Free Raiders from the North: Empire of the Moghul by Alex Rutherford Page A

built by Timur to protect his ultimate stronghold, the four-storey Kok Saray. In the years since his death it had acquired an evil reputation. Babur had grown up with stories of the torture, murder and blindings of ambitious princes and nobles invited to the Kok Saray to feast and never seen again.
    He wheeled his horse to a standstill. Even from this distance he could sense the city’s watchfulness, as if it was a great creature, tense and waiting. Many eyes would be looking out, trying to assess when and from which direction Babur would come and how many men he would bring. Spies would have observed every step of their three-hundred-mile journey west from Ferghana.
    This time there was no sign of any other army. Babur grinned, wondering how his lovelorn cousin Mahmud was faring. Doubtless he had already found himself another woman to sate his throbbing loins – but if he still wanted her, Babur vowed, the grand vizier’s daughter would be his. He would send her as a gift.

    ‘You must have patience, Majesty,’ Wazir Khan said, as he had every day for the past five months.
    Babur scowled into the basket of glowing charcoals Wazir Khan had lit to warm them as they squatted in the middle of a grove of trees, well beyond the camp with its prying ears and eyes. They needed the warmth. Autumn was coming and the night air was bone-numbingly chill. ‘We have traitors in our midst, I am sure of it. Every time we attack a section of the walls or try to tunnel beneath, the enemy seem to know and to be ready for us.’ Babur poked the charcoal with the tip of his dagger.
    ‘Every camp has its spies, Majesty. It is inevitable. And don’t we also have our own spies?’
    ‘But they tell us nothing.’
    ‘They will, when there is something to tell. We have held the city under siege for five months. We still have food and water but the enemy’s must be running low. Soon they will have to send out foraging parties. We must set our spies to watch for them and learn their secret exits. What cannot be taken by force may be taken by stealth.’
    Babur grunted. Wazir Khan, so wise and level-headed – the man who since the time Babur first stood unaided had tutored him in the arts of war – was good at reminding him how much he still needed to learn. All the same, the last months had taught him much. In the scorching heat of summer, he had learned that grass growing brighter and taller than anywhere else was a sign of hidden water channels. He had learned how to drill his men and keep them active and high-spirited when there was no fighting to be done. He had ordered them to play polo insolently close to Samarkand’s high walls and, braving the city’s best archers, had joined in, thundering over the ground to swipe his mallet at the sheep’s-head ball, which – when they had finished – they had lobbed contemptuously over the battlements.
    Babur knew now how to move silently through the darkness with his men and to position long ladders, the tops wrapped in sheep’s wool to deaden any sound, against the high walls. He had climbed with them, only to be met by missiles, clouds of arrows and buckets of burning pitch, and forced to retreat. He had crept along dark, sandy tunnels dug by his men towards the walls, hoping to burrow beneath them but encountering foundations as unyielding as the mountains of Ferghana.
    Babur had also attacked by day, his sweating men dragging up the great siege engines which had hurled massive rocks. But Samarkand’s metal-bound gates and thick walls had withstood these barrages, and the pounding of his battering rams.
    ‘I don’t understand. The King of Samarkand was my uncle. I’m directly of the blood of Timur. I’ve sent assurances that I’ll not put the city to the sword. Why don’t the people open their gates to me of their own accord? Why do they prefer the rule of a usurping vizier?’
    Wazir Khan’s patient half-smile again told Babur that he had spoken with the ignorance of youth, not