King Errant Part 35

It was a perfect autumn day when, after dismissing the Persian contingent, Babar made his triumphant entry. All along the route, high and low, n.o.bles and poor men, grandees and artisans, princes and peasants, alike testified their joy at the advent of one who had already twice before come to them as King, and who had endeared himself to them by his kindness and generosity.

The streets were all draped with cloth and gold brocades; pictures, drawings, wreaths, were hung up on every side. Such pomp and splendour no one has ever seen or heard of before or since. He was received at the Gate by the great men of the city, who a.s.sured him that the inhabitants had for years been longing that the shadow of his protection might be cast upon them.

Babar, who was dressed, rather to their regret, in the uniform of a _kissilbash_ General (which smacked of heresy, almost of unbelief) responded heartily, and all eyes followed his splendid figure as he rode through the streets saluting the crowd right and left. He was in the highest spirits, for he knew that in the very Palace where she had been left ten long years before, his dearest sister was awaiting him.

Dearest-One! It seemed almost too good to be true.--G.o.d save the man who had brought this happiness into his life!

Impatient, headstrong in all his emotions, he would gladly have cut short his reception and gone straight to her; but the people would not be denied a sight of their hero. If the angels were crying aloud "Enter in peace!" and the populace was shouting "G.o.d save the Emperor!" the least he could do was to listen to them patiently.

So it was nigh dusk before he found himself, trembling with sheer joy, in the Garden-Palace and saw before him a tall, slender figure in white--

"Dearest-One! Dearest-One!" he cried and was kissing her feet, her hands, her thin, worn face.

"Brotherling! Brotherling!"

That was all they said. And then they held back to see each other. She saw strength, and health, and manhood such as she had scarce dreamed of, even for him; a man of past thirty in the very prime of all things. And he saw a woman of nigh forty with streaks of silver in her dark hair, upright, tall, but with a weariness even in her joy.

"I am sorry, Dearest-One," he said humbly as he had said to her many a time when as a child he had grieved her.

"And I am glad," she replied softly.

That night the city seemed on fire. Flares blazed from every house, the flickering lines of countless lights seemed to interlock one street with another. Vast crowds surged through them, and far and wide rose Babar's praise.

But at the door of a mosque an old white-bearded _mullah_ sat and spat calmly. "He wore the accursed red-cap of the schismatic--Wherefore?"

And the folk who heard him looked at each other and echoed:

"Wherefore?"

That was the question. Asked by one to-day, it was asked by half-a-dozen the next, by a hundred the week after, when Babar, faithful as ever to his promises, had the Kutba, the Royal Proclamation, read in the name of Shah-Ismael as over-lord. A thousand asked it when the first gold coin was struck bearing the hated Shiah legends. The Emperor, the man they had welcomed, was a heretic. He and his army wore the red-cap.

Samarkand, head centre of orthodoxy, became alarmed, began to whisper.

"I am no heretic, but a keeper of promises," said Babar grimly, and went on his way. He had become a trifle arrogant, and inclined to resent any interference. The Samarkand folk were rude, ignorant, bigoted; he would not even try to pacify them.

So the winter pa.s.sed and spring set in--(the plentiful drops of her rain having clothed the earth in green raiment)--and with the warmer weather the Usbeks once more appeared like locusts on the edge of the Turkhestan desert and the fight for Samarkand began all over again.

And this time Babar with not a wish ungratified, Babar in the plenitude of his pride and strength, was forced to flight; for religious bigotry is the hardest of all foes to fight.

A horde of _kizzilbashes_, it is true, was sent by his over-lord to help him; but they only made matters worse. First by their confirmation of heresy; next by their brutality in murdering high and low, the sucklings and the decrepit.

Sick at heart, Babar found himself once more a wanderer; once more a prey to the treachery of Moghul troops, from which he escaped one night with bare life and in his night clothes.

His one consolation was that Maham, Dearest-One and his children, were safe with relatives in Khost.

No! he had another consolation; for the man who had set aside wine as an enhancement of pleasure, now took to it as a lessener of care. The Cup-of-Life for him was filled again and again with the Wine-of-Death, and he laughed as he quaffed at its bubbles on the rim. Vaguely, too, came to him a sort of disgust at dogmatic creeds. He would sit and sing Sufic odes with fervour, and praise.

