Humayun and Bairam Khan headed through the rain across the slightly undulating ground towards the southwest corner of the camp, past collapsed tents, overturned cooking pots and the bodies of dead and wounded men and animals lying slumped amid the puddles, some of which were now stained red. As they drew closer, the cries and sounds of battle grew louder, including the occasional crack of muskets when soldiers from one side or the other managed to open their powder horns and prime their muskets sufficiently quickly or under sufficient cover for the powder to remain dry enough to ignite.
By the sombre leaden light of the new day, Humayun could see that Sekunder Shah’s men were fighting determinedly. They had managed to overturn a number of baggage wagons around some small hillocks, and archers and musketeers were firing from behind the protection they provided. Several squadrons of cavalry were grouped in the middle of the barricades, whose perimeter stretched for perhaps twelve hundred yards. There appeared to be several thousand of the enemy in total. However, they were completely encircled by his own troops.
‘Bairam Khan, order our men to pull back just a little but to keep Sekunder Shah’s troops securely surrounded. We will offer them a chance to live if they will lay down their arms and tell us the whereabouts of Sekunder Shah.’
A quarter of an hour later, a gap was opened in Sekunder Shah’s barricades and Humayun’s emissary, a young officer named Bahadur Khan, re-emerged and galloped over to where Humayun was waiting, seated on his black horse.
‘Majesty, they are willing to surrender. They are adamant that Sekunder Shah is not among them and that although it was indeed he who left the command tents with his bodyguard just after we attacked, he did so in flight. They accuse him of deserting them to save himself and it is for that reason that they have agreed to surrender. Several commanders actually volunteered to join our armies.’
Relief and joy swept through Humayun in equal measure. Victory was his. He had surmounted the last obstacle to his regaining Hindustan. Even if, as it seemed, he had failed to capture Sekunder Shah, his victory was complete. Sekunder Shah’s vast army had been smashed in less than two hours of combat. Those who remained unwounded had surrendered or fled. Voice shaking with emotion, Humayun spoke.
‘I thank you, my commanders. We have won a great victory. Hindustan is firmly within our grasp, but there is still no time to waste. First we must care for our wounded and bury our dead, but then we move on to Delhi to secure that great city.’
Humayun woke to the sound of birdsong in his scarlet tent at the centre of his camp, just outside the great sandstone walls of Delhi. Later that morning he was due to make his ceremonial entry through the high gateway in them to hear the khutba read once more in his name at the service in the Friday Mosque, proclaiming him Padishah of Hindustan.The days since his victory at the battle of Sirhind had been crowded as he and his army had marched as quickly as the monsoon would allow towards Delhi. Local rulers had hastened to offer their obeisance and groups of soldiers formerly loyal to other of the pretenders to the throne had ridden in to surrender and to volunteer their services to Humayun.
Four days ago Humayun had passed the site of the battle of Panipat where he and his father had first won Hindustan. Even now, twenty-nine years later, the white bones of some of Sultan Ibrahim’s great war elephants killed by Babur’s artillerymen still lay scattered across the plain.
The previous evening, lying in his tent, Humayun had pondered the parallels and paradoxes within his own life and the comparisons with that of his father. He had lost his first great battle with Sher Shah when his enemy had made a surprise night attack during the monsoon and won his last great battle against Sekunder Shah by using those same tactics. On both occasions he had been wounded in his right forearm. His forces had melted away after his defeat by Sher Shah just as they had grown by desertion from Sekunder Shah and the other claimants to Hindustan during his recent campaign. His half-brothers had rebelled against him and threatened his family but Sher Shah’s relations had exceeded even this. Not content with fighting his family, Adil Shah had killed his young nephew, the legitimate heir, in front of his mother, his own sister, something at which even Kamran had baulked.
Humayun had gained the Koh-i-Nur for the Moghuls following the great victory at Panipat and sacrificed it at his and the dynasty’s nadir to help bring about its renaissance. Like his father, he had known youthful triumph but then suffered great reverses which had tested his resolve. Persian support and the religious compromises it had demanded had proved of less assistance to both than they had hoped. Like Babur, he had spent far more time in Kabul than he’d intended before seizing Hindustan.
Were these real patterns, just as in the movements of the stars? And if they were, how did they come about? Were events inevitable, predestined and laid down by a superior power, ready to be read within the stars by anyone with insight, as he had once believed? Or, on the contrary, were the patterns in men’s lives he thought he saw figments of his imagination and its search for structure in a shifting world, and the events themselves caused by coincidence or understandable similarities in circumstances? Weren’t family rivalries inherent threats to ruling dynasties? Hadn’t Babur’s own half-brother rebelled against him and hadn’t Timur’s sons disputed and dissipated their father’s legacy? Weren’t defeats always followed by desertions, great victories by swathes of fawning new adherents? Hadn’t learning from his father’s experience and using it to strengthen his resolve created the similarities between their lives?
In his youth, he had liked to believe in patterns and in predestination. Such beliefs had seemed to absolve him from full responsibility for his actions and their consequences. They had fed his indolence and justified his naive trust that his supreme position was his by right and inviolable. But his experiences had changed him and now, in his maturity, he usually rejected such external explanations — excuses for failure even. Although it was God’s will into which station a man was born, it was up to an individual and his use of his abilities to shape his life from there on. He had not regained his empire because it was predestined but because he had striven to do so, mastering his weaknesses and spurning indulgences to focus all his efforts on that single goal. Proud of this thought, Humayun had fallen asleep as he wondered how his renewed reign would evolve in comparison with the few short years Babur had had on the throne after conquering Hindustan.
As he stood up and prepared to call Jauhar, Humayun recollected his thoughts of the previous evening. As he did so, his eyes happened to fall on one of his volumes of star charts. He smiled. Even if he no longer believed that the stars held all the secrets of life, the study of them, their movements and the reasons underlying them, still stimulated his intellect. Stargazing would never lose its fascination for him.
Two hours later, after he had finished dressing him, Jauhar held up a long, burnished mirror for Humayun to inspect himself in his imperial finery. He saw a tall figure as erect and muscular at forty-seven years of age as he had been when he first had come to the throne, even if the hair at his temples was now flecked with grey and there were lines around his eyes and at the corner of his mouth when he smiled.
He was wearing a white surcoat embroidered with suns and stars in gold thread and hemmed with a border of lustrous pearls over a long cream silk tunic and pantaloons of the same colour. His belt was made from fine gold mesh and from it hung Alamgir in its jewelled scabbard. On his feet were short tawny leather boots with curled, pointed toes and a massive gold star embroidered on each side of the ankles. On his head he wore a turban of gold cloth with a peacock plume set at its peak and a circlet of rubies around its middle which matched his heavy ruby and gold necklace. On the index finger of his right hand he wore Timur’s tiger ring and his other fingers sparkled emeralds and sapphires.