CHAPTER IX
"Bring! bring the musky scented wine!
A draught of wine the memory cheers,
And wakens thoughts of other years."
So the months, even the years sped on bringing calm. Sometimes Babar felt a trifle regretful over the old storms. The glints of sunshine between had seemed, mayhap, the brighter for them. He was now only nearing his twenty-ninth year, and yet he felt almost as if life had ended for him. He looked round on his growing family, on his gardens, his aqueducts, his highly-disciplined small army; all were well in their way, but for all that his restless eyes followed the doings of Shâh-Ismael of Persia, who, young as he was, a mere boy in fact, had dared to send the arch-enemy, the Usbek-raider, Shaibâni Khân, a spinning-wheel and a spindle, and bid him if he would not fight, go sit in a corner and busy himself with the little present like the woman he was!
It had been splendid, that interchange of discourtesies. First of all, the Shâh's demand for a treaty followed by Shaibâni's contemptuous advice to make no claim for kingship through his mother, who had withdrawn herself from the circle of distinction by her marriage; since he, Shaibâni, made one through his father, a Sultan and son of a Sultan. This was accompanied by a beggar's bowl and staff with the script: "In case you wish, as is fitting, to follow the profession of your father, I remind you of it and the verse--
"'Clasp the bride of sovereignty close to you if you will, But don't
you dare to kiss her until the swords are still.'"
Shâh-Ismael, however, had been no whit behind. Back had come the spindle and distaff with the rhyming insult--
"Who boasts of his dead fathers only owns
Himself a dog that loveth ancient bones."
After that, naturally, there was but one end--extermination of one or the other. Which would it be?
Shâh-Ismael, with his thousands of disciplined and heretical kizzilbâshes, or Shaibâni Khân with his hordes of wild Mongols?
"God's truth," said Babar to old Kâsim who had been ailing this while back, "I scarce know which to choose. I hate the Red-caps almost as much as the Moghuls."