Perhaps with a man of his temperament, it was only to be expected.

"The wine, the lamp which night and day Lights us along our weary way.

Saki! thou knowest I worship wine, Let that delicious cup be mine, Wine! pure and limpid as my tears."

BOOK III

FRUIT TIME

1525 TO 1530

CHAPTER I

"The Long Years slide, The Door of Life stands wide, Ghosts creep inside, With their dead fingers hide Present from Past.

Dear G.o.d be kind!

Grant that I keep enshrined Within my mind The Love of Human-kind, Until the Last"

Babar sat overlooking a Kabul valley, a tall, straight, still athletic man of two-and-forty.

Twelve years had pa.s.sed since, broken, crestfallen at his failure to keep the loyalty of Samarkand, he had shaken the dust of his kingly hopes in Transoiana from him for ever, returned to Kabul and set himself another emprise--the conquest of India. Thus far he had not succeeded. Three or four attempts had been made, in themselves satisfactory, in result futile. On his last expedition he had got as far as Lah.o.r.e; but he had had to return for reinforcements to Kabul, leaving a doubtfully-loyal governor in the Punjab. So he was still no more, no less, than King-of-Kabul; for those twelve years had brought a marked diminution in the vivid initiative of his younger years. He was up at dawn as usual, it is true; the wine he had drunk overnight had never been allowed to cloud his days; yet those twelve comparatively empty years remained, and remain, in mute testimony to the toxic power of the body over the mind. He felt this himself vaguely; for he was always sensitive to the touch of truth.

He had begun wine-bibbing of deliberate intent. He had told himself that he would only indulge for ten years, until he was forty. Indeed, wanting one year of that age he had drunk more copiously as a sort of send-off to virtue. But virtue had not come. As he sat overlooking the valley where his twelve thousand troops were encamped, the instinct to enhance his keen enjoyment of the beauty he saw found words in an order for a beaker of good Shiraz wine, and an intimation that the Pavilion-of-Spirits was to be prepared, his friends and boon companions warned.

The royal cup-bearer brought a golden goblet filled to the brim, and he quaffed it down like mother's milk; so--the cup still in his hands that hung between his knees--sat drinking in that intoxicating beauty of the splendid world.

For it was still splendid to him; though for twelve years he had seldom gone to bed strictly sober. His face, however, showed no sign of his life, save in a certain premature haggardness of cheek. The eyes were clear as ever, and had gained in their falcon-like keenness by reason of his slight stoop, not from the shoulders, but the neck.

It was sunset. The crests of the surrounding hills showed softly violet against the clear, primrose sky. The girdle of the distant snow peaks were losing the last faint flush of day; the cold icy pallor that was Creeping over them, matched the low, level mist streaks which were beginning to stretch, like a winding sheet, over the darker purple shadow of the valley. A shadow that looked like the sky at night, all set as it was with constellations of camp fires ...

"Slave! Another goblet of wine!"

But, even as he gave the order, a twinge of conscience made him remember the Arabic verse: "The breach of a promise avenges itself on the promise breaker." But it was only a twinge. After all, most of the wine parties had been guileless and innocent. He could scarcely recollect being miserably drunk more than once or twice; and then he had always suffered horribly in the stomach for his sin. And but one or two parties had been disagreeable, as when one Gedai, being troublesome-drunk had tried to recline on the royal pillow, and had had to be turned out neck and crop by royalty itself; such royalty having invariably a stronger head than the other carousers.

But even that had been rather funny; though not so funny as on the day when, drinking in the open, they had been apprised of the enemy's approach and Dost-Mahomed could not--despite skins full of water--be got on his horse; so Amni, being solemn-drunk, had suggested that rather than leave him in that condition to fall into the enemy's hands it would be better at once to cut off his head and take it away to some place of safety!

The very remembrance brought laughter. Babar tossed off the second beaker of wine, and stood up quoting Nizami's verses:

"Oh! bring the musky scented wine, The key of mirth which must be mine, The key which opens wide the door Of rapture rich and varied store, And o'er the temper casts a spell Of kindness indescribable."

In those last words lay the secret of Babar's superiority to the debasing influence of his life.