Swords From the East (67 page)

"We must not stir from this spot," I heard them say, "until we have news of Kadir Berdi." And after a while one of them added, "This stone house is too near the village. There is a place on the outskirts where we might lie safely hidden if we could reach it."

Evidently my choice of the dwelling did not satisfy them. About midnight we mounted our horses and went to a garden on the edge of the suburbs. The garden had a mud wall around it and a building of sorts with a terrace roof. Here Baba Sairami sat and kept a sharp lookout. And here we waited until the next noon.

Then Baba Sairami came down from the terrace and said-"Here comes Yusuf the Overseer."

I was seized with utter dismay and responded-"Find out if he comes because he knows I am here!"

Baba went out and after some talk returned.

"Yusuf the Overseer says," he explained, "that he met a foot soldier at the gate of Akhsi who told him that the king was in Karnan hiding in a garden on the outskirts. Without communicating this news to anyone, he had the man bound and guarded and hastened to you as swiftly as his horse could bring him. The Begs, your enemies, know nothing about you, as yet."

"What do you think of this?" I asked him.

"They are all your servants," he replied. "There is nothing left for you but to join them. Why do you doubt they will greet you as a king again?"

I did doubt, and greatly.

"After this last war and trickery, I can trust no strangers."

As I was speaking, Yusuf suddenly presented himself and fell on both knees, exclaiming: "Why should I conceal anything from you? Tambal Beg knows nothing at all. But Sheikh Bayezid Beg has discovered where you are, and has sent me hither!"

Although he was on his knees he spoke arrogantly, and his words alarmed me mightily. There is nothing in this world that stirs a man more painfully than the near approach of death.

"Tell me the truth!" I exclaimed. "Then, if matters are about to go against me finally, I may perform the last ablutions."`

Yusuf swore again and again, but I did not heed his oaths. Feeling very weak, I rose and went into a corner of the garden. I meditated, saying to myself, "Should a man live a hundred-nay, a thousand years, death comes to him in the end."

I resigned myself, accordingly, to die.

There was a stream in the garden, and at its edge I made my last ablutions and recited a prayer of two bowings, Then, giving myself up to meditation, I was about to ask God for His compassion, when irresistible sleep closed my eyes. I dreamed, and in the dream I saw the son of the murdered Kwajah Yahia with a great following, all on dappled gray horses, come to me and say: "Do not be troubled. The holy Kwajah has sent me to support you to your throne. Whenever you are in distress and danger, appeal to him and victory and triumph shall come to your side!"

I woke with an easy heart, at the very moment when Yusuf the Overseer and his companions were agreeing to seize and throttle me. After listening to them talking about it a while, I opened my eyes and joined the discussion, saying-"All you say is very well, but I am curious to see which of you dares approach me first."

As I spoke, the tramp of a number of horses was heard outside the garden wall.

Yusuf the Overseer sprang up angrily.

"If we had bound you and taken you to Tambal, we would have prospered greatly by it. As it is, he has sent a large troop to seize you, and the noise you hear is the tramp of horses on your track."

At this plain statement, my face fell and I wracked my brains to decide what to do. At that very moment the horsemen, who had not managed to find the garden gate, began to make a breach in the crumbling wall. The mud bricks fell away and a rider jumped through, then another.

They were Mohammed Barlas and Babai Pargari, two of my most devoted followers, with fifteen or twenty others at their heels. When they had come near to my person, they threw themselves off their horses, and, bending the knee at a respectful distance, fell at my feet and overwhelmed me with marks of their affection. Amazed at what seemed to be an apparition-I was very weary and hungry-I felt that God had restored me to life.

"Seize Yusuf the Overseer," I cried to them at once, "and the wretched traitors who are with him, and bring them to me, bound hand and foot!"

Then turning to my rescuers, I said: "Whence came you? Who told you what was happening?"

With the loss of his homeland, and the defeat of his uncles, Babar's tenyear struggle for his heritage came to an end. Since he was Babar, and still alive, he did not give up the struggle for a kingdom. Having lost his own country, he set out to conquer a new land. And this second period of his life took him from his native hills to India, and gave us the story of the first of the great Moghuls.

Foreword by Harold Lamb

Four hundred years ago there lived a happy-go-lucky and gallant boy who was dubbed the "Tiger." He was born in the mountains of Central Asia, where the snow peaks of the Hindu Kush and the Roof of the World itself stand like sentinels against the skyline.

He was a Moghul, which is a European way of saying that he was a descendant of the great Mongols-Genghis Khan on one side, Tamerlane on the other. When he was eleven years of age his father died, leaving him the kingship of a small mountain country, Ferghana, and a fellowship of a few Moghul noblemen to serve him. Some of his nobles became devoted to the boy; others betrayed him for their own gain.

No one-least of all the Tiger himself-dreamed that he would one day conquer India. Or that he would be known to history as the first of the great Moghuls.

