The tide of victory

Belisarius' glare, they obeyed with alacrity.

Startled, Gregory and his artillerymen lifted their heads. Belisarius swore under his breath.

'Not you, Gregory! You keep firing! I want the cataphracts to hold their fire!'

Gregory nodded and went back to his work. Sittas, meanwhile, started trotting-then cantering-his horse toward Belisarius. Seeing him come, Belisarius didn't know whether to scowl or smile. He had no doubt at all that Sittas was going to protest the order.

But, to his surprise, when Sittas pulled up his horse the big man was smiling broadly.

'I was going to chew your head off-respectfully, of course-until I figured it out.' He hefted himself up in the stirrups and studied the Malwa. Another volley of cannon fire ripped them again.

'You've got no intention of finishing them off, do you?' The question was obviously rhetorical. 'Which means we wouldn't be able to recover our arrows. No small problem, with our light supply train, if we use up too many this early in the campaign.'

It had been a long time since Belisarius had actually been on campaign with his barrel-chested friend. Sittas looked so much like a boar-and acted the part, often enough-that Belisarius had half-forgotten how intelligent the man was underneath that brawler's appearance.

'No, I'm not. At close quarters, we'll suffer casualties, no matter how badly they're battered. There's no purpose to that, not with almost the whole campaign still ahead of us.' For a moment, he studied the enemy. 'That army's finished, Sittas. By the end of the day, what's left of that mass of men will be of no military value to the Malwa for weeks. Or months. That's good enough.'

Sittas nodded. 'Pity not to finish 'em off. But, you're right. Cripple 'em and be done with it. We've got other fish to fry and'-he glanced up at the sun-'at this rate we can still manage to make another few miles before making camp.'

He gave the bleeding Malwa his own scrutiny. Then, with a grimace: 'No way we want to camp anywhere near this place. Be like sleeping next to an abattoir.'

* * *

For the next half an hour, Belisarius forced himself to watch the butchery. Eight more volleys were fired in that time. That rate of fire could not be maintained indefinitely, since firing such cannons more than ten shots per hour over an extended period ran the risk of having them become deformed or even burst from overheating. But against such a compact and massed target, eight volleys was enough. More than enough.

For Belisarius, too, this was the first time he had been able to see with his own eyes the incredible effectiveness of field artillery under the right conditions. He had planned for it-he wouldn't have made the gamble this whole campaign represented without that presumption-but, still.

Gustavus Adolphus' guns broke the imperialists at Breitenfeld, said Aide softly. And those men in that riverbed are neither as tough nor as well led as Tilly's were.

Belisarius nodded. Then sighed. But said nothing.

I know. There are times you wish you could have been a blacksmith.

Belisarius nodded; sighed; said nothing.

By the end of that half-hour, Belisarius decided to break off the battle. There was no point in further butchery, and the Malwa soldiers were finally beginning to escape from the trap in any event. By now, corpses had piled so high in the riverbed that men were able to clamber over them and find refuge on the steep, opposite bank. Abbu and his Arabs were no longer there to drive them back. Belisarius had pulled them back, fearing that some of the light cavalry might be accidentally hit by misaimed Roman cannons-as he and Agathius' cataphracts had been at the battle of Anatha, by Maurice's rocket fire.

Most of the killing was done by the big guns, but not all of it. Twice, early on, bold and energetic Malwa officers succeeded in organizing sallies. One sally charged down the riverbed toward the Thracian bucellarii, the other upstream against Sittas' Greeks. Both were driven back easily, with relatively few casualties for the armored horsemen.

Thereafter, Belisarius gave the Malwa no further opportunities for such sallies. To his delight, Mark of Edessa was finally able to give his sharpshooters their first test in battle. Whenever it seemed another group of officers was beginning to bring cohesion back to some portion of the Malwa army bleeding to death in the riverbed, Belisarius would give the order and concentrated fire from the sharpshooters would cut them down. Mark's men, shooting weapons which were modeled after the Sharps rifle, were still indifferent marksmen by the standards of the nineteenth-century America which would produce those guns. But they were good enough, for this purpose.

By the time Belisarius broke off the engagement, the enemy forces had suffered casualties in excess of fifty percent. Far more than was needed to break almost any army in history. The more so because the casualty rate was even higher among officers, and higher still among those who were brave and capable. For all practical purposes, a Malwa army had been erased from the face of the earth.

Even Maurice pronounced himself satisfied with the result. Of course, Maurice being Maurice, he immediately moved on to another problem. Maurice fondled worries the way another man might fondle a wife.

'None of this'll mean shit, you understand, if the Ethiopians can't give us supremacy at sea.' The comfort with which he settled back into morose pessimism was almost palpable. 'Something will go wrong, mark my words.'

* * *

'I can't see a damned thing,' complained Antonina, peering through the relatively narrow gap between the foredeck's roof and the bulwarks which shield the cannons in the bow.

'You're not supposed to,' retorted Ousanas, standing just behind her. 'The sun is down. Only an idiot would make an attack like this in broad daylight on a clear day.'

Scowling, Antonina kept peering. She wasn't sure what annoyed her the most-the total darkness, or the endless hammering of rain on the roof.

'What if we go aground?' she muttered. Then, hearing Ousanas' heavy sigh, she restrained herself.

'Sorry, sorry,' she grumbled sarcastically. 'I forget that Ethiopian seamen all sprang full-blown from the brow of Neptune. Can see in the dark, smell a lee shore-'

'They can, as a matter of fact,' said Ousanas. 'Smell the shore, at least.'

'Easiest thing in the world,' chimed in Eon. The negusa nagast of Axum was standing right next to Ousanas, leaning on one of the four cannons in the bow. In the covered foredeck of the large Ethiopian flagship, there was far more room than there had been in the relatively tiny bow shield of the Victrix.

'People call it the 'smell of the sea,' ' he added. 'But it's actually the smell of the seacoast. Rotting vegetation, all that. The open sea barely smells at all.' He gestured toward the lookout, perched on the very bow of the ship. 'That's what he's doing, you know, along with using the lead. Sniffing.'

'How can anyone smell anything in this wretched downpour?' Antonina studied the lookout. The man's position was well forward of the roof which sheltered the foredeck. She thought he looked like a drowned rat.

At that very moment, the lookout turned his head and whistled. Then whistled again, and twice again.

Antonina knew enough of the Axumite signals to interpret the whistles. Land is near. Still no bottom.

For a moment, she was flooded with relief. But only for a moment.

'We're probably somewhere on the Malabar coast,' she said gloomily. 'Six hundred miles-or more! — from Chowpatty.'

Suddenly she squealed and began dancing around. Eon was tickling her!

'Stop that!' she gasped, desperately spinning around to bring her sensitive ribs away from his fingers.

Eon was laughing outright. Ousanas, along with the half dozen Axumite officers positioned in the foredeck, was grinning widely.

'Only if you stop making like Cassandra!' boomed Eon. Who, at the moment, looked more like a very large boy than the Ethiopian King of Kings. A scamp and a rascal-royal regalia and vestments be damned. The phakhiolin, as Ethiopians called their version of an imperial tiara, was half-askew on Eon's head.

With a last laugh, Eon stopped the tickling. 'Will you relax, woman? Ethiopian sailors have been running the Malwa blockade of Suppara for almost two years now. Every ship in this fleet has half a dozen of those sailors aboard as pilots. They know the entire Maratha coastline like the back of their hand-good weather or bad, rain or shine, day or night.'