Empire of the Moghul: The Tainted Throne

by Alex Rutherford

  Bartholomew grabbed hold of the heavy body, stared for a moment into the still open eyes to reassure himself that it was indeed Sher Afghan, then pushed it to the floor and turned his attention to the woman who had now opened her eyes and was sitting up, knees drawn up defensively. Her lover’s blood was running down between her opulent breasts and her dark eyes were fixed on his face as if trying to predict what he would do next. ‘Don’t make a noise and I won’t hurt you,’ he said. Slowly, her gaze never leaving his face, she pulled up a sheet over her but said nothing.

  He was relieved – he didn’t want to kill a woman any more than he had wanted to kill the young watchman – but at the same time he was surprised. He’d have expected someone in her situation to scream hysterically or shout abuse but she didn’t look as devastated as she might have that the man who just moments earlier had been passionately and vigorously making love to her was lying in a pool of congealing blood on the floor. Instead her expression was almost one of curiosity. He realised she was taking in every detail from his dark, grubby robe and blood-smeared hands to the stray curls of red-gold hair slipping from beneath the length of dun-coloured cloth he’d wound round his head.

  He turned to go. He’d stayed too long already. Backing away just in case she had a weapon concealed somewhere, he reached the doors, expecting any moment to hear her scream out for the guards. But he was through the door, down the corridor and hurling himself down the stone steps into the silent and now empty courtyard before, at last, he heard a woman’s shrill cry of ‘Murder!’ As he ran through the dark gardens he heard a commotion break out behind him – men’s voices, the sound of running feet – but he was nearly at the wall now. Forcing his way through the tough bamboos, not caring how he scraped or scratched himself, he flung himself at the wall and scaled it, this time without difficulty.

  Back in the street he paused for a moment. Taking his Turkish dagger, still stained with Sher Afghan’s gore, he kissed it lightly. The thousand mohurs were his.

  Chapter 3

  The Widow

  ‘We have prepared and washed your husband’s body ready for burial,’ said the hakim. ‘I thought that before we laid him in his coffin you would wish to assure yourself that everything has been done exactly as you instructed.’

  ‘Thank you.’ Mehrunissa stepped closer and stared down at her husband’s corpse. ‘Leave me, please . . .’ When she was alone she leaned over the body and scrutinised Sher Afghan’s face, which looked surprisingly peaceful for a man who had met such a violent end. She could smell the astringent odour of the camphor water with which the hakim and his helper had cleansed him.

  ‘I’m sorry you died in such a way,’ she whispered, ‘but I’m not sorry I’m free of you. If the killer had struck me down instead of you, you wouldn’t have cared.’ For a moment she touched her husband’s cheek with her fingertips. ‘Your flesh is cold now, but you were always cold to me and to our daughter, who meant nothing to you because she was not born a boy . . .’

  Mehrunissa felt tears welling, but not for Sher Afghan. Though she despised self-pity they were for herself and her wasted years with a man to whom, once he had secured her dowry, she had become only an object on which to satisfy his lust and to demonstrate his power. She had been barely seventeen when she had married him. Nothing had prepared her for what became his callous indifference or – if she ever dared complain – his casual and vicious brutality. She turned away, feeling sick and a little giddy. It was barely six hours since the assassin had struck. The whole scene was raw and vivid in her mind: the murderer’s eyes – pale blue like a Persian cat’s – as he had stood over the bed, the silver flash of his blade, the warm red blood spurting from the cut in Sher Afghan’s throat over her naked flesh, the utter astonishment on her husband’s face in that moment just before life left him. Everything had happened so fast that she’d had no time to feel afraid, but now the thought that the killer might well have turned his bloodied dagger on her was making her shake. He hadn’t scrupled to kill the young watchman . . .

