By the time the pyre extinguished, midnight had passed and the next day was fast approaching. Not that Rudra had any way to tell the time when he was in a jungle in 16th-century India.
As the flames slowly died down, Rudra contemplated what to do next. He had promised himself that he would bring all who tried to kill him to justice, and he intended to keep that promise. But what next?
With the memories of his old life alone, he can bring a lot of changes in this world and turn the wheels of progress. The perspective of a person from the 21st century alone can be quite helpful as it can help him view things in a way a 16th-century mind cannot.
But that was not all the things that were in his memories. As he analyzed the older memories, he realized there were a lot of things that were very useful to him. Ideas related to Engineering, Mathematics, Medicine, Architecture, Chemistry, and a lot of other professions.
There were so many memories that he began to suspect it was not just the scattered memories of his old life that he could recall. There was no way any person could have learned this in a single lifetime. No, somebody tampered with his old memories. It was probably the same source that had caused him to transmigrate in the first place.
But all was not merry with these new memories. Although they were there, he could not access all of them. There are some memories and ideas that he could readily access. Things such as literature, History, and philosophy are some of the more easily accessible memories.
But the more useful memories had more restrictions placed upon them. Topics related to Science and medicine are more strictly guarded in his brain. He could easily understand how to build a printing press for example, but the memories of building a tank are locked away. It was like being able to look at the cover of a book but not being able to open and read it. It was a very frustrating experience for Rudra.
By the time the first rays of the Sun began to appear on the horizon, Rudra was ready to leave the camp. He collected all the things that could be helpful to him from the packs carried by the porters and arranged them in a small bag. He filled up the water bag from a small stream nearby and filled the food pack with some dried fruits usually carried by Narappa for emergency rations.
He already bathed in the stream and wore the only other set of clothes he had while disposing of the old blood-spoiled clothes. He wore the iron arm guards of his guard and tied Narappa's sword to his hip. Though Rudra had a personal set of metal and leather armor, he had not bought it the hunt because it would slow him down. The soldiers had stolen his sword, along with his ring for their value.
With the supplies in the bag and armed with a sword, Rudra set out in the opposite direction of where the hunting party had come from. The direction he was going would lead him to the border towns of the Golkonda Sultanate.
Though it was all but conformed to Rudra that the soldiers were acting on the orders of his uncle, he was sure that soldiers would not be welcome back home. It was too risky, and people would suspect something. The best move would be to tell everyone that Rudra and the rest of the party died by some unknown fate in the forest.
The most probable location the soldiers were traveling to was the fort town of Macherla. It was the closest town to their current location and the only town of the Golkonda sultanate, which was on the east side of the Krishna River. To travel to any other town, They had to cross the River.
Macherla Fort and the town surrounding it were captured by the Sultanate, in the war of 1528, 10 years ago to secure the river crossing of Krishna and conquer the Palanadu region. It was the same war in which their kingdom lost the entire Godavari delta and the on-land access to Gajapathi Orissa.
While traveling across the forest, Rudra began to think of the many differences he had noticed when comparing his old and new memories. Rudra was sure that he was on a parallel earth where history had changed when compared to his old world.
In the memories of his old life, there was no mention of his kingdom or him. The lands that belonged to his kingdom were occupied by the Vijayanagara Empire and the Gajapati kings of Orissa and later came into the control of the Golkonda Sultanate.
In the original timeline, Prataparudra Deva Gajapati, who is currently Rudra's grandfather, and namesake, lost the area south of the Krishna River, to emperor Krishna Deva Raya of the Vijayanagara Empire. Because his grandfather was too focused on the Bengal sultanate, he failed to properly reinforce the southern territories, which led to the disaster that was the siege of Udayagiri.
Vijayanagara emperor himself participated in the siege against the Udayagiri fort, whose garrison held out for 18 months with no reinforcements from the Gajapathis. After the fall of the fort, another strategic fortress at Kondaveedu also fell to Krishna Deva Raya, before a peace treaty was eventually signed. The emperor then married a daughter of the Gajapathi as a sign of peace.
