Empire of the Moghul: The Tainted Throne (52 page)

At the sound of a fanfare of trumpets Khurram, quickly followed by Dara Shukoh and Aurangzeb, ducked out of the scarlet tent in his camp at the village of Sikandra, five miles
outside Agra. Close to the tomb of his beloved grandfather Akbar – the soaring sandstone gateway was visible through the neem trees – Sikandra had seemed to Khurram a fitting place to halt before his triumphal entry into Agra. This was no campaign camp, with austere lines of soldiers’ tents and run with military discipline, but a vast tented city where the celebrations of his triumph had already begun. Banners of Moghul green fluttered from the roofs of the tents of his nobles and commanders, grouped around his own tent and spreading in all directions. Every night since his arrival here from Lahore two weeks ago had seen lavish feasting and entertainments, paid for from the coffers of the Agra treasuries to which he now had the keys. Every day the numbers in his camp had been swelling as vassal rulers arrived in answer to the summons of the Moghul emperor-in-waiting.

And at last the person whose arrival he had been anticipating above all others was approaching. He could see, glinting in the midday sun, Arjumand’s silver, emerald-encrusted howdah swaying atop the richly caparisoned elephant he had sent to carry her the final miles of her journey. Ahead of her rode some of Mahabat Khan’s Rajput horsemen and behind he could make out the elephant on which his four other children would be travelling, including the new son, Murad Bakhsh, he hadn’t yet seen. At the thought that at last his family would be together again, Khurram felt a surge of happiness greater even than when he contemplated the moment he would mount the Moghul throne. He smiled at Dara Shukoh and Aurangzeb, dressed in coats and turbans of silver cloth in readiness for this moment. ‘It’s your mother. She’s coming,’ he said softly.

He led the boys to a tall tent nearly twenty feet high at its apex that had been erected in front of the
haram
tents in
readiness for the arrival of Arjumand’s elephant. Khurram had to force himself to stay still, standing between his sons with a hand on each of their shoulders, as her elephant approached, the two
mahouts
perched behind its gold-painted ears guiding it skilfully with their metal rods towards the great tent. As soon as the elephant had entered, followed by Khurram and his sons, attendants pulled the curtains back in place. Khurram waited while the
mahouts
brought the great beast to its knees and sliding from its neck swiftly positioned the dismounting block of gilded wood that had been placed ready. Then, touching their hands to their breasts, they quickly left the tent.

Heart beating fast, Khurram mounted the steps of the block and slowly drew back the pearl-sewn, green silk curtains. Words were impossible as he looked into Arjumand’s eyes. Leaning into the howdah, he took her in his arms and kissed her warm lips. ‘I’ve been waiting for this moment for so long . . . sometimes it seemed impossible that it would ever come. But there are two here who have been waiting even longer than me,’ he whispered as at last he released her. He opened the howdah’s silver door and held her henna-tipped hand as together they stepped down. Tears were already running down Arjumand’s cheeks as she looked about her for her sons. Then, in the soft light of the many oil lamps with which the tent was lit, she saw Dara Shukoh and Aurangzeb, looking hesitant, shy even . . . Smiling through her tears, she held out her arms to them, and they ran to her.

Three nights later, as they lay side by side after making love, Arjumand sat up. Pushing back a lock of his dark hair she
looked for a moment into Khurram’s eyes. ‘May I ask you a question?’

‘Of course.’

‘As we were travelling towards Sikandra, one of my attendants told me something I found difficult to believe – a story she had got from a messenger just arrived from Burhanpur. I tried to put it from my mind but could not.’

‘What was it?’ Something in Arjumand’s tone made Khurram sit up as well.

‘That one morning his attendants found Khusrau dead on his bed in the apartments where you had imprisoned him.’

Khurram said nothing for a moment. Then: ‘It is true. My half-brother is dead,’ he said quietly.

‘But the story is that he was smothered on your orders.’

Khurram was again silent. The second letter – the one he had despatched to the Governor of Burhanpur – had been an order to kill Khusrau as painlessly as possible. He had written with a heavy heart but convinced he was acting out of expediency and in the best interests of his family. But later, as he waited for news that his wishes had been carried out, he had begun to wonder how it would feel to be Khusrau hearing the door to his chamber unexpectedly open . . . turning his partially sighted gaze towards it . . . wondering who his visitors were . . . perhaps hoping that it was his wife Jani. At what stage would his half-brother realise that the opening doors brought not the comfort of a loving wife but assassins? How would Khusrau die? His only orders had been that it should be painless. Would it be a quick dagger thrust to the heart or the clean sweep of a sword blade? A cup of poison forced through resisting lips or suffocation with a pillow?

However, he had realised that he could not afford to allow sentiment to master necessity and to think like this. He must think of Khusrau as a past and potential rebel – not as a living, feeling human being. But later, when the news of Khusrau’s smothering had reached him, a new concern had grown in his mind. How much had he been influenced by Mehrunissa’s words as she stood before him with Shahriyar? Had she played his emotions when they were heightened by his victory and his reunion with his sons and manipulated him into doing something he might regret for ever, just as she had manipulated his father? No, he had again convinced himself. He and he alone had made the fateful decision and it had been justified.

‘I cannot lie to you. It is true. But I acted to protect ourselves and our children.’ Khurram paused before forcing himself to continue. ‘And there is more . . . news that reached me only yesterday. After completing the funeral arrangements for Khusrau, Jani went to her rooms and killed herself – it is said by swallowing a burning coal from the brazier heating her room against the winter chill.’

Tears appeared in Arjumand’s eyes and she began to shake. ‘How could you, Khurram? What a horrible way to die. I can almost feel the coal burning and scorching my throat, eating my lungs. What terrible, terrible pain she must have endured in those last moments.’

