Bah!--he was a fool to let his fancy run so far. Still he could enquire when he went to Khorasân as he meant to do some time that summer. Meanwhile a feeling of content came to him; partly because his imagination endorsed the idea as delightfully sentimental; mostly because it postponed necessity for immediate action.
And yet, when a day or two after a missive arrived from his uncle, Sultan Hussain, begging for his assistance at Khorasân against the arch enemy and raider Shaibâni-Khân who threatened an inroad, Babar felt pleased at what seemed an order from Fate; especially as the missive came by the hands of rather a quaint ambassador; namely by the son of his uncle's professional Dreamer-of-Dreams. To be sure Cousin Gharîb had made fun of the man's pretensions; but there was more in that sort of thing than could be accounted for by reason. Anyhow, it was a clear duty to set off at once. If Shaibâni was the enemy, then, if other princes went to the attack on their feet it was incumbent on him to go if necessary on his head! and if they went against him with swords, it was his business to go, were it only with stones!
"The Most High must have a care of Kâbul nathless," said wary old Kâsim. "Look you the saying runs:
Ten dervishes in one rug
Lie comfy, and warm, and snug,
But two Kings upon one throne--
Such a thing never was known.
The most High's brother--and his cousin--"
But Babar cut him short. He never would listen to suspicions of his own relations.
"I have done nothing," he said, with just that little touch of conscious virtue that in him was so translucent, so simple, though in one less artless it might have been offensive, "to provoke either of them to hostility; neither have they given me ground for dissatisfaction."
Kâsim shrugged his shoulders and muttered under his breath that it would need the Day of Judgment to make some folk believe in sin, and applied himself to seeing that the garrison left was sufficient to keep order.
Babar himself was full of spirits. Apart from other considerations the prospect of, at last, seeing Herât, the most civilised city in Central Asia, filled him with keen interest. It was full, he knew, of poets, painters, philosophers, and its luxuries were things to speak of with bated breath. In addition, he had a pleasant remembrance of his Uncle Hussain. It was more than ten years since he had seen him over in the camp which had struck him, the hardy barbarian, with awe. Did the old man--old now with a vengeance since he had reigned a good fifty years--still keep butting rams and amuse himself with cock fighting? Above all, did he still on festival days put on that small turban tied in three folds, broad and showy, and having placed a plume nodding over it in that style go to prayers? Babar wrote in his own hand--in the Babari writing which he had just invented and of which he was vastly proud--a letter to the kindly old man, telling him that he had set out from Kâbul and hoped to be with him shortly. This he entrusted to an ambassador who with the Dreamer-of-Dreams started express for Herât; he himself having a small job on hand by the way, in the punishment of some wandering tribes to the west.
It was not much of a task; but summer quarters in the hills had a fascination for Babar, and he remained on the top of one of the many ranges he had to cross; despatching Kâsim-Beg meanwhile with a body of troops to scour the countryside for rebels.