by Peter Hayes
Did Sikandar believe this? Was it bheda? I couldn’t tell. For Sikandar was closely guarding his thoughts. And, thus far, Jafir had acted like a perfect gentleman, displaying none of the aberrant behavior for which I’d been prepared.
Jafir unhooded his falcon, Vajra. The hawk swiveled his head and, attracted by something, leapt from his perch, streaking skyward. Only then did I spy what he himself saw, a speck hurtling through the cloud-filled heavens. I watched as Vajra rose above it, then stooped and struck so hard and fast that speck and hawk appeared to fuse. Then, swooping low, he came racing home, the dove in his talons. He landed awkwardly, barely arresting momentum. He dipped his beak in the pigeon’s breast. Its blood trickled out—which is when I saw its leg was banded.
Sikandar saw it, too, and stripped it in a stroke, palming the damn thing before Jafir noticed (even if the falcon did, hissing like some feathered serpent).
Sikandar made a sign with his thumb and pinky that signaled a biological urge, then arose and slipped behind a wooden lattice, making water in a golden bowl, even as he opened the message and read:
Lord Jafir —
In the name of God, the Benevolent and Ever-Merciful. ‘Abd al-Wali, King of Hind, first son of Princess Chandi of Amber, sends you his greetings. Let it be known that he has seized the throne from your treacherous and faithless brother, and extolled the qutba in his own name. Knowing of this, you may deal with that Unfortunate One without fear of ‘Abd al-Wali Shah’s displeasure.
Our kingdom has no quarrel with Lord Jafir, provided he recognize its sovereign borders, extending for 93 kos at 48 degrees north-northwest from Gulkan to the southernmost branch of the Chambal River, and from there due East to the village of Mund . . . .
For a moment, Sikandar’s soul almost failed, for no earthly message, save of the Queen’s demise, could have been less welcome. ‘Abd al-Wali had seized the throne! ‘Abd al-Wali ibn Qabil? He who had suckled at their nurse’s other breast!
Then there were the implications, like distant echoes just beginning to be heard. For if ‘Abd al-Wali was Shah, then Ghazil was dead, in prison, or in hiding, for the royal vizier never would have supported the treacherous fool. It also meant that if Jafir refused for any reason to let Sikandar go, no army would ride to rescue and save him.
And how foolish of ‘Abd al-Wali to think he might appease Jafir by giving him one corner of the kingdom. As if Jafir could be sated by anything but all!
Sikandar tucked away both note and his fear-shriveled member. He knew he had to leave in haste, for it would be only hours now before news of the coup reached Jafir. Yet we still hadn’t seen the Queen; didn’t know if she was even living!
“I beg you, again, O Jafir Shah: return me my slave.”
Jafir was clearly pleased by our appeal. He lifted a finger and the Rani appeared, borne on a litter.
But as she drew near, we both noticed something wrong with her eyes. They were sewn shut.
“Jesus!” I screamed, though nobody heard. I looked on Jafir as the psychopath he was, even though with the silken pennants and the ramparts of the fort behind him, he looked like the hero of a romantic fable, the exotic prince charming every schoolgirl yearns to meet.
“Sikandar brings you greetings, my Queen. He’s come to reclaim you.”
A light not originating in her eyes lit her face, like flaring candles behind her bones. “I would bow to you, my lord, but I fear in my blindness, I might bow to the wrong brother.”
“It was unkind of you to seal her eyes,” Sikandar said.
“Kinder than having them plucked by Vajra.”
“Yes, but why do it?” Sikandar asked.
“For treachery against our clan.”
“It’s you who flaunt the signs of treachery!” the Queen declared.
“How can you discern what I flaunt or no, being quite unable to see?”
The conversation was going places I did not want it to go . . . . And I slapped the Queen, hard, across the mouth, and in the silence, said, “Allow me to take my unmannerly slave home.”
“Yes, little brother; but, you must first take some food and rest.”
“I would love nothing more. But if I don’t reach Patpur by nightfall tomorrow, this fort will be assailed.”
