King-Errant

by Flora Annie Webster Steel

CHAPTER I

"Youth asked the lark,

'Why dost thou sing

When clouds are darkling?'
Replied the lark,

'Behind the dark
The light is sparkling.'

Youth begged the Hours
Death not to bring
Though clouds were lowering.
Replied the Hours,

'In Heaven's bowers
Roses are flowering.'"

"To-day I will shave," said Babar with conviction; and his long, fine fingers felt his rather ragged young beard reflectively.

He was altogether a bit ragged after his long wanderings. But he had come back from them wiser, steadier in mind, still stronger in body. The record of years of clean, hard living showed in his bright hazel eyes, and the general alertness of his lithe young body.

But he was ragged! The brilliant June sunshine poured down on the sorry encampment set out on the summer pasturage of the high alps of Ilâk, and revealed the rents and patches of the two tents which were all that Babar possessed; his own, terribly tattered in its royalty, reserved for his mother's use; a common felt tilt, flexible in its cross-poles, for his own.

And then his followers! Some two hundred in all; mostly on foot with brogues to them: blanket frocks over their shoulders; clubs in their hands. A miserable court, indeed, for a Prince of the Blood Royal!

Yet the sense of Kingship rose stronger than ever in the young mind.

"Yea! I will be shaven!" he said, magisterially, and summoned the court barber. He came running barefoot with a tin basin.

"There should be ceremonials and entertainments," said the Khânum, his mother, plaintively. "Even at my brothers' first shavings there were ever illuminations and feastings, and thou art King; but what will you, here in the wilderness?"

Babar laughed. "One King is as like another King as split peas, when there is lather to his face, motherling; so quick, barber, image me to Sulaiman-the-Wise, or Haroun-ul-Raschid. Lo! I could be Emperor as well as they, were fate but kind."

So, out in the June sunshine, the young man sat while the white lather foamed up into his eyes and made them smart.

"Have a care! slave," he said sharply. "Lo! I shall see things cloudy--and I would fain see clear."

See clear! Aye! that was what he wanted. The past was leaving him--with his beard! He had made up his mind to that. Never again would he quarrel possession of that sweet valley on the extreme limits of the habitable world. He would go farther afield; how far depended--On what? On himself chiefly. So for the present he was on his way to Khorasân, the centre of civilisation.

Ay! Bare feet and blanket frocks were well enough in boyhood; but when a man came to his own there were other Kingships to be fought for besides those which involved a temporal throne. There was Kingship in thought, Kingship in Art; a dozen or more Kingships ready to be gripped.

The razor sweeping backwards and forwards, seemed to be shaving away all the disappointments of his past life; he leapt to his feet when the business was over and stretched his strong young arms out as if to embrace the whole world.

"Lo! I feel a new man. I am ready for anything--for everything!"

So, as he stood there, the memory--never very far distant from his mind in his moments of exaltation--of the Crystal Bowl of Life came back to him and he sang the last verse, his full voice rolling away among the hills:

"Clear Crystal Bowl, I laugh as I quaff.
Bring me Life's whole! I won't take the half!
Crystal Bowl, I bid thee bring to me

Joy, Grief, Life, Death."

"Where didst learn that song, sonling?" said his mother, fondly. "And how well thou singest now! Thou hast learnt much of late, Babar."

"I learnt it," replied her son, his face sobering, "from my cousin Gharîb. Dost know, motherling," he added swiftly, the light coming back to his eyes, "I learnt more of him than I wist at the time. Sometimes I think I owe all to him."

"All?" echoed the Khânum, hurt. "Dost owe nothing to me--or at least to thy grandmother?"

Babar's face showed whimsically reverent. "Oh, yea! Oh, yea!" he assented readily; "I owe much to my revered grandparent; yet at this present it shows but little."

And he pointed to the two ragged tents, the two hundred tatterdemalions. "I would I were a tulip at times," he added irrelevantly, as he flung himself down on the grass that was all starred with the blood-red blossoms. "Think of it, motherling! To lie cosy all winter at your own heart, and when the sun has warmed the world to unfurl your banner and flaunt it independent--disobedient, if you choose!"--he rolled over on his stomach to look clear into one ruby cup--"Yea! little one!" he said patronisingly. "Rightly art thou called 'na farmân.'[^[2]] Thou holdest thine own treasure secure, caring for none--yet will I touch it with my hand," and the tip of his long finger dived into the chalice to touch the stiff stamens, and come out all covered with pale, yellow pollen. "An augury!" he said gravely, as he smeared his forehead with the powder of life. "Lo! I am marked like a Hindu--I shall conquer Hind yet."

