Raiders from the North: Empire of the Moghul (64 page)

It was lucky, Babur thought, examining his appearance in a mirror of burnished bronze, that he was still relatively young.
Inshallah
, God willing, he would have plenty of time to correct the faults in all of his sons and to find ways to satisfy their competing ambitions.

B
abur’s head was throbbing with the persistent ache that dogged him during the monsoon. The warm rain had been falling for three days now but the still, heavy air held no promise of relief. The rains would go on for weeks, even months. Lying back against silken bolsters in his bedchamber in the Agra fort, he tried to imagine the chill, thin rains of Ferghana blowing in over the jagged summit of Mount Beshtor and failed. The
punkah
above his head hardly disturbed the air. It was hard even to remember what it was like not to feel hot. There was little pleasure just now even in visiting his garden – the sodden flowers, soggy ground and overflowing water channels only depressed him.

Babur got up and tried to concentrate on writing an entry in his diary but the words wouldn’t come and he pushed his jewel-studded inkwell impatiently aside. Maybe he would go to the women’s apartments. He could ask Maham to sing. Sometimes she accompanied herself on the round-bellied, slender-necked lute that had once belonged to Esan Dawlat. Maham lacked his grandmother’s gift but the lute still made a sweet sound in her hands.

Or he might play a game of chess with Humayun. His son had a shrewd, subtle mind – but so, he prided himself, did he and he could usually beat him. It amused him to see Humayun’s startled look as he clamed victory with the traditional cry
shah mat
–
‘check-mate’, ‘the king is at a loss’. Later, they would discuss Babur’s plans to launch a campaign when the rains eased against the rulers of Bengal. In their steamy jungles in the Ganges delta, they thought they could defy Moghul authority and deny Babur’s overlordship.

‘Send for my son Humayun and fetch my chessmen,’ Babur ordered a servant. Trying to shake off his lethargy he got up and went to a casement projecting over the riverbank to watch the swollen, muddy waters of the Jumna rushing by. A farmer was leading his bony bullocks along the oozing bank.

Hearing footsteps Babur turned, expecting to see his son, but it was only the white-tunicked servant.

‘Majesty, your son begs your forgiveness but he is unwell and cannot leave his chamber.’

‘What is the matter with him?’

‘I do not know, Majesty.’

Humayun was never ill. Perhaps he, too, was suffering from the torpor that came with the monsoon, sapping the energy and spirit of even the most vigorous.

‘I will go to him.’ Babur wrapped a yellow silk robe round himself and thrust his feet into pointed kidskin slippers. Then he hurried from his apartments to Humayun’s on the opposite side of a galleried courtyard, where water was not shooting, as it should, in sparkling arcs from the lotus-shaped marble basins of the fountains but pouring over the inundated rims.

Humayun was lying on his bed, arms thrown back, eyes closed, forehead beaded with sweat, shivering. When he heard his father’s voice he opened his eyes but they were bloodshot, the pupils dilated. Babur could hear his heavy wheezing breathing. Every scratchy intake of air seemed an effort which hurt him.

‘When did this illness begin?’

‘Early this morning, Father.’

‘Why wasn’t I told?’ Babur looked angrily at his son’s attendants. ‘Send for my
hakim
immediately!’ Then he dipped his own silk handkerchief into some water and wiped Humayun’s brow. The sweat returned at once – in fact, it was almost running down his
face and he seemed to be shivering even more violently now and his teeth had begun to chatter.

‘Majesty, the
hakim
is here.’

Abdul-Malik went immediately to Humayun’s bedside, laid a hand on his forehead, pulled back his eyelids and felt his pulse. Then, with increasing concern, he pulled open Humayun’s robe and, bending, turned his neatly turbaned head to listen to Humayun’s heart.

‘What is wrong with him?’

Abdul-Malik paused. ‘It is hard to say, Majesty. I need to examine him further.’

‘Whatever you require you only have to say . . .’

‘I will send for my assistants. If I may be frank, it would be best if you were to leave the chamber, Majesty. I will report to you when I have examined the prince thoroughly – but it looks serious, perhaps even grave. His pulse and heartbeat are weak and rapid.’ Without waiting for Babur’s reply, Abdul-Malik turned back to his patient. Babur hesitated and, after a glance at his son’s waxen trembling face, left the room. As attendants closed the doors behind him he found that he, too, was trembling.

A chill closed round his heart. So many times he had feared for Humayun. At Panipat he could have fallen beneath the feet of one of Sultan Ibrahim’s war elephants. At Khanua he might have been felled by the slash of a Rajput sword. But he had never thought that Humayun – so healthy and strong – might succumb to sickness. How could he face life without his beloved eldest son? Hindustan and all its riches would be worthless if Humayun died. He would never have come to this sweltering, festering land with its endless hot rains and whining, blood-sucking mosquitoes if he had known this would be the price.

Babur spent the next half-hour pacing round the dripping courtyard and resisting the desire to send at once to the
hakim
to demand news. But at last Abdul-Malik appeared. Babur tried unsuccessfully to read his face.

‘The prince has a very high fever and is becoming delirious . . .’

‘What is it? Not poison?’

‘No, Majesty, there has been no vomiting. I cannot say what the cause is. We can only try to sweat the infection out. I have ordered fires to be lit in his room and I will prepare a cordial of spices to heat his blood . . .’

‘Is there nothing else to be done? Nothing I can send for?’

