Alex Rutherford - Raiders from the North

Humayun was starting to sob.

‘Don’t be sad for me. It’s what I prayed for when you were ill. Your astrologer told me what I must do — that I must offer up what was most precious to me. I offered God my life for yours and I did it gladly. God has been good. He gave us some time together before gathering in the debt. .’

Humayun looked down at his father’s wasted face. How could he tell him that that hadn’t been what the astrologer had meant? The man had told him of the conversation. He had been asking Babur to give up some of his treasure, perhaps the Koh-i-Nur, his Mountain of Light, not his own life. .

But a smile was curving his father’s dry lips and he was trying to speak again. ‘Don’t grieve. It means God listened to me. . I go gladly. . knowing that you will continue what I have begun. They are all waiting for me, all those I loved who have gone before me to Paradise. . my father, my mother and grandmother, Wazir Khan and my friend Baburi. . even Timur with his eyes like candles without brilliance. . I can see him and I will tell him what we did. . how we, like him, crossed the Indus and won a great victory. . how we. .’

Babur felt a warm peace envelop him. He was falling, floating, his consciousness diminishing. Whatever he had been going to say next, Humayun would never know. With a long, low sigh his father breathed his last and his head slumped forward.

Humayun lowered his own head and began to pray: ‘Speed my father to Paradise. Give me the strength to continue what he began so that, looking down on me, he will be proud. . Give me the strength. .’

Rising at last, Humayun took one last look at his father, then turned away. Tears filled his eyes again and he struggled to steady his voice. ‘Abdul-Malik,’ he called, ‘the emperor is dead. . Send for the embalmers. .’

Two days later, Humayun watched as six officers laid Babur’s body, washed in camphor, wrapped in a soft, woollen shroud and enclosed in a silver coffin packed with spices, on a gilded cart drawn by twelve black oxen. Then, to the slow beating of drums, the funeral cortege began the long, slow journey that would take it north-west over the bleached plains of Hindustan, across the Indus and up through the winding, dun-grey hills of the Khyber Pass to Kabul. Humayun knew it was right that in death his father should return to the mountainous lands he had loved.

As Babur had asked, when his body reached Kabul it would be laid in the earth in the hillside garden Babur himself had created beneath a simple marble slab close to Baburi’s grave and those of his mother and grandmother. As Babur had also wished, nothing would be constructed over it, no great edifice. The grave of the first Moghul emperor would lie exposed to the winds and soft rain beneath the infinite canopy of the sky.

Humayun glanced at Kamran, Askari and Hindal close beside him. Their sombre faces told him they shared his grief and that for the moment, they were united. But how long would that last? Might they come to resent his father having given him supreme power rather than dividing his realm between them? Ambition — the relentless hunger for fresh conquest and the power it would bring that he had long felt stir within himself — would undoubtedly rise in them, especially Kamran, so close to him in age. . Would he not feel resentment in Kamran’s place? Or Askari’s? Even little Hindal might soon consider the world with a cool, ambitious, speculative eye. All sons of an emperor, it was in the blood of each of them to desire to be the one to lead their dynasty to new heights. How long before Babur’s memory faded and brotherly feeling waned? Might they become like snapping dogs circling the same piece of meat? Before he realised what he was doing, Humayun stepped away from his half-brothers, whose eyes were still on the cortege as, with its escort, it slowly disappeared round a bend in the road through the city of Agra, leaving a pall of orange dust hanging in its wake.

‘Do nothing against your half-brothers. . love them. . reconcile them. .’ Babur’s words, the last instructions of a loved and loving father, resounded inside Humayun’s head. He had made a promise to Babur and he would keep it. Doing so would not be easy and might demand all his self-restraint. Babur’s words had in part been a warning. . For generations the House of Timur had ripped itself apart. Brother had turned on brother, cousin on cousin, and their feuding had irredeemably weakened them, making them easy prey to external enemies like the Uzbeks. He, the new Moghul emperor, must not let that happen in Hindustan. It was his sacred duty.

Humayun looked down at Timur’s heavy gold ring, an unaccustomed weight on his right hand, with the spitting, flat-eared tiger carved deep into the metal. It had seen so many conflicts, so many conquests. . where would it travel with him? What glories, what disasters might it see while on his hand? That was not yet for him to know but, whatever happened, he would never bring dishonour on his dynasty or on his father’s memory. Raising the ring to his lips he kissed it and made a silent vow: ‘I will be a worthy successor to my father, and all the world will have cause to remember me.’