The tide of victory

Chapter 27

The Sind

Autumn, 533 A.D.

Belisarius and his army encountered the first Malwa force shortly after rounding the southern slopes of the Kot Diji hills and crossing the Nara. Fortunately, the Romans had received forewarning that enemy troops were in the vicinity-not from any spies or scouts, but from the stream of refugees coming south from the Indus.

Abbu and his scouts captured a small group of the refugees, what appeared to be an entire extended family. Not knowing their language, he brought the group to the general. Belisarius' fluency in foreign tongues was a byword among his troops. The Talisman of God allowed him to understand any language-even, some said, the speech of animals.

The truth, of course, fell far short of that legend. Aide did provide Belisarius with a great facility for learning foreign languages. But it was not magic, and did not allow Belisarius to understand and speak a language in an instant.

So the group of peasants huddling on the ground before him, with their few belongings strapped to their backs and their one precious cow "guarded" in the center, were unable to communicate with him. In truth, the people were so terrified that Belisarius doubted they would have been able to speak in any event. The eyes of the men and women were downcast. They stared at the soil before them as if, by ignoring the armed and armored men who surrounded them, they could change reality itself.

The children were less bashful. Or, at least, less ready to believe that reality was susceptible to such easy manipulation. They ogled the Roman soldiers around them, wide-eyed and fearful. One young girl-perhaps six or seven-was sobbing wildly, ignoring the way her mother was trying to shake her into silence. Because of the mother's own terror, the shaking was a subdued sort of thing, not the kind of ferocious effort which could hope to subdue such sheer hysteria.

Belisarius winced and looked away. His eyes met those of a boy about the same age. Perhaps the girl's brother; perhaps a cousin. Between the dirt and grime which covered the peasants, and the distortion which fear produced in their faces, it was hard to detect family resemblance. More accurately, family resemblance was buried under the generic similarity which makes all desperate people look well-nigh identical.

The boy was not sobbing. He was simply staring at the general with eyes so open they seemed to protrude entirely from his face. Belisarius gave him a smile. The boy's only reaction was to-somehow-widen his eyes further.

There was nothing of childlike curiosity in those wide eyes. Just a terror so deep that the lad was like a paralyzed rodent, facing a cobra.

"Oh, Christ," muttered Maurice.

Belisarius sighed. He dismissed any thought of trying to interrogate the peasants. They would tell him nothing, in any event. Could tell him nothing, even if he spoke their language. The war had smote the peasants as war always does-like a thunderstorm cast down by distant and uncaring deities, sweeping them aside like debris in a river raging in flood. They would understand nothing of it, beyond chaos and confusion. Troop movements, maneuvers, terrain as a military feature rather than just a path of panic-stricken flight-these were beyond their ken and reckoning.

"Let them go," he ordered. "Make sure you have our own Thracians escort them to the rear. I don't expect there'd be any trouble with other soldiers, but. "

"There's no reason to risk the temptation," finished Maurice, scowling a bit. "Not that these have anything worth stealing, but some of the Greeks-the new ones, not Cyril's men-are starting to complain about the lack of booty."

He eyed one of the peasant girls. Older, she was-perhaps sixteen or seventeen. "They might take out their frustration with other pleasures. And then-" He grated a harsh little laugh. "You'd give the army another demonstration of Belisarius discipline, and we'd look a bit silly charging into battle dragging executed cataphracts behind us."

Belisarius nodded. "The fact these people are here at all tells me what I need to know. The Malwa have started their massacre."

He gathered up the reins of his horse. His brown eyes, usually as warm as old wood, glinted like hard shells in a receding tide. "Which means they'll be spread out and disorganized. So it's time for another demonstration." The next words were almost hissed. "I will put the fear of God in those men. Old Testament fear."

* * *

He fell on the Malwa less than two hours later. Early afternoon it was, by then. The Arab scouts had begun bringing in further reports, this time based on direct observation of the enemy. As Belisarius had expected, the Malwa soldiers were spread out across miles of terrain.

"Some burning, not much," summarized Abbu. The old desert chief's face was tight with anger. "Probably they plan to do the burning later. Now it is just the killing."

