Reprinted by arrangement with Doubleday & Co., Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior written consent of the Publisher, excepting brief quotes used in reviews. First Zebra Books printing: October 1984 Printed in the United States of America Key Words Author: Thomas Hoover Title: The Moghul Moghul, India, Shah Jahan, British India, Taj Mahal, Portuguese India, India, Shah Jahan, India History, Agra, Raj, Seventeenth-Century India AUTHOR'S NOTE This tale is offered to the memory of one William Hawkins (1575-1613), a brandy-drinking, Turkish-speaking seaman and adventurer who was the first Englishman to reach the court of Jahangir, the Great Moghul of India. There he delivered gifts from the new East India Company and a letter from King James proposing direct trade, then a zealously protected monopoly of Portugal. As he gradually adopted Indian ways, Hawkins became a court favorite of the Moghul, who made him a knightly _khan _and eventually tried to keep him in India. After several Portuguese-instigated attempts to murder him, Hawkins attached himself for safety to a certain willful Indian woman. The end of their story eventually became a minor legend throughout the early East India Company. As astonishing as some of the elements in the historical landscape described here may seem today, they are all by and large fictional re- creations of actual events, practices, people--drawn from diaries of seventeenth-century European travelers and from Indian historical materials. Aside from the names, only the clocks in this remote world have been knowingly altered. Years in historical time have become months in these pages, months have become days. Several vicious naval engagements between English frigates and Portuguese galleons, several major land battles between Indian armies, have each been compressed into one. But the major occurrences in this faraway saga all happened. While Shakespeare wrote of commoners and kings, while colonists hewed log cabins from the wilds of the New World, a land ruled by violent intrigue, powerful drugs, and sensual beauty lay hidden in that legendary place known as Moghul India. BOOK ONE LANDFALL CHAPTER ONE He watched from the quarterdeck as the chain fed through the whitecaps of the bay, its staccato clatter muffled, hollow in the midday heat. Then he sensed the anchor grab and felt an uneasy tremor pass along the hull as the links snapped taut against the tide. The cannon were already run in and cooling, but vagrant threads of smoke still traced skyward through the scuttles and open hatch, curling ringlets over two draped bodies by the mainmast. Along the main deck scurvy-blotched seamen, haggard and shirtless to the sun, eased the wounded toward the shade of the fo'c'sle.