innkeeper's greed, of course, would soon enough add to their misery. Neither his wife, nor his children, nor his servants doubted that in the least. The innkeeper would expect a similar bonus from the occasional noble customer in the future. And, when that bonus did not appear, would brutalize his household.
But that was a problem for the future. Neither his wife, nor his children, nor his servants were given to worrying about the future. The present was more than dark enough. And, thankfully, they would enjoy a rare respite from the ever-present fear in their lives. The innkeeper, awash in his sudden wealth, indulged himself in a drunken stupor for the next three days.
Every night, as she watched him soddenly sleeping, his wife thought of poisoning him. It was her principal entertainment in life. Over the years, she had determined eighteen different toxins she could use. At least five of those would leave no trace of suspicion.
But, as always, the amusement paled after a time. There was no point in poisoning him. She would be required-by law, now-to immolate herself on his funeral pyre. Her children and her servants would fare little better. The innkeeper had long ago sunk into hopeless debt to the local potentates. Upon his death, that debt would come due, immediately and in its entirety. By law, now, all lower-caste households were responsible for the debts of the family head, upon his death. They would not be able to pay those debts. The inn would be seized. The servants would be sold into slavery. The children, being twice-born rather than untouchable, could not be made slaves due to debt. They would simply starve, or be forced to turn themselves to unthinkable occupations.
By the end of the innkeeper's binge, three days later, his wife hardly remembered the nobleman who had given her that brief respite from fear. Her mind had wandered much farther back in time, to the days of her youth. Better days, she remembered-or, at least, thought she did. Though not as good as the days of her mother, and her grandmother, judging from the tales she half-remembered from her childhood. The days when suttee was only expected from rich widows-noblewomen desirous to prove their piety, and with no need to be concerned over the material welfare of their children.
The old days, the Gupta days. The days when customs, harsh as they might be, were only customs. The days when even those harsh customs, in practice, were often meliorated by kinder-or, at least, laxer-potentates. The days when even a stern potentate might shrink from the condemnation of a Buddhist monk, or a sadhu.
The days before the Malwa came. With Malwa law, and Malwa rigor. And the Mahaveda priests to sanctify the pure, and the mahamimamsa to punish the polluted.
Fourteen royal couriers raced south across northern India. Unlike the three couriers headed west, all of these couriers were filled with the urgency of their mission. Royal couriers, in their own way, were one of the pampered elite of Malwa India. All of them were of kshatriya birth-low-caste kshatriya, true, but kshatriya nonetheless. And while their rank was modest, in the official aristocratic scale, they enjoyed an unusual degree of intimacy with the very highest men of India. Many of those couriers, more than once, had taken their messages from the very hand of the God-on-Earth himself.
An arrogant lot, thus, in their own way. Royal Malwa couriers believed themselves to be the fastest men in the world. As they pounded their way south, every one of those fourteen men was certain that the vast hordes of the Malwa army had no chance of catching the foreign devils. The couriers-and they alone-were all that stood between the wicked outlanders and their successful escape.
Fast as the Romans and Ethiopians were, with their remounts and their fine steeds, they were not as fast as Malwa couriers. The horses which the couriers rode were even better, and the couriers enjoyed one great advantage-they were under no compulsion to keep their horses alive. Many more horses awaited them in relay stations along every main road. And so all of them, more than once, ran their horses to death as they raced from station to station along their route.
The couriers were filled with the confidence that they could reach the ports before the fleeing enemy, and alert the garrisons. The Malwa army could flounder, and the Rajputs and Ye-tai thrash about in aimless pursuit, but the couriers would save the day.
So they thought, and they were not wrong in thinking so. But the couriers, like so many others throughout India in those weeks of frenzy, were too confident. Too full of themselves; too incautious; too heedless of all that could go wrong, in this polluted world.
