The Tippoo did not spare the gorgeous throne a glance. He had ordered the throne made, but had then sworn an oath that he would never climb its silver steps nor sit on the cushions of its golden platform until he had at last driven the British from southern India. Only then would he take his royal place beneath the pearl-strung canopy and until that
bright day the tiger throne would stay empty. The Tippoo had made his oath, and the oath meant that he would either sit on the tiger throne or else he would die, and the Tippoo’s dreams had given him no presentiment of death. Instead he expected to expand Mysore’s frontiers and to drive the infidel British into the sea where they belonged, for they had no business here. They had their own land, and if that far country was not good enough for them, then let them all drown.
So the British must go, and if their destruction meant an alliance with the French, then that was a small price to pay for the Tippoo’s ambitions. He envisaged his empire spreading throughout southern India, then northwards into the Mah-ratta territories which were all ruled by weak kings or child kings or by tired kings and in their place the Tippoo would offer what his dynasty had already given to Mysore: a firm and tolerant government. The Tippoo was a Muslim, and a devout one, but he knew the surest way to lose his throne was to upset his Hindu subjects and so he took good care to show their temples reverence. He did not entirely trust the Hindu aristocracy, and he had done what he could to weaken that elite over the years, but he wished only prosperity on his other Hindu subjects for if they were prosperous then they would not care what god was worshipped in the new mosque that the Tippoo had built in the city. In time, he prayed, every person in Mysore would kneel to Allah, but until that happy day he would take care not to stir the Hindus into rebellion. He needed them. He needed them to fight for him against the infidel British. He needed them to cut down the red-coated enemy before the walls of Seringapatam.
For it was here, on his island capital, that the Tippoo expected to defeat the British and their allies from Hyderabad. Here, in front of his tiger-muzzled guns, the redcoats would be beaten down like rice under a flail. He hoped they could be lured into the slaughteryard he was preparing on the western bastions, but even if they did not take the bait and
came at the southern or eastern walls, he was still ready for them. He had thousands of cannon and thousands of rockets and thousands of men ready to fight. He would turn their infidel army into blood and he would destroy the army of Hyderabad and then he would hunt down the Nizam of Hyderabad, a fellow Muslim, and torture him to a slow and deserved death which the Tippoo would watch from his canopied golden throne.
He walked past the throne to stare at his favourite tiger. This one was a lifesize model, made by a French craftsman, that showed a full-grown beast crouching above the carved figure of a British redcoat. There was a handle in the tiger’s flank and when it was turned the tiger’s paw mauled at the redcoat’s face and reeds hidden within the tiger’s body made a growling sound and a pathetic noise that imitated the cries of a man dying. A flap opened in the tiger’s flank to reveal a keyboard on which an organ, concealed in the tiger’s belly, could be played, but the Tippoo rarely bothered with the instrument, preferring to operate the separate bellows that made the tiger growl and the victim cry out. He turned the handle now, delighting in the thin, reedy sound of the dying man. In a few days’ time, he thought, he would stun the very heavens with the genuine cries of dying redcoats.
The Tippoo finally let the tiger organ fall silent. ‘I suspect the man is a spy,’ he said suddenly.