But things went very differently in this timeline. Although, as in the old timeline, Rudra's grandfather was still not interested in his southern territories, he did manage to send an army to the south. Though the army sent out by Prataparudra Gajapthi failed to make it in time to help Udayagiri, they unintentionally caught the Vijayanagara army, which was celebrating the surrender of the fort garrison, off guard.
Still, despite the lack of preparedness of the soldiers, Krishna Deva Raya's generals managed to organize enough soldiers to put up a defense, so that the rest of the army had time to organize. The Vijayanagara troops managed to win a pyrrhic victory with heavy losses while the Orissan troops surrendered.
The Vijayanagara troops in the region then had to repel an invasion from the Qutb Shahs of the Golkonda sultanate, where Krishna Deva Raya himself was injured. This led to the rumor that the entire region was cursed and soldiers refusing to fight any further.
Krishna Deva Raya, unwilling to see the hard-fought territories going back into the hands of Gajapathis, came up with a solution. He raised one of his Generals as a king and arranged for him to marry one of the daughters of the Gajapathi as part of the treaty with them.
To fuel the fire, the general turned-king died before the marriage was done. So the Gajapathi's daughter, i.e. Rudra's mother, was married to his father, the general's eldest son.
The kingdom ruled the territory between the Godavari and Gundlakamma Rivers. The stated purpose of the kingdom was to not only serve as a buffer state between the Vijayanagara Empire and the Gajapathi Dynasty but also to act as a shield against the Golkonda Sultanate's coastal ambitions.
The new kingdom's capital was Dharanikota. A small city, which did not have any importance in the original timeline since the 3rd century CE.
The Golkonda sultanate then formed a temporary alliance with the Bidar sultanate, to wage war on Vijayanagara and recapture Raichur fort from the Vijayanagara empire. Though he recently suffered losses at Dharanikota, Krishna Deva Raya managed to win the field battle and the following sieges on Bidar without the help of Artillery.
The war ended in 1518, with a peace treaty where the old borders were restored between the three, and significant reparations were paid to Vijayanagara from the sultanates. The 48-year-old emperor then married the Golconda sultan's teen daughter, owing to Krishnadevaraya's victory over the sultanates.
The marriage was a key point of conflict between the two nations, as the sultan of Golkonda felt deeply humiliated to marry off his young daughter to what his religion taught him was an infidel.
His solution to rectify this, of course, is to assassinate the crown prince of Vijayanagara and the only male heir, Tirumala Deva in 1524. This caused Krishna Deva Raya to fly into a rage and implicate the empire's prime minister, Timmarusu, whom he regarded as the father figure responsible for his coronation, and blind him as a punishment. By the time the truth came out, in 1528, the emperor was on a deathbed.
The whole set of events closely mirrored the events of his old world, where instead of the Sultans, it was the Gajapathis who were responsible for the assassination of the prince. Their reason was that the emperor was of a lower caste than them and not of a pure lineage and did not deserve their princess, who became Deva Raya's third wife when he married her at the age of 44.
In both timelines, after the death of Krishna Deva Raya, his brother Achyuta Deva Raya took the crown. The problem was that the new emperor didn't particularly care about the kingdom of Dharanikota, in the new timeline.
When the Golkonda Sultanate, invaded both the Vijayanagara Empire and Dharanikota in the aftermath of the old emperor's death, the Vijayanagara Empire barely sent any reinforcements to the kingdom, and by the time Gajapathi's army mobilized in the north, the war was over.
As a result of the war, Dharanikota lost the fertile Godavari delta and access to Odisha. This caused the kingdom's role as a buffer state to become redundant and the demands for integration into the Empire were raised from the nobility of the Vijayanagara.
'Still these changes are only local. I wonder what other changes happened across the world.' Rudra thought as he approached the River Krishna.
Although the Fort town of Macherla is only about 40km as the crow flies, from the initial location of the camp, traveling by foot in a forest with hilly terrain would take him at least two days of travel.
So, to make that trip easier, Rudra chose a longer but faster trip over the water. It was midday by the time he reached the river. It took another hour of walking along the river, for Rudra to spot signs of human civilization. A few fishing boats started to appear in the river. After another hour of walking, he finally arrived at a large village.