The Tide of Victory (46 page)

The shrilling voice in Venandakatra's mind began to shape a name. But he was too paralyzed to really hear.

The shadows moved. The figure stepped forward into the light.

Prowled forward, it might be better to say. He moved more like a predator than a man. Then, as he began slipping an iron-clawed gauntlet over his right hand, assumed the form of a predator completely.

"So now it is time for our unfinished business. Let us dance, Vile One. The dance of death you would have once given my beloved, I now give to you."

Finally, Venandakatra broke through the paralysis. He opened his mouth to scream.

But it never came. It was not so much the powerful left hand clamped on his throat which stifled that scream, as the pure shock of the iron claws on the right hand which drove into his groin and emasculated him.

The agony went beyond agony. The paralysis was total, complete. Venandakatra could not think at all, really. Simply listen to, and observe, the monster who had ruined him.

So strange, really, that a panther could talk.

"I trained her, you know, in the assassin's creed when slaying the foul. To leave the victim paralyzed, but conscious, so that despair of the mind might multiply agony of the body."

The iron-clawed gauntlet flashed again, here and there.

When Venandakatra's mind returned, breaking over the pain like surf over a reef, he saw that he was still standing. But only because that incredible left hand still held him by the throat. Under his own power, Venandakatra would have collapsed.

Collapsed and never walked again. Nor fed himself again. His knees and elbows were . . . no longer really there.

"Enough, I think. I find, as I age, that I become more philosophical."

The monster, still using only the one hand, hefted Venandakatra's body like a man hefts a sack full of manure and drew him toward the corner where it had waited in ambush. On the way, that remote part of Venandakatra's mind was puzzled to see the gray hair in the monster's beard. He had never imagined a panther with a beard of any kind. Certainly not a grizzled one.

Now in the corner, the monster swept aside the heavy curtain over the window. Tore it aside, rather, sweeping the iron claws like an animal. Sudden light poured into the chamber.

When Venandakatra saw the chair now exposed, he suddenly realized how the monster had whiled away the time he spent lurking in ambush. The chair had been redesigned. Augmented, it might be better to say. The remote part of his brain even appreciated the cunning of the design and the sturdiness of the workmanship.

The rest of his mind screamed in despair, and his ruined body tried to obey. But the monster's left hand shifted a bit, the iron claws worked again, and the scream died with the shredded throat which carried it.

"You may bleed to death from that wound, but I doubt it. It certainly won't kill you before the other."

The claws worked again, again, again.

"Not that it probably matters. There are no guards left in this palace to hear you. It seems a great wind has scoured it clean."

Venandakatra now stood naked, his expensive clothing lying tattered about the chamber. The iron claws raked his ribs, the iron left hand turned him. He was now facing away from the chair. His throat and joints leaked blood and ruin.

Despair of the mind, to multiply agony of the body.
That was Venandakatra's last, fully conscious thought, except for the final words of his executioner.

"I thought you would appreciate it, Vile One. You always did favor a short stake."

Abbu leaned over the map and studied it. His face was tense, tight; half-apprehensive and half-angry. The lighting shed by the lamps hanging in Belisarius' command tent brought out all the shadows in the old man's hawk face. Brow and nose were highlighted; thick beard framed a mouth and cheeks in shadows; the eyes were pools of darkness. He looked, for all the world, like a sorcerer on the verge of summoning a demon. Or, perhaps, about to sup with the devil—and wishing he had a longer spoon.

Belisarius glanced quickly around the table. Judging from their stiff expressions, he thought Maurice and Sittas and Gregory were fighting the same battle he was—to keep from laughing outright at the scout chief's reluctance to have anything to do with the
cursed new-fangled device.
The detested, despised—
map
.

Maps were toys for children!
At best.
Real men—father teaching son, generation after generation!—relied on their own eyes to see; their memory to recall; the verbal acuity of a poetic race to describe and explain!

Too bad he doesn't mutter, except in his own mind, mused Aide. I'm sure he could give even Valentinian an education in the art. 

