The Dance of Time

Chapter 36

The Ganges plain, north of Mathura

As he'd hoped he would, Belisarius caught the Mathura garrison while it was still strung out in marching order.

"They're trying to form up squares," Abbu reported, "but if you move fast you'll get there before they can finish. They're coming up three roads and having trouble finding each other. The artillery's too far back, too." The old bedouin spat on the ground. "They're sorry soldiers."

"Garrison duty always makes soldiers sluggish, unless they train constantly." Ashot commented. "Even good ones."

The Armenian officer looked at Belisarius. "Your orders?"

"Our cataphracts are the only troops we've got who are really trained as mounted archers. Take all five hundred of them-use Abbu's bedouin as a screen-and charge them immediately. Bows only, you understand? Don't even think about lances and swords. Pass down the columns and rake them-but don't take any great risks. Stay away from the artillery. If they're already too far back, they'll never get up in position past a mass of milling infantrymen."

Ashot nodded. "You just want me to keep them confused, as long as I can."

"Exactly." Belisarius turned and looked at the huge column of Rajput cavalry following them. Using the term "column" loosely. Most of the cavalry were young men, eager for glory now that a real battle finally looked to be in the offing. Their ranks, never too precise at the best of times, were getting more ragged by the minute as the more eager ones pressed forward.

"I'm not going to be able to hold them, Ashot," Belisarius said. "That's all right-provided you can keep that Malwa army from forming solid musket-and-pike squares before I get there."

Seconds later, Ashot was mounted and leading his cataphracts forward.

Belisarius turned to the Rajput kings and top officers, who had gathered around him.

"You heard," he stated. "Just try to keep the charge from getting completely out of control."

Dasal grinned. "Difficult, that. Young men, you know-and not many of them well-blooded yet."

Belisarius winced, a little. Young, indeed. At a guess, close to a third of the twenty thousand cavalrymen he had under his command were still teenagers. Being Rajputs, they were proficient with lances and swords, even at that age. But, for many of them, this would be their first real battle.

If the Malwa had solid infantry squares, it'd be a slaughter before Belisarius could extricate his soldiers. Hopefully, the speed of his approach and Ashot's spoiling charge would keep the enemy off-balance just long enough. As impetuous as the Rajputs were certain to be, they'd roll right over that Malwa army if it wasn't prepared for them, even though it outnumbered Belisarius' army by something close to a three-to-two margin.

"We'll just have to hope for the best," he said, trying not to make the lame expression sound completely crippled. "Let's go."

* * *

Kungas and his men had no difficulty at all driving back the first Malwa attempt to force the river. It was a desperate undertaking, as few boats as the enemy had managed to scrounge up. Kungas was a little surprised they'd made the attempt at all. Not a single one of the enemy boats got within thirty yards of the north bank of the Ganges.

"What's that bitch thinking?" wondered Vima. "I thought she was supposed to be smarter than any human alive."

Kujulo shrugged. "How smart can you be, when you've run out of options? Trap a genius in a pit, and he'll try to claw his way out just like a rat. What else can he do?"

* * *

By the time Ashot reached the vanguard of the Malwa army, its commander had managed to get the columns on two of the roads to join forces. But he hadn't had time to get them into anything resembling a fighting formation.

Even moving at the moderate canter needed for accurate bow fire, Ashot needed no more than a few minutes to shred what little cohesion the forward units had. It was becoming obvious that the officers were either inexperienced or incompetent. Perhaps both.

That was not surprising, really. After years of war, the Malwa army like any other would have gone through a selection process with the most capable and energetic officers sent to the front; the sluggards and dull-wits, assigned to garrison duty.

Ashot even considered disobeying Belisarius' order and passing onward to find the artillery. The odds were that he'd be able to rip them up badly, also.

But he decided to forego the temptation. The scattered musket fire being directed at his men didn't pose much of a danger, but if he had the bad luck of catching even a few guns ready to fire and loaded with canister, he'd suffer some casualties-and he only had five hundred men to begin with.

"Back!" he bellowed. "We'll hit the forward units again!"

All he had to do, really, was keep the advance regiments of enemy infantry in a state of turmoil. When the Rajputs struck them, they'd scatter them to the winds-and the fleeing infantrymen would transmit their panic all the way back through the long columns.

