1637: The Peacock Throne

by Eric Flint

  She had to admit he was a fine horseman. The speed of his mount was impressive, but it was the rider who lent a horse both heart and mind. Dara had hardly slowed when leaping the creek that ran parallel to the walls of Red Fort. Where many sowar had to fight their mounts to get them to attempt the crossing at speed, he’d simply braced in the stirrups and given the horse his head.

  She rode past Dara as the drummer began the signal and, finding another target among the tents, loosed. The target didn’t immediately fall, but gave a satisfying yelp before disappearing in the chaos of silk and livestock that every camp throughout the long, dark history of war inevitably sank into when unexpectedly attacked.

  She kneed her horse into a tight circle and looked back along the way they’d come. Many, many men lay dead or wounded along that path, but Aurangzeb had a great deal more men to spare than Dara. She wasn’t sure how many fighters Dara had lost, but he could ill afford more than a pittance.

  The drums started to roll.

  Atisheh slowed and came to a stop near Dara, who was shading his eyes and looking with concern to the southeast and the great mass of men struggling to overcome the defenses of Red Fort.

  That she was chief among his harem guards was the only reason Atisheh did not get more resentful looks from those few of his courtiers surrounding him who were not part of Jahanara’s inner circle.

  “Are we late, Atisheh?” he called.

  “The Sultan Al’Azam arrives when he deems appropriate,” she said with an immediately regretted shrug. Now that she had time to breathe, her shoulder ached with the fierce insistence of a lover too long absent.

  The chuckle that followed was as manly a noise as she’d ever heard from him.

  Groups of his sowar began to rejoin the messengers, musicians, and courtiers surrounding the emperor.

  A crashing volley echoed across the killing field.

  “I do believe we made enough room for Talawat’s guns to do their work,” Dara commented.

  Atisheh sniffed.

  “You do not like them?”

  “Oh, they kill well enough.” Not being able to shrug without pain was cramping her style.

  Dara stood in the stirrups when the majority of his men seemed to have returned. “What do you think, my sowar?” he shouted. “Shall we help those who have to get their own feet dirty rather than ride steeds of beauty and power like ours?”

  The men roared their approval.

  Atisheh was impressed. Suffering as he did from the horrible headaches brought on by any kind of stress or setback, she had rarely seen Dara this strong or well-spoken of late. Never one to pray overmuch, Atisheh sent one winging up to Heaven in hopes that Dara would remain healthy and fully in control, at least for the duration of the battle.

  As she opened her eyes, she saw one of Dara’s battle servants dispensing sheafs of arrows among the men. She gestured for him to join her and, as he was loading her quivers, looked south and east toward the clouds of gun smoke and constant, regular beat of massed gunfire that marked the Sikh advance.

  And they were advancing. The men had already covered a hundred gaz or so, even after marching out in the wake of Dara’s sowar and deploying in a double file. Atisheh could now see the point of John’s endless drilling of the men: their advance was steady and their fire killed or wounded hundreds of warriors with every volley. But there were thousands more behind them, pressing into the space between the creek and the walls.

  Aurangzeb’s warriors were caught in a bind. Too many men crowded into a limited space. So many that the sowar were forced to dismount on the far side of the creek and walk the remaining distance to the walls. The vast herd of abandoned horses were driven to the edges of the crowd of men, obscuring the advance of Dara’s much smaller force.

  Atisheh’s smile was predatory beneath her veil.

  The lions will soon be culling the sheep.

  Dara shouted at the drummers. Several thousand sowar rocked into motion, heading back the way they’d come. A short time later they were approaching the edge of the shallow ravine and beginning the turn to the right.

  They were, by now, approaching the extreme right of Dara’s infantry. A double line of arquebus-armed infantry was lining up along the creek to cover the Sikh flank and the sowar when they were eventually driven back by Aurangzeb’s superior numbers.

  While planning the sortie, John had said the infantry formation would resemble one of the Latin alphabet’s letters, an “L” with the base toward the enemy.

