The Tide of Victory (40 page)

In her heartbreak and despair, Antonina thought of summoning Belisarius and Aide—somehow, someway—but gave up that thought soon enough. Aide would know of some method of the future which could save Eon—
did
know, for her husband had ordered experiments begun to create the medications of the future. But there had been no time—
no time—
for that, along with everything else. And now, time had run out. Even if—somehow, someway—she could summon Aide, the crystal being from the future would be able to do no more than Antonina herself.

Weep, and weep, and weep. And, as she wept, nestled in Ousanas' arm while he joined her in the weeping, Antonina wondered, now and then, how a crystal might weep as well.

Not whether. Simply how.

When Belisarius first heard the guns roaring at Sukkur, he felt a great sense of relief. Granted, Abbu's scouts had already reported that the Roman and Persian forces at Sukkur were holding back the Malwa besieging the city. Still, there was nothing quite as comforting as hearing the sound of those Roman cannons himself.

Even at a distance—Sukkur and the Indus were still a mile away—he could tell the difference in the sound between the Roman and the Malwa guns. The difference, ironically, was not in the guns themselves. Most of the siege guns which Belisarius had brought with him to the Indus—and all of the forty-eight-pounders—were Malwa in origin. Belisarius and the Persians had captured them in Mesopotamia the year before. But the Roman powder was uniformly "corned" powder, whereas the Malwa often used the older "serpentine" powder.

Here, as in many areas, the Malwa were handicapped by their sluggish economy—a handicap which was inevitable, given their insistence on maintaining rigid caste distinctions. The enemy
had
corned powder, but not enough of it to keep all their units supplied through a long battle or siege. Just as they were perfectly capable of making horseshoes and the new harnesses for draft animals—but, making them without replacing caste handicraft methods by the "industrial" system the Romans had adopted, they weren't able to supply enough for their entire army. Where every single one of Belisarius' cavalryman rode a shod horse, and all of his supply train animals used the new harnesses instead of the old collars, at least half of the Malwa army was not so equipped.

With large, small-number items like cannons or even muskets, the Malwa could compensate for their more primitive methods by substituting a mass of production. Even workers using older methods, remaining within caste boundaries, could produce a lot of such items—given that enough of them were put to work on the projects. Where the Malwa's reactionary fanaticism tended to really show up was in their inability to mass produce small and cheap items like horseshoes and large quantities of corned powder.

What pleased Belisarius the most, listening, was the comparative rate of fire. The Malwa were firing volleys, where Ashot's guns were firing individually. Under some circumstances, that would have concerned Belisarius. A volley was more effective in breaking a charge than uncoordinated fire. But Ashot knew that as well as anyone, and the fact that he was allowing his gun crews to set their own pace meant that he was not repelling any assaults. He was simply engaged in an artillery duel.

"Good," grunted Maurice, who had reached the same conclusion. The chiliarch leaned back in his saddle. "We're still in time, then."

He scanned the surrounding area, his gray beard bristling. "Which is a good thing, since
this
little part of your plan came all to pieces. Greedy damn Greeks!"

Belisarius' jaws tightened a little. He shared Maurice's anger at the indiscipline of the Greek cataphracts, and had every intention of chewing on Sittas' ear about it. But . . .

He sighed heavily. "I suppose it couldn't have been avoided." His eyes moved to the right, where what was left of Rohri was being plundered by Sittas' Constantinople cataphracts. Then, with considerably greater satisfaction, moved on to examine the ordered ranks of his Thracian bucellarii and the Greeks who were under the command of Cyril.

The "old Greeks," as they were called by the rest of Belisarius' troops, were the cataphracts who had served with Belisarius in Mesopotamia. Along with the Thracians and the field artillery, they were almost back in formation after the assault which took Rohri. Belisarius would be able to resume his advance with
them
within the hour.

The others . . .

"Leave them to it," he growled. "I'll have words with Sittas later. Not fair to him, really, since he's been doing his best to rein them in. But he'll take out his anger at getting reprimanded on his own troops. All the better. Sittas will gore them worse than I would, with his temper up."

