The Years of Rice and Salt

1 The Cuckoo in the Village

What happens is that sometimes there is a confusion, and the reincarnating soul enters into a womb already occupied. Then there are two souls in the same baby, and a fight breaks out. Mothers can feel that kind, the babies that thrash around inside, wrestling themselves. Then they’re born and the shock of that ejection stills them for a while, they’re fully occupied learning to breathe and otherwise coming to grips with this world. After that the fight between the two souls for the possession of the one body recommences. That’s colic.

A baby suffering colic will cry out as if struck, arch its back in pain, even writhe in agony, for many of its waking hours. This should be no surprise, two souls are struggling within it, and so for weeks the baby cries all the time, its guts twisted by the conflict. Nothing can ease its distress. It’s not a situation that can last for long, it’s too much for any little body to bear. In most cases the cuckoo soul drives out the original, and then the body finally calms down. Or sometimes the first soul successfully drives out the cuckoo and is restored to itself. Or else, in rare cases, neither one is strong enough to drive the other out, and the colic finally subsides but the baby grows up a divided person, confused, erratic, unreliable, prone to insanity.

Kokila was born at midnight, and the dai pulled her out and said “It’s a girl, poor thing.” Her mother Zaneeta hugged the little creature to her breast, saying, “We will love you anyway.”

She was a week old when the colic struck. She spat up her mother’s milk and cried inconsolably all through the nights. Very quickly Zaneeta forgot what the cheerful new babe had been like, a kind of placid grub at her breast sucking, gurgling amazedly at the world. Under the assault of the colic she screamed, cried, moaned, writhed. It was painful to see it. Zaneeta could do nothing but hold her, hands under her stomach as it banded with cramping muscles, letting her hang face downward from Zaneeta’s hip. Something about this posture, perhaps just the effort of keeping her head upright, quieted Kokila. But it did not always work, and never for long. Then the writhing and screams began again, until Zaneeta was near distraction. She had to keep her husband Rajit fed, and her two older daughters as well, and having borne three daughters in a row she was already out of Rajit’s favor, and the babe was intolerable. Zaneeta tried sleeping with her out in the women’s ground, but the menstruating women, while sympathetic, did not appreciate the noise. They enjoyed getting out of the home away with the girls, and it was not a place for babies. So Zaneeta was driven to sleeping with Kokila out against the side of their family’s house, where they both dozed fitfully between bouts of crying.

This went on for a couple of months, and then it ended. Afterward the baby had a different look in her eye. The dai who had delivered her, Insef, checked her pulse and her irises and her urine, and declared that a different soul had indeed taken over the body, but that this was not really important—it happened to many babies, and could be an improvement, as usually in colic battles the stronger soul won out.

But after all that internal violence, Zaneeta regarded Kokila with trepidation, and all through her infancy and childhood Kokila looked back at her, and at the rest of the world, with a kind of black wild look, as if she were uncertain where she was or what she was doing there. A confused and often angry little girl, in fact, although clever in manipulating others, quick to caress or to yell, and very beautiful. She was strong too, and quick, and by the time she was five she was more help than harm around the home. By then Zaneeta had had two more children, the youngest of them a son, the sun of their lives, all thanks to Ganesh and Kartik, and with all the work there was to be done she appreciated Kokila’s self-reliance and quick abilities.

Naturally the new son, Jahan, was the center of the household, and Kokila only the most capable of Zaneeta’s daughters, absorbed in the business of her childhood and youth, not particularly well known to Zaneeta compared to Rajit and Jahan, whom naturally she had to study in depth.

So Kokila was free to follow her own thoughts for a few years. Insef often said that childhood was the best time in a woman’s life, because as a girl she was somewhat free of men, and mostly just another worker around the house and in the fields. But the dai was old, and cynical about love and marriage, having seen their results so often turn bad, for herself and for others. Kokila was no more inclined to listen to her than to anyone else. To tell the truth she didn’t seem to listen much to anybody. She watched everyone with that startled wary look you see on animals you come upon suddenly in the forest, and spoke little. She seemed to enjoy going off to do the daily work. She stayed silent and observant around her father, and the other children of the village didn’t interest her, except for one girl, who had been found abandoned as an infant, one morning in the women’s ground. This foundling Insef was raising to be the dai after her. Insef had named her Bihari, and often Kokila went by the dai’s hut and took Bihari with her on her morning round of chores, not talking to her very much more than she did to anyone else, but pointing things out to her, and most of all, bothering to bring her along in the first place, which surprised Zaneeta. The foundling was nothing unusual, after all, just a little girl like all the rest. It was another of Kokila’s mysteries.

In the months before monsoon, the work for Kokila and all the rest of them got harder for several weeks on end. Wake in the morning and stoke the fire. Cross the cool village, the air not yet dusty. Pick up Bihari at the dai’s little hut in the woods. Downstream to the defecation grounds, wash up afterward, then back through the village to pick up the water jars and head upstream. Past the laundry pools, where women were already congregating, and on to the watering hole. Fill up and hump the big heavy jars back home, stopping several times to rest. Then off into the forest to forage for firewood. This could take most of the morning. Then back to the fields west of the village, where her father and his brothers had some land, to sow pulse of wheat and barley. They put it in over a few weeks, so that it would ripen through the long harvest month. This week’s row was weak, the tops small, but Kokila thrust them in the plowed earth without thought, then in the heat of the day sat with the other women and girls, mixing grain and water to make a pasty dough, throwing chapatis, cooking some of them. After that she went out to their cow. A few rhythmic downward tugs of her finger in its rectum started a spill of dung that she collected warm in her hands, slapped into patties with some straw for drying, and put on the stone-and-turf wall bordering her father’s field. After that she took some dried dung cakes by the house, put one on the fire, went out to the stream to wash her hands and the dirty clothes: four saris, dhotis, wraps. Then back to the house in the waning light of the day, the heat and dust making everything golden in the slant air, to the hearth in the central room of their house, to cook chapatis and daal bhat on the little clay stove next to the firepit.

Some time after dark Rajit would come home, and Zaneeta and the girls would surround him with care, and after he had eaten the daal bhat and chapatis he would relax and tell Zaneeta something about his day, as long as it had not gone too badly. If it had, he wouldn’t speak of it. But usually he told them something of his juggling of land and cattle deals. The village families used marginal pastures as securities for new animals, or vice versa, and brokering trade in calves and kids and pasture rights was what her father did, mostly between Yelapur and Sivapur. Then also he was always making marriage arrangements for his daughters, a bad business since he had so many of them, but he made up dowries when he could, and had no hesitation in marrying them down. Had no choice, really.

So the evening would end and they slept on rush mattresses unrolled for the night on the floor, by the fire for warmth if it was cool, for the smoke’s protection from mosquitoes if it was warm. Another night would pass.

One evening after dinner, a few days before Durga Puja marked the end of the harvest, her father told her mother that he had arranged a possible marriage for Kokila, whose turn it was, to a man from Dharwar, the market village just the other side of Sivapur. The prospective husband was a Lingayat, like Rajit’s family and most of Yelapur, and the third son of Dharwar’s headman. He had quarreled with his father, however, and this left him unable to ask Rajit for much of a dowry. Probably he was unmarriageable in Dharwar, Kokila guessed, but she was excited anyway. Zaneeta seemed pleased, and said she would look the candidate over during the Durga Puja.

Ordinary life was pegged to whichever festival was coming next, and the festivals all had different natures, coloring the feel of the days leading up to them. Thus the car festival of Krishna takes place in the monsoon, and its color and gaiety stand in contrast to the lowering gray overhead; boys blow their palm-leaf trumpets as if to hold off the rain by the blast of their breath, and everyone would go crazy from the noise if the blowing itself didn’t reduce the trumpets quickly to palm leaves again. Then the Swing Festival of Krishna takes place at the end of monsoon, and the fair associated with it is full of stalls selling superfluous things like sitars and drums, or silks, or embroidered caps, or chairs and tables and cabinets. The time for the Id shifts through the year, making it seem a very human event somehow, free of the earth and its gods, and during it all the Muslims come to Sivapur to watch their elephant parade.

Then Durga Puja marks the harvest, the grand climax of the year, honoring the mother goddess and all her works.

So the women gathered on the first day, and mixed a batch of vermilion bindi paste, while drinking some of the dai’s fiery chang, and they scattered after that, painted and giggling, following the Muslim drummers in the opening parade, shouting “To the victory of Mother Durga!” The goddess’s slant-eyed statue, made of clay and dressed in colored pith and gilding, looked faintly Tibetan. Placed around it were similarly dressed statues of Laksmi and Saraswati, and her sons Ganesh and Kartik. Two goats were tethered in turn to a sacrifical post before these statues and decapitated, the bleeding heads staring up from the dust.

The sacrifice of the buffalo was an even greater matter; a special priest came from Bhadrapur, with a big scimitar sharpened for the occasion. This was important, for if the blade didn’t make it all the way through the buffalo’s big neck, it meant that the goddess was displeased and had refused the offering. Boys spent the morning rubbing the skin on the top of its neck with ghee, to soften it.

This time the heavy stroke of the priest was successful, and all the shouting celebrants charged the body to make little balls of blood and dust, and throw them at each other, shrieking.

An hour or two later the mood was entirely different. One of the old men started singing, “The world is pain, its load past bearing,” and then the women took it up, for it was dangerous for the men to be heard questioning the Great Mother; even the women had to pretend to be wounded demons in the song:

“Who is she that walks the fields as Death, She that fights and swoops as Death? A mother will not destroy her child, Her own flesh, creation’s joy, yet we see the Killer looking here then there…”

Later, as night fell, the women went home and dressed in their best saris, and came back out and stood in two lines, and the boys and men shouted “Victory to the Great Goddess!” and the music began, wild and carefree, the whole crowd dancing and talking around the bonfire, looking beautiful and dangerous in their firelit finery.

Then people from Dharwar showed up, and the dancing grew wild. Kokila’s father took her by the hand out of the line and introduced her to the parents of her intended. Apparently a reconciliation had been patched together for the sake of this formality. The father she had seen before, headman of Dharwar as he was, named Shastri; the mother she had never seen before, as the father had pretensions of purdah, though he was not really wealthy.

The mother looked Kokila over with a sharp, not unfriendly eye, bindi paste running down between her eyebrows, face sweaty in the hot night. Possibly a decent mother-in-law. Then the son was produced; Gopal, third son of Shastri. Kokila nodded stiffly, looking aslant at him, not knowing what she felt. He was a thin-faced, intent-looking youth, perhaps nervous—she couldn’t tell. She was taller than he was. But that might change.

They were swept back into their respective parties without exchanging a word. Nothing but that single nervous glance, and she did not see him again for three years. All the while, however, she knew they were destined to marry, and it was a good thing, as her affairs were therefore settled, and her father could stop worrying about her, and treat her without irritation.

Over time she learned from the women’s gossip a bit more about the family she was going to join. Shastri was an unpopular headman. His latest offense was to have exiled a Dharwar blacksmith for visiting a brother in the hills without asking his permission first. He had not called the panchayat together to discuss or approve this decision. He had never called the panchayat together, in fact, since inheriting the headman position from his deceased father a few years before. Why, people muttered, he and his eldest son ran Dharwar as if they were the zamindars of the place!

Kokila took all this in without too much concern, and spent as much time as she could with Bihari, who was learning the herbs the dai used as medicines. Thus when they were out collecting firewood, Bihari was also inspecting the forest floor and finding plants to bring back—bittersweet in sunny patches, whiteroot in wet shade, castor bean under saal trees among their roots, and so on. Back at their hut Kokila helped grind the dried plants, or otherwise prepare them, using oils or spirits, for use by Insef in her midwifery, for the most part: to stimulate contractions, relax the womb, reduce pain, open the cervix, slow bleeding, and so on. There were scores of source plants and animal parts that the dai wanted them to learn. “I’m old,” she would say, “I’m thirty-six, and my mother died at thirty. Her mother taught her the lore, and the dai who taught my grandmother was from a Dravidian village to the south, where names and even property were reckoned down through the women, and she taught my grandmother all the Dravidians know, and that goes back through all the dais of time to Saraswati, the goddess of learning herself, so we can’t let it go forgotten, you must learn it and teach your daughters, so that birthing is made as easy as it can be, poor things, and as many kept alive as possible.” People said of Insef that she had a centipede in her head (this was mostly an expression said of eccentrics, although in fact mothers searched your ears for them if you had been lying with your head on the grass, and sometimes rinsed out your ears with oil, for centipedes detest oil), and she often talked as fast as you ever heard anyone talk, rambling on and on, mostly to herself, but Kokila liked to hear her.

And it took very little for Insef to convince Bihari of the importance of these things. She was a lively sweet girl with a good eye in the forest, a good memory for plants, and always a cheerful smile and a kind word for people. She was if anything too cheery and attractive, because in the year Kokila was to be married to Gopal, Shardul, his older brother, the eldest son of Shastri, soon to become Kokila’s brother-in-law—one of those in her husband’s family who would have the right to tell her what to do—started looking at Bihari in an interested way, and after that, no matter what she did, he watched her. It couldn’t lead to any good, as Bihari was perhaps untouchable and therefore unmarriageable, and Insef did what she could to seclude her. But the festivals brought the single men and women together, and the daily life of the village afforded various glimpses and encounters as well. And Bihari was interested, anyway, even though she knew she was unmarriageable. She liked the idea of being normal, no matter how vehemently the dai warned her against it.

The day came when Kokila was married to Gopal and moved to Dharwan. Her new mother-in-law turned out to be withdrawn and irritable, and Gopal himself was no prize. An anxious man with little to say, dominated by his parents, never reconciled with his father, he at first tried to lord it over Kokila the way they did over him, but without much conviction, particularly after she snapped at him a few times. He was used to that, and quickly enough she had the upper hand. She didn’t much like him, and looked forward to dropping by to see Bihari and the dai in the forest. Really only the second son, Prithvi, seemed to her at all admirable in the headman’s family, and he left early every day and had as little to do with his family as he could, keeping quiet with a distant air.

There was a lot of traffic between the two villages, more than Kokila had ever noticed before it became so important to her, and she made do—secretly taking a preparation that the dai had made for her, to keep from having a baby. She was fourteen years old but she wanted to wait.

Before long things went bad. The dai got so crippled by her swollen joints that Bihari had to take over her work, and she was much more frequently seen in Dharwar. Meanwhile Shastri and Shardul were conspiring to make money by betraying their village, changing the tax assessment with the agent of the zamindar, shifting it to the zamindar’s great advantage, with Shastri skimming off some for himself. Basically they were colluding to change Dharwar over to the Muslim form of farm tax rather than the Hindu law. The Hindu law, which was a religious injunction and sacred, allowed a tax of no more than one sixth of all produce, while the Muslim claim was to everything, with whatever the farmers kept being a matter of the pleasure of the zamindar. In practice this often meant little difference, but Muslim allowances varied for crops and circumstance, and this was where Shastri and Shardul were helping the zamindar, by calculating what more could be taken without starving the villagers. Kokila lay there at night with Gopal, and through the open doorway as he slept she heard Shastri and Shardul going over the possibilities.

“Wheat and barley, two fifths when naturally watered, three tenths when watered by wheels.”

“That sounds good. Then dates, vines, green crops, and gardens, one third.”

“But summer crops one fourth.”

Eventually, to aid in this work, the zamindar gave Shardul the post of qanungo, assessor for the village; and he was already an awful man. And he still had an eye for Bihari. The night of the car festival he took her in the forest. From her account afterward it was clear to Kokila that Bihari hadn’t completely minded it, she relished telling the details, “I was on my back in the mud, it was raining on my face and he was licking the rain off it, saying ‘I love you I love you.’ ”

“But he won’t marry you,” Kokila pointed out, worried. “And his brothers won’t like it if they hear about this.”

“They won’t hear. And it was so passionate, Kokila, you have no idea.” She knew Kokila was not impressed by Gopal.

“Yes yes. But it could lead to trouble. Is a few minutes’ passion worth that?”

“It is, it is. Believe me.”

For a while she was happy, and sang all the old love songs, especially one they used to sing together, an old one.

But Bihari got pregnant, despite Insef’s preparations. She tried to keep to herself, but with the dai crippled there were births that she had to attend, and so she went and her condition was noted, and people put together what they had seen or heard, and said that Shardul had gotten her with child. Then Prithvi’s wife was giving birth and Bihari went to help, and the baby, a boy, died a few minutes after it was born, and outside their house Shastri struck Bihari in the face, calling her a witch and a whore.

All this Kokila heard about when she visited Prithvi’s house, from Prithvi’s wife, who said the birth had gone faster than anyone expected, and that she doubted Bihari had done anything bad. Kokila hurried off to the dai’s hut, and found the gnarled old woman puffing with effort between Bihari’s legs, trying to get the baby out. “She’s miscarrying,” she told Kokila. So Kokila took over and did what the dai told her to, forgetting her own family until night fell, when she remembered and exclaimed, “I have to go!” and Bihari whispered, “Go. It will be all right.”

Kokila rushed home through the forest to Dharwar, where her mother-in-law slapped her, but perhaps just to preempt Gopal, who punched her hard in the arm and forbade her to return to the forest or Sivapur ever again, a ludicrous command given the realities of their life, and she almost said “How will I fetch your water then?” but bit her lip and rubbed her arm, looking daggers at them, until she judged they were as frightened as they could get without beating her, after which she glared like Kali at the floor instead, and cleaned up after their impromptu dinner, which had been hobbled by her absence. They could not even eat without her. This fury was the thing she would remember forever.

Before dawn next morning she slipped out with the water jugs and hurried through the wet gray forest, leaves scattered at every level from the ground to the high canopy overhead, and arrived at the dai’s hut frightened and breathing hard.

Bihari was dead. The baby was dead, Bihari was dead, even the old woman lay stretched on her pallet, gasping with the pain of her exertions, looking like she too might expire and leave this world at any minute. “They went an hour ago,” she said. “The baby should have lived, I don’t know what happened. Bihari bled too much. I tried to stop it but I couldn’t reach.”

“Teach me a poison.”

“What?”

“Teach me a good poison to use. I know you know them. Teach me the strongest one you know, right now.”

The old woman turned her head to the wall, weeping. Kokila pulled her around roughly and shouted, “Teach me!”

