The Dance of Time: Chapter Twenty Seven

The Iron Triangle

    At least Emperor Khusrau had enough sense to leave his Persian army on the west bank of the Indus, when he came storming into Maurice’s bunker on the Iron Triangle. In point of fact, Maurice wouldn’t have allowed him to bring them across—and he, not the Persians, controlled the rivers. The Iranians had nothing to match the Roman ironclad and fireship.

    Still, even Khusrau alone—in his current mood—would have been bad enough. Surrounded as he was with enough sahrdaran to pack the bunker, he was even worse. And the fact that Maurice was sure the Persian emperor was mostly playing to the audience didn’t improve his own mood at all.

    “—not be cheated!”

    Maurice had had enough. “Cheated?” he demanded. “Who is ‘cheating you’, damnation?” He had just enough control of his temper left to add: “Your Majesty.”

    Maurice pointed to the west wall of the bunker. “Take as much as you can over there, for all I care! But don’t expect me to do your fighting for you!”

    Several of the sahrdaran hissed angrily, one of them very loudly. That was a sahrdaran in his early forties whose name was Shahrbaraz. He was the oldest son of the leader of the Karin family, which was one of the seven great sahrdaran houses and perhaps the most influential after the Suren.

    Maurice glared at him, still pointing at the west wall. “Why are you here, hissing at me—instead of fighting to take the land you claim is yours?”

    Shahrbaraz started to respond angrily, but the emperor waved him down.

    “Be silent!” Khusrau commanded. He gave Maurice a fine glare of his own. “May I then assume that you will not object if I launch my own offensive?”

    “Not in the least.”

    “And you will not object if we retain the land we conquer?”

    Maurice snatched up the messages on the center table and shook them at the emperor. Those were copies of the exchange between Belisarius and Damodara that had taken place days earlier. “How many times do I need to show this to you? Your Majesty. Whatever you can take west of the river is yours. As far north as you can manage to get.”

    “To the Hindu Kush!” shouted one of the other sahrdaran. Maurice couldn’t remember his name, but he was a prominent member of the house of the Spandiyads.

    By a mighty struggle, Maurice managed not to sneer. “I’d recommend you stop at the foot of the Hindu Kush. Keeping in mind that King Kungas counts the Vale of Peshawar as part of it. Everything north of Kohat Pass and west of Margalla Pass belongs to him, he says. But if you think you can roll over the Kushans as well as the Malwa, so be it.”

    “And when have the Aryans cared—”

    “Be silent!” Khusrau roared again. This time, thankfully, it was the Spandiyad who was the recipient of his imperial glare. “We are not at war with the Kushans,” he stated. “All of the west Punjab to the Hindu Kush. We will stop once we have reached the passes into the Vale of Peshawar held by our allies the Kushans.”

    The emperor glanced down at the half-crumpled pile of messages. “As all have now agreed,” he finished, more softly.

    When he looked up at Maurice, he seemed considerably calmer. “Will your gunships provide us with protection from the Malwa ironclads?”

    Maurice shook his head. Not angrily, but firmly nonetheless. “We can’t, Your Majesty. I’m sorry, but we just can’t. Neither the Justinian nor the Victrix is a match for them. Not even one of them, much less the two they have stationed on the Indus. That’s why we laid the mine fields across the rivers. Once you move north of those minefields, you’ll be on your own. I recommend you keep your army away from the rivers. Far enough away to be out of range of the ironclads’ guns.”

    Khusrau didn’t seem surprised by the response. Or angry, for that matter. He simply grunted softly and turned away.

    “To the Hindu Kush!” he bellowed, striding toward the exit of the bunker.

    Within a minute, they were all gone.

    “Thank God,” muttered Maurice. “Can’t stand Persians. Never have liked the arrogant bastards. Think their shit doesn’t stink.”

    “It certainly does,” sniffed Anna. She’d happened to be present in the bunker, visiting her husband, when the Persian delegation arrived. “I’ve visited their camps, on the way up here. Their sanitary practices would cause a hyena to tremble.”

