“You have nothing to say?”
“Nothing but another abject apology,” he prostrated himself fully, “Sultan Al’Azam.”
“Oh, you will have to do better than that! Not only did you act counter to my wishes, you also proved yourself inept. Methwold survived your attack. He and the other Englishmen will now have just cause to speak of Our empire as barbaric and uncivilized, and say that I, as Sultan Al’Azam, cannot—or will not—control my people.”
He has to die, now. Anything less and he may return to avenge himself upon me. Nur realized she was leaning forward, eager for the emperor’s sentence. Glancing at the other women behind the jali, she slowly leaned back.
“Sultan Al’Azam, I beg you: forgive me.”
“Who was it drove you to this stupidity?”
“It was my error, Sultan Al’Azam.”
“Very well, as you merely repent and offer no others to share in your shame, I will but punish you: I strip you of title. I strip you of land. I strip you of all favors bestowed upon you. Further, you will no longer be allowed on the grounds of any state-funded madrassa. If someone should decide to go against my wishes and offers you comfort at any such school, I will revoke my support from them.”
The court shuffled and murmured. The punishment was unusual.
Showing greater self-control than Nur gave him credit for, Mullah Mohan made no protest.
Nur hid her disappointment. Without friends among the umara he would suffer, but his base had always been among the masses. Mullah Mohan remained a threat, not only to her now, but to the emperor as well. Shah Jahan’s decision had been unwise; he should have had the mullah executed.
“Leave us.”
Mohan climbed to his feet and began backing away from the emperor, head bowed.
“Oh, and lest you think to seek comfort with our enemies, know that I will use your presence as cause for war with any foreign power that should shelter your worthless carcass.”
Mohan flinched. He opened his mouth to protest, but was caught on the horns of Shah Jahan’s angry, expectant glare.
And there was the reason Mohan did not protest his sentence too loudly. He must have thought to find shelter with one of the Deccani Sultanates. It was actually quite an elegant solution, in some ways. Now Mohan must remain within the circle of Shah Jahan’s power, an ongoing reminder to the other umara of the consequences of overstepping one’s authority. But Nur still thought the emperor would have done better to simply have the mullah put to death.
Mohan finished his retreat, the lesser umara on the outskirts of the court closing ranks to cut him off from view, if not from thought.
Along the Yamuna outside Red Fort
“All of it is in there?” Talawat eyed the small brass shell with the lead tip. “Shot, powder, and wadding?”
“Not really any wadding, but yes, it’s all in there,” John said.
“And the powder is smokeless,” Salim added.
The Atishbaz gunsmith looked at John, disbelief writ large on his face. “Really?”
“Yes.”
“May I see it in action?” he asked, handing the round back to John.
John looked a question at Salim, who shrugged.
“Yes, of course, Talawat.”
Salim watched as John shoved the 9mm round into the magazine, seated the black metal box into the well of the pistol and worked the action. He checked down range for anyone who might get hit if he threw a round and, seeing none, raised the pistol.
Salim, plugging the ear closest to John, shifted his gaze to watch the row of cantaloupe a slave had placed about fifty gaz away.
The back of the leftmost cantaloupe exploded even as the vicious crack of the round leaving the barrel made the short gunsmith start.
“Merciful Allah!” Talawat gasped.
“What?” John asked, lowering the pistol and, Salim noticed approvingly, keeping it pointed down-range.
“Such a sharp sound! I have only heard the like twice before, when a barrel breached under the pressure of too much explosive and a poorly fitted round.”
“Oh.” John shrugged. “These nine-millimeters are pretty zippy, so they tend to crack like a horse whip, but the barrel is sound.”
Talawat looked at the cantaloupe. “And you hit it at this distance, even with such a tiny barrel?”
“Well, yeah. Want me to peg the others?”
“What?”
John grinned. “Might want to plug your ears.”
“Oh?” Talawat asked.
But John had already raised the pistol, taking aim.
