Empire of the Moghul: The Tainted Throne (28 page)

‘Good. That means we’ve achieved something since
launching our pursuit from Burhanpur, but it’s not enough . . . Are any of our forces between them and the range of high hills that mark the divide between our two lands?’

‘No, Highness. Only a few detachments of scouts not strong enough to fight a delaying action.’

‘I thought not. Malik Ambar has outmanoeuvred us yet again. Despite our best efforts we’ve never managed to get enough of our forces between him and the borderlands to compel him to fight us on ground of our own choosing. He seems to anticipate our every move.’

‘But we’ve been victorious in nearly all the skirmishes we’ve fought with his men and we’ve kept him away from any sources of fresh plunder – and even recovered some of what he had taken before,’ said Kamran Iqbal with a hint of pride in his voice, while several other officers nodded in vigorous agreement.

‘True, but I wanted to do more than contain his threat. Now I fear that within a day or two he will be back in among the hills he knows so well and almost impossible to bring to a decisive battle’, said Khurram, trying but failing to keep some of the frustration he felt out of his voice. It was almost as if Malik Ambar had a spy amongst his senior officers, he’d complained to Arjumand in their tent the previous evening.

‘But in that case, wouldn’t he have found an opportunity to surprise and defeat you, rather than retreat?’ she had argued. She was probably right, he comforted himself.

‘Highness, one of our most reliable scouts tells me that the river bends quite sharply to the west about ten miles or so from Malik Ambar’s present position.’ Kamran Iqbal interrupted Khurram’s sombre musing. ‘Couldn’t we attempt to corner him in the river bend?’

‘Perhaps, but it depends on the nature of the ground within the bend. It’s not too marshy, is it?’

‘No. There are some sandbanks which might have defensive potential but they’re quite low and apparently there aren’t too many of them.’

‘It’s probably worth the risk then,’ said Khurram, his spirits rising. ‘When is Malik Ambar likely to get there?’

‘Around ten o’clock tomorrow morning – if he follows his usual pattern of making camp for about nine hours overnight.’

‘Let’s attack him there, then. Have our outlying pickets redoubled to stop Malik Ambar’s scouts getting close enough to observe our preparations. We’ll make the bulk of them after dark for added security.’

The next morning Khurram felt the mixture of fear and excitement that he always experienced before a battle drive out all other emotions as he galloped across the sandy ground towards Malik Ambar’s position in the river bend. His preparations the previous night had gone seemingly unnoticed by his enemies but an advance party of his war elephants had travelled only half of the ten-mile distance towards the ambush place in the river bend before they had encountered some of Malik Ambar’s scouts. Although the musketeers in their howdahs had shot down three of the scouts at least two others had galloped away unscathed towards Malik Ambar’s column, so he would have had nearly an hour’s warning of their attack. Perhaps he had been wrong not to rely solely on his cavalry, thought Khurram, but then he would have lacked the firepower of the small cannon in the
howdahs of his elephants, which were loping into the attack surprisingly quickly for such large cumbersome-looking beasts, only a short distance behind his horsemen.

In the time the scouts’ warning had given them, Malik Ambar’s artillerymen had got perhaps half a dozen of their cannon into position behind some of the sand dunes, which seemed more numerous if a little lower than Khurram had anticipated. Their first shots had fallen short, thudding harmlessly into the sandy earth. Now, however, two of the cannon balls fired in the second round landed close together among the leading wave of Moghul horsemen.

Khurram, who was galloping in the second wave the better to see and direct the action, saw the mounts of two of his leading men crash to the ground, pitching their riders over their heads. Other horses including that of one of the Moghul standard-bearers stumbled over the bodies and fell too, legs flailing in the air. The long green banner dropped by its carrier was blown by the wind towards Malik Ambar’s lines for a few yards before becoming entangled with a small spiny bush growing on the side of one of the dunes.

Malik Ambar’s gunners were well disciplined and drilled. More cannon shots boomed out and more horsemen fell from the saddle. Two horses, one missing part of its left foreleg and both of them riderless and neighing in pain, swerved away from the guns across the path of other Moghul horsemen. As they did so, the first wave of Moghul cavalry began to lose all impetus. Soon Khurram and the leading riders of the second wave were among the remnants of the first.

‘Come on! Charge with us!’ Khurram yelled as loudly as he could above the noise of battle to some of the faltering
riders. ‘Aim for the nearest cannon – those behind the low dune to the left. The distance is short – they can’t reload fast enough to get more than one round off before we reach them.’ Head bent low to his horse’s neck and with his sword extended before him in his right hand, Khurram wheeled his mount to lead them directly towards the long low dune in the centre of Malik Ambar’s line over which two cannon barrels peered.

Before he had covered more than half the distance, he heard a crashing explosion followed immediately by a second boom and felt a rush of hot air as shards of metal and a shower of sand and grit flew around him and acrid smoke billowed from behind the dune. The chestnut horse of the rider next to him collapsed with a jagged piece of metal embedded in its throat and its rider, a tall, orange-clad Rajput, hit the ground head first and lay still, his neck broken. Khurram kicked his horse on, ears ringing, brains scrambled and eyes and mouth full of grit and smoke. Even dazed as he was, he knew that the violent blasts were not the normal discharge of the cannon. The thought that it might be some sort of new weapon flitted across his mind for a moment but then as his black horse breasted the low dune and some of the smoke cleared he saw that one of the two large cannon behind the dune had exploded. Its barrel had been peeled back like a banana. The dismembered and mangled bodies of several of its crew were strewn around. There was a large crater in the sand nearby around which were some fragments of tin and white cloth. The second explosion must have been caused by some powder stored nearby and ignited by the first.