    Maurice chuckled. “Worse than the natives here?”

    “Yes, as a matter of fact,” Anna replied stiffly. “Even before I started governessing them. Today, the Punjabi habits are much better. A week from now—well, a month—there’ll be no comparison at all.”

    Maurice didn’t doubt it, although he thought Anna’s estimate of one month was wildly optimistic. The difficulty wasn’t so much native resistance—perhaps oddly, the Punjabis seemed quite taken by their new “Governess”—as it was the sheer scale of the problem.

    Malwa armies were always notorious for their rough habits with local populations. The huge Malwa army dug in to the north of the Triangle was behaving especially badly, as packed in as those soldiers were and suffering all the miseries and frustrations of siege warfare. The Iron Triangle had become a refuge for untold thousands of Punjabis in the area. They came across the rivers, on small skiffs or even swimming through the minefields.

    By now, the population density of the Triangle was almost that of a huge city. Worse, really, since most of the land area had to be left available for farming. The Triangle got much of its supplies from the Sind, brought up by the river boats, but it still had to provide the bulk of its own food. Controlling the raw sewage produced by such a population was enough to make Hercules’ legendary cleaning of the Augean Stables look like an afternoon’s easy chore.

    “You’ll see,” said Anna.

    “There’ll be enough, General,” said Ashot. “Just barely.”

    Belisarius nodded, after he finished wiping his face with a cloth. That was to clean off the dust, mostly. Despite the heat, the Thar was so dry that sweat didn’t have time to really accumulate.

    He was careful not to let his worry show. This was the third well they’d reached, and all of them had had just enough water—just barely—for his expedition. They had almost no reserve left at all. If even one of the wells was empty, or near-empty...

    But there was no point in fretting over the matter. The long war with the Malwa was nearing its end, and there remained only to drive home the lance—or die in the attempt. It was in the hands of Fate, now.

    “Let’s be off,” he said. He glanced at the horizon, where the dawn was beginning. “There’s still enough time for three hours’ travel before the sun’s up high enough to force us to camp for the day.”

    “I feel like a bat,” complained Ashot. “Live by night, sleep by day.”

    He said it fairly cheerily, though. Ashot had plenty of experience with desert campaigns, and knew perfectly well that no sane man traveled through an area like the Thar when the sun was up. Like all the cataphracts on the expedition, he was wearing loose-fitting Arab-style robes instead of armor—the only difference being that Ashot knew how to put them on without help from one of Abbu’s men.

    “Something’s happening,” Kujulo stated. Slowly, he swept the telescope across the terrain below the pass. “I’m not sure what, but there’s too much movement down there.”

    “Are they preparing another attack?” asked one of the other Kushans.

    “After the way we butchered the last one? Doubt it,” grunted Kujulo. “No, I think they’re pulling out some of their forces. And I think—not sure about this at all—that there’s some sort of troop movement in the far distance. But it doesn’t seem to be reinforcements.”

    He lowered the telescope. Awkwardly, since it was big and clumsy; one of the eyeglasses newly-made in Begram’s fledgling optical industry, not one of the sleek Roman devices.

    “Let the King know,” he commanded. “This may be what he’s expecting.”

    Miles away, a squad of Ye-tai had a much better view of what was happening. They were serving as sentries for the Malwa army positioned against the Kushans—and none too happy about it, either. In times past, it would have been Kushans themselves who’d be detached for this rigorous duty. But Kushans could no longer be relied upon, what few of them were still left in the Malwa forces. Their army’s commander hadn’t dared used common troops for the purpose. Kushans were much too good at mountain warfare to depend on levied infantry to serve as outlying sentries.

    “Tell me again,” said the squad leader.

    The new member of the squad shrugged. He’d only arrived the day before. “Don’t believe me, then. Great Lady Sati is on her way to the capital. With forty thousand troops. Seems there’s a big rebellion.”

    “Why were you traveling with them?”

