Part 25 (1/2)

The task of consolidating his empire occupied Akbar for the next two years. It would be idle to attempt to follow him from the Nerbudda to the Indus, from Allahabad to Guzerat. One incident will give an idea of his swiftness, his extraordinary dash and courage.

Returned from a long campaign on the north-western hills against his young brother, Mahomed Hakim, Akbar heard of renewed trouble with the Usbeks in Oude. Though it was then the height of the rainy season, he made a forced march over a flooded country, and arriving at the Ganges at nightfall, swam its swollen stream with his advanced guard, and after lying concealed till daybreak, sounded the attack.

”The enemy, who had pa.s.sed the night in festivity, little supposing the king would attempt to cross the river without his army, could hardly believe their senses when they heard the royal kettledrums.”

Needless to say, the rebels, surprised, were defeated, and, as usual, pardoned. This was Akbar's policy. To punish swiftly, then to forgive.

Thus he bound men to him by ties of fear and love. Already he had conceived and carried out the almost inconceivable project of allying himself in honourable and peaceful marriage with the Rajputs. Behari Mull, Rajah of Amber (or Jeypore), had given the king his daughter, while his son Bhagwan-das, and his nephew Man-Singh, were amongst Akbar's most trusted friends, and held high posts in the imperial army. Toleration was beginning to bear fruit; but Chitore, the Sacred City, held out alike against annexation or cajolery. So it could not be allowed to remain a centre of independence, of revolt. It was in A.D. 1568 that Akbar began its siege. Udai-Singh, the Fat King, had fled to the mountains, being but a b.a.s.t.a.r.d Rajput in courage, leaving one Jaimul in charge of the sanctuary of Rajput chivalry.

It was a long business. Once an accident in the mines which Akbar was pus.h.i.+ng with the utmost care, brought about disaster, and the siege had practically to be begun again. In the end, it was a chance shot which brought success. Alone, unattended, in darkness, Akbar was in the habit of wandering round his guards at night, marking the work done in the trenches, dreaming over the next day's plans. So occupied in a close-pushed bastion, he saw by the flare of a torch on the rampart of the city some Rajput generals also going their rounds. To s.n.a.t.c.h a matchlock from the sentry and fire was Akbar's quick impulse.

It won him Chitore; for the man who fell, shot through the head, was Jaimul himself. Next morning, Akbar went through scenes which he never forgot. He saw, as his grandfather had done, the great war-sacrifice of the Rajputs; but, unlike Babar, he did not view it contemptuously.

It made an indelible mark upon his soul. The story goes, that two thousand of the Rajput warriors escaped the general slaughter by the ”stratagem of binding the hands of their women and children, and marching with them through the imperial troops as if they were a detachment of the besiegers in charge of prisoners.”

If this extraordinary tale be true, the explanation of it surely lies in Akbar's admiration; an admiration which led him on his return to Delhi to order two huge stone elephants, formed of immense blocks of red sandstone, to be built at the gateway of his palace. And on the necks of these elephants he placed two gigantic stone figures representing Jaimul and Punnu, the two Rajput generals who had so bravely defended Chitore.

It was during this siege that Akbar's friends.h.i.+p with the poet Faizi commenced. Five years younger than the young king, who was then but six-and-twenty years of age, Faizi, or Abul-faiz, as he is rightly named, was by profession a physician, by temperament an artist in the highest sense. Charmed by his varied talents, fascinated by his goodness, Akbar kept him by his side until he died nineteen years afterwards, when it is recorded that the king wept inconsolably. One thing they had in common--an unusual thing in those days--they were both extraordinarily fond of animals, especially of dogs.

This friends.h.i.+p, bringing about as it did the introduction to Akbar of Abul-faiz's younger brother, Abul-fazl, marks an important change in the king's mental development.

