The Sultanate’s forces began to slaughter unmercifully and blood flowed in torrents. They plundered more gold and silver than they could have imagined. Most of the women and men were captured and marched in the scorching sun to a military enclosure just outside the town.
Straight opposite the mouth of the Mahe river, a mile or so away, awaited the ship Malik had positioned. Its captain was a loyal man who would not move unless his master told him; moreover, his family was in the custody of Hassan’s people back in Arabia. He could feel the flow of water under his ship every day, as the tide rushed up the river and back. But his ship just bobbed up and down, held by a secure anchor. He could see the smoke in the port city and was concerned about the safety of his master. He observed other ships leaving and some being moored off the coast, but he did not pull his anchor. He had food for a month, a set of the most loyal mercenaries with him and fair weather to guide him all along. Most of all, he had instructions to wait for his master or else his family back in Arabia would suffer. That confounded slave had thought of everything.
On the shore, Hassan’s palace was empty, its women and children long sent to the safety of the peninsula. The voice of his master echoed in the emptiness. Still, this silence is better, Malik thought, than the mistresses being raped and the children kidnapped to become slaves. The armies had not yet reached their side of the town and Malik had a boat ready for his master in their private dock on the estuary, in case they needed to leave immediately. He just had to untie the boat and he would reach his ship in a couple of hours.
Then Malik heard a commotion and hurried over to a balcony to see what the excitement was about. He looked on in horror as he stood near the water’s edge. The river was choked with bodies as the tide pushed the water back.
Events threatened to overtake him. He should not have waited for the tide to turn and should have advised his master to leave earlier. For the first time in a very long while, Malik was nervous.
After a day of looting, the citizens of Khambayat made peace. They had to act before the Mohammedans brought the city to utter ruin. A delegation had offered the invaders whatever they wanted if they would not damage the infrastructure. While the Sultanate’s armies intended to raze the port to the ground and dance over the ruins, the traders were ready to buy them off with the lure of future taxes. They offered Ulugh Khan whatever terms he desired.
A delegation of the citizens’ council visited Ulugh under the pretence of a social visit, carrying presents for the conqueror. Hassan, the Arab, was noticeably absent.
‘Why hasn’t he come?’ asked Umar, a pearl merchant and an Arab.
‘Why should he? He has sent his wives and wealth to Arabia over the last month. Nothing but the shell of his house remains.’
‘How did he know what was going to happen?’
‘He saw the obvious. But knowing him, he must have listened to his wonder slave. Haven’t we all seen his meteoric rise in the last six years after the slave came? The slave must have been clever enough to have foreseen this too.’
When the delegation reached Ulugh Khan’s tent, they were made to wait. Initially, he decided to refuse to engage the delegation, but gave in to the lure of what was on offer. When he let them enter, he offered them seats and placed goblets of wine before them. They talked about trivial topics like the heat of Gujarat and the delegation laughed politely at his comments. While the loot continued outside, here they were with the chief architect of the plunder, sipping on his wine, and this made them nervous.
Finally, the offer of a settlement was made. The traders offered a great quantity of their treasures and revenue in future taxes. Each of them pledged to give a certain amount, promising that was all that they had. Ulugh Khan seemed satisfied with these terms, and accepted them.
The traders were about to leave when Ulugh spoke, ‘I need a eunuch for the harem. Somebody who is local.’ The traders looked at him quizzically.
‘I have acquired many Gujarati girls,’ joked Ulugh, ‘and I can’t communicate with them. They pull their dresses up when I want them to undress.’ There was a mischievous gleam in his eye when Ulugh Khan spoke about the girls. The delegation laughed politely, though they were seething inside – it was their women he was joking about. Ulugh continued, ‘I need a slave who speaks local languages as well as Turkish. And it better be a eunuch.’
‘I think I know the ideal choice for you’ said Umar. His perpetual rivalry with Hassan had infused him with hatred for Malik, who he knew was the source of the Arab’s newfound wealth. ‘The best eunuch in the country, sire, is in Khambayat. His last owner paid a thousand dinars for him.’