“Assailed?” Jafir repeated, in surprise. “By whom?”
“Shri Ghazil.”
Jafir scowled. “You have placed a sharp weapon in the hands of a fool. And an old one at that.”
“Old, he may be. Fool, he is not. And he would like nothing more than your head. Give him one reason to attack and he will.”
“I will crush him! And drink wine from his skull!” And he gestured at a cup mounted in silver, made from the head of some unfortunate foe.
“You have six thousand troops. We . . . Ghazil has sixteen thousand. With patience, all of them will pass under your command. Or, if you choose, they will oppose you.”
“Send a message.”
“Any message I send triggers an attack. All that won’t is my timely return—with the Queen. It was the one condition by which Ghazil permitted me to come.”
“And you?”
I prayed to the Goddess of Words for inspiration.
“I not only trust but love you, brother. All of my life you have been the star I’ve followed. My one desire is to be your slave. It is why I have gifted you with the heirloom of our father’s kingdom.”
Whether Jafir believed me or not didn’t matter. Like a mantra that counters the effects of snakebite—even if one does not know its meaning—this paean of praise consoled my brother’s heart, for he fed on praise the way others feed on meat. He sat for a while in sullen deliberation. Then he said, “You must take food before you go.”
“There is more than food that we require. We have a long hard road.” Though the sun was shining, the western sky was a purple bruise, filled with mist and distant thunder. “I therefore beg you to restore my slave’s sight.”
Jafir assented. “Summon the tailor.”
“Tailor?” I shrieked. It was outrageous. Then again, I asked myself, who did I think had sewn them shut?
Her sutures removed, the Queen fluttered her eyes.
“What do you see?”
“. . . just a brightness.”
“Your sight will return,” Jafir reassured her. “For now, please wear this,” and he bandaged her eyes with a yellow silk band. This act was performed with such kindness and grace, it was hard to believe that it was he who had blinded her in the first place. I felt a pulse of love for Jafir—one that had throbbed in me since our childhood—then stifled it, lest it hinder my plans.
“My guard will escort you.”
And, waiting until my brother arose, I took the Rani’s hand. “Where is your son?”
She looked unnerved. “I sent him to you.”
I was impressed by Sikandar’s performance. Despite the missing heir to Indore’s throne, he had accomplished what he’d set out to do in a cool and nearly effortless manner. There’d been no swordplay, no derring-do. No genie or magic carpet had delivered them. He’d inserted himself into an invincible fort and removed the Queen from the grasp of a fiend. If he’d had to forfeit his kingdom to do it, so be it.
But congratulations were premature . . . . Five miles from the castle gates, they ran into what remained of Sikandar’s loyalists: all ten of them.
“ ‘Abd al-Wali,” Ghazil spat, “has manure for brains. When the jailer refused to lock me up, they jailed him with us, but neglected to relieve him of his keys. We were out in half a ghari.”
As thousands of enemy soldiers were encroaching—those of Indore, ‘Abd al-Wali’s, and as soon as he learned of the coup, Jafir’s—there was no safe place for us to run and we decided to divide: myself and the Queen taking ship from Cambay, while Ghazil and the Queen’s young son headed north by horse.
Ghazil appeared to welcome this decision. I think he was itching to raise another prince. And he and the boy got along well. The child followed
Ghazil about, swinging a stick and scowling like his mentor.
“I will raise him the way that I raised you.”
“Sadly, I failed you.”
“Not at all, Sikandarji. You lost your kingdom. You’ve kept your head!”
Then Ghazil solicited Mayura’s forgiveness. “Those we knew as true have proved faithless. Those we thought were faithless . . . Acch . . . !”
Mayura drew Ghazil onto her lap. She bared one swollen, golden breast and pressed its tip between his lips, expressing it with her hand. I watched Ghazil gulp and swallow.
“You are now my son. And he is now your little brother. I beg you, O Great One, treat him as such, or you’ll invite on you this mother’s curse.”
