King Errant Part 10

A runner from Andijan, bearing further news found it so, and, anxious for the truth, stole upstairs on tiptoe to see for himself.

How still! How cold! How silent! And that half-seen form in the dusk, motionless among the quilts? Dead! Dead! or so close to Death that no alternative remained.

That night as his bells tinkled from his post-runner's pike as he ran past village, and field, and wood, they jangled the refrain that was on his mouth for all who cared to listen.

"Babar is dead! Life has ended! The cup is finished!"

Yet, even as the words rang out on the chill air, other words, faint, scarce to be heard, were startling those two sad watchers in the Garden-Palace.

"The Crystal Bowl. Give it back to me ... I ... I laugh as I drink.... Bring me the whole, I say, the whole."

The boy's brain, faintly conscious, was taking command once more.

And the body obeyed. In four or five days he was reading letters of despair from his mother, from old Isan-daulet, from Dearest-One.

Samarkand, they said, had been taken with troops from Andijan. Could not _one_ man be spared from Samarkand to keep Andijan?

Babar had not the heart to delay, and ill as he was set off in a litter with such followers as he could gather together. It was a Sat.u.r.day in March that he started; just a hundred days since he had entered Samarkand, and he knew he could not hope to return as King.

"_One hundred days only_," he thought, as he jolted through the peach gardens that were once again swelling to bud.

He reached Khojend by forced marches in a week's time; but by then he was on his horse again, beginning to regain strength and colour.

So he wondered why the people looked at him so strangely as he rode through the town. Did they take him for a ghost?

Yet he was even as one when they told him the news. Just a week before, on the very Sat.u.r.day when he had started in such haste from Samarkand, Andijan had capitulated, needlessly capitulated, to the enemy on the news of Babar's death brought by a returning post-runner.

For the sake of Andijan he had lost Samarkand, and now found that he had lost the one without preserving the other.

Worse still, he had lost a dear friend; for the saintly Kwaja Kazi, protesting against the premature yielding of the citadel while there was yet no lack of provisions or of fighting men, had been barbarously martyred by being hanged in a shameful manner over the gate of the citadel.

No wonder Babar wrote in the diary he had begun to keep: "I was in a very distressed condition and wept a great deal."

CHAPTER VI

Blest is the soul that is lifted above The paltry cares of Self's selfish love, Which adds no weight to another's care And gives no soul a burden to bear, Which takes what comes as its part and lot, Which laughs at trouble and worries not, Which sleeps without malice or fraud in its breast And rises pure from its daily rest.

_Jami_.

There was a sad meeting, naturally, with the womenfolk Babar had hoped to help, and who were--somewhat contemptuously--sent to him, unharmed, after a few days. Or perhaps that "divinity which doth hedge a king"

or whatever it was, which all his life long ensured Babar's own safety, extended itself to those who were dear to him.

Anyhow they came, and fell with tears on the neck of their dethroned darling. Dearest-One, slim and tall, her face still showing the lines of conflicting anxieties, yet still sweet utterly, without trace of bitterness for her brother. The Khanum, too rejoiced at seeing her son alive and well to care so much about his loss of dignity. Old Isan-daulet, keener of look and sharper of tongue than ever, but with a world of sympathy in her stern eyes for the lad who had lost all save honour. For she realised that Babar had practically given up Kings.h.i.+p for the sake of his womenkind. He had had fair grip of Samarkand, and even with but a thousand devoted followers of his own to help him hold it, could, nay would have done so.

Babar, himself, did not attempt to deny his virtue. He never did; he was too frank to gloze over any of his actions, good or bad. He had done the right thing and he accepted the fact gravely; perhaps a trifle pompously; but that was his nature. In the same way, he could not fail to see, that what had placed him in the unfortunate position of having insufficient followers to hold both Samarkand and Andijan, was no error of judgment on his part, but simply his extreme and unusual justice in refusing to grind down the distressed inhabitants of the former city for the benefit of his soldiery. Could he only have shut his eyes to the usual undisciplined plunder his army would not have deserted wholesale.

He was not introspective, but he knew, vaguely, that he had, somehow, had no choice in the matter. He had been born with this strong sense of justice, so he could not help himself; therefore despite this recognition of his own virtue, it slipped from him like water off a duck's back leaving no self-conceit behind.

So he welcomed his loving women quite whole-heartedly, and then wept more profusely than ever at the difficulty of maintaining them in proper fas.h.i.+on. Not that they wanted this. The Khanum, gentle, kindly soul, was only too glad that her quite capable hands should do all things for her darling, Dearest-One brisked up with work that took her out of herself, and Isan-daulet had roughed it too much in her youth not to enjoy the familiarity of roughing it again. And life, even at Khojend, a miserable place in which a single n.o.bleman would have found it difficult to support his family, was not without its interests. Of the rather more than two hundred, and considerably less than three hundred followers who chose exile with their young King, quite a number were men of good family, whose wives and children joined them.

There was, therefore, company of a sort. Then Babar, despite his tears, was not one to give in. Inspired as he was by an ambition for conquest and extensive dominions, he could not, on account of one or two paltry defeats, sit down and look idly about him.

So, at any rate, he told the three loving women with his usual serious pomp, when he sent a request for a.s.sistance to his uncle, the Khan of Moghulistan, and then set off to reconnoitre around Samarkand. He returned ere long disappointed; but was soon on the march again to see his uncle in person at Tashkend. In this he was encouraged by Isan-daulet who remembered her brother of old. "Lo! I know him. A good soul but a stupid. The brains of my father, Yunus, went in the female line. But if you beat his ears with words he will listen. And keep on the soft side of Shah-Begum, my husband's widow--G.o.d rest his soul!

