The tide of victory

'Don't need to,' said Belisarius aloud, forgetting in the excitement of the moment that neither Khusrau nor Antonina could have followed his mental exchange with Aide. Then, remembering, he began to explain-but Khusrau interrupted him.

'No need to,' he concurred. 'With twenty thousand heavy cavalry I can break any Malwa force in the field. So what if they retreat into their fortresses along the river? I can quickly establish military rule and bring almost the entire population under my control. Keep them working in the fields, providing us with food and billeting while we protect them against Malwa sallies.'

'You'll wind up saving the lives of a lot more peasants this way,' added Antonina quietly. She understood fully, even if Khusrau did not, how heavily the thought of those peasants slaughtered at Malwa hands had weighed upon her husband. Belisarius had hoped to save perhaps a few tens of thousands with his light cavalry expedition. No more than that.

But now-with such a powerful force in the mid-valley.

'We could save almost all of them,' he murmured. Then, giving Khusrau a somewhat stony eye: 'Not that their lives will be all that splendid, under Aryan martial law.'

'Better than being butchered,' retorted Khusrau. 'As for the rest. ' He shrugged. 'I can keep the dehgans from committing any real atrocities. The first few days will be rough, of course. No way to keep such soldiers from pilfering what little treasure there might be and pestering the local women.'

' 'Pestering'!' snorted Antonina.

Again, Khusrau shrugged. 'And so a number of Indian peasants find themselves with bastards soon thereafter. Not even many of those, truth to tell, because my dehgans will be looking for concubines anyway. So they will formalize the relationships, more often than not, and see to the well-being of their new offspring.'

'The peasant men won't like that much,' pointed out Belisarius. He cut off Khusrau's rebuttal with his own. 'But that's neither here nor there. They've doubtless been suffering worse under the Malwa as it is. They'll adjust, soon enough. Especially since Indian peasants are even less inclined than most of the world's peasantry to care two figs who happens to rule their area. As long as their new masters don't tax them dry-you will extend your new tax system to the Indus, yes?-'

Khusrau nodded. 'I'll do more than that. I'll use the Indus as the testing ground. Along with much else.' The emperor began pacing about slowly. 'I'm sure, by now, you have deduced my plans for transforming Aryan society. I've had enough of these damned squabbling noblemen. As much as possible, I intend to duplicate Rome's more efficient and intelligent system. Advancement by merit, not birth, with the new aristocracy tied with ropes to the imperial dynasty.'

Belisarius said nothing. He had not, in fact, 'deduced' any such thing. He had not needed to. Aide, with his encyclopedic knowledge of human history, had long since acquainted the Roman general with the sweeping changes which Khusrau the Just-as future history would have called him-would make in Persian culture and society. Replacing a feudal system with an imperial one, and instituting a tax system so efficient and fairly spread that even the later Moslem conquerors would adopt it for their own.

'The Indus will be the perfect place to plant that shoot,' mused Khusrau. 'My army will be made up almost entirely of modest dehgans from the impoverished eastern borderlands. Not rich and haughty grandees from Mesopotamia. They'll be willing enough, in exchange for land and wealth, to accept new terms of imperial service.'

He clenched his fist. 'And with them to back me, I can deal with any fractious Mesopotamian sahrdaran as roughly as I need to.' He quirked a smile. 'Who knows? Perhaps, upon my eventual death, my designated successor can take the throne without having to wage the usual civil war.'

Belisarius leaned over the map, planting both his hands, and studied the terrain depicted there. 'All right,' he said softly. 'I can see where the land campaign has a good chance for success. A very good chance, actually, since the one thing not even the superhuman mind of Link will be expecting is to see twenty thousand Persian heavy cavalry come charging into the Indus valley out of the Kacchi Desert.'

Chuckling: 'The whole idea's insane, after all. And if there's one thing that damned monster is not, it's given to illogical planning.'

It will never understand the power of such myths as Rustam, came Aide's soft thought. I would never have understood either, had I not spent so many years now living in your mind. And your heart.

True, said Belisarius in reply. In the end, Link and the 'new gods' who sent it here will fail, as much as anything, because they tried to shape humanity's future without ever understanding its soul.

He straightened from the table. 'But that still leaves the naval problem,' he said forcefully. 'The fact is that none of this can possibly succeed without a total mobilization of the entire fleet for the logistical effort. That, and-of course-the actual assault on Barbaricum.'

His next words sounded harsh even to himself, but they needed saying. 'And that, in turn, is impossible so long as the Malwa have that great fleet of theirs in Bharakuccha. At harbor today, yes, but only because of the monsoon. By the time we can take the delta, no matter how fast we move, summer will be over and we will be into autumn. Come November, the change in winds will be upon us. At which point, the Malwa fleet will be able to ravage our own shipping. And because of the inevitable disruption in our careful planning which Antonina's scheme will create, our navy will be ill prepared to fend them off. The only way to get the whole army into the delta ahead of schedule is to transport them by sea instead of having them march. Which will completely tie up all of our shipping, military as well as civilian. Whether we like it or not, the fact is that until the Ethiopians finish expanding their navy-which won't be for months-we haven't got the additional maritime power to make this work. It's as simple as that.'

He gave both of them a stony look. 'Without complete command of the sea-which depends on the Ethiopian fleet-we could easily wind up in exactly the same position we left the Malwa last year-with a huge army stranded, and dying of starvation. We can't possibly weather through the first few months in the Indus simply on the food which the valley's peasants might provide us. Their own situation will have been completely disrupted also. We need our own stable logistics train for that first winter, no matter what else may happen.'

Neither Khusrau nor Antonina responded. They were both bridling at the logic, but neither of them could quite figure out how to gainsay it.

Still, they intended to try, clear enough. Belisarius braced himself for renewed quarrel.

Whereupon came the second royal intervention.

* * *

The doors opened, and Agathius limped in, shouldering his way through the ornate and heavy portals with rough abandon, even knocking one aside with a crutch. He seemed excited-excited enough, at least, that he began speaking in the presence of royalty without so much as a polite cough of apology.

'You won't believe this, but a whole slew of ships just showed up on the horizon. Biggest damn fleet I've ever seen. Axumites, no doubt about it. And if we're interpreting those newfangled flag signals of yours correctly, King Eon himself is leading them.'

Belisarius stared at Khusrau. Then at Antonina.

'You planned this,' he accused.

'Nonsense!' retorted Khusrau. 'How could she?'

'Indeed,' concurred Antonina with demure reproof. 'Just feminine intuition, that's all. As reliable as ever.'

Chapter 20

The Jamuna

Summer, 533 A.D.

The first thing Nanda Lal saw, after Toramana ushered him into his small pavilion, was the statue resting on a small table in a corner. The statue was a representation of Virabhadra, the chief deity in the Mahaveda cult which