Raiders from the North: Empire of the Moghul (41 page)

‘So that old fool of a grand vizier will be your father-in-law.’

‘Yes.’

‘So he’ll have even more op-op-opportunity to p-p-prose on and you’ll have even less excuse not to l-l-listen.’

‘He comes from an ancient family. His ancestor was grand vizier when Timur’s army passed through.’

‘That explains why Timur didn’t stay long. What does she look like?’

Babur shrugged. ‘Gulrukh? I’ve not seen her. When the time comes I’ll do my duty by her, but Maham will always have first place among my wives . . .’

On a cold March evening in 1508, Babur was on the citadel’s battlements. His breath rose in frosty spirals and he pulled his fur-lined robes tightly round him. The skies above Kabul – as so often at this season – were clear and the stars shone with such brilliance it almost hurt to look at them. An hour ago, he had been standing in this exact spot with his astrologer gazing skywards with him. ‘If the child is born tonight, while we are in Pisces, it will bring good fortune on your house,’ the old man had said, mottled hands shaking with cold as they clutched his bundle of charts.

Babur had dismissed him and all of his attendants – even Baburi. Until he knew what had happened he wanted to be alone. At least up here he was unable to hear Maham’s agonised screams . . . She had been in labour now for fifteen hours. It had taken every ounce of his self-control not to rush to her bedside but it was no fit place for a man. His grandmother had shouted at him to go away and leave matters to the women. He had caught only a glimpse of Maham’s face, contorted with pain, running with sweat, her lip bleeding where she had bitten it, before the great doors had been closed firmly in his face.

‘It doesn’t matter whether it’s a boy or a girl – but let Maham live,’ he found himself praying. ‘And if any must die let it be the child, not her . . .’ The
hakims
had been warning for days that the child was large – perhaps too large for Maham’s slight frame.

Gulrukh, too, was pregnant. Her child would not come for another five months yet already she had swelled up like a watermelon and looked healthy and well. But pregnancy had only made Maham ill. She had found it difficult to eat and instead of blooming like Gulrukh, her face had grown pinched. Circles dark as bruises were etched in the delicate skin beneath her long-lashed eyes.

Baisanghar, too, had been watching Maham anxiously. She was his only surviving child. These would be difficult hours for him . . .

‘Majesty . . . come quickly . . .’ The woman, one of Maham’s attendants, was panting and finding it hard to summon enough breath to speak. She put an arm against the stone door frame through which she’d emerged to steady herself. Babur felt as if he was viewing the scene from far away . . . ‘You have a son, Majesty . . .’

‘What did you say . . . ?’

‘Her Majesty, your wife, has borne you a son . . . She ordered me to find you – to tell you all is well . . .’

‘And my wife . . . how is she?’

‘She is exhausted but she is asking for you.’ For the first time the woman looked at him, and, perhaps because she saw an anxious father rather than a king, she shed her nervousness and smiled. ‘All is well, Majesty, truly, and you can go to her.’

She disappeared back down the twisting staircase towards the women’s quarters, but he didn’t follow her immediately. For just a few moments he raised his face to the cold, pure sky above, seeking Canopus, the sign of fortune. It had surely guided his steps from the moment he saw it beaming, beacon-like, beyond the snowy passes of the Hindu Kush. There it was now, shining brightly. Babur gave silent thanks.

As the mullahs in their black robes and high white turbans finished chanting their prayers, Babur showered tiny silver and gold coins from a jade saucer over the head of his five-day-old son, lying naked on a blue velvet cushion in Baisanghar’s arms.

‘You are my first-born, my beloved son. I name you Humayun, Fortunate One. May your life be fortunate and may you bring honour and glory to our house.’ The tenderness he felt as he looked into his son’s wrinkled little face was like nothing he’d ever known. He’d wanted a son – many sons – to carry the blood line down through the generations, but he had never thought of what fatherhood would mean to him. It was good he had no formal speeches to make – he might not be able to hold his voice steady or keep back the tears welling in his eyes.

Humayun’s voice rose in a thin wail as Babur handed the empty saucer to Baburi at his side. Lifting the child from the cushion, he held him high so that all his courtiers, all his chiefs, could see him and acknowledge their new prince.

Maham, though still weak, his mother and grandmother would be watching through the carved marble grille high in the wall to the right of the royal dais in Babur’s audience hall. They would have seen him acknowledging the traditional gifts – silver coins signifying good luck, silks, horses and hunting dogs from the wealthier nobles, sheep and goats brought by the tribal leaders.

The feasting and celebrations would last late into the night, long after Humayun had been returned to the care of Maham and his wet-nurse, a bright-eyed young woman who had recently weaned her own son. To be wet-nurse to a Timurid prince was a great honour and the position was eagerly sought. She would guard her new charge well.

Gusts of male laughter roused him from his thoughts. Back on the blue cushion that Baisanghar was still holding, a vigorously wriggling Humayun had unleashed an arc of yellow urine.

‘So may he piss on all our enemies!’ Babur shouted, amid the general mirth, but he had something else to say. He had not planned to do it now, in this way, but something – a new resolve – was driving him on. He signalled for silence.

‘You have come here today to honour my son, to honour my house – the House of Timur. The time has come for me to claim Timur’s title of Padishah, Lord of the World. I, with my son Humayun and my sons yet to be born, will prove myself worthy of it, and all who support me will share the glory.’

S
ix months later Babur sat, face impassive, on his gilded throne, his courtiers erect and motionless around him, as Baburi lowered the sack to the ground before him.