  She looked forward and realized they did not have far to ride before starting the wheel, loosing arrows at the point closest to their targets in the fashion that had delivered death to the enemies of nomadic horse archers since the days of Genghis Khan, if not long before.

  Of course, not all of Dara’s horsemen were archers. A few hundred or so bore lances and wore heavy armor, preferring to charge home among the ranks of their enemies. Not unaware of how suicidal such tactics would be under the present circumstances, they kept to their orders, riding with the larger circle of horse.

  The drums changed beat, signaling the wheel. Atisheh pressed her horse’s flank with her left knee, and stood in the stirrups as the first of the enemy rotated into view. Riderless horses were stampeding away from the wall, crushing men and panicking the mounts of Aurangzeb’s men trying to come to grips with Dara’s sowar.

  Aurangzeb had packed so many men into the attack that Atisheh loosed, reloaded, loosed, reloaded, and loosed again before the circle had moved her beyond view of targets. As she stood down and rode round again, she watched the wall to see if the wheel had advanced or not.

  They had not. There were too many men to kill, and too few warriors to kill them.

  Still, the wheel went through two more full rotations and half of one of her large quivers before suffering their first losses. She could not tell from the mess of tangled horseflesh and men whether the two riders had been shot or simply collided, but the wheel rode on, heedless. Another spin and she heard, over the pounding of hooves and the gunfire of the Sikhs, the signal to advance.

  The slower rotation brought about by the advance and greater penetration into the ranks of the enemy gave her time to loose four arrows before she could find no target.

  She’d started her second quiver by then, and her horse was sweating. They were even with the Sikhs now and caught a glimpse of a man riding hard and fast toward them from Delhi Gate. She blinked, realizing the boxes lashed to his horse and the two following it contained the paper and brass shells Talawat’s weapons required.

  Didn’t they have bearers among them?

  The wheel brought her around again. Atisheh ignored fatigue and pain to pick a target, draw, and loose.

  I know they did. She drew and loosed again. They went through that many shells already?

  She drew and loosed once more before the cannonball ripped her horse from beneath her and killed the next three sowar behind her.

  Gun line

  “God! Where did they come from?” Carvalho breathed. He’d been busy with reloading, and had missed the appearance of an orderly line of men around the shoulder of the redoubt to the north and west of the mob Aurangzeb’s men had become as they tried to cross the creek and carry the walls of Red Fort.

  The newcomers leveled long guns like those that had been killing his men and opened fire. Dozens of men died in that first volley, and many more were wounded. That was bad enough, but then they fired again without reloading. The line of men behind them stepped forward and repeated the process. By the time they were being replaced by the first rank, a thousand men and more lay dead, dying or wounded on the field.

  Then, just to be certain the artillerist knew he was no longer loved by God, at least a thousand horsemen rode into view on his side of the creek and almost immediately began to rain arrows on the mass of dismounted men and riderless horses milling in confusion. Men fell dead, or screaming, on this side of the river too.

  “Reset to the west!” he scr
eamed, thanking God the Whore of Babylon was already loaded.

  Islam’s crew heaved, struggling to get the massive weight of the gun lined up with the new target. The cannon was not made for such small targets as men, even mounted men, but by God, he would do his best.

  He signaled the other guns to continue firing at the gatehouse while the crew worked to shift the Whore. There was risk enough of striking their own men with a ball from one cannon but he wouldn’t allow the guilt for such a mishap to fall on another man’s shoulders.

  No-man’s-land

  Atisheh heard muffled screams of men and horses. Some of them had been her own, she thought. She drew breath and coughed. Something rolled her into the light of the flares…or maybe daylight, she wasn’t sure. Everything had a reddish cast she could not blink away.

  The ground trembled beneath her. Many horses striking the earth. A steady thunder, as of drums, penetrated her many aches and no few pains, the paired sensations waking her to the idea she should be doing something other than lying on her back, bleeding.

