Except this Akbar of light turned his head, and looked through the lit space between them, and Bistami saw then that his eyes were black balls in his head, black as onyx; and he said to Bistami, We have never met before; I am not the one you seek; the one you seek is elsewhere.

Bistami reeled, fell back in the corner made by the two walls.

When he came to himself, still in a colourful glassine world, Akbar in the flesh stood there before him, sweeping the courtyard with Bistami's broom.

'Master,' Bistami said, and began to weep. 'Mowlana.'

Akbar stopped over him, stared down at him.

Finally he put a hand to Bistami's head. 'You are a servant of God,' he said.

'Yes, Mowlana.'

'"Now hath God been gracious to us",' Akbar recited in Arabic. For whoso feareth God and endureth, God verily will not suffer the reward of the righteous to perish. -

This was from Sura Twelve, the story of Joseph and his brothers. Bistami, encouraged, still seeing through the edges of things, including Akbar and his luminous hand and face, a creature of light pulsing through lives like days, recited verses from the end of the next sura, 'Thunder': Those who lived before them made plots; but all plotting is controlled by God: He knoweth the works of every one. -

Akbar nodded, looking to Chishti's tomb and thinking his own thoughts.

No blame be on you this day",' he muttered, speaking the words Joseph spoke as he forgave his brothers. God will forgive you, for He is the most merciful of those who show mercy."'

'Yes, mowlana. God gives us all things, God the merciful and compassionate, he who is He. 0 he who is He, 0 he who is He, 0 he who is He…' With difficulty he stopped himself.

'Yes.' Akbar looked back down at him again. 'Now, whatever may have happened in Gujarat, I don't wish to hear any more of it. I don't believe you had anything to do with the rebellion. Stop weeping. But Abul Fazl and Shaikh Abdul Nabi do believe this, and they are among my chief advisers. In most matters I trust them. I am loyal to them, as they are to me. So I can ignore them in this, and instruct them to leave you alone, but even if I do that, your life here will not be as comfortable as it was before. You understand.'

'Yes, master.'

'So I am going to send you away 'No, master!'

'Be silent. I am going to send you on the haj.'

Bistami's mouth fell open. After all these days of endless talking, his jaw hung from his face like a broken gate. White light filled everything, and for a moment he swooned.

Then colours returned, and he began to hear again: ' you will ride to Surat and sail on my pilgrim ship, llahi, across the Arabian Sea to Jiddah. The waqf has generated a good donation to Mecca and Medina, and I have appointed Wazir as the mir haj, and the party will include my aunt, Bulbadan Begam, and my wife Salima. I would like to go myself, but Abul FazI insists that I am needed here.'

Bistami nodded. 'You are indispensable, master.'

Akbar contemplated him. 'Unlike you.'

He removed his hand from Bistami's head. 'But the mir haj can always use another cladi. And I wish to establish a permanent Timurid school in Mecca. You can help with that.'

'But – and not come back?'

'Not if you value this existence.'

Bistami stared down at the ground, feeling a chill.

' Come now,' the Emperor said. 'For such a devout scholar as you, a life in Mecca should be pure joy.'

'Yes, master. Of course.' But his voice choked on the words.

Akbar laughed. 'It's better than beheading, you must admit! And who knows. Life is long. Perhaps you will come back one day.'

They both knew it was not likely. Life was not long.

'Whatever God wills,' Bistami murmured, looking around. This courtyard, this tomb, these trees, which he knew stone by stone, branch by branch, leaf by leaf this life, which had filled a hundred years in the last month – it was over. All that he knew so well would pass from him, including this beloved awesome young man. Strange to think that each true life was only a few years long that one passed through several in each bodily span. He said, 'God is great. We will never meet again.'

Five. The Haj to Mecca

From the port of jiddah to Mecca, the pilgrims' camels were continuous from horizon to horizon, looking as if they might continue unbroken all the way across Arabia, or the world. The rocky shallow valleys around Mecca were filled with encampments, and the mutton greased smoke of cooking fires rose into the clear skies at sunset. Cool nights, warm days, never a cloud in the whitish blue sky, and thousands of pilgrims, enthusiastically making the final rounds of the haj, everyone in the city participating in the same ecstatic ritual, all dressed in white, accented by the green turbans in the crowd, worn by the sayyids, those who claimed direct descent from the Prophet: a big family, if the turbans were to be believed, all reciting verses from the Quran following the people in front of them, who followed those before them, and those before them, in a line that extended back nine centuries.

On the voyage to Arabia, Bistami had fasted more seriously than ever in his life, even in the tomb of Chishti. Now he flowed through the stone streets of Mecca light as a feather, looking up at the palms dusting the sky with their gently waving green fronds, feeling so airy in God's grace that it sometimes seemed he looked down on the palm tops, or around the corners into the Kaaba, and he would have to stare at his feet for a while to regain his balance and his sense of self, though as he did so his feet began to seem like distant creatures of their own, thrusting forwards one after the other, time after time. 0 he, 0 he who is He…

He had separated himself from the representatives of Fatepur Sikri, as Akbar's family he found an unwelcome reminder of his lost master.

With them it was always Akbar this and Akbar that, his wife Salima (a second wife, not the Empress) plaintive in a self satisfied way, his aunt egging her on – no. Women were on their own pilgrimage in any case, but the men in the Mughal retinue were almost as bad. And Wazir the mir haj was an ally of Abul Fazl, and therefore suspicious of Bistami, dismissive of him to the point of contempt. There would be no place for Bistami in the Mughal school, assuming that they established one at all, rather than just disbursing some alms and city funds from an embassy, which was how it looked as if it would come about. Either way Bistami would not be welcome among them, that was clear.

But this was one of those blessed moments when the future was no matter for concern, when both past and future were absent from the world. That was what struck Bistami most, even at the time, even in the act of floating along in the line of belief, one of a million whiterobed hajjis pilgrims from all over Dar al Islam, from the Maghrib to Mindanao, from Siberia to the Seychelles: how they were all there together in this one moment, the sky and the town under it all glowing with their presence, not transparently as at Chishti's tomb, but full of colour, stuffed with all the colours of the world. All the people of the world were one.

This holiness radiated outwards from the Kaaba. Bistami moved with the line of humanity into the holiest mosque, and passed by the big smooth black stone, blacker than ebony or jet, black as the night sky without stars, like a boulder-shaped hole in reality. He felt his body and soul pulsing in the same rhythm as the line, as the world. Touching the black stone was like touching flesh. It seemed to revolve around him. The dream image of Akbar's black eyes came to him and he shrugged them away, aware they were distractions out of his own mind, aware of Allah's ban on images. The stone was all and it was just a stone, black reality itself, made solid by God. He kept his place in the line and felt the spirits of the people ahead of him lifting as they passed out of the square, as if they were climbing a stairway into heaven.