He fired five more times in quick succession, pulping the cantaloupes into a sodden mess.
As the echoes of the shots faded, one of the emperor’s elephants trumpeted challenge in the distance, offended by the loud noise.
John lowered the weapon and smiled at Talawat, who was nearly bouncing with excitement.
“Such a rate of fire! May I examine it?”
With practiced motions Salim recognized as the result of long practice, John stripped the metal box holding the ammunition and worked the action across the top, exposing a greater length of the barrel for an instant which, by some mechanism, flipped one of the brass rounds into the air, where he caught it in the same hand that held the “magazine.”
Pocketing the magazine, John handed the pistol to Talawat, who marveled at the light weight and precision craftsmanship of the up-time device.
John leaned close, pointing out the different features of the weapon, “This is the slide—”
Feeling someone’s eyes on him, Salim turned and looked up the walls of Red Fort. He picked out a group of darker shadows in the shade of the jali-screened enclosure that allowed the ladies of the court to observe the elephant fights without the need to clear every man from the vicinity.
“I still say I shoot better than you, John!” Salim needed a moment to translate the shouted Amideutch, but when he did he turned and cocked an eyebrow at the American.
John turned, smiling, and called, “We’re both here because of your better shooting!”
A hint of laughter carried to them across the intervening distance.
Salim found himself wondering which shade was Jahanara, which laugh, hers.
“Is that my pistol you’re shooting?”
“Sure is.”
“Don’t break it. It’s so hard to find nice accessories these days.”
The up-timer grinned. “We won’t, dear.”
“Good. Shoot straight now.”
“Yes, dear.”
More laughter from the women.
John, still smiling, turned back to Talawat, who was inspecting the pistol with a look of avid concentration, even adoration, not unlike that of those freshly converted to Islam.
“Want to take it apart?”
“May I?” the gunsmith asked, breathless.
“Here, I’ll show you.” A clink and the upper part of the pistol, the “slide,” including the barrel, came free of the grip. John turned the slide over to reveal a steel spring wrapped around a shaft below abutting the barrel. He covered the spring and shaft assembly with one hand and popped it free, allowing the whole assembly to part ways. He handed the barrel, which appeared to have been forged with a metal flange to house the end of the spring and shaft arrangement, to Talawat.
The gunsmith looked straight down the steel tube. “I see that the barrel has grooves inside it. To what purpose?”
“They make the bullet spin in the air, stabilizing it.”
“And the spring, it makes the ‘slide’ travel back into place?”
John nodded. “Into battery, yes.”
Talawat beamed at the familiar term.
John didn’t notice. “When it slides back into place, it drags another round up into the chamber from the magazine on this ramp here, see.”
“Your artisans must be geniuses, to craft such fine works out of such hard materials.”
“Nearly four hundred years of advancements make us look a lot smarter
than we actually are as individuals, friend. The tolerances used to build automatics are tight, I admit, but this Italian piece is pretty simple in relation to some of the crazy-complex stuff being manufactured up-time.”
“And did I hear your wife correctly, that this is her weapon?”
Another broad smile, this one full of pride. “You sure as shit did. She used it to drop a few bandits on our way here.”
“I heard.” Talawat looked down at the disassembled weapon, biting his lip. “Can I copy this?”
John snorted. “What?”
“I mean no offense. Could I possibly try and copy this marvel?”
John gestured at all the steel parts, including the springs and odd-shaped barrel-piece. “I don’t think you could even if you wanted to.”
Talawat grinned. “Oh, but I beg to differ.”
“Well…I like a challenge as much as the next guy, but the real problem is the rounds.”
“And why is that?”
John held up the round he’d fished out of the air, showed the dimple at the bottom. “The primer at the base—where the hammer strikes and initiates the explosion—it’s like the pans of your guns.”
“And what is the problem?”
John shrugged. “The primers are a different formula from the rest of the powder, and I don’t have that formula.”