  Ignoring the pull of chain mail on tender flesh, Atisheh wiped at her eyes with the backs of her hands. They were tacky with blood, but she eventually cleared her lashes of most of it.

  Blinking in the increased light, she watched mutely as a horse, flat on its back and its guts strewn about, flailed beside her with its hooves kicking at the dawn-reddened sky. Atisheh looked away from that horror, saw fletching catch the light as arrows whistled through the air above her.

  Instinctively, she began to move.

  A part of her wondered how the horse had managed to roll over her without crushing her. Atisheh scrambled aside and climbed to her feet. Indeed, despite her many aches and pains, nothing seemed broken.

  Smoke carrying the stench of burned horsehair, sulfur, blood, offal, and seared pork that could not be pork drifted across her position, making her gag.

  Atisheh winced as she moved her veil aside to spit the taste of vomit from her mouth. Fresh blood flowed. The chain mail had grated the skin off her nose and one cheek despite the silk winding meant to protect her flesh.

  The regular beat of the Sikhs’ shotguns discharging in volley fire was audible from somewhere fairly close by. The sound cut through the other noises of the conflict raging around her, but she could not see the men themselves.

  Someone she didn’t recognize came wheezing out of the smoke toward her, only to fall a few paces away, an arrow sprouting from his neck.

  A pang of regret flashed through her as she realized her own bow was lost in the wreckage she lay in, if not destroyed. The regret made her examine her other weapons. Her sword, scabbard and all, had been bent degrees by some impact. Perhaps the steel had protected her from the rolling horse? Her daggers, one at the top of her boot, and one in her wide belt, were still in place.

  The smoke cleared for a moment. Freed of the stench, Atisheh spat and quickly took her bearings. She had somehow ended up standing on the far lip of the ravine that paralleled the wall. Idle considerations like how she’d managed to move twenty gaz from where she estimated she’d been when the cannonball hit fled before the scene below her. The creek bed was filled with men in tangled heaps, some struggling, most forever stilled. She raised her eyes and saw the ground from the ravine to the walls was similarly covered in men, though the dead and dying were less visible, being trampled underfoot by the thousands of men trying to get out from under the fire lashing at them from the walls and one flank.

  She flinched as one of the cannon on the wall coughed smoke and fire in her direction. The air filled with the sound of angry wasps and then the sound of hammers striking wet flesh as the men between her and that great muzzle were flailed by dozens of lead shot. Each individual projectile was nothing compared to the heavy cannonballs usually fired by such guns, but the up-timer shells packed dozens of balls that spread to wreak their own destructive path.

  Dara’s horsemen were a bit more than a hundred gaz to the west, arrows still flickering from their wheel and overhead at…she turned her head to the right. Perhaps it was the fact she was on foot and closer than before, but the milling mass of men and horses they’d been loosing into when she fell appeared neither better organized nor shrunken despite the losses she knew Aurangzeb’s men had to be suffering under the killing rain of arrows and gunfire.

  Those few men on the near edge of the mob who were not already panicked were starting to raise bows toward their tormentors. Realizing the danger she was in, Atisheh turned, searching for either a mount to carry her away or some protection from the arrows—from both enemy and ally alike—that fell around her.

  Those riderless horses closest to her were far too panicked to hold still while she approached, let alone mounted. She had just started to curse God for leaving her in this predicament when a handsome mare emerged from the smoke at the gallop, charging toward her.

  Heedless of her many hurts, Atisheh staggered into a sprint perpendicular to the horse’s path. The mare saw her at the last moment and swerved, but Atisheh sprang for the cantle, grabbing at it. She missed, but her leap carried her arm over it, and she managed to hook it in the crook of her elbow as she started to fall away. Quickly adjusting position, the horse barely slowing despite her weight and awkward positioning, she gripped the cantle in hand. Shoulder protesting every jarring step, she flew one giant stride and then another before using the gathered momentum of her next touch of the ground to bounce up and into the saddle in a move even her aunt might have complimented her on.

