The Moghul

the silver bracelets and massive silver anklets that had been their dowries.
    Jadar sat unmoving on his elephant as the men began to come forward with items of silver. Soon there was a line stretching into the dark of the tents. He watched the pile growing, and his calculations began.
    Will it be enough? The weight must be enough or the Shahbandar, motherless thief that he is, will never agree. But I think we will have it.
    He thought back over the plan. It had required almost the entire afternoon to refine. But when he had convinced himself that it would succeed, he had posted the pigeons to Surat.
    Where, he had asked himself, can I find fifty lakhs of silver, five million rupees, within a month, and have them at Burhanpur when we arrive? I'll not squeeze a copper pice , penny, from Agra.
    If not Agra, where?
    And slowly in his mind a form had taken shape. He had examined it, almost touched it, puzzled over it. And then he knew what it was.
    The mint at Surat. Where foreign coin is melted and recast as rupees. Fifty lakhs of silver rupees would scarcely be missed. Especially if the Shahbandar would allow his minters to work a normal day. The backlog of foreign coin he holds unmelted, creating an artificial shortage of silver, would easily cover fifty lakhs of rupees. I need only borrow what I need, and with it buy back into service the cavalry I need to reclaim the Deccan.
    The Shahbandar.
    But will he do it?
    He will. If I can show him collateral.
    I don't have enough collateral. Not in my own funds. Not even in the local treasuries.
    But there must be enough silver in eighteen thousand tents to assemble five million rupees.
    I will hold it, and give him a note of obligation using it as collateral. If we reach Ahmadnagar, I will squeeze the five million rupees many times over from every traitorous mansabdar I do not hang. I will confiscate their jagir estates and let them buy them back. I can easily confiscate enough to return the Shahbandar his loan, and then my men will have back their silver.
    If we do not reach Ahmadnagar, it will be because we are dead. So what will it matter? We will make an oath to reach the city or die.
    Only one problem remains.
    How to move the coin from Surat to Burhanpur. Secretly. No one must know where it came from or that it's being transferred. But a train with fifty lakhs of rupees must be heavily guarded. And the guards will betray its value.
    Unless there can be some other reason for a heavily guarded train from Surat to Burhanpur. A reason that would not automatically evoke suspicion. Possibly a person of importance. Someone whom all India knows cannot be touched. Someone important to the Moghul.
    And then the perfect answer came. The most obvious answer of all. Who will soon be traveling from Surat to Burhanpur, en route to Agra, under safe conduct of the Moghul? The Englishman.
    The infidel feringhi need never know. That with him will be the silver that will save Prince Jadar.

    CHAPTER TEN

    Brian Hawksworth stepped lightly off the prow of the barge as it eased into the riverbank and worked his way through the knee-deep tidal mud onto the sandy shore. Even here, across the harbor, the water still stank of the sewers of Surat. Then he turned and surveyed the sprawling city, back across the broad estuary, astonished that they could have crossed the harbor so easily on nothing more substantial than a wide raft of boards lashed with rope, what the Indians called a bark.
    Ahead, waiting on the shore, was a line of loaded bullock carts—conveyances with two wooden wheels higher than a man's head, a flat bed some six feet wide, and a heavy bamboo pole for a tongue—each yoked to two tall, humpbacked gray cattle with conspicuous ribs. The carts stretched down the muddy road that emerged from the tangle of coastal scrub and were piled to overflowing with rolls of English wool cloth. The turbaned drivers now shouted Hindi obscenities as they walked alongside and lashed the sullen cattle into place for unloading. As Hawksworth watched, the porters who had ridden with him splashed their way toward the shore and began driving stakes to secure the mooring lines of the bark. Wool would be ferried across the harbor and cotton brought back with each trip.
    Then Hawksworth caught sight of George Elkington's ragged hat bobbing in the midday sunshine as the Chief Merchant and his aide, Humphrey Spencer, climbed down from their two-wheeled Indian coach, drawn by two white oxen, which had been