An hour later, Akbar visited his mother in the royal women’s quarters. The sleeping tents and bathhouses were protected by a fence of tall, gilded wooden screens lashed together with thongs of oxhide in which there was only one well-guarded entry gate. As he entered her tent, he smelled the sweet spicy scent that ever since childhood he had associated with Hamida — sandalwood. It was coming from a silver incense burner in the centre of the floor, from which a thin wisp of smoke was curling upwards to a vent in the roof.

Hamida was lying against a bolster of flowered silk while Zainab her attendant combed her long hair, dark as Akbar’s own. On one side sat his aunt Gulbadan, frowning with concentration as she plucked the strings of a somewhat battered round-bellied lute that had once belonged to Akbar’s great-great-grandmother, who had carried it strapped to her back during the Moghuls’ flight from Central Asia. Akbar knew the story of that lute as minutely as he knew all the family history. He also knew that his aunt, clever as she was, had no talent for lute-playing and that that annoyed her, hence her persistence.

On the other side of Hamida, embroidering a shirt, was his wet-nurse or milk-mother, Maham Anga. In Moghul society, the bond between wet-nurse and the royal child she had suckled was lifelong. It also made Maham Anga’s own son Adham Khan — just a few months older than himself — his milk-brother, bound to him with ties as strong as those of blood.

At the sight of Akbar, the faces of all three women lit up. His mother Hamida, barely thirty and slender-bodied and smooth-skinned still, jumped up and hugged him. Gulbadan put down her lute and smiled. A little older than Hamida, tiny lines already wrinkled the corners of her tawny eyes, and had her long hair not been hennaed, silver threads would have run through it. Maham Anga came forward to embrace him warmly. She was taller than either Hamida or Gulbadan and handsome in a big-boned, almost masculine way.