"God forgive thee, child," exclaimed his mother hastily. "Say not such things--they tempt Providence. Even not thyself to an idolater."

Babar looked contrite. "Yet if I conquer Hind, I cannot kill all my subjects," he replied thoughtfully. "There is a puzzle for thee, motherling--how to be true Mussulman and yet not a fool?"

His mother looked at him and shook her head. Dear son as he was, always loving, always affectionate, he had a bad habit of getting away from her ken mentally and bodily. It all came of leading such a wandering life. If only he would marry and settle down. But there seemed no chance of either.

Yet Fate held the latter to close quarters. It almost seemed as if that shaving of his beard, that setting aside once and for all of his boyish aspirations had had a magical effect on Babar's environments; for within two months, seated at his ease in a splendid tent, he was writing in his diary:

"The Lord is wonderful in His might! That a man, master of twenty or thirty thousand retainers, should, in the space of half-a-day, without battle, without contest, be reduced to give up all to a needy fugitive like myself, who had only two hundred tatterdemalions at his back (and they, all in the greatest want); that he should no longer have any power over his own servants, nor over his own wealth, nor even his own life, was a wonderful disposition of the Omnipotent!"

Undoubtedly! And as the enemy who was thus discomfited was no less a person that Khosrau-Shâh, the man who had so treacherously caused Prince Baisanghâr to be strangled, it is certain that his lack of power over his own life was a sore temptation to Babar. The man undoubtedly deserved death: it was indeed conformable to every law, human and divine, that such should meet with condign punishment. But an agreement had been entered into, so he must be left free and unmolested, and allowed to carry off as much of his personal property as he could.

For Babar was no promise-breaker. Perhaps also the memory of poor, miserable Khosrau's appearance when this pompous man (who for years had wanted nothing of royalty save that he had not actually proclaimed himself King) presented himself for audience and bent himself twenty-five or twenty-six times successively, and went and came back, and went and came back, till he was so tired that he nearly fell forward in his last genuflection, may have weighed with the keen young observer. The man was getting old; let him go with his sins upon his head.

So he went. And Babar with the thirty thousand retainers at his back set out promptly for Kâbul.

His paternal uncle, its King, had died leaving a young son. A perfidious minister had ousted this boy from the throne, but had himself been assassinated at a grand festival. Thereinafter all was disorder and tumult. Fitting opportunity then for a coup d'état.

So, over the peaks and passes, Babar at the head of a movable column passed swiftly. Still more swiftly--since surprise is the essence of success--when news came that the usurper for the time being had left Kâbul at the head of his army to intercept another adversary. The instant this information was received, the young leader gave his orders; within an hour the force was on the march. A hill pass lay before them; it must be mastered ere dawn; they must go up and up all the night through, the laden mules stumbling over the stones, dismounted troopers hauling their horses up rock ladders. A troublous time, indeed; but at last the crest of the hill was reached, and there, bright to the South, showed a star.

The young leader's heart leapt to his mouth--Could it--could it be Canopus?--the lucky star of the conqueror? The star of which he had read--the star he had never seen before ...

"That--that cannot be Soheil," he said almost timorously.

"It is Soheil, Most High," replied Bâki Cheghaniâni in a courtier's voice; then repeated pompously the well known verse:

"How far dost thou shine, Soheil?
And where dost thou rise?
Who knows? But this cannot fail:
Thy light brings luck to the eyes
Who see it and cry, 'All hail!

Soheil!'"

"Gentlemen!" rang out Babar's jubilant young voice, cutting the clear night air like a knife. "Let us give it all we can...! All hail!--Soheil!"

"All hail! Soheil!" The cry clamoured round the rocks and surged up from the ravines where men were still striving upwards; while on that downward path to the pleasant valleys below where spear points were already beginning to cluster, the troopers paused to echo and re-echo:

"All hail! Soheil!"

And Babar's star was veritably in the ascendant. Within a month--yet once more without battle, without contest--he had gained complete possession of Kâbul and Ghazni with the countries and provinces dependent thereon.

It had been almost unbelievable success ever since that day when on the uplands of Ilâk, he had shaved off his beard and set aside, once and for all, his childish hopes and aims!

Really, it was rather quaint! The thought of it, with its hint of imagination, its something beyond the dull routine of the inevitable, added zest to the young King's almost rapturous appreciation of his new dominions.

