They flew there in thousands and their certainty of possessing that region exclusively was so great that they scarcely moved aside in front of our horses and their wings brushed our faces disagreeably. I struck several with my riding crop, and I heard the cavaliers who had departed with us from Agra, and who were Mongols, say that in analogous cases, on battlefields, in the intoxication of feeding and conscious of their strength of numbers, those birds had not hesitated to attack humans.
“An eye is so quickly taken,” said one of them.
And everyone protected is face with a flap of his cloak. But there could not be any bloody intoxication among the species there, for the bones had been entirely stripped and made innumerable white patches on the brown earth. To that, perhaps, we owed not being attacked and conserving the precious globes of our eyes.
I made bitter reflections on the immense extent of the land of India and I was despairing of ever reaching the city of Ahmednabad, when the cavalier in the lead suddenly veered sideways and quit the road. We all plunged into vast stone quarries to our right, which seemed abandoned. On the far horizon I had vaguely perceived he domes of mosques and the contours of a city.
Everyone dismounted. It was necessary to wait or nightfall. I lay down on the ground and went to sleep.
The sound of an argument woke me up. It was dark. Several people unknown to me were speaking animatedly. It was a matter of knowing whether it was appropriate to make a solemn entrance for the Emperor’s prime minister, Aboul Fazi, who was famous from the north to the south of India. He was loved by the Hindus but hated by those who professed the Muslim religion. Khan Yacoub, who was a fanatical Muslim, said in a somber fashion that it would risk provoking an immediate insurrection.
Suddenly, torches were agitated. A group of horsemen had just arrived. A tall man with shining eyes and a majestic appearance, his neck entirely enveloped in a thick fur, bowed deeply before Aboul Fazi and, having seized his right hand, placed it on his forehead as a sign of respect. While he was making that gesture, a soldier who was making a metallic sound as he walked, because he was covered in plates of gold, advanced with a deliberate solemnity, holding aloft the banner of the Empire, and placed himself behind the minister, inclining the banner slightly over his head.
“I salute the Emperor’s envoy, “said Khan Khanan, for it was him, bowing again, although Aboul Fazi, with his habitual simplicity, made him a sign to abridge those rites of reception.
“And I have good news to tell him,” the Khan went on, raising his voice, appearing to address the audience as well as the minister. “Our Master, the Subadar of the Deccan, has almost recovered. He does not go out of is apartments, but he is much better.”
I have always had a curious faculty of perceiving falsehoods by the sound of the words that express them. I was certain that that assertion was not true.
Aboul Fazi must have had the same suspicion, for instead of emoting an action of grace, he contented himself with putting his hands together and raising them slightly, thanking Providence if that were true, but participating as little as possible in the lie if it were false.
A little later he took me to one side and I knew how the idea of the lie was tormenting him.
“Mourad is dead,” he told me. “Hide your face carefully, for you will be called upon to play the role that is destined for you. I had thought…I had hoped…but no, we are going to be obliged to soil ourselves with a grave lie. Know, my child, that a lie is a companion that no longer leaves you. It is to save the lives of many men that the Emperor has decided to organize the lie of which we are about to be the actors. Do not forget that, in a certain measure, one is free of the responsibility for one’s actions, in not losing sight of their utility and refusing to obtain a personal advantage therefrom.”
I only knew very vaguely then about what is called Karma in the Hindu religion, and I only grasped the meaning of those words poorly. I nevertheless approved them with vivacity, for I respected Aboul Fazi.
We were in the shadows, at the foot of the smooth wall of the quarry, and the only light that reached us was that of a torch that seemed to be about to go out. Aboul Fazi was anxious, not so much because of the death of Mourad, who had always nourished an active hatred against him, as because of a prevision of the events that were about to ensue. I perceived that his principal cause for anxiety was the unease that my nature caused him.
“Khan Khanan,” he went on, “is naturally in our confidence. An old woman who was caring for Mourad and his physician witnessed his death, but there is nothing to fear from them, it appears. The Khan has done everything necessary. Thanks to you, we shall gain the necessary time. But it’s for you that I’m afraid.”
He looked at me intently. He was about to say something else, but we were abruptly interrupted. A face was stuck close to mine. It was that of Khan Khanan.
“It’s true. The resemblance is prodigious.”
And abruptly, he snatched from his shoulders the brocade robe that, in spite of the extreme heat, had a sable collar, and he threw it over my back. Once, a fakir had predicted that he would escape the death delivered by a sword thrust thanks to the thickness of a sable fur that he was wearing around his neck. Since then, the Khan had not taken off that fur, in expectation of the sword thrust in question.
He raised the collar over my face and almost over my eyes
“When he has the costume he will be the Subadar in person.”
The clink of weapons was heard. All eyes were fixed on Aboul Fazi. The bearer of the imperial banner had approached. The horses were brought.
“How long do you think it will take for the troops to reach Ahmednagar?” the Khan asked.
Aboul Fazi reflected.
“That depends on the rain, the heat and the difficulty the cavalry has in crossing the rivers. Twelve days, perhaps fifteen.”
I sensed his anxious eyes passing over the Khan’s sable that I was wearing.
