Still dazed, he caught the sound of rapidly approaching hoofbeats and turned to see a rider weaving through the low scrub and spindly trees towards them. It must be a messenger from the camp, no doubt sent by Bairam Khan to hurry him up. Five minutes ago he’d have been annoyed to have his sport interrupted but now he felt grateful for the distraction from thoughts of what might have happened. The crowd of beaters, guards and attendants parted to let the rider through. His tall bay horse was foamy with sweat and he himself so caked with dust that his tunic of bright Moghul green looked almost brown. Reining in before Akbar, he flung himself from the saddle, made the briefest of obeisances and said breathlessly, ‘Majesty, Bairam Khan requests that you return to the camp immediately.’

‘Why?’

‘Delhi has fallen to an advance force of Hemu’s rebels.’

Four hours later, as the hunting party with Akbar at its head passed through the first of the picket lines thrown out around his camp, the sun was still high in the clear blue sky. Despite the tasselled brocade canopy shading him, Akbar’s head ached. Sweat was sticking his tunic to his body, yet he barely noticed the discomfort as he pondered the disastrous news of the loss of his capital. Surely his rule was not destined to be over almost before it had begun.

It was barely ten months since, on a makeshift brick throne hastily erected on a masonry platform in the centre of a Moghul encampment, he had been proclaimed Emperor of Hindustan. Still raw with grief at the sudden death of his father, the Emperor Humayun, he had stood awkwardly but proudly beneath a silken awning to receive the homage of Bairam Khan and his other commanders.

His mother Hamida had only recently succeeded in convincing him just how desperate that time had been. How Bairam Khan, despite his Persian origins, had understood better than anyone that in the first hours and days after his father’s death the danger to Akbar came from within — from ambitious commanders who, now the emperor was dead leaving only a boy as heir, might claim the throne for themselves.