Raiders from the North eotm-1

by Alex Rutherford

  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.’

  Chapter 17

  Daughter of Genghis

  Six 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?’

  ‘He promised to return my lands that he had captured. He promised me honour again instead of being a hanger-on at your court. I warned him you were proposing an alliance with Khorasan. He wished to stop it. He plans to attack Khorasan and then you, Majesty. Let me be your spy now, Majesty. . Shaibani Khan trusts me. I will send him whatever messages you wish. . perhaps we can lure him into a trap.’

  To Babur, the man’s oily wheedling was as repulsiv
e as the sour stench of vomit on his breath. He let go of him and stepped back. ‘Take this traitor and throw him head first from the battlements. If that fails to kill him, throw him down again. Then take his body to the dunghill in the marketplace so the mongrels that scavenge there can devour it.’

  ‘Majesty, please. .’ Warm, yellow urine was seeping down on to the soft red leather of Mirza Khan’s boots, slowly forming a small pool on the stone floor. Suddenly he vomited again, and a new smell told Babur that Mirza Khan had also lost control of his bowels.

  ‘Take him!’ Babur shouted to the guards. ‘See that my orders are carried out at once.’

  An hour later, Babur rode out to observe the execution of the Kafirs. So brutal had been their treatment of his men that he had ordered them to suffer a long-established punishment for the worst of traitors. They were to be impaled on sharpened stakes beneath the city walls. Their cries would not reach as far as the citadel. He was glad. Their agonised shrieking was not for the ears of Maham, Kutlugh Nigar or his grandmother although, now he thought about it, Esan Dawlat could probably have observed the whole process without flinching — as he would.

  His contempt for Mirza Khan, his anger with the Kafirs for their mindless bestiality, banished any pity. He watched as the condemned men were roughly stripped of their clothes and dragged to where the stakes waited. The executioners, wearing black leather aprons over their tunics — red as the blood that would soon soak them — seized and impaled the prisoners one by one. Some had the sharp stakes driven up through their anuses. Others were spitted sideways to roars of encouragement from the townspeople. Not that Babur could condemn them — he felt nothing but satisfaction every time a sharpened stake penetrated the soft flesh of a writhing body and the warm blood spurted. He would have liked to give Mirza Khan the same treatment — only his royal birth had saved him.

  That night Babur found it hard to lift his mood. Even the sight of Humayun and his new brother Kamran, with his mop of dark hair, soft as a dandelion seed head — born two months ago to Gulrukh and already gripping Babur’s thumb hard — failed to cheer him. Neither could the feel and scent of Maham’s warm, willing body stifle his forebodings. The storm was coming whether he was ready or not. The decisions he must soon take would be the difference between glorious victory and immortal fame or defeat and obscure death not only for him but for all of his family. .

  A month later, the precariousness of existence was brought home to Babur in a way he had not anticipated. Esan Dawlat’s body on the bier seemed as small as a child’s. The delicate tang of the camphor water in which her women had washed her rose from her simple cotton shroud. As he looked down on his grandmother’s body, Babur didn’t conceal his tears. Somehow he had always taken her strength and determination for granted. The idea that she could die suddenly in her sleep, without uttering a final word — a command, a piece of shrewd advice — was absurd. But as he thought back over the past months, he realised now that there had been signs — vagueness, and an uncertainty and a tendency to fuss that she had never shown before. Her memory had sometimes seemed confused — she would speak to Babur with perfect clarity about his boyhood but if he asked her what she’d been doing yesterday her face would cloud.

  Life without her seemed unthinkable. In their most desperate days, she had been the lynchpin of the family, the voice of reason and common sense but, above all, of courage. Soon he must face the biggest challenge of his life without her. He recollected some of her words to him in his youth: ‘Have no fear of your ambitions. Stare them in the face, fulfil them. Remember, nothing is impossible. .’

  At a signal from Babur, three of his grandmother’s favourite attendants — dressed, like him, in the black robes of mourning — bent down and, with Babur, each took a corner of the bier. Hoisting it on to their shoulders, they carried it slowly down the dark, winding stone staircase from her apartments — the sound of sobbing, led by Kutlugh Nigar, rising behind them — across the sunlit courtyard and laid it on the flat, horse-drawn wagon draped with bright crimson cloth. It was the red that Esan Dawlat had always claimed was the colour of the ancestor she revered: Genghis Khan.

  Followed by his mullahs, courtiers and commanders, Babur walked behind the cart as it carried Esan Dawlat on her final journey. With his mother’s consent he had decided to bury her in his hillside garden among the fruit, flowers and tumbling watercourses. When she had been laid to rest in the dark, fertile earth and the final prayers for the repose of her soul in Paradise had been intoned, he turned to the mourners. ‘She was a true daughter of Genghis. Her bravery never failed her. She believed to despair was a sin. I will never forget her and one day, when I have overcome my enemies, I will return to this spot to tell her what I have done and to ask her blessing.’

  At least Esan Dawlat had died without knowing the terrible calamity that had befallen their royal relations in Herat, Babur thought, a few weeks later, as he tried to take in what Baisanghar was telling him.