I was about to be a king for a fortnight!
THE FACE OF DEAD MOURAD
Now that I can look back with serenity on the events of the past, I have no difficulty in absolving myself of the insensate actions that I am about to relate, for I can see the chain of causes and effects, and how small a part my will played therein.
No, I am not responsible for what happened. Was it me who demanded that liquor composed of sagre, a kind of black sugar mixed with the juice of baboul bark?28 I didn’t know what sagre and baboul were. Would I have been able to think of having that tari brandy extracted from two kinds of palms, the codgiour and the coconut, brought to me, and demanding that the proportion of codgiour be greater than that of the ordinary coconut?29 Was it my fault if someone placed before me, in a massive golden casket, pellets of opium prepared by a Chinese physician, and if I swallowed several with simulated avidity in order to play the character that was imposed on me? Was it my fault if, in order to dispel the somnolence that the diabolical drug in question procured, I was obliged to absorb the essences of baboul and codgiour that make inflamed anger surge through the veins?
Mourad’s last lucid words had been addressed to his confidant and friend the Macassar Aurend Bey. He had given him an order to have reduced to powder the fragments of the ivory cane that had broken under his and caused his fall. He wanted to punish that object, or rather, the spirit hidden in its substance, for the evil intention that it had manifested, and he intended to smoke the ivory dust in his pipe. Then he had asked for the various palm alcohols.
That was on the day of our arrival. He drank during the morning and had been seized by a crisis of furious delirium in the course of which he had died. Khan Khanan, hearing his cries, had come running and had found him lying on the flagstones. He had immediately had his door sealed up, without informing anyone. The thought he might gain us the two days necessary for the repair of the walls of the fortress, in which the Emperor’s partisans could enclose themselves and defend themselves until the arrival of troops if the revolt burst forth
&
nbsp; But in order for me to be able to take Mourad’s place usefully, it was necessary that there should not be the slightest suspicion of trickery, that I was scarcely glimpsed, that I was not betrayed by the accent of my voice or some excessively persona gesture. It was also necessary that I adopt, in a sense, the course of his ideas. I had to demand the various liquors and drink them. I even had to smoke the ivory dust of the cane.
Everything went well to begin with. Did the Chinese physician have a heart of stone or was he nourishing old resentments? He manifested for the death of his master a mute indifference. Perhaps he was proud of participating in a State secret. Or did he know from his experience of the great men of the earth that his life depended on his obedience? He could acquire from a Chinaman of Ahmednagar everything that he required to preserve Mourad’s body from putrefaction and await the definitive embalming that could take place in a matter of days.
We had arrived during the night, through the great breach in the ramparts made a year before by the imperial cannons. We were preceded by the banner and ten trumpet-bearers who were not playing. It was not necessary to wake the inhabitants, but to show those not yet asleep that the trumpets were there and that they could have been played to announce the arrival of the Emperor’s minister. I followed the Khan to reach the interior of the fortress. Workmen were toiling on the ramparts by the light of torches. Men of wretched appearance surrounded them and were shouting insults at them because they were working. I was gripped by an atmosphere of insecurity and hatred. I think that a stone was even thrown at us and hit a soldier.
We traversed the three enclosing walls, skirted some ponds and climbed a steep pathway that led us to a stone vault that seemed to me to be very ancient. We went through halls with exceedingly high ceilings that resonated beneath our footsteps. It seemed to me that bats were colliding with the walls and I saw a huge lizard ambling slowly over one wall, and was immobilized by the light.
In front of a metal door, Khan Khanan gave various orders, and all those accompanying us withdrew respectfully, with the exception of Yacoub, who took a step forward and twisted his moustache angrily.
The Khan took a torch from the hands of a servant and made a respectful sign to Amoul Fazi to go through. I marched behind them. The door closed again.
“Those are the women’s apartments,” said the Khan, indicating a sequence of rooms to the left where I could still perceive a flock of bats. I remembered how many times in my childhood, in the vicinity of Toulouse, I had heard it said that those creatures were a bad omen.
Those of Toulouse perhaps, but not those of India, I said to myself, so much was I in need of optimism.
Aboul Fazi had seized my arm and he squeezed it with an eloquent gaze that meant: I have confidence you in spite of your youth.
The experiment that it was about to be given to me to make is rather rare—rare and frightening—and I was often to repent of it subsequently.
The Chinese physician must have been waiting for us. He surged forth like an apparition. He must have originated from northern China, for he was of tall stature. He gave the impression of a philosophical executioner. His eyes were invisible beneath his eyelids. At the sight of me he remained immobile for a few seconds and I saw a green gleam flicker in his eyes and then die out. I perceived then that the Khan’s fur had slipped.
The Emperor had been struck by my resemblance to his son, but other people had assured me that the resemblance was almost non-existent, for faces lend themselves to the interpretations, and resemblances are relative to the desire one has to discover them. But the Chinese physician certainly had the sensation of once again seeing alive the man he had just seen dead.
There had been neither any transition nor any preparation. At the back of the room there was an area elevated by three steps and covered by a mosquito net suspended from the ceiling, narrow and tapering at the base, so that, in the torchlight, one might have thought it a great maleficent goddess whose face could not be seen. The Chinese physician had approached it, and with a gesture that was both simple and theatrical he threw back one of the undulating sheets.