The explosion of the first cannon had blown the long
barrel of the second from its heavy wooden limber crushing two of its gunners beneath it. A third was trying to crawl away with a shattered left leg which ended in a bloody mess of flesh and bone halfway down his calf.

Looking down as he reined in his horse to allow his troops to gather round him again, Khurram saw that the lower part of his breastplate, his saddle pommel and a steel plate protecting his horse’s head were all spattered with blood and small pieces of flesh that must have come from the body of one of the crew of the first cannon. He had been very lucky, he thought with a shudder. The explosion had occurred directly in front of him. If overuse or faulty manufacture had not caused that gun barrel to explode, more than likely the cannon ball would have cut him in two. He must not fail to exploit the opportunity fate had given him.

To his delight he and the men swiftly gathering about him were now in Malik Ambar’s lines and the Abyssinian’s artillerymen could not manhandle their remaining weapons into a position where they could fire at them even if, stunned as they must be by the explosions, they had the presence of mind to do so. Some of the war elephants had now come up, trampling through the soft sand of the dune. Khurram waved them forward towards the centre of Malik Ambar’s position, where behind some more dunes he could see baggage wagons and beyond them a group of mounted men, and shouted to his horsemen to follow.

Malik Ambar’s troops were beginning to recover from their confusion. As the elephants moved forward Khurram heard the crackle of musketry from behind some of the nearby dunes, followed by the ring of musket balls ricocheting off the elephants’ heavy steel plate armour. One elephant,
clearly hit in an unprotected spot, first slowed and then veered away but the rest plodded resolutely forward as if deaf to their comrade’s trumpets of distress. Knowing that the problem with muskets as with artillery was the time required to complete the cumbersome loading process, Khurram immediately gestured to an officer on the flank of his party to gather some of his horsemen to cut down the musketeers before they could reload. The man obeyed and less than a minute later several musketeers emerged from behind one side of the nearest of the dunes as the horsemen rounded the other. The enemy threw down their weapons and as they ran they tried pathetically to protect their heads from the cavalrymen’s sharp slashing swords with their hands. It was to no avail and soon all were lying sprawled in the sand.

Meanwhile the elephants were approaching the wagons. Suddenly Khurram saw a group of Malik Ambar’s men straining to heave two small wagons aside, revealing as they did so two cannon and their leather-jerkined gunners. At once the artillerymen put their tapers to the firing holes. One of the leading elephants pitched forward, hit by a cannon ball which shattered one of its tusks and reduced its trunk and mouth to bloody pulp. The second shot luckily missed but sprayed sand as it embedded itself in the ground near the foot of another large Moghul elephant. The beast stopped immediately, perhaps blinded momentarily by the grit, and began to trumpet. Nevertheless, the other elephants moved round it, answering to the commands of their
mahouts
as obediently as if on the parade ground. Khurram saw a flash and a billow of white smoke from a howdah as one of his
gajnals
fired. The ball hit the nearest of Malik Ambar’s
cannon, knocking off one of its metal-bound wooden wheels and destroying the axle, causing the cannon barrel to point skywards at a crazy angle. Musketeers from another of the howdahs had picked off two of the crew of the second cannon, one of whom lay on his back, heels drumming the sandy ground in his death agony. As Khurram watched, four of his horsemen surrounded the remaining two artillerymen, who threw themselves face down on the ground in token of surrender.

As he ordered his men to push on towards the riverbank, Khurram was delighted to see that Malik Ambar’s men were pulling back towards the river. As he waved his men forward against his retreating enemy Khurram began to realise that, after little more than an hour, victory would soon again be his, although it had taken a stroke of great good fortune when the cannon had exploded to assure it. However, as he breasted another sand dune and for the first time got a clear view of the river, he saw that there was a large group of horsemen on the opposite bank and rafts carrying others were in midstream, being frantically poled towards the far side. As he reached the edge of the river a minute or two later a small figure wearing a breastplate which glinted mirror bright in the late morning sun waved his sword in a gesture of defiance before turning and leading his few remaining troops away. Malik Ambar had eluded him again, thought Khurram, but again he had lost most of his army and – if the abandoned wagons contained what he thought they did – most of his booty.

His father would be pleased when the news reached him. So too would his mother have been, but Jodh Bai had died three months ago. According to the reports that had reached
him, her death though unexpected had been peaceful, in her sleep. He still thought of her often and found it hard to believe she was gone.

The acrobat’s lithe body, naked except for a short orange loincloth, gleamed with oil as, bracing his legs on the paving stones of the terrace of Jahangir’s apartments, he leaned back and raised his right hand to insert the two-foot-long slim steel sword that Jahangir had just inspected into his open mouth. Jahangir gasped as the blade disappeared up to the hilt, expecting at any moment to see the tip burst through the man’s muscular torso in a shower of blood. But as smoothly as he had swallowed it the man drew the blade slowly out again, bowed before Jahangir and Mehrunissa and placed the sword on the ground. He clapped his hands and two more acrobats came forward, each holding a long metal skewer around which cloth dipped in oil had been tightly bound and then set alight. Leaning back again, this time so far that his long dark hair brushed the paving stones, the man swallowed first one of the skewers, then the other, then both simultaneously. Just as there had been no pierced skin there was no smell of burning flesh. As the man stood upright again and taking deep breaths extinguished the still-burning skewers, Jahangir tossed him a handful of gold
mohurs.