The Enchantress of Florence by Salman Rushdie Page A

creatures crawling over his feet and through his hair and into his groin, the albino roaches, the blind snakes, the transparent rats, the phantom scorpions, the lice. He would die without telling his story. He found this thought intolerable and so it refused to leave him, it crawled in and out of his ears, slid into the corners of his eyes and stuck to the roof of his mouth and to the soft tissue under his tongue. All men needed to hear their stories told. He was a man, but if he died without telling the story he would be something less than that, an albino cockroach, a louse. The dungeon did not understand the idea of a story. The dungeon was static, eternal, black, and a story needed motion and time and light. He felt his story slipping away from him, becoming inconsequential, ceasing to be. He had no story. There was no story. He was not a man. There was no man here. There was only the dungeon, and the slithering dark.
    When they came to get him he did not know if a day had passed, or a century. He could not see the rough hands that loosened his chains. For a time his hearing too was affected, and his powers of speech. They blindfolded him and took him naked to another place where he was scoured and scrubbed. As if he were a corpse being readied for burial, he thought, a dumb corpse who could not tell his tale. There were no coffins in this unchristian land. He would be sewn into a shroud and flung without a name into a hole in the ground. That, or burned. He would not rest in peace. In death as in life he would be full of unspoken words and they would be his Hell, tormenting him through all eternity. He heard a sound.
There was once.
It was his own voice.
There was once a prince.
He felt his heart begin to beat again, his blood to flow. His tongue was thick but it could move. His heart boomed like a cannon in his chest.
Who possessed enchanted weapons.
He had a body again, and words. They removed the blindfold.
Four terrifying giants and a woman.
He was in another cell but in this place there was a candle burning and a guard in the corner.
The most beautiful woman.
The story was saving his life.
    “Save your strength,” the guard said. “Tomorrow you stand trial for murder.”
    There was a question he was trying to ask. The words would not form. The guard took pity on him and answered it anyway.
    “I don’t know the name of the man who accuses you,” he said. “But he is a godless foreigner like yourself, and he lacks an eye and half a leg.”
    The first trial of Mogor dell’Amore took place in the house of the sandstone banana tree, and his judges were the greatest grandees of the court, all nine of the Nine Stars, whose presence had been commanded by an exceptional imperial decree: Abul Fazl the wise and obese, Raja Birbal of the lightning wit, the finance minister Raja Todar Mal, Raja Man Singh the army chief, the unworldly mystic Fakir Aziauddin and the rather more worldly priest Mullah Do Piaza who preferred cookery to prayer and was accordingly a favorite of Abul Fazl’s, the great poets Faizi and Abdul Rahim, and the musician Tansen. The emperor sat on the top of the tree as usual, but his mood was most unusual. His head was bowed, giving him the most unimperial appearance of an ordinary mortal suffering the misery of a dreadful personal calamity. For a long time he did not speak, but allowed the trial to take its course.
    The crew of the pirate vessel
Scáthach
stood to one side in a tight, grumbling bunch, close behind the macabre figure of the one-legged, eyepatched doctor who was their appointed spokesman. This was not Praise-God Hawkins as the accused remembered him, the weepy cuckold whom he had so effortlessly bent to his will. This Hawkins was smartly dressed and grim of countenance, and when he saw the prisoner enter this courthouse he pointed at him and cried in a ringing voice, “There he stands, the vile Uccello, who murdered the ambassador for his gold!”
    “Justice!” cried the sailors