marriage was dissolved had afforded Babur as much satisfaction as it had angered his grandmother. According to the messenger who had delivered the letter — and returned the wedding jewellery Babur had given her — the talk was that Ayisha was shortly to marry a man of her own tribe to whom she had been promised before Babur’s offer of marriage. At least Babur thought he might now understand the reason for her coldness towards him, but as far as he was concerned Ayisha could lie in another man’s bed — any man who could thaw her was welcome.
‘I have no time for a wife,’ he said bluntly. ‘It is my destiny to be a king and I must strike back. .’
‘If you truly believe in your destiny you will listen. Even now, Shaibani Khan is searching for you. He knows it was you who ambushed his men at Mirror Rock, and by now he will know, too, that you have returned here to Sayram. Many will be willing to take his gold for betraying you.’
‘I made a promise to Khanzada. .’
‘Which you cannot honour if he cuts your head off your shoulders. And will it ease her suffering when Shaibani Khan tells her you are dead?’ Her face softened when she saw the bitterness in his eyes. ‘You are still so young. You must learn to be patient. When you live as long as I, you learn that circumstances change. Sometimes the bravest thing — and the hardest — is to wait.’
Kutlugh Nigar nodded. Since Khanzada had been taken she had became so silent it was hard to coax a word from her. ‘Your grandmother is right. You have no chance if you stay here. He will murder us all. I do not care for myself, but you must survive. . Remember whose blood flows in your veins. Don’t let Shaibani Khan wipe you out like some petty bandit.’
Kutlugh Nigar wrapped her thick dark blue shawl round herself more tightly and held her hands over the brazier in the hearth. Winter would soon be upon them again, as the winds blowing around Sayram’s mud-brick houses and penetrating the wooden shutters were warning them.
Babur kissed her thin cheek. ‘I will think over what you have both said.’
Esan Dawlat picked up her lute. It was battered and some of the mother-of-pearl, inlaid to resemble clusters of narcissi, had fallen out, but as she plucked the strings the soft, sweet notes carried Babur back to the days of his boyhood in Akhsi.
Going outside, he walked across the courtyard, climbed on to the village wall and stared out into the gathering dusk. He would make his own decisions, but he knew his grandmother and mother were right. His priority must be to stay alive.
‘Majesty.’ He heard Baburi’s voice from below him. A trio of plump pigeons dangled by their feet from his belt — he must have been hunting. He climbed the short flight of steps on to the wall and stood in silence at Babur’s side.
‘Do you ever doubt your destiny, Baburi?’
‘Market boys don’t have destinies. They’re a luxury, for kings.’
‘All my life I’ve been told that I was put on this earth to achieve something. What if it isn’t true. .?’
‘What do you want me to tell you? That you are heir to Genghis Khan and Timur? That life should be good to you as of right?’
Baburi’s tone was impatient; rough, even. Babur had never heard him speak like that before. ‘I have been unlucky.’
‘No you haven’t. You were fortunate in your birth. You had everything. You weren’t an orphan. You didn’t have to fight for scraps like me.’ Suddenly anger blazed in Baburi’s indigo eyes. ‘I’ve watched you since we rode back here from Akhsi, drowning in self-pity, hardly speaking to those around you. You’ve changed. You weren’t like this when we went riding together or when you had Yadgar in your arms. That was living and you’ve forgotten what it was like. If this is how you behave in adversity, perhaps you don’t deserve this “great destiny” — whatever it might be — that you seem to carry around like a burden on your back.’
Before he knew it, Babur had taken a swing at Baburi and the two had tumbled from the walls on to the hard mud below. Babur was the heavier and had Baburi pinned under him but, quick as an eel, Baburi twisted to one side and, with the fingers of one hand poking into one of Babur’s eyes, caught him a hard blow with the other on the side of his head. Grunting with pain, Babur rolled off him, sprang to his feet and leaped on him again, winding him. Seizing Baburi’s head he began banging it hard against the ground, but a second later felt Baburi’s boot in his groin. In agony, he let go of Baburi and rolled aside.
The two of them — hair dusty and tousled — looked at one another. Baburi’s nose was bleeding and Babur felt blood running down his own face from a cut above his ear, while his left eye, where Baburi had jabbed it, was already hard to keep open.
‘You’d make a good street-fighter,’ Baburi said. ‘You’ll never starve — destiny or no destiny.’
As men, alerted by the sound of their fight, came running along the walls above them, led by an amazed- looking Baisanghar, the two of them started to laugh.
The air was so cold it stung Babur’s eyes. Every two or three steps his feet, in their hide boots, slipped on the ice. Yet this steep pass, leading south out of Ferghana, was the only viable escape route from Shaibani Khan whose patrols had been hunting Babur and his men like foxes, flushing them from place to place and laying everywhere waste.
The absence of horses or ponies made Babur feel vulnerable, even high on this icy mountain where they would meet no one. He and his people had always been horsemen but for the moment they must rely on the endurance of their own bodies. During the first few days of the journey up the lower slopes, Esan Dawlat and Kutlugh Nigar had ridden on the backs of one of the four donkeys Babur had brought with him to help carry their possessions. But as the ascent got steeper and the weather worsened, Babur had had to order the animals killed for food.
Thereafter, it had sometimes been possible for Esan Dawlat and Kutlugh Nigar to be carried in baskets on the backs of his strongest men. But for the rest of the time, they and their two serving women, like the forty or so men who remained with Babur, had had to walk, feeling their way upwards through the frozen rocks with their wooden staves. Kutlugh Nigar had surprised her son with her agility and balance, refusing help in favour of her own weaker mother. Babur could see her now, ahead of him, so muffled in sheepskins that almost nothing of her was visible, pulling herself up the rocks quicker than some of his men. She was faring much better than Kasim, who had fallen repeatedly and was clearly exhausted.
All that the party had to shelter them were four felt tents and some fleeces rolled together round poles that three men — one behind another with the pole resting on their shoulders — could just about carry. Babur had taken his turn, his back bending as his feet fought for purchase.
After another day, they should be over the pass. In the valleys below there would be villages to provide them with shelter and later with horses. That night, lying beneath the fleeces, Babur took comfort from that thought, as he did from the companionable warmth of the bodies of Baburi and his men pressed tightly around him.
Caught urinating on the ice of a frozen stream, the boy gawped in amazement two days later at the unkempt party stumbling towards him from the direction of the pass. Then he turned and fled, slipping and slithering to the village a few hundred yards further downhill.
‘Shall I send men ahead, Majesty?’ Baisanghar asked.
Babur nodded. Though he was numb with cold, relief and pride began to pump through him, reviving him. He had done it. He had brought his family and his men safely through the mountains. That they were a ragged few, rather than the armies he had once commanded, didn’t matter for the present.
A few minutes later, Baisanghar’s soldiers returned with what looked — beneath the layers of thick quilted coats and the dark woollen cloth wound round his head — like an elderly man. They must have told him who Babur was for he fell at his feet, touching his forehead to the cold snow.
‘There’s no need for that.’ It was a long time since Babur had received such obeisance. He took the man by the shoulders and helped him gently to his feet. ‘We are weary and have come far. And we have women with us. Will you give us shelter?’
‘Few cross the mountains so late in the year,’ the man said. ‘I am the headman here. You are welcome in our village.’
That night, Babur sat cross-legged by the fire in the headman’s simple, mud-walled house. The lower floor was a single room with bolsters of wool to sleep on — Esan Dawlat, Kutlugh Nigar and the headman’s wife were sharing a small room above, reached by a flight of wooden stairs outside. Baburi was next to him, and both were