The old woman looked over at the two bodies under a spread sari, but there was no one else there to be alarmed. Kokila began to raise a hand to threaten her, then stopped herself. “Please,” she begged. “I have to know.”

“It’s too dangerous.”

“Not as dangerous as sticking a knife in Shastri.”

“No.”

“I’ll stab him if you don’t tell me, and they’ll burn me on a bonfire.”

“They’ll do that if you poison him.”

“No one will know.”

“They’ll think I did it.”

“Everyone knows you can’t move.”

“That won’t matter. Or they’ll think you did it.”

“I’ll do it cleverly, believe me. I’ll be at my parents’.”

“It won’t matter. They’ll blame us anyway. And Shardul is as bad as Shastri, or worse.”

“Tell me.”

The old woman looked into her face for a time. Then she rolled over, opened her sewing basket. She showed Kokila a small dried plant, then some berries. “This is water hemlock. These are castor bean seeds. Grind the hemlock leaves to a paste, add seeds to the paste just before you place it. It’s bitter, but you don’t need much. A pinch in spicy food will kill without any taste. But it looks like poisoning afterward, I warn you. It’s not like being sick.”

So Kokila watched and made her plan. Shastri and Shardul continued their work for the zamindar, gaining new enemies every month. And it was rumored Shardul had raped another girl in the forest, the night of Gauri Hunnime, the woman’s festival when mud images of Siva and Parvati are worshiped.

Meanwhile Kokila had learned every detail of their routine. Shastri and Shardul ate a leisurely breakfast, and then Shastri heard cases at the pavilion between his house and the well, while Shardul did accounting beside the house. In the heat of midday they napped and received visitors on the verandah facing north into the forest. In the afternoons of most days they ate a small meal while lying on couches, like little zamindars, then walked with Gopal or one or two associates to that day’s market, where they “did business” until the sun was low. They returned to the village drunk or drinking, stumbling cheerfully through the dusk to their home and dinner. It was as steady a routine as any in the village.

So Kokila considered her plans while spending some of her firewood walks on the hunt for water hemlock and castor beans. These grew in the dankest parts of the forest, where it shaded into swamp, and hid every manner of dangerous creature, from mosquito to tiger. But at midday all such pests were resting; indeed, in the hot months everything alive seemed sleeping at midday, even the drooping plants. Insects buzzed sleepily in the sleepy silence, and the two poison plants glowed in the dim light like little green lanterns. A prayer to Kali and she plucked them out, while she was bleeding, and pulled apart a bean pod for the seeds, and tucked them in the band of her sari, and hid them for the night in the forest near the defecation grounds, the day before the Durga Puja. That night she did not sleep at all, except for short dreams, in which Bihari came to her and told her not to be sad. “Bad things happen in every life,” Bihari said. “No anger.” There was more but on waking it all slipped away, and Kokila went to her hiding place and found the plant parts and ground the hemlock leaves furiously together in a gourd with a stone, then cast the stone and gourd away in beds of ferns. With the paste on a leaf in her hand she went to Shastri’s house, and waited until their afternoon nap, a day that seemed to last forever; then put the little seeds in the paste, and smeared a tiny dab of the paste inside the doughballs made for Shastri and Shardul’s afternoon snack. Then she ran from the house and through the forest, her heart taking flight like a deer ahead of her—too much like a deer, in that she ran wild with the thrill of what she had done, and fell into an unseen deer snare, set by a man from Bhadrapur. By the time he found her, stunned and just starting to struggle in the lines, with some of the paste still on her fingers, and took her to Dharwar, Shastri and Shardul were dead, and Prithvi was the new headman of the village, and Kokila was declared a witch and poisoner and killed on the spot.

2 Back in the Bardo

Back in the bardo Kokila and Bihari sat next to each other on the black floor of the universe, waiting their turn for judgment.

“You’re not getting it,” said Bihari—also Bold, and Bel, and Borondi, and many, many other incarnations before, back to her original birth in the dawn of this Kali-yuga, this age of destruction, fourth of the four ages, when as a new soul she had spun out of the Void, an eruption of Being out of Nonbeing, a miracle inexplicable by natural law and indicative of the existence of some higher realm, a realm above that even of the deva gods who now sat on the dais looking down at them. The realm that they all sought instinctively to return to.

Bihari continued: “The dharma is a matter that can’t be shortchanged, you have to work at it step by step, doing what you can in each given situation. You can’t leap up to heaven.”

“I shit on all that,” Kokila said, making a rude gesture at the gods. She was still so mad she could spit, and terrified too, weeping and wiping her nose on the back of her hand, “I’ll be damned if I cooperate in such a horrible thing.”

“Yes! you will! That’s why we keep almost losing you. That’s why you never recognize your jati when you’re in the world, why you keep doing your own family harm. We rise and fall together.”

“I don’t see why.”

Now Shastri was being judged, kneeling with his hands together in supplication.

“He’d better be sent to hell!” Kokila shouted at the black god. “The lowest, nastiest level of hell!”

Bihari shook her head. “It’s step by step, like I said. Little steps up and down. And it’s you they’re likely to judge down, after what you did.”

“It was justice!” Kokila exclaimed with vehement bitterness. “I took justice into my own hands because no one else would do it! And I would do it again too.” She shouted up at the black god: “Justice, damn it!”

“Shh!” Bihari said urgently. “You’ll get your turn. You don’t want to be sent back as an animal.”

Kokila glared at her. “We are animals already, and don’t you forget it.” She took a slap at Bihari’s arm and her hand went right through Bihari, which somewhat deflated her point. They were in the realm of souls, there was no denying it. “Forget these gods,” she snarled, “it’s justice we need! I’ll bring the revolt right into the bardo itself if that’s what it takes!”

“First things first,” Bihari said. “One step at a time. Just try to recognize your jati, and take care of them first. Then on from there.”

3 Tiger Mercy

Kya the tiger moved through elephant grass, stomach full and fur warm in the sun. The grass was a green wall around her, pressing in on every side. Above her the grass tips waved in the breeze, crossing the blue of the sky. The grass grew in giant bunches, radiating out from their center and bending over at the tops, and though the clumps were very close, she made her way forward by finding the narrow breaks at the bottom between clumps, pushing through the fallen stalks. Eventually she came to the edge of the grass, bordering a parklike maidan, burned annually by humans to keep it clear. Here grazed great numbers of chital and other deer, wild pig, and antelopes, especially the nilghai.

This morning there stood a lone wapiti doe, nibbling grass. Kya could imitate the sound of a wapiti stag, and when she was in heat, she did it just to do it; but now she simply waited. The doe sensed something and leaped away. But a young gaur wandered into the clearing, dark chestnut in color, white socked. As it approached Kya lifted her left forepaw, straightened her tail back, and swayed slightly forward and back, getting her balance. Then she threw her tail up and leaped across the park in a series of twenty-foot bounds, roaring all the while. She hit the gaur and knocked it down, bit its neck until it died.

She ate.

Ba-loo-ah!

Her kol-bahl, a jackal that had been kicked out of his pack and was now following her around, showed his ugly face at the far end of the maidan, and barked again. She growled at him to leave, and he slunk back into the grass.

When she was full she got up and padded downhill. The kol-bahl and ravens would finish the gaur.

She came to the river that wound its way through this part of the country. The shallow expanse was studded with islands, each a little jungle under its canopy of sal and shisham trees, and several of these held nests of hers, in the matted undergrowth of brake and creepers, under tamarisk trees overhanging the warm sand on the banks of the stream. The tiger padded over pebbles to the water’s edge, drank. She stepped in the river and stood, feeling the current push her fur downstream. The water was clear and warmed by the sun. In the sand at the stream’s edge were pawprints of a number of animals, and in the grass their scents: wapiti and mouse deer, jackal and hyena, rhinoceros and gaur, pig and pangolin; the whole village, but none in sight. She waded across to one of her islands, lay in the smashed grass of her bed, in the shade. A nap. No cubs this year, no need to hunt for another day or two: Kya yawned hugely in her bed. She fell asleep in the silence that extends out from tigers in the jungle.

She dreamed that she was a little brown village girl. Her tail twitched as she felt again the heat of a cooking fire, the feel of sex face-to-face, the impact of witch-killing stones. A sleeping rumble, big fangs exposed. The fear of it woke her up and she stirred, trying to fall back into a different dream.

Noises pulled her back into the world. Birds and monkeys were talking about the arrival of people, coming in from the west, no doubt to the ford they used downstream. Kya rose quickly and splashed off the island, slipped into thickets of elephant grass backing the curve of the stream. People could be dangerous, especially in groups. Individually they were helpless, it was only a question of picking one’s moment and attacking from behind. But groups of them could drive animals into traps or ambushes, and that had been the end of many tigers, left skinned and beheaded. Once she had seen a male tiger try to walk out a pole to some meat, slip on a slippery patch, and fall onto spikes hidden in leaves. People had arranged that.

But today, no drums, no shouts, no bells. And it was too late in the day for humans to hunt. More likely they were travelers. Kya slipped through the elephant grass unobtrusively, testing the air with ear and nose, and moving toward a long glade in the grass that would give her a view of their ford.

She settled down in a broken clump to watch them pass. She lay there with her eyes slitted.

There were other humans there, she saw, hiding as she was, scattered through the sal forest, lying in wait for the humans to arrive at the ford.

As she noticed this, a column of people reached the ford, and the hidden ones leaped out of their hiding places and screamed as they fired arrows at the others. A big hunt, it seemed. Kya settled down and watched more closely, ears flattened. She had come upon such a scene once before, and the number of humans killed had been surprising. It was where she had first tasted their flesh, as she had had twins to feed that summer. They were certainly the most dangerous beast in the jungle, aside from the elephant. They killed wantonly, like kol-bahl sometimes did. There would be meat left here afterward, no matter what else happened. Kya hunkered down and listened more than watched. Screams, cries, roars, shouts, trumpet blasts, death rattles; somewhat like the end of one of her hunts, only multiplied many times.

Eventually it grew quiet. The hunters left the scene. When they had been gone a long time, and the ordinary hush of the jungle had returned, Kya shifted onto her paws and looked around. The air reeked of blood, and her mouth watered. Dead bodies lay on both banks of the river, and were caught on snags against the banks of the stream, or had rolled into shallows. The tiger padded among them cautiously, pulled a large one into the shadows and ate some of it. But she was not very hungry. A noise caused her to slink swiftly back into the shadows, hair erect on her back, looking for the source of the sound, which had been a cracked branch. Now a footfall, over there. Ah. A human, still standing. A survivor.

Kya relaxed. Sated already, she approached the man out of no more than curiosity. He saw her and jumped backward, startling her; his body had done it without his volition. He stood there looking at her in the way hurt animals sometimes did, accepting their fate; only in this one’s face there was also a little roll of the eyes, as if to say, What else could go wrong, or, Not this too. It was a gesture so like that of the girls she had watched gathering wood in the forest that she paused, unhungry. The hunters who had ambushed this man’s group still occupied the trail to the nearest village. He would soon be caught and killed.

He expected her to do it. Humans were so sure of themselves, so sure they had the world figured out and were lords of it all. And with their monkey numbers and their arrows, so often they were right. This as much as anything was why she killed them when she did. They were a scrawny meal in all truth, which of course was not the main consideration—many a tiger had died trying to reach the tasty flesh of the porcupine—but humans tasted strange. With the things they ate, it was no surprise.

The confounding thing would be to help him; so she padded to his side. His teeth chattered with his trembling. He was no longer stunned, but holding his place on purpose. She nosed up one of his hands, rested it on her head between her ears. She held still until he stroked her head, then moved until he was stroking between her shoulders, and she was standing by his side, facing the same direction. Then very slowly she began to walk, indicating by her speed that he should come along. He did, hand stroking her back with every step.

She led him through the sal forest. Sunlight blinked through trees onto them. There was a sudden noise and clatter, then voices from the trail below, in the trees, and the hand clutched at her fur. She stopped and listened. Voices of the people-hunters. She growled, then coughed deeply, then gave a short roar.

Dead silence from below. In the absence of an organized beat, no human could find her up here. Sounds of them hurrying off came to her on the wind.

The way was now free. The man’s hand was clenched in the fur between her shoulder blades. She turned her head and nuzzled his shoulder and he let go. He was more afraid of the other men than of her, which showed sense. He was like a helpless cub in some ways, but quick. Her own mother had held her by biting the same fold of skin between the shoulder blades that he had seized, and at the same pressure—as if he too had once been a tigress mother, and was making an unremembered appeal to her.

She walked the man slowly to the next ford, across it and along one of the deer trails. Wapiti were bigger than humans, and it was an easy trail. She took him to one of her entrances to the big nullah of the region, a steep and narrow ravine, so precipitous and cragbound that its floor was only accessible at a couple of points. This was one, and she led the man down to the ravine floor, then downstream toward a village where the people smelled much like he did. The man had to walk fast to match her gait, but she did not slow down. Only a few pools dotted the ravine floor, as it had been hot for a long time. Springs dripped over ferny rockfalls. As they padded and stumbled along she thought about it, and seemed to recall a hut, near the edge of the village she was headed for, that had smelled almost exactly like him. She led him through a dense grove of date palms filling the floor of the nullah, then still denser clumps of bamboo. Green coverts of jaman fruit bushes covered the sides of the ravine, mixed with the ber thorn bush, dotted with its acid orange fruit.

A gap in this fragrant shrubbery led her up and out of the nullah. She sniffed; a male tiger had been here recently, spraying the exit from the nullah to mark it as his. She growled, and the man clutched the fur between her shoulders again, held on for a help as she climbed the last pitch out.

Back in the forested hills flanking the nullah, angling uphill, she had to nudge him with her shoulder—he wanted to contour the slope, or go directly down to the village, not up and around to it. A few bumps from her and he gave that up, and followed her without resistance. Now he had a male tiger to avoid too, but he did not know that.

She led him through the ruins of an old hill fort, overgrown with bamboo, a place that humans avoided, and that she had made her lair several winters running. She had borne her cubs here, near the human village and among human ruins, to make them safer from male tigers. The man recognized the place, and calmed down. They continued on toward the backside of the village.

At his pace it was a long way. His body hung from his joints, and she saw how hard it must be to walk on two feet. Never a moment’s rest, always balancing, falling forward and catching himself, as if always crossing a log over a creek. Shaky as a new cub, blind and wet.

But they reached the village margin, where a barley field rippled in the afternoon light, and stopped in the last elephant grass under the sal trees. The barley field had furrows of dirt into which people poured water, clever monkeys that they were, tiptoeing through life in their perpetual balancing act.

At the sight of the field, the exhausted creature looked up and around. He led the tiger now, around the field, and Kya followed him closer to the village than she would have dared in most situations, though the afternoon’s mix of sun and shadow provided her maximum cover, rendering her nearly invisible to others, a mere mind-ripple in the landscape, if she moved quickly. But she had to keep to his faltering pace. It took a bit of boldness; but there were bold tigers and timid tigers, and she was one of the bold ones.

Finally she stopped. A hut lay before them, under a pipal tree. The man pointed it out to her. She sniffed; it was his home, sure enough. He whispered in his language, gave her a final squeeze expressing his gratitude, and then he was stumbling forward through the barley, in the last stages of exhaustion. When he reached the door there were cries from inside, and a woman and two children rushed out and hugged him. But then to the tiger’s surprise an older man strode out heavily and beat him across the back, several heavy blows.

The tiger settled down to watch.

The older man refused to allow her refugee into the hut. The woman and children brought out food to him. Finally he curled up outside the door, on the ground, and slept.

Through the following days he remained in disfavor with the old man, though he fed at the house, and worked in the fields around it. Kya watched and saw the pattern of his life, strange as it was. It seemed also that he had forgotten her; or would not risk the jungle to come out and look for her. Or did not imagine she was still there, perhaps.

She was surprised, therefore, when he came out one dusk with his hands held before him, a bird carcass plucked and cooked, it appeared—even boned! He walked right to her, and greeted her very quietly and respectfully, holding out the offering. He was tentative, frightened; he did not know that when her whiskers were down she was feeling relaxed. The offered tidbit smelled of its own hot juices, and some other mix of scents—nutmeg, lavender. She took it gently in her mouth and let it cool, tasting it between her teeth as it dripped hot on her tongue. A very odd perfumed meat. She chewed it, growling a little purr-growl, and swallowed. He said his farewells and backed away, returning to the hut.

After that she came by from time to time in the lancing horizontal light of sunrise, when he was going off to work. After a while he usually came out with a gift for her, some scrap or morsel, nothing like the bird, but tastier than it had been, simple uncooked bits of meat; somehow he knew. He still slept outside the hut, and one cold night she slinked in and slept curled around him, till dawn grayed the skies. The monkeys in the trees were scandalized.

Then the old man beat him again, hard enough to make him bleed from one ear. Kya went off to her hill fort then, growling and making long scratches in the ground. The huge mahua tree on the hill was dropping its great weight of flowers, and she ate some of the fleshy, intoxicating petals. She returned to the village perimeter, and deliberately sniffed out the old man, and found him on the well-traveled road to the village west of theirs. He had met several other men there, and they talked for a long time, drinking fermented drinks and getting drunk. He laughed like her kol-bahl.

On his way home she struck him down and killed him with a bite to the neck. She ate part of his entrails, tasting again all the strange tastes; they ate such odd things that they ended up tasting peculiar themselves, rich and various. Not unlike the first offering her young man had brought out to her. An acquired taste; and perhaps she had acquired it.

Other people were hurrying toward them now, and she slipped away, hearing behind her their cries, shocked and then dismayed, although with that note of triumph or celebration one often heard in monkeys relating bad news—that whatever it was, it hadn’t happened to them.

No one would care about that old man, he had left this life as lonely as a male tiger, unregretted even by those in his own hut. It was not his death but the presence of a man-eating tiger that these people lamented. Tigers who learned to like manflesh were dangerous; usually they were mothers who were having trouble feeding their cubs, or old males who had broken their fangs, so that they were likely to do it often. Certainly a campaign to exterminate her would now begin. But she did not regret the killing. On the contrary, she leaped through the trees and shadows like a young tigress just out on her own, licking her chops and growling. Kya, Queen of the Jungle!

