King-Errant

by Flora Annie Webster Steel

CHAPTER IX

Think, in this battered Caravanserai
Whose doorways are alternate Night and Day,
How Sultan after Sultan with his Pomp
Abode his Hour or two and went his way.

Omar Khayyam.

Those first few days of despair were as a dream. The world and all that is in it showed to Babar's eyes like a phantasy of sleep. He lay and rested at a friendly village, passing from the extreme of famine to plenty; from an estate of danger and calamity to peace and ease. The nice fat flesh, the bread of fine flour well baked, the sweet melons and excellent grapes in great abundance, all these made him feel sensibly the pleasures of peace and plenty; for enjoyment after suffering, abundance after want, come with an increased relish and afford a more exquisite delight. It was the first time in his life that he had passed from the injuries of his enemies and the pressure of actual hunger to the ease of security, and he revelled in it like the wholesome-hearted, and, for the time, mindless creature that he was.

But memory of a sort came back to him after a few days and he grew restless; so they marched on. And as he rode over the hills or walked, leading his mother's pony, discontent began once more to leaven his glad content. The world in these lower lying districts was beautiful in the early springtide, but there was something more in life than mere beauty. There was something else needed to make it splendid.

"I will go back to where we were in the White Mountains," he said one day. "I was happy there and so was Dearest-One."

It was the first time he had mentioned his sister's name, and his mother looked at him anxiously. But he said no more. Nature was dealing in kindly fashion with him and bringing memory back by slow degrees.

But at Bishâgher, where they halted a few days, it was like to have been otherwise, for there they came across an old duenna of Babar's mother who having been left behind in Samarkand because of the scarcity of horses, had, nothing daunted, trudged after her mistress on foot. The two women sobbed on each other's necks, while the one told and the other listened to the piteous tale of a marriage, which after all had not been so bad as it might have been, because of old Isân-daulet's masterful spirit. But they said nothing to the menfolk about it all. It was as well that their boy should hear as few details as possible.

And here--the first possible place for news since those long months of siege--tidings came of family deaths at Tashkend. It was fourteen years since Babar's mother had been there and seen her people, and now, when they were hopeless, homeless, and when, moreover, she had her old governess to serve her once more, the time seemed fitting for a visit.

So she went, and for the first time for many years Babar was left alone without any hostages to fortune.

And one of the first things he did with his liberty was to climb a certain hill all set with flowers, which he and his sister had climbed one spring day in the past. The gentians were as blue, the primulas as pink as ever, and the mosaic of forget-me-nots and yellow crowsfoot lay almost inconceivably bright as ever. The blue sky, grazing ground for fleecy white flocks of clouds, stretched away beyond the hills to that faint bluer line of distant Samarkand.

All was as it had been. And the green enamel frame set with jewels, like flowers, lay on the transparent ice where she had put it. He had not noticed that before; one could see through the slab--see green grass-blades, and a half opened flower bud that had been held in chill prison for years and years and years--It was quaint, utterly, when her face, her portrait had gone! The rain had washed it away. The vellum on which it had been painted lay white as snow.

Yes! quaint utterly. The icy grip had kept its hold, the warm sunshine had let slip its prize. He sat down idly, his head resting in his hands.

Yes! her face had gone! What matter now if there was place or grace beside it for another? Poor Baisanghâr! and poor--infinitely poorer Dearest-One! For the first time the full meaning of what had happened came over him; he turned round passionately, hid his face among the flowers and cried like a child.

Ishk and ashk! Love and tears. How little divided them. So the thought of his dead, crippled cousin came to him and the memory of that vivid, fate-defying face stood between him and despair. The Crystal Bowl! Yes! he would laugh as he quaffed: life had brought him strange adventures; let her bring more! He was ready for them--quite ready, in his manhood, to take what the years might hold. For boyhood had gone. That had capitulated with Samarkand.

He did not formulate all this clearly; he simply felt it. Felt the keen joy in life come back to him as he sat up once more and looked out over God's beauties with still swimming eyes; and the tears were magnifying glasses!

A quaint conceit that might be worked up into a couplet or perchance a quatrain. Baisanghâr would have done it finely: he worked well on such finniken fancies. But he had been wrong in the verses he had written on the back of the enamel frame. Were they there still? Aye! they had been protected from the tears of rain.

He read the lines over, feeling as he read them that there was something in them that lacked. So, as he felt, words came to him; for he was born with that artistic temperament which cannot help trading on its own most sacred emotions; perhaps because such natures see vaguely that individualism is a snare to the soul, that all things worth recording are part of a Greater Personality than their own. And the outcome of feeling and words ran thus:--

"Seven thrones, seven sins, seven stars,
But not one thing that bars
Life's love, Life's tears.
The crushed grape fills the bowl
With wine for the sad soul
Beyond these years."

He jumped up feeling quite pleased with himself, for they were the first verses in that measure he had ever composed!