‘No, Majesty. We must wait. God alone will decide his fate as he does for us all.’

All through the night, Abdul-Malik and his assistants tended Humayun. In the almost suffocating heat of the room, Babur sat close by the bed as his son heaved and tossed, struggling to throw off the thick wool blankets that the
hakim
had ordered to be piled on him. All the time Humayun was muttering, sometimes shouting. The words were incomprehensible to Babur.

In the hour before dawn, as a pale yellow sliver of light appeared on the eastern horizon, Humayun’s delirium worsened. He began to shriek as if in terrible pain and to shake so convulsively that had the hakim’s assistants not held him down he would have fallen from the bed. His eyes were bulging and his tongue – furry and yellow – protruded through dry lips.

Suddenly unable to bear the sights and sounds of his son’s suffering, Babur turned and left the chamber. In the courtyard, he bent and immersed his head in the lotus basin of one of the fountains. As the cool water filled his nose and ears, it was as if – just for a moment – he could insulate himself from the pain and anxieties of the world. Reluctantly he straightened and wiped the water from his eyes.

‘Forgive me, Majesty . . .’

Babur glanced round. The diminutive figure of Humayun’s astrologer, in the rust-coloured robes that always looked too large for him, was standing beside him. Babur brushed his wet hair off his face. ‘What is it?’

‘I have been looking into the heavens, Majesty, trying to discern what is written there about God’s plans for my master. There is something I must tell you. Your son’s life lies in your hands. If you wish him to live you must make a great sacrifice . . .’

‘I would do anything to save him.’ Without realising it, Babur had seized the astrologer’s wrist.

‘You must offer up the most precious thing you possess . . .’

‘What is that?’

‘Only you can know, Majesty.’

Babur turned and, half running, half stumbling, made for the fort mosque. Flinging himself down on the stone floor before the ornately carved plaster niche of the
mihrab
he began to pray, rocking back and forth, eyes tight shut, pouring every ounce of himself into the promise he was making to God: ‘Let me be the sacrifice. Let me take on the burden of my son’s pain. Let me, not him, be the one to die . . . Take my life . . .’

For three long days and nights, Babur had been sitting alone in his chambers, barely eating and drinking and postponing all official business. He knew he should go to Maham but the thought of her anxiety for her son – her only child – on top of his own overwhelmed him. Neither could he write to Kamran and Askari in their distant provinces. What would he say to them? That Humayun had fallen ill and that the
hakim
held out little hope? Even if he did write, they could never reach Agra in time. And at the back of Babur’s mind was a suspicion he could hardly bring himself to contemplate: that Kamran and Askari might not be sorry to learn that their older half-brother was dying.

Why hadn’t God accepted his sacrifice? Why was he still breathing whilst Humayun’s life ebbed . . . ? Babur had never known quite such depths of despair as the hours dragged by. Whichever path he tried to turn his mind down, it ended in the blackest darkness. Though the loss of Baburi had felt like the death of part of himself, that had been a personal grief. If Humayun died it would also be an overwhelming personal loss – he had become closer to Humayun than to any of his other sons – but it would be something more too. It would be God’s way of saying that everything Babur had striven for, everything he had achieved, had been for nothing . . . that he would never found an empire or a dynasty to prosper in Hindustan . . . that he should never have come – or, at the very least, not tried to outdo Timur by staying on. He should have been
less proud, less blown up with vanity, and contented himself with his mountainous lands beyond the Khyber Pass.

Babur glanced at his diary, lying open on a low table. What a piece of conceit it had been to think it worth giving to Humayun to guide him one day in ruling, never thinking his son might not live long enough to rule. He was tempted to throw it on to the fire, burning so bright and hot in Humayun’s sick chamber . . . But he could no longer bring himself to go there and witness Humayun’s shrieking, agonised delirium.

‘Majesty . . .’

Babur turned. One of the hakim’s assistants was before him. The man looked worn out, the skin beneath his eyes so shadowed it looked bruised. ‘My master asks that you should come . . .’

Babur ran to Humayun’s chamber.

Abdul-Malik was waiting for him at the entrance, hands folded across his stomach. ‘Majesty . . . your son gave a great groan . . . and I thought – I truly believed – his end had come . . . Then his eyes opened and he looked at me and knew me . . . He is very weak but the fever has left him even more suddenly than it came . . .’ The
hakim
shook his head, as much puzzled as he was joyful. ‘I have never seen a case like it, Majesty . . . It is a miracle.’

Humayun was cantering along the sunlit riverbank below the Agra fort, his black hawk in its tufted red leather hood on his gauntleted wrist. Later he would join him, Babur decided. It had been a long time since he’d gone hawking. First, though, he’d visit his gardens over the Jumna where he wished to discuss the planting of apricots with his gardeners. Reluctantly he drew his eyes from the sight of Humayun, so vigorous and strong again just four months after his miraculous recovery from his illness.

Babur made for the carved sandstone staircase that descended to a little gate at the base of the fortress wall. A few feet beyond it, further steps – narrow and mottled with lichen – led to the jetty where his gilded barge was waiting to carry him along the river. Suddenly he felt a searing pain in his stomach so severe that he gasped
and put out a hand to clutch the balustrade. As the pain started to ease and he began to breathe more deeply, it came again, spreading to engulf his whole body. He swayed dizzily . . . ‘Help me . . .’

Strong hands took hold of him under his armpits, raising him. Who was it? He looked up gratefully but saw nothing except an enfolding darkness.