Holder of the World - Bharati Mukherjee [94]
“What will become of people in the fort?” she asked.
“They will understand. They helped me get away.”
Guilt did not enter his makeup, only duty, and his duty was to lead, to defend, to fight.
“The General will not waste his time on them. He is a general because he kills kings, not eunuchs and women.” All of this he announced with a boyish smile. It was as Bhagmati once said: men fight because war makes them young. Even the old Emperor, fifty years on the throne through filicides and fratricides and still roaring with fire.
Then she said something that startled Jadav Singh. “I would rather die, however horribly, than see others killed.”
He began to laugh.
And then she added, “Why would one people desecrate another god, if they weren’t horribly, desperately afraid?”
She was asking on her own behalf as well as Morad Farah’s, or the Emperor’s. It was the same fear her own people had exercised, back in the forests of Brookfield.
He sped off, again to the rear where his horsemen had called him. After two more hours, with the sun beginning its flat western trajectory directly in their eyes, it was time to break for the first night. But when they arrived at the small fort that was their goal, the subedar welcomed him, then gave the Raja less accommodating news. The Emperor’s men, indeed, had entered Panpur fort, suspecting that the Raja had fled, and the soldiers, so restless from inactivity and the promise of glorious battle, had been issued practice rounds of bullets, cannons and burning balls of pitch. Panpur was no more, the outlying villages were burned and corpses lay facedown in the paddy fields. Cows were butchered in front of the priests, then the priests in front of the statues of Lord Vishnu, then soldiers urinated on all the statues—Lord Hanuman, and elephant-headed Ganesh—or washed them in the blood of slaughtered cattle, then they razed the temples.
The villagers who’d survived were making their way to other forts, carrying bundles of rice, pitchers of water, their calves and their children slung across their shoulders.
“Then we must not stay here,” the Raja decided. They replenished what meager stocks they could carry and set out again, by the fading sun and then the moon, along the main path to Devgad fort. If Morad Farah was the great general he claimed to be, there would be an ambush along the defile where the paths all narrowed to scale the Deccan escarpment. If he was nothing but Aurangzeb’s mercenary butcher, he would linger in the captured villages, devising devilish entertainments and waiting for morning to launch an assault wherever the Raja’s army had camped for the night.
So they would not camp. The Raja would run the risk of ambush, but trust to his enemy’s baser character. And again he was happy, having calculated his enemy, having raised, in his own mind, the odds of battle. As happy as some Company factor figuring a profit.
8
DAWN WAS streaking the eastern sky behind them, but straight ahead where the path snaked upward into a rocky defile, the sky was a pure, lustrous, nighttime black. If they scaled the defile safely, the road to Devgad, their allied fort, was open, sanctuary was assured.
The Raja raised his sword, addressing his officers: “Today is but another death. Who frightens and who fears is irrelevant. A warrior faces death with cowardice or courage.” The words were no longer empty; the morning light revealed that all along the ridge, Morad Farah’s men squatted like birds of prey.
Jadav Singh lifted his shield, spurred his caparisoned tattu, and uttered a war cry. The Muslim warriors answered from atop the ridge. Like an upward-flowing river, the hundreds of Devgad soldiers stormed the escarpment. Thousands of the Emperor’s cavalrymen spilled down the defile, arrows flying, spears thrust forward. Hannah caught a glimpse of the Raja’s scarlet knuckle cloth. All around her she heard the chants of Jai Ram! Jai Devgad! Jai Singh!
No sooner had the syllables escaped their lips than they fell. It was, as the Lion had said, the