I did not doubt her but I would not let go of my cussed silence.
‘You don’t give a damn about my husband. Is it because of the Princess? Haven’t you learnt yet that she loves someone else? Always has?’
You are doing all right, my friend. You need no longer practise pretending being a stone in the mirror. You’ve become one.
‘Why then, Maharaj Kumar? Why?’
Chapter
35
The news from Tej, Shafi and Hem was encouraging. They were everywhere and nowhere. Northern and eastern Malwa were as much a part of Sultan Mahmud’s territories as Mandu but the Sultan was distinctly at a disadvantage in these parts. Medini Rai and the other rais were locals and closer to the hearts of the people.
There was no denying that the boys’ campaign of harassment was steadily wearing down the enemy. All food was rapidly disappearing from the market. When the Malwa troops forcibly extracted grain, lentils or salt from the food merchants and villagers, retribution from Tej or Hem was swift and severe. Often it was meted out even as the soldiers were heading back for their camp.
All in all, I should have been a satisfied man, if not a happy one. Instead I was growing more and more uneasy. Mahmud Khalji had sent an urgent missive to the Delhi Sultan asking for monetary and military assistance against us. I knew that I had no reason to fear Ibrahim Lodi of Delhi. If he could find the time to respond, it would be to beg off. And that was the source of all my anxiety, edginess and helplessness. How far had the Moghul Babur come into India by now? Would the Sultan of Delhi be able to stand up to him? I felt trapped and was in a hurry to be back in Chittor. A bad state of mind to take critical decisions and fight an enemy whose forces outnumbered ours three to one.
Then Mangal’s right-hand man Shiraz Ali intercepted a letter from Sultan Muzaffar Shah. A Gujarat force, ten thousand strong was riding full speed for Dharampur. That certainly made me forget even the Moghul. We would make a nice sitting target caught between the Malwa and Gujarat armies. There’s a time to fight and a time for flight. Our only hope was to gather whatever we could of our baggage, and run all the way to Mewar or perhaps to Chittor itself.
I went over to the Rai’s palace, had the briefest meeting I have ever had with a senior leader of such standing, five minutes all told, came out, ordered all real and phony camps to be dismantled by four in the afternoon, and sent word by courier to Shafi, Tej and Hem to forget goodbyes and other niceties and pull out.
Before Medini Rai and I led our troops out of Dharampur in an unseemly hurry we made sure that word got out that we were off to Mandu to visit the absent Sultan.
An army can’t ride like the devil as a search party or a small band of men can but we did a middling imitation. We rode three nights, the guerrilla warriors joined us on the second night. On the fourth day the Rai and I scouted the territory, chose level ground in a valley encircled on all sides by decent-sized mountains, the kind you can climb on horseback in half an hour. The next morning we got word that His Highness Suraj Rai, one of Medini Rai’s vacillating allies was joining us at the head of five thousand troops. I doubt if I have ever been a greater hypocrite than on this occasion; I was so relieved I could have rushed up to him and embraced him as if he was my friend Raja Puraji Kika himself. Instead I was civil, courteous but distant. I was not going to welcome him with open arms and thank him for taking his time.
Over the campfire in the evening, he asked the question that had been weighing on his mind all day.
‘Where are the rest of the troops?’ He tried to make the question sound as casual as possible.
I kept silent. Medini Rai gestured offhandedly to the mountains behind us.
‘They’ll come out at the right time.’
We were having dinner when Silhadi sought permission to have an audience with the Rai and the Maharaj Kumar of Mewar.
‘This is a rare privilege, Highness. We have fought side by side with His Majesty, the Rana, but we hear the son is every bit a match for his father,’ Silhadi’s voice was glossy as china silk but without character or sincerity.
‘Our admiration is mutual, then. His Majesty has spoken often of you but I did not think that you would honour us with a visit after all these months.’
My little dart did not miss its mark but Silhadi was not about to be fazed. He would let me know that we were beholden to him.
‘Not a mere personal visit, Highness, a train of seven thousand gallant men is following on my heels to be of assistance to you.’
‘Then we are doubly honoured and you are doubly welcome. Won’t you join us for dinner?’