Then the Queen swept up her little boy, kissing him passionately again and again, weeping with an intensity that made us all ill at ease. I turned and took my leave of Ghazil. He looked quite stunned; the last teat between his lips was probably his mother’s. Though as we departed, he called after me, crying, “Avoid marshes and defiles. Watch the light. Stay on the heights, Sikandar. Or, if you must, keep them to your right or rear. Remember, avoid battles by water, and when fighting on a hill, fight going down . . .”
Part VI
THE MOTHER
Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart
And try to love the questions themselves
like locked rooms or like books that are written in a
foreign tongue.
—Rainer Maria Rilke
Letters to a Young Poet
Chapter 35
There’s an Indian saying, “the customs house and dawn.” You take a covert route at night to evade customs, yet somehow find yourself before it at the break of day. Simply put, life confronts us with whatever we avoid.
It should not have been surprising, then, that our long flight from rank injustice ended with me seated before Houlihan in Stour confessing to Jai Prasad’s murder. I had thought about it long and well, and had decided I would not let Lady Vidya take the fall. Enlightened by Sikandar’s tale, I knew the only way to free her was to trade my kingdom for her, even if it consisted of no one but me. “She had nothing to do with it,” I told Houlihan. “Nothing. In fact, she slept through the whole damn thing.”
He waited. “It was just like you said. Jai and I argued. He brought up some things, ones I thought I’d gotten over long ago. I guess, I hadn’t.”
“What things?”
“Personal ones. About my character. And career.”
“And you killed him.”
“Not like that,” I said annoyed. “The whole thing escalated. It got nastier and hotter. The sword was out, already unsheathed. We’d been looking at it earlier. Finally, I said something—about his wife, I think—and Jai launched himself at me out of his chair. I picked up the sword and he impaled himself. If you want to know the truth, he killed himself. He threw himself at me. And then, I guess, I went a little crazy. I don’t really remember that.”
Houlihan’s face was without expression. You’d have thought after all these weeks of his begging, my confession would have made his day.
“How long you spend cleaning up?”
“Ten minutes. I couldn’t get off the goddamn blood. It kept smearing. I took off my shirt. Then I slipped the sword inside my pants and down my leg.”
“When you come back out, there were lotsa flies?”
“Yeah. Buzzing the body. I went out into the hall. The elevator was coming, so I took the stairs.”
Long silence. Then Houlihan exhaled. “Always,” he said, “with two perps? They point the finger at each other. Never seen a case before—ever—where they pointed the finger at themselves. So that in itself is unusual, right there.
“Then there’s the flies. You say there were flies when you finished cleaning. And that bothers me, see, ‘cause flies, they don’t fly at night. You wouldna thought that, but it happens to be true. Flies can’t see. Inna dark. You can sit with a fresh corpse all night long—I have—and, I swear, you won’t see a goddamn fly till it starts gettin’ light again. Then, in minutes, the place is swarmin’. Now that is just a natural fact. But since you’re making this whole thing up, you wouldn’t know that. So get the fuck outta here, Donne, before I charge your lying ass with something serious.”
It’s humiliating enough confessing to murder. More humiliating is not being believed. I drove home.
On my cellphone was a voicemail from Strugnell. “Right, you are. Truck was there. Total cockup. Jurisdictional thing. Only 10 miles from the body, but being it was another shire, no one thought of looking there. And yes, the CID was most appreciative. Embarrassed, but appreciative all the same. And oh, I hear you met Mother.” He laughed, then added: “Sorry about that.”
I shook my head. I didn’t know anymore who or what to believe.
King Edward II had wavy hair, a straw-coloured beard and watery eyes. His appearance was proud, I would have said, save for several defects in his toilet: a boil on his throat besmeared with a poultice, a small tear widening in his hosiery. He was seated with “his Sami,” Sikandar writes, apparently referring to a male lover.
Mayura was presented as the “Queen of Hind” and Sikandar as “Shah of Outremer.1” When questioned how they had reached his realm, they told him of their tribulations: of the loss of their kingdoms; of their exile, sea voyage, and sojourn in Alexandria; of the Venetians who had intended to sell them as slaves, etc. And though neither of us spake the Anglish tongue, the English King did not either, and we conversed instead—myself in French and the Queen in Portuguese, rendered by a Spaniard.