‘A thousand?’ Ulugh suddenly sobered up. ‘A thousand dinars is what I get to loot from a minor fort. Who bought him?’
‘Hassan, the Arab horse dealer.’
‘Send for him. If he can buy a eunuch for a thousand dinars, he must be worth much more,’ said Ulugh.
*
The rumours reached him: the Turks wanted a eunuch and they had heard about Malik. He was surprised – he had been out of touch with the harem and nobody would like a eunuch who traded and kept accounts meticulously. It was obvious that the other merchants had collaborated with the invader because they wanted him away from Hassan.
A Turk emissary came to the Arab’s house with orders for Hassan to hand over the eunuch. The emissary viewed the empty palace with hungry eyes realizing that the furniture and curtains were only a hint of what was in the treasury. While the emissary went around the house, the master and his slave conferred. Hassan was sad, remembering that Malik had become a most intimate friend and a trusted guide. Like two lanes at a crossroad, they had started somewhere else and were going their separate ways, but had paused to intertwine for a brief period and both had benefited.
Hassan asked Malik, ‘What if I refuse?’
‘They will kill you and then take me,’ said Malik matter-of-factly.
The Arab was overcome with sadness at his inability to control the situation. ‘Life will never be the same after we part,’ he said.
Malik spoke urgently, ‘As soon as I leave, go to the boat in the garden. Stay still till night falls, master. You will feel a grinding beneath the boat. That is when you will have to cut the rope. The tide will take you close to the ship. There is some food for you inside the boat. Keep your head low; they will be looking for you.’
‘Why did we not escape earlier if you had thought of everything, Malik?’ asked Hassan with a pained expression.
‘I was sure you would escape, master, but I did not want to tempt destiny.’
They hugged as brothers would. ‘You will reach much greater heights,’ Hassan predicted.
How was it, Malik wondered, that everybody thinks I’ll have a great future when I can see none of it? All he longed for was security, but every time he settled down, he changed hands like an unwanted toy.
Hassan and Malik held hands, not wanting to let each other go. The slave had contributed to Hassan becoming one of the wealthiest men in this part of the world. And he had now safely returned his wealth and family to Hassan’s homeland. ‘I should thank you for buying me and securing my future for six years. Yet, the time has come for us to part,’ Malik conceded softly. They were silent for some time. It had been six long years, but Malik’s short-lived brilliance as a trader was over. Hassan and Malik had planned to create the biggest business empire that Hindustan had ever seen and both felt a deep regret that their fantasy had gone sour, like milk left uncovered.
Go with the Sultanate, his inner voice said. It was of paramount importance to realize that it was up to him to create his destiny. He dared not obstruct the course of fate.
Hassan began crying when he saw Malik being taken away by the soldiers. When the slave vanished behind a bend in the road, he walked slowly to the boat and waited for the tide to turn under its hull. Before the next dusk fell, their lives would have changed forever.
BOOK II
CHAPTER 11
TEMPLE OF THE TOOTH
They boarded the ship in the light of a half-moon late in the night. The wooden plank sagged under the company’s weight. Given his luck, Veera would not have been surprised had it buckled. Sails were unfurled and tied onto the masts. A cloud of tears soon hid the land Veera loved as he stared into the distance. The fronds of the coconut trees seemed to wave him farewell in a show of loyalty. Dolphins followed the ship in its wake of white surf.
In these picturesque surroundings, a poem would have spontaneously flowed out of Veera. But the poet in him had died. Somehow, a couplet came to his mind, a fitting epitaph for the poet within him:
In parting’s painful throes
Even my poetry became prose...
Veera woke up just before dawn and walked out to the wooden deck. The crew was already at work. A sailor’s life consisted of riding the waves, eating food that was salted and stored for months, and his sexual desire quenched by harbour harlots. Inclement weather could send these boats down to Varuna’s belly. The crew members were a cheerful lot, considering that most of them would not die in their beds unless they were fast asleep in their bunks when their ship sank.