“I see,” Talawat said, looking crestfallen.
“Sorry.”
“Perhaps one of your less complex pieces?”
“Well, the boys have an extra Remington 870 and a lot of twelve-gauge. Primers are less of a problem with them, but still an issue.”
“And what is this Remington 870?”
“A shotgun…A fowling piece, I suppose, that can also be used for war, though its range isn’t a lot better than the Beretta.”
Talawat looked around, clearly hopeful.
John read the expression, smiled apologetically. “Sorry, didn’t think to bring one down.”
“Perhaps some other time?”
“Of course.”
“Thank you for showing me these things, Mr. Ennis.”
“You really want to try and copy this, don’t you?”
“Merciful Allah, yes!”
“Look, since it’s my wife’s I can’t very well just give it to you, but I’ll ask her if it’s all right…”
“Perhaps, in the meantime, Talawat could draft plans from your piece there?”
“Um, that quick?”
Talawat nodded. “If you’re not in a great hurry?”
“I’m sure Salim can find something to entertain me.”
The Atishbaz’s grateful smile was something to behold. They left him shouting for quill and paper.
Salim led John a few hundred gaz along the river, then stopped where they could watch the hive of activity on the construction site of what would be one of the Seven Wonders of the World. They stood in silence for some time, watching the carefully choreographed movements of the hundreds of elephants and thousands of workers completing the mausoleum’s construction.
Salim thought it a scene worthy of recording in verse: the men’s working-chants, the sounds of the small creatures of the riverbank, the sounds and sights of the river itself, all of it combining to form a perfect backdrop for another of man’s attempts to construct something strong enough to thwart the ravages of time itself.
It was a subject for a poet more worthy than him, however.
“They’re finishing up the mausoleum?” John asked.
Salim nodded. “The principal construction, yes. Putting the white marble in place. The calligraphers and carvers will be working for some time, especially on the interior, before it looks like what you saw in your ‘postcards.’”
“I always wondered how, with the Taj so close to the river, they kept all that weight of stone from settling unevenly.”
“There are twenty-two wells preventing the water from saturating the ground beneath.”
John shook his head and stood silent a long time.
Eventually Salim noticed tears coursing down the up-timer’s cheeks.
Moved, but uncertain what the cause could possibly be, Salim asked gently, “Forgive me, John, but do you care to share your troubles?”
John wiped his face, as if ashamed of manly tears.
Salim put away his puzzlement over that reaction to listen to John’s answer: “Not troubles, exactly. I just…” He cleared his throat. “You know, I wonder sometimes what my life would have been like had we not come here—to this time, I mean. I don’t think I would have even left the state of West Virginia, let alone the country. And now me and all of us from Grantville, we’ve changed—and continue to change—the whole damn world.”
“I see. It has been a hardship?”
John looked at him. “God, yes…And yet: hell, no.” He shook his head. “I have done things, seen things,” he hiked a thumb at the palace behind them, “met people, I would never, ever had the opportunity to if the Ring of Fire hadn’t happened.”
“A mixed blessing, then.”
“Damn straight.”
Aurangzeb’s Camp, The Deccan
The intermittent rattle of musket fire sounded from across the plain, punctuated by the slower, deeper thudding of the imperial cannon ringing the hilltop fort.
Standing alone on the slight rise to the east, Aurangzeb resisted the urge to grind his teeth. Too slow. Nothing one could call a proper battle, just skirmishes followed by an assault on some minor holdfast. But each of these pockets of resistance, and there are a lot of them, slowed his advance and allowed Golkonda and Bijapur time to consolidate their defenses, even arrange to cooperate against him.