  While the mare had barely slowed, it had run in a slight arc as a result of her added weight. Seeing she was charging in the right direction, Atisheh giggled with pure relief before realizing the men she was heading toward might not recognize her.

  No sooner had the thought come to her than the first arrow flew past her head.

  “Damn stinking dogs!” she screamed. “Can’t you see it’s me?”

  The warriors ahead were still in the wheel of death, though, which was hard enough to do without worrying about whether you recognized the idiot charging toward you from the enemy’s direction. Giving up on yelling, she hunched over her horse’s neck and tried to think herself and the horse as small and nonthreatening as she could.

  The next several moments were among the longest of her life.

  She saw a horseman lower his aim upon her and knew she was dead, but the eunuch who rode beside him recognized her and jostled his arm. The arrow went wide, the bowman cursing the eunuch as they whirled from view. All the while the steady beat of hundreds of shotguns firing in near unison grew louder on her right.

  She turned her head to face the wall and saw the Sikhs. The formation looked exactly to plan: a long line of men three deep facing the ravine while the remainder made the same formation perpendicular to the wall in what looked like a Latin letter “L.” She passed the short end of the L, looking down the lines of men extending from the ravine’s edge to the outer wall of Red Fort.

  The short end was the source of the crashing volleys, each rank firing a barrel and then, a scant moment later, the other. A slightly longer pause as the second rank leveled arms before firing. The only reason she could see them at all was the wind carrying their gun smoke east toward the sun and their targets. The front rank stood and retreated behind the third, while the second, now first rank, leveled their weapons and fired. The middle rank closed breeches over fresh shells. The movement was as machinelike and frightening as it was beautiful; a complex dance of hundreds of men and weapons orchestrated at the will of one man.

  That will shouted something she did not need to speak Punjabi to understand.

  She was past then, riding parallel to the long axis of the formation. The men in the first rank were kneeling, guns up, the second standing with their weapons pointed over the shoulders of their comrades. More than five hundred guns pointed in her general direction was a threat even her intense dislike of gunpowder weapons could not mask.

  Again the bellowed order.
<
br />   She was close enough now—or far enough from the great cannon—to hear the lower officers relaying the command for their men.

  Looking to her left, Atisheh swallowed and, if she hadn’t already decided it was past time to flee for her life, clapped her heels to her stolen horse’s flanks on seeing the horde of sowar riding toward Dara’s cavalry.

  Certain she would die once the Sikh officer ordered his men to open fire, Atisheh considered hanging from the side of her horse, but knew she couldn’t count on battered limbs to support her weight for an instant, let alone a hundred gaz and more between her and the relative safety of Dara’s men. Assuming her prayers would be drowned out by those from more pious throats, Atisheh instead lay as flat as she could over the saddle and croaked encouragement to the mare.

  She looked right. The range was closing fast. The infantry would be in range about—

  B-b-b-bam!

  No more the near-perfect drumbeat of volley fire, this was a long, drawn-out stuttering crash of each man waiting until she was clear of their immediate front before opening fire.

  A lump formed in her throat; not of admiration for their action—checking fire for a lone warrior of unknown allegiance was not wise—but for their discipline. That those men were not only able to hear but also execute such a foolish order with complete precision in the heat of battle was a testament to their leadership and drill.

  She looked again at Aurangzeb’s men. Many of the leading horses had gone down under the Sikh fire, taking their riders and, more often than not, those following too closely behind as well. The charge she’d thought would kill her stalled as a result, allowing her a chance.

  Atisheh counted it a minor miracle none of Dara’s sowar plugged her with arrows as she covered the last few gaz and rejoined the wheel. Her mare nipped at another horse that came too close. Wishing she had the energy to match, Atisheh looked for Dara.

  He was there, somehow having lost his helmet and the magnificent horse he’d been mounted on when she last saw him, but he was there. Still in command, not only of his senses, but of the men. He yelled something and the drum changed cadence, sounding the withdrawal.