I watched him play with the partridge pickle and the sarson ka sag on his plate. In the lamplight, he had a reptilian charm. I had the odd feeling that he would be a good happy-go-lucky friend so long as the weather did not change and the stars were favourable. Which was not really as much of an adverse comment as it sounds. It is a happy circumstance for mankind that things rarely come to the crunch and friendships are not put to the test often.
Just then Shiraz Ali asked to have a word with me.
Suraj Rai made his excuses about not realizing how late it was and Silhadi discovered that he was exhausted after such a long day.
When they left, I beckoned Shiraz Ali in.
‘The Sultan and his armies will be here by one in the afternoon, two at the latest.’
* * *
Shiraz Ali’s timing was off by half an hour. The Sultan was in a hurry to save his capital from the Mewari marauders and must have left his overnight camp by six in the morning. They had made good progress. Elephants, camels, cavalry and infantry had trudged for six or seven hours when they entered the enchanted circle of the mountains. The much-hated Gujarat division of five thousand horse permanently posted in Malwa ostensibly to safeguard Sultan Mahmud Khalji from his own people rode in first followed by the rest of the Malwa army. We should have been closing in on Mandu, the Malwa capital. What in the devil’s name were we doing in battle formation some eighty miles from Dharampur? And where were the fifty or sixty thousand Mewari troops? There were not even ten thousand massed together in the valley. The Sultan raised his hand for his armies to come to a halt. For the next hour they kept pouring in and arranged themselves in respectable units: the camel corps, cavalry and infantry. The Sultan and his commanders had had time to look around by now. They were puzzled. Silhadi’s men were atop the northern mountains, Suraj Rai’s on the western heights and close to seven thousand of Medini Rai’s men stood guard above the southern slopes. Exactly how many troops were there in the mountains? Thirty, forty, sixty – or barely ten thousand? What were they doing up there instead of being with their brothers in the valley? Did Medini Rai and the Maharaj Kumar of Mewar want to take on the Sultan’s forty-five thousand with a force of a mere seven or eight thousand? There had to be a catch. The Sultan could mow down the entire cavalry on the ground in an hour, or hour and a half at the most. But then those thousands of troops on the ridges of the mountains whose numbers it was impossible to ascertain could swoop down and draw a deadly noose around the Malwa armies. Or had we taken up these positions merely as a temporary decoy so that while we delayed the Sultan, the greater part of our armies would race to Mandu and capture it?
It was an odd tableau. Two enemies ranged against each other, one tired after riding for close to seven hours and hungry to boot, the other full-bellied and fresh, and neither willing to make the first move. The Malwa Sultan seemed to be paralyzed. I thought it was time to relieve his agony. Tej detached himself and taking a position ahead of the Rai and me, and barely seventy feet from the Sultan, took out a scroll tied in red brocade.
‘Can you hear me, Your Majesty?’ Pause. ‘Because if you can’t, I will draw closer to you.’ He did not wait for an answer but went forward another twenty feet or so. ‘His Highness Medini Rai, His Highness the Maharaj Kumar of Mewar, His Highness Silhadi and His Highness Suraj Rai send you greetings from His Majesty Rana Sangram Simha of Mewar. His Majesty,
the Rana wishes you a long and healthy and prosperous reign. Which is why he wishes to stress again that he bears you only goodwill and would avoid confrontation with you. It is his belief that both the people of Malwa and Mewar desire peace and that it is a foreign power which wishes to lord it over you, and which is instigating you to fight against Mewar and its allies.
‘Ask your soldiers, enquire of your farmers and villagers, listen to your townspeople, they’ll tell you they would be rid of the Gujarati forces who treat your sovereign land as a vassalage and its people as second-class citizenry. They want to be left alone. They wish for peace.
‘All His Majesty, the Rana, asks for is fairness and justice. Give Chanderi to the man who helped you regain your throne and your lost capital and who was your closest ally and friend, His Highness Medini Rai. As the Sultan of Malwa, you alone have the power to make a generous peace with their Highnesses, Silhadi and Suraj Rai. As to reparations to Mewar for our troubles, we can work them out as two great nations in a spirit of amity and goodwill.