But the next time she came to visit her young man, he brought out a morsel of goat meat, and then tapped her gently on the nose, talking very seriously. He was warning her of something, and was worried that the details of the warning were escaping her, which they were. Next time she came by he shouted at her to leave, and even threw rocks at her, but it was too late; she hit a trip line connected to spring-loaded bows, and poisoned arrows pierced her and she died.

4 Akbar

As they carried the body of the tigress into the village, four men working hard, huffing and puffing under its weight as it swung by its tied paws from a stout bamboo bouncing on their shoulders, Bistami understood: God is in all things. And God, may all his ninety-nine names prosper and fall into our souls, did not want any killing. From the doorway of his older brother’s hut, Bistami shouted through his tears, “She was my sister, she was my aunt, she saved me from the Hindu rebels, you ought not to have killed her, she was protecting us all!”

But of course no one was listening. No one understands us, not ever.

And it was perhaps just as well, given that this tigress had undoubtedly killed his brother. But he would have given his brother’s life ten times over for the sake of that tiger.

Despite himself he followed the procession into the village center. Everyone was drinking rakshi, and the drummers were running out of their homes with their drums, pounding happily. “Kya Kya Kya Kya, leave us alone forevermore!” A tiger holiday was upon them, and the rest of the day and perhaps the next would be devoted to the impromptu festivalizing. They would burn its whiskers to make sure that its soul would not pass into a killer in another world. The whiskers were poisonous: one ground up in tiger meat would kill a man, while a whole one placed inside a tender bamboo shoot would give those who ate it cysts, leading to a slower death. Or so it was said. The hypochondriacal Chinese believed in the efficacious properties of almost everything, including every part of tigers, it seemed. Much of the body of this Kya would be saved and taken north by traders, no doubt. The skin would go to the zamindar.

Bistami sat miserably on the dirt at the edge of the village center. There was no one to explain himself to. He had done everything he could to warn the tigress off, but to no avail. He had addressed her not as Kya but as madame, or Madame Thirty, which was what the villagers called tigers when they were out in the jungle, so as not to offend them. He had given her offerings, and checked to make sure that the markings on her forehead did not form the letter “s,” a sign that the beast was a were-tiger, and would change to human form for good at the moment of death. That had not happened, and indeed there had been no “s” on her forehead; the mark was more like a birdwing in flight. He had kept eye contact with her, as one is supposed to do when coming on tigers unexpectedly; he had stayed calm, and been saved by her from death. Indeed all the stories he had heard of helpful tigers—the one that had led two lost children back to the village, the one who had kissed a sleeping hunter on the cheek—all these stories paled in comparison to his, although they had prepared him as well. She had been his sister, and now he was distraught with grief.

The villagers began to dismember her body. Bistami left the village, unable to watch. His brutal older brother was dead; his other relatives, like his brother, had no sympathy for his Sufic interests. “The high look to the high, and so they can see each other from a great distance off.” But he was so far away from anyone of wisdom, he could see nothing at all. He remembered what his Sufi master Tustari had told him when he left Allahabad: “Keep the haj in your heart, and make your way to Mecca as Allah wills it. Slow or fast, but always on your tariqat, the path to enlightenment.”

He gathered his few possessions in his shoulder bag. The death of the tiger began to take on the cast of a destiny, a message to Bistami, to accept the gift of God and put it to use in his actions, and regret nothing. So that now it was time to say Thank you God, thank you Kya my sister, and leave his home village forever.

Bistami walked to Agra, and there he spent the last of his money to buy a Sufi wanderer’s robe. He asked for shelter in the Sufi lodge, a long old building in the southernmost district of the old capital, and he bathed in their pool, purifying himself inside and out.

Then he left the city and walked out to Fatepur Sikri, the new capital of Akbar’s empire. He saw that the not-yet-completed city replicated in stone the vast tent camps of Mughal armies, even down to marble pillars standing free of the walls, like tent poles. The city was dusty, or muddy, its white stone already stained. The trees were all short, the gardens raw and new. The long wall of the emperor’s palace fronted the great avenue that bisected the city north and south, leading to a big marble mosque, and a dargah Bistami had heard about in Agra, the tomb of the Sufi saint Shaikh Salim Chishti. At the end of his long life Chishti had instructed the young Akbar, and now his memory was said to be Akbar’s strongest link to Islam. And this same Chishti in his youth had traveled in Iran, and studied under Shah Esmail, who had also instructed Bistami’s master Tustari.

So Bistami approached Chishti’s great white tomb walking backward, and reciting from the Quran. “In the name of God, the compassionate, the merciful. Be patient with those who call upon their Lord at morn and even, seeking his face: and let not thine eyes be turned away from them in quest of the pomp of this life; neither obey him whose heart we have made careless of the remembrance of Us, and who followeth his own lusts, and whose ways are unbridled.”

At the entry he prostrated himself toward Mecca and said the morning prayer, then entered the walled-in courtyard of the tomb, and made his tribute to Chishti. Others were doing the same, of course, and when he was done paying his respects he spoke to some of them, describing his journey all the way back to his time in Iran, eliding the stops along the way. Eventually he told this tale to one of the ulema of Akbar’s own court, and emphasized his master’s relation-by-teaching to Chishti, and returned to his prayers. He came back to the tomb day after day, establishing a routine of prayer, purification rites, the answering of questions from pilgrims who spoke only Persian, and socializing with all the people visiting the shrine. This finally led to the grandson of Chishti speaking to him, and this man then spoke well of him to Akbar, or so he heard. He ate his one meal a day at the Sufi lodge, and persevered, hungry but hopeful.

One morning at the very first light, when he was already in the tomb’s courtyard at prayers, the emperor Akbar himself came into the shrine, and took up an ordinary broom, and swept the courtyard. It was a cool morning, the night chill still in the air, and yet Bistami was sweating as Akbar finished his devotions, and Chishti’s grandson arrived, and asked Bistami to come when he was done with his prayers, to be introduced.

“A great honor,” he replied, and returned to his prayers, murmuring them thoughtlessly as the things he might say raced through his head; and he wondered how long he should delay before approaching the emperor, to show that prayer came first. The tomb was still relatively empty and cool, the sun just rising. When it cleared the trees entirely, Bistami stood and walked to the emperor and Chishti’s grandson, and bowed deeply. Greeting, obeisances, and then he was obeying a polite request to tell his story to the watchful young man in the imperial finery, whose unblinking gaze never left his face, or indeed his eyes. Study in Iran with Tutsami, pilgrimage to Qom, return home, a year’s work as a teacher of the Quran in Gujarat, a journey to visit his family, ambush by Hindu rebels, salvation by tiger: by the end of the story Bistami had been approved, he could see it.

“We welcome you,” Akbar said. The whole city of Fatepur Sikri served to show how devout he was, as well as displaying his ability to create devotion in others. Now he had seen Bistami’s devotion, exhibited in all the forms of piety, and as they continued their conversation, and the tomb began to fill with the day’s visitors, Bistami managed to lead the discussion to the one hadith he knew that had come by way of Chishti to Iran, so that the isnad, or genealogy of the phrase, made a short link between his education and the emperor’s.

“I had it from Tutsami, who had it from the Shah Esmail, teacher of Shaikh Chishti, who had it from Bahr ibn Kaniz al-Saqqa, that Uthman ibn Saj related to him, from Said ibn Jubair, God’s mercy on him, who said, ‘Let him give a general greeting to all the Muslims, including the young boys and the adolescents, and when he has arrived at class, let him restrain whoever was sitting from standing up for him, since neglecting this is one of the banes of the soul.’ ”

Akbar frowned, trying to follow it. It occurred to Bistami that it could be interpreted as meaning that he had been the one who had refrained from asking for any kind of obeisance from the other. He began to sweat in the chill morning air.

Akbar turned to one of his retainers, standing unobtrusively against the marble wall of the tomb. “Bring this man with us on our return to the palace.”

After another hour of prayer for Bistami, and consultations for Akbar, who was relaxed but increasingly terse as the morning wore on and the line of supplicants grew rather than shrank before him, the emperor bade the line to disperse and come back again later. After that he led Bistami and his retinue through the raw worksites of the city to his palace.

The city was being built in the shape of a big square, like any other Mughal military encampment—indeed, in the form of the empire itself, Bistami’s guard told him, which was a quadrilateral protected by the four cities of Lahore, Agra, Allahabad, and Ajmer. These were all big compared to the new capital, and Bistami’s guard was particularly fond of Agra, where he had worked in the construction of the emperor’s great fort, now finished. “Inside it are more than five hundred buildings,” he said as he must always have said when speaking of it. He was of the opinion that Akbar had founded Fatepur Sikri because the fort of Agra was mostly complete, and the emperor liked beginning great projects. “He is a builder, that one, he will remake the world itself before he is done, I assure you. Islam has never had such a servant as him.”

“It must be so,” Bistami said, looking around at the construction, white buildings rising out of cocoons of scaffolding, set in seas of black mud. “Praise be to God.”

The guard, whose name was Husain Ali, looked at Bistami suspiciously. Pious pilgrims were no doubt a commonplace. He led Bistami after the emperor and through the gate of the new palace. Inside the outer wall were gardens that looked as if they had been in place for years: big pine trees towering over jasmine bushes, flower beds in all directions. The palace itself was smaller than the mosque, or the tomb of Chishti, but exquisite in every detail. A white marble tent, broad and low, its interior filled by room after cool room, all surrounding a fountain-filled central courtyard and garden. The whole wing at the back of the courtyard consisted of a long gallery walled with paintings: hunting scenes, the skies always turquoise; the dogs and deer and lions rendered to the life; the skirted hunters carrying bow or flintlock. Opposite these scenes were suites of white-walled rooms, finished but empty. Bistami was given one of these to stay in.

That night’s meal was a feast, set sumptuously in a long hall opening onto the central courtyard. As it proceeded, Bistami understood that it was simply the ordinary evening meal in the palace. He ate roast quail, yogurt with cucumber, shredded pork in curry, and tastes of many dishes he didn’t recognize.

That began a dreamlike period for him, in which he felt like Manjushri in the tale, fallen upward into the land of milk and honey. Food dominated his days and his thoughts. One day he was visited in his rooms by a team of black slaves dressed better than he was, who quickly brought him up to their level of raiment and beyond, outfitting him in a fine white gown that looked well but hung heavily on him. After that he was given another audience with the emperor.

This meeting, surrounded by sharp-eyed counselors, generals, and imperial retainers of all kinds, felt very different from the dawn meeting at the tomb, when two young men out to smell the morning air and see the sunrise, and sing the glory of Allah’s world, had spoken to each other chest to chest. And yet in all these trappings, it was the same face looking at him—curious, serious, interested in what he had to say. Focusing on that face allowed Bistami to relax.

The emperor said, “We invite you to join us and share your knowledge of the law. In return for your wisdom, and the rendering of judgments on certain cases and questions that will be brought before you, you will be made zamindar of the late Shah Muzzafar’s estates, may Allah honor his name.”

“Praise be to God,” Bistami murmured, looking down. “I will ask God’s help in fulfilling this great task to your satisfaction.”

Even with his gaze steadfast to the ground, or returned to the emperor’s face, Bistami could sense that some of the imperial retinue were less than pleased by this decision. But afterward, some who had seemed least pleased came up to him and introduced themselves, spoke kindly, led him around the palace, probed in a most gentle way concerning his background and history, and told him more about the estate he was to administer. This, it appeared, would mostly be overseen by local assistants on-site, and was mainly his title and source of income; and in return he was to outfit and provide one hundred soldiers to the emperor’s armies, when required, and teach all he knew of the Quran, and judge various civil disputes given to his charge.

“There are disputes that only the ulema are fit to judge,” the emperor’s advisor Raja Todor Mal told him. “The emperor has great responsibilities. The empire itself is not yet secure from its enemies. Akbar’s grandfather Babur came here from the Punjab, and established a Muslim kingdom only forty years ago, and the infidels still attack us from the south and the east. Every year some campaigns are necessary to drive them back. All the faithful in his empire are under his care, in theory, but the burden of his responsibilities means in practice he simply doesn’t have time.”

“Of course not.”

“Meanwhile, there is no other system of justice for disputes among people. As the law is based on the Quran, the qadis, the ulema, and other holy men such as yourself are the logical choice to take on this burden.”

“Of course.”

In the weeks following, Bistami did indeed find himself sitting in judgment in disputes brought before him by some of the emperor’s slave assistants. Two men claimed the same land; Bistami asked where their fathers had lived, and their fathers’ fathers, and determined that one’s family had lived in the region longer than the other’s. In ways like this he made his judgments.

More new clothes came from the tailors; a new house and complete retinue of servants and slaves were provided; he was given a trunk of gold and silver coins numbering one hundred thousand. And for all this he merely had to consult the Quran and recall the hadith he had learned (really very few, and even fewer relevant), and render judgments that were usually obvious to all. When they were not obvious, he made them as best he could and retired to the mosque and prayed uneasily, then attended the emperor and the evening meal. He went on his own at dawn every day to the tomb of Chishti, and so saw the emperor again in the same informal circumstances as their first meeting, perhaps once or twice a month—enough to keep the very busy emperor aware of his existence. He always had prepared the story he would relate to Akbar that day, when asked what he had been doing; each story was chosen for what it might teach the emperor, about himself, or Bistami, or the empire or the world. Surely a decent and thoughtful lesson was the least he could do for the incredible bounty that Akbar had bestowed on him.

One morning he told him the story from Sura Eighteen, about the men who lived in a city that had forsaken God, and God took them apart to a cave, and made them to sleep as it were a single night, to them; and when they went out they found that three hundred and nine years had passed. “Thus with your work, mighty Akbar, you shoot us into the future.”

Another morning he told him the story of El-Khadir, the reputed vizier of Dhoulkarnain, who was said to have drunk of the fountain of life, by virtue of which he still lives, and will live till the day of judgment; and who appeared, clad in green robes, to Muslims in distress, to help them. “Thus your work here, great Akbar, will continue deathless through the years to help Muslims in distress.”

The emperor appeared to appreciate these cool dewy conversations. He invited Bistami to join him on several hunts, and Bistami and his retinue occupied a big white tent, and spent the hot days riding horses as they crashed through the jungle after the howling dogs or beaters; or, more to Bistami’s taste, sat on the howdah of an elephant, and watched the great falcons leave Akbar’s wrist and soar high above, thence to dive in terrific stoops onto hare or fowl. Akbar fixed his attention on you in just the same way the falcons did.

Akbar loved his falcons, in fact, as kin, and always spent the days of the hunt in excellent spirits. He would call Bistami to his side to speak a blessing over the great birds, who looked off to the horizon, unimpressed. Then they were cast into the air, and flapped hard as they made their way quickly up to their hunting height, splaying wide their big wing feathers. When they were settled in their gyres overhead, a few doves were released. These birds flew as fast as they could for cover in trees or bush, but they were not usually fast enough to escape the attack of the hawks. Their broken bodies were returned by the great raptors to the feet of the emperor’s retainers, and then the falcons flew back to Akbar’s wrist, where they were greeted with a stare as fixed as their own, and bits of raw mutton.

It was just such a happy day that was interrupted by bad news from the south. A messenger arrived saying that Adham Khan’s campaign against the Sultan of Malwa, Baz Bahadur, had succeeded, but that the khan’s army had gone on to slaughter all of the captured men, women, and children of the town of Malwa, including many Muslim theologians, and even some sayyids, that is to say, direct descendants of the Prophet.

Akbar’s fair complexion turned red all over his neck and face, leaving only the mole on the left side of his face untouched, like a white raisin embedded in his skin. “No more,” he declared to his falcon, and then he began to give orders, the bird thrown to its falconer and the hunt forgotten. “He thinks I am still underage.”

He rode off hard, leaving all his retinue behind except for Pir Muhammad Khan, his most trusted general. Bistami heard later that Akbar had personally relieved Adham Khan of his command.

Bistami had the Chishti tomb to himself for a month. Then he found the emperor there one morning, with a dark look. Adham Khan had been replaced as vakil, the chief minister, by Zein. “It will enrage him but it must be done,” Akbar said. “We will have to put him under house arrest.”

Bistami nodded and continued to sweep the cool dry floor of the inner chamber. The idea of Adham Khan under permanent guard, usually a prelude to execution, was disturbing to contemplate. He had a lot of friends in Agra. He might be so bold as to try to rebel. As the emperor must very well know.

Indeed, two days later, when Bistami was standing at the edge of Akbar’s afternoon group at the palace, he was frightened but not surprised to see Adham Khan appear and stomp to the top of the stairs, armed, bloody, shouting that he had killed Zein not an hour before, in the man’s own audience chamber, for usurping what was rightfully his.

Hearing this Akbar went red-faced again, and struck the khan hard on the side of the head with his drinking cup. He grabbed the man by the front of his jacket, and pulled him across the room. The slightest resistance from Adham would have been instant death from the emperor’s guards, who stood at each side of them, swords at the ready; and so he allowed himself to be dragged out to the balcony, where Akbar flung him over the railing into space. Then Akbar, redder than ever, raced down the stairs, ran to the half-conscious khan, seized him by the hair and dragged him bodily up the stairs, armored though he was, over the carpet and out to the balcony, where he heaved him over the rail again. Adham Khan hit the patio below with a loose heavy thud.

Indeed he had been killed. The emperor retired into his private quarters in the palace.

The next morning Bistami swept the shrine of Chishti with a tightness all through his body.

Akbar appeared, and Bistami’s heart hammered in his chest. Akbar seemed calm, though distracted. The tomb was a place to give himself some serenity. But the vigorous brushing he gave the floor that Bistami had already cleaned belied the calm of his speech. He’s the emperor, Bistami thought suddenly, he can do what he wants.

But then again, as a Muslim emperor, he was subservient to God, and the sharia. All-powerful and yet all-submissive, all at once. No wonder he seemed thoughtful to the point of distraction, sweeping the shrine in the early morning. It was hard to imagine him mad with anger, like a bull elephant in musth, throwing a man bodily to his death. There was within him a deep well of rage.