And then I saw myself. I saw myself as I might have been, deformed by evil passions, violence, remorse and the desire to kill my soul. There was a black ribbon sustaining the jaw and cutting the yellow waxen block of the face in two. The forehead was swathed in a bandage on which had been posed, like a crown, a necklace of turquoises that he had the habit of wearing. The physician had not had time to dress him again, and had hastily thrown over him a gold lamé cloak whose sumptuousness was lugubrious. I recognized myself, and was sad to recognize myself such as I might be in death, if I had allowed to develop in me that which resembled that debauched son of a great Emperor.
I bowed profoundly and stood aside, gripped by horror.
In a shadowed corner, what I had taken for a heap of cushions stirred, and I saw that it was an old woman, praying. The Khan said a few words to her in a low voice. It was necessary not to waste any time. The rumor of Aboul Fazi’s arrival had spread rapidly and almost all the important men in the city, friends and enemies, were filling the halls of the palace. At the same time as the imminent arrival of troops, Mourad’s recovery was about to be announced, and a glimpse of him would be allowed.
The old woman had drawn away and she came back carrying what is known in Agra as a cadeby, a brocade coat with broad sleeves, which Mourad had the custom of wearing, tightened at the waist by a broad Persian belt of white silk. I experienced a great repulsion in putting on that coat, as well as a green turban that was to conceal my hair, more abundant that Mourad’s, but it was too late to back out.
The Khan picked up the necklace of turquoises and held it out to me.
“Is that necessary?” I asked.
“The Subadar never took it off. He wore it over his turban.”
I felt one of the turquoises touch my temple. I had such a sensation of a burn that I could not help reaching up to it with my hand, and I suppressed a cry.
I had to lean on Aboul Fazi’s shoulder, and accompany him to the top of the staircase at the bottom of which the officers of the army and the notables of the city had gathered who had come to render homage to the Emperor’s minister. I would appear for a few seconds, and the door would immediately close on me again.
Reassured by Aboul Fazi’s gaze, full of wisdom, I started walking by his side. It was then that an unforeseeable event occurred.
We had passed through two interminable halls and I had just noticed, with an internal smile—for it is necessary to divert oneself in the most difficult situations—that the Khan had hastily put on his cloak with the sable collar, as soon as I had taken it off, when I heard footfalls behind me and a sigh that might have resembled a sigh of great joy or of sudden alarm.
I turned round. A woman had just run up behind me. She had emerged from the door that had been designated to me as the one leading to the women’s apartments. Her face was unveiled. It was of great beauty and revealed a delightful ingenuousness, at the same time as the distress of dolor. She had been running. She stopped, open-mouthed, in front of me.
In the haste to arrive, the Khan had not talked to us about Miriah, the daughter of Ali, one of the masters of the Deccan, a friend of Akbar, whom Mourad had married two months before. He had only loved her for a few days and had then started drinking again. After his accident, he had immediately asked not to be cared for by her. Khan Khanan had had great difficulty in persuading her to withdraw to a fortified house that her father had twenty cosses from Ahmednagar, and to which news of her husband was sent every day.30
Now, mysteriously informed of the death of her husband, or under the influence of an imperious presentiment, she had come running during the night, and was considering, with eyes widened by the inexplicable, the caricature of the beloved individual that I was for her.
I saw her take a step forward, and she held out her hand as if to touch me and thus assure herself that my form was material and that I was not a vai
n simulacrum. But she dared not carry that experiment through to the end, She uttered a loud heart-rending cry.
“A preta! It’s a preta!”
Pretas are, for the Hindus, the miserable dead wandering in the afterlife in quest of evil to accomplish.
At that exact moment the great door leading to the staircase opened slowly, and I heard a murmur of distant voices.
“But can’t you see that it’s not him! It’s a demon that has taken possession of his body! Expel that demon! Mourad is dead!”
The Chinese physician, who had come running, seized her by the arm and started running, carrying her away.
“Close the doors!” cried the Khan.
“Mourad is dead! Expel the demon!” The young woman’s voice seemed to grow louder as she drew away.
Then there was a silence.
Have they heard? we asked ourselves.
THE NIGHT OF THE CHINESE PHYSICIAN
A saint, an authentic saint, would not have been able to resist, and if I resisted for two days, it was only thanks to the tari alcohol and the opium pellets that the Chinese physician gave me, which made me sleep for fourteen hours. But I felt so ill when I woke up that I swore not to touch that poison again and that I would content myself with the effect of the alcohol, which was at least familiar to me.
The physician, the old woman and I were prisoners in vast apartments where two taciturn eunuchs brought us our meals and tari alcohol, and renewed the water in the alcazaras suspended near the windows in order that they retained their freshness. My two companions knew that their lives depended on their silence and their immobility, and they had no thought of budging. In the Chinese physician at least, however I sensed an interior anxiety as to what might happen to him later. We quickly sympathized, for he thought that my destiny had points in common with his, and that they would not fail to get rid of me as soon as my role was concluded.
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