Then the Queen withdrew an emerald of a lustrous water, sized like a pigeon’s egg, and placed it in his royal palm. Dānā.
The King nearly toppled off his chair, for he’d thought us “penniless,” as his people call it. Happily accepting the gem, he returned our largesse by gifting us with a nearby manor, along with the income from its two hundred serfs. He further declared us Defenders of the Realm, so that by nightfall of our third day in Anglia, we were landlords and Anglish gentry, snugly ensconced in an old Roman villa.
But though Sikandar and the Queen had reached safe haven, Sikandar’s reaction come morning was of dismay. The villa, which had seemed so snug the night before, was all but falling down. The village so generously granted us was little more than several dozen thatched mud and wattle huts along a rutted track, inhabited by folk who looked on us with stark suspicion on rude, starved, frostpinched faces.
For an unhealthy lot, our villeins were, suffering from all manner of woes: frenzies and fluxes, cardiacles, toothaches, cramps and rheumes, radegoundes and running scabies, boils and coughs and burning agues, griping in the guts and glands, the liver, lights and far reaches of the intestynes! And since their medicines were few and far beneath our own, my Lady brought about many wondrous healings through the application of herbs and tinctures.
For her pains, she was accused of indulging the folk. The gentry have a saying, “Bless a villein and he will smite you. Smite a villein2 and he will bless you.” And her conspicuous kindnesses were looked upon ill. My Lady’s reply was royal if undiplomatic: “They are my villeins whom I’ll bless and smite as I do please.”
In short, she ruled the manor like a mother and a queen. If a villein’s child or calf were ill, she had prepared for it a special broth. Our third month there, she had two villeins hanged for killing a traveller, ending talk of her indulgent ways. On Thursdays, she worshipped the sheep, pigs, cows and horses with chanted prayers, waved lights and garlands in a way never seen before. And once a month she gave milksweets to the children. She was at once kind and demanding, hard to fool, generous, and fair. And she was young, imperious and beautiful, and wore robes that shone like the morning star. Was it any wonder then that our villeins loved her?
Our first year was bittersweet. On the one hand, we mourned our former lives and kingdoms, and the Queen often wept for her parted son, quizzing every traveller from the east
for news of him, but there was none. Then again, we were so preoccupied with the demands of the manor—vegetable, animal, human, divine—so beguiled by the beauty of the passing seasons, so paralyzed by the winter cold, so entranced by the round of holy days and the stream of supplicants and distinguished guests who came to see her, for her name and fame spread far and wide, that our stolen kingdoms, bit by bit, receded from our minds. For we had found another kingdom which, while considerably smaller, colder and poorer, was just as earnest, real and true.
It was Bloodmonth—the season we sacrificed livestock—when the estranged English Queen landed in Ipswich at the head of a foreign army. At the news, King Edward and his minion fled to Wales, where at Christmastide, they were apprehended; his favourite killed barbarically, they say; and the King imprisoned and deposed.
For us it was an anxious turn. I counselled the Queen we quit this isle as the tides of power were swiftly shifting.
But my Lady would not hear of it, asking me what would become of our villeins.
“Our villeins are not my main concern. Inishallah, they’ll endure—as villeins ever do, somehow, despite kings and wars, plagues and taxes. My concern is for my Lady.”
But still she would not agree, claiming our position was not what I feared—and perhaps it wasn’t. Until we unearthed the Saxon treasure.
A villein named Cedric uncovered it while ploughing the spring wheat: a magnificent hoard of gold and silver vessels, coins, plate, ewers and idols, in pieces numbering over a thousand! Though found on property deeded us by the former King, an odd and maddening Anglish law declared that any treasure buried with the intent to recover must go into the coffers of the Crown. The purpose of this strange decree was to frustrate those who would hide their wealth—only to “discover” it after the taxman goeth.