Rebellion of ostensibly Muslim subjects struck deepest into this well. A new rebellion in the Punjab was reported, an army sent to put it down. The innocents of the region were spared, and even those who had fought for the rebellion. But its leaders, some forty of them, were brought to Agra and placed in a circle of war elephants that had long blades like giant swords attached to their tusks. The elephants were unleashed on the traitors, who screamed as they were mowed down and trampled underfoot, their bodies then tossed high in the air by the blood-maddened elephants. Bistami had not realized that elephants could be driven to such blood lust. Akbar stood high on a throne howdah perched on the biggest elephant of all, an elephant that stood still before the spectacle, the two of them observing the carnage.

Some days later, when the emperor came to the tomb at dawn, it felt strange to sweep the shadowed courtyard of the tomb with him. Bistami swept assiduously, trying not to meet Akbar’s gaze.

Finally he had to acknowledge the sovereign’s presence. Akbar was already staring at him.

“You seem troubled,” Akbar said.

“No, mighty Akbar—not at all.”

“You don’t approve of the execution of traitors to Islam?”

“Not at all, yes, of course I do.”

Akbar stared at him in the same way one of his falcons would have.

“But didn’t Ibn Khaldun say that the caliph has to submit to Allah in the same way as the humblest slave? Didn’t he say that the caliph has a duty to obey Muslim law? And doesn’t Muslim law forbid torture of prisoners? Isn’t that Khaldun’s point?”

“Khaldun was just a historian,” Bistami said.

Akbar laughed. “And what about the hadith that has it from Abu Taiba by way of Murra ibn Hamdan by way of Sufyan al-Thawri, who had it related to him by Ali ibn Abi Talaib, that the Messenger of God, may God bless his name forever, said, ‘You shall not torture slaves?’ What about the lines of the Quran that command the ruler to imitate Allah and to show compassion and mercy to prisoners? Did I not break the spirit of these commandments, O wise Sufi pilgrim?”

Bistami studied the flagstones of the courtyard. “Perhaps so, great Akbar. Only you know.”

Akbar regarded him. “Leave the tomb of Chishti,” he said.

Bistami hurried out the gate.

The next time Bistami saw Akbar was at the palace, where he had been commanded to appear; as it turned out, to explain why, as the emperor put it icily, “your friends in Gujarat are rebelling against me?”

Bistami said uneasily, “I left Ahmadabad precisely because there was so much strife. The mirzas were always having trouble. King Muzaffar Shah the Third was no longer in control. You know all this. This is why you took Gujarat under your protection.”

Akbar nodded, seeming to remember that campaign. “But now Husain Mirza has come back out of the Deccan, and many of the nobles of Gujarat have joined him in rebellion. If word spreads that I can be defied so easily, who knows what will follow?”

“Surely Gujarat must be retaken,” Bistami said uncertainly; perhaps, as last time, this was exactly what Akbar did not want to hear. What was expected of Bistami was not clear to him; he was an official of the court, a qadi, but his advice before had all been religious, or legal. Now, with a previous residence of his in revolt, he was apparently on the spot; not where one wanted to be, when Akbar was angry.

“It may already be too late,” Akbar said. “The coast is two months away.”

“Must it be?” Bistami asked. “I have made the trip by myself in ten days. Perhaps if you took only your best hundreds, on female camels, you could surprise the rebels.”

Akbar favored him with his hawk look. He called for Raja Todor Mal, and soon it was arranged as Bistami had suggested. A cavalry of three thousand soldiers, led by Akbar, with Bistami ordered along, covered the distance between Agra and Ahmadabad in eleven dusty long days, and this cavalry, made strong and bold by the swift march, shattered a gaggle of many thousands of rebels, fifteen thousand by one general’s count, most of them killed in the battle.

Bistami spent that day on camelback, following the main charges of the front, trying to stay within sight of Akbar, and when that failed, helping wounded men into the shade. Even without Akbar’s great siege guns, the noise of the battle was shocking—most of it created by the screaming of men and camels. Dust blanketing the hot air smelled of blood.

Late in the afternoon, desperately thirsty, Bistami made his way down to the river. Scores of wounded and dying were already there, staining the river red. Even at the upstream edge of the crowd it was impossible to drink a mouthful that did not taste of blood.

Then Raja Todor Mal and a gang of soldiers arrived among them, executing with swords the mirzas and Afghans who had led the rebellion. One of the mirzas caught sight of Bistami and cried out, “Bistami, save me! Save me!”

The next moment he was headless, his body pouring its blood onto the bankside from the open neck. Bistami turned away, Raja Todor Mal staring after him.

Clearly Akbar heard of this later, for all during the leisurely march back to Fatepur Sikri, despite the triumphant nature of the procession, and Akbar’s evident high spirits, he did not call Bistami into his presence. This despite the fact that the lightning assault on the rebels had been Bistami’s idea. Or perhaps this also was part of it. Raja Todor Mal and his cronies could not be pleased by that.

It looked bad, and nothing in the great victory festival on their return to Fatepur Sikri, only forty-three days after their departure, made Bistami feel any better. On the contrary, he felt more and more apprehensive, as the days passed and Akbar did not come by the tomb of Chishti.

Instead, one morning three guards appeared there. They had been assigned to guard Bistami at the tomb, also back at his own compound. They informed him that he was not allowed to go anywhere else but these two places. He was under house arrest.

This was the usual prelude to the interrogation and execution of traitors. Bistami could see in his guards’ eyes that this time was no exception, and that they considered him a dead man. It was hard for him to believe that Akbar had turned on him; he struggled to understand it. Fear grew daily in him. The image of the mirza’s headless body, gushing blood, kept recurring to him, and each time it did the blood in his own body would pound through him as if testing the means of escape, eager for release in a bursting red fountain.

He went to the Chishti tomb on one of these frightful mornings, and decided not to leave it. He sent orders for one of his retainers to bring him food every day at sundown, and after eating outside the gate of the tomb, he slept on a mat in the corner of the courtyard. He fasted through the days as if it were Ramadan, and alternated days reciting from the Quran and from Rumi’s “Mathnawi,” and other Persian Sufi texts. Some part of him hoped and expected that one of the guards would speak Persian, so that the words of the Mowlana, Rumi the great poet and voice of the Sufis, would be understood as they came pouring out of him.

“Here are the miracle signs you want,” he would say in a loud voice, “that you cry through the night and get up at dawn, asking that in the absence of what you ask for, your day gets dark, your neck thin as a spindle, that what you give away is all you own, that you sacrifice belongings, sleep, health, your head, that you often sit down in a fire like aloes wood, and often go out to meet a blade like a battered helmet. When acts of helplessness become habitual, those are the signs. You run back and forth listening for unusual events, peering into the faces of travelers. Why are you looking at me like a madman? I have lost a friend. Please forgive me. Searching like that does not fail. There will come a rider who holds you close. You faint and gibber. The uninitiated say he’s faking. How could they know? Water washes over a beached fish.

“Blessed is that intelligence into whose heart’s ear from heaven the sound of ‘come hither’ is coming. The defiled ear hears not that sound—only the deserving gets his desserts. Defile not your eye with human cheek and mole, for that emperor of eternal life is coming; and if it has become defiled, wash it with tears, for the cure comes from those tears. A caravan of sugar has arrived from Egypt; the sound of a footfall and bell is coming. Ha, be silent, for to complete the ode our speaking king is coming.”

After many days of that, Bistami began to repeat the Quran sura by sura, returning often to the first sura, the Opening of the Book, the Fatiha, the Healer, which the guards would never fail to recognize:

“Praise be to God, Lord of the worlds! The compassionate, the merciful! King on the day of reckoning! Thee only do we worship, and to Thee do we cry for help. Guide Thou us on the straight path, the path of those to whom Thou has been gracious;—and with whom Thou are not angry, and who go not astray.”

This great opening prayer, so appropriate to his situation, Bistami repeated hundreds of times per day. Sometimes he repeated only the prayer “Sufficient for us is God and excellent the Protector”; once he said it thirty-three thousand times in a row. Then he switched to “Allah is merciful, submit to Allah, Allah is merciful, submit to Allah,” which he repeated until his mouth was parched, his voice hoarse, and the muscles of his face cramped with exhaustion.

All the while he swept the courtyard clear, and then all the rooms of the shrine, one by one, and he filled the lamps and trimmed the wicks, and swept some more, looking at the skies as they changed through the days, and he said the same things over and over, feeling the wind push through him, watching the leaves of the trees surrounding the shrine pulse, each in their own transparent light. Arabic is learning, but Persian is sugar. He tasted his food at sundown as he had never tasted food before. Nevertheless it became easy to fast, perhaps because it was winter and the days were a bit shorter. Fear still stabbed him frequently, causing his blood to surge in him at enormous pressure, and he prayed aloud in every waking moment, no doubt driving his guards mad with the droning of it.

Eventually the whole world contracted to the tomb, and he began to forget the things that had happened before to him, or the things that presumably were still happening in the world outside the shrine grounds. He forgot them. His mind was becoming clarified; indeed everything in the world seemed to be becoming slightly transparent. He could see into leaves, and sometimes through them, as if they were made of glass; and it was the same with the white marble and alabaster of the tomb, which glowed as if alive in the dusks; and with his own flesh. “All save the face of God doth perish. To Him shall we return.” These were the words from the Quran embedded in the Mowlana’s beautiful poem of reincarnation:

He repeated this poem a thousand times, always whispering the last part, for fear the guards would report to Akbar that he was preparing himself for death.

Days passed; weeks passed. He grew hungrier, and hypersensitive to all tastes and smells, then to the air and the light. He could feel the nights that stayed hot and steamy as if they were blankets swaddling him, and in the brief cool of dawn he walked around sweeping and praying, looking at the sky over the leafy trees growing lighter and lighter; and then one morning as dawn grew, everything began to turn into light. “O he, O he who is He, O he who is naught but He!” Over and over he cried these words out into the world of light, and even the words were shards of light bursting out of his mouth. The tomb became a thing of pure white light, glowing in the cool green light of the trees, the trees of green light, and the fountain poured its water of light up into the lit air, and the walls of the courtyard were bricks of light, and everything was light, pulsing lightly. He could see through the earth, and back through time, over a Khyber Pass made of slabs of yellow light, back to the time of his birth, in the tenth day of Moharram, the day when the Imam Hosain, the only living grandson of Muhammad, had died defending the faith, and he saw that whether or not Akbar had him killed he would live on, for he had lived before many times, and was not going to be done when this life ended. “Why should I be afraid? When did I ever lose by dying?” He was a creature of light as everything else was, and had once been a village girl, another time a horseman on the steppes, another time the servant of the Twelfth Imam, so that he knew how and why the Imam had disappeared, and when he would return to save the world. Knowing that, there was no reason to fear anything. “Why should I be afraid? O he, O he who is He, sufficient is God and excellent the Protector, Allah the merciful, the beneficent!” Allah who had sent Muhammad on his isra, his journey into light, just as Bistami was being sent now, toward the ascension of miraj, when all would become a light utterly transparent and invisible.

Understanding this, Bistami looked through the transparent walls and trees and earth to Akbar, across the city in his clear palace, robed in light like an angel, a man surely more than half angel already, an angel spirit that he had known in previous lives, and that he would know again in future lives, until they all came to one place and Allah rang down the universe.

Except this Akbar of light turned his head, and looked through the lit space between them, and Bistami saw then that his eyes were black balls in his head, black as onyx; and he said to Bistami, We have never met before; I am not the one you seek; the one you seek is elsewhere.

Bistami reeled, fell back in the corner formed by the two walls.

When he came to himself, still in a colorful glassine world, Akbar in the flesh stood there before him, sweeping the courtyard with Bistami’s broom.

“Master,” Bistami said, and began to weep. “Mowlana.”

Akbar stopped over him, stared down at him.

Finally he put a hand to Bistami’s head. “You are a servant of God,” he said.

“Yes, Mowlana.”

“ ‘Now hath God been gracious to us,’ ” Akbar recited in Arabic. “ ‘For whoso feareth God and endureth, God verily will not suffer the reward of the righteous to perish.’ ”

This was from Sura Twelve, the story of Joseph and his brothers. Bistami, encouraged, still seeing through the edges of things, including Akbar and his luminous hand and face, a creature of light pulsing through lives like days, recited verses from the end of the next sura, “Thunder”:

“ ‘Those who lived before them made plots; but all plotting is controlled by God: He knoweth the works of every one.’ ”

Akbar nodded, looking to Chishti’s tomb and thinking his own thoughts.

“ ‘No blame be on you this day,’ ” he muttered, speaking the words Joseph spoke as he forgave his brothers. “ ‘God will forgive you, for He is the most merciful of those who show mercy.’ ”

“Yes, Mowlana. God gives us all things, God the merciful and compassionate, he who is He. O he who is He, O he who is He, O he who is He…” With difficulty he stopped himself.

“Yes.” Akbar looked back down at him again. “Now, whatever may have happened in Gujarat, I don’t wish to hear any more of it. I don’t believe you had anything to do with the rebellion. Stop weeping. But Abul Fazl and Shaikh Abdul Nabi do believe this, and they are among my chief advisors. In most matters I trust them. I am loyal to them, as they are to me. So I can ignore them in this, and instruct them to leave you alone, but even if I do that, your life here will not be as comfortable as it was before. You understand.”

“Yes, master.”

“So I am going to send you away—”

“No, master!”

“Be silent. I am going to send you on the haj.”

Bistami’s mouth fell open. After all these days of endless talking, his jaw hung from his face like a broken gate. White light filled everything, and for a moment he swooned.

Then colors returned, and he began to hear again: “…you will ride to Surat and sail on my pilgrim ship, Ilahi, across the Arabian Sea to Jidda. The wagf has generated a good donation to Mecca and Medina, and I have appointed Wazir as the mir haj and the party will include my aunt Bulbadan Begam and my wife Salima. I would like to go myself, but Abul Fazl insists that I am needed here.”

Bistami nodded. “You are indispensable, master.”

Akbar contemplated him. “Unlike you.”

He removed his hand from Bistami’s head. “But the mir haj can always use another qadi. And I wish to establish a permanent Timurid school in Mecca. You can help with that.”

“But—and not come back?”

“Not if you value this existence.”

Bistami stared down at the ground, feeling a chill.

“Come now,” the emperor said. “For such a devout scholar as you, a life in Mecca should be pure joy.”

“Yes, master. Of course.” But his voice choked on the words.

Akbar laughed. “It’s better than beheading, you must admit! And who knows? Life is long. Perhaps you will come back one day.”

They both knew it was not likely. Life was not long.

“Whatever God wills,” Bistami murmured, looking around. This courtyard, this tomb, these trees which he knew stone by stone, branch by branch, leaf by leaf—this life, which had filled a hundred years in the last month—it was over. All that he knew so well would pass from him, including this beloved awesome young man. Strange to think that each true life was only a few years long—that one passed through several in each bodily span. He said, “God is great. We will never meet again.”

5 The Road to Mecca

From the port of Jidda to Mecca, the pilgrims’ camels were continuous from horizon to horizon, looking as if they might continue unbroken all the way across Arabia, or the world. The rocky shallow valleys around Mecca were filled with encampments, and the mutton-greased smoke of cooking fires rose into the clear skies at sunset. Cool nights, warm days, never a cloud in the whitish blue sky, and thousands of pilgrims, enthusiastically making the final rounds of the haj, everyone in the city participating in the same ecstatic ritual, all dressed in white, accented by the green turbans in the crowd, worn by the sayyids, those who claimed direct descent from the Prophet: a big family, if the turbans were to be believed, all reciting verses from the Quran, following the people in front of them, who followed those before them, and those before them, in a line that extended back nine centuries.

On the voyage to Arabia, Bistami had fasted more seriously than ever in his life, even in the tomb of Chishti. Now he flowed through the stone streets of Mecca light as a feather, looking up at the palms dusting the sky with their gently waving green fronds, feeling so airy in God’s grace that it sometimes seemed he looked down on the palm tops, or around the corners into the Kaaba, and he would have to stare at his feet for a while to regain his balance and his sense of self, though as he did so his feet began to seem like distant creatures of their own, thrusting forward one after the other, time after time. O he, O he who is He…

He had separated himself from the representatives of Fatepur Sikri, as he found Akbar’s family an unwelcome reminder of his lost master. With them it was always Akbar this and Akbar that, his wife Salima (a second wife, not the empress) plaintive in a self-satisfied way, his aunt egging her on—no. Women were on their own pilgrimage in any case, but the men in the Mughal retinue were almost as bad. And Wazir the mir haj was an ally of Abul Fazl, and therefore suspicious of Bistami, dismissive of him to the point of contempt. There would be no place for Bistami in the Mughal school, assuming that they established one at all, rather than just disbursing some alms and city funds from an embassy, which was how it looked as though it would come about. Either way Bistami would not be welcome among them, that was clear.

But this was one of those blessed moments when the future was no matter for concern, when past and future both were absent from the world. That was what struck Bistami most, even at the time, even in the act of floating along in the line of belief, one of a million white-robed hajis, pilgrims from all over Dar al-Islam, from the Maghrib to Mindanao, from Siberia to the Seychelles: how they were all there together in this one moment, the sky and the town under it all glowing with their presence, not transparently as at Chishti’s tomb, but full of color, stuffed with all the colors of the world. All the people of the world were one.

This holiness radiated outward from the Kaaba. Bistami moved with the line of humanity into the holiest mosque, and passed by the big smooth black stone, blacker than ebony or jet, black as the night sky without stars, like a boulder-shaped hole in reality. He felt his body and soul pulsing in the same rhythm as the line, as the world. Touching the black stone was like touching flesh. It seemed to revolve around him. The dream image of Akbar’s black eyes came to him and he shrugged them away, aware they were distractions out of his own mind, aware of Allah’s ban on images. The stone was all and it was just a stone, black reality itself, made solid by God. He kept his place in the line and felt the spirits of the people ahead of him lifting as they passed out of the square, as if they were climbing a stairway into heaven.

Dispersal; return to camp; the first sips of soup and coffee at sundown; all occurred in a silent cool evening under the evening star. Everyone at such peace. Washed clean inside. Looking around at all the faces, Bistami thought, Oh why don’t we live like this all the time? What is important enough to take us away from this moment? Firelit faces, starry night overhead, ripples of song or soft laughter, peace, peace: no one seemed to want to fall asleep, to end this moment and wake up the next day, back in the sensible world.