Anyhow he is at peace from her! A clever woman, but like a camel in mud--slippery!"

And this expedition was so far successful that the young leader actually returned from it once more at the head of some seven or eight hundred hors.e.m.e.n. Rather a wild lot, mostly free-lance Moghuls eager for loot and violence. But it was better than nothing, though Khojend was not large enough to hold them, even for a night. Mercifully, however, there was an enemy's fort some forty miles off, so, taking scaling ladders with them, they rode on to it and carried the place by surprise. But even one day of Babar's strict discipline was more than enough for the wild men of the desert, and the very next morning the Moghul Begs represented that, having but a mere handful of men, no possible benefit could result to anyone from the keeping of one miserable castle; and so, there being truth in this remark, they rode off to their desert again unabashed, leaving Babar to return annoyed, but not despondent. For at this particular fortress there grew a particular melon, yellow in colour, with skin puckered like s.h.a.green leather. A remarkably delicate and agreeable melon, with seeds about the size of those of an apple, and pulp four fingers thick, which everyone agreed was not to be equalled in that quarter.

It was as well, certainly, to have gained _something_ if only a good melon, and the little party at Khojend feasted on it and thanked G.o.d they had their boy back again safe and sound.

The summer was pa.s.sing to autumn when another fit of despondency came to young Babar in the news of his cousin Gharib-Beg's death. The invalid had lingered far longer than had been expected, but still the certainty that he was gone brought grief; the more so because it re-aroused regret for the lost Crystal Bowl; regret which had almost been forgotten in the clash of arms of the last few months. But now he had time--only too much of it--for thoughts. Not given to mysticism in any form, he yet wondered vaguely if the Crystal Bowl had ever existed, or if the whole incident had not been part of the curious hold Poverty-prince had had upon his imagination; and not on his only, but on the imagination of all with whom the cripple had come in contact.

And now he was dead! Gone for ever, like so many friends in these last troublous times.

Babar, translucent as the crystal itself, gloomed under the shadow of his regrets till his mother began to fret with the fear of on-coming illness.

But Dearest-One knew her brother better. "He must get away from us all," she said. "Yea! even from old Kasim and his warriors. Let him go to the White Mountains a-hunting for the winter."

But Babar would have none of it.

The White Mountains? Aye! they would be splendid--there were more bears there than in any other part of the country. Aye! and snow leopard too--the lad's eyes glistened as he admitted this--but he _could_ not leave his women-folk again, and he ought not to leave those who, to their own cost, had chosen to stick by him.

"Then we will go also," said Dearest-One, nothing daunted. "We are not of towns more than thou art, and thou canst divide thy magnificent army!--take a hundred men with thee and leave an hundred to guard Khojend!"

Her sweet eyes smiled at him, and he agreed. No one in all his life had understood him like Dearest-One, he thought; there was perfect confidence between them, though, strangely enough, he had never yet given her the portrait he had found in the Garden-Palace--the portrait left by Baisanghar in his flight.

Why had he not done so? He scarcely knew, except that he had felt shy of broaching a subject that seemed buried. 'Twas best not to rouse coiled snakes, and Baisanghar, who had taken refuge in Bokhara, had gone out of their lives altogether; out of his, Babar's, at any rate.

But everything seemed gone out of that; as the Turkhi couplet said:

"No home, no friends, no roof above my head; Six feet of earth, no more, to make my bed."

The White Mountains, however--white indeed during winter with their snowy slopes invading all save the tiny cleft of the valley where the skin tents of the little party had been pitched--soon brought back content. It was as if the soft covering of snow had blotted out the past, and the winter slipped by, full up with trivial distractions.

Babar, returning long after dark to the encampment with half-a-dozen or so of bear-skins, forgot he was, or ever had been, King. And when early spring came on, and the bears were breeding, he took to hunting tulips instead. There were so many different kinds of them. Over thirty; and one yellow, double and sweet-scented like a rose.

Dearest-One used to accompany him on these expeditions, for she was a real Moghul maiden, and the bright, cold winter had braced her up, until her cheeks glowed once more. Yet still Babar had never given her the portrait of herself, though he carried it with him more than once with that determination. Again, he scarcely knew why, except that it seemed to him the right thing to do. Why should she not have it?

But one day the brother and sister had wandered high over the melting snow slopes, where the flowers lay thick as a carpet. Blue spring gentian and cl.u.s.tered pink primrose, purple pansy, and deep brown nodding columbines above a mosaic of forget-me-not and yellow crowsfoot. Great sweeps and drifts of flowers where the snow-drifts ended, and beyond in the far, far distance, in a dip of the hills, a level line of clear cobalt-blue.

"Yonder lies Samarkand," said Babar, glooming in a second with the thought of past defeat; but his mind, ever vagrant, followed swiftly a line of new thought as he narrowed his long eyes to see better. "Had I the quaint contrivance at the Observatory there," he went on; "did I not tell thee of it?--no!--Well! 'twas a thing with curved gla.s.ses in a box and it made far-off things seem near--but blurred sometimes.

Still had I it, I could mayhap see the Green-Palace. It stands high above the town."

Dearest-One, her hands clasped idly over her knees as she sat on a little peak of rock and ice that rose out of the flowers, was silent for a s.p.a.ce; then she said dreamily:

"'Twas in the Green-Palace, was it not, where Kings.h.i.+p comes and goes, that Baisanghar was to die that time he escaped?"