Maurice nodded, stroking his beard. "Then, after Sittas rages at them, you can give them a calm little speech about the need for discipline—
if
we're to win this campaign and get ten times more in the way of booty than this piddly little river town provides."

"Bound to happen, I suppose," repeated Belisarius. "They've been complaining for weeks about the lack of booty. As if our men last year just walked into a treasure room without fighting for months!"

"Well, look on the bright side. The Greeks paid for it, well enough."

Maurice's words didn't bring Belisarius much in the way of satisfaction. True, the enthusiastic assault of Sittas' cataphracts had overwhelmed the Malwa garrison in Rohri, far quicker than Belisarius could have done with the siegecraft he had been planning to use. And, true also, had thereby gained him more precious days in which to continue outmaneuvering the enemy.

But the cost had been steep. At a rough estimate, he had lost a thousand cataphracts in that pell-mell—and completely impromptu—charge. And he knew he would lose as many afterward to wounds suffered in the course of taking the city. As always, war had been an unpredictable mistress. Gain something, lose something, then shift plans accordingly.

There was no point dwelling on it. And there was this much to be said: at least the "Greek fury" was not producing the atrocities against native civilians which usually accompanied the uncontrolled sacking of a city. Not because the Greeks were restraining themselves—they had already put the entire Malwa garrison to the sword, refusing any and all attempts at surrender—but simply because there were no civilians left in Rohri. The Malwa garrison had already massacred them.

"It's insane," snarled Belisarius. "The Malwa are still carrying out their orders long after the situation which called for those orders has changed. No point in a scorched earth policy in the Sind
now.
We're already at the gates of the Punjab. They ought to be corralling the populace in order to use them for a labor force themselves."

Half-gloomily, half with philosophical satisfaction, he studied the ruins of Rohri's outer fortifications. The only reason the first charge of the Greek cataphracts had broken through, for all its headlong vigor, was that the fortifications had not been completed before the Roman army arrived unexpectedly from the south. The civilians who could have finished the work were dead before it got well underway.

"Insane," he repeated. Then, shaking his head, looked away and studied the terrain ahead. What was done was done.

"Send a courier to Sittas and tell him to follow us whenever he can get those maniacs back under control. If we wait here for them, we'll lose the initiative. I think, judging from Abbu's report and the sound of those guns, that if we move now we can take the good ground on the south bank."

Maurice nodded, summoned a courier, and gave him the necessary commands. By the time that was done, Belisarius had already set his army into motion.

What was left of it, at least, with the Greek cataphracts now out of action for a time. So, the army which finally reached the bank of the Indus across from Sukkur was the smallest Belisarius had led in years. Three thousand of his own bucellarii, two thousand of Cyril's men, several thousand Arab and Syrian light cavalry, two thousand artillerymen—and, fortunately, Felix's five hundred sharpshooter dragoons.

Which rump of a rump army was what made the difference, in the end. Because by the time Belisarius and his army reached the south bank, the Malwa commander of the great army besieging Sukkur across the river had already sent thousands of his men across the Indus to relieve the garrison under attack in Rohri.

But . . . that flotilla of barges and river boats hadn't
quite
reached the bank, when Belisarius arrived. Quickly, Gregory began bringing up the field guns to repel the looming amphibious assault. In the meantime, moving much more quickly, Felix had his sharpshooters—firing under discipline, at coordinated targets—begin taking out the helmsmen and sailors controlling those ships.

It was a close thing. But Felix managed to throw the oncoming flotilla into enough confusion to give Gregory the time he needed to position the field guns. Thereafter, volleys of cannon-fire added their much heavier weight to the battle between land and water. By then it was already sunset. And if three-pounders were far too small to make much of a dent in good fortifications, they were more than enough to hammer river boats into pieces. Enough of them, at least, for the Malwa to call off the assault and retreat back to the opposite bank.

Not for long, of course. Early the next morning, just after dawn, the Malwa boats came again. This time, spreading out to minimize the damage of the cannon and sharpshooter fire. The Malwa suffered considerable casualties in that crossing, but they did manage to land a total of ten thousand men in three separate places along the south bank by midmorning. In numbers, at least, they now had almost as many men as Belisarius on his side of the Indus.

