Raiders from the North: Empire of the Moghul (14 page)

The crowds along the streets were restrained but not hostile. Babur could feel their curiosity as he rode into the vast Registan Square where, beneath striped green silk awnings, was a marble dais. His uncle’s former counsellors and the leading nobles of Samarkand were waiting in meek lines at its foot.

He dismounted, stepped on to the dais and made his way to its centre where a gilded throne, with carved tiger feet, waited. With so many scrutinising him, he was suddenly self-conscious as he gathered his voluminous robes about him and sat down with as much dignity as he could manage. He was still so young – not quite fourteen. What would people think to see a boy seated before them? But, he told himself, Samarkand was his – by blood and conquest. He lifted his chin and stared proudly ahead.

Sitting stiffly on the splendid throne, he received the oath of allegiance from his new subjects and in turn distributed offices and more of the vizier’s hoarded wealth. But as rank after rank of figures advanced to prostrate themselves before him, Babur knew there was scarcely a man among them he could trust. The thought sobered him and the grand vizier’s contemptuous words thrust themselves into his mind: ‘You’ll never hold Samarkand.’

He would prove to the people he was fit to rule. Hadn’t he already shown mercy and generosity? He had pardoned all who would submit to his authority. The women of the grand vizier’s harem would, in due course, be found places in those of Babur’s chiefs instead of being ravished in the first moments of victory. As for the vizier’s daughter, he had already despatched her to his cousin Mahmud in Kunduz. She had shown little reluctance. Indeed, she should be pleased. Not only would she be wife to a royal prince
of the House of Timur, but Mahmud had saved her only two years previously from being raped by brigands. He had been so smitten with her that he had laid siege to Samarkand for her sake.

Yes, he had acted well, Babur reflected. The people had no reason to fear him and every reason to respect him. All the same, the grand vizier had planted a malignant canker in his mind . . .

Suddenly Babur heard Wazir Khan proclaim, ‘Hail, Babur, King of Samarkand!’ The cry taken up by thousands of voices filled the square and roused Babur from his thoughts. He was a fool to let a dead man whose body now hung in a cage to rot torment him. As he had agreed with Wazir Khan when they had arranged the ceremony, Babur took the cry as his cue. He rose and turned slowly to face each side of the crowded square, allowing all to gaze up on their new king. Then he told the populace, ‘My rule will bring peace and prosperity to all the citizens of Samarkand. As a token of this, I will remit a month of the taxes levied on the city’s markets.’

The crowd roared its approval. Though his own expression remained impassive, jubilation welled inside him again. Timur had been thirty-one, more than twice his age, when he had seized Samarkand. It had been his first great conquest, the springboard to a mighty empire. And so it would be for Babur.

Tonight he would have food distributed throughout the city to alleviate the sufferings of the siege as a further demonstration of his largesse. For himself and his men, there would be feasting and here, at least, he could already outshine Timur, whose tastes had been austere: his favourite dishes had been roasted horsemeat, boiled mutton and rice. They would eat fat sheep brought into the starving city from the meadows beyond and already turning on the spit. Partridges and pheasants were simmering in succulent sauces flavoured with pomegranates and tamarinds. Ripe melons bursting with juice sweet as honey and purple grapes with the bloom still on them were being piled on jewelled salvers. Babur’s mouth watered.

The ceremonials were at an end but Babur still had something to do before the celebrations began. Slowly he stepped from the dais and remounted his horse. Signalling to Wazir Khan and his
guard to follow, he trotted out of the square in the direction of the Gur Emir, the ribbed, egg-shaped, blue-tiled dome with its two slender minarets that was Timur’s tomb.

At the tall, arched gatehouse of the walled complex, Babur jumped down. For reasons he could not have explained, he needed to be alone. He asked Wazir Khan and his guards to wait, then went inside. He crossed a courtyard where sparrows fluttered amid the branches of a mulberry tree, took off his embroidered boots, as custom demanded, and entered the tomb.

