Raiders from the North: Empire of the Moghul (23 page)

Baburi nodded, with a frown of concentration. He had natural grace in the saddle and would make a good rider, Babur thought. What had his life been like till now? It was hard for Babur to imagine. Images came into his head of the scrawny old man with his mildewed onions in the square in Samarkand where Babur had hidden after creeping into the city through the tunnel. Perhaps Baburi had been somewhere in the square that morning.

‘Come on,’ Babur shouted. ‘Hurry up.’

‘I will – if I can persuade the horse to agree, Majesty.’

A few days later, Babur was handing his horse to his groom outside the stables, when he saw Baburi inside, bending down with his back towards him to groom his horse’s legs. Babur walked over to him quietly and extended his hand to tap his shoulder to ask him how he was progressing. As he did so, his wrist was gripped and twisted. Baburi had whipped around and grabbed him. As soon as he saw who it was, he let go and dropped to his knees. ‘Forgive me, Majesty, I didn’t realise it was you.’

‘Of course you did not, but even so why did you react like that?’

‘Instinct. When you live on the streets as a child and you sense someone sneaking up behind you, you must act quickly to protect
what you’ve got – whether food or a coin or indeed your freedom. There were plenty of men ready to abduct children to sell them into slavery or worse.’

‘Was there no one to look out for you?’

‘Not after my mother died. Sometimes people were kind but usually because they wanted something – even if it was only gratitude or flattery or to have you do their bidding. Those you were most likely to be able to rely on – for information on the back way into a bakery to steal a loaf or a good place to sleep in winter – were your fellow street children and even they looked after themselves first.’

‘Was it really like that? Are people so selfish?’

‘Perhaps I exaggerate. I made some good friends,’ Baburi said, then added, with a wry smile, ‘Is it so different at court? How many can you rely on unquestioningly among your counsellors? Who doesn’t put his own interest before yours, seeking some advantage for himself, some honour or reward to raise himself above his peers? How many of your fellow rulers – relatives or not – wouldn’t sneak into your territory to plunder it when your attention is distracted, like I did into bakeries when the owner was serving someone else?’

Babur suddenly scowled, reminded so forcibly of the actions of his half-brother Jahangir and his cousins Tambal and Mahmud. ‘I still prefer life in the castle to that on the streets – and so do you, or you wouldn’t be here.’

‘At least I have a choice. You are a chieftain or nothing. You can never live an obscure, quiet life. Someone will see you as a threat and kill you. I’m free to choose my fate, so my options are more numerous if less exalted. Yes, I do prefer it here, but I shan’t get too comfortable.’

‘Quite right. My father used to say it was possible to be too clever for one’s own good and that, I think, applies to paupers as well as princes.’ With that Babur turned away, satisfied to have had the last word.

As he had done a dozen times before over recent weeks, Babur tied the length of coarse blue cloth round his waist. His black
trousers were ragged at the hem and the leather jerkin he pulled on over the dun tunic was shiny and worn.

‘Take care, Majesty.’ Wazir Khan looked worried.

Babur guessed he disapproved of these night-time excursions and, even more, of his growing closeness with Baburi, his companion in them. But for Babur his adventures were becoming addictive insight into the lives of his people. ‘I will.’ He smiled at his old friend as he slipped from the chamber and hurried down a narrow back staircase to a small courtyard at the back of the fort where, as they had agreed, Baburi was waiting for him in the darkness.

Silently, they made for a side gate where Wazir Khan’s guards, knowing who they were, let them pass without challenge. Several hundred yards beyond the castle, grazing contentedly, were the two ponies Babur had ordered to be saddled and tethered there.

They untied them, jumped on to their backs and, with a click of their tongues and a drumming of their feet on the ponies’ well-fed sides, cantered into the darkness. It was extraordinary, Babur thought, how in just a few short weeks Baburi was becoming like the full blood-brother he had never had. He was teaching him to fight with a sword, to wrestle, even to fire arrows from the saddle – as Wazir Khan had once taught him. Baburi had indeed proved a natural horseman and, made wiser by a few bruising falls, could now almost keep pace with Babur.

Baburi, in turn, was teaching him the songs and dances of the people – and even the concealment skills and deftness required of the sneak thief. It had been Baburi, too, who had taught him how to dress as a peasant for their nocturnal ramblings. When they rode out into the night, they bargained in the villages and settlements for goods in the bazaars and sat hunched round communal fires sipping smoky tea while the elders told their stories.

Sometimes Babur heard them inveigh against himself and the other warlords who made the lives of ordinary men so precarious. At first such comments had angered him, but now he listened, trying to understand what was in the hearts and minds of his people. However, both he and Baburi laughed at the outrageous rumours circulating about the peccadilloes of those in the fortress.
Kasim – Babur’s quiet, unassuming vizier – was said to have a male member of which a stallion would be proud but to be able to enjoy sex only when dressed as a woman and shackled to his bed.

But tonight there was an even more potent attraction than a discussion of Kasim’s appetites. In Dzhizak, the village they were making for, was a brothel they had visited several times already – a broken-down wooden shack where the women danced in the firelight, flaunting their wares, and the men could take their pick. At the thought of the luscious breasts and wide hips of one of them, Yadgar, Babur’s pulse quickened. In daytime his thoughts were on preparing for his coming campaign, but when night fell he could scarcely contain his eagerness to gallop through the soft darkness to her.