Akbar’s family and haj left in a caravan back to Jidda. Bistami went to the outskirts of town to see them off; Akbar’s wife and aunt said good-bye to him, waving from camelback. The rest were already intent on the long journey to Fatepur Sikri.

After that Bistami was alone in Mecca, a city of strangers. Most were leaving now, in caravan after caravan. It was a lugubrious, uncanny sight: hundreds of caravans, thousands of people, happy but deflated, their white robes packed away or revealed suddenly to be dusty, fringed at the foot with brown dirt. So many were leaving that it seemed the city was being abandoned before some approaching disaster, as perhaps had happened once or twice, in time of war or famine or plague.

But a week or two later the ordinary Mecca was revealed, a whitewashed dusty little town of a few thousand people. Many of them were clerics or scholars or Sufis or qadis or ulema, or heterodox refugees of one sort or another, claiming the sanctuary of the holy city. Most, however, were merchants and tradespeople. In the aftermath of the haj they looked exhausted, drained, almost stunned, it seemed, and inclined to disappear into their blank-walled compounds, leaving the remaining outsiders in town to fend for themselves for a month or two. For the remnant ulema and scholars, it was as if they were camping out in the empty heart of Islam, making it full by their own devotions, cooking over fires on the edges of town at dusk, trading for food with passing nomads. Many sang songs through most of the night.

The Persian-speaking group was big, and congregated nightly around fires of its khitta on the eastern edge of town, where the canals came in from the hills. Thus they were the first to experience the spate that burst onto the town after storms to the north, which they heard but never saw. A wall of muddy black water slammed down the canals and spread out through the streets, rolling palm trunks and boulders like weapons into the upper half of the town. Everything flooded after that, until even the Kaaba itself stood in water up to the silver ring that held it in place.

Bistami threw himself with great pleasure into the efforts to drain the waters, and then to clean up the town. After the experience of the light in Chishti’s tomb, and the supreme experience of the haj, there was little more he felt he could do in the mystic realm. He lived now in the aftermath of those events, and felt himself utterly changed; but what he wanted to do now was to read Persian poetry for an hour in the brief cool of the mornings, then work outside in the low hot winter sun in the afternoons. With the town broken and waist-deep in mud, there was a lot of work to be done. Pray, read, work, eat, pray, sleep; this was the pattern of a good day. Day after day passed in this satisfying round.

Then as the winter wore on, he began to study at a Sufi madressa established by scholars from the Maghrib, that western end of the world that was becoming more powerful, extending as it was both north into al-Andalus and Firanja, and south into the Sahel. Bistami and the others there read and discussed not just Rumi and Shams, but also the philosophers Ibn Sina and Ibn Rushd, and the ancient Greek Aristotle, and the historian Ibn Khaldun. The Maghribis in the madressa were not as interested in contesting points of doctrine as they were in exchanging new information about the world; they were full of stories of the reoccupation of al-Andalus and Firanja, and tales of the lost Frankish civilization. They were friendly to Bistami; they had no opinion of him one way or another; they thought of him as Persian, and so it was much more pleasant to be among them than with the Mughalis in the Timurid embassy, where he was regarded uneasily at best. Bistami saw that if his being stationed in Mecca was punishment in the form of exile from Akbar and Sind, then the other Mughalis assigned here had to wonder if they too were in disfavor, rather than honored for their religious devotion. Seeing Bistami reminded them of this possibility, and so he was shunned like a leper. He therefore spent more and more of his time at the Maghribi madressa, and out in the Persian-speaking khitta, now set a bit higher in the hills above the canals east of town.

The year in Mecca always oriented itself in time to the haj, in just the same way that Islam oriented itself in space to Mecca. As the months passed, all began to make their preparations, and as Ramadan approached, nothing else in the world mattered but the upcoming haj. Much of the effort involved simply feeding the masses that would descend on the town. A whole system had developed to accomplish this miraculous feat, astonishing in its size and efficiency, here on this out-of-the-way corner of a nearly lifeless desert peninsula. Though of course Aden and Yemen were rich, to the south below them. No doubt, Bistami thought as he walked by the pastures now filling up with sheep and goats, mulling over his readings in Ibn Khaldun, the system had grown with the growth of the haj itself. Which must have been rapid: Islam had exploded out of Arabia in the first century after the hegira, he was coming to understand. Al-Andalus had been Islamicized by the year 100, the far reaches of the Spice Islands by the year 200; the whole span of the known world had been converted, only two centuries after the Prophet had received the Word and spread it to the people of this little land in the middle. Ever since then people had been coming here in greater and greater numbers.

One day he and a few other young scholars went to Medina, walking all the way, reciting prayers as they went, to see Muhammad’s first mosque again. Past endless pens of sheep and goats, past cheese dairies, granaries, date palm groves; then into the outskirts of Medina, a sleepy, sandy, delapidated little settlement when the haj was not there to bring it alive. In one stand of thick ancient palms, the little whitewashed mosque hid in the shade, as polished as a pearl. Here the Prophet had preached during his exile, and taken down most of the verses of the Quran from Allah.

Bistami wandered the garden outside this holy place, trying to imagine how it had happened. Reading Khaldun had made him understand: these things had all happened. In the beginning, the Prophet had stood in this grove, speaking in the open air. Later he had leaned against a palm tree when he spoke, and some of his followers had suggested a chair. He had agreed to it only as long as it was low enough that there was no suggestion he was claiming any sort of privilege for himself. The Prophet, perfect man that he had been, was modest. He had agreed to the construction of a mosque where he taught, but for many years it had gone roofless; Muhammad had declared there was more important business for the faithful to accomplish first. And then they had made their return to Mecca, and the Prophet had led twenty-six military campaigns himself: the jihad. After that, how quickly the word had spread. Khaldun attributed this rapidity to a readiness in people for the next stage in civilization, and to the manifest truth of the Quran.

Bistami, troubled by something he could not pin down, wondered about this explanation. In India, civilizations had come and gone, come and gone. Islam itself had conquered India. But under the Mughals the ancient beliefs of the Indians endured, and Islam itself changed in its constant contact with them. This had become clearer to Bistami as he studied the pure religion in the madressa. Although Sufism itself was perhaps more than a simple return to the pure source. An advance, or (could one say it?) a clarification, even an improvement. An effort to bypass the ulemas. In any case, change. It did not seem that it could be prevented. Everything changed. As the Sufi Junnaiyd at the madressa said, the word of God came down to man as rain to soil, and the result was mud, not clear water. After the winter’s great flood, this image was particularly vivid and troubling. Islam, spreading over the world like a spate of mud, a mix of God and man; it did not seem very much like what had happened to him in the tomb of Chishti, or at the moment of the haj, when it seemed the Kaaba had revolved around him. But even his memory of those events was changing. Everything changed in this world.

Including Medina and Mecca, which grew in population rapidly as the haj approached, and shepherds poured into town with their flocks, tradesmen with their wares—clothing, traveling equipment to replace things broken or lost, religious scripts, mementos of the haj, and so on. In the final month of preparation the early pilgrims began to arrive, long strings of camels carrying dusty, happy travelers, their faces alight with the feeling Bistami remembered from the year before, a year which seemed to have gone so fast—and yet his own haj at the same time seemed as if it were on the far side of a great abyss in his mind. He could not call up in himself the feeling that he saw on their faces. He was no pilgrim this time, but a resident, and he found himself feeling some of the residents’ resentment, that his peaceful village, like a big madressa really, was swelling to a ridiculous engorgement, as if a great family of enthusiastic relatives had descended on them all at once. Not a happy way of thinking of it, and Bistami set himself guiltily to a full round of prayers, fasting, and aid of the influx, especially those exhausted or sick: leading them to khittas and finas and caravanserai and hostelries, throwing himself into a routine to make himself feel he was more in the spirit of the haj. But daily exposure to the ecstatic faces of the pilgrims reminded him how far he was from that. Their faces were alight with God. He saw how clearly faces revealed the soul, they were like windows into a deeper world.

So he hoped that his pleasure at greeting the pilgrims from Akbar’s court was obvious on his face. But Akbar himself had not come, nor any of his immediate family, and no one in the group looked at all happy to be there, or to see Bistami. The news from home was ominous. Akbar had become critical of his ulema. He received Hindu rajas, and listened sympathetically to their concerns. He had even begun openly to worship the sun, prostrating himself four times a day before a sacred fire, abstaining from meat, alcohol, and sexual intercourse. These were Hindu practices, and indeed on every Sunday he was initiating twelve of his amirs in his service. The neophytes placed their heads directly on Akbar’s feet during this ceremony, an extreme form of prostration known as sijdah, a form of submission to another human being that was blasphemous to Muslims. And he had not been willing to fund much of a pilgrimage; indeed, he had had to be convinced to send any at all. He had sent Shaikh Abdul Nabi and Malauna Abdulla as a way of exiling them, just as he had Bistami the year before. In short, he appeared to be falling away from the faith. Akbar, falling away from Islam!

And, Abdul Nabi told Bistami bluntly, many at the court blamed him, Bistami, for this change in Akbar. It was a matter of convenience only, Abdul Nabi assured him. “Blaming someone who is far away is safest for all, you see. But now they have it that you were sent to Mecca with the idea of reforming you. You were babbling about the light, the light, and you were sent away, and now Akbar is worshiping the sun like a Zoroastrian or some pagan from the ancient times.”

“So I can’t return,” Bistami said.

Abdul Nabi shook his head. “Not only that, but I judge that it isn’t even safe for you to stay here. If you do, the ulema may accuse you of heresy, and come and take you back for judgment. Or even judge you here.”

“You’re saying I should leave here?”

Abdul Nabi nodded, slowly and deeply. “Surely there are more interesting places for you than Mecca. A qadi like you can find good work to do, any place where the ruler is a Muslim. Nothing will happen during the haj, of course. But when it’s over…”

Bistami nodded and thanked the shaikh for his honesty.

He realized that he wanted to leave anyway. He didn’t want to stay in Mecca. He wanted to go back to Akbar, and the timeless hours in Chishti’s tomb, and live in that space forever; but if that was not possible, he would have to begin his tariqat again, and wander in search of his real life. He recalled what had happened to Shams when the disciples of Rumi got tired of Rumi’s infatuation with his friend. Shams had disappeared, never to be seen again, some said tied to rocks and thrown in a river.

If people in Fatepur Sikri thought that Akbar had found his Shams in Bistami—which struck Bistami as backward—but they had spent a lot of time together, more than seemed explicable; and no one else knew what had gone on between them in those meetings, how much it had been a matter of Akbar teaching the teacher. It is always the teacher who must learn the most, Bistami thought, or else nothing real has happened in the exchange.

The rest of that haj was strange. The crowds seemed huge, inhuman, possessed, a pestilence consuming hundreds of sheep a day, and all the ulema like shepherds, organizing this cannibalism. Of course one could not speak of these things, but only repeat some of the phrases that had burned their way into his soul so deeply, O he who is He, O he who is He, Allah the Merciful, the Compassionate. Why should I be afraid? God sets all in action. No doubt he was supposed to continue his tariqat until he found something more. After the haj one was supposed to move on.

The Maghribi scholars were the friendliest he knew, they exhibited the Sufi hospitality at its finest, as well as a keen curiosity about the world. He could go back up to Isfahan, of course, but something drew him westward. Clarified as he had been in the realm of light, he did not care to go back to the richness of the Iranian gardens. In the Quran the word for Paradise, and all of Muhammad’s words for describing Paradise, came out of Persian words; while the word for Hell, in the very same suras, came from Hebrew, a desert language. That was a sign. Bistami did not want Paradise. He wanted something he could not define, a human challenge of some indefinable kind. Say the human was a mix of material and divine, and that the divine soul lived on; there must then be some purpose to this travel through the days, some movement up toward higher realms of being, so that the Khaldunian model of cycling dynasties, moving endlessly from youthful vigor to lethargic bloated old age, had to be altered by the addition of reason to human affairs. Thus the notion of the cycle being in fact a rising gyre, in which the possibility of the next young dynasty beginning at a higher level than the last time around was acknowledged and made a goal. This was what he wanted to teach, this was what he wanted to learn. Westward, following the sun, he would find it, and all would be well.

6 Al-Andalus

Everywhere he went seemed the new center of the world. When he was young, Isfahan had seemed the capital of everywhere; then Gujarat, then Agra and Fatepur Sikri; then Mecca and the black stone of Abraham, the true heart of all. Now Cairo appeared to him the ultimate metropolis, impossibly ancient, dusty, and huge. The Mamluks walked through the crowded streets with their retinues in train, powerful men wearing feathered helmets, confident in their mastery of Cairo, Egypt, and most of the Levant. When Bistami saw them he usually followed for a while, as did many others, and he found himself both reminded of Akbar’s pomp, and struck by how different the Mamluks were, how they formed a jati that was brought into being anew with each generation. Nothing could be less imperial; there was no dynasty; and yet their control over the populace was even stronger than a dynasty’s. It could be that everything Khaldun had said about dynastic cycling was rendered irrelevant by this new system of governance, which had not existed in his time. Things changed, so that even the greatest historian of all could not speak the last word.

Thus the days in the great old city were exciting. But the Maghribi scholars were anxious to begin their long journey home, and so Bistami helped them prepare their caravan, and when they were ready, he joined them continuing westward on the road to Fez.

This part of the tariqat led them first north, to Alexandria. They led their camels to a caravanserai and went down to have a look at the historic harbor, with its long curving dock against the pale water of the Mediterranean. Looking at it Bistami was struck by the feeling one sometimes gets, that he had seen this place before. He waited for the sensation to pass, and followed the others on.

As the caravan moved through the Libyan desert, the talk at night around the fires was of the Mamluks, and of Suleiman the Magnificent, the Ottoman emperor who had recently died. Among his conquests had been the very coast they were now skirting, though there was no way to tell that, except for an extra measure of respect given to Ottoman officials in the towns and caravanserai they passed through. These people never bothered them, or put a tariff on their passing. Bistami saw that the world of the Sufis was, among many other things, a refuge from worldly power. In each region of the earth there were sultans and emperors, Suleimans and Akbars and Mamluks, all ostensibly Muslim, and yet worldly, powerful, capricious, dangerous. Most of these were in the Khaldunian state of late dynastic corruption. Then there were the Sufis. Bistami watched his fellow scholars around the fire in the evenings, intent on a point of doctrine, or the questionable isnad of a hadith, and what that meant, arguing with exaggerated punctilio and little debater’s jokes and flourishes, while a pot of thick hot coffee was poured with solemn attention into little glazed clay cups, all eyes gleaming with firelight and pleasure in the argument; and he thought, these are the Muslims who make Islam good. These are the men who have conquered the world, not the warriors. The armies could have done nothing without the word. Worldly but not powerful, devout but not pedantic (most of them, anyway); men interested in a direct relation to God, without any human authority’s intervention; a relation to God, and a fellowship among men.

One night the talk turned to al-Andalus, and Bistami listened with an extra measure of interest.

“It must be strange to reenter an empty land like that.”

“Fishermen have been living on the coast for a long time now, and Zott scavengers. The Zott and Armenians have moved inland as well.”

“Dangerous, I should think. The plague might return.”

“No one appears to be affected.”

“Khaldun says that the plague is an effect of overpopulation,” said Ibn Ezra, the chief scholar of Khaldun among them. “In his chapter on dynasties in ‘The Muqaddimah,’ forty-ninth section, he says that plagues result from corruption of the air caused by overpopulation, and the putrefaction and evil moistures that result from so many people living close together. The lungs are affected, and so disease is conveyed. He makes the ironical point that these things result from the early success of a dynasty, so that good government, kindness, safety, and light taxation lead to growth and thence to pestilence. He says ‘Therefore, science has made it clear that it is necessary to have empty spaces and waste regions interspersed between urban areas. This makes circulation of the air possible, and removes the corruption and putrefaction affecting the air after contact with living beings, and brings healthy air.’ If he is right, well—Firanja has been empty for a long time, and can be expected to be healthy again. No danger of plague should exist, until the time comes when the region is heavily populated once again. But that will be a long time from now.”

“It was God’s judgment,” one of the other scholars said. “The Christians were exterminated by Allah for their persecution of Muslims, and Jews too.”

“But al-Andalus was Muslim at the time of the plague,” Ibn Ezra pointed out. “Granada was Muslim, the whole south of Iberia was Muslim. And they too died. As did the Muslims in the Balkans, or so says al-Gazzabi in his history of the Greeks. It was a matter of location, it seems. Firanja was stricken, perhaps from overpopulation as Khaldun says, perhaps from its many moist valleys, which held the bad air. No one can say.”

“It was Christianity that died. They were people of the Book, but they persecuted Islam. They made war on Islam for centuries, and tortured every Muslim prisoner to death. Allah put an end to them.”

“But al-Andalus died too,” Ibn Ezra repeated. “And there were Christians in the Maghrib and in Ethiopia that survived, and in Armenia. There are still little pockets of Christians in these places, living in the mountains.” He shook his head. “I don’t think we know what happened. Allah judges.”

“That’s what I’m saying.”

“So al-Andalus is reinhabited,” Bistami said.

“Yes.”

“And Sufis are there?”

“Of course. Sufis are everywhere. In al-Andalus they lead the way, I have heard. They go north into still empty land, in Allah’s name, exploring and exorcising the past. Proving the way is safe. Al-Andalus was a great garden in its time. Good land, and empty.”

Bistami looked in the bottom of his clay cup, feeling the sparks in him of those two words struck together. Good and empty, empty and good. This was how he had felt in Mecca.

Bistami felt that he was now cast loose, a wandering Sufi dervish, homeless and searching. On his tariqat. He kept himself as clean as the dusty, sandy Maghrib would allow, remembering the words of Muhammad concerning holy behavior: one came to prosper after washing hands and face, and eating no garlic. He fasted often, and found himself growing light in the air, his vision altering each day, from the glassy clarity of dawn, to the blurred yellow haze of midday, to the semitransparency of sunset, when glories of gold and bronze haloed every tree and rock and skyline. The towns of the Maghrib were small and handsome, often set out on hillsides, and planted with palms and exotic trees that made each town and rooftop a garden. Houses were square whitewashed blocks in nests of palm, with rooftop patios and interior courtyard gardens, cool and green and watered by fountains. Towns had been set where water leaked out of the hillsides, and the biggest town turned out to have the biggest springs: Fez, the end of their caravan.

