Previewof First Chapter of  The King's Assassin

THE KING'S ASSASSIN

BEING THE ACCOUNT OF

FATHER PIETRO DONATI'S SOJOURN,

1600–1605, IN THE COURT OF

JALALU-D DIN MUHAMMAD

AKBAR, KING OF INDIA

Robert Burdette Sweet

GLB Publishers                 San Francisco
Copyright © 2007 Robert Burdette Sweet
All rights reserved. Printed in the U.S.A.

No part of this book may be reproduced by any mechanical, photographic, or electronic process,
or in the form of an electronic recording, nor may it be stored in a retrieval system, transmitted,
translated into another language, or otherwise copied for public or private use, excepting brief
passages quoted for purposes of review, without the written permission of the publisher.

Published in the United States by
GLB Publishers
P.O. Box 78212, San Francisco, CA 94107

www.GLBpubs.com

Cover art by the author
Cover Design by GLB Publishers

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the products of
the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living
or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental

Library of Congress Cataloguing Control Number
2007904059

ISBN 978-1-934203-05-7
1-934203-05-X

PROLOGUE

My bowels spew lava. My legs feel made of milksop. My stomach burns. One day the galleon
will arrive for us here in Goa and maybe I'll be strong enough to bear the return journey to
Portugal. Father Monserrate scribbles on his note pages. Because his eyes are bad, the
feather he writes with wriggles above his tonsured skull, stops, and then wriggles a foot further
past the unkempt white fringe of his hair. I've suggested to Monserrate that writing with a
peacock feather is ostentatious and an insult to God. Two flies walk the grey bristles that
disrupt his tonsure and are undisturbed by the waving of the feather. I think they're copulating
on that head that has never admitted to an indecent thought. But then, in this heat, Monserrate
smells. The flies must feel at home on him.
     Though we're seated at opposite ends, the table is so small that our toes, protruding over our
sandals, have touched. Instantly, I tucked my feet under my chair. As I can even hear him breathing,
I'm surprised I feel free to write so rudely about the Father in this journal. But then, in our time together
here in India, it's understood we've fallen into an unfortunate dislike for each other. He thinks that what
I write is for my own amusement and not for the greater glory of God and Church, the declared purpose
of our task. He has sworn, with an impatient shake of his head, never to read my work. I believe him.
     Besides, in the intervals between prayers and attacks of weakness, I merely seek to exonerate myself,
scratching shyly with a pigeon feather, and composing, not in Latin, but in Portuguese, as better fits my
modest task.
     I've just returned from Agra. The burro ride from the palace at Agra back to our mission here at Goa-by-the-sea, where Father Monserrate waited, has proved to be my greatest trial. During the
journey, the sun scalded my brain and branded my hands that gripped the reins and burnt the tip
of my nose that I could not shade with the welt of my cowl. And the rain chilled me. When rips of
lightning flared distant towns—most of them spiked with minarets and spiraled with Hindu towers—
my soul broke open. It was then I got the ague and flux. The wounds on my arms, self-inflicted in penance, festered.
     Father Monserrate has just smiled at me in his unnerving way and said, "So, Father Donati,
you've actually taken to the quill? It will do your stomach good to try some writing." A drop of sweat
hangs at the end of his nose. The flies tumble in their ecstasy toward where his left ear peeks out
of the fluff of hair.
     I try to smile back at him as he finally whisks the peacock feather's blue eyes at the flies.
     "I think it will do more than my stomach good. Do you still believe I have nothing to say?
You think I have realized nothing? You've not observed me carefully, Father."
     "So be it!" he insists, leaning toward me blinking his puffed eyelids. You're still in the service
of the Church, Father Donati, and the truth is that King Akbar is dead. You can't subject yourself
to him anymore. And God walks alive and above us, His ears pressed to the floor of Heaven to
hear even the nastiest thoughts of those of us below. Donati? Donati? Can you hear anything
but the scratching of your own foolish pen?"

