Most were men with no time for sentiment. Many were from the old Moghul clans who with Akbar’s grandfather Babur had founded a new empire on the dry plains of Hindustan. The code of the steppes, had always been taktya, takhta, ‘throne or coffin’. Any who felt strong enough could challenge for the crown and over the years many had done so and would do so again.

Akbar’s elephant stumbled, jerking him from his recollections, but only for a moment. Staring down at the wrinkled grey neck of the beast with its sproutings of sparse coarse hair, his mind soon returned to its dark reflections. If the news was true and Delhi had indeed fallen, everything his mother and Bairam Khan had done for him might have been for nothing. To win precious time, they had concealed Humayun’s death for nearly two weeks, finding a loyal servant of similar build to impersonate the dead emperor. Each day at dawn, he had donned the imperial robes of green silk and Humayun’s jewelled turban with its plume of white egrets’ feathers and appeared as custom demanded on the riverside balcony of the imperial palace in Delhi, the Purana Qila, to show the crowds jostling each other on the banks of the Jumna that the Moghul emperor lived.

Meanwhile, Hamida and her sister-in-law Gulbadan, Akbar’s aunt, had persuaded the reluctant Akbar that he must secretly leave Delhi. He could still see his mother’s strained anxious face as, holding a flickering oil lamp in one hand, she had shaken him awake with the other, whispering, ‘Come now — bring nothing with you — just come!’ Stumbling from his bed, he had allowed her to throw a dark hooded cloak over him, like the one she was wearing. Barely awake but head reeling with questions he had followed her down narrow passageways and twisting flights of stairs through a part of the palace he had never seen to emerge into a small, grubby courtyard. He could still recall the acrid smell of urine — human or animal, he couldn’t tell.