The Moghul

at first found almost totally rootless. Using a wire plectrum attached to his right forefinger, he seemed to be waving sounds from the air above the fingerboard. A note would shimmer into existence from some undefined starting point, then glide through the scale via a subtle arabesque as he stretched the playing string diagonally against a fret, manipulating its tension. Finally the sound would dissolve meltingly into its own silence. Each note of the alien melody, if melody it could be called, was first lovingly explored for its own character, approached from both above and below as though a glistening prize on display. Only after the note was suitably embroidered was it allowed to enter the melody—as though the song were a necklace that had to be strung one pearl at a time, and only after each pearl had been carefully polished. The tension of some vague melodic quest began to grow, with no hint of a resolution. In the emotional intensity of his haunting search, the passage of time had suddenly ceased to exist.
    Finally, as though satisifed with his chosen scale, he returned to the very first note he had started from and actually began a song, deftly tying together the musical strands he had so painstakingly evolved. The sought-for resolution had never come, only the sense that the first note was the one he had been looking for the entire time.
    This must be the mystical music Symmes spoke of, Hawksworth thought, and he was right. It's unlike anything I've ever heard. Where's the harmony, the chords of thirds and fifths? Whatever's going on, I don't think opium is going to help me understand it.
    Hawksworth turned, still puzzling, back to Mukarrab Khan and waved away the brown ball—which the governor immediately washed down himself with fruit nectar.
    "Is our music a bit difficult for you to grasp, Ambassador?" Mukarrab Khan leaned back on his bolster with an easy smile. "Pity, for there's truly little else in this backwater port worth the bother. The cuisine is abominable, the classical dancers despicable. In desperation I've even had to train my own musicians, although I did manage to steal one Ustad, a grand master, away from Agra." He impulsively reached for the water pipe and absorbed a deep draw, his eyes misting.
    "I confess I do find it hard to follow." Hawksworth took a draft of wine from the fresh cup that had been placed beside him on the carpet.
    "It demands a connoisseur's taste, Ambassador, not unlike an appreciation of fine wine."
    The room grew ominously still for a moment, and then the drums suddenly exploded in a torrent of rhythm, wild and exciting yet unmistakably disciplined by some rigorous underlying structure. The rhythm soared in a cycle, returning again and again, after each elaborate interlocking of time and its divisions, back to a forceful crescendo.
    Hawksworth watched Mukarrab Khan in fascination as he leaned back and closed his eyes in wistful anticipation. And at that moment the instrumentalist began a lightning-fast ascent of the scale, quavering each note in erotic suggestiveness for the fraction of a second it was fingered. The governor seemed absorbed in some intuitive communication with the sound, a reaction to music Hawksworth had never before witnessed. His entire body would perceptibly tense as the drummer began a cycle, then it would pulse and relax the instant the cycle thudded to a resolution. Hawksworth was struck by the sensuality inherent in the music, the almost sexual sense of tension and release.
    Then he noticed two eunuchs leading a young boy into the room. The youth appeared to be hovering at the age of puberty, with still no trace of a beard. He wore a small but elaborately tied pastel turban, pearl earrings, and a large sapphire on a chain around his pale throat. His elaborate ensemble included a transparent blouse through which his delicate skin glistened in the lamplight, a long quilted sash at his waist, and tight-fitting trousers beneath light gauze pajamas that clung to his thighs as he moved. His lips were lightly red, and his perfume a mixture of flowers and musk. The boy reached for a ball of spiced opium and settled back against a quilted gold bolster next to Mukarrab Khan. The governor studied him momentarily and then returned to the music. And his thoughts.
    He reflected again on Abul Hasan's blundering "accident" on the chaugan field, and what it must signify. If it were true the qazi had been bought by the Shahbandar, as some whispered, then it