Victory City(99)

This was a haughty, insulting, and belittling speech. There was little she could do about it but maintain her personal dignity. “Be careful,” she told him as she left his presence. “Or your wisdom may ruin us all.”



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—

In the beginning Aliya wanted to be avenged for the loss of Raichur, so, pretending to be an ally who had information about Adil Shah’s treacherous intents toward them, he persuaded the sultans of Ahmadnagar and Golconda to attack Bijapur.

Then he persuaded Ahmadnagar to change sides, to make peace with Bijapur so that they could jointly attack Golconda.

Later, when Qutb Shah of Golconda’s younger brother Ibrahim fell out with his older sibling, Aliya arranged for him to take refuge in Ahmadnagar, which resulted in another war between that sultanate and Golconda.

When that ran out of steam, Aliya persuaded Adil Shah of Bijapur to demand two fortresses from Hussain Shah of Ahmadnagar, who refused contemptuously, as Aliya had known he would, and so conflict broke out between Bijapur and Ahmadnagar once again.

The whole region of the Five Sultanates was in turmoil, which was exactly what Aliya wanted. He incited lesser nobles within each sultanate to rise up against their sultan, so the sultanates had to fight civil wars as well as wars between one another.

And so the years went by. The Portuguese ravaged the Malabar coast, killing most of the inhabitants of Mangalore, but Aliya didn’t interfere. He made a peace treaty with Viceroy Constantine de Braganza, elected to ignore the horrors being wrought upon Goa by the excesses of the Inquisition, and was pleased by the foreigners’ destabilization of the west, which occupied much of the sultanates’ attention.

Also, he persuaded Ahmadnagar and Bijapur to attack Golconda again, and then secretly negotiated an alliance between Bijapur and Golconda, which led to Ahmadnagar suffering a humiliating defeat.

And the years went by, and by.

Aliya’s machinations continued, and, thanks to his plotting, the war between the sultanates, with their many dizzying, broken alliances, and changes of side, went on. And after each victory, each defeat, there were surrenders of land and fortresses and gold mines and elephants and tributes were paid in gold and precious stones, which made it easy for Aliya Rama Raya—who continued to profess friendship to all parties—to incite further conflicts whose purpose was to regain lost territory and wealth and honor.

The years passed. Everyone grew older. Tirumalamba Devi did not dare to ask Pampa Kampana any more questions about the coming catastrophe, but knew it must be close. Pampa Kampana composed perfunctory verses about the battles of the Five Sultanates, and Tirumalamba duly wrote them down, and placed the pages in the old satchel where the great book lived. And Aliya Rama Raya celebrated his ninetieth birthday, proud of having kept Bisnaga safe from the sultanates, who hated one another more than they hated him.

“It is a strategy,” he told Tirumalamba Devi, “that I have named ‘Divide and Rule.’?”



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—

One day in the year 1564, old Adil Shah of Bijapur experienced a moment of dazzling clarity. He summoned his family and closest advisers and spoke like a man to whom the gods—or in his case, his one god—had provided a moment of revelation. “How blind we have been!” he declared. “The reason we have been fighting one another like cats and dogs for the last two decades is one man, who has pretended to be our friend.” He immediately sent a message to Ibrahim Qutb Shah at Golconda. “That old schemer has fooled us long enough,” it read, in part. “We can’t defeat him by ourselves, but if we come together, we can surely take him down.” Adil Shah’s greatest enemy was Hussain Shah of Ahmadnagar, but Qutb Shah acted as an intermediary between them, and two marriages were arranged, one between Hussain Shah’s daughter Chand Bibi and Adil Shah’s son Ali, the other between Hussain Shah’s son Murtaza and Adil Shah’s sister. When Ali Barid of Bidar learned of this new grouping, he joined it too. And so the grand alliance of Four of the Five Sultans against the emperor of Bisnaga was born. Only the sultan of Berar, whose general Jahangir Khan had been executed by Hussain Shah of Ahmadnagar during the inter-sultanate wars, refused to join.

“Let nobody say,” Adil Shah declared when the Four Sultans met at Bijapur to ratify the alliance, “that we come together today on behalf of our one true god against their many false ones. If this was about god versus gods, we five would not have been fighting one another, true god versus the same true god, for the last twenty years. Simply said, we go now to teach that conniving trickster bastard a lesson he will never forget.”

January 1565. A cold dry winter. The immense armies of the alliance were on the march. Their agreed meeting place was the great plain near the little town of Talikota.

Talikota lay on the banks of the river Doni, one hundred miles due north of Bisnaga City. News of the gathering army traveled quickly, but nobody in Bisnaga was unduly concerned. These battles happened from time to time. Maybe the Four Sultans were about to fight one another again. At any rate, the seven walls of Bisnaga were impregnable. The giant army of Bisnaga was invincible. There was nothing to worry about. The business of the city continued as normal, and caravans of bullock-carts traveled to the western seaports without fear of interception. At length, however—a little late, a little hurriedly—Aliya Rama Raya mobilized his forces and headed north. The whole army of Bisnaga went with him, except for a group left behind to defend the walls, which nobody believed would need defending. He had six hundred thousand infantrymen, a cavalry force of one hundred thousand, mostly mounted on trained and armored battle elephants, as well as artillery—cannon, archers, javelin throwers. “If they are all coming for us,” he told Tirumalamba Devi, “then they will find out how mighty the power of Bisnaga really is. Make sure everyone stays calm. There is no cause for concern.”