The Tree Bears Witness (A Birbal Novel)

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Chapter One

Azgher Abbasi leant shapelessly on his spear, the blunt copper tip pointing skyward. It was a thick, thundery night, but not cold. Once every few minutes or so the sky rumbled, and the corners of clouds broke open in streaks of white. The threat (or was it hope?) of rain lingered everywhere, on the dry sandstone walls of the garden behind them, the rusted armour plates that hung off Azgher’s wrinkled, limp wrists, between his grimy toes inside hardened leather sandals.

He looked up at the sky, shook his head. The clouds weren’t heavy enough. Rain would not come just yet to Agra.

‘So, baba,’ said the boy standing guard at the other end of the gate, ten feet to his right, ‘what do you think of the new queen?’

Azgher gave his younger companion a wary look. Decades of working as a palace guard had taught him to keep his opinions on the royal family to himself. The younger lot strutted about the corridors like they owned a piece of the Mughal throne. Azgher had seen many of these bustling young men shoot their mouth off about something that didn’t concern them, and before you knew it you didn’t see them again.

‘Let me give you some advice, boy,’ said Azgher. ‘What did you say your name was?’

‘Rashid.’

‘Your parents have named you well.’ Azgher looked ahead, at the saffron-lit colonnade that led to the kitabkhana, the harem, the guest rooms, and beyond that, the emperor’s mansion. ‘And you’ve become a guard inside the court of the Mughal emperor, at your age. When I was as young as you, the only jobs going around were those on the streets. The dirty ones.’

‘Easy, baba,’ said the boy, chuckling around the words. ‘I was only making conversation.’

‘Well,’ said Azgher, ‘you do not make conversation about the royals. What they do, how they do it, who they do it with – leave them out of your head and you will remain here for as long as I have. Otherwise –’

The boy let his shoulders raise and drop once. His armour clinked. His spear slid further down his arm. Azgher could not make out whether his words of wisdom had been well received, or if the boy though him a fool. A smile of sheer arrogance played on those young, thin lips. The firelight illuminated his face enough to display the still drying marks of acne on the ruddy cheeks. He was tall, this boy, taller than Azgher, but wore his height with a slouch so bad that he couldn’t stand with his feet locked together, in the manner of a dutiful guard.

Youth is wasted on the young, thought Azgher, and sighed. Two more years, and he could collect his purse of gold from the emperor and retire to the northern outskirts of Agra, where he could set up his own little wood carving studio, away from all this, where he wouldn’t have to watch his tongue so much. It would just be his carvings, then, and the azaan he would sing at the mosque. Yes, that he would do to his dying day.

If someone like Rashid were to walk by then, he would give him a piece of his mind. But now, what else could he do but swallow it and soldier on?

‘You want some?’

‘Huh?’

The boy was holding out two large tobacco rolls. Azgher began to shake his head.

‘Baba,’ said Rashid, ‘it’s going to be a long night. You’re new here at the garden. Let me tell you, hardly anyone ever comes here at night.’

Azgher thought about it. The boy was right, it was going to be a long night. He reached for one of them, balanced it between his fingers, held it to his nose and took a nice long breath. ‘I am not worried about getting caught,’ he said.

Rashid’s sharp, almost feminine eyebrows came together. ‘Then what?’

‘Forget it,’ said Azgher. ‘You have a light on you?’

The first few puffs sent a deep itch to Azgher’s throat, and a cough threatened to break out of his chest. But then, as smoke filled his lungs, his head began to swim. He shook it once to take a good look at the roll in his hand; it looked like normal tobacco leaf, but there was – there was something different about the way it tasted.

He took another drag, and this one went straight to the back of his eyes and pulled at the sockets. ‘Ooh,’ he said. He tried to hold on to his spear, but his grip faltered, and the weapon fell to the dust.

Rashid’s dreamy eyes focused on something at this moment, and he pushed himself off the wall into a posture of perfect attention that Azgher had thought would be impossible for him. He snubbed out the red tip of the tobacco roll on his palm and tossed it into his pocket. ‘Shh,’ he said. ‘Someone’s coming. Give me that!’