After this when he was wandering barefoot over hill and dale, he would sit down when he found some pleasant spot and string rhymes together; for he was in a backwater, mentally and bodily. For twenty years he had battled with Fate over trivialities; since what, after all, were Ferghâna and Samarkand and Hissâr? Only tiny little bits of God's earth. He was beginning to be a trifle weary of it all, to long for a larger horizon. So he sent off on the pretext of getting news, the few followers who had remained with him while he, Nevian-Gokultâsh, and another wandered farther and farther, higher and higher up the White Mountains until they reached the Roof-of-the-World. And there they lodged awhile in the felt tents of a shepherd and lived on sheeps'-milk, cheese and buckwheat-cakes. Their host was a man of some eighty years; but his mother was still alive, and of extreme age, being at this time no less than one hundred and eleven years old, and in full possession of her faculties. Indeed, the circumstances of the great Timur's invasion of India remained fresh in her memory owing, doubtless, to her having been in her youth greatly interested in one who had been in his army.

She was a hale old woman, smoke-dried yet apple-cheeked, who loved to hear herself talk, especially when the tall good-looking young stranger sat at her feet, fixing his hazel eyes that were at once so sad and so merry on her whirling pirn as she twisted the brown wool for the blankets.

How it whirled, and leaped, and spun, as the withered old hand jerked the thread! So the Hand of Fate jerked men's lives, setting them spinning like tops into the shadows, out into the firelight again; always, always spinning!

"So the Great Khân was feeding his dogs, being in those days infidel, when Shaikh Jumâl-ud-din the divine came to him. 'Am I better than this dog?' quoth Timur, 'or is he better than I?' And the Shaikh smiled. 'If the King has faith he is better than his dog; but if he has no faith, then is his dog better than he, since the dog believes in a master.' So the Great Khân said the Creed immediately."

"Wah!" murmured the circle of shepherds; but Babar would press for tales of the Great Invasion. And sometimes the old lady would begin at the very beginning, and tell how Timur's soldiers, imitating their leader, would make their left arms straight as the letter "I" and their right arms crooked as a "K" and so write death in the blood of their enemies. How they let fly their arrows as the moon lets fly shooting stars so that the blood-sodden hillsides showed like a drift of red tulips. Or she would drone on--it was a long story--over the "Battle of the Mire," where the enemy not having strength to fight, sought help from the magic rain-stone, so that though the sun was in the Warrior, a host of dark clouds suddenly filled the sky. The thunder resounded, the lightnings flashed, the water descended from the eyes of the stars until the voice of Noah was heard praying a second time for deliverance from the Deluge. Then the beasts of the field swam like fishes, the skin of the horses' bellies adhered to the crust of the earth. The feathers of the arrows damped off, their notches came out, neither men nor horses could move by reason of the rain ...

So she would maunder on until Babar would say impatiently:

"Get on to India, mother! I would fain be there myself."

And he would hardly listen as she, once more beginning at the very beginning, would detail the eight-hundred-thousand men, provided with rations for seven years and each accompanied with two milch-kine and ten milch-goats, so that when stores were exhausted they might live on milk, and when milk dried up they could convert the animals themselves into provisions.

It was all doubtless very wise of Timur--God rest his soul!--who was ever great on the commissariat; but he, Babar, preferred the laconic remark in his great ancestor's autobiography, "The princes of India were at variance with one another. Resolved to make myself master of the Indian empire. Did so."

It was however the more intimate personal experiences which the old woman held by virtue of that dead "interest" of hers, which fired Babar's imagination; but these fragments of a half-forgotten past were not always to be got at. The long years of common round and daily task had overlaid them; it needed a subtle touch upon the instrument to make it vibrate once more. But Babar found a key. There was a certain Turkhomân ballad called "The Maid-of-the-Spring," which invariably unlocked the old woman's memory. So, often, as they sat over the camp fire at night, Babar, smiling to himself, would say, "A song, a song! Let us sing 'The Maid-of-the-Spring' together once more, grandmother! There is none sings it as thou dost."

Which was true! Still the toneless treble of the old voice whining away like the fine whing of a mosquito did not sound so bad against the rich baritone. And the youngest maiden could not have nodded and becked more, or looked more arch. And perhaps the old heart beat as quickly as a young one; such things do not go by age.

And this is what they sang in somewhat monotonous antiphon:

He.
Maid of the Spring! I'm thirsty! I pray
A drop of water! I must away.
God bless you, my girl! And don't be slow!
Give me a drink and let me go.

She.
I don't give drinks to strange young men
Who come a-swaggering down the glen;
Naught you'll get from my pitcher to-day,
Drink for yourself and go your way.

He.
Maid of the Spring! I cannot alight,
I'm far too tired! I'm wearied quite!
I haven't time! God bless you, my dear!
Give me a drink--I can't stay here.

She.
The birds sing sweet in the spring, they say,
It's sweeter still when I tune my lay,
But tired man should sleep in his bed--
Farewell! God's blessing be on your head.

He.
Give me some water, you pretty dear!
If I'd only time, you need not fear.
My darling! a drink from that stoup of thine,
Be it water or be it wine.

She.
Many men travel along this way,
All are thirsty but none can stay.
Take my pitcher and drink if you will,
A thirsty man must have his fill.

He.
Your brows are arched by a pen, I swear,
Your teeth are pearls--I will treat you fair,
Get down from my horse and wait an hour.
Give me your lips, my sweet, my flower.

