At last, Hamida smiled and stretched out her hand to Humayun. ‘Come to bed. It is late.’
It was nearly ten o’clock the next morning when Humayun emerged from the women’s quarters to find Jauhar waiting for him, beaming broadly. ‘Majesty, good news. . wonderful news. Our spies have brought reports that Sher Shah is dead. He was assaulting a fortress in Rajasthan when a missile filled with burning pitch that one of his siege engineers had hurled at the walls rebounded and landed on a gunpowder store. The entire store exploded, dismembering Sher Shah and two of his senior commanders. They say parts of Sher Shah’s body were scattered over a hundred yards.’
‘Are the reports reliable?’
‘The spies say they come from several sources. There is no reason to doubt them.’
Humayun found the news difficult to take in. It seemed to justify his decision to pardon his half-brothers and unite his subjects. They would need to act quickly and together to seize the opportunity to regain the throne of Hindustan.
‘Call my commanders to me. Let my half-brothers join us too. Together we will march to fulfil our family’s destiny.’
Part IV
Chapter 21
‘Majesty, you must come at once.’ Humayun slid back into its embossed black leather scabbard the ivory and steel-hilted sabre — a recent gift from a vassal — that he had been examining. ‘What is it, Jauhar?’
Jauhar spread his hands in a helpless gesture and Humayun read such distress in his face that he asked no more questions but simply followed him. Dusk was falling and purple shadows softened the stark outlines of stone and brick as Humayun quickly descended into the courtyard. Just inside the gateway four of Ahmed Khan’s men were clustered around a tall chestnut horse. Drawing closer, Humayun noticed that its neck and shoulder were stained with something dark that was attracting flies, and as the men stepped back from the horse to salute him he saw a body slung face down over the saddle, limp as a dead deer. The discolouration on the horse’s coat was congealed blood. But it was the body itself that arrested his gaze. Though he didn’t want to believe it he thought he recognised that powerful form, whose lifeless arms and legs were so long they dangled down beneath the horse’s belly.
With an ever-increasing sense of foreboding Humayun slowly approached and, crouching down, raised the dead man’s head. Hindal’s tawny eyes stared blankly at him. Unable to bear their unblinking gaze, Humayun closed them. As he did so, the warmth of his brother’s dead flesh shocked him, then he realised that Hindal’s face had been resting against the horse’s flanks. He drew his dagger from his sash and waving back his guards cut through the ropes with which someone had secured Hindal’s body to the horse. Then he carefully lifted his brother’s corpse and laid it gently, face up, on the flagstones. As he knelt beside it, by the flickering amber light of a torch held aloft in the gathering gloom by one of Ahmed Khan’s men he saw a raw wound in Hindal’s throat that only an arrowhead could have made.
Grief washed through him. Hindal was the one of his half-brothers he had cared for most. Courageous, honest and principled, and less ambitious than his siblings, perhaps Hindal had been at heart the best of all Babur’s sons. ‘I wish you godspeed to Paradise, my brother, and that in death you will forgive me the hurt I did you in life,’ Humayun whispered. Images of Hindal in his youth and of him proudly recounting his rescue of Akbar filled Humayun’s mind, bringing tears to his eyes. It was some minutes before, brushing them away with the back of his hand, he got to his feet and asked, ‘Who found the body?’
‘I did, Majesty,’ said the torchbearer, who, Humayun saw, was no more than a youth.
‘Where?’
‘His horse was tethered by some juniper bushes half a mile from the town.’
So someone had drawn out the fatal arrow, tied Hindal to his horse and then left him where he would be found. Such an act bore all the hallmarks of Kamran, Humayun thought with a weariness of heart. Far from being grateful for his mercy, within two months of being set free Kamran and Askari had vanished from Kabul. United against him again, they had become raiders, sweeping down from remote strongholds at the head of bands of tribesmen — lawless Kafirs and Chakraks mostly, but whoever they could find; they weren’t particular — to attack Humayun’s outposts and the caravan trains that were the source of Kabul’s prosperity — its life’s blood. Kamran would not have forgiven Hindal’s betrayal in rescuing Akbar and he certainly had the malice to send Humayun the message of Hindal’s slaughtered body.
But what had actually happened? If the murderer was Kamran, had Hindal’s death been the result of a chance encounter or had Kamran deliberately hunted Hindal down in the northern mountains which he had made his retreat in the years since he had rescued Akbar? ‘Search my brother’s body and his saddlebag. Look for anything that might tell us how or why he met his end,’ Humayun ordered as he turned away, unable to face the task himself.
A few minutes later, a soldier came up to him where he stood in the gloom, lost in his thoughts and recollections. ‘We found nothing of importance, Majesty, except this note in the saddlebag.’ Humayun took the scrap of paper and read it by the light of a torch. In a few brief sentences addressed to no one, Hindal asked, if anything should happen to him, to be buried close to his father. He also wrote that he wished Akbar to have his ruby-inlaid dagger that had once belonged to Babur. ‘The dagger was still in his sash, Majesty.’ The soldier held out a silver scabbard, also inlaid with rubies, that glittered in the torchlight. So whoever had killed Hindal had not been a thief, Humayun thought. It also told him that death had come suddenly and probably unexpectedly to Hindal, who had had no time to draw his dagger. Again he saw Kamran’s green-eyed, sneering face. .
Three weeks later, the branches of the tall cherry trees brought by Babur as saplings to Kabul stirred in the breeze, shedding blossom that fluttered like pink snowflakes. Spring melt water from the mountains rippled through the two intersecting marble-lined channels that divided the garden into four quarters planted with pomegranate, apple and lemon trees. The scent of honey rose from the lilac clover covering the ground as, walking through the garden Babur had planted, Humayun came to the new grave in the middle of a grove of young willows. The inscription on the marble slab told the onlooker that here lay Mirza Hindal, youngest and beloved son of Babur, Moghul Emperor of Hindustan.
Gulbadan had chosen the delicate tracery of irises and tulips that the masons had carved round the stone’s edge and every day, on Hamida’s orders, the pale marble was sprinkled with dried rose petals. She had never forgotten her gratitude to Hindal for saving Akbar — if anything it had grown because Akbar was still their only child. The
Turning away from Hindal’s grave, Humayun walked the few paces to Babur’s simple tomb. Every time he came here, he sensed his father’s presence so keenly he could almost see him standing before him, eyes fixed understandingly upon him. Babur too had taken Kabul only to have his hopes of advancing quickly to invade Hindustan disappointed. Yet there was a profound difference between their circumstances. Babur’s problem had been that he lacked an army strong enough to take on Sultan Ibrahim, Hindustan’s powerful overlord. That obstacle had been overcome when his friend Baburi had brought him Turkish cannon and matchlocks — weapons then unknown in Hindustan. Humayun’s problems were more complex, more corrosive, because they came from within his own family. Because of Kamran and Askari, Humayun had been forced to delay his invasion of Hindustan just
