Empire: Read an excerpt from Devi Yesodharan's historical fiction tale, based on the Chola dynasty

Editor’s note: Devi Yesodharan’s new historical fiction novel ‘Empire’, published by Juggernaut Books, looks at the Chola dynasty to offer a tale as high on adrenaline as it is on authentic detailing. Reproduced here, is an except from the book. In this extract, Anantha, the commander-in-chief of Rajendra Chola, recalls a battle from when he was a young captain. Read on… The Parvati with its crew of fifty had broken apart from the main fleet headed to the Lanka islands during a storm, and been stalled by choppy seas. We lit our torches, looking in the distance for answering flickers, but there were none, we were too far out. We followed the water compass south-west but never caught up despite two days of smooth weather — the others had gained too much distance. I was a new captain and I didn’t have my pick of warriors, I had to make do with what I got, what the others didn’t want, and the men on my ship were a raw, temperamental lot who barely knew each other. Seasick and throwing up their morning meals. Everyone feeling that they had to look out for themselves, despite my attempts to make them come together. And our isolation from the fleet now made us even more nervous. We reached land finally and sailed along the coast looking for our ships. There was no one in sight. Finally I spotted Krishnan’s smaller ship, nestled among a few trees. Evidently he had fallen behind too. We docked next to it, a few hundred yards from a beach. [caption id=“attachment_4011397” align=“alignnone” width=“825”]  Cover of Empire by Devi Yesodharan. Image courtesy Juggernaut Books[/caption] The men were bored and itching to get off the ship. But something told me that there was more bad weather coming. I made them wait as I surveyed the beach. In the distance, I saw bodies lying face down in the sand. Dead men in armour that looked like ours. ‘Slowly, with as little noise as possible,’ I told them, as we disembarked. ‘Keep your daggers and arrows ready.’ The most courageous thing you do in a battle is get off your ship in hostile land, abandoning safety. Once you do that, you are propelled forward by events and the momentum of other men. You live in the bravado of the moment and the need to stay alive. There were pools of blood everywhere, soaking the beach sand. Some of the men stirred, most looked dead. The alien sun drenched my back with sweat at once, the sand burned under my feet as we ran up the beach, looking for shade or enemy. It was too quiet. We headed forward through the trees surrounding the beach until we saw smoke rising into the sky. I had my few men split into two groups, to give us a chance to surprise the attackers. ‘Change of plans,’ I said. ‘We are no longer attempting to catch up with the rest of our ships. We save who we can here, and leave.’ It sounded like desertion, but we knew we were well and truly lost. We could end up in ambush after ambush if we tried going further into the island. I put Maran in the lead with me, for his sharp eyes and aim with the spear. As we walked through the forest towards the smoke, I noticed that the plants around us were beaten down. Maran stopped, turned back to me. His eyes grown hard. He nodded and I went forward. I crouched with him in wild grass that made my nose tickle and my skin itch. The heat relentless. This place didn’t like me a bit. It was trying to spit me out. ‘Can you hear it?’ As soon as he said it, I could. Screaming came at me in the wind and cooled the sweat on my back. ‘No more than two hundred paces away, is my guess,’ Vishakh observed. A thick-armed rower. Good with his knife and one of the few here I knew well. I looked around. ‘How many bows do we have?’ Five men raised their hands, and I tried to look unperturbed. ‘How many arrows?’ ‘Full quivers,’ the lead archer said. ‘Around four hundred.’ That was something. ‘Climb the trees when we are eighty paces away,’ I said. ‘Maran will give you the sign. And aim for the eyes and throats. There will be many of them and few of us.’ We crept forward quietly in case they had placed guards up ahead, and soon enough we spotted three men standing with their backs facing us, their swords unsheathed but intent on something happening on the other side. I nodded to Maran and Vishakh, both of whom had done this before with me, and we took down the men easily from behind with a knife in their necks so that they couldn’t scream a warning, and then again deep in their flanks, so that their legs were useless. Three good swords out of that. I put mine in my belt. We moved ahead again, and the raw smell of blood grew stronger, not good news. Maran spotted something and gave the archers the signal to prepare their bows. I issued a sign for my favourite defensive position, the star, placing Maran and Vishakh at the apexes, with ten men to their right and their left, swords and machetes alternating, and moved forward. The rest of the men behind us. Maran and Vishakh signalled back what they saw — at least two hundred of the enemy in the clearing and thirty of our own men, bound and gagged. We were