‘Once again we wish to extend our hand towards you. Will you hold it forever in friendship?’
Tej stopped and looked up at the Sultan and his commanders and then at the common people and soldiers of Malwa whom neither their Sultan nor any previous Maharana had ever taken cognizance of before.
‘Make peace, Your Majesty, or you’ll rue this day for the rest of your life. This we promise you. This we swear, that seven thousand five hundred Mewar and allied men, unnatural men without conscience or human heart, fed on that which no civilized men will eat, dog and monkey meat, which makes them invincible and beyond the reach of Yama, will ride forth and slaughter, destroy and erase without trace all Malwa soldiers here present.
‘No idle threat, this, Your Majesty. For how else can you explain the preternatural confidence that permits us to ask the host of our armies to stand aloof and still on distant heights instead of joining fierce battle with the enemy?
‘Think, Your Majesty. If we do not receive a friendly reply within ten minutes, you and you alone will be accountable for the deaths of forty-five thousand innocent soldiers.’
As a parting gesture, Tej rode up to where His Majesty the Sultan sat on the howdah of his royal elephant, rolled back the scroll, tied the strings into a neat knot, bowed deeply, handed it to the monarch of Malwa and joined us. Medini Rai and I retreated to the sidelines while Tej, Shafi and Hem Karan took command of the three divisions into which the army had been divided.
I had woken up in the morning and broken my resolve not to send Hem Karan into battle and risk his death. I did not wish to test his good luck any further but we are warriors and sentimentality is but another word for fear and I had to learn to live with my fears, not close my eyes to them.
‘The war we have initiated and pursued so far is a war of nerves,’ I had told our soldiers in the morning. ‘One you cannot see and which seems either like child’s play or a waste of time. There is, however, some proof that it works. You cannot deny that Prince Hem Karan and his braves are with us without our having shed any blood. But the war of nerves is first and last an aid to conventional and guerrilla warfare. Its purpose is to break the backbone of the enemy, his morale, before we attack. Have we succeeded? I don’t know. You alone can bring in the results of that experiment this afternoon.
‘Your swords are seven inches longer and yet weigh a little less than the conventional sword that the Sultan’s men use. They are lighter but not a whit less sturdy and thirty percent more tensile. In short, your reach and efficacy are greater.
‘Prince Tej and his men will stay behind with us. They are our emergency group. If you can’t force the Sultan’s men back into the narrow orifice from which they issue forth, if we find instead they have us on the run, then of course we’ll call down the troops from the mountaintops. Do you want that to happen? Our new allies are opportunists. They have joined us after all these months only because they think our chances are good and they can share the fruits of war and glory with us. Seems a bit unfair to me that you do all the work and they arrive to collect the laurels.
‘Can so few beat so many of the enemy? I think so. Go forth and make history. Godspeed.’
The Sultan’s ten minutes were over. Fifty massive ladles, with forty-foot long handles which had been pinned down to the ground sprang up suddenly like behemoth shot-putting arms and flung out great comets of whooshing, hurtling fireballs. I doubt if these oil-soaked cloth and cotton wool-bound rocks did much physical damage to the enemy but they did cause pandemonium in his ranks. The ladles had been staggered and placed strategically after much testing the previous day so that the fire barrage would catapult all over the enemy.
At the height of this inflammable rain, Shafi and his men formed themselves into a tight triangle and headed for the Gujarati division. Their programme was limited: destroy the Gujarat cavalry within thirty minutes. Simultaneously a hundred megaphones addressed the Sultan’s men. ‘Malwa brothers, we have no intention of killing you. Drop your arms and withdraw to the sides. No one will raise his weapon against you. Brother will not fight brother.’
It would make a rather elegant story if I could report that the Malwa troops watched from the wings while Shafi and his men struck and ravaged Muzaffar Shah’s Gujarati troops. Nothing of the sort happened. Most of them swung valiantly into action. But there was hesitation and few things work as effectively in the enemy’s favour as a divided state of mind. For a brief moment but long enough for our purposes, the Gujaratis felt isolated. They were good, experienced warriors and slashed out for the kill but discovered seven inches of deadly extra blade had overtaken and dismembered them.
