of the tent and came to rest just over the throne. Each ridge of fingernail, each wrinkle around an aged man’s knuckles, were etched with accuracy by the master goldsmith in the imperial atelier. On the sides of the gold sphere, a lion nuzzled a lamb. Embedded on the top of his gold universe, like the polestar, was a single diamond, the largest, most beautiful she had ever seen or imagined.

So he was more than a conqueror and acquisitor. He had instructed his master goldsmith to merge the metaphoric with the literal. She had come to speak logically, reasonably—politically—to a race of omniscient dreamers. How much easier it would be if she could have dehumanized him as the old Queen did, as the Raja did. To them, he was Ravanna, the demon-king of Lanka, in Muslim disguise.

He registered her presence with a kind of detached alarm, then turned to his attendant for an explanation. They spoke in Persian, obviously about the conditions of her apprehension, perhaps about her connection to the Raja, maybe even her killing of Morad Farah. The Emperor stared at her more closely with each new disclosure, then swiveled his whole body to address short questions to the attendant.

When he spoke, his voice was raspy. She felt the eunuchs reach for her again.

“His Imperial Highness will not order your execution,” the translator announced.

The Emperor spoke again.

“You will be given instructions. You will find it most convenient to be obedient.”

She began by loosening the cinch of her trousers and
angya
, then by tearing off her jewels, one set for every word she spoke, and flinging them at the Emperor’s feet.

“You despot! You tyrant!” she screamed. “You may have made me your prisoner, but I am not your plaything!” The look, first of rage, then of confusion, as the veiled translator conveyed her words, seemed to inflate, then compress, His Imperial Majesty. He raised a gnarled hand and recited a few words with the rhythm of verse.

Hannah’s head was whacked into a low bow and her arms jerked into the Mughal court’s ritual obeisance. She staggered and would have fallen on the carpet if a veiled attendant had not glided out of line and steadied her. When she regained her balance, she stared—with all the insolence she could summon—at the man who had discarded the only rules of fair play she knew and had guiltlessly imprisoned her.

“I am with child.”

The translator did not bother to render her words. Instead, he said, “His Imperial Highness says we are neither prisoners nor playthings. We are all servants of Allah, fulfilling His commands.”

She heard footfalls behind her, turned, and saw Bhagmati being led by two attendants, pushed to the edge of the throne, then roughly bent, as Hannah had been, in the ritual courtesy.

“It will not go so easily for the idolater,” said the translator. “The troops will do with her as they wish.”

“We are here on a mission, then we shall leave. If you detain us, or dishonor us, we shall die.”

The Emperor spoke. Bhagmati translated. “His Imperial Majesty says we all must die. Allah is merciful.”

He gestured for Bhagmati to come closer and spoke to her in a low voice, then gestured her back. She said to Hannah, translating: “His Majesty has heard that I hear and speak for you. So His Majesty will not cut out my tongue or cut off your ears.”

The Emperor and the translator chuckled.

“His Majesty has heard you corrected the rough manners of Commander Morad Farah.”

“Morad Farah … very … expensive … man,” said the Emperor, in clear English.

“And who hears for you in Devgad Palace?” asked Hannah. “Why must you destroy the Raja?”

The Emperor answered only obliquely, and then again through his translator. Statements to him were always posed as questions, for a statement in his presence implied arrogance. Earnest questions were never asked, for they implied uncertainty.

“A skillful ruler trusts no friend, no family member. Trust only the hunting tiger or the vengeful enemy. The survivor is he who distrusts his own shadow. He destroys himself who does not submit.”

She hated the Emperor for his self-righteous terrors that forced him to see her not as a person on a mission but as a pawn in his endless game of
shatranj
. To him, she was just another case of brandy, or a cannon, that an ambitious factor like Cephus Prynne might barter for a land grant or new concession. Her only value to him was her bibi power to lure the Raja, as Ravanna had lured Sita, outside the white circle of his hill-fort’s safety.

“Look around you!” Hannah shouted. “There is no golden world. It’s a dream, all a dream!”

The Emperor nodded his head at the eunuch to indicate the audience was over. The eunuch escorted Hannah and Bhagmati into a tent of their own, luxurious with silk canopies, hangings and floor spreads, in the haram section of the war camp. Then he settled down to sleep outside.

ALL THE NEXT DAY
, defying the rules of modesty that decreed the veil and head covering, Hannah roamed the tent city of the haram, accepting an old woman’s offer of a tour of the grounds. There would be a city, and a fort, and several mosques, and perhaps even a burial vault, but before all of that, there would be a glorious battle. The Mughal’s vast army was prepared for the kill.

All day, contingents of spear throwers and lance bearers marched across the battlefield. Cavalrymen with their shields out, lances low, pounding forward on armored horses, staged mock assaults. Engineers directed the digging of trenches and burying of mines all around the revetted hill. Horses in teams of two and three pulled gun carriages into place behind newly erected battlements. Slaves packed powder horns and counted primers. Metal grinders sharpened the blades of swords, scimitars and saddle axes. Servants polished the steel of arm guards, breastplates and helmets. Smithies hammered smooth the skirmish-dented shields.

Oh, the murderers’ vanity!

Hannah, knowing the condition of the Raja’s armaments, wanted to call off his mission of suicide, wanted only a chance to speak. The trajectories of hate and love would intersect on this field. And she, the would-be peacemaker, had made herself Aurangzeb’s bait, had allowed herself to be staked like a goat to lure the tiger from his lair.

That night the Emperor sent again for Hannah and her servant. He sat, as he had the night before, under the gold mobile of the world grasped tight in his rigid gold hands, but this time he sat on a cushion no bigger than the one assigned to Hannah herself. As he spoke, he forced his fingers to grasp a needle and to embroider a simple prayer cap. The tent was empty of his vast retinue of slaves and servants. The attendants were slumped half-asleep, guarding the entrance to the tent.

For minutes the Emperor did not look at or address his guest. He sewed. Bhagmati fanned her mistress, more against flies than the evening’s trapped heat. Only when the needle fell out of his misshapen fingers did he break his silence.

“Your night was comfortable?”

She merely nodded. Bhagmati made the proper affirmations. The interpreter rendered all speech in the flattest of monotones.

“You are wrong to think that you have been wronged. As woman serves man, man serves the will of God. You have placed yourself where no woman has a right to be. I have decided to be merciful and return you to your people.”