"My writing is just to make a little memory of words, Father, to prove to myself that I did live all of it."

But is there a truth I can tell about our time in the court of Jalalu-d din Muhammad Akbar? I fear the heat of this continent has robbed me of a sense of what might be real. In memory, the palace-fort at Agra rises off the land saturated by pillars beyond the mist of the river Jumna. I close my eyes and see the city of marble doorways and lattice screens, so thinly carved the stone seems light as air. I see it dazzling in the heat and sun that float its scalloped courtyards…
     The truth? I don't know what that is, or if history is privy to one jot of it. I think Father Monserrate will fabricate—in bad Latin— how Akbar chose at his end, however involuntarily, our God and brought Him
to reign with his son, the Emperor Jahangir, in the enormous halls of Agra. And that will be all that
the world will know about Akbar the great, the monster, the demi-god, and my hallowed friend.
     I've just had to relieve myself at the hole behind this hovel, balancing myself on thin legs,
straddling the place like a molting canary, feverish…. I cannot recall what it means not to be
crucified by one's body. As I straightened my robe and tottered back through the rubbish heap,
which is all there is of a garden here, Father Monserrate leaned out of the small window toward
me. "Pray, child. Pray and your bowels will do God's will." His red lips and sunburned skin faced
me accusingly. From the mirror glass, I've known that my skin is yellow, my eyes too large from
taking in so little food. Does he think that if I could believe more fervently in God, I'd triumph
over my own flesh? Does he believe that if I could invent my own truth, I'd be as healthy and
sure of myself as Monserrate is?
     I tell him, "You're right, Father. I will pray to the Jesus that India has nearly robbed me of."
Yet I suspect my illness is not due to a loss of God. It was I who found God. And in a man!
Monserrate, I'm jaundiced and feverish from grief! It is the Good Friday of India. The Passion
has bled itself through. My King is dead!
     I can hear, distantly, the ocean waves break on Goa's shore. I will go now to the edge of
India and bathe, secretly, so that you, Father, will never suspect I've bared the places of my
sin to sun and sky.

       CHAPTER ONE

     It was the hour before dawn, June 10, 1598. This date I easily remember. It was my birthday,
and I was twenty-seven. Seven years with the Society of Jesus, seven months in the land of India,
two years under the tutelage—and pall!—of Father Monserrate. Before the good Father wakened,
I decided to wander off from him, to leave the stifling rooms we'd been occupying near the outer
courtyard of the palace of Jalalu-d din Akbar. I gratefully breathed a Matin prayer as I passed
down the stone road that led by the cannon and gun smithy shops. Finally, I exited Agra's north
gate and stumbled in the dark through the first stirrings of the Hindu streets that crowded close
to the umber walls of Akbar's enclosed city.
     The silver cross, slung around my waist, smacked against my left knee, reminding me that
I was not part of this India that the Father General had ordered Monserrate and me to missionize.
I was a vassal of the Lord, an invited but apparently unwanted guest of a king I had not yet seen
and, as I'd been informed by Monserrate the night before, a spy for the monarch of Portugal
and Spain.
     It was with distaste and horror I walked the Hindu "encampment"—I can think of no better
word to describe the ramshackle oppressiveness of this city outside a city. Despite occasional
candle flames, I stepped more than once on bodies sprawled upon the dust, mouths open in
sleep or death.
     It had not rained in central India for two years. In an hour, with the first strike of the merciless
sun, the danashti would come, poles heavy on their shoulders, their cart's not-quite-round wooden
wheels sticking in ruts, to lift onto their wagons the dead as well as those who could not muster
strength to crawl away. I had seen the still living piled upon the carts, eyes lidless as lizards, staring.
I learned to walk over the living and the dead as I would stones on a path. As the sky lightened,
I found myself entering an awakened stream of walking people, some of them skeletons, some
fat as bloated pigs, turbaned in white, yellow or pale blue, robed or nearly naked, flowing listless
as silt toward where the Hindu city ended on the bank of the river Jumna.
     There is another river, the Ganges, far greater than the Jumna, that the Hindus hold to be
entirely sacred, the putrid waters of which they drink as an act of purification. The miseries of
the Hindus there at Agra had led them to assume the Jumna to be a headwater of the Ganges,
and so they had begun to worship it in a like manner. It would take every pope and priest in all
the history of Europe to bless so much green water into holiness or turn it pure! Ignatius Loyola,
forgive me, for it was that dawn of my twenty-seventh birthday, thinking how I was with Monserrate
to undermine King Akbar's reign for the benefit of not our God so much as for the King of Portugal
and Spain that made the youth in me wane and my faith falter.
     "How else, Donati, but under the auspices of King Phillip do you think we managed to ship
this far and with supplies, gifts of gold crosses, paintings of saints and beasts enough to take
us this distance across India? Do you think our new Order is rich, so rich it can maneuver to do
God's work without a king to set its wheels in motion?" That was the first time I detected impatience
and even anger in Father Monserrate's words to me.
     "I thought the Pope," I said, "ruled beyond kings."
     "Ass," he rapped his hairy fist against a marble wall. "The King does for the Pope, the Pope
does for the King. We all use one another. That's the real meaning of friendship. That's the depth of love."