That too, Belisarius had also deduced. As they marched forward, the Roman army had encountered other refugees since the first group. The trickle had become a stream, until the entire countryside seemed to have little rivulets of frantic people pouring through it. The Malwa were butchering everyone in the area they could catch. A scorched earth campaign Tamerlane would have been proud to call his own. Tear out the ultimate roots of the land by destroying the work force itself, not simply the products of its labor.

"Is there a depression in the land we can drive them toward?" he asked.

Abbu pointed east by north. "Yes, General. That way, not far-maybe five miles. A little riverbed, almost dry. Runs northwest by southeast."

The scout leader's face tightened still further. The anger was still there, but it was now overlaid with anticipation. He understood immediately Belisarius' purpose.

"Good killing ground," he snarled. "The opposite bank will channel them downriver. Not high, but sharp and steep."

He pointed again, this time more east than north. "There. A small rise slopes down toward our bank of the river, which is shallow."

Belisarius nodded. Then:

"Sittas, take all your cataphracts and flank them on the west. Take Cyril's, too. Roll the bastards up. Don't try to smash them, just herd them toward Abbu's river. As disorganized as they are, they'll run, not fight."

He gave the big Greek general a hard stare. "Run, not fight. As long as you don't corner them."

Sittas returned the stare with a grin. "Stop fussing at me. I do know how to do something other than charge, you know." He began turning his horse. "Besides, I like this plan. We'll show these swine how to run a real slaughter."

Before Sittas had finished, Belisarius was issuing new orders. "Gregory, set up the artillery on that rise. But don't use the mitrailleuse or the mortars unless I give the command. In fact, keep them covered with tarpaulins. I want to keep those weapons a secret as long as possible, and they require special ammunition anyway. Which we need to use sparingly, this early in the campaign. Abbu, guide them there-or have one of your men do it."

As Gregory and Abbu peeled off to set their troops into new motion, Belisarius continued to issue orders. They were obeyed instantly, with one exception.

"No, Mark," said Belisarius forcefully. "I know you want to give your sharpshooters their first real taste of battle, but this is not the time and place. We can't replenish your ammunition from the general stock, and we'll need it later."

He eased any sting out of the rebuke with a slight smile. "You'll have plenty of combat, soon enough. At Sukkur and elsewhere. For today, I just need you to guard the guns. They'll do the killing."

Mark, as always, was stubborn. It was a trait Belisarius had managed to wear down some, over the years. But not much, because in truth he had never really made much of an effort to do so. If there was any single word which captured the spirit of Mark of Edessa, it was pugnacious-a characteristic which Belisarius prized in his officers.

At the Battle of the Pass, that pugnacity had broken a Ye-tai charge like so much kindling. That it would do so again, and again-or die in the trying-was one of the lynchpins of Belisarius' entire campaign.

"The damn artillery doesn't have much ammunition either," grumbled Mark. "And they chew it up like a wolf chews meat."

"They can also chew up enemy troops like a wolf," pointed out Belisarius. "Especially at close range, with canister. And I can keep them restocked from any kind of gunpowder. Even that cruddy Malwa stuff, if I have to. I can't replace your special cartridges easily."

Mark of Edessa knew he had pushed the general as far as he could. Stubborn he was, yes, but not insubordinate. So, still scowling, he trotted off on his horse, venting his resentment by barking his commands to the sharpshooters. He sounded like a wolf himself.

"God help the Malwa if they try to overrun the batteries," said Maurice, smiling grimly. "Mark's been wanting to test the bayonets, too. And don't think he won't, if he gets half a chance."

Maurice too, it seemed, had caught the general bloodlust. "Not that I wouldn't enjoy watching it, mind you. But, you're right-this is not the time and place." He sighed with happy satisfaction. "This is just a time and place for butcher's work."

* * *

By the time the real butchery began, the Malwa were already badly blooded. Sittas, if he had not violated the letter of his orders, had obviously stretched the spirit of them as far as he could. Watching the Malwa soldiers pouring down the river bed in complete disorder, Belisarius knew that Sittas and his Greek cataphracts had "rolled them up" the way a blacksmith rolls a gun barrel-with hammer and flame.

Belisarius had chosen to take his own position with the artillery and the sharpshooters. These were his least experienced troops-in the use of these weapons, at any rate-and he wanted to observe them in action.