Hitherto he had been strictly orthodox. In a way, he had set aside the problems of life in favour of his self-imposed task; henceforward his mind was to be as keen, as swift to gain spiritual mastery, as his body was to gain the physical mastery of his world. Possibly he may have been led to thought by the death in this year of his twin sons; apparently these were the only children which had as yet been born to him, and at twenty-seven it is time that an Eastern potentate had sons. With him, too, the very idea of empire must have been bound up with that of an heir to empire. So it is no wonder that we find him overwhelmed with joy at the birth, in 1569, of Prince Salim. Yet his sons (he had three of them in Fate's good time) were to be the great tragedy of Akbar's life. Long years afterwards, when the baby Salim, whom he had welcomed verily as a gift from G.o.d, had grown to be a man, a cruel man, who ordered an offender to be flayed alive, Akbar, with a s.h.i.+ver of disgust, asked bitterly ”how the son of a man who could not see a dead beast flayed without pain, could be guilty of such barbarity to a human being?”

How indeed? Were they really his sons, these hard-drinking, hard-living young princes, who had no thought beyond the princelings of their age?

This resentment, this disgust, however, was not to be for many years.

Meanwhile, Akbar, having built the fort at Agra, that splendid building whose every foundation finds water, whose every stone is fitted to the next and chained to it by iron rings, began on his City of Victory, Fatehpur Sikri.

And wherefore not, since sons had been born to his empire? It was wide by this time, but Guzerat was still independent and had to be brought within the net.

It was in this campaign that Akbar nearly met his end in the narrow cactus lane at Sarsa, when he and the two Rajput chieftains, Bhagwan-das and Man-Singh, fought their way through their enemies, each guarding the other's head.

Akbar's life is full of such reckless bravery, such wonderful escapes; in this, at least, he was true grandson to Babar-of-the-Thousand-Adventures.

It was in the following year that the famous ride from Agra to Ahmedabad in nine days was made; and, after all, somewhat uselessly made, since the emperor was too chivalrous to take his enemy unawares, and, finding him asleep, ordered the royal trumpeters to sound a _reveillee_ before, after giving him plenty of time, the imperial party ”charged like a fierce tiger.” It is good reading all this, overburdened though the pages of the Akbarnamah-Abul-fazl's great History of his Master--may be with flatteries and digressions.

But it is not in all this that Akbar's glory lies. It is in the far-reaching justice of his legal and administrative reforms, above all, in the reasons he gives for these reforms, that he stands unique amongst all Indian kings. We have, however, still to record his conquest of Bengal (where, it may be noted, he swam his rivers on horseback at the head of every detachment for pursuit, every advance guard), still to tell the tale of the Fat King Udai-Singh's son, Rajah Pertap, before at Fatehpur Sikri, in the twentieth year of his reign, and the thirty-third of his life, we can find pause to consider Akbar's principles and practice. Bengal, then, was added to empire with the usual rapidity. Then arose trouble in Mewar. Udai-Singh was dead, still defying from a distance Akbar's power, still scorning the alliance by marriage which had brought his neighbours revenue and renown; but his son Pertap lived--Pertap, who was to the sixteenth century what Prithvi-Raj had been to the fourteenth; that is to say, the flower of Rajput chivalry, the idol of the men, the darling of the women. He had taken to the hills, he had outraged Akbar's sense of justice, and he must be crushed. The battle of Huldighat decided his fate. Wounded, wearied, he fled on his grey horse ”Chytuc” up a narrowing stony ravine, behind him the clatter of another horse swifter than his own; for ”Chytuc,” his friend, his companion, was wounded, too, and more wearied even than wounded.

”_Ho! nila-ghora-ki-aswar!_”

[”Oh! Rider of the grey horse!”]

The cry rang out amid the echoing rocks. What! Was his enemy within call already? ”Chytuc” stumbled on, urged by the spur.

”_Ho! nila-ghora-ki-aswar!_”

Nearer and nearer! A cry that must be answered at last. One final stumble, ”Chytuc” was down, and Pertap turned to sell life dearly.

Turned to find his brother.

”Thy horse is at its end--take mine,” said Sukta, who long years before had gone over to Akbar's side, driven thither by Pertap's pride.