It was then I realized why Monserrate had persuaded the Father General to command me on this
journey, despite the fact that I said I did not wish to proselytize. I was to be the plaything of Monserrate's
mind. I was to be the youth whose innocence might dupe a king into not realizing the suspicious
nature of our mission.
I stood, finally, on stone steps, called there a bathing ghat, waiting for the first breeze to lift the
world into day. I liked dawn on the Jumna, a frail mist rising, the drought having reduced the water
to a stain of felt across the land. Drums rumbled along the river's cracked-mud shores. The day
would be brought to bear upon the living with ovations, the glow of saffron, voices rising high and
strained, and the braying of blown conch shells.
     I crouched on the steps by a wall where shade would fall, for I knew the sky of India opened with
awful suddenness. Already water buffaloes waded in the thick water, their backs picked of vermin
by egrets walking the fan of their wasted ribs. Hindus struggled through the mud to where some
water still flowed as gongs drowned the wail of the conches. The air off the steps of the ghat
began to heat. A beggar leaned toward me, his head a silhouette in front of the brightening sky.
I tried not to bellow like some struck beast at his arm severed raggedly near the elbow, at his one
leg crushed and folded back. With a large smile, he banged his stick of a crutch and sang out in
Persian which I had managed to learn, "Foreigner, foreigner, help me, please." In panic I got to
my feet and started to push by him, upsetting his perch on the step. But he followed. I went down
toward the water, elbowing the crowd. And still he followed. The wooden thump, thump of his stick…
followed. "Foreigner, foreigner, help me, please!" Across his young face spread a superior grin.
His too large head with its dark teeth nuzzled under my arm—my arm that had involuntarily risen
to point a veined fist at him! I, the priest, wanted the beggar dead. Was I afraid the threat his
suffering imposed would pry into my skull and stay there? Miserere nobis!
     I ran to the ghat's bottom step. A woman squatted there clutching in her hands a banana-leaf
boat. She was about to launch the boat into the river for her Vishnu-god. The leaf had candles
attached to bow and stern. Without thinking, I pulled the boat from the woman's hand and, with
her screams pursuing me, I fled across the mudflat to the water. I wanted to thank her, to beg
her pardon for my action, but a press of people pushed between us. With a "Hail Mary, Mother
full of Grace," I set sail my own votive prayers and guilts onto the river that seemed to flow for
other gods, not mine.
     Standing in the mud, I watched my heathen contrivance, caught by a wind, toss onto the river's
back, its candles dimming in the first reach of the sun. Vultures from a tree on the far bank rose to
float like charred paper, the shadow of one a black cross on the water before me. As the shadow
-cross drifted slowly upon the water, one arm of it slid over the massive shoulders of a man, his
own strong arms folded over his chest, his dark legs thigh-deep in Jumna water. Though, except
for a shy glance, I avoided looking at him, I sensed he did not honor me with equal circumspection.
I am used to being stared at—my blue eyes and brown hair, my black habit, all making me anomalous
even in Portugal—but I have never learned to enjoy the attention of others. And in India I might as
well have worn a halo or dragged a ball and chain, from the looks of apprehension my presence
brought about. It was as if my eyes revealed too much of what my words and general demeanor
chose to hide. I was as naked in my way as that man now watching me was in his. I sensed in that
moment that we were both chosen—but whether by Heaven or Hell I could not say—to walk outside
the pale of our ordinary societies. His bold observance of me indicated he enjoyed this fate,
whereas I have stepped always hesitantly and with restraint. The man's wide shoulders and stance
