She flinched as one of the cannon on the wall coughed smoke and fire in her direction. The air filled with the sound of angry wasps and then the sound of hammers striking wet flesh as the men between her and that great muzzle were flailed by dozens of lead shot. Each individual projectile was nothing compared to the heavy cannonballs usually fired by such guns, but the up-timer shells packed dozens of balls that spread to wreak their own destructive path.
Dara’s horsemen were a bit more than a hundred gaz to the west, arrows still flickering from their wheel and overhead at…she turned her head to the right. Perhaps it was the fact she was on foot and closer than before, but the milling mass of men and horses they’d been loosing into when she fell appeared neither better organized nor shrunken despite the losses she knew Aurangzeb’s men had to be suffering under the killing rain of arrows and gunfire.
Those few men on the near edge of the mob who were not already panicked were starting to raise bows toward their tormentors. Realizing the danger she was in, Atisheh turned, searching for either a mount to carry her away or some protection from the arrows—from both enemy and ally alike—that fell around her.
Those riderless horses closest to her were far too panicked to hold still while she approached, let alone mounted. She had just started to curse God for leaving her in this predicament when a handsome mare emerged from the smoke at the gallop, charging toward her.
Heedless of her many hurts, Atisheh staggered into a sprint perpendicular to the horse’s path. The mare saw her at the last moment and swerved, but Atisheh sprang for the cantle, grabbing at it. She missed, but her leap carried her arm over it, and she managed to hook it in the crook of her elbow as she started to fall away. Quickly adjusting position, the horse barely slowing despite her weight and awkward positioning, she gripped the cantle in hand. Shoulder protesting every jarring step, she flew one giant stride and then another before using the gathered momentum of her next touch of the ground to bounce up and into the saddle in a move even her aunt might have complimented her on.
While the mare had barely slowed, it had run in a slight arc as a result of her added weight. Seeing she was charging in the right direction, Atisheh giggled with pure relief before realizing the men she was heading toward might not recognize her.
No sooner had the thought come to her than the first arrow flew past her head.
“Damn stinking dogs!” she screamed. “Can’t you see it’s me?”
The warriors ahead were still in the wheel of death, though, which was hard enough to do without worrying about whether you recognized the idiot charging toward you from the enemy’s direction. Giving up on yelling, she hunched over her horse’s neck and tried to think herself and the horse as small and nonthreatening as she could.
The next several moments were among the longest of her life.
She saw a horseman lower his aim upon her and knew she was dead, but the eunuch who rode beside him recognized her and jostled his arm. The arrow went wide, the bowman cursing the eunuch as they whirled from view. All the while the steady beat of hundreds of shotguns firing in near unison grew louder on her right.
She turned her head to face the wall and saw the Sikhs. The formation looked exactly to plan: a long line of men three deep facing the ravine while the remainder made the same formation perpendicular to the wall in what looked like a Latin letter “L.” She passed the short end of the L, looking down the lines of men extending from the ravine’s edge to the outer wall of Red Fort.
The short end was the source of the crashing volleys, each rank firing a barrel and then, a scant moment later, the other. A slightly longer pause as the second rank leveled arms before firing. The only reason she could see them at all was the wind carrying their gun smoke east toward the sun and their targets. The front rank stood and retreated behind the third, while the second, now first rank, leveled their weapons and fired. The middle rank closed breeches over fresh shells. The movement was as machinelike and frightening as it was beautiful; a complex dance of hundreds of men and weapons orchestrated at the will of one man.
That will shouted something she did not need to speak Punjabi to understand.
She was past then, riding parallel to the long axis of the formation. The men in the first rank were kneeling, guns up, the second standing with their weapons pointed over the shoulders of their comrades. More than five hundred guns pointed in her general direction was a threat even her intense dislike of gunpowder weapons could not mask.
Again the bellowed order.
She was close enough now—or far enough from the great cannon—to hear the lower officers relaying the command for their men.
Looking to her left, Atisheh swallowed and, if she hadn’t already decided it was past time to flee for her life, clapped her heels to her stolen horse’s flanks on seeing the horde of sowar riding toward Dara’s cavalry.
Certain she would die once the Sikh officer ordered his men to open fire, Atisheh considered hanging from the side of her horse, but knew she couldn’t count on battered limbs to support her weight for an instant, let
