Akbar himself had already washed and changed his rain-soaked and mud-spattered clothes for clean dry ones. Sipping the juice of red-fleshed watermelons, he watched as the final preparations were made for departure. They had become routine to the sailors as Akbar had insisted on hunting expeditions on most afternoons since their departure from Agra, arguing that they were a good opportunity for his horsemen to exercise their mounts and his musketeers to demonstrate their skill, as well as providing sport for himself. He had only varied the routine when, at least once a week, he ordered Muhammad Beg, Ravi Singh and others of his generals to drill his infantry on any dry ground that they could find, and when, ten days ago, he had gone ashore at Allahabad, the holy city at the confluence of the Jumna and Ganges, where he had arranged with the governor to make a ceremonial procession through the streets before his Kashgar magicians organised a show of fireworks from the city walls in the evening.
He turned to Ahmed Khan, at his side. ‘How many more weeks do you think it will take us to reach Patna?’
‘Perhaps a month, but much will depend on the monsoon. We’ve been lucky so far. The only serious accident was that time when two pontoons collided and we lost three cannon to the bottom of the Jumna. However, as the Ganges begins to widen out we’ll encounter more shallows and mud banks and the chances of running aground will increase. Shah Daud may even attempt ambushes to delay us. We know that he tried to bribe some river pirates to attack us.’
‘But they wisely refused, didn’t they?’
‘Yes, Majesty. Some even brought the news to us. We’ll also have to beware of the river forts defending the approaches to Patna. Our scouts tell me they are well manned and well provisioned.’
‘During the passage downriver I have given a lot of thought to how to unsettle young Shah Daud and undermine his men’s confidence in him. Now would seem a good time to make the attempt.’
‘What do you mean, Majesty? How?’ Ahmed Khan looked genuinely surprised.
‘Why don’t I write to him enumerating the strength of our army and offering him the opportunity to send ambassadors to witness the truth of my claims? I will go on to offer to forgo my advantage in men and equipment and to settle matters in single combat with him if he will agree.’
‘But what if he says yes?’
‘I’m sure he won’t, but if he does all the better. I am the equal of any man in battle, never mind a callow youth as he is reputed to be. We will save many lives and much time and trouble that way.’
‘How do you expect him to react, then?’
‘To dismiss our offer with what he means to be a confident smile but — unless he’s a braver man than I think or a better actor — will seem a nervous one to those around him. When his troops come to hear of my proposal — as we’ll make sure they do — they should be impressed by our confidence. His refusal of single combat will make them think their leader something of a coward and thus undermine their morale.’
‘It may work, Majesty,’ said Ahmed Khan, still looking doubtful.
‘It should. My own campaigns have taught me that my grandfather Babur was right when he wrote that as many battles are won in the mind before troops even come in sight of each other as are won on the field of battle itself. In any case, to make the offer costs us nothing.’
At that moment, a crack of thunder erupted overhead from the leaden clouds that had continued to fill the sky as they spoke and the warm monsoon rain began to pour down once more, millions of fat drops splashing into the Ganges and on to Akbar’s fleet as it completed its preparations to cast off.
Akbar stood with Ahmed Khan on the muddy banks of the Ganges looking towards one of the forts protecting the approaches to Patna. Its strong fifty-foot-high walls, stone at the bottom and brick further up, towered over them and Akbar could see the long barrels of bronze cannon on the battlements. The weapons would have a clear field of fire over the river and across the paddy fields, bright green with rice shoots, which covered most of the banks of the Ganges at this time of year. His troops would need to cross them as fast as possible as they moved to assault the fortress’s walls.
Shah Daud had — as Akbar expected — made no response to his offer of single combat. Akbar’s flotilla, moving as quickly as the monsoon would allow, had reached this point on the Ganges two days ago. The previous night, after a brief war council, he had ordered part of his fleet under the command of Ravi Singh to sail under cover of darkness past the fort, and braving its guns, to land a powerful force downstream ready to attack the fort from that direction. Akbar knew how lucky he had been that the monsoon clouds had covered the moon and the rain had been incessant, so that his ships had come undetected almost abreast of the fort. However, an alert sentry had then given the alarm and the fort’s cannon had begun to fire.
A pontoon carrying five war elephants had been hit and begun to sink. Amid the cannon smoke and with the river running at full spate downstream, a large boat bearing some of Akbar’s best archers, recruited from his father’s homelands around Kabul, had collided with the semi-submerged elephant pontoon and been holed in the prow below the waterline. As the vessel began to take in water and the intricately carved peacock at its bow dipped below the surface, the musketeers and artillerymen on the walls of the fort had started to find their range.
More cannon balls had hit the sinking pontoon, killing two of the elephants. Another, wounded in the belly, had fallen into the river where it floated on its back, thrashing its shackled legs and trumpeting in pain, blood from the gaping wound in its stomach mingling with the muddy river water. At the same time, the vessel carrying Akbar’s archers had been holed again and was now itself half submerged.