Belisarius' lips tightened still further. If so much as a single chuckle emerged . . .

"Here," rasped Abbu, pointing with a finger at a bend in the Chenab. The mark on the map was recent. So recent the ink had barely dried. Which was not surprising, since Belisarius had just drawn that stretch of the Chenab himself, following Abbu's stiff directions.

"A bit far to the north," rumbled Sittas. Now that real business was being conducted, the big general was no longer having any trouble containing his amusement. His heavy brows were lowered over half-closed eyes, and his lips were pursed as if he'd just eaten a lemon.

Abbu flashed him a dark glance. "Here!" he repeated. "The ships at Uch are big. Both of them. The whole army could be transferred across the river in a single day. And there are good landings at three places on the opposite bank."

He leaned over the map again, his earlier reluctance now lost in the eagerness of a prospective triumph.

"Here. Here. Here." Each word was accompanied by a jab of the finger at a different place on the map, indicating a spot on the opposite bank of the Chenab. "I would use the second landing. Almost no risk there of grounding the ships."

For a moment, Abbu hesitated, reluctant again. But the reluctance, this time, stemmed from simple tradition rather than outrage at newfangled ways. Like any master scout, Abbu hated to allow any imprecision into his description of terrain.

But . . . Abbu was the best scout Belisarius had ever had because the man was scrupulously honest as well as infernally capable. "I can't be certain. We did not cross the river ourselves, because there is no ford. But the river looks to run deep at that second landing, with no hidden sandbars. Not even a beach. So the fishing village built a small pier over the water. Too small for these ships, of course, but the simple fact it is there at all means that we could unload the big ships without running aground."

Sittas was still scowling. "Too far to the north," he grumbled again. "Both the town and the landing across the river. A good twenty or thirty miles past the fork of the Chenab and the Indus. Hell of a gamble." He straightened up and looked at Belisarius. "Maybe we should stick to the original plan. Seize
this
side of the Indus and set up our lines right at the fork itself."

Belisarius did not reply immediately. He understood Sittas' reluctance, but . . .

What a coup if we could pull it off! 
 

You'd have no line of retreat at all, said Aide.

"No line of retreat," echoed Maurice. The chiliarch had no way of hearing Aide's voice, of course, but the situation was so obvious that Belisarius was not surprised their thoughts had run in tandem. "If it goes sour, we'll be trapped in the triangle, bottled up by the Malwa. The Chenab to our right and the Indus to our left."

Sittas shook his head. "I can't say I'm much concerned about
that
. Once we make the thrust into the Punjab—wherever we strike, and wherever we set up our fieldworks—'lines of retreat' are pretty much a delusion anyway."

He gestured toward the army camped just outside the tent, unseen behind its leather walls. "You know as well as I do, Maurice, that we'll have no way to retreat across the country we just passed through. Even if we
could
break contact with the Malwa after the fighting starts. Which isn't too likely, given how badly we'll be outnumbered."

"We've already foraged the area clean," said Belisarius, agreeing with Sittas. "As it was, the thing was tight. If the peasants hadn't been panicked by reports of Malwa massacres in the Sind and fled, we might not have had enough to get this far."

Maurice winced a little, but didn't argue the point. The stretch of territory which Belisarius' army had marched through, with the Indus to one side and the Cholistan desert to the other, had been—just as Aide suspected—far less barren than future history would record. But it had still not been anything which could be called "fertile." If the fleeing peasantry hadn't left a good deal of already collected food behind them, the Roman army would have been forced to move very slowly due to the need for constant foraging.

As it was, they had been able to make the trek in sixteen days—better than Belisarius or his top subordinates had expected. But, in doing so, they had stripped the land clean of all easily collectable food. Trying to retreat through that territory, with much larger forces in pursuit, would be a nightmare. Most of the Roman soldiers would never make it back alive. And it was quite possible that the entire army would be forced to surrender.

"Surrender," into Malwa hands, meant a rather short stint in labor battalions. The Malwa had the charming practice of working their prisoners to death.