Belisarius didn't have to crush this army. All he had to do was send them into a panicky retreat to Mathura. The Malwa officers wouldn't be able to rally their army until it was all the way back into the city. And then, getting them to march out again would take several days.

Long enough, Ashot thought, to enable Belisarius to return to the Ganges and crush the army that really mattered. Link's army.

* * *

The raking fire of the Roman cataphracts on their return did exactly what Ashot thought it would. By the time the last cataphract passed out of musket range, the enemy's front lines were a shambles. Not a single one of the squares the Malwa officers had tried to form was anything more than a mass of confused and frightened men.

The Romans suffered only twenty casualties in the whole affair, and only seven of those were fatalities.

Just blind, bad luck, that Ashot was one of them. As he was almost out of range, a random musket ball fired by a panicked Malwa soldier passed under the flange of his helmet and broke his neck.

* * *

Belisarius didn't find out until later. At the time, he was cursing ferociously, trying to keep the Rajput charge from dissolving into a chaos even worse than that of the enemy's formations.

He failed, utterly, but it didn't matter. The young Rajputs suffered much worse casualties than they needed to have suffered, but their charge was so headlong that they simply shattered the front of the Malwa army. Twenty thousand cavalrymen charging at a gallop would have been terrifying for any army. Experienced soldiers, in solid formations and with steady officers, would have broken the charge anyway. But the Mathura garrison hadn't been in a real battle since many of its units had participated in the assault in Ranapur, years earlier.

They broke like rotten wood. Broke, and then-as Ashot had foreseen-began shredding the rest of the army in their panicked rout.

Belisarius and the kings tried to stop the Rajputs from pursuing the fleeing enemy. There was no need to destroy this army in a prolonged and ruthless pursuit. But it was hopeless. Their blood was up. The glorious great victory those young men eagerly wanted after the wretched business of being simple arsonists was finally at hand-and they wanted all of it.

After a time, Belisarius gave up the effort. The old kings could be relied upon to bring the Rajputs back, when they were finally done, and he'd just gotten word of Ashot.

Sadly, he gazed down on the Armenian's corpse. Ashot's expression was peaceful, with just a trace of surprise showing in his still-open eyes.

He'd been one of the best officers Belisarius had ever had serve under him. So good, and so reliable, that he'd assigned him to serve as Antonina's commander on her expedition to Egypt. Except for Maurice, Belisarius wouldn't have trusted anyone else with his wife's safety.

"Shall we bring him back?" asked Ashot's replacement, a Thracian cataphract named Stylian.

"No. We've got another forced march ahead of us, and who knows what after that? We'll bury him here."

Belisarius looked around. The landscape was typical of the area between the Ganges and the Yamuna. A grassy plain, basically, with fields surrounding the villages and dotted with groves and woods. They hadn't burned here, since Belisarius had seen no reason to.

His eyes were immediately drawn to a grove of sal trees perhaps a quarter of a mile away. The trees were considered holy by many Hindus and Buddhists. The legend had it that the famous Lumbini tract where the Buddha meditated and acquired salvation had been in a grove of sal trees.

"We'll bury him over there," he said. "It seems a good resting place, and it'll be easy to find the grave later."

While Stylian handled that matter, Belisarius organized his cataphracts to help Jaimal and Udai Singh and the old kings round up the Rajputs. That would take the rest of the day, under the best of circumstances. Belisarius could only hope that Link wouldn't be able to move far in the time it took him to get back to the Ganges.

Link had managed to move its army exactly seven miles down the Ganges. What was worse, the foraging parties it had sent out had returned with very little. The constant harassment of the Kushans, even on the south side of the Ganges, made the foragers exceedingly cautious. Kushans were not a cavalry nation in the same sense as Persians and Rajputs, but they seemed to be mostly mounted and just as proficient in the saddle as they were in all forms of warfare.

Link had only three thousand cavalry. Fewer than that, now, after a number of clashes with Kushan dragoons. It could not even stop the Kushans from continuing the scorched earth campaign that Belisarius had begun.