One courier's incaution manifested itself in the most direct way possible. Thundering around a bend in the road, his forward vision obscured by the lush forest which loomed on either side, the courier suddenly learned that he was indeed faster than the foreign enemy. He had overtaken them.
The courier had already plunged into the midst of the foreigners before he made that unhappy discovery. A quick-thinking man, the courier did not make the mistake of trying to turn around. Instead, he took advantage of his speed and simply pounded right through them, guiding his horse expertly through the little crowd.
He made it, too. In truth, the royal courier
But no horseman is fine enough to outrun a cataphract arrow. Not, at least, one fired by the bow of that cataphract named Valentinian.
The foreigners dragged his body into the woods, and then piled insult onto injury. They added his wonderful steed to their stock of remounts.
A second courier, and a third, and then a fourth, also discovered the caprices of fate.
Dramatically, in the case of the second courier. The monsoon downpours had washed out portions of many of the roads throughout India. The route this courier took happened to be one of the lesser roads, and thus suffered more than its share of climatic degradations. The courier, however, was unfazed by these obstacles. He was an experienced courier, and an excellent rider. He had leapt over many washed-out portions of road in his career, and did so again. And again and again and again, with all the skill and self-confidence of his station in life. What he failed to consider, unfortunately, was that his horse did not share the same skill and experience-not, at least, when it was half-dead from exhaustion. So, leaping yet another stream, the horse stumbled and spilled the courier.
Well-trained, the horse waited for its rider to remount. A very well-trained horse, that one. It did not begin to forage for two hours, after its equine mind finally concluded that the courier seemed bound and determined to remain lying in the stream. Face down, oddly enough, in two feet of water.
The third courier's mishap took a less dramatic form. He, too, driving an exhausted mount across a broken stretch of road, caused his horse to stumble and fall. Unlike the other courier, this one did not have the bad luck to strike his head against a boulder in a stream. He landed in a bush, and merely broke his leg. A simple fracture, nothing worse. But he was not discovered for two days, and by the time the small party of woodcutters conveyed him to the nearest Malwa post it was much too late for it to do any good.
The fourth courier encountered his unfortunate destiny in its most common and plebeian manifestation. He got sick. He had been feeling poorly even before he left Kausambi, and after a week of relentless travel he was in a delirium. A man can drive a horse to death, but not without great cost to himself. That courier was a stubborn man, and a brave one, and he was determined to fulfill his duty. But willpower alone is not enough. On the evening of the seventh day he reached a relay station and collapsed from his horse. The soldiers staffing the station carried him into the barracks and did their best-with the aid of a local herb doctor-to tend to his illness.
Their best, given the medical knowledge of the time, was not good enough. The courier was a brave and stubborn man, and so he lived for four more days. But he never recovered consciousness before dying, and the soldiers were afraid to even touch the courier's message case, much less break the Malwa seal and open the royal instrument. It would have done no good, anyway, since all of them were illiterate.
It was not until two days later, upon the arrival of the first unit of regular troops slogging in pursuit of the escapees, that an officer inspected the message. A high-caste officer, a Malwa as it happened, who was arrogant enough to break the royal seal. Immediately upon reading the message, the officer issued two commands. His first order despatched his best rider to Bharakuccha with the-now much too belated-message. His second order flogged the guards of the relay station. Fifty lashes each, with a split bamboo cane, for gross dereliction of duty.
Still, ten couriers remained. By the end of the second week after the Romans and Ethiopians began their flight south, all ten of these couriers had bypassed the foreigners and were now forging ahead of them. Slowly, to be sure. The foreigners were indeed moving very rapidly, and were steadily outdistancing the great mass of their pursuers. Even the couriers were only able to gain a few miles on them each day. (On average. All of the couriers were taking different roads, and none of those roads was the same as that taken by the foreigners.)
A few miles a day is not much, but it would be enough. The couriers would arrive at the Gulf of Khambat with more than ample time to spread the alarm. Four of them were destined for Bharakuccha itself. By the time the
