Yet, even as the words rang out on the chill air, other words, faint, scarce to be heard, were startling those two sad watchers in the Garden-Palace.
"The Crystal Bowl. Give it back to me ... I ... I laugh as I drink.... Bring me the whole, I say, the whole."
The boy's brain, faintly conscious, was taking command once more.
And the body obeyed. In four or five days he was reading letters of despair from his mother, from old Isân-daulet, from Dearest-One. Samarkand, they said, had been taken with troops from Andijân. Could not one man be spared from Samarkand to keep Andijân?
Babar had not the heart to delay, and ill as he was set off in a litter with such followers as he could gather together. It was a Saturday in March that he started; just a hundred days since he had entered Samarkand, and he knew he could not hope to return as King. "One hundred days only," he thought, as he jolted through the peach gardens that were once again swelling to bud.
He reached Khojend by forced marches in a week's time; but by then he was on his horse again, beginning to regain strength and colour.
So he wondered why the people looked at him so strangely as he rode through the town. Did they take him for a ghost?
Yet he was even as one when they told him the news. Just a week before, on the very Saturday when he had started in such haste from Samarkand, Andijân had capitulated, needlessly capitulated, to the enemy on the news of Babar's death brought by a returning post-runner.
For the sake of Andijân he had lost Samarkand, and now found that he had lost the one without preserving the other.
Worse still, he had lost a dear friend; for the saintly Kwâja Kâzi, protesting against the premature yielding of the citadel while there was yet no lack of provisions or of fighting men, had been barbarously martyred by being hanged in a shameful manner over the gate of the citadel.