The Diwan nodded: "The King sees them at audience to-day to consider----"
Birbal interrupted with a bitter laugh: "Before God, Abul," he said, with his habitual shrug of the shoulders, "when the Most-Excellent thinks of himself as Head of the Church and Defender of the Faith, he is too excellent for this world. Better sure a little injustice than that the King should back on himself. It is not time for weakness. What does he say?"
"'The Law-maker cannot break the law,'" replied the Diwan softly, and in his voice there was a touch both of irritation and of pride.
So in the sunshine the eyes of those two followed the King who dreamt such strange new dreams of duty and responsibility toward his subjects.
[CHAPTER VII]
What makes a monarch? Not his throne, his crown,
But man to work his will, to tremble at his frown.
--Sa'adi.
The city was astir, sleepily astir. In the blind tortuous alleys where the hot May sun struggled in vain to shine, shut out on every side by the high tenement houses hiving swarms of men, women and children, rumour spread like mushroom spawn in the dark; spread aimlessly, idly, sending its filaments at random, here, there, everywhere, ready at a moment's notice to shoot up into some fantastic mushroom growth. Even in Agra itself, connected with Fatehpur Sikri by that twenty-mile-long ribbon of shop-edged road, the talk was all of what was about to happen in Akbar's City of Victory. The King had accepted the appeal of Jamâl-ud-din Syed concerning his marriage, and had appointed the next Friday audience for the hearing of proof concerning the same; so much was certain. But would he really go back on his own order? Could a King possibly own himself in the wrong? If he did, what became of his claim to divine guidance, and how could folk in the future live content on his judgment? Had a body ever heard of the Learned-in-the-Law eating their own words? No! they stuck to them; in that way lay safety, confidence, authority.
And what was this still more vague rumour concerning the King's Luck, the diamond which had of a surety been his talisman these many years? Was it really to be given to the foreigner to hack and hew?
This was a question which disturbed more than the populace, which brought anxiety to the most highly cultured mind in Fatehpur Sikri.