outnumbered. But we didn’t have much choice but to keep going forward. Fifty paces away from them, still shrouded by wilderness, I gave the sign to charge, for the archers in the trees to shoot. Twenty of their men were down before we covered the distance. We hacked our way through the stinking mass of men, but a sword wound is not always lethal, and enemy fighters we had injured were charging up behind us to attack again, and soon my small group was dwindling, but I kept slashing forward in desperate hope. Our archers still firing. Somehow we reached the middle of the clearing with dead men piled up in circles. They’d hung Krishnan upside down from a tree like a goat and stripped him of his armour. Whip marks on his back, his face bleeding from where the switch had curled around his torso and caught his cheeks. I charged ahead, ignoring a knife catching me on the arm. The man who had wielded the whip was waiting, and jumped at me from behind a tree. He was a big fellow with pretentious warpaint slathered on his face and neck. I knew from one look that he was a clumsy fighter given to smashing skulls together, so I ran straight at him while he mentally cracked his fingers and waited, and then I feinted left, and before he had time to whip towards me I moved right. Fighters have a certain set of expectations in the speed and accuracy of their opponents, and I took pleasure in showing them how narrow those expectations were. I was never where they turned their eyes. At home, I was already mythologised as the ‘fast-footed one’ — that’s what I was, that’s how I saw myself. I jumped towards him and landed my sword deep into his stupid neck, before he got his first good look at me. He screamed like a dying cat. But focused on killing him, I hadn’t noticed a man I had maimed crawling towards me in the mud. He planted a knife into the front of my foot, pushing it down till the hilt. I cut his neck and bent down and pulled the knife out before I lost the courage or strength to do it and then sank to the ground, light-headed. Somebody else got Krishnan down from the tree, and soon Maran was kneeling beside me, tying up my foot with a dirty cloth. We had had a victory of sorts. ‘How many of our men did we save?’ I asked. ‘We found nine still alive,’ he said. A very small victory, then. They cut down some palm fronds, quickly wove them together and carried me on it. Krishnan, the man I had been lunging to save, walked beside me, the wounds on his back bleeding but otherwise whole. I turned my head to curse at him but my mouth failed to make the words. The sun winked in and out through the trees, and the back and forth of the palm hammock fed a rising fever. I’d get up and walk ahead of the men into the forest painlessly until I woke up again on the palm leaves. This happened again and again until we reached the beach. They placed me down on the sand, and far ahead I could see a commotion. Krishnan came back and said, ‘There are fifteen men here who are still breathing.’ I lay back, relieved that we would have fewer women at Nagapattinam about to find out that they were widowed. ‘We will have to leave a ship behind,’ I said. ‘There aren’t enough men to row.’ He nodded. ‘Which one?’ I realised I was now the highest-ranking officer here. All the commanders were dead. We both knew the answer. We didn’t have enough men to steer the Parvati back home. He waited for me to say it. ‘Mine. Burn it,’ I said. ‘Those butchers cannot have one plank of wood from it.’ He agreed without argument. I was being sentimental. Burning would take precious time, which exposed us to more danger. But I couldn’t leave her to them. They poured what war oil we had over it and they gathered near me as it caught the flame. The minute the fire took hold, the masts of the ship turning black, I ordered the men to the remaining ship. As we cast off, I pulled myself upright and scanned the beach. There was still no sign of anyone. Somewhere on this island, a war was being fought without us, we had missed it entirely. They left me on the deck, Krishnan sitting by me. ‘How’s your back?’ It looked like a mess of blood and ripped flesh. ‘Nothing that will kill me. How’s your foot?’ It was my turn for bravado, but I didn’t have the heart for it. The wound in my left foot was an open, bloody mouth. The foot felt hot and as big as the ship itself, my whole leg too sensitive to touch. Soon Maran or one of the boys would come with a tumbler of fresh water, and make me lie down on a sheet I would soak with my sweat while they held my foot up and bathed the bloody hole as the sun shone right through it. We arrived back in Nagapattinam eight days before the rest of the ships. We arrived quietly and ignominiously, close to night, docking when the port was busy with trade boats. Word spread quickly of our injuries though, and we faced questions for which we had no answers, and were grateful when the rest of the men arrived triumphant, the Sinhala royalty held captive below deck, trussed with rope. We were quickly forgotten and it took a few battles for Krishnan and me to redeem ourselves. Excerpted from Devi Yesodharan’s Empire, published by Juggernaut Books.