To begin with Kâbul was in the very midst of the habitable world. That was a great point in its favour. Then it was in the fourth climate; and so of course its gardens were perfection. Its warm and its cold districts were close together; in a single day you could go to a place where snow never falls, and in the space of two astronomical hours you might reach a spot where snow lay always (except now and then when the summer happened to be peculiarly hot).

Then the fruits! Grapes, pomegranates, apricots, peaches, pears, apples, quinces, jujubes, damsons, walnuts, almonds, to say nothing of oranges and citrons! The wines, also, were strong and intoxicating; indeed, that produced on the skirts of one mountain was celebrated for its potency. This, however, was only a matter of hearsay since Babar was still a tee-totaler; and as the verse says:

"The drinker knows the virtue of wine
Which those who are sober can't divine."

Then the honey was delicious, the number of beehives extraordinary, and the climate itself was so extremely delightful that in this respect there was no other such place in the known world.

But it was the gardens, after all, which made Kâbul what it was, a place that filled the imagination with joy. Years and years afterwards the mere thought of them was to make Babar homesick almost to tears; now every moment of time he could spare was spent on the skirts of the Shâh-Kâbul hill where terraces rise one above the other to touch the Summer Palace of the New Year. It was early October; the plane trees were dropping their golden leaves, the peaches were crimson and pale red, the vines vied with each other in vivid colouring. It was all so much pure joy to the young King, and he passed on his content to all. His dearest mother was housed as she never had been before. And when old Isân-daulet came, just to have a peep at her grandson's success, he lodged her in the New Year's palace where the old lady could have her fill of the garden. Since, quaintly enough, it was from the ancient desert-born dame that Babar inherited his keen delight in flowers. Kâsim-Beg was back too, and so was Dost-Ali, his oldest friend amongst the nobles of Andijân; but Kambar-Ali had left; he was a thoughtless and rude talker and the more polished courtiers of Kâbul could not put up with his manners. Not that he was a great loss, for besides talking idly--and those who talk persistently cannot avoid at times saying foolish things--his wits were but skin deep, and he had a muddy brain.

There was but one fly in the honey, and that was the desire of all Babar's female relations that he should marry. There was justice, he felt, in his mother's claim for grandchildren. Undoubtedly it was his duty; but ...

He was too good-natured, however, to resist making everyone as happy as he was himself, especially after old Isân-daulet arrived with a bride in her pocket; so, before he quite realised the magnitude of the affair, he was duly wedded to yet another cousin, a half-sister of dead Prince Baisanghâr. She was some years older than her groom and very, very beautiful.

But Babar came out from the bridal-chamber with a stern, set mouth and went straight to his mother.

"Tell her to say no more of Dearest-One," he said briefly; "or there will be trouble. And 'twere as well if she left Baisanghâr in peace also. She loved him, doubtless--but--but so did I." His voice softened over the last words.

Trouble, however, was not to be avoided. Babar made no more complaints; possibly because he gave few opportunities for fresh injury.

His mother wept and scolded in vain. That hurt him; but for his cousin-wife he cared not at all. He was proud; he could not understand a woman's petty spite, especially when shown to him, a good-looking young King in the zenith of success.

"We do not agree," he said gloomily. "Lo! it is true what Saádi saith:

'In a good man's house a cross-grained wife
Makes hell upon earth with ill-tempered strife.'

Mayhap if we part we may come together again in better fashion; and sure I pray God that such a thing as a shrew be not left in the world."

He would not acknowledge any fault on his side. Perhaps there was none. Anyhow he was determined this year of good fortune should not be marred by silly domestic squabbles. So, with affectionate farewells to his mother, whom he left determined to bring her choice to reason, he set off in light-hearted fashion to make that irruption into Hindustan which he had threatened when he had marked his forehead with pollen dust. He was not strong enough as yet, his army was not yet sufficiently disciplined for any attempt at real conquest; but he meant at least to cross the river Sind and set foot on Indian soil. The expedition, however, fizzled out into a mere plundering raid along the western bank of the Indus. But Babar at least saw India, getting his first glimpse of it across the wide waters and sandbanks of that great stream. He was deeply impressed by the sight. At some places the water seemed to join the sky; at others the farther bank lay reflected in inverted fashion like a mirage. And he saw other strange and beautiful things also. Once between this water and the heavens something of a red appearance like a crepuscule cloud was seen, which by and by vanished, and so continued shifting till he came near.