Several archers had fallen dead or wounded from the stricken barge into the water. Others, stripping off their breastplates and throwing aside their weapons, had jumped into the river in an attempt to swim ashore or to other boats. Suddenly sinuous shapes had appeared in the dark waters — bright-eyed crocodiles attracted by the smell of blood. High-pitched screams had mingled with the sounds of battle as men had begun to disappear beneath the water despite the attempts by musketeers on other ships to shoot the crocodiles, whose sharp teeth had quickly reduced the wounded elephant to a hunk of bloody, mangled red meat.
At first light, Akbar’s men had found dozens of partly dismembered bodies of archers, a half-eaten limb here, a bloody torso there, which had floated into the shallows downstream. They had even had to drive off packs of scrawny pariah dogs intent on finishing the feasting the crocodiles had begun. Yet despite the losses the good news had reached Akbar that the rest of Ravi Singh’s ships had succeeded in avoiding the collision and passing downstream of the fort with relatively few casualties, and had soon begun transporting men and equipment ashore. The strategy agreed at the war council to encircle the fort and then to attack it from all sides was working.
‘Ahmed Khan, how much longer before the forces we landed upstream will have joined up with those advancing from downstream?’
‘Perhaps another hour. There’ve been no sorties from the fort to try to disrupt them.’
‘Good. Are the pontoons carrying cannon ready to float down past the fort firing as they go when I order the attack?’
‘Yes. The artillerymen are aboard. The first round of shot is already loaded and the powder is being protected as best we can from the rains by oiled awnings. The troops that are to assault the river gate into the fort are in their rowing boats.’
An hour later Akbar gave the word and the sailors aboard the ten pontoons bearing the cannon cut the anchor ropes that had been holding them in midstream. Guided by the sailors’ long oars, the large wooden vessels moved quickly downstream. As soon as he was in range of the fort, the officer on the leading pontoon — a tall, bushy-bearded man dressed entirely in red — signalled to the teams manning the two cannon under his command to open fire.
Carefully shielding the lit taper with their cupped hands against rain blowing under the awning, two of the artiller
ymen put the flame to the touchholes. Both cannon fired despite the damp, their recoil sending the pontoon swaying up and down in the fast-moving current and causing one gunner to fall into the water, only for a comrade to pull him out before any lurking crocodile could grab him. As the men tried desperately to reload on the bobbing vessel, the cannon on the other pontoons fired and a swirling layer of white smoke soon lay over the river, mingling with the rain.
Akbar was standing in an advanced position on a low mud promontory jutting out into the river. Through one of the occasional gaps in the smoke he could see that some damage had been done to the fort’s water gate, which seemed to have been dislodged from one of its great hinges. Now was the time to attack, before the defenders could reinforce the damaged portion. ‘Send in the boats,’ he shouted, struggling to make himself heard over the din of his own cannon firing and the answering shots from Shah Daud’s men within the fort.
From where he stood, Akbar could also see that on land his war elephants were trampling through the muddy water of the rice paddies towards the fort, crushing the delicate green plants beneath their large feet. Musketeers were firing from the howdahs swaying on their backs, attempting to pick off those manning the cannon on the walls. More of his soldiers ran behind the elephants, fighting the suction of the deep mud on their feet and taking what cover they could from the animals’ bulk as they did so. Some carried between them long, roughly fashioned scaling ladders to assault the walls. One elephant hit in the head by a cannon ball had collapsed into a rice paddy and Moghul infantry were now using its body as a protective barricade to assemble behind before rushing to the final assault on the walls. All was going well, at least for the present.
Suddenly, turning back to the action on the fast-flowing Ganges, Akbar saw one of the rowing boats packed full of his troops going forward to attack the water gate approach within a few yards of the shore. Avoiding Ahmed Khan’s restraining hand he rushed instinctively through the shallows towards it, careless of the presence of any crocodiles in his eagerness to join the attack. Recognising him by his gilded breastplate, his men cheered as they hauled him over the boat’s wooden side.
Quickly scrambling to his feet, Akbar stood in the bow urging the rowers on towards the gateway. Moments later, however, he was propelled backwards as if by a giant hand pushing him in the chest. He landed awkwardly across one of the wooden struts in the bottom of the boat and lay there, winded and confused. What had happened? He could feel no running blood but his right side felt numb and he explored his breastplate with his hand. There was no hole in it but a dent beneath which a dull pain was now spreading. He must have been hit by a half-spent musket ball.
Brushing aside the attentions of his men clustering around him, he sat up to see that the boat was now only a few yards from the watergate, and that some fortunate or very well-aimed shots from his floating cannon had broken down the iron grille protecting the ten-foot-high entrance and splintered the wooden gate itself. Troops from another of his boats were already running towards it, zigzagging as they did so to put the musketeers and archers on the wall above off their aim. However, as Akbar watched, several of them fell and the rest retreated, some dragging wounded comrades with them to what little protection was afforded by a small stone hut at the end of a little jetty about ten yards from the gate.