  Soldiers were already ransacking the town for the murderer. Her description had been enough to confirm that whoever he was, he was a foreigner. There had already been reports of a blue-eyed man – a Portuguese, some said – who had been staying in one of the caravanserais but now seemed to have vanished . . . Wrapping her arms around herself to feel warmer even though it was a summer’s day, Mehrunissa turned her back on her husband’s corpse and began to pace as she liked to do when she wished to think. Who the murderer was mattered less to her than his motive. Had the killing been the prelude to some wider rising? Might Gaur itself soon come under attack? If so, her own life and that of her daughter might yet be in danger.

  Or had Sher Afghan’s murder been the result of some personal grudge? Her husband had made plenty of enemies. He had boasted to her about how he had embezzled imperial money as well as extorted higher taxes than authorised to enrich himself. He had also told her he had taken bribes from bandit chiefs to the north of Gaur in return for not suppressing their activities, and she knew that just before the start of the last monsoon rains, in response to pressure from the authorities in Agra to whom some wealthy merchants had complained, he had gone back on his word, pursuing the bandits relentlessly and cementing the heads of those he killed into towers as a warning. Many a man would be glad Sher Afghan was dead, but who would have dared to kill him in his own bedchamber?

  Hearing voices outside – perhaps the coffin makers coming to measure the body – Mehrunissa hastily put such thoughts aside. In the hours and days ahead she must watch for any threat to herself and her daughter but now she had her part to play as a grieving widow. It was a matter of family honour. She would scrupulously observe the mourning rituals and no one would suspect that in her heart she felt no sorrow, only release.

  A travel-stained, dusty-haired Bartholomew Hawkins was shown into Jahangir’s private apartments. Though it was approaching midnight, learning of the Englishman’s return Jahangir had been impatient for his news.

  ‘Well?’

  ‘Majesty, it is done. I slit his throat with my own hands.’

  ‘Did anyone see you?’

  ‘Only the woman he was with.’

  Jahangir stared at him, face suddenly aghast. ‘You didn’t harm her?’

  ‘No, Majesty.’

  ‘You are absolutely certain?’

  ‘I swear it on my life.’

  Jahangir could see the puzzlement on Bartholomew’s face. Clearly the man wasn’t lying. He began to breathe more easily. ‘You’ve done well. One of my qorchis will bring you your money in the morning . . .’ He paused as an idea came to him. ‘What do you intend to do now? Return to your own land?’

  ‘I’m not sure, Majesty.’

  ‘If you stay at my court I will find you further tasks. If you serve me as well as you have already, I will make you rich enough to purchase your own ship to take you home.’ For all his tiredness Bartholomew Hawkins’s eyes were suddenly agleam in his sunburned face. People were not so hard to understand as he had once believed, Jahangir thought.

  Despite all the cushions and the fur rugs to protect against the cold, the bullock cart carrying Mehrunissa up through the Khyber Pass towards Kabul was uncomfortable. She’d be glad when the long journey from Bengal was ended. Her daughter Ladli was sleeping, head resting in the lap of Farisha, her Persian nurse, who had tended her since birth. The child had enjoyed the river journey westward along the Ganges and then northwards up the Jumna, but since they had disembarked near Delhi to travel the last six hundred miles overland she had grown fretful. The interior of the bullock cart, enclosed by thick curtains, was stuffy and dark. At almost six years old Ladli was still too young to understand that the curtains must be drawn to preserve them from the common view. The only time of day she enjoyed was when camp was pitched and she could run around the area separated off for the women by high wooden screens.

  But at least they were making good progress. They should be
beyond the passes before the first snows fell. Winter in Kabul was harsh. Mehrunissa could recall the icicles thick as a man’s arm hanging from the eaves of her father’s house and how little moved beyond the city walls except the occasional hungry wolf patrolling the white expanses in search of a meal. Yet there had been many times in the hot, humid air of Bengal when she’d longed to feel the chill wind on her cheek and to breathe out spirals of frosty air.

