was young and she still serves the family. This morning she came to me early. She said that, woken by the disturbance following the wolf’s raid on the animal pens last night, she heard you talking to yourself about Timur as you passed the kitchen of the women servants’ quarters where she was boiling some tea. She reminded me — as I well knew from her tales in my childhood — that her grandfather had ridden with Timur in his raid on Delhi and had often spoken to her of it. She asked whether you too might wish to hear his stories. I told her you wouldn’t want to be bothered with an old soldier’s tales second-hand from an old woman. But she insisted, so I have brought her to you.’
At this, Rehana looked up at Babur and he was touched by the pride in her eyes.
‘I would be glad to hear of my ancestor’s deeds. Make Rehana comfortable by the fire and have one of the servants bring us tea.’
Slowly Rehana eased her old bones on to a stool.
‘Do begin.’
Rehana seemed suddenly shy, as if uncertain where to start now that her request to speak of a revered relation in such exalted company had been granted. She stammered, then fell silent.
‘What was your grandfather’s name?’ Babur prompted her gently.
‘Tariq.’
‘What was his position in Timur’s army?’
‘He was a horse archer — one of the best.’
‘And where did he first see Timur?’
‘In Samarkand in the summer of 1398, just as the preparations for his attack on Hindustan — Northern India — were getting under way. His father — a veteran of one of Timur’s previous campaigns — had brought him to join up, and he was among the recruits Timur reviewed in the Garden of Heart’s Delight just beyond the walls of Samarkand.’
‘What did he remember of how Timur looked then?’
‘He was nearly sixty — only twenty years younger than I am now,’ said Rehana, with the pride that old people have in reaching a good age. She paused as if expecting congratulation.
Babur did not disappoint her. ‘I would never have thought you had seen so many seasons.’
She smiled. ‘But my grandfather said Timur was tall and still unbowed, with thick white hair. His brow was broad, his voice deep and his shoulders wide. When he walked he had a pronounced limp from a serious injury to his right leg when, as a youth, he had been thrown from his horse. It had left that leg much shorter than the other. .’ Rehana was in full stride now, timidity gone, rocking a little as she spoke. Babur guessed she had told this tale many times before in her long life.
‘Mounting his gilded throne, Timur addressed his men. “We prepare to go across the Hindu Kush, down through the passes, across the Indus to Hindustan’s rich capital of Delhi. Not even Alexander reached that city. Or Genghis Khan who only got as far as the Indus. The prize is great. Hindustan is full of riches — gold, emeralds and rubies. It has the only mine in the known world for the bright diamond. But its inhabitants do not deserve such jewels. Although some of the rulers follow our God, most of the people are cowardly infidels, worshipping idols of distorted half-human, half-animal deities. God will take any who die fighting them straight to Paradise. He will grant us great victories over them and their rulers who weakly tolerate unbelief among their subjects. We will take immense booty.”
‘Soon afterwards the army departed. A thick pall of dust hung over the parched grasslands outside Samarkand as ninety thousand men — mostly on horseback — manoeuvred into formation and moved off. Within three days they had passed Shakhrish, the Green City, Timur’s birthplace, and descended the strongly garrisoned defile known as the Iron Gates out on to the scrubby red desert plain, the Kizl Kum.
‘On and on they marched, across the Oxus, past Balkh and Andarab, all the time still within the boundaries of Timur’s empire. And then Timur took an advance party of thirty thousand — my grandfather among them — up through the Khawak Pass on to the roof of the world and into the Hindu Kush. There, they encountered early winter and conditions unknown to plainsmen. Their horses slipped on the ice. Some fell with their riders to their death. Others broke legs and were fit only for the cooking pot.
‘Timur ordered the men to rest by day and travel by night when the ice was frozen solid and less slippery than during daytime when it had a coating of meltwater. Soon they reached an escarpment that was impossible to descend without ropes. Now — my grandfather told me — Timur had to be lowered on a litter by his men a hundred feet down a rocky cliff since he could not make the climb down himself. The cold had reopened the old scar on his right leg and he dared not trust the limb with his full weight. And all the time they were fighting off ambushes by the local tribe, the infidel Kafirs. The snow was often stained bright red with blood. .
‘But after many struggles they reached Kabul. My grandfather told me it was a fine city, overlooked by a hilltop fort, and at a point where great trade routes meet. Smaller and less grand than Samarkand, of course, but very splendid nonetheless.’
‘Indeed, I believe it still is,’ Babur murmured to Baburi. ‘One of my father’s cousins rules it.’
‘You have relatives on every throne, just as I have friends behind every market stall in Samarkand. .’
‘Ignore us, Rehana, and continue.’
‘By September, Timur had crossed the Indus using a bridge made of boats lashed together and was just five hundred miles from Delhi. Everywhere his troops took prisoners, destined for the slave markets of Samarkand on their return but for the present forced to serve them as they marched. My grandfather had five. His particular favourite was a small, dark-eyed orphan called Ravi.
‘In December, Timur’s advance patrols sighted the great domes and minarets within Delhi’s walls. But the Sultan of Delhi had a strong army, including a hundred and fifty of his most feared weapon — the armoured elephants with their shining coats of overlapping steel plates and curved scimitars attached to their long ivory tusks.
‘Timur wanted to avoid a costly and uncertain assault on the walls and provoked the sultan’s cavalry to make a sally against him. But before long the sultan’s troops, amid heavy fighting, retreated back into the city through the same gate out of which they had charged.’
Rehana paused. ‘Here I come to a melancholy part of the story. The prisoners had let out a huge cheer of support for the sultan’s men, hoping to be freed if the sultan were victorious. Timur had heard this and feared that their ardour might lead them — they numbered nearly a hundred thousand — to rebel when the next battle took place.
‘Determined and unsentimental, he ordered that all the prisoners should be killed. What is more, each man should execute his own captives.
‘Men wept as they killed in cold blood. Even women prisoners who had become loving concubines were slain, and some say Timur made the women of his harem kill captives who had served them. My grandfather killed his adult prisoners but could not kill Ravi. He ordered him to run and hide among some dunes. However, when he returned later, he found Ravi’s body half concealed by a scrubby bush under which he must have been trying to hide, his head cleft almost in two. I always remember my grandfather saying that it looked like a ripe melon cut in half on a market stall in Samarkand and that the carnage all around looked and smelled as if he were among the butchers’ stalls there.
‘Timur hoped that the killings would provoke the Sultan of Delhi into another attack and he prepared for battle. To guard against the much-feared elephants, he ordered his soldiers — whether cavalry or infantry, officers or men — in front of their lines to dig deep trenches and pile the earth they dug out into ramparts. Next, he had the blacksmiths stoke their fires to their whitest heat and beat out three-pronged, sharp-tipped iron stakes to strew where the elephants were most likely to charge. He had buffaloes roped together by the head and feet with leather strips, then tied up behind the stakes and in front of the trenches. He ordered camels to be loaded with wood and dried grass, lashed together and held in reserve. Finally, he told the archers to fire only at the elephants’ drivers who sat exposed on the beasts’ necks just behind their ears. With them dead, the elephants would run out of control.
‘In the middle of December — I remember my grandfather said the skies were grey and the weather cool — the sultan’s men indeed sallied out once more, just as Timur had hoped, the great brass kettle-drums on the beasts’ backs sounding and the very ground seeming to shake under their huge feet.
‘But then my grandfather saw the wisdom of Timur’s plan. The elephants never reached their lines. Stumbling on the pointed iron tripods, they came almost to a halt among the bullocks. Then Timur unleashed his masterstroke.