‘Show them.’

Taking his dagger from his blue sash, Baburi slit the sack to reveal the contents: two heads, blood-encrusted and mottled purple-black with weeping putrescence. The stench of decay – sweet and rotten to the point of nausea – filled the room. The ragged flesh where a blade had roughly hacked through the base of the neck suggested that death had not come easily to the two men. The once handsome features of Sayyidim, the young cup-bearer whom Babur had helped hold down while his frost-bitten hand had been amputated, were only just recognisable in his bloated face. His bursting lips were pulled back to reveal gums suppurating pus above still perfect white teeth. As for the other head, Babur had not even recognised the man – one of Baisanghar’s lieutenants – but his death, like Sayyidim’s, would be avenged.

The dead men’s task had been to take a letter from Babur to the King of Khorasan, his distant relation, at his court in Herat. Merchants arriving with the biggest caravan to reach Kabul that season had reported that, beyond the Hindu Kush, Shaibani Khan was on the move again at the head of a vast army. Some said his target was
wealthy Khorasan, west of Kabul, others that it was Kabul itself. Babur’s letter to the king had been a warning but also a suggestion for their alliance. Except that the letter had never arrived . . .

Baburi had come upon the messengers’ fate by chance during a routine raid against a clan of sheep-rustling Kafirs. While searching the mud-brick huts of their remote village he had found the messengers’ heads in a large clay pot under a buzzing cloud of green-black flies. The heads of their ten-man military escort were nearby. From the account Baburi choked out of the headman, the Kafirs had tortured them for no reason other than sadistic pleasure. Some had had their tongues cut out, but even more appalling was what had they done to one messenger who had been slashed in the abdomen during the fight in which they were captured. The Kafirs had put their hands into the wound and pulled out part of his intestine and, as he screamed out, tied it to a post and then made the man dance around it, unravelling his intestines as he went until at last death had mercifully ended his sufferings.

Baburi, resisting the temptation for instant vengeance, had bound the headman’s ankles to his wrists behind his back and rounded up all the other Kafirs he could find to bring back to the citadel in Kabul. The convoy had arrived just a few hours earlier and in the dungeons beneath the citadel it hadn’t taken long to force from them a confession of who had bribed them to carry out such a barbarous act.

Babur addressed his courtiers in a flat, dispassionate voice. ‘I asked you to assemble here before me to hear proof of an act of treason. These heads belong to my messengers to the King of Khorasan. They were murdered on the orders of a man of my blood, a man I trusted . . . Bring him in.’

A gasp went up as Mirza Khan was led into the room surrounded by guards. In deference to his rank as a descendant of Timur he was not bound. There was nothing humble or fearful in his demeanour or his clothes: a heavy enamelled chain hung round his neck and his tunic of purple silk was secured about his stout body with a yellow sash woven with pearls. His expression was insolent.

Glancing briefly at the two rotting heads as if they were no
more than a speck of dirt on his red riding boots Mirza Khan touched his hand to his breast but said nothing.

‘The men who murdered my messengers – Kafirs from the mountains – have confessed to their crime. They name you as the instigator . . .’

‘Any one of us, never mind villains, will say anything under torture . . .’

‘Sometimes even the truth . . . They say you paid them to seize the messengers – one of them once your own cup-bearer – as they entered the Shibartu Pass and to steal the letter they were carrying to the King of Khorasan. You also told them they could do as they liked with the prisoners, provided their disposal was permanent. In their stupidity they kept their heads as proof of this . . .’

Mirza Khan shrugged. ‘Kafirs are known for their lies and deceit . . .’

‘My quartermaster found this among their miserable possessions.’ An attendant passed Babur a shabby little bag of flowered silk. Untying the cord at its neck, Babur pulled out a small plug of ivory with a piece of onyx set into its base. ‘Your seal, Mirza Khan. The craftsmen who inscribed your name did a good job – see how clearly your name and titles stand out. You were a fool to send a token like that to your hirelings, but I always knew you had manure for brains . . .’

It was good to see Mirza Khan’s fear beginning to show. Sweat was running down his face into his perfumed beard and dark stains were spreading visibly into the purple silk beneath his armpits.

‘What I don’t understand is why you did it.’

Mirza Khan dabbed at his face briefly with a lilac handkerchief but remained silent.

‘If you don’t speak I’ll have you tortured.’

‘You can’t – I’m of Timur’s house, your own cousin.’

‘I can and I will. You forfeited your rights when you betrayed me.’ Babur’s cold words seemed to crush the insolence from Mirza Khan. The screws were twisting now.

‘Majesty . . .’ It was the first time Mirza Khan had addressed him so. ‘I had no choice – I was forced to act as I did . . .’

‘A man always has a choice. For whom were you acting?’

Mirza Khan suddenly began to retch. A thin trail of yellowish vomit spewed from the corner of his mouth, staining the purple silk of his tunic. He wiped it away, raised his head and looked piteously at Babur. ‘Remember, we share the same blood . . .’

‘I do remember, and I am ashamed of it. Once more, who is your paymaster?’

Mirza Khan looked as if he was about to vomit again, but he swallowed hard and mumbled something.

‘Speak up.’

‘Shaibani Khan.’

Babur stared. Then he jumped down from his dais and advanced on Mirza Khan, shook him by his shoulders and yelled into his face, ‘You have betrayed me to Shaibani Khan, that Uzbek barbarian – the enemy of all our house?’