The situation would have been infuriating, if Link had been capable of fury. The burning done by Belisarius' and Kungas' armies prevented Link from marching quickly, foraging as it went. And the Kushan harassment, despite the fact that the Malwa outnumbered them at least two-to-one, made their progress slower still. Link could destroy any Kushan attempt to charge its solid infantry, true enough. But Kungas was far too canny to order any such foolish assault.

And where was Belisarius? Link had no information at all. All the telegraph lines had been cut, and the Kushans ambushed any scouts it sent out. Link was operating as blindly as any commander in human history, except that it had an encyclopedic knowledge of the terrain. But that meant almost nothing, when it had no idea where the main enemy force was to be found in it.

The probability was that Belisarius had left to meet a garrison coming north from one of the large cities. Mathura, most likely.

It was always possible that such a garrison would defeat the Roman general. But Link estimated that probability as being very low. Not more than ten percent, at best. Assuming the far more likely probability that Belisarius would triumph in that battle as he had in almost all others, he and his army would be back at the Ganges within a few days.

By which time, Link and its forces would not have moved more than ten or fifteen miles. Probably ten. Kushan harassment was becoming more intense, seemingly by the hour.

"What shall we do, Great Lady?"

"Continue down the Ganges," Link replied. What else could it say?

When Khusrau and his army reached Chandan, on the Chenab river, the emperor was so taken by the beauty of the town and its setting that he ordered his soldiers not to burn it. He did, however, give them permission to loot the homes and public buildings.

That took little time. Most of the population had fled already, taking their most valuable possessions with them. After his army had crossed the Jhelum and entered the land between that river and the Chenab, the Persians considered themselves in enemy territory. By the terms of the agreement Khusrau had made with the Romans and the new Malwa emperor, after the war this would become Malwa territory. So, they were destroying everything, driving the population south toward Multan, where they'd join a horde of refugees already overburdening the Malwa garrison there.

In an sense, they'd been in enemy territory also, west of the Jhelum, but those lands were destined to become part of the Persian empire, by the provisions of the agreement. So, Khusrau had kept his soldiers under tight discipline, and had refrained from any destruction except where enemy forces put up resistance.

There hadn't been much of that. Apparently, the Malwa commander of the main army in the Punjab had been withdrawing all his detachments in the north in order to reinforce the Malwa lines facing the Romans. Lord Samudra, as he was named, was adopting a completely defensive posture while the Persians and the Kushans invaded the northern Punjab with impunity. For all practical purposes, the Malwa empire's largest and most powerful army had become paralyzed on its western border, while Damodara and Belisarius and Kungas and Khusrau himself drove lances into its unprotected guts.

Khusrau thought Samudra was an idiot. Knew him to be an idiot, rather, since the Persian emperor was well aware that Maurice had no more than fifty thousand Roman troops in the Iron Triangle. Sixty thousand, perhaps, counting the various auxiliary units that were assigned to maintaining the critical supply lines from the Sind. But even including those soldiers, Maurice was still outnumbered well over two-to-one. Probably closer to three-to-one.

With fifty thousand men behind those formidable Roman defensive works, of course, Maurice could hold his own against Samudra. But only on the defensive-and the same was true the other way. Samudra could have easily taken over half his army north to put a stop to Khusrau's expedition and, possibly, even cut off the Kushan army. Depending on where Kungas had taken it, of course. Khusrau suspected the Kushans were already into the Gangetic Plain. If they were able to join forces with Belisarius. .

But while the Malwa commander in the Punjab seemed capable enough, when it came to routine matters, Samudra obviously had not an ounce of initiative and daring. The Malwa regime was not one that fostered independent thinking on the part of its commanders.

Hard to blame them, really. The one great exception to that rule was probably even now battering at the gates of Kausambi.

Damodara was not battering at the gates, as it happened. But he was bringing the siege guns into position to do so.

"Yes, yes, Ajatasutra, I know we hope to enter the city through. . ah, what would you call it? 'Treachery' seems inappropriate."

"Guile and stratagem, Your Majesty," Ajatasutra supplied.

Damodara smiled. "Splendid terms. On my side, anyway."

The new emperor glanced at Narses. The Roman spymaster was perched on the mule he favored, studying the fortifications on the western walls of Kausambi.

It was a knowing sort of examination, not the vacant stare that most imperial courtiers would have given such a purely military matter. Damodara had realized long since that Narses was as shrewd with regard to military affairs as he was with all others. Damodara was quite sure that despite his age, and the fact that he was eunuch, Narses would make an excellent general himself.