    “I wasn’t. I was just part of a troop sent by Samudra up here. We only marched with the Great Lady’s expedition for a short distance. She’s headed up the Sutlej, of course.”

    “I wish we were too,” muttered one of the other squad members.

    Again, the newcomer shrugged. “So do I. But they’re leaving some of the Ye-tai they brought with them here—me among them, worse luck—while they take back to the Punjab almost ten thousand regular troops.”

    “Why do the two of you wish you were going back to the plain?” demanded the squad leader. “So we could get lost in a whirlpool in the Ganges? Don’t be stupid.”

    Their camp was perched on a rise that looked directly onto Margalla Pass, which divided the Vale of Peshawar from the Punjab proper. From the distance, the squad leader couldn’t see any of the Kushan troops who were holding the pass. But he imagined he could almost see the blood the Malwa army had left on those slopes, in the course of four defeated assaults.

    They were being ground up here. On level ground, the Ye-tai squad leader would have faced Kushans without worrying too much. Up here, in the hills and mountains, fighting them was like fighting crocodiles in a river.

    “I’m half-Sarmatian,” he murmured. “Mother’s side.”

    None of his mates so much as curled a lip, despite the absurdity of the statement. There hadn’t been any Sarmatians in centuries.

    It didn’t matter, since that wasn’t the point of the statement. Within a few seconds, all of the squad members were eyeing the new arrival.

    Fortunately for him, he wasn’t stupid. “The war’s lost,” he said, softly but clearly. “That’s what I think, anyway.”

    The squad leader grinned. “What’s your name?”

    The new man grinned back. “Prabhak. I know, it sounds funny. It’s a Sarmatian name. Given to me by my mother.”

    At that, the whole squad laughed. “Welcome, brother,” said one of them. “Would you believe that all of us are half-Sarmatian?”

    That brought another little laugh. When it died down, Prabhak asked: “When? And which way?”

    The squad leader glanced at the sun, which was now setting. “As soon as dark falls. There’ll be a half moon. Good enough. And we’ll head for the Kushans.”

    Prabhak winced, as did most of the squad members.

    “Don’t be stupid,” growled the squad leader. “You want to spend the rest of your lives living like goats?”

    Put that way...

    “They say King Kungas isn’t a bad sort,” mused one of the squad members.

    The squad leader chuckled humorlessly. “Nobody says anything of the sort. He’s a demon and his witch wife is even worse. Which is fine with me. Just the sort of rulers who can keep us alive, in what’s coming.”

    The first fortress in the Vindhyas that Damodara’s army reached was deserted. Its garrison had fled two days before, they were told by some of the natives.

    So was the second, and the third.

    The fourth fortress, far down from the crest, was still manned. Either the garrison or its commander were more stalwart.

    They were stalwart enough to last for exactly eight minutes, once Sanga launched the assault, before they tried to surrender.

    Tried, and failed. Sanga was giving no quarter.

    Even if he’d been inclined to, which he wasn’t—not with his wife and children in Kausambi—Lord Damodara had commanded a massacre.

    Emperor Damodara, rather. As a mere Lord, Damodara had always been noted for his comparative leniency toward defeated enemies, by Malwa standards. But the garrison of the fortress which had dared to resist him were no longer simply “enemies.” They were traitors and rebels.

    Of course, Sanga allowed some of the garrison to escape. That, too, had been commanded by Emperor Damodara. There was no point in slaughtering garrisons if other garrisons didn’t learn of it.

    By the next day, Damodara’s army was out of the mountains and marching up the Chambal river. The Chambal was the main tributary of the Yamuna, whose junction was still five hundred miles to the north. Once they reached that junction, they’d still have three hundred miles to march down the Yamuna before reaching Kausambi.

    Even with every man in his army mounted, either as cavalry or dragoons, Damodara could not hope to make faster progress than twenty miles a day—and the long march would probably go slower than that. True, now that they were out of the Vindhyas, the countryside was fertile and they could forage as they went. But his army still numbered some forty thousand men. It was simply not possible to move such a huge number of soldiers very quickly.