The slant of the terrain gave him a view of at least half a mile of the riverbed. The first Malwa units had almost reached the slight bend where he intended to hold them. Behind, moving more like fluid water than solid men, came enough enemy soldiers to fill the riverbed from bank to bank.

"How many, do you think?"

Maurice shook his head. "Hard to say, exactly, with a mob like that. At a guess, we'll wind up facing maybe twelve thousand."

That was a little higher than Belisarius' own estimate, but not by much. He nodded, continuing to study the oncoming enemy. Some of the Malwa soldiers, perhaps instinctively sensing a trap, were trying to clamber out of the riverbed over the shallow southwestern bank. But Sittas-who, for all the fury with which he could drive home a charge, was as shrewd as any cataphract commander in the Roman army-had foreseen that likelihood. So he had peeled off Cyril's men to flank the enemy yet again. The Greek cataphracts were already on the southwestern bank, ready and eager to drive the Malwa back with lance and saber.

A few Malwa tried to clamber over the opposite bank. But, as Abbu had said, that far bank was steep if not especially high. Close to vertical, in many places; and, nowhere that Belisarius could see, shallow enough to allow a man to scamper rather than climb.

The opposite bank ranged in height from eight to twelve feet. Not much of a climb, perhaps-except for a man laden with armor and weapons, being driven in a packed crowd of confused and frightened soldiers. Not many of the Malwa even attempted to make that climb, and most of them were swept off the bank by their fellows pouring past in a rout. And for the few who made it, the ground beyond proved no refuge in any event. Abbu and his Arabs had crossed the riverbed and taken up positions on the opposite bank half an hour earlier. Their lances and sabers were just as eager as those of the cataphracts.

"It's working," said Maurice. "Damned if it's not."

Belisarius nodded. His tactics for this battle were proving themselves in action. Sittas and the main body of cataphracts had caught the Malwa infantry spread out, in the open. And the forces were evenly matched-twelve thousand against twelve thousand. The heavily armed and armored cavalry might be "obsolete" in this new age of gunpowder weapons, but obsolescence does not happen overnight.

A cataphract charge struck like a mailed fist. Well-organized and prepared troops could withstand such a charge, even bloody and break it, with pikemen shielding musketeers and volleys coming like clockwork thunder. But an army caught off-guard, driven off balance and never allowed to regain it, was like grain in a thresher.

Routed soldiers, like water, will follow the path of least resistance. Especially with Sittas and his cataphracts pouring into the riverbed themselves and driving the Malwa before them. With Cyril and his men guarding the shallow bank and Abbu guarding the other, almost the entire Malwa army was being herded toward the guns. Penned into a perfect killing ground.

The rise where Gregory had stationed the field guns had a clear line of fire into the river bed, and at enough of an angle to enfilade the coming troops. There remained only to place the "stopper" in the bottle.

"Now, I think," said Maurice.

Belisarius nodded. The chiliarch made a motion and the cornicenes began blowing. The Thracian bucellarii, awaiting the signal, trotted across the riverbed some two hundred yards down and took up positions. As the lead elements of the Malwa spotted them, they began slowing their pell-mell race. Several of them stopped entirely. Behind them, the Malwa soldiers started piling up in a muddle. They formed a perfect target for cannon fire, not more than four hundred yards away-almost too close, for round shot.

Belisarius leaned toward Gregory, who was sitting a horse to his left. "You're loaded with round shot, or canister?"

"Round shot," came the immediate and confident reply. "On that ground-most of the near bank is shale and loose rock-the ricochets will work as well as canister. And I've got more round shot than anything else."

Belisarius wasn't quite sure Gregory was right, but he wasn't about to second-guess him and order the guns reloaded. In truth, the artillery commander was more experienced at this than he was, at least in training and theory. This would be the first time ever in the Malwa war that either side used field guns as the major element in a battle. And since the range was at the outer limits of canister effectiveness, anyway.

"Go ahead, then. Fire whenever you're-"

"Fire!" bellowed Gregory, waving his arm. The cornicenes, waiting for the cue, began blowing the call. But the sound of the horns was almost instantly drowned under the roar of the guns. Gregory's entire battery-thirty-six three-pounders-had fired at once.

