The Enchantress of Florence

In the day's last light the glowing lake below the palace city looked like a sea of molten gold. A traveller coming this way...might believe...the monarch so fabulously wealthy that he could allow a portion of his treasure to be poured into a giant hollow on the earth to dazzle and awe his guests...Nor were there guards at the golden water's edge; was the king so generous then that he allowed all his subjects...to draw up liquid bounty from the lake? ...But then the sun fell below the horizon, the gold sank beneath the water's surface, and was lost. Mermaids and serpents would guard it until the return of daylight. Until then, water itself would be the only treasure on offer, a gift the thirsty traveller gratefully accepted.

"Keep your secret," he said.  "Secrets are for children, and spies."  The stranger got down ... "And for sorcerers," he told the driver of the bullock cart.  "And for lovers too.  And kings."

Without water we are nothing, the traveller thought.  Even an emperor, denied water, will swiftly turn to dust. Water is the real monarch and we are all its slaves.

Fires began to burn in the twilight like warnings.  From the black bowl of the sky came the answering fires of the stars.  As if the earth and the heavens were armies preparing for battle, he thought.  As if their encampments lie quiet at night and await the war of the day to come.

We will take your finest offspring from you and we will transform them utterly. We will make them forget you and turn them into the force that keeps you under our heel. By your own lost children will you be ruled.

Tell me everything. . . and then you will be free.

And in the absence of the men the women of the capital learnt all over again that they were not made of lies and treasons but only of hair and skin and flesh, that they were all as imperfect as each other, and that there was nothing special if they were hiding from one another, no poisons, no plots and that even sisters can in the end find a way of getting along.

"I jostled her," she said, " I shoved so that she almost fell and she was my senior. I did not honour her and now she is gone."   Akbar comforted his mother.  "She knew you loved her," he said.  "She knew that a woman maybe a bad jostled and a good friend as well."   But the Queen mother was inconsolable.  "She always seemed so young," she said.  "The angel made a mistake.  I am the one who was just waiting to die."

In bed she whispered to him that she had another self inside her, a bad self, and when that self took over she was no longer responsible for her actions, she might do anything, anything.