Bistami stayed at the Sufi lodge in Fez, and then he and Ibn Ezra traveled by camel north to Ceuta, and paid for a crossing by ship to Málaga. The ships here were rounder than in the Persian Sea, with pronounced high-ended keels, smaller sails, and rudders under their centerposts. The crossing of the narrow strait at the west end of the Mediterranean was rough, but they could see al-Andalus from the moment they left Ceuta, and the strong current pouring into the Mediterranean, combined with a westerly gale, bounced them over the waves at a great rate.

The coast of al-Andalus proved cliffy, and above one indentation towered a huge rock mountain. Beyond it the coast curved to the north, and they took the offshore breezes in their little sails and heeled in toward Málaga. Inland they could see a distant white mountain range. Bistami, exalted by the dramatic sea crossing, was reminded of the view of the Zagros Mountains from Isfahan, and suddenly his heart ached for a home he had almost forgotten. But here and now, bouncing on the wild ocean of this new life, he was about to set foot on a new land.

Al-Andalus was a garden everywhere, green trees foresting the slopes of the hills, snowy mountains to the north, and on the coastal plains great sweeps of grain, and groves of round green trees bearing round orange fruit, lovely to taste. The sky dawned blue every day, and as the sun crossed the sky it was warm in the sun, cool in the shade.

Málaga was a fine little city, with a rough stone fort and a big ancient mosque filling the city center. Wide tree-shaded streets rayed away from the mosque, which was being refurbished, up to the hills, and from their slopes one looked out at the blue Mediterranean, sheeting off to the Maghrib’s dry bony mountains, over the water to the south. Al-Andalus!

Bistami and Ibn Ezra found a little lodge like the Persian ribats, in a kind of village at the edge of the town, between fields and orange groves. Sufis grew the oranges, and cultivated grapevines. Bistami went out in the mornings to help them work. Most of their time was spent in the wheat field stretching off to the west. The oranges were easy: “We trim the trees to keep the fruit off the ground,” a ribat worker named Zeya told Bistami and Ibn Ezra one morning, “as you see. I’ve been trying various degrees of thinning, to see what the fruit does, but the trees left alone develop a shape like an olive, and if you keep branches off the ground at the bottom, then the fruit can’t pick up any ground-based rots. They are fairly susceptible to diseases, I must say. The fruit gets green or black molds, the leaves go brittle or white or brown. The bark crusts over with orange or white fungi. Ladybugs help, and smoking with smudge pots, which is what we do to save the trees during frosts.”

“It gets that cold here?”

“Sometimes, in the late winter, yes. It’s not paradise here you know.”

“I was thinking it was.”

The call of the muezzin came from the house, and they pulled out their prayer mats and knelt to the southeast, a direction Bistami had still not gotten used to. Afterward Zeya led them to a stone stove holding a fire, and brewed them a cup of coffee.

“It does not seem like new land,” Bistami noted, sipping blissfully.

“It was Muslim land for many centuries. The Umayyads ruled here from the second century until the Christians took the region, and the plague killed them.”

“People of the Book,” Bistami murmured.

“Yes, but corrupt. Cruel taskmasters to free men or slave. And always fighting among themselves. It was chaos then.”

“As in Arabia before the Prophet.”

“Yes, exactly the same, even though the Christians had the idea of one God. They were strange that way, contentious. They even tried to split God Himself in three. So Islam prevailed. But then after a few centuries, life here was so easy that even Muslims grew corrupt. The Umayyads were defeated, and no strong dynasty replaced them. The taifa states numbered more than thirty, and they fought constantly. Then the Almoravids invaded from Africa, in the fifth century, and in the sixth century the Almohads from Morocco ousted the Almoravids, and made Seville their capital. The Christians meanwhile had continued to fight in the north, in Catalonia and over the mountains in Navarre and Firanja, and they came back and retook most of al-Andalus. But never the southernmost part, the Nasrid kingdom, including Málaga and Granada. These lands remained Islam to the very end.”

“And yet they too died,” Bistami said.

“Yes. Everyone died.”

“I don’t understand that. They say Allah punished the infidels for their persecution of Islam, but if that were true, why would He kill the Muslims here as well?”

Ibn Ezra shook his head decisively. “Allah did not kill the Christians. People are wrong about that.”

Bistami said, “But even if He didn’t, He allowed it to happen. He didn’t protect them. And yet Allah is all-powerful. I don’t understand that.”

Ibn Ezra shrugged. “Well, this is another manifestation of the problem of death and evil in the world. This world is not Paradise, and Allah, when he created us, gave us free will. This world is ours to prove ourselves devout or corrupt. This is very clear, because even more than Allah is powerful, He is good. He cannot create evil. And yet evil exists in the world. So clearly we create that ourselves. Therefore our destinies cannot have been fixed or predetermined by Allah. We must work them out for ourselves. And sometimes we create evil, out of fear, or greed, or laziness. That’s our fault.”

“But the plague,” Zeya said.

“That wasn’t us or Allah. Look, all living things eat each other, and often the smaller eats the larger. The dynasty ends and the little warriors eat it up. This fungus, for instance, eating this fallen orange. The fungus is like a field of a million small mushrooms. I can show you in a magnifying glass I have. And see the orange—it’s a blood orange, see, dark red inside. You people must have bred them for that, right?”

Zeya nodded.

“You get hybrids, like mules. Then with plants you can do it again, and again, until you’ve bred a new orange. That’s just how Allah made us. The two parents mix their stock in the offspring. All traits are mixed, I suspect, though only some show. Some are carried unseen to a later generation. Anyway, say some mold like this, in their bread, or even living in their water, bred with another mold, and made some new creature that was poison. It spread, and being stronger than its parents, supplanted them. And so the people died. Maybe it drifted through the air like pollen in spring, maybe it lived inside the people it poisoned for weeks before it killed them, and passed on their breath, or at the touch. And then it was such a poison that in the end it killed off all its food, in effect, and then died out itself, for lack of sustenance.”

Bistami stared at the segments of blood-red orange still in his hand, feeling faintly sick. The red-fleshed segments were like wedges of bright death.

Zeya laughed at him. “Come now, eat up! We can’t live like angels! All that happened over a hundred years ago, and people have been coming back and living here without any problems for a long time. Now we are as free from the plague as any other country. I’ve lived here all my life. So finish your orange.”

Bistami did so, thinking it over. “So it was all an accident.”

“Yes,” Ibn Ezra said. “I think so.”

“It doesn’t seem like Allah should allow it.”

“All living things are free in this world. Besides, it could be that it was not entirely accidental. The Quran teaches us to live cleanly, and it could be that the Christians ignored the laws at their peril. They ate pigs, they kept dogs, they drank wine—”

“We here don’t believe that wine was the problem,” Zeya said with another laugh.

Ibn Ezra smiled. “But if they lived in their sewage, among the tanneries and shambles, and ate pork and touched dogs, and killed each other like the barbarians of the east, and tortured each other, and had their way with boys, and left the dead bodies of their enemies hanging at the gates—and they did all these things—then perhaps they made their own plague, do you see what I mean? They created the conditions that killed them.”

“But were they so different from anyone else?” Bistami asked, thinking of the crowds and filth in Cairo, or Agra.

Ibn Ezra shrugged. “They were cruel.”

“More cruel than Temur the Lame?”

“I don’t know.”

“Did they conquer cities and put every person to the sword?”

“I don’t know.”

“The Mongols did that, and they became Muslim. Temur was a Muslim.”

“So they changed their ways. I don’t know. But the Christians were torturers. Maybe it mattered, maybe it didn’t. All living things are free. Anyway they’re gone now, and we’re here.”

“And healthy, by and large,” said Zeya. “Of course sometimes a child catches a fever and dies. And everyone dies eventually. But it’s a sweet life here, while it lasts.”

When the orange and grape harvests were done, the days grew short. Bistami had not felt such a chill in the air since his years in Isfahan. And yet in this very season, during the coldest nights, the orange trees blossomed, near the shortest day of the year: little white flowers all over the green round trees, fragrant with a smell reminiscent of their taste but heavier, and very sweet, almost cloying.

Through this giddy air came a cavalry, leading a long caravan of camels and mules, and then, in the evening, slaves on foot.

This was the sultan of Carmona, near Sevilla, someone said; one Mawji Darya, and his traveling party. The sultan was the youngest son of the new caliph, and had suffered a disagreement with his elder brothers in Sevilla and al-Majriti, and had therefore decamped with his retainers with the intent of moving north across the Pyrenees, and establishing a new city. His father and elder brothers ruled in Córdoba, Sevilla, and Toledo, and he planned to lead his group out of al-Andalus, up the Mediterranean coast on the old road to Valencia, then inland to Saragossa, where there was a bridge, he said, over the river Ebro.

At the outset of this “hegira of the heart,” as the sultan called it, a dozen or more like-minded nobles and their people had joined him. And it became clear as the motley crowd filed into the ribat yard, that along with the young Sevillan nobles’ families, retainers, friends, and dependents, they had been joined by many more followers from the villages and farms that had sprung up in the countryside between Sevilla and Málaga. Sufi dervishes, Armenian traders, Turks, Jews, Zott, Berbers, all were represented; it was like a trade caravan, or some dream haj in which all the wrong people were on their way to Mecca, all the people who would never become hajis. Here there were a pair of dwarves on ponies, behind them a group of one-handed and handless ex-criminals, then some musicians, then two men dressed as women; this caravan had them all.

The sultan spread a broad hand. “They are calling us the ‘Caravan of Fools,’ like the Ship of Fools. We will sail over the mountains to a land of grace, and be fools for God. God will guide us.”

From among them appeared his sultana, riding a horse. She dismounted from it without regard for the big servant there to help her down, and joined the sultan as he was greeted by Zeya and the other members of the ribat. “My wife, the Sultana Katima, originally from al-Majriti.”

The Castilian woman was bareheaded, short and slender armed, her riding skirts fringed with gold that swung through the dust, her long black hair swept back in a glossy curve from her forehead, held by a string of pearls. Her face was slender and her eyes a pale blue, making her gaze odd. She smiled at Bistami when they were introduced, and later smiled at the farm, and the waterwheels, and the orange groves. Small things amused her that no one else saw. The men there began to do what they could to accommodate the sultan and stay by his side, so that they could remain in her presence. Bistami did it himself. She looked at him and said something inconsequential, her voice like a Turkish oboe, nasal and low, and hearing it he remembered what the vision of Akbar had said to him during his immersion in the light: the one you seek is elsewhere.

Ibn Ezra bowed low when he was introduced. “I am a Sufi pilgrim, Sultana, and a humble student of the world. I intend to make the haj, but I like the idea of your hegira very much; I would like to see Firanja for myself. I study the ancient ruins.”

“Of the Christians?” the sultana asked, fixing him with her look.

“Yes, but also of the Romans, who came before them, in the time before the Prophet. Perhaps I can make my haj the wrong way around.”

“All are welcome who have the spirit to join us,” she said.

Bistami cleared his throat, and Ibn Ezra smoothly brought him forward. “This is my young friend Bistami, a Sufi scholar from Sind, who has been on the haj and is now continuing his studies in the west.”

Sultana Katima looked at him closely for the first time, and stopped short, visibly startled. Her thick black eyebrows knitted together in concentration over her pale eyes, and suddenly Bistami saw that it was the birdwing mark that had crossed the forehead of his tiger, the mark that had always made the tigress look faintly surprised or perplexed, as it did with this woman.

“I am happy to meet you, Bistami. We always look forward to learning from scholars of the Quran.”

Later that same day she sent a slave asking him to join her for a private audience, in the garden designated hers for the duration of her stay. Bistami went, plucking helplessly at his robe, grubby beyond all aid.

It was sunset. Clouds shone in the western sky between the black silhouettes of cypresses. Lemon blossoms lent the air their fragrance, and seeing her standing alone by a gurgling fountain, Bistami felt as if he had entered a place he had been before; but everything here was turned around. Different in particulars, but more than anything, strangely, terribly familiar, like the feeling that had come over him briefly in Alexandria. She was not like Akbar, nor even the tigress, not really. But this had happened before. He became aware of his breathing.

She saw him standing under the arabesque arches of the entryway, and beckoned him to her. She smiled at him.

“I hope you do not mind my not wearing the veil. I will never do so. The Quran says nothing about the veil, except for an injunction to veil the bosom, which is obvious. As for the face, Muhammad’s wife Khadijeh never wore the veil, nor did the other wives of the Prophet after Khadijeh died. While she lived he was faithful to her alone, you know. If she had not died he never would have married any other woman, he says so himself. So if she didn’t wear the veil, I feel no need to. The veil began when the caliphs in Baghdad wore them, to separate themselves from the masses, and from any khajirites who might be among them. It was a sign of power in danger, a sign of fear. Certainly women are dangerous to men, but not so much that they need hide their faces. Indeed, when you see faces you understand better that we are all the same before God. No veils between us and God, this is what each Muslim has gained by his submission, don’t you agree?”

“I do,” Bistami said, still shocked by the sense of alreadyness that had overcome him. Even the shapes of the clouds in the west were familiar at this moment.

“And I don’t believe there is any sanction given in the Quran for the husband to beat his wife, do you? The only possible suggestion of such a thing is Sura 4:34, ‘As to those women on whose part you fear disloyalty and ill-conduct, admonish them, next refuse to share their beds’—how horrible that would be—‘last beat them lightly.’ Daraba, not darraba, which is really the word ‘to beat’ after all. Daraba is ‘nudge,’ or even ‘stroke with a feather,’ as in the poem, or even to provoke while lovemaking, you know, daraba, daraba. Muhammad made it very clear.”

Shocked, Bistami managed to nod. He could feel that there was an astonished look on his face.

She saw it and smiled. “This is what the Quran tells me,” she said. “Sura 2:223 says that ‘your wife is as your farm to you, so treat her as you would your farm.’ The ulema have quoted this as if it meant you could treat women like the dirt under your feet, but these clerics, who stand as unneeded intercessors between us and God, are never farmers, and farmers read the Quran right, and see their wives are their food, their drink, their work, the bed they lie on at night, the very ground under their feet! Yes, of course you treat your wife as the ground under your feet! Give thanks to God for giving us the sacred Quran and all its wisdom.”

“Thanks to God,” Bistami said.

She looked at him and laughed out loud. “You think I am forward.”

“Not at all.”

“Oh, but I am forward, believe me. I am very forward. But don’t you agree with my reading of the holy Quran? Have I not cleaved to its every phrase, as a good wife cleaves to her husband’s every move?”

“So it seems to me, Sultana. I think the Quran… insists everywhere that all are equal before God. And thus, men and women. There are hierarchies in all things, but each member of the hierarchy has equal status before God, and this is the only status that really matters. So the high and the low in station here on Earth must have consideration for each other, as fellow members of the faith. Brothers and sisters in belief, no matter caliph or slave. And thus all the Quranic rules concerning treatment of others. Constraints, even of an emperor over his lowest slave, or the enemy he has captured.”

“The Christians’ holy book had very few rules,” she said obliquely, following her own train of thought.

“I didn’t know that. You have read it?”

“An emperor over his slave, you said. There are rules even for that. But still, no one would choose to be a slave rather than an emperor. And the ulema have twisted the Quran with all their hadith, always twisting it toward those in power, until the message Muhammad laid out so clearly, straight from God, has been reversed, and good Muslim women are made like slaves again, or worse. Not cattle quite, but not like men either. Wife to husband portrayed as slave to emperor, rather than feminine to masculine, power to power, equal to equal.”

By now her cheeks were flushed, and he could see their color even in the dusk’s poor light. Her eyes were so pale they seemed like little pools of the twilit sky. When servants brought out torches her blush was enhanced, and now there was a glitter in her pale eyes, the torchfire dancing in those windows to her soul. There was a lot of anger in there, hot anger, but Bistami had never seen such beauty. He stared at her, trying to fix the moment in his memory, thinking You will never forget this, never forget this!

After the silence had gone on a while, Bistami realized that if he did not say something, the conversation might come to an end.

“The Sufis,” he said, “speak often of the direct approach to God. It is a matter of illumination; I have… I have experienced it myself, in a time of extremity. To the senses it is like being filled with light; for the soul it is the state of baraka, divine grace. And this is available to all equally.”

“But do the Sufis mean women when they say ‘all’?”

He thought it over. Sufis were men, it was true. They formed brotherhoods, they traveled alone and stayed in ribat or zawiya, the lodges where there were no women, nor women’s quarters; if they were married they were Sufis, and their wives were wives of Sufis.

“It depends where you are,” he temporized, “and which Sufi teacher you follow.”

She looked at him with a small smile, and he realized he had made a move without knowing he had done it, in this game to stay near her.

“But the Sufi teacher could not be a woman,” she said.

“Well, no. They sometimes lead the prayers.”

“And a woman could never lead prayers.”

“Well,” Bistami said, shocked. “I have never heard of such a thing happening.”

“Just as a man has never given birth.”

“Exactly.” Feeling relieved.

“But men cannot give birth,” she pointed out. “While women could very easily lead prayers. Within the harem I lead them every day.”

Bistami didn’t know what to say. He was still surprised at the idea.

“And mothers always instruct their children what to pray.”

“Yes, that’s true.”

“The Arabs before Muhammad worshiped goddesses, you know.”

“Idols.”

“But the idea was there. Women are powers in the realm of the soul.”

“Yes.”

“And as above, so below. This is true in everything.”

And she stepped toward him, suddenly, and put her hand to his bare arm.

“Yes,” he said.

“We need scholars of the Quran to come north with us, to help us to clear the Quran of these webs obscuring it, and to teach us about illumination. Will you come with us? Will you do that?”

“Yes.”

7 The Caravan of Fools

Sultan Mawji Darya was almost as handsome and gracious as his wife, and just as interested in talking about his ideas, which often returned to the topic of “the convivencia.” Ibn Ezra informed Bistami that this was the current enthusiasm among some of the young nobles of al-Andalus: to re-create the golden age of the Umayyad caliphate of the sixth century, when Muslim rulers had allowed the Christians and Jews among them to flourish, and all together had created the beautiful civilization that had been al-Andalus before the Inquisition and the plague.

