Empire of the Moghul: The Serpent's Tooth (33 page)

As green-turbaned guards snapped to attention, Shah Jahan dismounted stiffly. Either through age or the aftermath of his illness – probably both – the ride had tested and tired his muscles and bones more than he had anticipated. Throwing his reins to a
qorchi
, he signalled his escort to remain outside and walked alone through the gateway. As he emerged into the gardens beyond, a monkey, taken by surprise, scampered off screeching and a trio of deer grazing beneath a plane tree raised their heads and looked towards him. But Shah Jahan’s eyes were on his grandfather’s tomb directly ahead at the end of a long raised sandstone path shaded by trees. The tomb was too solid for beauty but its bulk seemed to embody Akbar’s spirit. He had been a big and powerful man, physically and mentally, expanding his empire and placing it on foundations as firm and deep as those that supported his burial place. Slowly, Shah Jahan made his way down the path and reaching the end sat on one of two marble benches facing the tomb. He had come here to think but, exhausted by the ride and the shock of the day’s events, almost immediately his eyes began to close.

Footsteps on the sandstone paving woke him with a start. Standing, he turned to see someone walking quickly towards him but the shadows cast by the trees made it impossible to see who it was. Why had his bodyguards admitted anyone when he’d asked to be left alone? Instinctively his right hand went to the dagger at his belt. ‘Who are you? Who permitted you to intrude on my privacy?’ he called.

The newcomer paused. Shah Jahan saw golden hair – not as bright or as thick as it had once been but unmistakable all the same.

‘Approach.’ He waited as Nicholas Ballantyne came closer.

‘Majesty, forgive me for interrupting you. The captain of your guard knows me. When I told him I had urgent information for you, he allowed me to enter.’

Shah Jahan let his hand drop back to his side. Now that the Englishman was closer he could see that his face was gaunt and there were deep circles beneath his eyes. ‘My daughter wrote to you, I know, expressing my … regret at the … misunderstanding that caused you to leave Agra.’

‘Majesty, that’s not why I’ve ridden so hard to find you. I’ve something to tell you that cannot – must not – wait.’ Nicholas’s words tumbled out.

‘Speak, then.’

‘I was in Surat waiting to embark for England when the forces of your son Murad attacked the city. They smashed through the walls with their cannon and looted the East India Company’s treasury … From what I learned from those I met on the road from Surat, one of Murad’s generals led the assault. The prince himself was already riding south with an even larger force to rendezvous with Prince Aurangzeb … I knew I must bring you this news at once. I …’ Seeing Shah Jahan’s faint, sad smile, Nicholas tailed off.

‘I appreciate your coming, but I already knew about the attack on Surat. Even before the event I heard that Murad planned to seize the city and its treasuries but I had no troops to despatch who could arrive in time …’

‘I’m relieved you know, Majesty. My worry was that I’d be too late.’

‘And what action do you think I’ve taken?’

‘Sent an army to intercept Murad before he and his brother join forces?’

‘Quite right. In fact, I did it before I heard the definitive news about Surat. You look surprised, Nicholas. You don’t believe my rebellious sons’ claims that I’ve become too enfeebled to rule, do you?’

Seeing Nicholas’s hurt expression Shah Jahan softened his tone – after all, the Englishman had had no need to return to Agra rather than take ship for his homeland. ‘Matters have moved more quickly than you realise. You’ve come back to Agra in one of my darkest hours since the death of my empress. You thought you had important news to tell me – for which I thank you. But now let me tell you something … Only a few hours ago I learned that Aurangzeb and Murad had joined forces by the time Raja Jaswant Singh and the strong army I had sent to confront them caught up with them at Dharmat, not far from Ujjain. Jaswant Singh was misinformed – or perhaps deliberately misled – about the strength of his enemies’ artillery and ordered a frontal attack. As his Rajput horsemen galloped into battle over open ground, the rebel cannon cut them down. When the rebels followed their cannonade with a cavalry charge of their own, our troops broke under the impact and scattered, many – Jaswant Singh included – into the Rajasthani desert.’

‘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.’

N
icholas 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.

After the cannon came wooden ox carts, some with tightly roped-down oiled covers – the powder wagons – and some with the cannon balls of stone or iron stacked in them. Behind them, mostly mounted but some on foot, were the musketeers, long weapons and ram rods either tied to their saddles or slung across their backs, together with their powder horns and pouches containing the balls for the muskets. Their weapons were mostly matchlocks, more reliable in Hindustani conditions than the newer flintlocks which were prone to failure to fire through dust or damp. Marching with the musketeers were armourers whose task it was to fashion new musket balls when required by pouring liquid lead into the moulds they carried.

Nicholas was growing ever more hot and tired and anxious to be on the move as the archers marched past. Although fewer in number than on previous campaigns their double bows and quiverfuls of feathered arrows still had the advantage of speed of fire over muskets, even if they were less deadly. Last before the rearguard came the infantry. Hardly any had footwear. Most wore only a loincloth and a simple turban to protect against the sun. A few carried swords. Many had simple spears. But some carried as weapons only the tools such as scythes and hoes which they had used to work the fields from which they had recently and hastily been plucked by their landlords to replace the more experienced men who had gone with Suleiman to confront Shah Shuja.

Nicholas had never found such raw infantry of great use in battle. They were either quick to panic and flee or easy for the enemy to cut down if they did resist. Perhaps their greatest function was by their very number to overawe civilian populations or other inexperienced armies. It took nearly another half-hour for their stumbling, already disorganised mass to pass. Then, with a great sigh of relief, he saw the mounted rearguard appear – a mixture of Rajputs in pale yellow or orange robes mounted on prick-eared Mewari horses and heavily bearded and more bulky-bodied Punjabis on larger beasts, slower but of greater endurance.

With a joyful wave of his hand Nicholas gestured to his men, now all sweating like himself in the hot June sun, perspiration running in rivulets down their faces and coursing down their spines beneath their hot heavy backplates, to join their comrades. As he did so, he gave grateful thanks that he did not have to await the baggage train with its mixture of heavily loaded spitting camels, braying mules and protruding-ribbed donkeys to lumber past, still less the great body of camp followers who as far as he could see through the choking dust were straggling almost back to the gates of Agra. Still, the army needed the entertainment and pleasures the cooks, acrobats, nautch girls and snake charmers provided to while away the empty hours that were such a feature of campaign life, as well as to soothe worries and anxieties as battle approached. May this campaign be a short one and Dara triumphant, he thought, as he kicked his horse forward and the willing chestnut, as glad as Nicholas to be on the move once more, cantered down the small hill to join Dara’s vast army.