The Assassin's Song Page 0,2

its pages carried on the backs of elephants and trailed by all the learned men. Great intellectual debates took place in the palace, but with dire consequences for the losers, who often had to seek a new city and another patron. In recent times, though, an uneasy air had come to hang over this capital, riding on rumours of doom and catastrophe that travelled with increasing frequency from the north.

Into this once glorious but now a little nervous city there arrived one morning with the dawn a mysterious visitor. He was a man of such a striking visage that on the highways which he had recently travelled men would avert their faces when they crossed his path, then turned to stare long and hard at his back as he hastened on southward. He was medium in stature and extremely fair; he had an emaciated face with a small pointed goatee, his eyes were green; and he wore the robe and turban of a sufi. His name he gave as Nur Fazal, of no fixed abode. He entered the city's northern gate with a merchant caravan and was duly noted by his attire and language as a wandering Muslim mendicant and scholar originally from Afghanistan or Persia, and possibly a spy of the powerful sultanate of Delhi. Once inside, he put himself up at a small inn near the coppersmiths' market frequented by the lesser of the foreign merchants and travellers. Soon afterwards, one afternoon, in the company of a local follower, he proceeded to the citadel of the raja, Vishal Dev. The time for the raja's daily audience with the public was in the morning, but somehow the sufi, unseen at the gate—such were his powers—gained entrance and made his appearance inside.

He stood with mild amazement beside a pale blue man-made lake, contained by banks of red stone painted with designs in pink and blue; in the middle was an ornate pavilion where played and relaxed royal women in bright clothes and long black hair, the tinkle of their pretty voices echoing off the water like birdsong. All around the water stood three-foot-high carvings that, the sufi confirmed as he approached closer to one, then another, depicted the god Shiva. He was standing on the bank of the sahasralinga talav, tank of a thousand Shiva shrines, whose fame had spread as far away north as Samarkand and Ghazna, whose sultans and generals always kept an eye open for opportunities to foray into Hindustan and plunder its legendary wealth. The mystic stood staring at the closest icon in wonder. Shiva's one leg was bent and raised in a gesture of dance, two hands poised in midair; the smile was mischievous and immediately infectious. Here was a god who liked to play. The sufi had been told during his long voyage, and often with a horrified look on the face of the informer, that the people of Hindustan worshipped not only idols of men and women, but also images of animals and, if that were not strange enough, the human procreative organs as well. (“And may God bring destruction on the infidels!”) Some would sacrifice humans and eat the flesh of the head, others mutter nonsense syllables or roar like a bull after bathing in sand. But Nur Fazal himself was an exile for his beliefs and did not take to judging others too easily. There are meanings within meanings, he had always been taught; the truth lies shrouded behind a thousand veils.

He was reminded of a home in the north and west now being ground to dust under the hooves of Mongol horses, and drenched in the blood of his folk and his loved ones. He remembered his spiritual master whom he'd left there, at whose instigation he had taken on this long journey.

He was brought around from his memories by approaching sounds— footsteps and human exclamations, accompanied by a sight that brought him a smile.

A young pandit, a priest in a gleaming white dhoti, a tuft of hair collected into a topknot on his otherwise close-cropped head, was striding towards him with all the exaggerated sense of gravity that seems incumbent to a short stature. His chest was bare, and around one shoulder ran a ceremonial white thread. From the opposite side, the stranger noticed, approached two older, bald-headed priests draped around the whole body in white; a race was on for who would reach the interloper first. It was the young topknot who did so, as he exclaimed, “What