The Dance of Time: Chapter Thirty One

The Punjab,

North of the Iron Triangle

    “This is the craziest thing I’ve ever seen,” muttered Maurice. “Even for Persians.”

    Menander shook his head. Not because he disagreed with Kungas, but simply in...

    Disbelief?

    No, not that. Sitting on his horse on a small knoll with a good view of the battlefield, Menander could see the insane charge that Emperor Khusrau had ordered against the Malwa line.

    He could also see the fortifications of that line itself, and the guns that were spewing forth destruction. He didn’t even want to think about the carnage that must be happening in front of them.

    He could remember a time in his life when he would have thought that furious charge might carry the day. However insane it was, no one could doubt the courage and the tenacity of the thousands of Persian heavy cavalrymen who were hurling themselves and their armored horses against the Malwa. But, even though he was still a young man, Menander had now seen enough of gunpowder warfare to know that the Persian effort was hopeless. If the Malwa had been low on ammunition, things might have been different. But the fortifications they’d erected on the west bank of the Indus to guard their flank against just such an attack could be easily re-supplied by barges crossing the river. In fact, he could see two such barges being rowed across the Indus right now.

    Against demoralized troops already half-ready to surrender or flee, the charge might have worked. It wouldn’t work here. The morale of the Malwa army had suffered a great deal, to be sure, from their defeats over the past two years. But they were still the largest and most powerful army in the world, and their soldiers knew it.

    They knew something else, too. They knew that trying to surrender to—or flee from—an assault like the Persians had launched, was impossible anyway. If they broke, they’d just get butchered.

    It didn’t help any, of course, that the Persians were shouting the battle cry of Charax! as they charged. Whether because their emperor had ordered it or because of their own fury, Menander didn’t know. But he knew—and so did the Malwa soldiers manning the fortresses—that the Persians might as well have been using the battle cry of No Quarter.

    “Let’s go, lad,” said Maurice quietly. “We made an appearance as observers, since Khusrau invited us. But now that the diplomacy’s done, staying any longer is just pointless. This isn’t really a battle, in the first place. It’s just an emperor ridding himself of troublesome noblemen.”

    He turned his horse and began trotting away. Menander followed.

    “You think?” asked Menander.

    “You’ve met Khusrau. Did he strike you as being as dumb as an ox?”

    Menander couldn’t help but smile, a little. “No. Not in the least.”

    “Right.” Maurice jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “Not even an ox would be dumb enough to think that charge might succeed.”

    Maurice was slandering the Persian emperor, actually. It was true that breaking the power of the sahrdaran and vurzurgan families was part of the reason Khusrau had ordered the charge. But it wasn’t the only reason. It wasn’t even the most important reason.

    There would be no way to eliminate the great families simply through one battle, after all. Not all of their men had come to India, even leaving aside the Suren, and not all of them would die before the walls of the Malwa.

    Not even most of them, in fact. Khusrau was no stranger to war, and knew perfectly well that no battle results in casualties worse than perhaps one-quarter of the men engaged, unless they get trapped, and many of those would recover from their wounds. It was amazing, really, how many men survived what, from a distance, looked like a sheer bloodbath.

    There was no chance of a trap here, nor of enemy pursuit once the Persians cavalrymen finally retreated. Many sahrdaran and vurzurgan would die this day, to be sure. But most of them wouldn’t. He’d bleed the great families, but he wouldn’t do more than weaken them some.

    So, the emperor hadn’t even stayed to watch, once he ordered the assault. Quietly, almost surreptitiously—and far enough from the Malwa lines not to be observed—he’d slipped away from his camp with two thousand of his best imperial cavalry.

    Light cavalry. Over half of them Arabs, in fact.

    He’d be gone for several days. Khusrau didn’t believe in cavalry charges against heavy fortifications any more than Maurice did. But since he came from a nation that had always been a cavalry power, he’d given much thought to the proper uses of cavalry in the new era of gunpowder.

    Assaults against fortresses were pointless. Raids against a specific target, were not.

    Two days later, he was vindicated.

    “You see?” he demanded.

    Next to him, also sitting on a horse carefully screened from the river by high reeds, the chief of the emperor’s personal cavalry smiled.

    “You were right, Your Majesty. As always.”

    “Ha! Coming from you!”

    Almost gloating, the emperor’s eyes went back to the target of the raid. One of the two ironclads had its engines steaming, but it was still tied to the dock like the other. From the casual manner of the sailors and soldiers moving about on the docks, Khusrau thought the engines were running simply as part of routine care. What the Roman naval expert Menander called “maintenance.” Khusrau didn’t know much about the newfangled warships, but he knew they needed a lot of it. The things were cantankerous.

    “No point in trying to capture them,” he said, regretfully.