As the caravan in its ragged glory rode out of Málaga, Ibn Ezra told Bistami more about this period, which Khaldun had treated only very briefly, and the scholars of Mecca and Cairo not at all. The Andalusi Jews in particular had flourished, translating a great many ancient Greek texts into Arabic, with commentaries of their own, and also making original investigations in medicine and astronomy. Andalusi Muslim scholars had then used what they learned of Greek logic, chiefly Aristotle, to defend all the tenets of Islam with the full force of reason, Ibn Sina and Ibn Rashd being the two most important of these. Ibn Ezra was full of praise for the work of these men. “I hope to extend it in my own small way, God willing, with a particular application to nature and to the ruins of the past.”

They fell back into the rhythms of caravan, known to them all. Dawn: stoke the campfires, brew the coffee, feed the camels. Pack and load, get the camels moving. Their column stretched out more than a league, with various groups falling behind, catching up, stopping, starting; mostly moving slowly along. Afternoon: into camp or caravanserai, though as they went farther north they seldom found anything but deserted ruins, and even the road was nearly gone, overgrown by fully mature trees, as thick-trunked as barrels.

The beautiful land they crossed was stitched by mountain ridges, between which stood high, broad plateaus. Crossing them, Bistami felt they had traveled up into a higher space, where sunsets threw long shadows over a vast, dark, windy world. Once when a last shard of sunset light shot under dark lowering clouds, Bistami heard from somewhere in their camp a musician playing a Turkish oboe, carving in the air a long plaintive melody that wound on and on, the song of the dusky plateau’s own voice or soul, it seemed. The sultana stood at the edge of camp, listening with him, her fine head turned like a hawk’s as she watched the sun descend. It dropped at the very speed of time itself. There was no need to speak in this singing world, so huge, so knotted; no human mind could ever comprehend it, even the music only touched the hem of it, and even that strand they failed to understand—they only felt it. The universal whole was beyond them.

And yet; and yet; sometimes, as at this moment, at dusk, in the wind, we catch, with a sixth sense we don’t know we have, glimpses of that larger world—vast shapes of cosmic significance, a sense of everything holy to dimensions beyond sense or thought or even feeling—this visible world of ours, lit from within, stuffed vibrant with reality.

The sultana stirred. The stars were shining in the indigo sky. She went to one of the fires. She had chosen him as their qadi, Bistami realized, to give herself more room for her own ideas. A community like theirs needed a Sufi teacher rather than a mere scholar. She had been a studious girl, people said, and had suffered fits about three years before. Now she was changed.

Well, it would become clearer as it happened. Meanwhile, the sultana; the sound of the oboe; this vast plateau. These things only happen once. The force of this sensation struck him just as strongly as the feel of alreadyness had in the ribat garden.

Just as the Andalusi plateaus stood high under the sun, its rivers were likewise deep in ravines, like the wadi of the Maghrib, but always running. The rivers were also long, and crossing them was no easy matter. The town of Saragossa had grown in the past because of its great stone bridge, which spanned one of the biggest of these rivers, called the Ebro. Now the town was still substantially abandoned, with only some road merchants and vendors and shepherds clustered around the bridge, in stone buildings that looked as if they had been built by the bridge itself, in its sleep. The rest of the town was gone, overgrown by pine trees and shrubbery.

But the bridge remained. It was made of dressed stones, big squarish blocks worn so smooth they appeared beveled, though they eventually met in lines that would not admit a coin or even a fingernail. The foundations on each bank were squat massive stone towers, resting on bedrock, Ibn Ezra said. He studied them with great interest as the backed-up caravan crossed it and set camp on the other side. Bistami looked at his drawing of it. “Beautiful, isn’t it? Like an equation. Seven semicircular arches, with a big one in the middle, over the deep part of the stream. Every Roman bridge I’ve seen is very nicely fitted to the site. Almost always they use semicircular arches, which make for strength, although they don’t cover much distance, so they needed a lot of them. And always ashlar, those are the squared stones. So they sit squarely on each other, and nothing ever moves them. There’s nothing tricky about it. We could do it ourselves, if we took the time and trouble. The only real problem is protecting the foundations from floods. I’ve seen some done really well, with iron-tipped piles driven into the river bottom. But if anything’s going to go, it’s the foundations. When they tried to do those quicker, with a big weight of rock, they dammed the water, and increased its force against what they put in.”

“Where I come from bridges are washed out all the time,” Bistami said. “People just build another one.”

“Yes, but this is so much more elegant. I wonder if they put any of this down on paper. I haven’t seen any books of theirs. The libraries left behind here are terrible, all account books, with the occasional bit of pornography. If there was ever anything more it’s been burned to start fires. Anyway, the stones tell the story. See, the stones were cut so well there was no need for mortar. The iron pegs you see sticking out were probably used to anchor scaffolding.”

“The Mughals build well in Sind,” Bistami said, thinking of the perfect joints in Chishti’s tomb. “But mostly the temples and forts. The bridges are usually bamboo, set in piles of stone.”

Ibn nodded. “You see a lot of that. But maybe this river doesn’t flood as much. It seems like dry country.”

In the evening Ibn Ezra showed them a little mock-up of the hoists the Romans must have used to move the great stones: stick tripods, string ropes. The sultan and sultana were his principal audience, but many others watched too, while others wandered in and out of the torchlight. These people asked Ibn Ezra questions, they made comments; they stuck around when the sultan’s calvary head, Sharif Jalil, came into the circle with two of his horsemen holding between them a third, who had been accused of theft, apparently not for the first time. As the sultan discussed his case with Sharif, Bistami gathered that the accused man had an unsavory reputation, for reasons known to them but left unsaid—an interest in boys perhaps. Apprehension very like dread filled Bistami, recalling scenes from Fatepur Sikri; strict sharia called for thieves’ hands to be cut off, and sodomy, the infamous vice of the Christian crusaders, was punishable by death.

But Mawji Darya merely strode up to the man and yanked him down by the ear, as if chastising a child. “You want for nothing with us. You joined us in Málaga, and need only work honestly to be part of our city.”

The sultana nodded at this.

“If we wanted to, we would have the right to punish you in ways you would not like at all. Go talk to our handless penitents if you doubt me! Or we could simply leave you behind, and see how you fare with the locals. The Zott don’t like anyone but themselves doing things like this. They would dispose of you quickly. I tell you now, this will happen if Sharif brings you before me again. You will be cast out of your family. Believe me”—he glanced significantly toward his wife—“you would regret that.”

The man blubbered something submissive (he was drunk, Bistami saw) and was hauled away. The sultan told Ibn Ezra to continue his exposition on Roman bridges.

Later Bistami joined the sultana in the big royal tent, and remarked on the general openness of their court.

“No veils,” Katima said sharply. “Not the izar nor the hijab, the veil that kept the caliph from the people. The hijab was the first step on the road to the despotism of the caliph. Muhammad was never like that, never. He made the first mosque an assembly of friends. Everyone had access to him, and everyone spoke their minds. It could have stayed like that, and the mosque become the place of… of a different way. With women and men both speaking. This was what Muhammad began, and who are we to change it? Why follow the ways of those who build barriers, who turned into despots? Muhammad wanted group feeling to lead, and the person in charge to be no more than a hakam, an arbiter. This was the title he loved the most and was most proud of, did you know that?”

“Yes.”

“But when he was gone to heaven, Muawiya established the caliphate, and put guards in the mosques to protect himself, and it has been tyranny ever since. Islam changed from submission to subjugation, and women were banned from the mosques and from their rightful place. It’s a travesty of Islam!”

She was red-cheeked, vibrant with suppressed emotion. Bistami had never seen such fervor and beauty together in one face, and he could hardly think; or, he was full of thought on several levels at once, so that focus on any one stream of ideas left him fluttering in all the others, restless and inclined to stop following that tributary; inclined merely to let all rivers of thought roll at once.

“Yes,” he said.

She stalked away toward the next fire, squatted down all at once in a fluff of skirts, in the group of handless and one-handed men. They greeted her cheerfully and offered her one of their cups, and she drank deeply, then put it down and said, “Come on then, it’s time, you’re looking ratty again.” They pulled out a stool, she sat on it, and one of them kneeled before her, his broad back to her. She took the offered comb and a vial of oil, and began to work the comb through the man’s long tangled hair. The motley crew of their ship of fools settled in around her contentedly.

North of the Ebro the caravan stopped growing. There were fewer towns on the old road to the north, and they were smaller, composed of recent Maghribi settlers, Berbers who had sailed straight across from Algiers and even Tunis. They were growing barley and cucumbers, and pasturing sheep and goats in the long fertile valleys with their rocky ridgelines, not far inland from the Mediterranean. Catalonia, this had been called, very fine land, heavily forested on the hills. They had left behind the taifa kingdoms to the south, and the people here were content; they felt no need to follow a dispossessed Sufi sultan and his motley caravan, over the Pyrenees and into wild Firanja. And in any case, as Ibn Ezra pointed out, the caravan did not boast food enough to feed many more dependents, nor the gold or money to buy more food than they already did from the villages they passed.

So they continued on the old road, and at the head of a long narrowing valley they found themselves on a broad, dry, rocky plateau, leading up to the forested flanks of a range of mountains, formed of rock darker than the rock of the Himalaya. The old road wound up the flattest part of the tilted plateau, by the side of a gravelly streambed almost devoid of water. Farther along it followed a cut in the hills, just above the bed of this small stream, wandering up into mountains that grew rockier and taller. Now when they camped at night they met no one at all, but bedded down in tents or under the stars, sleeping to the sound of the wind in the trees, and the clattering brooks, and the shifting horses against their harness lines. Eventually the road wound up among rocks, a flat way leading through a rockbound pass, then across a mountain meadow among the peaks, then up through another tight pass, flanked by granite battlements; and then down at last. Compared to Khyber Pass it was not much of a struggle, Bistami thought, but many in the caravan were shivering and afraid.

On the other side of the pass, rock slides had buried the old road repeatedly, and each time the road became a mere foot trail, switchbacking at sharp angles across the rock slides. These were hard going, and the sultana often got off her horse and walked, leading her women with no tolerance for ineptitude or complaint. Indeed she had a sharp tongue when she was annoyed, sharp and scornful.

Ibn Ezra inspected the roads every evening when they stopped, and the rock slides too when they passed them, making drawings of any exposed roadbeds, coping stones, or drainage ditches. “It’s classic Roman,” he said one evening by the fire as they ate roast mutton. “They knitted all the land around the Mediterranean with these roads. I wonder if this was their main route over the Pyrenees. I don’t suppose so, it’s so far to the west. It will lead us to the western ocean rather than the Mediterranean. But perhaps it’s the easiest pass. It’s hard to believe this is not the main road, it’s so big.”

“Perhaps they’re all that way,” said the sultana.

“Possibly. They may have used things like these carts the people have found, so they needed their roads to be wider than ours. Camels, of course, need no road at all. Or this may be their main road after all. It may be the road Hannibal used on his way to attack Rome, with his army of Carthaginians and their elephants! I have seen those ruins, north of Tunis. It was a very great city. But Hannibal lost and Carthage lost, and the Romans pulled their city down and sowed salt in the fields, and the Maghrib dried up. No more Carthage.”

“So elephants may have walked this road,” the sultana said. The sultan looked down at the track, shaking his head in wonder. These were the kinds of things the two of them liked to know.

Coming down out of the mountains, they found themselves in a colder land. The midday sun cleared the peaks of the Pyrenees, but only just. The land was flat and gray, and often swathed in ground mist. The ocean lay to the west, gray and cold and wild with high surf.

The caravan came to a river that emptied into this western sea, flanked by the ruins of an ancient city. On the outskirts of the ruins stood some modest new buildings, fishermen’s shacks they seemed, on each side of a newly built wooden bridge.

“Look how much less skillful we are than the Romans,” Ibn Ezra said, but hurried over to look at the new work anyway.

He came back. “I believe this was a city called Bayonne. There’s an inscription on the remaining bridge tower over there. The maps indicate there was a bigger city to the north, called Bordeaux. Water’s Edge.”

The sultan shook his head. “We’ve come far enough. This will do. Over the mountains, but yet only a moderate journey back to al-Andalus. That’s just what I want. We’ll settle here.”

Sultana Katima nodded, and the caravan began the long process of settling in.

8 Baraka

In general, they built upstream from the ruins of the ancient town, scaveng ing stone and beams until very little of the old buildings remained, except for the church, a big stone barn of a structure, stripped of all idols and images. It was not a beautiful structure compared to the mosques of the civilized world, a rude squat rectangular thing, but it was big, and situated on a prominence overlooking a turn in the river. So after discussion among all the members of the caravan, they decided to make it their grand or Friday mosque.

Modifications began immediately. This project became Bistami’s responsibility, and he spent a lot of time with Ibn Ezra, describing what he remembered of the Chishti shrine and the other great buildings of Akbar’s empire, poring over Ibn Ezra’s drawings to see what might be done to make the old church more mosquelike. They settled on a plan to tear the roof off the old structure, which in any case was showing the sky in many places, and to keep the walls as the interior buttressing of a circular or rather egg-shaped mosque, with a dome. The sultana wanted the prayer courtyard to open onto a larger city square, to indicate the all-embracing quality of their version of Islam, and Bistami did what he could to oblige her, despite signs that it would rain often in this region, and snow perhaps in the winter. It wasn’t important; the place of worship would continue out from the grand mosque into a plaza and then the city at large, and by extension, the whole world.

Ibn Ezra happily designed scaffolding, hods, carts, braces, buttressing, cement, and so on, and he determined by the stars and such maps as they had the direction of Mecca, which would be indicated not only by the usual signs, but also by the orientation of the mosque itself. The rest of the town moved in toward the grand mosque, all the old ruins removed and used for new construction as people settled closer and closer. The scattering of Armenians and Zott who had been living in the ruins before their arrival either joined the community, or moved off to the north.

“We should save room near the mosque for a madressa,” Ibn Ezra said, “before the town fills this whole district.”

Sultan Mawji thought this was a good idea, and he ordered those who had settled next to the mosque while working on it to move. Some of the workers objected to this, and then refused outright. In a meeting the sultan lost his temper and threatened this group with expulsion from the town, though the fact was he commanded only a very small personal bodyguard, barely enough to defend himself, in Bistami’s opinion. Bistami recalled the giant cavalries of Akbar, the Mamluks’ soldiers; nothing like that here for the sultan, who now faced a mere dozen or two sullen recalcitrants, and yet could do nothing with them. And the open tradition of the caravan, the feel of it, was in danger.

But Sultana Katima rode up on her Arabian mare, and slid down from it and went to the sultan’s side. She put her hand to his arm, said something just to him. He looked startled, thinking fast. The sultana shot a fierce glance at the uncooperative squatters, such a bitter rebuke that Bistami shuddered; not for the world would he risk such a glance from her. And indeed the miscreants paled and looked down in shame.

She said, “Muhammad told us that learning is God’s great hope for humanity. The mosque is the heart of learning, the Quran’s home. The madressa is an extension of the mosque. It must be so in any Muslim community, to know God more completely. And so it will be here. Of course.”

She then led her husband away from the place, to the palace on the other side of the city’s old bridge. In the middle of the night the sultan’s guards returned with swords drawn and pikes at the ready, to rouse the squatters and send them off; but the area was already deserted.

Ibn Ezra nodded with relief when he heard the news. “In the future we must plan ahead well enough to avoid such scenes,” he said in a low voice to Bistami. “This incident adds to the reputation of the sultana, perhaps, in some ways, but at a cost.”

Bistami didn’t want to think about it. “At least now we will have mosque and madressa side by side.”

“They are two parts of the same thing, as the sultana said. Especially if the study of the sensible world is included in the curriculum of the madressa. I hope so. I can’t stand for such a place to be wasted on mere devotionals. God put us in this world to understand it! That is the highest form of devotion to God, as Ibn Sina said.”

This small crisis was soon forgotten, and the new town, named by the sultana Baraka, that term for grace that Bistami had mentioned to her, took shape as if there could never have been any other plan. The ruins of the old town disappeared under the new city’s streets and plazas, gardens and workshops; the architecture and city plan both resembled Málaga, and the other Andalusi coastal cities, but with higher walls, and smaller windows, for the winters here were cold, and a raw wind blew in from the ocean in the fall and spring. The sultan’s palace was the only structure in the town as open and light as a Mediterranean building; this reminded people of their origins, and showed them that the sultan lived above the usual demands of nature. Across the bridge from it, the plazas were small, the streets and alleyways narrow, so that a riverside medina or casbah developed that was, as in any Maghribi or Arabian city, a veritable warren of buildings, mostly three stories tall, with the upper windows facing each other across alleyways so tight that one could, as was said everywhere, pass condiments from window to window across the streets.

The first time snow fell, everyone rushed out to the plaza before the grand mosque, dressed in most of their clothes. A great bonfire was lit, the muezzin made his call, prayers were recited, and the palace musicians played with blue lips and frozen fingers as people danced in the Sufi way around the bonfire. Whirling dervishes in the snow: all laughed to see it, feeling they had brought Islam to a new place, a new climate. They were making a new world! There was plenty of wood in the undisturbed forests to the north, and a constant supply of fish and fowl; they would be warm, they would be fed; in the winters the life of the city would go on, under a thin blanket of wet melting snow, as if they lived in high mountains, and yet the river poured out its long estuary into the gray ocean, which pounded the beach with unrelenting ferocity, eating instantly the snowflakes that fell into the waves. This was their country.

One day in spring another caravan arrived, full of strangers and their possessions; they had heard of the new town Baraka, and wanted to move there. It was another ship of fools, come from the Armenian and Zott settlements in Portugal and Castile, its criminal tendencies made obvious by the high incidence of handlessness and musical instruments, puppeteers and fortune tellers.

“I’m surprised they made it over the mountains,” Bistami said to Ibn Ezra.

“Necessity made them inventive, no doubt. Al-Andalus is a dangerous place for people like these. The sultan’s brother is proving a very strict caliph, I have heard, almost Almohad in his purity. The form of Islam he enforces is so pure that I don’t believe it was ever lived before, even in the time of the Prophet. No, this caravan is made of people on the run. And so was ours.”