She.
Roses and violets grow our groves,
No one may pluck them but he who loves.
My brother has slaves, and sticks a-main;
Drink and be off--it soon will rain!

He.
Darlingest dear! let it storm or rain,
My wide felt cloak shall shelter us twain.
Pitcher and all, leap up and ride,
We'll find a kiss at the water's side.

She.
My love! my love! have you come at last?
Drop the pitcher and hold me fast!
There are my lips before we fly
Out to a new world--you and I.

"And now for India!" Babar would cry when the applause was over. "I want to hear about the size of it, and the fruit and flowers of it, and all about it. See you, grandmother, begin and tell me of the young woman thy man met at Lahore--then thou wilt remember to a nicety!"

So the summer passed, until old Isân-daulet arriving from Samarkand with news of Dearest-One, set Babar's mind a-jogging once more over his enemy Shaibâni. But there was nothing to be done in winter time: such a bitter cold winter, too. More than one man died of it, and even Babar himself admitted that, after diving sixteen times in swift succession into a river that was only unfrozen in the middle by reason of its swift current, the extreme chilliness of the water quite penetrated his bones; as well it might.

Then early spring brought a great grief which gave pause to energy. Nevian-Gokultâsh was done to death, by a scoundrel who was jealous of Babar's affection for him, and who had the temerity to say that faithful creature had fallen over a precipice when he was drunk. Nevian, who adhered so strictly to the law of Islâm! Nevian, who had always sided for sobriety, who had been to the full as urgent as old Kâsim Beg against a King giving himself up to wine. Babar, helpless to follow the murderer, felt deeply the death of his playmate in childhood, the companion of his boyhood. There were few persons for whose loss he would have grieved so much or so long. For a week or ten days, he thought of nothing else and the unbidden tears were ever in his eyes.

After this, a great restlessness set in, fostered by old Isân-daulet, whose whole life had been one long succession of battles and murders and sudden deaths, and whose belief in Moghul troops never wavered. Why, she suggested, not go to his uncles the Khâns at Tashkend? His mother had been ill; she would like to see him once more. And if his tongue was sufficiently careful amongst his thirty-two teeth, he might get substantial help.

"For what?" gloomed Babar--"to get back Âkshi and lose Andijân or get Andijân and lose Âkshi? 'Tis all one in the end."

"Not the fine fighting, child!" replied the old lady craftily. "That is the same, be it in Gehannum or Bihisht." (Hell or Heaven.)

That was undoubtedly true; and there was no good to be gained by rambling from hill to hill as he had been doing.

So, once more, the young adventurer gathered together a very scanty band of followers; for old Kâsim Beg, who till then had never left him, had come to words with Isân-daulet over these same Moghuls, and refused to accompany him.

"I say not, sire," remonstrated the wise old soldier, "that these men are bad soldiers for me; but they are for the Most Exalted, who has ideas of discipline. Besides, I care not to risk my own neck for a chance. In obedience to the Most Exalted's commands I beheaded quite a number of these men in the last campaign, for marauding. Wherefore, therefore, should I go amongst their mourning relatives? I will come if there be fighting. Then there is no leisure and little desire for private revenge; blood can be let anywhere and one corpse is as good as another."

So Kâsim went with his immediate adherents towards Hissâr; and Babar set off to Tashkend with rather a heavy heart. In a somewhat didactic mood also, for resting for a day or two beside a spring in the lower hills, he caused a verse to be inscribed on a stone slab which formed one side of the well where the water gushed in from the hill above, to disappear into the earth when it had run through a masonry trough.

"Many a man has rested and has drunk
Thy water, and like thee, O spring, has sunk
Swift to a grave where he lies all forgot,
Conqueror or vanquished, libertine or monk."

He was not, however, at home in the rubâi, as he had not, at that time, studied with much attention the style and phraseology of poetry.

Indeed, one of his first actions on reaching Tashkend was to submit some of his compositions to the Khân who had pretensions to taste, and who, moreover, wrote verses himself; though his odes, to be sure, were rather deficient in manner and substance. The younger poetaster, however, did not get either explicit or satisfactory criticism, and came to the conclusion that his uncle had no great skill in poetic diction. He did not know, for instance, that in the Turkhi language it was allowable, by poetic licence, to interchange certain letters for the sake of the rhyme.

"He will think thee a nincompoop," stormed Isân-daulet. "Why did'st not show him thy sword play?"

"He may see that ere long," quoth Babar, grimly, and went straight away to write the first ghazel of six Couplets he ever composed.

"I have found no faithful friend
In the world save my own sad soul.
Dear heart! thou must give and spend
On thyself thy confidence whole.
Nightingale sings to the rose,
Roses give scent to the bird,
Dreams one of the thorny foes?
The other of passion deferred?
The exile must live apart,
To his coffers none give or lend.
The banished one holds his heart
To his soul as lover and friend."

He was quite pleased with this effusion and sang it at a festive party soon after with great gusto; but the next morning he found that the golden clasp of his girdle had been stolen by one of the appreciative audience!

Moghuls again!