All armies are made up of companies of men led by an amir, rao, raja, sardar or whatever honorific the vassal may bear. Feuds and rivalries, between two villages, royal houses, subcastes, or religious groups are invariably transferred and carried on to the battlefield regardless of who the common enemy is. Hem Karan’s men slipped in and exploited the cracks, drove in wedges and left them wide open and then as those long, long blades cut down men like grass in late autumn, the Sultan’s men began to lose heart. Soon they were in earnest retreat. The battle, however, was not going according to my plan. We had been fighting for an hour and ten minutes but we were behind schedule. We were behind schedule because of one man, Sultan Mahmud Khalji himself.
I have seen some good warriors in my time, Father, Rao Viramdev, Rao Ganga, Malik Ayaz, but they were not in the same class as the Sultan on that day. The Sultan was heroic and murderously effective. We could have swords a yard longer, but no tactic could trap him. His own men were already rallying around him. Another forty-five minutes and visibility would be poor and the day would end with neither a decisive winner or loser.
Tej, Medini Rai and I set out with five hundred men. Within minutes we were engaged in hand-to-hand combat. Then I was face to face with the Sultan. I had lied to myself. He was good, very good but that was not why I had joined the fray. I wanted him dead so that we could appropriate Malwa and put an end to the foolishness that could very likely have already lost us Delhi. Mahmud Khalji was mine to finish off despite the circle of magic that had made him invulnerable so far. My sword was about to fall on him when I saw the Rai shaking his head and looking askance at me. It was an accident, I wanted to tell him, come on Highness, this much you owe me, back me up and tell a lie to His Majesty, the Rana, for your own sake and the sake of Mewar. We don’t need a victory over Malwa, think about it, we need an annexation. A permanent one. But by then the moment was past. The Sultan brought his sword down on me, I lunged to the right. The blade glanced off, struck sparks upon my chainmail and sank into the flesh of my left arm. He must have struck an artery for blood shot out and hosed his face. His eyes closed. I must have blacked out for when I came to my sword had fallen to the ground. How quickly blood congeals. He was trying frantically to open his eyes and rid them of the glue that blood is. I took the tip of the Sultan’s sword in my mailed right hand.
It was difficult to get a grip on it. I had little choice but to bring my left hand into play. I suddenly rose and leaning forward for better leverage drove the hilt of his sword with such force into his chest that he teetered and keeled over. He lay awkwardly on the ground, one of his feet tangled in the stirrup. I dismounted. My sword was in my hand and I had my right foot on the Sultan’s chest. For safety’s sake, the sword tip rested in the hollow under his adam’s apple, the same spot where many, many years ago Father had cold-bloodedly stabbed my mother’s throat when a chicken bone had got stuck in it. He wiped the blood from his eyes and face and looked at me.
‘Why, Maharaj Kumar? Why the moment of hesitation? It was either you or me.’ He had a childish voice, not unpleasant but the kind that would make you go back after a picnic to check whether that dreamy-eyed little boy had got left behind. ‘I certainly wouldn’t have spared you had my sword not missed its mark.’
I smiled. Dreamy-eyed people, I had learnt through experience, can be a shade more deadly than even mercenaries.
What should I tell the Sultan? That I was a boy of seven who did not disobey my Father?
When in trouble, always pull out the most egregious rhetoric.
‘One does not strike so valiant a warrior, Sire.’
Perhaps it’s time I gave up being a prince and took up my true vocation: become a court chronicler or charan turning defeats and stalemates into triumphs.
Chapter
36
I am like a schoolboy, I am always rushing home. From Idar, from Kumbhalgarh and now from Dharampur. It’s as if I need to pretend that there’s always something of moment, a crisis that cannot be resolved without my intercession, beckoning me. Am I stupid, am I incapable of learning that no human intervention can alter fate? Perhaps. But the day I acquire that wisdom, or rather, accept its behest, I will be unfit to be king. There’s indeed a time to let go. I’ll tell you when that is: when I am dead and gone.
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