    Six weeks, at least, it would take them to reach Kausambi. Conceivably, two months—and if they had to fight any major battles on the way, longer than that. They simply could not afford to be delayed by any of the fortresses along the way.

    The first fortress they encountered on the river was deserted.

    So was the next.

    So was the next.

    “They’ve heard of us, it seems,” said Rana Sanga to the emperor.

    “I prefer to think it’s the majestic aura of my imperial presence.”

    “Yes, Your Majesty. Though I’m not sure I understand the difference.”

    Damodara smiled. “Neither do I, as it happens. You’d think I would, since I believe I’m now semi-divine. Maybe even three-quarters.”

    The Bihari miner straightened up from his crouch. “They’re getting close, master. I think so, anyway. It’s hard to tell, because of all the echoes.”

    The term “echoes” seemed strange to Valentinian, but he understood what the miner meant. At the first dogleg, they’d dug two short false tunnels in addition to the one that led—eventually—to the exit in the stables. What the miner was hearing were the complex resonances of the sounds being made by the Malwa miners as they neared the end of clearing away the rubble that the Romans had left behind when they blew the charges.

    “Will you know when they break through?”

    “Oh, yes. Even before the charges go off.”

    The miner grimaced as he made the last statement. As someone who had spent all of his adult life and a good portion of his childhood working beneath the earth, he had an automatic sympathy for men who would soon be crushed in a series of cave-ins. Enemies or not.

    Valentinian didn’t share any of his sentiments. Dead was dead. What difference did it make if it came under tons of rock and soil, the point of a lance—or just old age?

    He turned to Rajiv. “Are you willing to do this? Or would you prefer it if I did?”

    The young Rajput prince shrugged. “If everything works right, the charges will go off automatically, anyway. I won’t have to do anything.”

    “’If everything works right,’” Valentinian jeered. “Nothing ever works right, boy. That’s the cataphract’s wisdom.”

    But Valentinian proved to be wrong.

    When their miners finally broke through the rubble into a cleared area, two Malwa officers pushed them aside and entered the tunnel. For all the risk involved, they were both eager. Emperor Skandagupta had promised a great reward for whatever officers captured Damodara’s family.

    Both of them moved their torches about, illuminating the area. Then, cursed together.

    “Three tunnels leading off!” snarled the superior officer. “But which is the right one?”

    His lieutenant gestured with his torch to the tunnel ahead of him. “I’ll explore this one, if you want. You take one of the others. We can leave some men to guard the third, until we have time to investigate it.”

    “As good a plan as any, I guess.” The captain swiveled his head and barked some orders. Within a minute, three guards had entered the tunnel along with one of the mining engineers.

    “Make a diagram of the three tunnels,” he commanded the engineer. “Nothing fancy. Just something that shows us—the Emperor—what direction they lead.”

    He ordered the guards to remain at the head of the third tunnel, while he and the lieutenant explored the other two.

    The engineer was done with his task in less than two minutes. “Nothing fancy,” the man had said—and the engineer didn’t want to stay there any longer than he had to. His sketch completed, he crawled back through the opening into the area that had now been cleared of the rubble left behind by the great explosions.

    He straightened up with a great sense of relief.

    The lieutenant spotted the booby-trap in his tunnel just in time to keep his foot from triggering the trip-wire.

    His superior was less observant.

    The charges in all three tunnels were wired together, of course. So the lieutenant’s greater caution only gave him a split-second longer lifespan, before the tunnels collapsed. The guards at the third tunnel were just as surely crushed.

    The engineer was knocked off his feet by the explosion, and then covered with the dust blown through the opening. He had just enough presence of mind to keep a grip on the sketch he’d made and protect it from harm.

    That caution, also, proved to be of no value.

    “This is useless,” snarled Skandagupta, after a quick study of the sketch. “They could have gone anywhere.”

    The emperor crumpled up the sketch and hurled it at the engineer. “Impale him,” he commanded.