“Sanctuary,” Bistami said. “That’s what the Christians called a place of protection. Usually their churches, or else a royal court. Like some of the Sufi ribat in Persia. It’s a good thing. The good people come to you when the law elsewhere becomes too harsh.”

So they came. Some were apostates or heretics, and Bistami debated these in the mosque itself, trying as he spoke to create an atmosphere in which all these matters could be discussed freely, without a sense of danger hanging overhead—it existed, but far away, back over the Pyrenees—but also without anything blasphemous against God or Muhammad being affirmed. It did not matter whether one was Sunni or Shiite, Arabian or Andalusi, Turk or Zott, man or woman; what mattered was devotion, and the Quran.

It was interesting to Bistami that this religious balancing act got easier to maintain the longer he worked at it, as if he were practicing something physical, on a ledge or high wall. A challenge to the authority of the caliph? See what the Quran said about it. Ignore the hadith that had encrusted the holy book, and so often distorted it: cut through to the source. There the messages might be ambiguous, often they were; but the book had come to Muhammad over a period of many years, and important concepts were usually repeated in it, in slightly different ways each time. They would read all the relevant passages, and discuss the differences. “When I was in Mecca studying, the true scholars would say…” This was as much authority as Bistami would claim for himself; that he had heard true authorities speak. It was the method of the hadith, of course, but with a different content: that the hadith could not be trusted, only the Quran.

“I was speaking with the sultana about this matter…” This was another common gambit. Indeed, he consulted with her about almost every question that came up, and without fail in all matters having to do with women or child-rearing; concerning family life he always deferred to her judgment, which he learned to trust more and more as the first years passed. She knew the Quran inside out, and had memorized every sura that aided her case against undue hierarchy, and her protectiveness for the weak of the city grew unabated. Above all she commanded the eye and the heart, wherever she went, and never more so than in the mosque. There was no longer any question of her right to be there, and occasionally even to lead the prayers. It would have seemed unnatural to bar such a being, so full of divine grace, from the place of worship in a city named Baraka. As she herself said, “Did God make me? Did He give me a mind and a soul as great as any man’s? Did men’s children come out of a woman? Would you deny your own mother a place in heaven? Can anyone gain heaven who is not admitted to the sight of God on this earth?”

No one who would answer these questions in the negative stayed long in Baraka. There were other towns being settled upstream and to the north, founded by Armenians and Zott who were less full of Muslim fervor. A fair number of the sultan’s subjects moved away as time passed. Nevertheless, the crowds at the grand mosque grew. They built smaller ones on the expanding outskirts of town, the usual neighborhood mosques, but always the Friday mosque remained the meeting place of the city, its plaza and the madressa grounds filled by the whole population on holy days, and during the festivals and Ramadan, and on the first day of snow every year, when the bonfire of winter was lit. Baraka was a single family then, and Sultana Katima its mother and sister.

The madressa grew as fast as the town, or faster. Every spring, after the snows on the mountain roads had melted, new caravans arrived, guided by mountain folk. Some in each group had come to study in the madressa, which grew famous for Ibn Ezra’s investigations into plants and animals, the Romans, building technique, and the stars. When they came from al-Andalus they sometimes brought with them newly recovered books by Ibn Rashd or Maimonides, or new Arabic translations of the ancient Greeks, and they brought also the desire to share what they knew, and learn more. The new convivencia had its heart in Baraka’s madressa, and word spread.

Then one bad day, late in the sixth year of the Barakan hegira, Sultan Mawji Darya fell gravely ill. He had grown fat in the previous months, and Ibn Ezra had tried to be his doctor, putting him on a strict diet of grain and milk, which seemed to help his complexion and energy; but then one night he took ill. Ibn Ezra woke Bistami from his bed: “Come along. The sultan is so ill he needs the prayers.”

This coming from Ibn Ezra was bad indeed, as he was not much of a one for prayer. Bistami hurried after him, and joined the royal family in their part of the big palace. Sultana Katima was white-faced, and Bistami was shocked to see how unhappy his arrival made her. It wasn’t anything personal, but she knew why Ibn Ezra had brought him at such an hour, and she bit her lip and looked away, the tears streaming down her cheeks.

Inside their bedroom the sultan writhed, silent but for heavy, choked breathing. His face was a dark red color.

“Has he been poisoned?” Bistami asked Ibn Ezra in a whisper.

“No, I don’t think so. Their taster is fine,” indicating the big cat sleeping curled in its little bed in the corner. “Unless someone pricked him with a poisoned needle. But I see no sign of that.”

Bistami sat by the rolling sultan and took his hot hand. Before a word had escaped him, the sultan gave a weak groan and arched his back. His breathing stopped. Ibn Ezra grabbed his arms and crossed them before his chest and pressed hard, grunting himself. To no avail; the sultan had died, his body still locked in its last paroxysm. The sultana burst weeping into the room, tried to revive him herself, calling to him and to God, and begging Ibn Ezra to keep up his efforts. It took both men some time to convince her that it was all in vain; they had failed; the sultan was dead.

Funerals in Islam hearkened back to earlier times. Men and women congregated in different areas during the ceremonies, and only mingled in the cemetery afterward, during the brief interment.

But of course this was the first funeral for a sultan of Baraka, and the sultana herself led the whole population into the grand mosque plaza, where she had ordered the body to lie in state. Bistami could only go along with the crowd and stand before them, saying the old prayers of the service as if they were always announced to all together. And why not? Certain lines of the service only made sense if said to everyone in the community: and suddenly, looking out at the stripped, desolate faces of every person in the city, he understood that the tradition had been wrong, that it was plainly wrong and even cruel to split the community apart at the very moment it needed to see itself all together as one. He had never felt such a heterodox opinion so strongly before; he had always agreed with the sultana’s ideas out of the unexamined principle that she ought always to be right. Shaken by this sudden conversion in his ideas, and by the sight of the beloved sultan’s body there in its coffin on its dais, he reminded them all that the sun only shone a certain number of hours on any life. He spoke the words of this impromptu sermon in a hoarse tearing voice, which sounded even to him as if it were coming from some other throat; it was the same as it had been during those eternal days long ago, reciting the Quran under the cloud of Akbar’s anger. This association was too much, and he began to weep, struggled to speak. All in the plaza wept, the wailing began again, many striking themselves in the self-flagellation that took some of the pain away.

The whole town followed the cortege, Sultana Katima leading it on her bay. The crowd roared in its sorrow like the sea on its pebble beach. They buried him overlooking the great gray ocean, and after that it was black cloth and ashes for many months.

Somehow they never came out of that year of mourning. It was more than the death of the ruler; it was that the sultana continued to rule on alone.

Now Bistami, and everyone else, would have said that Sultana Katima had been the true leader all along, and the sultan merely her gracious and beloved consort. No doubt that was true. But now, when Sultana Katima of Baraka came into the grand mosque and spoke in the Friday prayers, Bistami was once again uneasy, and he could see the townspeople were as well. Katima had spoken before many times in this manner, but now all felt the absence of the covering angel provided by the lenient sultan’s presence across the river.

This unease communicated itself to Katima, of course, and her talks became more strident and plaintive. “God wants relations in marriage between husband and wife to be between equals. What the husband can be the wife can be also! In the time of the chaos before the year one, in the zero time, you see, men treated women like domestic beasts. God spoke through Muhammad, and made it clear that women were souls equal to men, to be treated as such. They were given by God many specific rights, in inheritance, divorce, power of choice, power to command their children—given their lives, do you understand? Before the first hegira, before the year one, right in the middle of this tribal chaos of murder and theft, this monkey society, God told Muhammad to change it all. He said, Oh yes, of course you can marry more than one wife, if you want to—if you can do it without strife. Then the next verse says ‘But it cannot be done without strife!’ What is this but a ban on polygamy stated in two parts, in the form of a riddle or a lesson, for men who could not otherwise imagine it?”

But now it was very clear that she was trying to change the way things worked, the way Islam worked. Of course they all had been, all along—but secretly, perhaps, not admitting it to anyone, not even to themselves. Now it faced them with the face of their only ruler, a woman. There were no queens in Islam. None of the hadith applied anymore.

Bistami, desperate to help, made up his own hadith, and either supplied them with plausible but false isnads, attributing them to ancient Sufi authorities made up out of whole cloth; or else he ascribed them to their sultan, Mawji Darya, or to some old Persian Sufi he knew about; or he left them to be understood as wisdom too common to need ascription. The sultana did the same, following his lead, he thought, but took most of her refuge in the Quran itself, returning obsessively to the suras that supported her positions.

But everyone knew how things were done in al-Andalus, and the Maghrib, and in Mecca, and indeed everywhere across Dar al-Islam, from the western ocean to the eastern ocean (which Ibn Ezra now claimed were the two shores of the same ocean, spanning the greater part of the Earth, which was a globe covered mostly by water). Women did not lead prayers. When the sultana did, it remained shocking, and triply so with the sultan gone. Everyone said it; if she wished to continue along this path, she needed to remarry.

But she showed no sign of interest in that. She wore her widow’s black, and held herself aloof from everyone in the town, and had no royal communications with anyone in al-Andalus. The man other than Mawji Darya who had spent the most time in her company was Bistami himself; and when he understood the looks some townspeople were giving him, implying that he might conceivably marry the sultana and remove them from their difficulty, it made him feel light-headed, almost nauseous. He loved her so much that he could not imagine himself married to her. It wasn’t that kind of love. He didn’t think she could imagine it either, so there was no question of testing the idea, which was both attractive and terrifying, and so in the end painful in the extreme. Once she was talking to Ibn Ezra when Bistami was present, asking him about his claims concerning the ocean fronting them.

“You say this is the same ocean as the one seen by the Moluccans and Sumatrans, on the other side of the world? How could this be?”

“The world is most certainly a globe,” said Ibn Ezra. “It’s round like the moon, or the sun. A spherical ball. And we have come to the western end of the land in the world, and around the globe is the eastern end of the land in the world. And this ocean covers the rest of the world, you see.”

“So we could sail to Sumatra?”

“In theory, yes. But I’ve been trying to calculate the size of the Earth, using some calculations made by the ancient Greeks, and Brahmagupta of south India, and by my studies of the sky, and though I cannot be sure, I believe it must be some ten thousand leagues around. Brahmagupta said five thousand yoganda, which as I understand it is about the same distance. And the land mass of the world, from Morocco to the Moluccas, I reckon to be about five thousand leagues. So this ocean we look out on covers half the world, five thousand leagues or more. No ship could make it across.”

“Are you sure it is so big as that?”

Ibn Ezra waggled a hand uncertainly. “Not sure, Sultana. But I think it must be something like that.”

“What about islands? Surely this ocean is not completely empty for five thousand leagues! Surely there are islands!”

“Undoubtedly, Sultana. I mean, it seems likely. Andalusi fishermen have reported running into islands when storms or currents carried them far to the west, but they don’t describe how far, or in what direction.”

The sultana looked hopeful. “So we could perhaps sail away, and find the same islands, or others like them.”

Ibn Ezra waggled his hand again.

“Well?” she said sharply. “Do you not think you could build a seaworthy ship?”

“Possibly, Sultana. But supplying it for a voyage that long… We don’t know how long it would be.”

“Well,” she said darkly, “we may have to find out. With the sultan dead, and no one for me to remarry”—and she shot a single glance at Bistami—“there will be Andalusi villains thinking to rule us.”

It was like a stab to his heart. That night Bistami lay twisting on his bed, seeing that short glance over and over. But what could he do? How could he be expected to help such a situation? He could not sleep, not the entire night long.

Because a husband would have helped. There was no longer a feeling of harmony in Baraka, and word of the situation certainly had made its way over the Pyrenees, for early in the following spring, when the rivers were still running high and the mountains protecting them still stood white and jagged-edged to the south, horsemen came down the road out of the hills, just ahead of a cold spring storm, pouring in from the ocean: a long column of cavalry, in fact, with pennants from Toledo and Granada flying, and swords and pikes at their hips gleaming in the sun. They rode right into the mosque plaza at the center of town, colorful under the lowering clouds, and lowered their pikes until they all pointed forward. Their leader was one of the sultan’s elder brothers, Said Darya, and he stood in his silver stirrups so that he towered over the people gathering there, and said,

“We claim this town in the name of the caliph of al-Andalus, to save it from apostasy, and from the witch who threw her spell over my brother and killed him in his bed.”

The crowd, growing by the moment, stared stupidly up at the horsemen. Some of the townspeople were red-faced and tight-lipped, some pleased, most confused or sullen. A few of the rabble from the original Ship of Fools were already pulling cobblestones out of the ground.

Bistami saw all this from the avenue leading to the river, and all of a sudden something about the sight struck him like a blow; those pikes and crossbows, pointing inward: it was like the tiger trap, back in India. These people were like the Bagh-mari, the professional tiger-killing clans that went about the country disposing of problem tigers for a fee. He had seen them before! And not only with the tigress, but before that as well, some other time that he couldn’t remember but remembered anyway, some ambush for Katima, a death trap, men stabbing her when she was tall and black-skinned—oh, this had all happened before!

In a panic he ran across the bridge to the palace. Sultana Katima was about to get on her horse to go and confront the invaders, and he threw himself between her and the horse; she was furious and tried to brush by him, and he put his arm around her waist, as slender as a girl’s, which shocked them both, and he cried, “No, no, no, no, no! No, Sultana, I beg you, I beg you, don’t go over there! They’ll kill you, it’s a trap! I’ve seen it! They will kill you!”

“I have to go,” she said, cheeks flushed. “The people need me—”

“No they don’t! They need you alive! We can leave and they can follow! They will follow! We have to let those people have this town, the buildings mean nothing, we can move north and your people will follow! Listen to me, listen!” And he caught her up by the shoulders and held her fast, looked her in the eye: “I have seen all this play out before. I have been given knowledge. We have to escape or we will be killed.”

Across the river they could hear screams. The Andalusi horsemen were not used to opposition from a population without any soldiers, without cavalry, and they were charging down the streets after mobs who threw stones as they fled. A lot of Barakis were crazy with rage, certainly the one-handed ones would die to the man to defend her, and the invaders were not going to have as easy a time of it as they had thought. Snow was now twirling down through the dark air, flying sideways on the wind out of gray clouds streaming low overhead, and already there were fires in the city, the district around the grand mosque beginning to burn.

“Come on, Sultana, there’s no time to waste! I’ve seen how this happens, they’ll have no mercy, they’re on their way here to the palace, we need to leave now! This has happened before! We can make a new city in the north, some of the people will come with us, gather a caravan and start over, defend ourselves properly!”

“All right!” Sultana Katima shouted suddenly, looking across at the burning town. The wind gusted, and they could just hear screaming in the town over the whoosh of the air. “Damn them! Damn them! Get a horse then, come on, all of you come on! We’ll need to ride hard.”

9 Another Meeting in the Bardo

And so it was that when they all reconvened in the bardo, many years later, af ter going north and founding the city of Nsara at the mouth of the Lawiyya River, and defending it successfully from the Andalusi taifa sultans coming up to attack them in after years, and building the beginnings of a maritime power, fishing all the way across the sea, and trading farther yet than that, Bistami was well pleased. He and Katima had never married, the matter had never come up again, but he had been Nsara’s principal ulema for many years, and had helped to create a religious legitimacy for this new thing, a queen in Islam. And he and Katima had worked together on this project almost every day of those lives.

“I recognized you!” he reminded Katima. “In the midst of life, through the veil of forgetting, when it mattered, I saw who you were, and you—you saw something too. You knew something from a higher reality was going on! We’re making progress.”

Katima did not reply. They were sitting on the flagstones of a courtyard in a place very like Chishti’s shrine in Fatepur Sikri, except that the courtyard was vastly bigger. People waited in a line to go into the shrine and be judged. They looked like hajis in line to see the Kaaba. Bistami could hear Muhammad’s voice inside, praising some, admonishing others. “You need to try again,” he heard a voice like Muhammad’s say to someone. Everything was quiet and subdued. It was the hour before sunrise, cool and damp, the air filled with distant birdsong. Sitting there beside her, Bistami could see very clearly now how Katima was not at all like Akbar. Akbar had no doubt been sent down to a lower realm, and was even now prowling the jungle hunting for his food, as Katima had been in her previous existence, when she had been a tigress, a killer who had nevertheless befriended Bistami. She had saved him from the Hindu rebels, then picked him out of the ribat in al-Andalus: “You recognized me too,” he said. “And we both knew Ibn Ezra,” who was at this moment inspecting the wall of the courtyard, running his fingernail down the line between two blocks, admiring the stonework of the bardo.

“This is genuine progress,” Bistami repeated. “We are finally getting somewhere!”

Katima gave him a skeptical glance. “You call that progress? Chased to a hole at the far corner of the world?”

“But who cares where we were? We recognized each other, you didn’t get killed—”

“Wonderful.”

“It was wonderful! I saw through time, I felt the touch of the eternal. We made a place where people could love the good. Little steps, life after life; and eventually we will be there for good, in the white light.”

Katima gestured; her brother-in-law, Said Darya, was entering the palace of judgment.

“Look at him, a miserable creature, and yet he is not thrown down into hell, nor even become a worm or a jackal, as he deserves. He will return to the human realm, and wreak havoc all over again. He too is part of our jati, did you recognize him? Did you know he was part of our little band, like Ibn Ezra here?”

Ibn Ezra sat beside them. The line moved up and they shifted with it. “The walls are solid,” he reported. “Very well built, in fact. I don’t think we’re going to able to escape.”

“Escape!” Bistami cried. “This is God’s judgment! No one escapes that!”

Katima and Ibn Ezra looked at each other. Ibn Ezra said, “My impression is that any improvement in the tenor of existence will have to be anthropogenic.”

“What?” Bistami cried.

“It’s up to us. No one will help us.”

“I’m not saying they will. Although God always helps if you ask. But it is up to us, that’s what I’ve been saying all along, and we are doing what we can, we are making progress.”

Katima was not at all convinced. “We’ll see,” she said. “Time will tell. For now, I myself withhold judgment.” She faced the white tomb, drew herself up queenlike, spoke with a tigerish curl of the lip: “And no one judges me.”

With a wave of the hand she dismissed the tomb. “It’s not here that matters. What matters is what happens in the world.”