The sunrise was silent over the horizon. On land, dawn was never silent, accompanied as it was by the chirping of birds and the hum of insects, but not at sea. In a few minutes, the sun was a red fruit wobbling on the edge of the sea, and the waves seemed to be layered with gold. The kelp was torn into shreds by the winds and the waves wafted by the ship as flotsam. Soon, birds began flying towards them, indicating that their journey was about to end. Then the isle of Lanka appeared like a small dot on the horizon. It grew till it loomed large and completely hid the sun. A scream of joy went up as land was sighted.
Veera was still lost in his thoughts. He had given up without a fight, and now he felt ashamed. His hasty departure was intended to give some breathing space to the king, perhaps to marry off Sunanda to Sundar. Maybe even to crown Sundar as the crown prince. Veera looked overboard. If I fell into the sea right now, he thought, almost with disgust, I would sink to the bottom with the weight of a very weary heart.
Lanka was the traditional haven for Tamil rebels and dethroned kings. Its treacherous terrain and rivers in furious spate would hide them for months. During Chola rule, it was in Lanka that the Pandyan crown and the king’s sword were hidden – the very crown of pearls that Kulasekharan now wore. Hundreds of Lankans and Pandyans had laid down their lives rather than let the royal emblems fall into enemy hands.
It was ironic that the Pandyans now considered the descendants of their benefactors their enemies. Having decimated the Cholas and Pallavas and with other enemies far to the north, the Lankans were perhaps the only ones who could lay claim to being a worthy enemy. Veera remembered Vikrama’s prophetic words, ‘When you have no more to conquer, you do not stop to consider if it is a friend or a foe.’
Their ship landed in Kankesan Thurai, a port under Pandyan control. As the ship anchored, a boat was lowered and Veera sailed to the port slowly as two oarsmen pulled with all their might.
The Pandyan regent-general who commandeered Lankan operations, Ariyan Chakravarthi, had not been given any formal intimation about the possible hierarchical position of Veera in the campaign, and he wondered how to treat him. A bulky man, he struggled to get up on his feet as Veera came towards him. He embraced Veera and led him to some cushions. Four diamonds sparkled on as many of his fingers and Veera wondered, like many others had, not about the show of opulence but about the lonesome finger. Perhaps he had not yet found a monster to match the other four.
‘You look so much like your…’ Ariyan left his sentence unfinished. Veera knew he had thought of Vikrama. Ariyan wondered whether this eager young man would take it as an insult to be compared to a proclaimed traitor. Instead, he smiled when Veera replied, ‘You do me great honour, sir, to compare me with him.’ No name had been mentioned, but a great bridge of assurance had been built over the otherwise unfathomable chasm.
Veera was apprised of the inactivity on the warfront. The Lankans had disappeared into the forests, where their army survived as a guerrilla force, invisible, unseen. A diligent effort to end this tiring wait for a foe which never showed itself was taking its toll on the soldiers. ‘They may be only needle pricks but they still hurt,’ Ariyan told him.
A spirit of nationalism had united the Lankan tribes and a new breed of young warriors had cropped up to take up the struggle against the invaders. They were now employing revolutionary tactics rarely mentioned in the rulebooks of war. The rebels always attacked just before dusk so that they could get away in the ensuing darkness. The general rule for the Pandyan army was to never venture behind a small group of Lankans into the forests for soldiers who did so had never returned and their bodies were found riddled with arrows the day after. Offal would spill out through the wounds, as if the body contained more than the skin could hold. It was a daunting task to prepare the bodies for cremation.
‘We don’t seek to make this country bow in submission. A deal would be enough – any treaty, an annual payment and help from soldiers when we are in trouble,’ the general told Veera, clear about the end goals of this war.