Yadgar’s warm, available body and hot, questing mouth had revealed a new world and taught him many techniques and sensations. She was so different from Ayisha who, in all their couplings, had never caressed him. Her hands were always clenched by her sides, her lips cold and shut against him. Perhaps if he had been a more experienced lover on his wedding night, things might have been different . . . But that was in the past. When he was again King of Ferghana he would make Yadgar his concubine. He would enjoy enhancing her lush beauty with bright gems and watching the shimmer of golden chains against her amber skin, the lustre of pearls rising and falling on the soft cushion of her breasts, moist with the sweat of their lovemaking. The thought made him kick his pony on urgently.

Soon they reached the willow grove that marked the outskirts of Dzhizak and called out to the night-watchman that they were travellers in need of refreshment. After he had examined their faces by the light of his guttering torch he grunted and let them continue. They dismounted and led their ponies past the low, mud-brick houses and down the narrow alley to the bazaar, where the thin yellow light from the merchants’ oil lamps barely illumined the piles of gritty, poor-quality rice and mouldering root vegetables. The ground was speckled with sheep and goat droppings and a sprinkling of chicken turds deposited by a few scrawny hens.

The brothel lay on the far side. Yes, Yadgar was there. Babur could see her warming her hands over the dung fire. So was Baburi’s usual choice – a wild mountain girl, boyish and slim, with red glints in her hair and an impudent little face.

As soon as she saw them, Yadgar came running, the cheap bells on her sturdy ankles jingling as she leaped at Babur, flinging her arms round his neck as her mouth sought his. She pressed herself close, laughing as she felt his instant response. Taking him by the hand she led him inside the brothel where, in a wooden cubicle barely large enough for the mattress on the floor, she shrugged off her clothes and went expertly to work with her hands and lips, before spreading her thighs to allow him to enter her warm, moist body.

The pale pink dawn was rising as Babur and Baburi, sated and happy and more than a little drunk from the strong spirits served in the brothel, came back within sight of Shahrukiyyah. They had spoken little on the return ride except to trade a few frank comments about their women and to boast of the frequency and inventiveness of their own performances. Inside the castle, Babur returned to his apartments, waving away the attendants who always seemed to materialise out of nowhere so that he could savour a few last moments of freedom and irresponsibility.

As the doors of his chamber closed behind him, he was already tugging off his clothes. He was unprepared for a sharp blow to his left ear. He turned to see Esan Dawlat, hand still raised, eyes blazing. Never had she come to his apartments like this. Two of her elderly waiting women were standing behind her, eyes downcast but half-smiles on their lips.

‘If you are sure you and your market boy have quite finished your whoring, we have matters to discuss,’ his grandmother snapped. ‘A messenger arrived during the night from Samarkand with a letter. It is from the chamberlain of your cousin Mahmud.’ She flourished a bit of paper in his face.

‘What does my cousin say? Does he want to make me a present of the kingdom he stole?’ Babur rubbed his ear. He wasn’t surprised Esan Dawlat knew he had been with a woman. She always knew
everything. But he felt embarrassed she was seeing him in peasant garb, fresh from Yadgar’s embraces and probably still smelling of her.

‘Your cousin says nothing – and never will again unless you count the
boom
of a drum. Shaibani Khan has taken Samarkand and had Mahmud flayed alive. His skin has been made into a drum to be beaten above the Turquoise Gate every time Shaibani Khan enters and leaves the city.’ Esan Dawlat’s shrewd old eyes were pinpoints of anger at the outrage inflicted by an Uzbek barbarian on a Timurid prince.

‘Listen.’ Squinting, she began to read: ‘“The Uzbeks fell on us like an army of ants devouring everything in their path. They overwhelmed the city’s defences by sheer weight of numbers and have butchered hundreds of our citizens. Bodies are piled in the marketplaces and rot in the wells. I and a few members of the court have survived in hiding thus far but we are in terrible peril . . . They have left us few places to conceal ourselves. May God show us the mercy that, in his infinite wisdom, he has denied to others.”’

Babur felt instantly sober. While he had been cavorting, a thunderbolt had struck. ‘I will summon my council and decide what to do. But we must have more information. The news in that letter must already be old. I will send scouts westward . . .’

Esan Dawlat nodded. It seemed there was nothing further she wished to say to him. A flick of her fingers brought her serving women to her side and she was heading for the door of his chamber. Babur himself opened it for her and watched her resolute figure walk briskly down the dimly lit passage back to the women’s quarters, her servants bobbing behind her.

He washed quickly, still in shock at the tidings from Samarkand. Despite everything, he would not have wished such a fate on Mahmud, and the thought of Shaibani Khan’s men defiling Timur’s exquisite city and murdering its people hurt. If he’d wanted revenge on his cousin or Samarkand’s fickle citizens, he would never have resorted to such obscene butchery . . .

Three-quarters of an hour later, dressed once more as befitted
a king, Babur looked at his counsellors, many recently roused from sleep for this early-morning meeting. On his finger was Timur’s ring – a mark of the gravity of the situation. ‘You have heard the news, of course?’

His counsellors nodded.

‘I fear it is true, but in case it is a trick to distract us from attacking Akhsi, Baisanghar, I want you to send scouting parties west towards Samarkand to see what they can learn. I want regular reports of whatever they find – even if all seems peaceful I want to know. When they reach the city, I want a full account of it. If the Uzbeks are indeed there I need to know whether it seems Shaibani Khan plans to hold the city or whether this was just a raid. Go now.’