The contrast with the bright light outside made it hard to see and he came blinking into an octagonal chamber. The sombre richness he saw in the shafts of tawny light filtering through fretted arches high in the wall made him gasp. He ran his fingers over marble walls inlaid with green alabaster and surmounted at head level by a band of gilded tiles. Above that, the walls were embellished with carved papier-mâché painted blue and gold and set around panels in which verses from the Koran were written in exquisite calligraphy. He craned his neck to see the domed ceiling painted with gilded stars dancing riotously in their private heaven.

Directly beneath the dome a sarcophagus lay on a plain marble platform. It was at least six feet long, with a lid of green jade so dark it looked almost black – a fitting monument to Timur but not, as Babur knew, where he lay. To one side of the chamber, a sloping vaulted passage led to a lower crypt. After a few moments, Babur entered it. The passage was so narrow that his shoulders brushed the cold walls as slowly he descended – bare feet slipping on smooth stone – to emerge into a much smaller, simpler room. A small marble screen high in the wall and carved like honeycomb was the only source of light, which fell in faint shafts on to the carved white marble coffin that contained Timur’s body.

When Timur had died on his march to conquer China, his attendants had perfumed and preserved his corpse with rosewater, camphor and musk before carrying it back in glory to Samarkand and laying it here. Despite the lavish funeral ceremony, it was said the great conqueror had not, at first, found peace. Night after night the sound of wild howling that rose from his tomb had terrified
the citizens of Samarkand. The dead emperor seemed unable to take his eternal rest. The screeches had lasted a year until, finally, the desperate people had gone to Timur’s son. They had tumbled to their knees before him, begging him to free the prisoners, especially the craftsmen, Timur had seized during his wars of conquest and brought to Samarkand to beautify his capital so that, as the released men journeyed to their earthly homes, Timur could finally make his way to his heavenly one. Seeing the frightened, harrowed faces of his subjects, Timur’s son had listened. The prisoners had been sent back to their homelands and Timur had howled no more.

Tales for old women, Babur thought. But there was another story he did believe – it was said that an epitaph had been engraved on the underside of Timur’s coffin lid: ‘If I am roused from my grave, the earth will tremble.’

Babur approached the coffin reverently. Almost afraid, he stretched out his hand to touch the lid where, standing out boldly, was a carved inscription recounting Timur’s ancestry. My ancestry, Babur thought. My blood. He lowered his head and pressed his lips to the chill stone. ‘I will be worthy of you,’ he whispered. It was a promise to the great Timur, and to his dead father. But, above all, it was a promise to himself.

The soft morning breeze stirred the gauzy, pearl-sewn hangings of the pavilion in the Baghi Dilkusha, Timur’s Garden of Heart’s Delight, where – nearly two months after his triumphal entry into Samarkand – Babur was asleep. Of all the parks that Timur had built in the fields and meadows around Samarkand, this was Babur’s favourite. The previous evening, with the sun already setting, on impulse he had summoned Wazir Khan and his bodyguard. They had ridden out through the Turquoise Gate and down the two-mile avenue of stately, gently swaying poplars that led eastward to the garden. Though night had been falling as they galloped in through the gateway, Babur had been able to see Timur’s domed and colonnaded summer palace, gleaming like a great pearl through the dark trees and the pale outlines of the airy pavilions that surrounded it.

Babur had chosen to sleep in one of the pavilions, its graceful marble pillars inlaid with Chinese porcelain and surrounded by elms, plane trees and slender, dark green cypresses. He knew that Timur, too, had liked to sleep in his gardens. He had even ordered his throne to be placed on a platform erected above the intersection of two watercourses. The four gushing channels represented the four rivers of life and symbolised his dominion over the four quarters of the globe.

The more Babur contemplated Timur, the more breathtaking his vision and ambitions seemed. It was easy to speak of himself as Timur’s heir, but when he considered what that meant, he felt humbled and exhilarated.