  Sher Afghan’s murderer had still not been found by the time she left Gaur and there had been no clues to the motive behind the killing. To her relief everything had remained peaceful, but all the same she was glad Gaur now lay far behind. She had expected her father to make the arrangements for her long journey, and had therefore been surprised to receive his letter informing her that imperial troops from the fort at Monghyr, west of Gaur along the Ganges, would accompany her all the way to Kabul. The emperor grieves for you in your sad situation. He wishes you to return swiftly and in safety to your family, her father had written. The emperor is good to us beyond anything I could have expected. Bless you, daughter. The letter had been signed Ghiyas Beg and fastened with the great seal of the Treasurer of Kabul.

  During the long journey, Mehrunissa had often pondered her father’s words. Presumably the emperor’s generosity to her family stemmed from those months he had spent in Kabul when his father, the Emperor Akbar, had exiled him there. According to rumours circulating even before the prince’s arrival, Jahangir had greatly angered Akbar. The wife of Saif Khan, the Governor of Kabul, had explained to Mehrunissa’s mother what had really happened – the prince had been caught with one of his father’s concubines. His punishment had been banishment but the woman’s had been death . . .

  The prince had become a frequent visitor to her father’s house. She could still recall the preparations when messengers brought word that he was on his way from the citadel – how her mother would order precious incense to be set alight in the burners, how her father would don his best robes and hurry to the entrance ready to greet him. Above all she could remember the night her father – who had given her no hint of what he intended – had summoned her to perform one of the classical dances of Persia for his guest. As her attendants brushed out and perfumed her hair she’d felt nervous but also excited. She had performed the dance of the golden tree, the tiny golden bells in her fluttering hands symbolising the falling of its gilded leaves in autumn to lie on the forest floor, ruffled by the chill breezes of the coming winter.

  She had been so intent on getting the movements right – it was an intricate dance that she had spent many hours with her instructor trying to perfect – that at first she hadn’t looked directly at the prince. When, confidence growing as the spirit of the dance began to possess her, she had raised her eyes to his, she had felt the intensity of his gaze. For some reason she hadn’t understood at the time and now, after so many years, was even further from understanding, she had allowed her veil to slip. For three or four moments – no more – she had let him see her face and knew that it had pleased him.

  Not long after, Akbar had ordered his son to return to Agra. By then her head had been filled with thoughts of her approaching marriage to Sher Afghan. It had been a good match for the daughter of a Persian nobleman who had come penniless to the Moghul court. Even though her father had grown rich enough in the service of the emperor, and through trading ventures with merchants passing through Kabul, to give his daughter a large dowry – ten thousand gold mohurs – he had no lands, no great estates. Sher Afghan on the other hand belonged to the old Moghul nobility – his great-grandfather had ridden with Babur, the first Moghul emperor, on his conquest of Hindustan. In her preparations for her coming marriage she’d pushed the prince – or the emperor as he now was – to the back of her mind: a sweet fantasy of what might have been.

  The cart gave a great judder. One of the front wheels must have hit a boulder, Mehrunissa thought. She would be heartily glad when this journey came to an end.

  Mehrunissa laid aside the volume of poems by the Persian Firduz that her father had purchased for her from a merchant recently arrived from Tabriz, got up and stretched. Feeling the need for some activity, she climbed up to the flat roof of her father’s house, enjoying the warmth of the shallow stone steps beneath her bare hennaed feet. Stepping on to the roof, she looked northwards. There against a backdrop of snow-dusted mountains was the forbidding citadel, perched on a barren crag overlooking the city.

  She had thought of it often during her time in Gaur – how the tiny apertures in its strong walls resembled eyes keeping watch over Kabul. Although it was the governor’s residence, her father had told her it was far from luxurious – a draughty stronghold built even before the time of Babur, who had launched his invasion of Hindustan from there. All the same she wished she could see inside a place where such grand ambitions had been nurtured. What must it have been like to see the Moghul army stream out of the citadel and away across the plains on a war of conquest that would change the lives of millions of people? What must it have been like for Babur to see his ambitions become reality?