It did them no good at all. By then, Sittas had restored order among his cataphracts and pulled them out of Rohri. The Malwa had barely gotten their feet on dry land when yet another furious cataphract charge, sallying from the Roman lines, crushed them like an avalanche. Eight thousand armored horsemen, using bows and lances and sabers, throwing their weight atop the forces Belisarius already had hammering the Malwa in their three enclaves, were more than enough to destroy yet another Malwa army.

Although, this time, Belisarius was able to save the Malwa soldiery trying to surrender. The Greeks had sated their bloodlust in Rohri the day before. Even they, belatedly, had come to understand that a captured soldier was someone
else
to do the scut work of erecting fieldworks. And even they, belatedly, were beginning to realize that real war was a lot more complicated than simply a series of charges.

Three battles and three victories, thus, were added to the luster of Belisarius' name by the time he finally reestablished contact with Ashot and Emperor Khusrau.

Kulachi. Rohri. The Battle of the Crossing. 
 

None of those battles was exactly a "major" battle, of course, measured in any objective sense. Two small armies destroyed, and a town taken. But it mattered little, if at all. The importance of the names lay in the names themselves, not the truth beneath them. Belisarius had a blooded army, now, whose new troops—which was most of them—had the satisfaction of adding themselves into that long roll call of triumph against Malwa which began at Anatha.

Eight times, now, since the war began, Belisarius and his army had met the Malwa on the battlefield or in savage siege. Anatha, and the Dam; The Battle of the Pass and Charax and Barbaricum—and now these new victories. Except for the Battle of the Pass against Damodara and Sanga, each clash had ended in a Roman victory. Even the defeat at the Pass had been a close thing, tactically—and had set up, strategically, the annihilation of the giant Malwa army at Charax.

Such a string of victories gives confidence to an army. A kind of confidence which doubles and triples their strength in war. Real war, which, unlike the maneuvers drawn by pen on paper, is as much a thing of the spirit as the flesh.

Confidence alone, of course, is not enough. As important is an army's sense of cohesion and solidarity. Achieving
that
was a bit more difficult. The indiscipline and selfish greed of the Greeks at Rohri had infuriated the rest of the army—the more so when they found themselves forced to fend off a Malwa assault immediately afterward, unaided by their supposed "comrades" for a full day.

For their part, the Greeks were outraged to discover that the rest of the army expected them to
share
the loot they had obtained by their own furious energy (and loss of blood) in the assault which took Rohri. Abstractly, they knew of that traditional policy of Belisarius' army. But . . . but . . . applied to
them
?
Here and now?
 

Belisarius let the troops sort the matter out in their own manner. He was busy enough, as it was, preparing for his coming council of war with Ashot and Khusrau. Even if he hadn't been, he probably would have stayed out of it. Some things are best handled informally, when all is said and done.

He
did
grow a little concerned when Gregory's artillerymen began training their field guns on the Greek encampment, true. And he kept an eye cocked on the maneuvers of the Thracian cataphracts to the south and Cyril's men to the east, blocking the Greek line of retreat. Not to mention the enthusiasm with which Felix's sharpshooters began making wagers on how big a hole their magnificent rifles could punch through a Greek nobleman's finest armor.

But . . . it all sorted itself out after a single tense day. Soon enough, the Greeks decided that largesse and generosity on the morrow of victory and triumph was a fine and splendid thing. And, for their part, the Thracians and others allowed that the Greek charges at Rohri and the south bank had been conducted with panache and flair well worthy of any man who ever marched with Belisarius.

In the end, the worst problem left to Belisarius was trying to make himself heard in the command tent while discussing stratagems and tactics with Ashot and Khusrau. The din of the great victory celebration was well nigh overwhelming: Greek cataphract shouting his praise of Thracian, artilleryman lifting his voice in chorus with sharpshooter—
a capella
which sent every frog nearby into shock—and Arab ululation adding its own special flavor to the acoustic stew.