What am I going to do with Narses? he asked himself, not for the first time. If I take the throne, do I dare keep such a man around? It'd be like sharing a sleeping chamber with a cobra.

The solution was obvious, but Damodara felt himself resisting that impulse. Whatever else, Narses had served him well for years. Superbly well, in fact. Had even, most likely, kept his family and that of Rana Sanga alive where they would have been murdered by Malwa otherwise.

It would bode ill, Damodara thought, if he began what amounted to a new dynasty in all but name with an act of treachery.

But what else can I do? The Romans certainly won't take him back. And the Persians and the Axumites and the Kushans know his reputation too well to entertain the thought of employing him, either.

What else is there, but an executioner or an assassin's blade?

Perhaps he could have him poisoned. .

Damodara shook his head and went back to the matter immediately at hand.

"You think too much like an assassin, Ajatasutra. When the time comes, Rana Sanga is ready to lead the charge. He'll take ten thousand of his Rajputs. But first we must fix Skandagupta's entire attention on this side of the city. I don't have a large enough army to invest Kausambi, and the emperor-ah, the false emperor-knows it. At least, his commanders will tell him so. So, now that I've massed my troops here before the western gates and"-he gestured with his head toward the heavy artillery berms his engineers were constructing-"am setting up the siege guns I brought from Mathura, he'll concentrate his own troops on these walls, and at these gates."

Whether or not he was inclined to argue the matter, Ajatasutra made no attempt to do so. Instead, he began thoughtfully scratching his chin.

"How long, Emperor? Before you can order Sanga's charge, I mean."

Damodara shrugged. "Hard to know. Not for a few days, certainly."

"In that case, I should return to Kausambi. They could use me there, when the time comes. Whereas here. ."

He waved his hand, indicating the soldiers under Damodara's command who were setting up their own camps and lines of defense against any possible sallies from the city. "Merely one blade among tens of thousands of others."

"Certainly. But. ." Damodara's eyes widened a bit. "Can you get back into the city? By now, the guards will be on the alert for spies."

"Oh, yes. Don't forget that they're mediocre guards, and"-Ajatasutra cleared his throat modestly-"I am very far from a mediocre assassin. I'll get in."

His good humor faded, however, as he contemplated his superb horse. "Alas, the horse won't. Not even sorry garrison troops will think it's a tinker's nag."

He bowed low. "May I present him to Your Majesty, then? A token of my esteem. No! My awe at Your effulgent presence, divine in its aspect."

Damodara laughed. And what was he to do with Ajatasutra, for that matter, if he took the throne? He didn't doubt the assassin's loyalty, but within a few years Ajatasutra's mocking ways would have half the courtiers in Kausambi demanding his head.

But there'd be time enough to deal with that later. First, he had to take Kausambi.

"Go, Ajatasutra. If we're both still alive in a few days, I'll return the horse."

It seemed impolitic to add: You might need it.

* * *

From their position just south of the junction of the Ganges and Yamuna rivers, the five members of the Malwa assassination team stared at the empire's capital city. That part of it they could see looked fine. But they could easily hear the sound of big guns firing to the west.

"Marvelous," snarled the captain. "Just perfect. After ten thousand miles-more like eleven, by now-we finally get back to Kausambi-having succeeded in doing nothing-and the city's under siege."

"We'll never get in," said his lieutenant, morosely. "No way the guards will pass five strange men."

It was true enough. No doubt, ensconced somewhere in the huge imperial palace, were the records that would identify the assassination team and establish their bona fides. Probably, even, two or three of Nanda Lal's subordinates who would recognize them personally. The captain and the lieutenant, at least.

And so what? The odds that any such spymasters would heed a summons from a gate's guards-assuming the guards were willing to send a summons in the first place, instead of simply killing the five assassins and saving themselves a lot of possible trouble-were too low to even think about.

"No hope for it," he sighed. "We may as well cross the Ganges and set up camp on the other side, as close as we can get to the eastern gate. Maybe something will turn up."

His lieutenant eyed the distance. "At least it's not far." He spit on the ground. "We laugh at a few miles, after so many wasted thousands."