    The Persians had no one who could operate the things. Even the Roman experts would need time to figure out the different mechanisms—and time was not going to be available. Khusrau was quite sure his two thousand cavalrymen could break through the small garrison protecting the Malwa naval base and burn the ships before reinforcements could arrive. But it would have to be done very quickly, if they were to survive themselves. They’d had to cross a ford to get to this side of the Indus, far upstream from the battlefield—upstream from the naval base, in fact—and they’d have to cross the same ford to make their escape.

    With his superb light cavalry, the emperor thought they could do it. But not if they dawdled, trying to make complex foreign equipment work.

    And why bother? These were the only two ironclads the Malwa had built on the Indus. Once they were destroyed, they had no way—no quick and easy way, at least—to bring their ironclads from the other rivers. All of the rivers in the Punjab connected to the Indus eventually—but only at the Iron Triangle.

    Which was held by the Romans. Who had an ironclad of their own. Which they had not dared to use because of these two ironclads. Which would shortly no longer exist.

    “Do it,” the emperor commanded.

    He did not participate personally in the charge and the battle that followed. He was brave enough, certainly, but doing so was unnecessary—would even be even foolish. Persians did not expect their emperors to be warriors also.

    What they did expect was that their emperors would present them with victories.

    The ironclads burned very nicely. Khusrau had worried, a bit, that they might not. But the Malwa built them the same way the Romans did, just as Menander and Justinian had said they would. An iron shell over a wooden hull.

    Burned very nicely, indeed.

    Almost as nicely as the emperor’s victory would burn in the hearts of his soldiers, after he returned to his camp. Where the sahrdaran and vurzurgan who had insisted on that insane assault—the emperor himself had been doubtful, and made sure everyone knew it—would be low-spirited and shamefaced.

    As well they should be.

    "I don't care if those sorry bastards up north are getting hammered by the Kushans!" General Samudra shouted at the mahaveda priest. Angrily, he pointed a finger to the west. "I've got Persians hammering on me right here! They just destroyed our ironclads on the Indus!"

    The priest's face was stiff. He was one of several such whom Great Lady Sati had left behind to keep an eye on the military leadership. Without, however, giving them the authority to actually over-ride any military decisions made by Samudra.

    From the priests' point of view, that was unfortunate. From Samudra's point of view, it was a blessing. What priests knew about warfare could be inscribed on the world's smallest tablet.

    "Absolutely not!" he continued, lowering his voice a little but speaking every bit as firmly. "I've already sent couriers with orders to the expedition I sent in relief to turn back. We need them here."

    The priest wasn't going to give up that easily. "The Kushans are out of the Margalla Pass, now!"

    "So what?" sneered Samudra. "Fifteen thousand Kushans - twenty at most, and don't believe that nonsense about fifty thousand - can't do anything to threaten us here. Sixty - maybe seventy - thousand Romans and Persians can."

    "They can threaten Great Lady Sati!"

    For a moment, that caused Samudra to pause. But only for a moment, before the sneer was back.

    "Don't meddle in affairs that you know nothing about, priest. If you think the Kushans are going to leave their kingdom unprotected while they hare off trying to intercept the Great Lady?"

    He shook his head, the way a man does upon hearing an absurd theory or proposition. "Ridiculous. Besides, by now she'll have reached the headwaters of the Sutlej. That's a hundred miles from the Margalla Pass. It would take an army of twenty thousand men - assuming they have that many to begin with - a week and a half to cover the distance."

    He cleared his throat sententiously. "Had you any experience in these matters, you would understand that a large army cannot travel faster than ten miles a day."

    He hoped the words didn't ring as false to the priest as they did to him, the moment he said them. That ten mile a day average was...

    An average. No more, no less. It did not apply to every army. Samudra had had Kushan forces under his command, in times past, and knew that a well-trained and well-led Kushan army could march two or three times faster than that - even while fighting small battles and skirmishes along the way.

    Still...

    "By the time they got to the headwaters of the Sutlej - assuming they were foolish enough to make the attempt in the first place - Great Lady Sati's forces will have already reached the headwaters of the Ganges. It's conceivable, I suppose, that the Kushans might be mad enough to venture so far into the northern Punjab, but no enemy force - not that size! - will be lunatic enough to enter the Ganges plain. The garrison at Mathura alone has forty thousand men!"

    The priest stared at him from under lowered brows. Clearly enough, he was not persuaded by Samudra's arguments. But, just as clearly, he did not have the military knowledge to pick apart the logic. So, after a moment, he turned and walked away stiffly.

    Samudra, however, did have the knowledge. And, now that he thought upon the matter more fully, be was becoming more uneasy by the minute.

    The northern Punjab had not been ravaged much by the war, and it was the most fertile portion of the Punjab because it got more rain during the monsoon season than the rest of the province. If the Kushans were willing to abandon their logistics train and cut across the area relying on forage, they could cover possibly thirty miles a day. Twenty, for a surety.