marked him as sufficiently different from the other bathers that I wondered at their paying no
attention to him. But then there is about some men an aura so intense it appalls rather than attracts.
I looked up again. His eyes were still upon me. Yes, there was a brightness in them, a cold
intelligence. Yet a warm energy licked like fire under the ruddy skin next to his high cheekbones.
I lowered my eyes in alarm. I try not to be a superstitious priest, even holding the recent miracles
of the Church in doubt, but the touch of that vulture's shadowed wing upon the man's dark skin gave
me a fright, a sense of awe. Reaching involuntarily for my crucifix, I discovered it defiled with mud.
I bent my head toward the task of hastily cleaning it with river water. A good bit of grime had caught
in Our Savior's hair and the silver twist of His beard. I promised myself that from then on I would
wear the crucifix about my neck and over my heart, not around my waist, and this I have done
since that moment.
     The man waded toward me. I heard the rippling of water. He stopped as he entered my shadow.
His voice was kind and deep as he bent over inquiring in Persian, "And what is it you so industriously
attempt to cleanse?" That the Hindu cripple knew how to beg in his conqueror's tongue surprised
me not at all, but that a Hindu might pleasantly converse in Persian must be unusual. Pressing the
now shining crucifix to my lips, I stared up at him. "It's the talisman of Jesus Christ," I said.
     "He's been good to you, your Christ? Tell me, tell me quickly." The man wore only a loincloth,
and lines of river silt darkly gilded the muscles of his chest and stomach. His eyelids were narrow
and oriental, his head drooped toward his right shoulder. A small mole rode the upper line of his lip.
"Never mind, never mind," he said impatiently, his nostrils fanning out from the broad ridge of his
nose. "As I've heard, there are three of Him, your God." But he smiled, his thick mustache and beard
catching the sunlight. "To think of Him must make one's eyes sore! And yet there is only one of Him
there on your chest?" I took the cross from my lips and slid the chain over my heavy brown hair to
hang it about my neck. I had refused a tonsure, more in keeping with the Society of Jesus. I'd leave
it to Monserrate to ape the Dominicans!
     "The Trinity?" I mused. I suspected I was somewhat taller than the man, though compared to him
I felt fragile, conscious of my burnt skin hanging like parchment shards from my narrow nose.
"But the three are one," I enunciated as clearly as I could, the Persian words sticking in my throat,
"Father, Son, and Holy Ghost." He dismissed with a wave of his hand the crucifix I raised to show
him. "To name the unknowable is vain. Look at the sun, raheb. Its brilliance is fire. The fire that
melts the All to One!" He stabbed with his thumb at the glow behind him. The river flashed into
swords of light. "It's Jalalu-d din Akbar who says this to you."
     I felt as if a fist had socked into my stomach even though there was a part of me, a cold still
center, that remained calm and not even surprised.
     "But why then are you talking to me?" I shrugged my shoulders in confusion. "Why should a king…"
     "Because you're my guest, sir, and honored. I have much to learn from you about your Jesus."
     Then don't mock Him, I thought. And don't mock me and Monserrate who you've kept waiting
for an audience with you without explanation or apology!
     All the conch shells sounded at once now. The drums swelled to a terrifying crescendo.
Copper pans were beaten with sticks and gongs groaned from the golden tops of temples.
I first assumed it was an accolade for their extraordinary king who waded near naked among
the people he had subdued. But no, Akbar and all Hindustanis turned toward the full blaze of
that very sun that was killing them, raising their arms and salaaming as it lifted its fire from
behind the earth. Akbar's eyes were closed, his lips set beatifically, his hair, long and glistening
black, falling below his shoulders. Abruptly the sounds stopped. The people began leaving the