Azgher tossed the lit roll across to Rashid. Then he turned to the colonnade. He saw no one. He turned to the side and cocked his ear, but his hearing had long begun to wane. Was the boy trying to have him on? He decided to play it safe and straightened himself too, bending down to pick up his spear so that he could draw it in a moment’s notice. Another wave washed through his head, making a sucking sound in his ear.

For ten seconds or so, they stood together in silence.

Then Azgher heard the footsteps, saw the man. Later, thinking back to this moment, he would say that the clouds overhead gathered close, and the wind stilled all about them, so that all of the sounds of the garden – the rustling of the leaves, the shaking of the thickets, the murmur of the granite lakes – died down to a deathly quiet.

A gaunt, dark figure. A sure step. A cloak wrapped around the shoulders and chest, but the shimmering silk cummerbund spoke of royal origins. As he came closer, Azgher saw that beads of sweat dotted the wide forehead, and the lower part of the face was covered with the cloak. The eyes had a green, darting quality to them, like a cat on prowl.

Rashid clicked his knees together and bowed at the approaching figure.

Azgher did the same.

The man reached under his cloak and brought out two silver coins. One he flipped at Rashid, the other he tossed at Azgher. Without a word to either of them he marched straight past the gate and made his way to the two mango trees.

After he was out of earshot, and after the things of the night began to move again, Rashid relapsed into his old position, and bit into the coin to examine it.

‘That was Sujjamal, of course,’ he said, in response to Azgher’s stare. ‘The new queen’s brother.’

***

Out came the younger man’s tobacco roll once again. This time Azgher noticed that Rashid’s hands were shivering as they worked the matchstick. Twice he held the flame to the tip of the roll, and twice it got snuffed out by the breeze. He swore under his breath, in a language Azgher could not quite place. Hindustani, perhaps, he thought.

‘He has no friends in this place, they say,’ said Rashid, calmer now that he had taken a couple of deep drags on his poison. ‘Even the new queen is tired of his antics. Wants him out of here.’

Azgher did not reply at once. But then his curiosity got the better of him. He had heard enough about the great wedding between Akbar and Hira Kunwari, the Rajput princess. All this last month, wherever he went, all he heard were details of how many jewels had been given to the Mughal treasury as gifts, how many saris the royal harem had been presented with, how many troops the Rajputs had donated to the Mughal army, how this union represented the greatness of Akbar, the tolerant monarch...

And now came Rashid, bearing some inside gossip. Azgher could no longer look away.

‘Is that right?’ he said, hoping it struck the right balance between eager and off-hand.

‘Sure is,’ said Rashid. ‘Look at him, walking around at this time of the night. Doesn’t look like he’s up to any good, does he?’

Azgher allowed himself to look over his shoulder. The man in the cloak had his hands tucked in behind his back, and was circling one of the two mango trees that stood in the middle of the garden.

‘He does not look that suspicious to me,’ he said.

‘Oh, well,’ said Rashid, ‘you don’t know what I know, Baba. They say that Sujjamal is not happy about the marriage between his sister and Akbar. Says that his sister would have been better off marrying one of their own kind.’

‘I agree with that,’ said Azgher, nodding. ‘People are better off sticking to their own kind as much as possible.’

‘Ah, you don’t believe in these newfangled notions, then, that the Hindus and Muslims ought to live together?’

‘Live together, maybe. Doesn’t mean we have to go around marrying one another. We’re too different, boy. Even a blind bat can see that.’

Rashid chuckled, and took a deep draw on his roll. He took a moment to blow out a ring of smoke into the still night air. He had the bright eyes of youth, Azgher saw, and yet the courage he wore on his person was but skin deep. This boy may talk a soldier’s language, even pass for being one in a camp, but put him in a battlefield and he would turn on his heels and run before the first canon was fired. Why, even here, in this very garden, if there were to be a crisis of some sort that required a heart of iron, this boy would crumble.