    The terrain was good, too. Excellent, from the standpoint of a marching army. From Peshawar ran the ancient trade route known as the Uttar Path or North Way, which crossed into the Ganges plain and ran all the way to the Bay of Bengal on the other side of the sub-continent. That was the same route that Great Lady Sati herself planned to take in her return to Kausambi, once she reached it by following the Sutlej.

    By now, Samudra was staring to the north, not really seeing anything except in his mind. A fast-moving Kushan army, unrestrained by a logistics train, marching down the Uttar Path from the Margalla hills with no army in their way any longer...

    They could intercept Great Lady Sati.

    Possibly. It depended on how fast her own march had been. But Samudra knew full well that with the size of the army she'd taken with her, mostly infantry and with elephant-borne chaundoli, she wouldn't be moving all that quickly.

    He opened his mouth, about to issue orders - that army coming back would curse him, for sending them north yet again, but better the curses of soldiers - far better - than?

    A horrific chain of explosions shattered his purpose.

    Gaping, Samudra spun around, now facing south by southwest.

    "What happened?" The chain of explosions was continuing. As loud as it was, it seemed strangely muffled. Samudra detected what might be...

    Fountains, in the distance?

    One of his aides coughed. "General, I think the Romans are blowing up their mine field in the river."

    "That's ridiculous! Our ironclads?"

    He broke off so suddenly the last word ended in a choke.

    "They're only blowing the mine field in the Indus," the same officer continued, his tone apologetic. "Not the one in the Chenab."

    The Malwa had no ironclads left in the Indus. The Persians had destroyed them. There was nothing to stop the Roman warships from sallying up the river, firing at troops who had no way to shoot back except small arms and light cannon. Great Lady Sati had dismantled the heavy batteries that had once been positioned along the east bank of the Indus, once the ironclads came into service, in order to move them across the river as a shield against a possible Roman flank attack.

    They could be turned around to face the river, but that would take at least a full day - and Samudra was quite sure the Romans or Persians or both would be attacking those forts again as soon as the Roman ironclad got up there and started firing on them.

    Perhaps the heavy batteries at Multan could be brought down...

    His earlier intentions completely forgotten, Samudra began issuing a blizzard of new orders.

    "Let's hope this works," Menander muttered to himself, as the Justinian steamed at full speed up the river. "If the engine breaks down..."

    He eyed the engine house warily. The damn gadget was more reliable than it had been when the former emperor after whom the ironclad had been named designed it, but it was still very far from being what anyone in his right mind would call dependable.

    Not for the first time, Meander contemplated ruefully the odd twists of fate that had wound up putting him in charge of the Roman army's brown-water naval forces, instead of becoming a simple cataphract liked he'd planned to be.

    When he said as much to his second-in-command, the newly-promoted former Puckle gunner, Leo Constantes laughed.

    "Today? Be glad you're not a cataphract - or you'd be taking part in the crazy charge Sittas is leading."

    Menander winced. "Point."

    Sittas himself was downright gleeful. He’d been frustrated for months, ever since the battle on the north lines of the Iron Triangle had settled down into a siege. There was really no place for heavy cavalry in such a fight, except to stay in reserve in the unlikely event of a Malwa breakthrough. Now, finally—!

    He was tempted to step up the pace, but managed to resist with no huge difficulty. Sittas was too experienced a horseman not to know that if he arrived with blown horses at the Malwa fortifications that had driven back the Persians a few days before, he might as well not have come at all.

    Besides, they were nearing the Persian lines. Sittas didn’t like Persians, and never had. No Roman he knew did except Belisarius—who was hopelessly eccentric—and those who had married Persian women, who at least had a reasonable excuse. Not even Sittas would deny that Persian women were attractive.

    The men, on the other hand—pah!

    “Look smart, lads!” he bellowed over his shoulder. “A fancy trot, now! Let’s rub salt into their wounds!”

    The Persian sahrdaran and vurzurgan glared at the Roman cavalrymen the whole way through their camp. The dehgans who fell in behind Sittas’ cavalry, on the other hand, seemed more philosophical about the matter. Or perhaps they were simply more sanguine. This time it would be Romans leading the charge against those damn Malwa guns. It remained to be seen how cocky they’d still be in a few hours.

    “All right,” Maurice said to his top officers, gathered in the command bunker. “Remember: make the sallies as threatening as you can, without suffering heavy casualties. We’ve got no more chance of storming the Malwa lines facing us here than they have of storming the Iron Triangle. All we’ve got to do is pin them, so Samudra can’t pull out troops to reinforce his right flank. Any questions?”

    “What if they make a sally?” one of the officers asked. “If they break through anywhere, we don’t have Sittas and his thousands of cavalrymen to drive them back.”

    Maurice shrugged. “We’ll scramble, that’s all.”