"Do or die," said Sittas calmly. "That's just the way it is, regardless of where we hit the enemy in the Punjab."

He leaned over the map, placing both large hands on the table it rested upon. "But I still think it's too much of a risk to go for the inside of the big fork. The problem's not retreat—it's getting supplies from downriver."

Belisarius understood full well the point Sittas was making. In order to reach a Roman army forted up in the fork itself, Roman supply vessels would have to run a gauntlet of enemy fire from the west bank of the Indus. Whereas if the Romans set up their fortifications on the opposite bank of the Indus just below the Chenab fork, the supply ships would be able to hug the eastern shore.

Still—

He scratched his chin. "The ships will
still
have to run the supplies in under fire, Sittas. Not as heavy, I grant you, but heavy enough. The Malwa have already built a major fortress on the west bank of the Indus, still further south, and you can be certain they've positioned big siege guns in it. The river's a lot wider south of the Chenab fork, true enough, but not so wide that those big guns won't be able to carry entirely across. So, no matter where we set up, the supply ships will be under fire trying to reach us."

Maurice started to say something, but his commander cut him off. Belisarius had relied on boldness throughout this campaign. His instincts told him to stay the course.

"I've made up my mind. We'll follow Abbu's proposal. Take Uch in a lightning strike, smash that small Malwa army there, and then use the ships to ferry our army into the triangle. We'll set up our lines across the triangle, as far down into the tip as we need to be to have enough of a troop concentration. Then—"

He straightened. "Thereafter, we'll be relying on the courage of our cataphracts to hold off the Malwa counterattack. And the courage of Menander to bring the supplies we need to hold out. Simple as that."

He scanned the faces of the men at the table, almost challenging them to say anything.

Maurice chuckled. "I'm not worried about their
courage,
general. Just . . . These damn newfangled contraptions of Justinian's better work. That's all I've got to say."

Sittas, like Maurice, was not given to challenging Belisarius once a decision had been made. So, like the excellent officer he was, he moved directly to implementation.

"Leaving the logistics out of it, the position in the fork is the best possible from a defensive point of view. We can design our fieldworks to provide us with continual lines of retreat. The more they press us, the more narrow the front will become as we retreat south into the tip of the triangle. As long as we can provide the men with enough to eat . . ."

Suddenly, he burst into laughter. "And they'll demand plenty, don't think they won't! Ha! Greek cataphracts—half of them aristocrats, to boot—aren't accustomed to digging trenches. They'll whine and grouse, all through the day and half the night. But as long as we keep them fed, they'll do the job."

"They won't have much choice," snorted Abbu. "Even Greek noblemen aren't that stupid.
Dig or die.
Once we cross the Chenab, those are the alternatives."

"I just hope they don't argue with me about the details," grumbled Gregory. "Those hide-bound bastards of Sittas'—on the rare occasions when they think about fieldworks at all—still have their brains soaked in legends about Caesar. The first time I use the words 'bastion' and 'retired flank' and 'ravelin' they're going to look at me like I was a lunatic."

Sittas grinned. "No they won't." He gestured with a thick thumb at Belisarius' chest. "Just tell them the Talisman of God gave you the words. That's as good as saints' bones, far as they're concerned."

Gregory still looked skeptical, but Belisarius was inclined to agree with Sittas. Even the notorious conservatism of Greek noble cataphracts could be dented, on occasion. And all of them, by now, were steeped in the Roman army's tradition of awe and respect for the mysterious mind of Aide.

"If I need to," he chuckled, "I'll give them a look. Aide can put on a dazzling show, when he wants to."

Great, muttered Aide. I travel across the vastness of time in order to become a circus sideshow freak. 

Belisarius was back to scratching his chin. And his crooked smile was making an appearance.

"I like it," he said firmly. "Let's not get
too
preoccupied with logistics. There's also the actual fighting to consider. And I can't imagine better defensive terrain than the triangle."

"Neither can I," chimed in Gregory.