The occupants of the tiny fort located in the northwest of what used to be the Ahmednagar Sultanate had decided to declare for Shahaji, a Maratha general who hoped to carve a kingdom from the ruins of Ahmednagar. Recently disintegrated by a combination of internal and external difficulties, the lands of the Ahmednagar Sultanate were being snapped up by greedy neighbors and petty rulers like Shahaji. Decades of Mughal and rival Deccani Sultanate pressures, not to mention internal strife rising from a series of weak rulers had finally disintegrated the once-mighty Ahmednagar Sultanate. That greatest of generals and statesmen, the Abyssinian slave-cum Wazir, Malik Ambar, had, by force of personality and skilled diplomacy, kept destruction at bay for more than forty years. Upon Ambar’s death, the collapse had begun to gather speed as the sultanate’s siblings and weaker offspring readied to feast on the corpse.
Disinclined to enter lengthy negotiations and lacking the resources necessary to feed the populace even if he did, Aurangzeb had decided that reducing such places as this was the best option, even if it slowed his advance. And while it was a race, Shah Shuja had shown no sense of urgency, and advanced at an even slower pace, complaining in his letters that “harsh conditions make advancing difficult.”
A rider of his messenger corps approached and dismounted.
But Aurangzeb knew better. Shuja hunted, he lay with his slaves, he bided his time in the hope that his younger brother would spend his strength—or, even better, suffer a defeat at the hands of one of the sultanates.
The messenger strode through Aurangzeb’s guards and made his obeisance.
Aurangzeb waved, indicating the man should report.
“Shehzada, Captain of Artillery Carvalho claims the eastern and northern walls of the fort will be reduced by mid-afternoon.”
“I hear you. My compliments to the captain, and relay my commands to him and Samarjit. The Rajputs are to coordinate with Carvalho and his gunners to put in the assault the moment the walls are breached.” Aurangzeb looked to the messenger. “You have it?”
“Yes, Shehzada.”
“Repeat it for me.” Trained, skilled messengers were the backbone of any army, especially when he expected to have to lead them against exquisitely skilled Maratha light cavalry that were a constant threat in the region. Defending against their hit and run tactics would make the de
livery of accurate and timely commands to his subordinates essential.
“Your compliments to Carvalho and Samarjit, and their two forces are to coordinate an assault as soon as the walls are breached.”
Aurangzeb nodded. “Close enough. Go now.”
“Yes, Shehzada.”
The messenger left. Watching him ride off prompted Aurangzeb to consider the news from court: Mullah Mohan’s letter regarding the incident, if one existed, had yet to arrive. He did have the accounts of the court news writer, Nur Jahan, and Roshanara to consider.
The news writer’s account was bland and only related bald facts.
Being ignorant of the ties between him and Mullah Mohan, Roshanara had barely mentioned the event in her letter.
Nur had expressed her regret at the man’s actions and dismissal from court, but made no effort to explain or investigate Mohan’s possible motives. And that was reasonable, given that their correspondence might be read by any of a number of his father’s people.
I just don’t like it. Reasonable or not, I know she was offended by Mohan’s condescension after the failed attempt on Dara, but enough to strike at him so?
It seemed too dangerous a ploy, even for her.
Realizing he needed more information, and was unlikely to get it in the near term, Aurangzeb focused on what he did know of the man. Mohan was volatile and uncouth, certainly, but he knew of no personal animus he might have against the English. And with the man’s inability to conceal what he was thinking, surely Aurangzeb would know if he harbored hate sufficient to drive him to ignore the emperor’s order…
No, Mohan must have been manipulated into acting so rashly, but by whom?
Dara?
Aurangzeb almost smiled. Certainly not.
He would suspect Wazir Khan, but he was in Bengal.
Father?
Possibly. It would be a bit circuitous, but he might see it as a way to attack Aurangzeb’s base and pry a potential ally from his grasp. Indeed, the more he thought on it, the more it fit his desires.
A whisper of suspicion: Or Nur.
He pondered the possibilities until the call to Asr prayer. Obeying that call, Aurangzeb returned to his tent and took his time performing the ritual cleansing.
Prayer, as always, steadied him and cleared his mind.