    When the Justinian came in sight of the Malwa fortifications on the west bank, Menander let out a whoop of exultation. The Punjabi peasants who’d managed to escape the labor gangs and desert to the Romans had told them that the Malwa hadn’t positioned any guns on the river side of the fortifications. What they hadn’t said—or hadn’t been asked—was that they’d also never bothered to put up walls sheltering the guns from the river, either. Why bother, when they had the ironclads?

    The gun ramps and platforms were completely exposed. The thousands of Malwa gunners and riflemen manning the lines would have no shelter at all from the Justinian.

    “Load case shot!” he bellowed.

    As his gun crews went about the labor, his eyes scanned the east bank of the river. There were some Malwa fortifications there also, but nothing substantial. What was more important was that he couldn’t see any sign of big guns. A few small pieces, here and there, but the Victrix could handle those well enough. The fireship wasn’t an ironclad, but her thick wooden walls should be able to handle anything the Malwa had on the spot. And by the time they could bring up heavy artillery, the Victrix would have done her job and gotten back downriver and out of range.

    And quite a job it would be, too. Menander contemplated the mass of barges tied up to the wharves. There were only two crossing the river. The rest...

    “You’re kindling, boys,” he gloated. “I’d recommend you get ashore quickly.”

    He turned to the signalman. “Tell the Victrix to come up.”

    A few seconds later, the signal flags having done their work, he saw heavy steam pouring out of the Victrix’s funnel. She’d be here very shortly.

    But he had his own work to do. By now, the Justinian was just coming abreast of the first fortress. There was something almost comical about the way the Malwa soldiers were frantically trying to move the big guns facing landward and get them turned around.

    It was a pointless effort, of course. But what else were they to do, except gape in consternation? The handguns and small artillery they had would just bounce off the Roman ironclad.

    They wouldn’t bounce off Menander, on the other hand. Constantes and the signalman had already retreated into the pilot’s armored turret. Hurriedly, Menander followed them.

    Once inside, he leaned over the speaking tube.

    “Let ‘em have it, boys.”

    Sittas waited until the Justinian had steamed completely past the fortifications, shelling them as it went.

    “Now!” he bellowed, and sent his horse into the charge. Six thousand Roman cataphracts came after him—and after them, over twice that number of Persian dehgans.

    “Back again,” Menander commanded. The Justinian had finished its turn. That was always a slow and delicate business, in the relatively narrow confines of the river. He’d had to be more careful than usual, too, since he didn’t have good charts of this stretch of the Indus.

    But the work was done, and the enemy was about to get savaged again. They were still as defenseless as ever. More so, actually, since he could see they were starting to panic.

    And well they might. By now, close to twenty thousand heavy cavalrymen would be thundering at them. If they’d still had their big guns intact, they could have sneered at that charge, as they’d done a few days earlier.

    Now...

    None of the guns had been dismounted, true enough, since Menander hadn’t used anything heavier than case shot. Nor would he again, since the plan was to capture the guns intact. But he’d inflicted heavy casualties on the crews and ammunition carriers, and even managed to blow up one of the smaller ammunition dumps that had been overly exposed. They’d be in no shape to resist the kind of charge Sittas would press, all the more so since they’d have to do so with Menander firing on them again from their rear.

    The barges across the river were making a nice conflagration, too. And—wonder of wonders—the wind was blowing the smoke away from the river. Menander had worried that if the smoke blew the other way he might find himself blinded.

    “It’s a miracle, lads,” he said cheerfully to the other men in the turret. “The one and only time in my life I’ve seen a military operation work exactly according to plan.”

    The engine coughed. The Justinian lurched.

    Coughed again. Coughed again.

    Silence. The Justinian glided gently downriver with the current, its engine dead.

    “Idiot!” Menander hissed at himself. “You had to go and say it!”

    Sighing, he studied the riverbank for a moment. “Can you keep her steady in midriver?”

    “Yes, sir,” replied the pilot.

    “All right, then.” He leaned over the speaking tube again. “Relax, boys. All that happens until the engineers get the engines running again is just that we have more time to aim. Let ‘em have it.”

    The fighting that afternoon at the front lines was brutal, but the casualties never got bad enough for Maurice to start worrying. And the Malwa never tried any sallies at all.

    Samudra was too pre-occupied to order any. All his attention was concentrated on the desperate effort to get reinforcements to the Indus in time to keep the Romans and Persians from crossing. It was bad enough that he’d lost the forts on the opposite bank. It wouldn’t take the enemy long to turn the guns around and built new berms to shelter them. The Persians and Romans were already working like bees to get it done. As it was, he’d henceforth be pressed on his western flank as well as the southern front. But let them get a toehold on his side of the river...

    Samudra managed to stave off that disaster. But it took two days to do so.

    It wasn’t until the morning of the third day that he remembered the Kushans at Margalla Pass. By which time it was too late to do anything.