Slowly he began to pick his way southwards through the leafless trees, following the horse’s tracks, which became less and less distinct as the ground grew more flinty towards the edge of the coppice. How he wished he had spent more time with his scouts learning the secrets of tracking. Lifting his eyes from the faint hoof prints, he scanned the horizon in the hope of catching sight of his mount. Instead, he saw some riders perhaps a mile away, approaching from the north in a cloud of dust. He couldn’t tell whether they were friend or enemy and took cover behind the trunk of one of the larger trees, straining his eyes to pick out any identifying signs. He could not, and remained still behind the trunk as the squadron came closer. Then it divided. Half the men headed around one side of the coppice, the remainder around the other, both halves clearly bent on a thorough search. As they came even nearer, Shah Jahan shrank back against the tree trunk, trying to make himself as small and inconspicuous as he could. Suddenly to his intense relief he recognised the leading officer — a tall Rajput mounted on a black horse and wearing saffron robes beneath his steel breastplate. It was Ashok Singh. The troops were his own. He emerged from the shelter of the tree trunk and ran to the edge of the coppice.
‘Majesty, is that you? Are you wounded?’ Ashok Singh shouted, dropping from his saddle.
‘Yes — and no, at least not seriously. Praise God you have found me. I was knocked out and my horse carried me here, I think, before I collapsed from it.’
‘We found it wandering not too far away.’
‘Were we victorious in the battle?’
‘Yes, Majesty. We gained the upper hand in the fighting during which we lost sight of you and drove the Bijapurans from their camp, inflicting many casualties on them as they retreated.’
‘Is the pursuit still continuing?’
‘No. Our losses were also high. In your absence your generals thought it better to regroup and tend our wounded rather than maintain the chase. They feared another ambush of the type that overtook Ahmed Aziz and of course we needed to discover what had happened to you.’
So the victory was by no means complete, thought Shah Jahan, but better a partial success than the setbacks he had suffered previously.
Two hours later, once more wearing his breastplate, which one of his soldiers had retrieved from its hiding place, Shah Jahan mounted his horse. Nearby the pyre hastily constructed by his Rajputs from the coppice’s dead trees crackled and burned. By her dress the old woman had clearly been a Hindu and it had seemed only proper to accord her the rites of her faith. But with the flames licking around the cotton-wrapped corpse there was no need to linger. Let the old woman crumble to ash alone in the desert. The important thing now was to re-join the main body of his troops before demoralising rumours spread that the emperor had been injured, even killed. Casting a last look at the spiralling black smoke of the pyre, he urged his tired horse to a canter.
For the first few miles not a living thing crossed their path in the arid and featureless terrain, but then Shah Jahan noticed what looked like a small village — no more than six or seven shacks — away to their right. Perhaps there was a well not yet dry where they could water their horses. Signalling to his men, he turned his mount in the direction of the low mud-brick houses. As they approached, an old man staggered up from his charpoy beneath a withered banyan tree which had retained just a few of its leaves and stumbled forward on stick-thin legs that looked too weak to bear even his frail weight.
‘Food, gentlemen, food, I beg you …’ he cried out through cracked lips.
Shah Jahan reined in his horse. The old man’s eyes stared unnaturally bright in sunken eye sockets above prominent cheekbones. ‘Are your stores exhausted? When did you last eat?’
‘Our grain was gone six weeks ago. A few days later our animals began to die. We ate their carcasses — skin and entrails too. We even ground their bones to make a kind of flour. We were lucky our well still had a little water. But other than that we’ve eaten nothing but dried leaves and two geckos we caught a few days ago.’
‘Where are the other villagers?’
‘They left three days since to seek food elsewhere but my wife was too weak and I’ve remained with her.’
‘Give him what food we have and any spare water bottles,’ Shah Jahan told Ashok Singh. ‘I hadn’t realised the extent of the famine.’
‘It is bad, Majesty. Around the walls of Burhanpur I have seen proud men fight over undigested grain one had extracted from animal dung. But it seems far worse in these outlying regions. Parents are said to be selling their children into servitude for a few coins in the hope that both they and the children may thereby live. There are even rumours of cannibalism among some of the hill people whose flocks of sheep and goats have perished.’
As his Rajputs handed the man food and water Shah Jahan could not get the thought of people grinding bones for flour and even descending to cannibalism from his mind. Perhaps he shouldn’t be surprised. After all, it was only a few hours since he himself had killed the old woman. However, as he rode on another thought struck him. The man must have truly loved his wife to stay with her rather than desert her to seek his chances away from the village, just as he himself would have stayed with Mumtaz. If survival was a basic and selfish instinct shared with animals, man also had other more noble ones … like love.
Chapter 4
Supported by Satti al-Nisa and wearing a shift of sapphire silk, Mumtaz stepped carefully down the three white marble steps into the pool of rose oil-scented water. Despite her bulk — in a few weeks she would give birth — her every move was graceful, thought Shah Jahan, watching from the doorway into the hammam. The apricot glow of the candles accentuated the curves of her body. For a moment he allowed himself the luxury of just watching her as she lay back in the pool, resting her head against its side as attendants poured more water down two marble shoots carved in a fish-scale pattern to make the droplets ripple and dance. At least here within the encircling walls of Burhanpur he had created a haven for Mumtaz. Red lilies and sweet-scented champa flowers bloomed in the courtyards and the ancient fountains had been coaxed to new life.
Yet beyond the walls lay an unforgiving landscape where men and beasts struggled beneath a pitiless sun that was daily sucking them and their land dry. In their temples his Hindu subjects were beseeching their gods to relieve their suffering — even making blood sacrifice to the many-armed Kali. Some were blaming the Moghul emperor for failing to aid his people. Last week two saddhus, bony ash-daubed bodies pale as ghosts, had walked up to the gates of Burhanpur, shaking their sticks and denouncing him. He had given orders they should not be molested and they had remained in the blistering heat for an hour. Before departing they had placed what looked like the body of a young child on the ground. When his soldiers investigated they found it was only a bundle of sticks wrapped in dirty cloth with a dried gourd for a head but the message was clear. Children were dying and he, the emperor, was to blame. He hadn’t told Mumtaz.