Veera visited the site of a previous battle that had taken place about six months earlier. The bones of the fallen soldiers had been picked clean by the vultures and pickled white by the harsh sunlight. He was aghast. The soldiers’ sacrifices shamed him, and he asked Ariyan why they hadn’t cremated their dead. Ariyan stopped short of a laugh. ‘Such luxuries do not exist for warriors who wed martyrdom. When our ancestors stormed forts, they used bodies of their own soldiers to fill up the moats,’ he pointed out.
When Veera interrupted Ariyan’s narration of the previous battles with obvious gaps in logic, which might have turned the tide of the war, the general tried to defend himself. ‘Your Highness,’ he said, ‘this war that we are fighting is not what you have learnt at military school. We are fighting an invisible enemy here, an enemy against which we cannot unleash the power of the infantry or cavalry.’
Veera was quick to retort, ‘If you had decisively beaten them on the battlefield, they would never have had the gall to resort to guerrilla warfare.’
Ariyan shrugged. Well, well, you don’t have to teach a fish to swim, he thought to himself.
Veera immersed himself deeply in the war. Ariyan initially thought that it was the eagerness of a new recruit, but Veera never seemed to let go. The driving force within him was like a demon that never let him rest. He was thinking and implementing his ideas at a pace that Ariyan and his group of archaic generals found hard to keep up with.
Veera designed a new camp for the troops on a flat land adjoining a hillock. The encampment was palisaded with a wall as tall as an average man and half as wide on three sides. The troops packed it in with buckets of clay and reinforced it with bamboo and reed. After four days of uninterrupted sun, the wall became as tough as granite. Veera constructed a watchtower on the hillock and instructed his soldiers to man it day and night.
But defence wasn’t the only issue. Lanka was a land of lakes, but the earth-filled bunds were breached every monsoon, consequently flooding the countryside. Water stagnated in a terrain with no certain slope. There were numerous puddles which got murkier by the day and played host to squiggling larvae of mosquitoes that tormented the men during their sleep. The only way anybody could escape from their bites was by using pots of embers with neem leaves thrown in, which created a smoky mist that the mosquitoes detested. However, so thick was this screen that people coughed through the nights.
Inside the camp, the smell of rotting excreta and garbage thrown on the outskirts of the palisade wafted through. During the nights, soldiers collected around the many stoves to get some warmth. Around these campfires voices joined in songs of valour, which would slowly merge into haunting melodies in memory of those who had left them.
Courage was calculated by counting the wounds of war. Men would count the number of scars an
d recount the encounters by the fireside. ‘This doesn’t look like a wound from a spear,’ one would taunt another, ‘looks like your wife used a crowbar to throw you off her.’
Those who could whistle or dance regaled the troops around the campfire. What a pity, Veera thought, the most powerful troops in the region acting like wandering minstrels. The besieger was himself under siege, locked up in his own camp. Boredom would kill his soldiers, Veera realized, so he began regular drills, marches and archery practice. He knew the most dangerous enemy in guerrilla warfare was monotony. If a soldier took a situation for granted, it meant certain death. Veera changed the vanguards every night, and launched surprise checks on the sentries. When he discovered some fast asleep, he ordered a public lashing on their posteriors – the ultimate ignominy for a soldier. After the whip had done its job, Veera stood up and spoke, ‘If the enemy attacks, who answers to our mothers, wives and children? Will it be them, or me?’
The security had vastly improved after that.
*
Months passed uneventfully. Veera longed to stamp out the last traces of resistance, if only he could find it. Desperate, he made it a routine to wander around the camp looking for traces of the enemy he was yet to see. The camp was surrounded by a lush canopy of tropical forest where a raindrop would take half an hour to fall on the ground.
The Lankans seemed to have fled to the central hills, where the terrain limited enemy transgressions. It was a classic case of the soil helping its sons. The Lankan was invisible in the forest and there was no way to drag him out and force a battle on him. But Veera saw everything differently. For him, the Lankans were everywhere. Veera scouted around the camp for traces. He found circles of crushed grass where people had stood for hours. He stood in those places and saw what they would have espied. All had excellent views of the camp.
Gods, Kings & Slaves: The Siege of Madurai Page 16
