The Mourners


 * The Mourners
 * by Jonathan I. Edelstein
 * 27 December 2001


 * With the Prophet's Army
 * South of Lahore
 * Summer, SE 219 [991 CE] FN1

There were smoke and dust in the distance and ruined houses all around. The Oghuz couldn't be far away.

Anan Singh gazed at the cloud to the north, trying to divine its secrets. "Your eyes are better than mine, Arunji," he said. "How many?"

His lieutenant, Arun Chauhan, fixed his eyes on the spreading cloud. "Thousands," he said. "Ten thousand, maybe more."

Singh nodded; his scouts had told him the same thing. So Toghril wasn't just raiding this time; he had come to stay. Driven off the plains, no doubt, by a king more powerful than he, and come to make himself a king in the valley. ''But he will not be staying here. We will.''

As they were, so were we. The Rajputs told tales of ancestors who had come down from the plains as conquerors. But Anan Singh had spoken to other men, travelers from the north, and they had told different stories -- stories of a long-ago people who had been defeated and driven south to seek new homes. He suspected that those accounts were closer to the truth than the stories he had heard as a child.

Some people, he knew, might feel shame about being descended from such men -- but what shame was there in truth? Had not Moses and the Israelites risen from an even lower estate? Had not the late Prophet, Karam Chand, labored twenty years as a slave? The tribe that had been driven off the plains had also risen to become a nation of princes. And they had gained something else more precious still -- knowledge of the one God and His Torah, and of the Book of Mourning of Anan ben David.

No doubt Toghril intended to make a place for himself as the Rajputs had. He had defeated the army of Lahore, an army larger than Anan Singh's, and he did not fear the Rajput warriors. But Anan Singh did not fear Toghril. He was a Mourner, a monk of Rajputana, and he did not merely fight. He studied war, as he studied the commandments of God, and he taught it with the fervor of the wandering holy men who taught the young.

Anan Singh had heard that, in the west, monks shut themselves off from the world. How could a monk bring light to the world if he didn't work, and build, and teach? How could a man be holy if he did not marry? He thought of his wife, a monk like himself and a doctor of medicine; she was in the rear of the army, making ready to care for the wounded. There would be a great deal of work for her today.

The cloud of dust was much closer now; it would not be long before Toghril's army was upon them. It was time; Anan Singh sent riders to his captains and watched a moment later as they took their places. They did it almost well enough to please him. The core of his army were battle-scarred veterans who had practiced these formations daily since they had grown old enough to carry a sword, and even the peasant levies had one monk for every sixteen men. Of Anan Singh's fourteen thousand, four thousand were Mourners, and today they would make Toghril mourn.

He sent Arun Chauhan to the right, in the place of honor; he took the left for himself. ''Let Toghril think that Chauhan is the general of this army. He'll find out different soon enough.''

A thousand horsemen came charging out of the dust, and then two thousand; the air came alive with the twang of bowstrings, the whistling of arrows and the cries of the wounded and dying. To the right, Chauhan's heavy horsemen set their lances to meet the charge.

Instead, the Oghuz wheeled about and fled to the north. Anan Singh grunted in satisfaction; it was an old plainsman's trick, but a trick known to one's enemy was worse than none at all. He ordered his light horsemen to chase the fleeing Oghuz; they had a trap set, and he intended to spring it. When they come back here, I want it to be all of them.

Twice the plainsmen fled, and twice they rallied to charge home again. The third time, Anan Singh's light horsemen broke, riding pell-mell back to the lines in panicked flight. Their captain had complained bitterly the night before, but Anan Singh had given him strict orders -- when he judged that all of Toghril's reserves were committed, break and run.

The Oghuz charged after them, breaking ranks as they saw victory within reach. Pretending to run from battle was a favorite trick of theirs, but they knew that it was something the city people didn't do, so they followed the fleeing horsemen -- through the lines, to where the spearmen were waiting.

Suddenly the shouts of triumph turned into the cries of wounded horses and men. A moment later, Anan Singh's heavy horse crashed into them, sending their lines reeling back. The Oghuz turned about. They were swift, and there was still time to extricate themselves from the trap into which they had fallen -- or they would have, if not for the fact that the Rajput light horsemen had regrouped and attacked from the flanks. The last of Anan Singh's reserves joined the attack -- and the Oghuz had no reserves of their own to save them from being enveloped. Toghril was brave and resourceful, and managed to punch through the Rajput lines with three thousand of his men, but the others had ceased to be an army and had become a frightened rabble. Some were able to save themselves; many more were cut down.

There would be a place for Toghril in the west, in the mountains of the Hindu Kush, although that place might be a kingdom or a grave. Lahore would be the Prophet's land.