  And could she ever really understand? If she’d been born a man like her elder brother Asaf Khan, now an officer in the imperial army and on campaign over a thousand miles away to the south in the Deccan, or her younger brother Mir Khan, serving in the imperial garrison at Gwalior where the emperor’s son Prince Khusrau was confined, she would have seen so much more of the world, understood so much more . . . Perhaps too her father would never have abandoned her to die straight after her birth on his perilous journey from Persia to Agra, however reluctant he had been to do so and however pleased he had been when fate and a friendly merchant had allowed him to recover her. The thought that expediency had overcome his love for her – and she knew both her parents loved her – was something that had remained with her. Together with her experiences in Bengal it had left her, she knew, with a cynical attitude to people and their motives. In a crisis the thoughts of few extended far beyond themselves.

  Besides, a woman’s life, her life, was anyway so confined, whether here in her parents’ house or later in Sher Afghan’s haram in Gaur. Ever since she began to grow up she’d felt curious about so much . . . about her family’s homeland of Persia to the west and how the shah ruled that empire; whether the domes and minarets of Samarkand to the northeast really sparkled blue, green and gold as she’d heard tell. Her father – when she could prise him from his ledgers – tried to answer her questions but there was so much more she wanted to know. Reading helped quell her frustration. In Gaur the few manuscript volumes she had acquired had made life with Sher Afghan more bearable after the first disillusionment had set in. Yet at the same time they had fed her restlessness, her dissatisfaction. Everything – the accounts of travellers, even poems – stimulated her already vivid imagination, suggesting life was laden with possibilities far beyond loveless couplings in the commander’s haram in Gaur or the domestic pleasantness of her parents’ home.

  Suddenly she heard a commotion in the square below. Walking swiftly across to the red and orange cotton screen that shielded the area of the roof bordering the square from passers-by, Mehrunissa peered down. A line of mounted imperial soldiers led by an officer and a banner-bearer was entering the square. As the soldiers dismounted her father’s grooms hurried outside to take the reins and moments later the tall, thin figure of Ghiyas Beg himself appeared. Briefly inclining his head and touching his breast with his right hand, he led the officer inside. What did they want? she wondered.

  The other soldiers began strolling around the square, talking and laughing and nibbling walnuts they had bought from the old vendor – his features as wrinkled as the nuts he sold – who habitually sat there. But however much she strained she couldn’t catch their words. As time passed and the officer remained with her father, Mehrunissa descended again to the women’s courtyard, sat down on her stool and picked up her book once more. The shadows were lengthening and two attendants were lighting oil
lamps when Mehrunissa heard her father’s voice. Glancing up, she saw he looked agitated.

  ‘What is it, Father?’

  He gestured to the attendants to withdraw then squatted beside her, long fingers twisting the gold-set amethyst ring that for as long as she could remember he had worn on the third finger of his left hand. She had never seen her father – normally so calm and controlled – like this. He hesitated briefly, then began in a voice that was not quite steady. ‘Do you remember the letter I wrote to you in Gaur? That I was surprised by the emperor’s goodness in sending imperial soldiers to escort you home . . . ?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I was not being entirely frank with you . . . I did have an idea what the emperor’s motive might be.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Some years ago something happened here in Kabul – something to do with you. I never told you because I thought it better you shouldn’t know. Had events turned out differently I alone would have taken the knowledge of it to my grave . . . When the emperor was still a prince, banished here to Kabul, he and I found much to discuss. Though I was only his father’s treasurer, I think he appreciated me as an educated man – even came to regard me as a friend. That was why one night I asked you, as my only daughter, to dance for him. My single thought was to pay him the greatest compliment within my power. But soon afterwards – perhaps even the next day, I’m not sure – he came to see me . . . Do you know what he wanted?’ Ghiyas Beg’s look was penetrating.

  ‘No.’

  ‘He asked for you as his wife.’

  Mehrunissa stood up so abruptly that her stool toppled sideways. ‘He wanted to marry me . . . ?’