Khusrau Anushirvan sprang lightly onto the low wall which surmounted the highest level of Esagila, the ancient ruin which had once been the great temple of the god Marduk. From that vantage point, the Emperor of Persia could gaze south at the huge Malwa army encamped before Babylon.
An instant later, Belisarius joined him. The general took a moment to make sure his footing was good. The wall-almost a battlement-was at least a yard wide, but there was nothing to stop someone who overbalanced from plunging to their death on the stone rubble sixty feet below.
Khusrau smiled.
'Does altitude bother you?' he asked. The question was polite, not scornful.
The Roman general shook his head. 'Not par-ticularly. Still, I wouldn't want to dance up here.'
'Lucky man! I myself am petrified by heights. Anything above the level of horseback.'
Belisarius glanced at the Persian Emperor. In truth, Khusrau's face seemed a bit pinched, as if he were controlling himself by sheer force of will.
He was impressed, again, by the Emperor's self-discipline. Since his arrival in Babylon three days before, Belisarius had been struck by the way Khusrau kept his obviously exuberant and dynamic personality under a tight rein. That same self-control was being manifested now, in the Persian ruler's ability to remain standing on a perch which would have sent most men to their knees seeking safety.
For ten minutes or so, the two men said nothing. They simply stood side by side, studying the battle being waged below them.
Belisarius' attention was immediately drawn by the roar of siege guns. A cloud of gunsmoke, well over a mile distant, indicated the presence of a battery of the huge cannons. After the wind blew the cloud away, he could spot the actual guns themselves. Eight of them, sheltered behind a berm. He recognized the pattern from his previous experience at the siege of Ranapur. His eyes ranged north and south, quickly spotting two more batteries. Another roar, another cloud of gunsmoke, and one of those batteries was also hidden from view.
Belisarius shifted his gaze to the walls of the besieged city. His eyes widened.
The defenses of Babylon were gigantic. The outer ring was so massive that it was impossible, almost, to think of it as anything other than a low ridge. The fortifications were not particularly tall-perhaps twenty feet, no more-but they spanned perhaps forty yards in thickness.
Studying it more closely, Belisarius saw that the outer defenses were actually a triple wall-or, at least, had been so once. The inner wall, some twenty feet wide, was constructed of sun-dried mud brick. Squat towers spaced at regular intervals projected another twenty feet above the wall itself, topped with sheltered platforms for Persian soldiers manning scorpions and other artillery engines. A rubble-strewn space fifty feet wide separated this inner wall from the middle wall. The middle wall was a bit thicker than the inner wall, with no towers. Unlike the inner wall, this wall was made of harder and more durable oven-baked brick.
That same type of brick was used in the third, outermost wall. No space separated this outermost wall from the midwall. The third wall, originally ten feet in thickness, served both as a bulwark for the midwall as well as the escarpment for the huge moat beyond it.
There was not much left of that third wall, however. Over the centuries, peasants had plucked away the good bricks for their own use. Today, the moat which lapped at the crumbled edge of the wall seemed more like a natural river than a man-made artifact. The size of the moat, of course, was partly responsible for producing that impression-Belisarius estimated that it was at least a hundred yards wide.
Belisarius watched a cannonball slam into the outer wall. A little avalanche of broken bricks slid into the moat, leaving a ripple in their wake. Other than that, the siege gun seemed to have made no impact whatsoever.
'At that rate,' he mused, 'they'll fill the moat with rubble and cannonballs before they ever finish breaking down the wall.'
Khusrau snorted.
'We were terrified-myself also, I will admit it-when they first began firing with those incredible machines. 'Siege guns,' as you call them. But after a few days-then weeks, and now months-we have little fear of them. It's ironic, actually. Most of my advisers urged me to make a stand at Ctesiphon, taking advantage of its tall, stone walls. But I think if I had done so-'
'You would have been defeated by now,' concluded Belisarius. 'I have seen these guns in use before, and I have seen the walls of Ctesiphon. Those walls would have been brought down within two months.'
He pointed to Babylon's outer fortifications. 'Whereas this wall-this wide, soft, low wall-is actually more of a berm. Exactly the best kind of defenses against siege guns.'
Both men watched as another cannonball struck the wall-the inner wall, this time. The cannonball buried itself in the crumbly mudbrick, without so much as shaking the tower thirty yards away from the impact.
'The wall just got stronger, I think,' chuckled Khusrau.
'How many assaults have they mounted?' asked Belisarius.
'Seven. The last one was a month ago. No-almost six weeks now.'
The Persian Emperor turned and pointed to his right, toward the Euphrates.
'That one they attempted with barges, loaded with soldiers. It was a massacre. As you can see, the western walls of the city are still standing, almost as they were built by Nebuchadrezzar a thousand years ago. Stonework. Very tall. We poured burning naphtha on them, and sank many of the barges with catapults.'
He elevated his finger, still pointing to the west.
'If they could position their siege guns to the west, they could probably break down those stone walls. But I ordered the dikes and levees broken.'
Belisarius gazed toward the river. It was now late in the afternoon, and the sun's rays were reflected off a vast spread of water. Khusrau, following a Mesopotamian military tradition which went back to the ancient Sumerians, had ordered the flooding of the low ground. Unchecked by manmade obstructions, the Euphrates had turned the entire area west of Babylon into a swamp. Impossible terrain even for an infantry assault, much less the positioning of artillery.
The area east of Babylon had been protected in the same manner. The ancient city was almost an island now, surrounded by water and marshes to the west, east and northeast. The Malwa army held the southern ground. Persian forces still retained control of the narrow causeway which led from the Ishtar Gate on Babylon's northwest side to the northern regions of Mesopotamia. Even after all these months, the Malwa had not been able to surround and isolate the besieged city.
Khusrau looked back to the south.
'The first six assaults were made here. The Malwa suffered great losses in all of them, with no success at all except, temporarily, during the third assault. In that attack, some of their troops-those excellent ones with the strange hair style-'
'Kushans.'
'Yes. About a thousand of them got past the outer fortifications, in three different places. But-'
He shrugged. Belisarius, gazing down, could not help wincing.
'Must have been a slaughter.'
'Yes,' agreed Khusrau. The Emperor pointed at the inner fortifications, which consisted of a second ring of walls positioned about two hundred yards inside the outer ring.
'That is a double wall. The outer wall is twenty feet thick; the inner, fifteen. These fortifications were also built by Nebuchadrezzar. Very clever, he was-or his engineers and architects, at least. You can see that the two walls are separated by a space of twenty feet. The area between is a built-up road, perfect for military traffic. Then, beyond the outer wall, is a low berm. You can't see it from here. But you can see the moat which butts up against that berm. It's fifty yards wide.'
Belisarius shook his head. 'A pure killing ground. If the enemy manages to cross the first moat and fight their way over the outer defenses, they find themselves trapped in the open-with another moat to cross, and still more fortifications to be scaled.'
'That, too, was slaughter. I had the road packed with dehgans and their retainers. It is quite solid and wide enough for horsemen. They were able to fire their bows from the saddle, sheltered by the outer wall, and rush to whatever spot looked most in danger. I don't think we lost more than two hundred men. And that's about how many of the Kushans finally made it back across the outer fortifications alive.'
He began to add something else, but his attention was distracted by the sight of a rocket arching up from the
