The Moghul

court. Recently, it seemed, everyone was training pigeons.
    Next to the date was the seal of Nadir Sharif, prime minister and brother of the queen. Mukarrab Khan knew Nadir Sharif well. A dispatch from Nadir Sharif, though it always reflected the wishes of the Moghul or the queen, could be relied upon to be reasonable. If the Moghul in fury condemned a man over some trivial transgression, Nadir Sharif always forgot to deliver the sentence until the next day, having found that Arangbar often tended to reverse sentences of death when musing in his evening wine cups. This order will be reasonable, Mukarrab Khan told himself, but it will have to be obeyed, eventually.
    As always, Mukarrab Khan tried to guess the message before unsealing the two-inch-long silver cap attached to the end of the tube. Probably taxes, late delivery. Or perhaps there's been a discrepancy between the open report filed from my chamber by the wakianavis, the public reportefs, and the private report, which I supposedly do not see, sent directly to the Moghul by the harkaras, the confidential reporters. And if that's the complaint, it will disprove my suspicion that no one in the Imperial chancery ever actually reads the reports. I deliberately inserted a difference of one-half lakh of rupees as reported logged at the mint last month, just to see if they would catch it.
    Mukarrab Khan unrolled the dispatch. And his heart stopped.
    Clasping the paper he wandered distractedly out of the now-empty audience hall and down the stairs toward the courtyard. When he reached the veranda he only half-noted the heavy clouds threatening in the west, toward the sea, and the moist air promising one last spatter of the monsoon. Servants were removing the tapestried canopy that shaded his cushioned bench, and when they saw him they discreetly melted out of sight, leaving one side of the cloth still dangling from the poles. He dropped heavily onto the bench and reread the order carefully, his disbelief growing.
    On the recommendation of Queen Janahara, Mukarrab Khan had just been appointed India's first ambassador to Portuguese Goa. He would leave in two weeks.

    CHAPTER TWELVE

    The moon was high, bathing the sleeping veranda in a wash of glistening silver, and the air was deliciously moist, heavy with perfume from the garden below. From somewhere among the distant rooftops came the thread of a man's voice, intoning a high-pitched melody, trilling out wordless syllables like some intense poetry of sound.
    Hawksworth leaned back against one of the carved juniper-wood posts supporting the canopy above his sleeping couch and explored Kali's body with his gaze, as a mariner might search a map for unknown islands and inlets. She lounged opposite him, resting against an oblong velvet bolster, examining him with half-shut eyes while she drew contentedly on a hookah fired with black tobacco and a concentrated bhang the Arabs called hashish .
    Her hair hung loose, in gleaming black strands reaching almost to her waist, and her head was circled by a thin tiara of gold and pearls, supporting the large green emerald that always hung suspended in the center of her forehead—even when she made love. The gold she wore—long bracelets at her wrists and upper arms, swinging earrings, even tiny bells at her ankles—seemed to excite her in a way Hawksworth could never understand. Her eyes and eyebrows were kohl-darkened and her lips carefully painted a deep red, matching the color of her fingernails and toenails. And as always she had dyed her palms and the soles of her feet red with henna. Four different strands of pearls hung in perfect array beneath her transparent blouse, glistening white against her delicate, amber-tinted skin. He noticed, too, that her nipples had been rouged, and told himself this was the only thing about her that recalled the women in London.
    "Tonight your thoughts were far away, my love. Do you weary of me so soon?" She laid aside the rome-chauri , the rubber ring impregnated with powdered hair that she often asked him to wear for her, then took a vial of rose attar from beside the couch and dabbed herself absently along the arms. "Tell me the truth. Are you now beginning to recoil from women, like so many bragging and posturing men I've known, and to long for a boy who fears to seek his own pleasure? Or a subservient feringhi woman whose parts are dry from lack of desire?"
    Hawksworth studied her for a moment without replying. In truth he did not know