Shadow Princess Read Free Page B

father had designated another son as heir and chased him out of India.
    On the bed, Mumtaz Mahal stirred. It was a little, restless movement, caught by everyone in the room watching their Emperor at the bedside of the woman who was his world, who had been similarly taught to consider their Empress as constituting the entirety of their world. It was not a difficult task for these retainers, for in following their Emperor’s wishes came some wealth, some influence in the imperial zenana, and the simple ability to preserve their heads on their shoulders so that they might see another day.
    When her breathing evened again, Shah Jahan captured his wife’s wrist and laid his lips upon the skin on the inside of her elbow. The child in the cradle raised a tiny voice, and a wet nurse with engorged breasts rose to feed her. Earlier in the day, this woman had been chosen from the many others who had presented themselves at the palaces, their persons neat, their hair combed, their teeth brushed rigorously with twigs from the neem tree. For to nurse a royal offspring meant riches, unimaginable affluence, perhaps even devotion from the child. Who, if a boy, could one day wear the crown of Hindustan, and who would remember even in adulthood the woman who had nursed him in infancy. Satti had picked this fortunate woman, with her thick peasant face, her lush and rounded body, her clean mouth, and her honeyed milk, which Satti had tasted herself.
    “Is she all right, Khurram?”
    Shah Jahan stumbled in his haste to rise from the stool and kneel by his wife’s bed. He laid his arms over her waist and thighs. “Yes, Arju. Are you, my love?” So he also called her, Arju, short for Arjumand, the name she had been born with.
    She seemed to wait a long while before answering. “I’m tired. It was . . . harder this time. I’m glad for this moment when I can see you.”
    “What sort of talk is this?” he asked lightly, even as his heart began a mad thumping within his chest. So something was wrong. Arjumand had never before been so distressed. The birth of a child was an occasion of joy, and no matter how much she had suffered, she had been smiling and happy when he came to her. The fears evoked by his daughter’s distraught words, laid to rest by Satti Khanum at the door, came flooding back in him. When his wife’s lips moved, he bent over her and laid his cheek by hers, not allowing her to speak. She would be fine, surely.
    “Let me call for the hakims, ” he said.
    “Wazir Khan?” Her voice was barely audible. “He knows nothing about women’s matters, and he has never been allowed into the imperial zenana before. What would he do?”
    “But you—”
    “I am all right, Khurram. Tired, that’s all. All right now that I have seen you. Will you stay here?”
    “Yes,” he said simply, and then he felt the brush of her eyelashes upon his skin as she closed her eyes and slept.
    When day broke over Burhanpur and the muezzins’ voices floated over the air to call the faithful to prayer, Shah Jahan left Mumtaz still asleep and went to his chambers to pray. He moved slowly through the zenana, worn from his vigil by his wife’s side. In the last hour, Jahanara had come to sit by him and had put her head on his shoulder as they watched Mumtaz Mahal. When he departed, he left his daughter by her mother’s side. She was sleeping also, still sitting on the floor, leaning against the mattress, her face against Mumtaz’s hand.
    Two hours after Emperor Shah Jahan left his wife in her apartments, Princess Jahanara woke with a feeling of dread. Her mother’s hand was cold. Jahanara scrambled up and saw that her chest was stilled of breath, her face calm, as though she was still asleep.
    “Bapa,” she howled. Her voice brought the women of the zenana flocking into the apartments. She pushed them aside and ran out again, tears streaking her face. Down the corridors, into her father’s room, where he was resting. She did not know what