‘Where are Aurangzeb and Murad now?’
‘I don’t know for certain. If I were them I’d be making for the Chambal river, the last obstacle between them and Agra. Naturally I’ve despatched scouts south to report to me the moment their forces appear.’
‘What will you do then, Majesty?’
‘The only thing I can — send my remaining troops to block their advance. Prince Dara must take the field for the honour and salvation of the empire — for everything my grandfather achieved and now hangs in the balance.’
Chapter 18
Nicholas sat relaxed on his chestnut horse atop a low hill rising from the plain about four miles southwest of Agra. Looking back in the soft early morning light he could still see the familiar outline of the Taj Mahal on the horizon. To him, the dome was a teardrop. The coarser minds among his mercenaries, of whom at his own request he had once more taken command, insisted it was nothing but a woman’s breast and its gold finial a fine pert nipple. In the pre-dawn hours Dara had despatched Nicholas and his five hundred men — disease, wounds and desertions had much reduced their number since the beginning of the northern campaign — to check the early stages of his route before he himself led the main body of his army out towards the Chambal river.
As, flaming torches in their hands, they had made their way down the steep ramp, through the towering gateway and out across the plain they had come upon nothing to concern them militarily. Nicholas had relished what to him was the wonderful and unique scent of Hindustan — the mixture of the smells of earth, night-flowering plants such as the champa, dung cooking fires and spices, as the country dwellers began to awake and prepare for the new day. He had heard nothing beyond the jingling of the harnesses of his men’s horses, the occasional wild screech of a peacock and the nocturnal howl of some wakeful village hound swiftly taken up by its newly roused fellows.
Now, though, the peace was being broken literally and metaphorically. Dara and his main army were beginning their march to face his brothers Aurangzeb and Murad in battle in person. Civil war was under way, with all its bitterness and divisions within families, high and low. He had seen enough of it during his early days in Hindustan as Shah Jahan fought for the throne to know its bloody perils and consequences. Later, letters from his older brother at home on the family estates in the west of England had told him of the civil war raging in his own country — of the execution of the king and the establishment of a people’s parliament. Its puritanical leader insisted on the following of a fundamentalist faith as strict and austere as any prescribed by Aurangzeb and his mullahs, banning even harmless festivities such as dancing around the maypole and the theatre.
Almost instinctively Nicholas put his hand to one of the two pistols in his sash. They had arrived in a tightly bound parcel accompanying his brother’s last letter. Such weapons were rarely seen in Hindustan. They should however prove useful in the fighting to come, even if he was unlikely to have the necessary time in the press of battle to reload them. He must make each of their single shots count, something his initial attempts had shown was difficult to achieve at much more than fifteen yards.
An ear-splitting blast jolted Nicholas from his reverie. It came from a long-stemmed trumpet held by an outrider of the vanguard as it approached.
The vanguard, all mounted on matching black horses and wearing tunics and turbans of Moghul green, were advancing thirty abreast. The front two ranks were made up of trumpeters interspersed with drummers who beat out a steady tattoo on the drums mounted on each side of the saddles of their horses who were so well trained as to appear oblivious of the noise. Behind the musicians the next ranks were of straight-backed cavalrymen. Except for those — one in every six, Nicholas guessed — who gripped the wooden staves of green banners blowing gently in the breeze, they held erect long lances with green pennants. Beyond them came further lines of horsemen, the pennants at their lance tips seeming to roll like the waves of a gentle sea swell or a ripple of wind through an autumn cornfield as their riders bobbed in their saddles.
After some minutes through the golden dust haze Nicholas saw a phalanx of war elephants approaching, each with a great howdah and a coat of overlapping steel plate armour. The individual plates were small to allow the elephants to move freely. Nicholas couldn’t help remembering how he had once tried to count the number in each coat, getting to over three thousand before giving up. As well as their war coats, every elephant had an outsize cutlass securely tied to each tusk. The tusks themselves were painted blood red and some filed to a sharp point to inflict the maximum damage at close quarters. From about a third of the howdahs poked the barrels of gajnals, the small cannon so effective in a war of movement because the elephants could transport them relatively quickly into the thick of the action.
In the middle of the elephant phalanx was a formation of the largest beasts, their tusks painted not red but gold, keeping pace with each other as they walked forward to maintain the shape of a square. From the howdah at each corner of the square flew vast green banners much bigger than those carried by the horsemen, six feet high and perhaps twenty feet long and embroidered in gold with the names of the emperor and Dara Shukoh. At the centre of the square plodded the largest elephant of them all, the jewels in its tower-like howdah glittering and glinting in the rising sun. As the elephant slowly drew closer Nicholas made out ever more clearly the figure of Dara sitting in the centre of the howdah clad in a gold breastplate like his revered great-grandfather the emperor Akbar, two dark-bearded bodyguards with drawn swords squatting behind him. As the column passed Nicholas Dara raised a hand in his direction but Nicholas couldn’t be sure whether he recognised him or was simply doing as a good general should — acknowledging any body of his troops he met along the way.
Half an hour later the army’s cannon were passing Nicholas, who had been ordered to join the rearguard with his men. The air was becoming hot as the morning drew on and the ever-increasing dust was clogging his nose and mouth. However, taking a quick swig from his leather water bottle before drawing his blue face cloth tighter, he couldn’t help being impressed by the magnificence of the artillery as he watched the largest of the cannon rumble past. How long their brass barrels, engraved with serpents and mystical birds, were — some nearly twenty feet. How many oxen were required to pull the great eight-wheeled limbers? He counted thirty straining to pull one of the weapons, urged on by white-loinclothed drivers running barefoot on skinny legs from one animal to another, cracking their long whips and tugging at the rope halters of recalcitrant beasts whose outraged bellowing he could sometimes hear over the general hubbub of the march.
Even more than the war elephants, the cannon — nearly a hundred and fifty years after their introduction into Hindustan by Dara’s ancestor Babur — were at the heart of any modern army, being as well suited to disrupting a charge of horsemen or war elephants as to blasting and battering down the walls and gates of a resisting city. The makers of gunpowder — often Turkish mercenaries — were producing better powder mixtures all the time to give the weapons longer range and greater reliability. If only, thought Nicholas, the forge masters could make these great weapons lighter and thus more manoeuvrable and swifter to deploy.