That volley. did much less than Belisarius expected. True, a number of Malwa soldiers went down-ripped in half, often enough. But instead of cutting entire swaths, the volley had simply punched narrow holes in the packed mass of soldiers.

He rose up in his stirrups, now tense. His whole battle plan depended on those field guns. And he didn't want to be forced to use the mitrailleuse and the mortars this early in the campaign. He turned to Gregory, about to order a switch to canister.

But Gregory was no longer there. The artillery commander had sent his horse trotting behind the guns. Gregory was up in his own stirrups, bellowing like a bull.

"Down, you sorry bastards! Lower the elevation! I want grazing shots, damn you!"

The artillerymen were working feverishly. In each gun crew, two men were levering up the barrels while the gun captain sighted by eye. On his command, a fourth man slid the quoin further up between the barrel and the transom, lowering the elevation of the gun and shortening the trajectory of the fire. That done, they raced to reload the weapons. Again, with the cast iron balls of simple round shot.

Belisarius hesitated, then lowered himself down to his saddle. He still wasn't sure Gregory was right, but.

Good officers need the confidence of their superiors. Best way for a general to ruin an army is to meddle.

While the guns were reloading, the Greek cataphracts who were now massing on the southwestern slope began firing their own volleys of arrows into the packed mass of Malwa troops in the riverbed. As Belisarius had insisted-he wanted to keep his own casualties to a minimum-Sittas and Cyril were keeping the armored horse archers at a distance. But, even across two hundred yards, cataphract arrows struck with enough force to punch through the light armor worn by Malwa infantrymen.

Belisarius could see a knot of Malwa begin to form up and dress their ranks. Somewhere in that shrieking and struggling pile of soldiers, apparently, some officers were still functioning and maintaining order. Good ones, too, from the evidence-within the few minutes it took for the Roman guns to reload, they managed to put together a semblance of a mass of pikemen, flanked by musketeers. Within a minute or so, Belisarius estimated, they would begin a charge.

He glanced at his own artillerymen. They were getting ready to fire again, waiting for Gregory to give the order. Belisarius moved his eyes back to the enemy. He wanted to study the effect of this next volley. "Grazing shots," Gregory had demanded. Belisarius understood what he meant, but he was uncertain how effective they'd be.

"Fire!" The cannons belched smoke and fury. Then-

"Sweet Mary," whispered Belisarius.

Gregory got his wish. Almost all of the cannonballs struck the ground anywhere from twenty to fifty yards in front of the Malwa soldiery. Three-pound cast-iron balls came screaming in at a low trajectory, hit the ground, and caromed back up into the enemy at knee to shoulder level. Where the first volley had plunged into the middle and rear of the Malwa soldiery, killing and maiming a relative few, this volley cut into them from front to back.

Far worse than the balls themselves, however, was the effect of the ricochets. The ground which those cannonballs struck was loose rock and shale. The impact sent stones and pieces of stone flying everywhere. For all practical purposes, solid shot had struck with the impact and effect of explosive shells. For each Malwa torn by the balls, four or five others were shredded by stones.

Most of those ricochet wounds, of course, were not as severe as those caused by the cannonballs themselves. But they were severe enough to kill many soldiers outright, cripple as many more, and wound almost anyone not sheltered from the blow.

That single volley also put paid to the charge the Malwa were trying to organize. Whether by accident or design, the worst effects of the cannon fire were felt by the semi-organized men in the middle.

The riverbed was a shrieking, blood-soaked little valley now. The cataphracts continued their own missile fire while the guns reloaded again.

"Fire!"

Another round of perfect grazing shots. Belisarius was beginning to sicken a little. Through his telescope, he could see Malwa soldiers trying to stand up, slip and slide on bloody intestines and every other form of shredded human tissue, fall, stagger to their feet again.

He lowered the telescope and waved at Sittas. But then, seeing that the big Greek general was preoccupied with keeping his men from moving too close and therefore hadn't seen his wave, Belisarius turned in his saddle and shouted at the cornicenes. For a moment, the buglers just stared at him.

Cease fire was the last order they had been expecting to blow. But, seeing 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."

He went back to lounging against the cannon, and patted the heavy flank of the great engine of war with a thick and powerful hand. "Soon enough-soon enough-we will finally break that blockade. Break it into pieces."

