Jean de Fodoas by Maurice Magre

Author:Maurice Magre [Magre, Maurice]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Black Coat Press
Published: 2018-08-25T00:00:00+00:00

THE MONSTROUS HORSE

Almaner, Yacoub’s city, is fifty cosses from Ahmednagar, surrounded by sheer mountains. I would require two days on horseback and a guide in order to reach it. I asked Aboul Fazi for authorization, I found a guide, and I departed.

I had not been able to forbid myself, before setting forth, a puerile desire. Strolling in the bazaar with Omar Ali, I had seen a prodigious gold lamé cloth for making a turban, and I had bought it for fifty rupees. It was so heavy and well-woven that I was unable to wind it round me head without my friend’s collaboration. Beneath that turban I walked like an idol and I had difficulty making my head oscillate either to signify yes or no. Furthermore, once my guide was paid, I no longer had anything in my belt but than five gold pieces, all that remained of a sum rapidly handed over by Aboul Fazi when we left Agra.

“That’s only on account, for traveling expenses,” the powerful minister had told me.

There had been no more question of the full sum. I had noticed that powerful men who dispose of great wealth forget promise sums more easily than those who are poor. In India, as in all the lands of the earth, all the actions one accomplishes have a counterweight in local coin, and one has exactly the same difficulty as elsewhere in procuring that counterweight.

While riding behind the guide, a timorous Hindu, I remembered what I had learned on the subject of Yacoub. That man of vulgar appearance, whom I had seen ready to fight bodily with a tiger, the man whose hairy arms and legs I had noticed with disgust when I had been sleeping in the same tent, belonged to the most ancient nobility on earth!

He was the cousin of the venerable Queen Tchand Bibi and the uncle of Bahadur,32 the pretender to the throne of the Deccan. He belonged to the family of Farrukhis, who descended from the emperors of Byzantium, and also the ancient emperors of Persia, the same sovereigns that had combated Greece twenty centuries earlier, in illustrious wars. I would never have believed that such an ancient family could exist in the world; but it was said that a tableau engraved on marble and conserved in the city of Asir carried the design of that unprecedented genealogical tree, whose roots plunged into the very sources of humankind. It gave proofs of the crossings and descendances, and the people were able to admire it and assure themselves of the antiquity of the royal blood. What were the Kings of France compared with such a nobility? What were the Fodoases, of which I was the unworthy last branch?

Yacoub’s father had converted to Islam and had been held in suspicion by his relatives because of that. Yacoub himself, a former companion in war of Akbar, was seen badly by everyone because he gave his passions priority over everything that it was customary to respect: amity, religion and duty.

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