Jani’s death – in particular the manner of it – had appalled him too when he had first heard of it, but all he said was, ‘I did not order her death.’

‘But it was a consequence of your order to execute Khusrau . . . Jani loved him as much as I love you. To take one’s life is a sin, I know, and I pray to God that if you died
I would have the courage to live on for our children’s sake, but I can understand how grief overcame her.’

Khurram looked at Arjumand’s troubled face. What she had said was true. His actions had caused Jani’s death. But whatever doubts he might feel – whatever guilt – he must put them behind him and be strong. ‘I did it for our children. They are our future – the future of the dynasty,’ he said, dismissing from his mind the thought that he had done it to make his own life and rule easier. But perhaps those motives in reality had coalesced. Few men – not even an emperor – had the cool courage to peer unflinching into their minds and motives, preferring to deceive themselves with specious justifications for their actions.

‘I pray Khusrau and especially Jani will rest in Paradise,’ said Arjumand, ‘and I pray too God will forgive you and exact no punishment on you or our children.’

‘I pray so too,’ said Khurram. He had never meant anything more, nor since his marriage felt so alone. This was what his father and grandfather had told him about the loneliness of power. It would never leave him.

The great sandstone gateway of the Agra fort – his fort – rose in front of Khurram as his elephant made its stately progress up the flower-strewn ramp at the head of the ceremonial procession. He had chosen the date of his entry into Agra with care – according to the solar calendar it was the 72nd anniversary of the proclamation of his grandfather Akbar’s reign. Rising before dawn he had walked through the drifting early morning mist to Akbar’s tomb where, as the peacocks fluttered down from their night-time roosts in the surrounding gardens, he had pressed his lips to the cold stone of his sarcophagus. ‘I will be a worthy emperor,’ he had whispered.

But today was also the 145th anniversary of the birth of Babur whose ambition and daring had first won Hindustan for the Moghuls. Babur’s eagled-hilted sword Alamgir now hung from his waist. How many battles Alamgir must have
seen on its long journey from beyond the Oxus river into Hindustan . . . The eagle’s ruby eyes glittered in the sun. Glancing at his right hand, Khurram smiled with satisfaction at the sight of something that had belonged to an even earlier ancestor – the heavy gold ring engraved with the image of a spitting tiger that had once been Timur’s. He, Khurram, was the tenth ruler in direct descent from that great warrior whose empire had once stretched from the Mediterranean in the west to the borders of China in the east, and the conjunction of the planets at his own birth had been the same as at Timur’s, much to Akbar’s delight. At this moment Khurram felt as if not only his subjects but the spectral figures of his ancestors were there watching him, the thirty-six-year-old Moghul emperor, take upon his broad shoulders the hopes and ambitions of their dynasty.

As Khurram’s elephant passed into the purple shadows beneath the main gatehouse kettledrums boomed in salute. For a moment Khurram closed his eyes, savouring the moment, the culmination of his wishes and ambitions. But then a darkness all of his own passed over him, driving out the euphoria. Despite the heat of the day and the weight of his diamond-encrusted green brocade tunic, he shivered as he thought of the anonymous note pinned by a steel dagger to the ground close to his command tent that he had found on his return from his grandfather’s tomb. Its content had been brief:
Surely a throne seized in so much blood will be ill omened
?

How had the note got there beneath the noses of his guards? Had it been written by someone he thought of as a friend but who was not – someone whose presence close to his tent wouldn’t have attracted attention? Or had it been
left by a stranger who had infiltrated the heart of his camp? With the preparations for the triumphal march into Agra under way since well before dawn and with the wispy white mist to shroud them perhaps it wouldn’t have been so difficult.

As he had flung the note into a brazier of burning charcoals and watched it consumed in a clear orange flame, Mehrunissa’s high-cheekboned face, lips curved in an ironic smile, had floated for a moment before him. He could imagine her writing such a note. Had she really found it possible from the seclusion of her quarters in Lahore to attempt to disturb his peace of mind on what should have been the greatest day of his life? If so she had succeeded. Whoever was responsible, the note had shaken him, but he had tried to push the message from his mind. He hadn’t even mentioned it to Arjumand whose parting kiss in the
haram
tents that morning had sent the same erotic shiver through him that it had in all the years of their marriage. It never failed to arouse him and had for a while banished any bleak thoughts.

But now as his elephant emerged back into the sunlight, bearing him onwards towards the throne he had desired for so long, they had returned. Why? Because he felt guilty? No. The deaths of Shahriyar and Khusrau had been necessary, hadn’t they? Wasn’t a little blood shed at the beginning of the reign better than a lot shed later because he had not had the courage to act? Wouldn’t the benefits from the deaths outweigh any sin in them? Yes, he reiterated to himself. With these deaths he had eliminated the potential rivals to the throne and protected himself and his family.

Enough, Khurram told himself. He had done what he
had to do and the past was just that – the past. All that mattered was the present and the future and he had secured both by his actions. Trying to pull himself together, he glanced round at the vast procession following him. The elephant bearing his four sons, the imperial princes, beneath a green silk canopy and the smaller one carrying Arjumand and their two daughters in a howdah enclosed by draperies of cloth of silver into which gold mesh grilles had been inset so that they could see out were following immediately behind. Next, mounted on a white stallion, rode Arjumand’s father Asaf Khan and seated on a black stallion with a jewelled saddlecloth and graciously acknowledging the crowds was Mahabat Khan, now his
khan-i-khanan,
commander-in-chief. Then came the imperial bodyguards followed by cavalrymen riding four abreast – many of them scarlet-turbaned Rajputs – and finally musketmen and archers, all of them magnificently dressed in Moghul green, representatives of the great army that was now his to command.