Antonina sighed. Abstractly, she knew that Eon was right. Right, at least, about the dangers of the voyage itself.

A long voyage that had been, and in the teeth of the monsoon's last days. The entire Axumite warfleet had sailed directly across the Erythrean Sea, depending entirely on their own seamanship-and the new Roman compasses which Belisarius had provided them-to make landfall. A voyage which would, in itself, become a thing of Ethiopian legend. Had the negusa nagast not led the expedition personally, many of the Ethiopian sailors might well have balked at the idea.

But, just as Eon and his top officers had confidently predicted weeks before, the voyage had been made successfully and safely. That still left.

A voyage, no matter how epic, is one thing. Fighting a successful battle at the end of it, quite another.

Antonina went back to fretting. Again, her eyes were affixed to the view through the foredeck.

"Silly woman!" exclaimed Eon. "We are still hours away. That Malwa fleet at Chowpatty is so much driftwood. Be sure of it!"

Again, for a moment, her fears lightened. Eon's self-confidence was infectious.

To break the Malwa blockade. Break it into pieces!

Such a feat, regardless of what happened with Belisarius' assault on the Sind, would lame the Malwa beast. The Maratha rebellion had already entangled the enemy's best army. With Suppara no longer blockaded, the Romans would be able to pour supplies into Majarashtra. Not only would Damodara and Rana Sanga be tied down completely-unable to provide any help to the larger Malwa army in the Indus-but they might very well require reinforcements themselves. Especially if, after destroying the Malwa fleet at Chowpatty which maintained the blockade of Suppara, the Ethiopian fleet could continue on and.

That "and" brought a new flood of worries. "It'll never work," Antonina hissed. "I was an idiot to agree to it!"

"It was your idea in the first place," snorted Ousanas.

"Silly woman!" she barked. "What possessed sane and sensible men to be swayed by such a twaddling creature?"

* * *

The Roman army made camp that night eight miles further north of the "battle" ground. North and, thankfully, upwind.

Just before they did so, they came upon the ruins of a peasant village. Bodies were scattered here and there among the half-wrecked huts and hovels.

There was a survivor in the ruins. An old man, seated on the ground, leaning against a mudbrick wall, staring at nothing and holding the body of an old woman in his arms. The woman's garments were stiff with dried blood.

When Belisarius rode up and brought his horse to a halt, the old man looked up at him. Something about the Roman's appearance must have registered because, to Belisarius' surprise, he spoke in Greek. Rather fluent Greek, in fact, if heavily accented. The general guessed that the man had been a trader once, many years back.

"I was in the fields when it happened," the old man said softly. "Far off, and my legs are stiff now. By the time I returned, it was all over."

His hand, moving almost idly, stroked the gray hair of the woman in his arms. His eyes moved back to her still face.

Belisarius tried to think of something to say, but could not. At his side, Maurice cleared his throat.

"What is the name of this village?" he asked.

The old peasant shrugged. "What village? There is no village here." But, after a moment: "It was once called Kulachi."

Maurice pointed over his shoulder with a thumb. "Today, we destroyed the army which did this. And now, as is Roman custom, we seek a name for the victory."

Belisarius nodded. "Quite right," he announced loudly. "The Battle of Kulachi, it was."

Around him, the Roman soldiers who heard growled their satisfaction. The peasant studied them, for a moment, as if he were puzzled.

Then, he shrugged again. "The name is yours, Roman. It means nothing to me anymore." He stroked the woman's hair, again, again. "I remember the day I married her. And I remember each of the days she bore me a child. The children who now lie dead in this place."

He stared to the south, where a guilty army was bleeding its punishment. "But this day? It means nothing to me. So, yes, you may have the name. I no longer need it."

On the way out of the village, several soldiers left some food with the old man. He seemed to pay no attention. He just remained there, stroking a memory's hair.

* * *

Aide did not speak for some time thereafter. Then, almost like an apology:

If you had been a blacksmith, this would have happened also. Ten times over, and ten times worse.

Belisarius shrugged. I know that, Aide. And tomorrow the knowledge will mean something to me. But today? Today it means nothing. I just wish I could have been a blacksmith.