His days were spent in the saddle. In all his years he did not pass the festival of Ramazan twice in the same place. At seventeen he was already a veteran in warfare-in the warfare of the clans of Central Asia, than which there is nothing more merciless.

Ferghana, his native state, was wrested from him by his enemies. He won it back, only to see it grasped by his uncles who had helped to gain it, and they in turn were driven from it by barbarian invaders from the northern deserts.

Perhaps in all history there never was a prince more recklessly daring than the young Tiger. He was wounded a dozen times, twice in the head. Once his own followers believed him dying, and again he gave up all hope, made his last ablutions, and prepared to meet death, only to be preserved to life by the strange good fortune that dogged him in his darkest hours.

The Tiger was a remarkable swordsman. His strength, in full manhood, was such that he was known to pick up a man under each arm and run along the edge of a rampart, leaping the embrasures.

He had set his heart on gaining an empire. He was the heir of emperors. He meant to wrest his heritage from his enemies.

Samarkand, the golden city of Tamerlane, aroused his longing. Samarkand was at that time the rendezvous for the astronomers, the poets and savants of Asia-as Baghdad once had been, and as Cordova was in Europe. These Moghuls of his were born warriors, fond of making a pyramid of the heads of foemen after a battle, but they were scholarly gentlemen as well. Their knowledge of the exact sciences, of medicine, latitude and longitude-of music and letters would have astonished the contemporary barons of England and France.

The Tiger did make himself master of Samarkand, only to be driven out twice, the last time by the Khan of the northern barbarians, Shaibani. He never gave up hope. Hunted by his enemies, he gambled with his last stake, his life. It was one of the most remarkable feats in the annals of men.

Confronted by an army that outnumbered his own followers hopelessly, he rode out between the two lines and challenged any enemies who had courage to draw sword against him. Five foemen had the courage, and he killed or badly wounded all of the five, one after the other. It was sheer desperation, but his own retainers were fired by such an example and his foes correspondingly dismayed. Somewhat to the Tiger's surprise, whole tribes began to rally to him in his hills.

Besides his mother and his sot of a brother, Jahangir, he now had an unruly army to care for, and he reflected that his ancestors had once ruled the mountain city of Kabul, midway between Samarkand and India. So to Kabul he went with his tatterdemalions, and the Providence that watched over the Tiger guided him to the plunder of eight hundred suits of armor and the weapons he needed, on the way.

Beyond Kabul lay India, another world, and at that time a much harried world. Here were vast multitudes, and the treasures of centuries. It was divided then as now between Moslem and Hindu.

The Moslem portion was the empire centering around the Punjab, and Delhi was its chief city. Sultan Ibrahim, the lord of the Lodi Afghans, was king of Delhi, and a cruel sort of monarch at that, even for an Afghan. Even members of his own family turned against him, and one of them was to appeal to the Tiger for aid.

In the heart of India and throughout the Thur or desert country, the Rajputs ruled the Land of Kings. They were chivalrous gentlemen, quarrelsome among themselves, with feuds that dated back to the sun and moon-magnificent swordsmen, Hindus all, and perfectly at unity when an invader was to be repelled.

Their feudal strongholds were almost impregnable-perched on masses of rock rising out of the plain-Chitore, the ruling city, the famous Rantambor, and Gwalior. Rana Sanga was then their overlord, being master of Chitore.

Until that day, cannon had been more ornamental than useful-huge pieces casting stones more often than balls, and depending more on the effect of one thunderous discharge-that might or might not do more damage to the artillerists than to the enemy-than any sustained fire. Foot soldiers were looked upon by Hindu and Moslem lords alike as a kind of inferior race, something in the way of camp-followers. Battles were fought by massed horsemen, and a charge driven home or broken, won or lost the issue.

A gorgeous pageant, India, in that age of Rajput glory, when horse and elephants were the servants of men and all men were of the blood of kings.

Down the Khyber Pass, into this array of multitudinous hosts, the Tiger was to advance with ten thousand hardy Moghuls and some Turks who had dreams of making artillery useful. He was aided by the strict discipline of the Mongols, by generalship that was the fruit of bitter experience, and by a determination never to turn back from this new land until he had conquered it.

He was to enter India without understanding the enervating heat and the fever that always took toll of his race, or the impossibility of returning again to the cool mountain kingdom of Kabul, in order to rule his new land from his old home-or the homesickness that thinned the ranks of his followers more than the fever.

Realizing these things, almost as the last battle was fought, the Tiger's will did not weaken. His empire gained; he would be emperor. The Providence that had aided him now took its toll, and sickness ended his days, in the prime of his life.

But the empire of the Moghuls was a thing achieved, and the foundation of modern India laid.

The Tiger has been in his tomb these four centuries, but his story has been written, and fortunately by himself. This indefatigable warrior who is known to history as Babar, the Tiger, had the gift of setting things down as they happened.