It was not a criticism of him; anyone his age would be the same. All bluster and bravado.

‘They say this man has it in for Akbar,’ said Rashid, in the same drawl of a voice. ‘And the king knows it too. Some have said that if the king had his way, Sujjamal would not leave Agra a living man.’

‘Now, now, come!’ said Azgher. ‘Surely the emperor would not strike a wedding guest.’

‘I am only telling you what I heard, baba.’ Rashid looked up at silvery smudge in the sky, where the clouds were light enough to allow a bit of moonlight through. ‘There are times when you either kill or be killed. You can’t be shackled by ideas of honour when the stakes are that high.’ He gave Azgher an old, forlorn look, a look of a veteran of a thousand battles. Only it was fake. Just like everything about him was.

The lights in the kitabkhana were blinking out, one by one. About two hours back the men filed out, one after the other. Azgher had seen four uniformed guards form a square around one bow-legged man around whom a small crowd of noblemen huddled. Even from this distance Azgher could make out the famous cock of the head to one side, the unsteady gait, the easy authority, the half-smile, the hand-knife sticking out of the waist belt.

The servants had been cleaning the hall since. Now it appeared that they were done.

‘If I am right,’ said Rashid, ‘one of those people will come here and meet with this fellow. And tomorrow someone from the court will ask us what they spoke about. Those silver coins – they are meant to buy our silence, baba. Did you not know?’

‘I shall not commit treason for a silver coin.’

‘Oh, there might be more than one silver coin in this. Perhaps even a small pouch of gold ones, if you do it right.’

‘Listen to you,’ said Azgher. ‘You’re a guard at the Imperial palace, and you speak of being bought out by silver and gold. Do you know that I can report you to the emperor this very moment?’

Rashid was not listening. He had turned around at the gate and was looking at the walking figure of Sujjamal. ‘By Allah,’ he said, pulling out the roll from his mouth. ‘Would you look at that?’

‘Don’t think you can distract me with your foolish posturing, boy,’ said Azgher, but nevertheless turned to look in the direction of Sujjamal. Something turned deep inside him. He could not quite place a finger on what it was, but there was a black, powdery feel about the figure of the man, hunched over forward, circling the tree. A water fountain stood in the middle of the two trees, spitting out a moonlit shimmer into the air. The flower beds surrounding the trees would be beautiful in daylight, Azgher knew, but now, they looked like magic carpets of doom. Any moment now, one of them would undulate, and from underneath would spring a fleet of demons...

‘Do you feel it too?’ said Rashid. ‘Do you feel it in the air?’

Azgher did not want to admit that he did. Four fire torches burned brightly from their holsters on the trunk of each tree. They did not even have the excuse of darkness for feeling this cold touch of death. The man cast two shadows of himself, one sharp and one light, on the paved stones surrounding the fountain. Silver and orange and black mixed together in a skull-like pattern in front of Azgher’s eyes, and in the middle of it all walked the figure of Sujjamal. He walked and walked and walked. Who was he waiting for?

And then it happened. Azgher had no memory of blinking, or of closing his eyes even for a moment, but he still missed it. One moment Sujjamal was striding around the tree with purpose, and the next, he stopped in his tracks. No, he did not stop. Something invisible wrenched him to a halt. One of his hands flew to his chest, the other slapped against his forehead. He gave out a feeble yell – a whimper of a dying man – and staggered back toward the other tree.

‘Whoa!’ said Rashid. ‘Did you see that!’

Azgher picked up his spear and started along the garden path. ‘Come!’

Another grunt came from Sujjamal while the two men rushed to him, this one louder and more urgent than the last. He clutched at the air and swayed around the tree like a drunken shaman. His cloak got dragged over one of the torches, extinguishing it, plunging one half of the front of the tree into shadow. Behind this shadow did Sujjamal disappear, and even from thirty feet away, both Azgher and Rashid heard his body hit the concrete ground.