  ‘It is true, Majesty. Herat has fallen to the Uzbeks. Shaibani Khan swept down around the slopes of Mount Mukhtar with thirty thousand warriors. The royal family fled into the Ala Qorghan fortress but the reinforcements summoned by the king were cut down before they could reach them.’

  ‘What happened to the family?’

  Baisanghar bit his lip. ‘Shaibani Khan laid siege to the fortress and tunnelled under the walls from the horse market adjoining it, causing part of them to collapse. The Uzbeks surged in. They killed every male member of the royal family down to the smallest son. Shaibani Khan himself seized the child’s ankles and smashed his head against the stone side of one of the royal tombs, spilling his brains, then tossed him aside on to the corpses of his family. He ordered the fortress to be burned down with the bodies still inside. .’

  ‘And what of the women?’

  ‘They say those found hiding in the Ala Qorghan fortress — whether young virgins or bent grandmothers — were forced to strip and dance naked before their drunken conquerors at the victory feast, that the Uzbek chiefs fought among themselves over who was to have the most beautiful, and that some could not wait for the feast to end before publicly sating their lust.’

  Babur’s hands were clenched so tightly that his knuckles seemed ready to burst through the skin. ‘What about Herat?’

  A look of anguish crossed Baisanghar’s usually calm face. ‘The Uzbeks sacked it. Ordinary men were slaughtered, their wives raped and their children sold into slavery. My cousin, who cared for Maham, was slain. Shaibani Khan has also turned on the city’s teachers and writers. The caravan that arrived here today brought a few lucky survivors from the madrasas of Herat. One — a poet — says all the manuscripts in the libraries were ripped up and Shaibani Khan ordered some of the scraps to be rammed down the throat of a scholar he caught until he choked while continually asking him, “How does it feel to live on a diet of poetry?”’

  Though repelled by Baisanghar’s report, Babur wasn’t surprised. From the moment he’d learned his messengers had been intercepted he’d known it couldn’t be long. What would have happened if his warning had reached his relatives in Herat? Their cultured, exquisite world of airy palaces, ancient mosques and madrasas, tucked away to the west, had been ripped apart by a whirlwind. Babur’s father had sometimes talked of these distant relations, so far away he had never visited them. He had mocked their love of luxury and their obsession with beauty, their lack of manly aggression and fighting skills, and had derided their effete, cultured court where a writer was more prized than a warrior and poets eulogised not victory in battle but the succulence of a well-roasted goose or the joy of drinking the wine they called ‘the water of life’.

  But had they really been so foolish? Babur wondered. They had preserved their charmed existence until now. It was a shock to realise that with Samarkand, Ferghana, Kunduz and Khorasan all beneath the Uzbek yoke, he was now the only Timurid ruler left alive. It was a great responsibility, a sacred trust. Whatever the condition of his arm
y, whatever the state of his supplies, before long he must march out against Shaibani Khan to defend what was left of Timur’s world or die in the attempt.

  The reports of the Uzbek mistreatment of the royal family, particularly of the women — probably true though they had a certain formulaic quality — yet again concentrated his thoughts painfully on Khanzada. Was she still alive? He had long comforted himself that she was more useful to the Uzbek as a live bargaining counter than dead. That was the argument he advanced time and again to put heart into his mother. With her own mother dead, now more than ever Kutlugh Nigar needed to believe that she would see Khanzada again. He could never share with her his darker thoughts — that Shaibani Khan’s desire to avenge the abuses he had suffered as a boy in Samarkand was unabated, that he seemed to glory in humilating others and might particularly relish debasing a Timurid princess.

  ‘Majesty. .’ Baisanghar’s anxious voice interrupted his bleak thoughts.

  Babur drew himself up. ‘I’m not going to wait for Shaibani Khan to bring his army to Kabul. In a week’s time we ride against him with whatever forces we can muster. How many troops do we have already?’

  ‘About eight thousand.’

  It was nothing compared with the size of the Uzbek horde but what had Esan Dawlat always said?: ‘Never despair while you still breathe.’

  ‘I must bring forward the plans I have long been forming to oppose Shaibani Khan once more. Send messengers at once — tonight — to all the tribes, even the Kafirs. Tell them that any who come will be free of all levies on grain and livestock for five years and that I will pay them well. Tell them what has happened in Herat and remind them that Shaibani Khan is the enemy of us all. He destroys anyone who is not an Uzbek. .’

  That night, with only Baburi for company, Babur climbed up to the battlements. It was one of his favourite places and usually brought him peace. In the meadows below, cooking fires glowed red in the darkness as shepherds and travelling merchants prepared their evening meal. Babur could hear voices calling and laughing, the bleating of sheep and the coughing of camels. Beyond, Kabul lay quiet within its girdle of walls. What was going through the citizens’ minds? The caravan trains pouring into the city from the west must be bringing as many rumours as trade goods. The people must know of the catastrophe that had overtaken Khorasan and that Shaibani Khan would soon be moving in their direction.