The tiger had stopped growling and Akbar sensed its amber eyes watching him. Slowly he rested the slender engraved-steel barrel of his matchlock musket on the side of the howdah. He had already loaded the metal ball, trickled gunpowder from his silver-mounted powder horn into the pan and checked the short, thin length of fuse. His qorchi, his squire, half crouching close beside him, was already holding the burning taper Akbar would need to ignite the fuse.
Satisfied, Akbar aimed his musket at the densest part of the acacia bushes where he was certain the tiger was hiding, braced his shoulder to the ivory-inlaid wooden butt and squinted down the length of the long barrel. ‘Hand me the taper,’ he whispered to his qorchi, ‘and signal to the beaters.’ Clustered in a semicircle behind the elephants, the beaters at once broke into high-pitched yells and began striking their gongs and beating their drums. Moments later, with an answering roar, the tiger burst through the screen of acacias. Akbar saw a blur of long white teeth and gold and black fur leaping towards his elephant as he lit the fuse. There was a brilliant flash, then a deafening bang. The musket’s recoil knocked Akbar backwards, almost somersaulting him out of the howdah, but not before he had seen the tiger drop to the ground, still ten yards away. As the smoke cleared, Akbar saw the animal lying motionless on its side, blood pouring from a jagged hole above its right eye.
Akbar gave a yell of triumph. Without waiting for the mahout to bring his mount — which had reacted with admirable calmness to the charge of the tiger and the sharp crack of the musket — to its knees, he climbed, grinning broadly, over the side of the howdah and dropped lightly to the ground. He’d made a fine kill, a perfect kill. He’d proved to the doubters who insisted a musket was too slow for killing such prey that in the hands of a good marksman it was easily fast enough. Curious to inspect the dead beast, Akbar advanced closer. The tiger’s pink tongue, lolling flaccidly from its mouth, was already attracting green-black flies. Then Akbar noticed something else protruding through the thick belly fur. Teats. The tiger he’d been hunting was supposed to have been male.
The thought was swiftly followed by another that made the hairs on the back of his young neck lift. With trembling fingers Akbar yanked his bow from his shoulder and, reaching behind him, grabbed an arrow. He was still fitting it to the string when a second and massive tiger launched itself out of the acacias straight towards him. Somehow Akbar managed to fire his arrow, and then time seemed to stop for him. The clamour of warning shouts behind him faded and it was as if he and the tiger were alone. He watched his arrow very slowly part the air in its flight. The tiger too looked almost suspended in its leap, saliva-flecked lips drawn back, long canines prominent and ears flattened against its head, like the image etched on the golden ring that had once belonged to Akbar’s great ancestor Timur and was now on his own shaking forefinger.
Then, suddenly, time rushed forward again and the tiger was almost on him. Akbar jumped aside, closing his eyes as he did so and expecting at any moment to feel claws ripping into his flesh or smell hot, rancid breath as sharp teeth sought his throat. Instead he heard a skidding thud and opened his eyes to see the tiger crumpled up beside him, his arrow embedded in the crimsoning fur of its throat. For a moment Akbar stood in silence, knowing he had experienced something almost unknown to him — fear — and also that he had been very, very lucky.
Still dazed, he caught the sound of rapidly approaching hoofbeats and turned to see a rider weaving through the low scrub and spindly trees towards them. It must be a messenger from the camp, no doubt sent by Bairam Khan to hurry him up. Five minutes ago he’d have been annoyed to have his sport interrupted but now he felt grateful for the distraction from thoughts of what might have happened. The crowd of beaters, guards and attendants parted to let the rider through. His tall bay horse was foamy with sweat and he himself so caked with dust that his tunic of bright Moghul green looked almost brown. Reining in before Akbar, he flung himself from the saddle, made the briefest of obeisances and said breathlessly, ‘Majesty, Bairam Khan requests that you return to the camp immediately.’
‘Why?’
‘Delhi has fallen to an advance force of Hemu’s rebels.’
Four hours later, as the hunting party with Akbar at its head passed through the first of the picket lines thrown out around his camp, the sun was still high in the clear blue sky. Despite the tasselled brocade canopy shading him, Akbar’s head ached. Sweat was sticking his tunic to his body, yet he barely noticed the discomfort as he pondered the disastrous news of the loss of his capital. Surely his rule was not destined to be over almost before it had begun.
It was barely ten months since, on a makeshift brick throne hastily erected on a masonry platform in the centre of a Moghul encampment, he had been proclaimed Emperor of Hindustan. Still raw with grief at the sudden death of his father, the Emperor Humayun, he had stood awkwardly but proudly beneath a silken awning to receive the homage of Bairam Khan and his other commanders.
His mother Hamida had only recently succeeded in convincing him just how desperate that time had been. How Bairam Khan, despite his Persian origins, had understood better than anyone that in the first hours and days after his father’s death the danger to Akbar came from within — from ambitious commanders who, now the emperor was dead leaving only a boy as heir, might claim the throne for themselves. Most were men with no time for sentiment. Many were from the old Moghul clans who with Akbar’s grandfather Babur had founded a new empire on the dry plains of Hindustan. The code of the steppes, had always been taktya, takhta, ‘throne or coffin’. Any who felt strong enough could challenge for the crown and over the years many had done so and would do so again.
Akbar’s elephant stumbled, jerking him from his recollections, but only for a moment. Staring down at the wrinkled grey neck of the beast with its sproutings of sparse coarse hair, his mind soon returned to its dark reflections. If the news was true and Delhi had indeed fallen, everything his mother and Bairam Khan had done for him might have been for nothing. To win precious time, they had concealed Humayun’s death for nearly two weeks, finding a loyal servant of similar build to impersonate the dead emperor. Each day at dawn, he had donned the imperial robes of green silk and Humayun’s jewelled turban with its plume of white egrets’ feathers and appeared as custom demanded on the riverside balcony of the imperial palace in Delhi, the Purana Qila, to show the crowds jostling each other on the banks of the Jumna that the Moghul emperor lived.
Meanwhile, Hamida and her sister-in-law Gulbadan, Akbar’s aunt, had persuaded the reluctant Akbar that he must secretly leave Delhi. He could still see his mother’s strained anxious face as, holding a flickering oil lamp in one hand, she had shaken him awake with the other, whispering, ‘Come now — bring nothing with you — just come!’ Stumbling from his bed, he had allowed her to throw a dark hooded cloak over him, like the one she was wearing. Barely awake but head reeling with questions he had followed her down narrow passageways and twisting flights of stairs through a part of the palace he had never seen to emerge into a small, grubby courtyard. He could still recall the acrid smell of urine — human or animal, he couldn’t tell.
A large palanquin was waiting, and in the shadows stood Gulbadan and about twenty soldiers he recognised as Bairam Khan’s men. ‘Get in,’ Hamida had whispered.
‘Why, where are we going?’ he had asked.
‘Your life is in danger if you stay here. Don’t question me. Just do it.’