Azgher’s breathing came hoarse and heavy. Rashid was ahead of him by a few feet, and he ran like a hare, with not so much as a pant. ‘Do you see anyone?’ he said, heaving, swallowing all the breath he could gather.

‘No,’ said Rashid. ‘No!’

Azgher willed himself to fight past the piercing pain in his old thighs, the pounding deep inside his withered knees. His eyes threatened to pop out, his tongue lashed out at the air, as if on fire. About fifteen feet from the tree, near the water fountain, he dropped his spear and held on to his haunches. ‘Water,’ he said, to himself more than to Rashid. ‘I need water.’

The world swayed in front of him. The trees, the mangoes, the fountain, the fire torches, swirled round and round and round...

He crashed onto the wet platform and splashed a handful of water full onto his face. It spurred him awake but did little to slake the thirst in his throat. With a savage grunt he thrust himself at the water and immersed his head under the surface.

The sounds of the world disappeared, but just for a moment, because the next second he heard the gasp of the boy at the tree, and when he turned to look at him, he saw the gangly legs buckle, the spear fall off, and then another thud as the head fell to the ground in a faint.

‘Rashid!’ said Azgher, pulling himself onto his feet, and feeling new energy surge through his veins.

He came abreast of the tree and stood next to the extinguished fire torch. He took a second to kneel by Rashid’s body to assure himself that the boy still drew breath. Should he turn him over on his back? No, that could wait. Let him sleep it off, whatever it was that he saw. Azgher pulled himself to a half-crouch, reached for Rashid’s fallen spear. His old fighter’s instinct told him that someone – or some thing – was behind this tree, no more than two feet away from him, towering over the body of Sujjamal. It had struck down one victim and was baying for the next.

Well, thought Azgher, pointing the spear forward, you shall not take me without a fight.

Then he lunged forward, into the light.

There he saw the sight that had struck Rashid down into a faint.

***

The first thing Azgher noticed that he need not have bothered with the spear. There was no one behind the tree but the fallen body of Sujjamal. He was thrown on his back with his arms stretched out wide, his cloak tangled around his legs, his eyes staring right up at the ripe mangoes overhead.

Then Azgher saw the knife sticking out of the man’s chest. It was a royal knife, not unlike the one the emperor carried and liked to use, the handle encrusted with diamonds and made of heavy, polished brass. Not a hint of black grime anywhere. It had been driven all the way into the body, so that the entire blade was buried inside the dead man’s flesh.

Then he saw the smatter of blood around Sujjamal’s head. He saw no wound, so he surmised that it must be at the back of the skull. Perhaps he had hurt himself falling down on the hard paved stones?

Azgher had a momentary impulse to turn the body over and examine it for further clues, but he held himself. He paused, surveyed the scene around him. Apart from the two mango trees, the rest of the garden consisted of just flower beds. No one could hide here, not on a moonlit night such as this, not under burning torches. He squinted his eyes, stared at the distance. Nothing moved, not even a shadow. The only smell his nose could detect was that of the lilac carpet to the right. Roses. Night queens. Asters. Orchids. And blood.

Blood most of all.

He felt a faint queasiness in his stomach. It was not the sight of the corpse; he had seen enough corpses in his life. But this whole – this whole business – again he looked around himself, again he sensed nothing but a huge, crushing sense of being alone.

And for some reason that he could not quite place, his eyes were tearing up, everything around him looked as if it were mounted on a roundabout, and his own limbs flailed in wild circles even though he was standing at rest.

‘Come on, old man!’ he whispered to himself.

Azgher licked his lips, then knelt down again by Rashid. He dragged the boy by his feet toward the front of the tree. Then he walked over to the fountain and sat on the edge, under the spray of droplets, watching the two men, one dead, one unconscious.

For a good ten minutes he sat, listening, watching, thinking. Eyes closed. His own voice in his head repeating the words, ‘Gather yourself. Gather yourself. Gather yourself.’

Then he staggered up to his feet, like a drunk, and walked out along the stone path to rouse the others. He did not look back at the trees.

***

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