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across the path of another enemy rider who could not prevent the bolting animal from crashing into his own mount so hard that both horses fell, taking their riders with them.
    A third horseman waving a long curved scimitar wildly above his head rode at Shah Jahan, who saw him only just in time to sway back in the saddle to avoid his flashing blade. However, recovering more quickly than his opponent, Shah Jahan thrust with his sword at the man’s groin. At the last moment the Bijapuran parried the blow with his scimitar but the weapon snapped as he did so. Shah Jahan tried again. This time the thrust got through, penetrating his enemy’s abdomen, and the man fell. Reining in, Shah Jahan saw that others of the attacking horsemen were now turning and beginning to gallop back in the direction from which they had so recently come.
    Heart thumping with the excitement of battle, Shah Jahan’s first instinct was to pursue and destroy this small band of enemy cavalry, but he quickly realised to do so would be foolish. As the army commander he should leave that to others. He must go to the rear of the column where the conflict had originally broken out to see how the fighting was progressing there. As he rode through the smoke and dust he noticed several of his men lying motionless on the ground and others being tended by their comrades. The body of a war elephant was slumped nearby, as well as those of several horses. Another horse, its left foreleg shattered, was standing neighing piteously. However, he saw little sign of fighting until he approached the rear where the baggage and powder carts had been travelling.
    Through a gap in the increasingly thick smoke he made out a number of stationary six-wheeled ox carts. Two of the oxen pulling the leading vehicle were slumped in the shafts, wounded. Their drivers were struggling to cut them from the traces while those of the wagons behind were attempting to manoeuvre around them, shouting at their oxen and pulling at their yokes. Just then Shah Jahan saw six riders clad entirely in black galloping towards them. Each was carrying a double bow and was accompanied by another man holding in his gloved hand two arrows with flaming pitch-soaked cloths bound round them – the same tactics that had killed Abdul Aziz’s father Ahmed Aziz, Shah Jahan just had time to think before the archers all took flaming arrows and fitted them to their bows. Rising in their stirrups they pulled back the drawstrings ready to fire at the wagons, where the drivers had now succeeded in cutting one of the wounded oxen from the shaft of the first cart. A musket ball hit a black-clad bowman before he could discharge his arrow and he pitched from his horse. As he did so his flaming arrow caught his clothing, setting it afire. Screaming in agony, he rolled over and over on the ground trying to extinguish it.
    A great blast of hot air blew past Shah Jahan, deafening him and nearly unseating him. As he struggled to control his wildly bucking mount, he wondered what had happened. Then he realised the wagons must have been powder carts and that at least one of the archers’ fire-arrows had penetrated an oiled cloth cover and ignited the powder bags inside. He succeeded in quietening his horse but felt a sharp pain in his left cheek. Removing his gauntlet and probing with his fingers he discovered a wood splinter protruding from it and plucked it out. Glancing down through eyes stinging with grit and dust, he saw several other splinters embedded in his horse’s flank and his gilded saddle. Like him, both were splattered with patches of a red, sticky substance – the flesh of the oxen and their drivers. As the dust began to settle he saw that two of the wagons had exploded. The mutilated bodies of men with fragments of singed cloth still adhering to them were strewn across the ground, mixed with those of the oxen and pieces of the carts. The acrid smell of powder mingled with the sweeter one of burned flesh.
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