Scrambling over the prow of the boat without waiting for it to be fully grounded, Akbar jumped into a foot of water and splashed ashore, yelling, ‘Follow me into the gateway. The faster we run the less the danger.’ Waving his sword he charged forward, keeping as low as he could. He was followed immediately by thirty of his men, musket balls and arrows hissing through the air around them. Seeing Akbar, the men sheltering in the hut on the jetty charged forward again too. Having a shorter distance to cover, one of them — an officer wearing a green turban — was first through the damaged gate, sword in hand, but a musket ball hit him in the forehead as he shouted to his men to follow. Spun round by the force of the impact, he collapsed just inside the fort. However, his men obeyed his last command and by the time Akbar reached the gateway himself there were a dozen or so men already there, flattening themselves against the wall to present the lowest profile to the defenders. Yet more were running up, feet sometimes slithering and sliding on the mud, from more boats which had just grounded on the shore.
Glancing upward to the walls as he caught his breath, Akbar realised that the defenders were becoming increasingly preoccupied with the assault from the landward side to have much time to spare to combat those entering through the watergate. Pointing to a stone staircase leading up to the walls about forty yards away, Akbar shouted, ‘Let us climb that and take some of the defenders in the rear,’ and ran forward himself, taking what cover he could by staying close to the wall. An arrow hit an infantryman running behind him in the throat and another clattered off his own breastplate but Akbar remained unscathed as, breathing hard again, he reached the base of the steep stairway and without pausing began to climb.
Suddenly the body of one of the defenders on the wall above fell, transfixed by a spear. With a thud and a crunch of bone it hit the stone staircase just above Akbar. He only just managed to dodge aside as the broken body rolled down the rest of the steps past him, skull banging on each sharp-edged step as it came. Then leaping up the remaining steps two at a time Akbar was on the battlements. He thrust at a small man who was using all his puny strength to try to dislodge one of Akbar’s scaling ladders. He fell with a jagged slash to the base of his neck and Akbar cut hard at a second who was bending over the battlements to fire on the Moghuls climbing the scaling ladders. The sword stroke took him across the back of his knees, severing his tendons, and he fell over the wall, arms flailing. A third man turned to face Akbar, who easily parried his first clumsy sword swing with his own weapon and then slid the long slim-bladed dagger he held in his other hand into the man’s side, deep between his ribs. As Akbar wrenched his blade free, the man collapsed, and immediately red blood frothed and welled up between his lips as well as from the wound.
Looking round, Akbar saw that by now so many of his men were either running up the staircase from the courtyard or clambering off the scaling ladders on to the battlements that they outnumbered the defenders, who for a while continued to fight bravely. But then, isolated and often wounded, more and more of them were throwing down their weapons and surrendering.
‘The fort is ours,’ shouted Akbar in triumph. ‘Make sure none of the defenders gets away.’ Another victory was his.
Towards dusk that day Akbar stood in the fortress courtyard and slapped at one of the host of mosquitoes which filled the air at that time of day, infuriating man and beast alike with their sharp bites and whirring whine. Turning to Ahmed Khan at his side, he asked, ‘Have we learned anything of significance from our interrogation of the prisoners?’
‘One of the most senior officers told us of Shah Daud’s discomfort when he received your offer of single combat. He said that the shah read it two or three times, on each occasion turning paler, before crumpling the paper, throwing it into a fire and wiping away some beads of perspiration from his forehead. It was only when one of the copies of the message that you distributed was shown to him a day or two later that he made any comment. It was to dismiss single combat as better fitting squabbles between leaders of gangs of common dacoits than disputes between rulers. However, the officer told us that Shah Daud doubled the number of his bodyguard just in case you should attempt to ambush him.’
‘If young Shah Daud is susceptible to our testing of his resolve and courage, we must think how to frighten him some more.’ As he spoke, Akbar’s eye was caught by a party of his men under the command of a junior officer who were slinging the bodies of some of their dead enemies on to untidy piles of corpses in one corner of the courtyard. Suddenly an idea occurred to him and he went on, ‘The souls of those dead men over there have already passed from their bodies so they can no longer serve them any useful purpose, can they, Ahmed K
han?’
‘So our religion teaches us, Majesty.’
‘Nevertheless, they may yet save the lives of some of their comrades by helping to persuade Shah Daud to surrender earlier than he might have done.’
‘How?’
‘Have fifty of the bodies decapitated and the heads placed in a large copper cooking cauldron. Have the cauldron covered with a fine brocade secured tightly round the rim. Then send it under a flag of truce into Patna with a message once again inviting Shah Daud to face me in single combat and telling him that if he still refuses more of his men will needlessly lose their heads and he will be their executioner.’
‘Won’t such an action make us appear the barbarians our enemies so often claim we are?’ Ahmed Khan looked appalled.
‘So much the better. We know we’re not and the more fear we can induce in Shah Daud and his men the sooner they will surrender. Start hacking the heads now.’
‘The cauldron of heads did its task, Majesty. By the time they reached Shah Daud they were putrefying in the heat. When he had the tie around the brocade cut and lifted the material to peer inside, a cloud of black flies burst out together with an unimaginable stench. Shah Daud turned away and retched from the pit of his stomach, and he was not the only one to do so. Immediately afterwards, he gave the order for the best regiments of his army, in particular his horsemen and his mounted musketeers and archers, to prepare to leave. Only two hours later he was himself in the saddle riding through the gates of Patna.’
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