"Now I will leave thee, Moro," said the girl. "I have no fear for thee; there will be no more delirium with new thoughts."
"I will follow thee to the temple," he replied; "go on before. I dare not stay here alone; she would come to me——"
[CHAPTER LI.]
Some days have passed at Beejapoor since we were last there, not idly, certainly. A large army had to be prepared for the field, and for a long, difficult, and perhaps hazardous service. The treasury was opened, and the arrears of all troops disbursed; for the men had to provide as well for their own wants as for those of their families during their absence. The condition of the artillery was looked to with particular care, and preparations made for rough roads and rougher service than other parts of the Dekhan afforded. Sivaji's mountains were high and steep, the jungle and forest next to impenetrable, yet Afzool Khan had taken up the "birra," the gage of service, and had determined to bring the rebel bound to the throne of his young King, there to receive death or pardon, as might be most fitting.
But the old Khan was no boaster. He had seen something of that country when, as a younger man, he had governed those provinces; and in his tours through them had shared the hospitality of Shahji, the father of Sivaji, and had been guided by Sivaji himself through many a rough hunting expedition; he therefore remembered enough to adopt precautions in all respects, and, so far as lay in his power, they were made.
That was not a country for the operations of cavalry, and it was therefore more to the infantry and artillery that he trusted: and it would not be wise to weaken the royal forces in and about the capital too much, lest the Moghuls should take advantage of it, and make incursions across the frontier, nay, even attack the capital itself.
His own Paigah, and troops that had been in quarters for the rainy season at his own town of Afzoolpoor:—some of the Wuzeer's Abyssinian levies, which were at Nuldroog,—some bodies of the old Dekhany horse under Alla-ool-Moolk, the Dâgtorays and Bylmees, were particularly selected; and, with some of the best infantry, the army was complete.
Nothing could exceed the spirit and devotion of the troops. In the beautiful Jumma Mosque, where more than five thousand men assembled daily for prayer, the preaching of the Peer, and the other ecclesiastics of that noble edifice—which yet remains as perfect as it was at the period of this history—eloquently set forth the merits of the Jéhâd, or religious war, in the eyes of God and the Prophet; and the certainty of paradise and its houris, to all who, falling by sickness or in battle, would surely enjoy them. Nor was it in the Jumma Mosque only that this fervour existed. In the royal Palace precincts, the city mosques—at the tombs of the ancestors of the Kings—the beauteous Ibrahim Roza, and noble mausoleum of Sultan Mahmood, nothing was left undone by the preachers to make the war popular, and to blacken the character and motives of the rebels. Frequently, indeed, to such a pitch of excitement were men wrought, that it was difficult to restrain them from attacking Hindus indiscriminately in the streets, and, in the expressive language of the Peer, from "making a pyramid of a lakh of heads before the palace gates." But it was no part of the royal policy to allow such religious fury vent at the capital or by the way: suffice it that, at the end of a long and toilsome journey, which would be made light through religious fervour, there would be free licence to slay, and the raid of Afzool Khan would become memorable in the history of the kingdom.
As the camps of the different leaders, too, formed without the walls, on that great plain which encompassed the city, bards and minstrels, in companies or singly, balled-singers, and, above all, troops of dancing women—thronged to them; and day and night, audiences were formed, sometimes in the tents, sometimes in the open air, where the feats of Sivaji and Maloosray were sung in the native Mahratta or Canarese, with verses added for the occasion, urging the faithful to destroy them.