Something – perhaps the cackle of a pheasant – roused him from his dreams. He sat up with a start and looked around him. The luxury – the floors inlaid with black ebony and pale ivory, the marble sculptures, the golden flasks and cups encrusted with emeralds, turquoises and rubies – was still hard to take in. He touched the rose-coloured silk, shot through with golden thread, of the mattress on which he was lying. This mattress was itself screened from his attendants by a delicately wrought silver and gilt screen set with rose quartz.

Whatever the grand vizier’s crimes, at least he had preserved the treasures of Timur’s summer palace. At the first sign of trouble, he had ordered all the costly carpets, hangings and vessels to be carried to Samarkand where he had secreted them in underground treasure chambers within the citadel. His officials, anxious to ingratiate themselves with their new ruler, had been quick to reveal them to Babur’s men. Though some of the palace’s precious inlay had been chipped away and several lesser pavilions constructed mainly of timber had been knocked down to provide fuel – probably by his own men during the siege, Babur reflected – it had not taken long to restore its beauty.

Babur grinned as he contemplated what his mother, grandmother and sister would say when, as soon as it was safe, he summoned them. His letters, scratched on the fine, thick paper for which Samarkand was famous, had not done justice to its grandeur, history
or scale. After all, this was a city founded eighteen centuries previously by golden-haired, blue-eyed Alexander who, coming from the far west with his armies, had, like Timur, brushed aside all opposition. Babur had ordered Samarkand’s outer walls with their thick ramparts to be measured and discovered it would take a man eleven thousand paces to walk round them. Timur had indeed protected his city well – though one of Babur’s first acts had been to brick up the tunnel through which he himself had sneaked in. He did not wish others – and there were many whose eyes would be on the rich prize of Samarkand – to follow literally in his footsteps. He had also ordered a thorough search for any other tunnels.

Babur lay back on the duck-down pillows. The past weeks had been so rich in new sights and experiences that it seemed incredible so little time had passed. In his letters to his grandmother, who was interested in such things, he had tried to capture his astonishment at the sight of the round, three-storey observatory on high Kohak Hill outside the city where Timur’s grandson, Ulugh Beg, had studied the solar and lunar calendars. Babur had gazed in utter amazement at Ulugh Beg’s sextant, a perfect arc of marble-clad brick, nearly two hundred feet long with a radius of some 130 feet and decorated with the signs of the zodiac. Ulugh Beg had made his observations and taken his measurements using an astrolabe mounted on metal rails at either side of the sextant.

If Timur had conquered the world, his armies moving like a cloud of locusts over a green field, it was Ulugh Beg who had captured the heavens. He had composed the royal astronomical tables still used by the star-gazers of Samarkand. Babur wished he had paid more attention to his lessons but, even so, the sophistication of the observatory filled him with pride at his ancestors’ achievements. Ulugh Beg’s own son, concerned where his father’s quest for knowledge and enlightenment might lead and encouraged by fanatical mullahs, fearful that their mysteries might be penetrated and their dogmas questioned, had had him murdered.

Babur had inspected the religious college Ulugh Beg had built. It filled one side of the Registan Square, and was decorated with turquoise and navy blue tiles, their pattern so intricate that men
called it
hazarbaf
, ‘thousand-weave’. The huge Bibi Khanym mosque in the heart of the city had overwhelmed him. Nothing could have been more different from the plain, austere mosque in his castle of Ferghana where, what seemed a lifetime ago, in the shafting moonlight, his chiefs had sworn their loyalty to him.

A priest told Babur how Timur’s favourite wife, Bibi Khanym, the ivory-skinned Chinese princess whose luminous beauty could move the great conqueror to tears, had intended the mosque as a surprise for Timur on his return from a campaign. But the architect she had summoned from Persia to build it had, in a moment of reckless passion, seized her and left a love-bite on her neck. When Timur returned just days later and saw the blemish on his wife’s otherwise flawless skin and heard her story, he had sent soldiers to seize the architect who, in terror, had flung himself from one of the sky-touching minarets he had just built. Whatever the truth of the tale, the tall, graceful portal flanked by columns more than 150 feet high, and the mosque’s even higher dome – decorated with mosaics – had left Babur dumb with awe.