Ruler of the World

somersaulting from the saddle to land painfully on the hard-baked ground.

Akbar smiled. He too had bruises. He was training every day now, firing shot after shot from his musket and practising with sword, flail and battleaxe until they felt like living extensions of his own body. He was also joining in wrestling bouts with his officers. At first they had treated him with too much respect, reluctant to fling their emperor into the dust, but his skill and speed and the challenges he had roared at them had quickly conquered such inhibitions.

He glanced up at the rapidly crimsoning sky. In another half-hour it would be growing dark. ‘Ahmed Khan, I would like to play polo with those men down on the riverbank.’

‘But the light is fading.’

‘Wait and see.’

Half an hour later, dressed in simple tunic and trousers and mounted on a small, muscular chestnut horse with white fetlocks, Akbar trotted out of the fort, across the parade ground and down to the riverbank. Behind him followed attendants, some carrying palas — wooden balls made from dark timber — and polo sticks while four staggered under the weight of a brazier of glowing charcoals supported on two wooden poles. As he reached the bank, Akbar kicked his horse into a canter and rode up to the horsemen. Seeing their emperor, they prepared to dismount and make their salutations.

‘No. Stay in the saddle. I want you to take part in an experiment,’ Akbar said.

As inky purple shadows stole over the river, he ordered his attendants to distribute the polo sticks, mark out goals with torches on either side and finally place one of the wooden balls in the brazier. Almost at once the ball began to smoulder, but even after four or five minutes it hadn’t burst into flames. Akbar smiled. So the story about Timur was true. On several evenings since announcing his intention to go to war, he had asked his qorchi to read him accounts of Timur’s exploits in case there was anything he could learn from his great ancestor. One description had diverted him from thoughts of strategy to those of sport. It told how, by chance, Timur had discovered that the hard timber of the wormwood tree smouldered for many hours. He had ordered his men to play polo through the night with glowing balls of wormwood to harden and prepare them for battle. Ever since, Akbar had been eager to try it for himself.

‘Throw the ball on the ground,’ he ordered. As one of his attendants lifted the ball from the brazier with a pair of long, curved tongs, Akbar kicked his horse forward and took a swing at the glowing sphere. ‘Let’s play,’ he yelled. Soon the dark riverbank echoed to the beat of hooves and the shouts of laughing men, and the game lasted until the moon had risen high, turning the Jumna’s muddy waters to liquid silver.

Later that night, as a hakim massaged his stiffening muscles with warm oil, Akbar again thought about Timur and why he had never once been defeated. He had favoured the shock attack, the hit- and-run raid. That was how he had smashed his way across Asia, allowing no physical or human obstacle, however mighty, to blunt his impetus. Crossing the frozen Hindu Kush he had had himself lowered down a sheer cliff of ice and brushed off attacks by cannibal tribes as easily as if they’d been fleas to be shaken from his fur-lined robes.

Timur’s tactics might not be appropriate for dealing with a modern enemy like Rana Udai Singh, equipped with cannon and entrenched behind the high walls of his desert fortress, Akbar thought. But Timur’s self-belief, his absolute determination to win and never to cede the initiative or be deflected from his goals, were as relevant now as two hundred years ago. The desire to emulate his warrior ancestor sent a restless energy burning through Akbar’s veins so that he could hardly lie still beneath the hakim’s strong fingers. But it would not be long before the war drums boomed out from the gatehouse of the Agra fort and the Moghul armies advanced southwest into the pale orange deserts of Rajasthan towards Mewar and its arrogant rana. His mother had conjured those deserts for him so vividly that Akbar could almost taste the dry, gritty air and hear the harsh shrieks of the peacocks that inhabited these desolate reaches. It was not surprising Hamida should remember them so well. She had given birth to Akbar in a small desert town in Rajasthan while she and his father had been fugitives from a Rajput king who had pledged to rip Akbar living from her womb and send the unborn child as a gift to Sher Shah, the invader who had robbed Humayun of his throne.

That Rajput leader was dead, but the humbling of Udai Singh was long overdue and subduing Mewar, which straddled the route between Agra and the south, made sound strategic sense. In his mind’s eye, Akbar already saw his armies battering down the gates of the great fort of Chittorgarh, capital of Udai Singh’s family for over eight hundred years and symbol of their overweening arrogance. Defeating Udai Singh, head of the most powerful Rajput ruling house, would make Akbar so feared — and respected — across the Indian subcontinent that none would dare challenge him.

Chapter 7

Saffron Warriors

In the early morning of a cloudless December day Akbar stood with Ahmed Khan at his side looking towards the Rana of Mewar’s great fortress-city of Chittorgarh. Its sandstone walls, over three miles long, sat high on a vast rocky outcrop soaring five hundred feet sheer from the dry Rajasthani plains below. Enclosed within them were temples, palaces, houses and markets, as well as military positions.

To Akbar’s acute frustration, he and his forces had already been besieging the city for six weeks to no great effect. Initially he had been pleased with the progress they had made. They had surrounded Chittorgarh completely, cut off all food supplies and captured or killed any foraging parties the Rajputs had sent out. They had gleaned some useful information from one of their captives, a ragged scrawny child of about ten whom they had apprehended with his two elder brothers as they climbed down the exposed rock face from the fortress’s outer walls in a desperate search for food. When Akbar’s soldiers had separated the child from his brothers and tempted him with a piece of freshly roasted mutton he had told them, after much cajoling, that Rana Udai Singh did not command the defending army himself but had appointed two of his young generals — Jai Mal and Patti by name — to the task. The rana himself, according to the boy, was somewhere in the Aravalli range of hills where he was said to be building a new capital to be named Udaipur after him.

The reaction of his older brothers when they had found out from the child what he had revealed underlined the strictness of the Rajput code. They had attacked the boy and would have strangled him if they had not been pulled away. They had repeated their assault the next day, when the three of them had been put to work with some other captives breaking and moving stone to be used in improving Akbar’s positions. This time, the eldest of the three had hit his brother with a sharp stone, inflicting a great gash to the side of his head. As he was hauled from his bleeding victim he had yelled at him, ‘You gave information to the infidel attacker. You are no longer my brother. You are not even a Rajput any more.’

When Akbar had heard this story, he had ordered the child to be cleaned up, clothed and put to work in the camp kitchen, remarking as he did so that it was a fitting fate for one whose desire for food had led him to help Chittorgarh’s attackers. However, the boy could not be persuaded to reveal anything about any secret routes into Chittorgarh. Nor would older captives, even when subjected to rough questioning and threatened with torture. Probably there were none.

Akbar and his generals had continued the assault, but his early hopes of success had faltered. He had ordered barrages of cannon shot to be followed up by wave after wave of attacks, attempting to charge up the single five-hundred-yard-long winding ramp leading from the plain to the city’s main gateway, which was situated at the lowest point of the summit of the outcrop. But none of the attackers had even got as far as the bottom of the ramp. As soon as his soldiers had begun to ride and run towards the ramp, Akbar had been forced to watch powerless as orange-turbaned Rajputs, oblivious of cannon and musket shot, had appeared on Chittorgarh’s crenellated ramparts and shot down the Moghuls with musket balls, crossbow bolts and a storm of hissing arrows. Men and horses had fallen dead or wounded, many on the exposed ground in front of the fortress. To Akbar’s dismay, more of his men had been killed as they bravely rushed out to attempt to drag wounded comrades back under cover.

Eventually so many lives had been lost in such rescue attempts that Akbar had reluctantly ordered his officers only to permit them under cover of darkness. Even then, the Rajputs had killed or wounded many, so good seemed