And the folk who heard him looked at each other and echoed:
"Wherefore?"
That was the question. Asked by one to-day, it was asked by half-a-dozen the next, by a hundred the week after, when Babar, faithful as ever to his promises, had the Kutba, the Royal Proclamation, read in the name of Shâh-Ismael as over-lord. A thousand asked it when the first gold coin was struck bearing the hated Shiah legends. The Emperor, the man they had welcomed, was a heretic. He and his army wore the red-cap.
Samarkand, head centre of orthodoxy, became alarmed, began to whisper.
"I am no heretic, but a keeper of promises," said Babar grimly, and went on his way. He had become a trifle arrogant, and inclined to resent any interference. The Samarkand folk were rude, ignorant, bigoted; he would not even try to pacify them.
So the winter passed and spring set in--(the plentiful drops of her rain having clothed the earth in green raiment)--and with the warmer weather the Usbeks once more appeared like locusts on the edge of the Turkhestân desert and the fight for Samarkand began all over again.
And this time Babar with not a wish ungratified, Babar in the plenitude of his pride and strength, was forced to flight; for religious bigotry is the hardest of all foes to fight.
A horde of kizzilbâshes, it is true, was sent by his over-lord to help him; but they only made matters worse. First by their confirmation of heresy; next by their brutality in murdering high and low, the sucklings and the decrepit.
Sick at heart, Babar found himself once more a wanderer; once more a prey to the treachery of Moghul troops, from which he escaped one night with bare life and in his night clothes.
His one consolation was that Mahâm, Dearest-One and his children, were safe with relatives in Khost.