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By Root 1045 0

guardian of their privacy and isolated the King from the pleas and sorrows of his subjects. For fourteen days and thirteen nights the lovers abandoned themselves to pleasure. Attendants fed them pomegranates, sprinkled them with attar of roses and lit his huqqa. Musicians serenaded them with flutes, drums and stringed instruments from the courtyard below. For fourteen days the King mounted his lady without surcease. “Forever regal,” he called his instrument; “Unbow’d,” she corrected. No innocent posture, no contortion, failed to yield a new delight. Flower vendors in kuttamarams tossed fragrant petals to the shore, and the faintest of distant odors now caught her attention, the flapping of birds’ wings, the scuttling of mice in distant fields. The moon seemed to burn, and on dark nights, the stars crackled like embers.

“Don’t you hear them?” she’d ask. “Can’t you smell it?”

“Hush,” the King replied, “I’m listening to the fishes swimming.”

And while the lovers tossed and twisted in the sweet carnality of their embraces, the drought season deepened in Panpur. The glossy soil, silken with moisture, that had once supported crops enough to feed the thousand villages of Devgad now flaked into dust in tillers’ hands. Cattle grazed in tinder-dry meadows, udders dry and bleeding, the sickened falling to buzzards even before they died. Hyenas and foxes and even a man-eating tiger prowled the palace’s peripheries and carried off goats and children.

The Nawab Haider Beg sent his most ruthless commander, Morad Farah, a mercenary Moor from the Barbary Coast who’d battled infidels on both sides of the Mediterranean, the Black Sea and up and down the Malabar Coast, to head an invasion force of horsemen, foot soldiers and engineers to erect batteries for light cannons and dig a tunnel under the Raja’s moat. Finally, the Nawab had his hard intelligence: Raja Jadav Singh was in the fort at Panpur. No rumor spreads quite so fast as that of sexual abandon. The Raja could have ridden his horse in plain sight under the Nawab’s nose, and still his existence would have been in doubt; let him hide behind a curtained cupola with his Salem bibi, and all of Hindustan would know before morning.

Morad Farah’s men had closed the river route to the interior and blocked the boat route through the roadway. The Emperor Aurangzeb’s battle standard flew over a city of tents. Soldiers leaned their muskets and spears against the beached canoes, awaiting the signal to ford the river and start the attack. The sound of their drunken curses carried cleanly across the water. Troupes of singers, dancers, whores and eunuchs moved between the camps. Sword sharpeners had set up their grinding wheels. Mahouts had already started to hang armored plates on the General’s battle elephant; grooms were rubbing down and readying for battle the noblemen’s horses. Grappling hooks, scaling poles and catapults were piled into carts for the assault that could be launched on a moment’s notice. And still the Raja did not order a response.

Morad Farah herded up Panpur’s cows and goats, seined the streams, and shot the birds nesting in the trees so his men would not complain of niggardly rations. Farmers who resisted were dragged by the hair to the tent of punishment; their feet and hands were severed by hatchet; their wives and daughters assaulted. This was efficient genocide: every dishonored daughter destroyed a father; every helpless father starved his family; every dead son condemned the souls of his parents to eternal return.

ON THE SECOND quarter of the fourteenth night, the limbless trundled into Panpur fort’s Hall of Audience. Their wails were louder than the music of flutes and gourds. Morad Farah has set fire to our huts! Morad Farah has dishonored our women! Morad Farah has rendered me a beggar the rest of my life!

Jadav Singh stirred uneasily in a bed strewn with blossoms. He sent his musicians away.

Morad Farah has razed three temples! Morad Farah has slaughtered cattle and smeared beef blood on the lips of pious Hindus!

Hannah bound his wrists with the silken