And then with a whirr of thousands--nay! not ten thousand nor twenty thousand wings, but of wings absolutely beyond computation and innumerable--an immense flock of flamingoes rose into the air, and as they flew, sometimes their red plumes showed and sometimes they were hidden.

So, with his mind stocked with endless new ideas, for he had been struck by astonishment--and indeed there was room for wonder in this new world where the grass was different, the trees different, the wild animals of a different sort, the birds of a different plumage, the very manners of the men different--he returned in early summer to Kâbul.

But here he once more found trouble. There was an epidemic of measles in the town and one of the first victims was his cousin-wife. He was vaguely distressed; mostly it is to be feared because of his mother who had nursed her daughter-in-law devotedly. Partly also from a remembrance of his own parting wish. Yes! it was distinctly wrong to say such ill-advised things, for if anything did happen one always regretted one's own words. And yet one had meant nothing.

"I will marry again, motherling! I will indeed; but this time let me choose for myself," he said consolingly as the fond woman clung to him in mingled joy at seeing him again, and grief at the failure of her schemes. Not that they would have come to much, likely, even had the cousin-wife not died; for she had been a handful doubtless, all those months.

"Lo! motherling," said her son once more, "let us forget the mistake for a time. Thy hands are hot, thou art outwearied. Lie so among the cushions, and I will sing to thee."

She loved to hear him sing, and even in the old Turkhomân ballads, she did not--like old Isân-daulet--claim to have them fairly bawled. This new soft fashion was utterly sweet. So was her son's close-shaven chin. He had gone far from the wild Turkhomân tents; far ahead of her; God only knew how much farther he was to go.

"Motherling! Thou art not so well to-night," he said with solicitude as he noticed how fever-bright were her kind, worn eyes. "I will bid the Court physician send for him of Khorasân. He will likely know all methods; for I cannot have thee ill, my motherling."

The Khânum held him fast with her hot hands. "I care not, sonling," she sobbed suddenly; "so long as thou art here to the last--the best--the bravest son--

"But I?" he said in tender raillery, though a sudden fear gripped at his heart. "Whom have I in the wide world but thee, mother? Lo! thou art the one thing feminine left to me after all these years." And his eyes grew stern as he thought of that dearest Dearest-One away in far Samarkand. Thank God she had a child.

"Have I not always said so?" wailed his mother. "Have I not bid thee have children? Ah, Babar! if I live, promise thou wilt marry."

"I will marry either way, motherling," he said. "Lo! I promise that; so cease thy tears and try to sleep. Thou wilt be better by morn."

But morning found the palace hushed with the hush of mortal sickness. There was no longer any doubt that the Khânum had contracted measles in its worst repressed form, and regret, vague almost unreasonable regret, seized on Babar. He was responsible. It was his fault. His mother had nursed his wife. The Khorasân physician came and ordered water-melons; he of Kâbul let blood. And Babar sat dry-eyed beside his mother, holding her hot hand. She did not know him. Those words of hers, begging him to marry had been her last to him. His to her his promise that he would marry. Even amid his dazed grief he remembered this; remembered it keenly as, when the end came in quiet unconsciousness, he bent over her to give the last caress before Death claimed the body and it lay soulless, impure. But she? She was received into the Mercy of God.

He said that over and over again to himself as, on the Sunday morning, he put his strong shoulder under the light bier and carried it to the Garden of the New Year. It was summer-time now, the roses were beginning to blow, the tulips were nigh over, but the wild pansies were in full blossom. They had dug a grave under the plane trees and here, after the committal prayers had been said and flowers strewn, Babar, holding the head and Kâsim, his foster brother, the feet, laid the light, muslin-swathed, tinsel-bound corpse in the long, low niche, cut coffin-wise in the side. His voice scarcely trembled at all as he laid a handful of earth upon the breast with the solemn words of admonition and hope.

"Out of the dust I made you, and to dust I return you, to raise you yet once more out of the dust upon the Day of Resurrection."

But his eyes brimmed with tears as, with lavish hand, he scattered pansy blossoms till the white shroud was hidden by them.

Then without one word he drew himself up from the grave, and taking a shovel worked his hardest to fill in the earth.

Afterwards he sat down and looked out over the valley.

When his time came, he, also, would lie here. One could not desire a more peaceful, a more beautiful spot. But he would have no tomb built over him to blot out the blue sky. No! He and his mother should rest together till the Resurrection morn out in the open, among the birds and flowers.