The tide of victory

'Thereafter, of course, disaster will follow.' Abbu's thick beard jounced with satisfaction. 'Disaster and ruin. The cannons will not arrive in time. The seaward assault will fail miserably, most of your newfangled gunships adrift or sunk outright. Your army will starve outside the walls of the city.'

'Barbaricum doesn't have any walls,' commented Belisarius mildly. 'The cannons we're offloading are mostly to stop any relief ships bringing reinforcements from upriver. If there are any, that is. Khusrau should be starting his own attack out of the Kacchi desert any day now. Who knows? He may have begun already.'

Abbu was not mollified. 'Persians! Attacking through a desert? By now, half of them are bones bleaching in the sun. Mark my words, General of Rome. We are destined for an early grave.'

Belisarius had to fight to keep from grinning. Abbu's high spirits were infectious. From years of working with the old bandit-in-all-but-name, Belisarius knew full well that Abbu's confidence stood in direct-and inverse- proportion to his grousing. A gloomy and morose Abbu was a man filled with high morale. A cheerful Abbu, dismissing all danger lightly, was a man with his back to the wall and expecting imminent demise.

'Be off, Abbu,' Belisarius chuckled. 'Clear any and all Malwa from my path.'

'That!' The Arab scout began to turn away, heading for his horse. 'That! The only thing which will go as planned!'

Within a minute or so, Abbu was over the side and organizing the Arab outriders. Within ten minutes, hundreds of lightly armed Arabs-from many ships-were disappearing into the darkness. Moving as swiftly as any light cavalry on earth, they would fall on any Malwa troops outside Barbaricum's shelter and either kill them or drive them into the port.

When the last Arab had vanished into the purple gloom of a barely breaking day, Belisarius turned to Maurice.

'So? Where are your predictions of catastrophe?'

Maurice grunted. 'Abbu said it all. Nothing to add.'

A heavier clattering began. The first of the Roman warhorses were being brought onto the deck, and the heavily armored cataphracts were clumping around to lead them off the ship.

Maurice's face seemed to lighten a bit. Or, perhaps, it was simply that daylight was beginning to spread. 'Might not be so bad, though. Abbu always was a pessimist. We might be able to fight our way back through the mountains, after the disaster, with maybe a tenth of the army still alive.'

By the time Belisarius caught sight of Barbaricum, the city was already burning. Burning fiercely, in fact-far more than any city made primarily from mudbrick should have been.

'No way the ships' guns caused that,' said Maurice.

Belisarius shook his head. He halted his horse atop a slight rise in the landscape-more like a little mound of dry mud than a 'rise'-and cocked an ear. He couldn't see the Roman fleet beyond the port, but he could hear the sound of its cannonade.

'Sounds good, though,' he said quietly. 'I don't think the fleet has suffered much damage.'

He listened for perhaps five minutes longer. Only once, in that time, did he hear the deeper roar of one of the Malwa siege guns positioned to protect the harbor. And even that one sounded odd. Slightly muted, as if-

'They're using light powder loads,' said Gregory. The commander of the artillery force which was off-loading onto the delta-miles behind them, now-had accompanied Belisarius and Maurice. 'Looks like you were right, General. They're saving it for something else.'

Belisarius left off listening to the cannon fire and studied Barbaricum. Much of the city was invisible, shrouded in smoke. But, here and there, he could see portions of the mudbrick buildings which made up most of the city's outlying areas.

Barbaricum was an unwalled city. But its residential areas were so tightly packed, one building abutting another, that at a superficial glance they appeared to form a defensive wall. The more so since, so far as he could see, there were no windows in any of the exterior walls of the buildings. That might be due to conscious planning, but Belisarius suspected it was simply a matter of cost. The population of Barbaricum, as the name itself implied, was polyglot and largely transient. The simplest and cheapest construction would be the norm.

He reached down into a saddlebag and pulled out his telescope. Then, looking for gaps in the smoke, he began studying the few alleyways which opened into the city's interior. Still, he could see hardly anything. The alleyways were narrow and crooked, providing only short lines of sight. Needless to say, they were filled with refuse. Only one of the alleys-the one Belisarius focused his attention upon-provided a glimpse of more than a few yards into Barbaricum.

A sudden lull in the cannon fire, perhaps combined with a slight shift in the wind, allowed him for the first time to hear sounds coming from the city itself. Sounds of screaming.

'You were right,' repeated Gregory. The words were almost hissed.

Belisarius tightened his jaws. As soon as Gregory began to speak, he had caught sight through the telescope of the first signs of movement in the city. Four people, dressed in rags-two women and two children, he thought- were running down one of the alleyways. Trying to get out of the city.

As he watched, one of the women stumbled and fell. For a moment, Belisarius thought she had tripped over some of the refuse in the alley. Twisted an ankle or broken a bone, judging from the way she was writhing on the ground. Her face was distorted by a grimace. Belisarius could hear nothing, but he was quite sure she was screaming.

Then he spotted the arrow sticking out of the back of the woman's leg. An instant later, another arrow took her in the ribs. Now he could hear her screams.

When the woman fell, one of the children had stopped and hesitated. Began to turn back, until the other woman grabbed the child and resumed the race to get out of the city.

Too late. Three soldiers came into sight, racing down the alley. A second or two later, a Mahaveda priest became visible also. The priest was shouting something. When the soldiers reached the wounded woman lying in the alley, one of them paused just long enough to slash her neck with a sword. Arterial blood spurted against the grimy walls of the nearest building.

The other two soldiers kept up their pursuit of the surviving woman and the two children. The refugees were now almost out of the city.

Behind him, Belisarius heard one of his bodyguards snarling a curse. Priscus, that was-his eyesight was superb, and he had no need of a telescope to follow what was happening.

'We could maybe reach-' said the cataphract, uncertainly.

Before Belisarius could shake his head, Aide's voice was ringing in his mind.

No! No! That city is a death-trap!

Belisarius sighed. He lowered the telescope and turned his head.

'I'm sorry, Priscus. We can't risk it. The Malwa started those fires, not our cannons. That was deliberate. They always knew they couldn't hold Barbaricum against a serious assault. Not so long as we control the sea. So they're starting the scorched earth policy right here. And, as I feared-and expected-that will include slaughtering the populace.'

He turned back, forcing himself to watch the last moments, though he saw no reason to use the telescope. The two soldiers had overtaken the fleeing woman and children just outside the city. Blades flashed in the distance. Then, moving more slowly, the two soldiers jogged back to their fellow and the priest, who were standing at the mouth of the alley. Once the small party was reunited, they began prowling back into the city's interior. They reminded Belisarius of scavengers, searching rubbage for scraps of food.

'Fucking animals,' snarled Priscus. 'But wait till they try to leave themselves.'

The cataphract's eyes ranged the landscape behind the small command party. The sight seemed to fill his hard face with satisfaction.

Already, columns of Roman troops could be seen marching through the flat terrain. Some of those soldiers were following the path left by Belisarius and his party. Most of them, however, were ranging inland. Within a few hours, Barbaricum would be surrounded by the Roman army. The city was already surrounded by a cavalry screen.

'No prisoners,' Priscus growled. He gave Belisarius a hard, almost angry stare. The Roman commander's policy of not allowing atrocities had, over the past two years, become firmly established throughout his army. With, as always, his personal household troops-bucellarii, as the Romans called them-ready to