water to trail in wet skirts and silt-stained pantaloons up the steaming ghat steps. Still they had
not noticed their king was among them.
     Apparently he did not care. I came to know later that Akbar often strolled incognito among
the people, seeking anonymity, envious perhaps of the privacy of their lives. He turned to me
again, placed his arm on my shoulder. His eyes appeared severely narrowed and distraught.
"The truth," he said, pulling my robed shoulder toward his chest. "I'll know the truth. Or, by all
the gods, I'll invent it!"
     "But, my Lord King," I said, shuddering at his touch, "maybe you think too much." I wondered
if he were obsessed, as only saints could be, regarding such matters. "The burdens of statehood…"
I tried to mollify him, but the man remained as intense as the sun that burned our backs. He guided
me through the mud to the ghat steps. With a sigh, and under his breath as though he'd thought
this out before, he said: "So goes a king, so goes the world."
     "But why tell this to me? Can't you know I'm embarrassed? I'm embarrassed by your openness."
Akbar held me away from him at arm's length. Our duplicate shadows fell from us and climbed the
first two steps in broken lines. "Listen!" he insisted. "You're not from this world of mine. Why do you
think I've sent for you? I need the breath of other thoughts in order to clarify my own. I need…" I stared
directly into the King's bright, black eyes, which he turned on me just as the oriental lids unaccountably
opened wide. The lights in the pupils momentarily looked to be going out. Or were they actually
intensifying? They were like the eyes of a statue-god set with black sapphires, refracting light
brilliantly, yet with no sight of their own.
     "My Lord," I said. "What is it? Is there something wrong?"
     "What?" The mole on his upper lip twitched as his lip curled upward. "We were speaking of…"
He crossed his arms over his chest, his fingers gripping his own thrust-forward shoulders.
"I'm going to…" The King started up the steps. "Don't watch me. Please." I saw the great muscles
in his back leap. I realized that he was going to fall to his knees. Already his shadow was
crumpling on the steps above us. "Akbar, Akbar!" I called in shameless concern, as though
I had known him all my life, as though he were not the King of Hindustan but a friend dissolving
into a vast and terrible chasm. When I reached him, his mouth was distorted and the pupils of
his eyes askew, only the whites showing from under flickering lids. He urinated with a burst and,
lying on his side over the steps now, arched his back and shook as if struggling to fit into the
confines of his pain. I had seen such convulsions once before and did not think of it as the Devil
in a man, though I've known those who do. I thought of it as the body wrestling the Devil out, the
purging of all that is unseemly and that defiles. I looked for someone to help me. But the few
people remaining on the ghat ignored the fallen man whose identity they did not recognize.
This tendency to turn away from suffering I was to find typical outside the walls of the palace.
The other bathers had quickly fled the sun to the relative cool of their shaded streets. I pulled
the crucifix from over my head and inserted carefully, carefully my silver God between his
clamped and salivating lips. I held his head, then, in my lap, where it banged like a thing
possessed, hard against my thighs. After a time the muscles stopped leaping. I withdrew
the crucifix from his wet lips to readjust it over my heart. He repeatedly whimpered a word
that sounded like "Agni, Agni." Then, to my bewilderment, I heard Jalalu-d din snore deeply.
Breathless and dazed, I chased flies off his closed but moving eyes. I stayed there with him
until he would awake, fearful that the danashti, whose creaking carts I could hear cruising
the street above, should pile the King upon their bed of offal and set fire to their own world
at a burning ghat while it was yet alive.

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