The Dance of Time: Chapter Twenty Four

Bharakuccha

    Damodara stared at the message which had just been handed to him. Idly, some part of his mind noted that the radio operator had perhaps the best handwriting he’d ever seen. Artistic calligraphy, almost—yet he’d seen the man jot down the message as rapidly as it came in.

    He tilted the paper in his hand, so that Rana Sanga and Narses could read it also.

    “Persians,” Narses sneered. “That’s why I was able to manipulate them so easily, in my days in Rome. Every border dehgan fancies himself the Lord of the Universe, because he’s got a few more goats than his neighbor. It might help if he could read.”

    Rana Sanga shrugged. “I don’t see where the Persians on their own can be much of a problem. Well...”

    “Except in the Punjab,” said Damodara.

    The radio operator handed him another message.

    “He’s probably right,” said Sanga. “The Rajputs can live with a small Roman territory in the fork of the Indus and the Chenab, easily enough. Probably even be good for us, in terms of trade. And he might keep the Persians from pushing north.”

    “Why do you care, anyway?” demanded Narses. “Let the Persians have part of the Punjab, for pity’s sake. Just insist on two things. First, they have to stay west of the Indus as far north as Multan; then, west of the line formed by the Chenab and the Jhelum. To make sure they stick to it, expand the Roman enclave. Let the Romans have the whole area in the fork of the Indus and the Chenab all the way up to Multan—and give them Multan.”

    Sanga was starting to look outraged. “You’d give the Persians almost half—”

    “Oh, nonsense! It’s not more than a third of the Punjab—and most of it, once you get north of Multan, is desert and badlands. Almost useless, except to the hill tribes. So let the Persians deal with the cantankerous bastards. As far as the expanded Roman enclave goes, yes, that’s fertile territory. But it’s still not all that much—and you can’t stop them from taking it anyway, if Link’s—”

    He glanced at the radio operator. “If Great Lady Sati’s army collapses. Which we’re counting on, because if it doesn’t we’re for exile anyway. Assuming we survive at all.”

    “He has a point, Sanga,” said Damodara mildly. “There’s another advantage, too, which is that giving the Aryans everything west of the Jhelum brings them up against the Kushans in the north.”

    Sanga thought about it, briefly. “True. And that means the Persians and the Kushans—not us—would have to deal with the Pathans and the other hill tribes. An endless headache, that is.”

    He gave Narses a not-entirely-admiring look. “And what’s the second thing?”

    The old eunuch’s smile was very cold. “I should think it was obvious. The Persians can have that area—if they can take it.”

    After a moment, Damodara laughed harshly. “Yes. Let them bleed. Done, Narses.”

    In the Iron Triangle, it was Belisarius’ turn to stare at a message. Then, tilt it so that Maurice could see. He also spoke the words aloud, for the benefit of Justinian and Calopodius.

    “It’s nice to see our new ally isn’t an idiot,” mused Justinian. “Unlike the old one.”

    The Grand Justiciar got a look on his face that could have been called “dreamy-eyed,” if he’d still had eyes.

    “Forget it,” said Belisarius, half-chuckling. “We are not going to form a pact with Damodara to attack Persia and carve it up between us.”

    “Probably a bad idea,” admitted Justinian. “Still, you have to admit it’s tempting.”

    Maurice had ignored the byplay. By now, having read the message perhaps five times, he was scowling fiercely. “Fine and dandy for you and Damodara—Khusrau’s probably in on it, also—to scheme up ways to bleed Persia’s aristocracy dry. But I remind you that I will have to be the one to deal with them. And I’m damned if I’m going to go along with any foolhardy plans to launch a massive frontal assault on the Malwa here. Their fortifications aren’t much weaker than ours, you now.”

    “I doubt that’ll be a problem,” Belisarius said, shaking his head. “If you’re guessing right about Khusrau’s plans, he’ll probably insist that you remain here while he leads a glorious Aryan sweeping maneuver against the right flank of the enemy. He’ll want you to keep some pressure on, of course.”

    Maurice grunted. “We’re doing that anyway, just being here.”

    “Multan’s what? About a hundred miles north of here?” asked Justinian. His face still had traces of dreaminess in it. “And at that point, the distance between the two rivers must be at least fifty miles.”

    Belisarius drew up a mental image of a map of the Punjab. “Yes, that’s about right.”

    “So our ‘enclave’—using the term very loosely, now—would contain something like two thousand square miles.”

    “Um... Probably closer to fifteen hundred,” countered Maurice. “That’s an awfully narrow triangle.”

    “Still. Even fifteen hundred square miles is a fair amount of breathing room. The land here is all fertile, too, even as arid as it is, because of the rivers. We could support a million people, easily. Some enclave!”

    Belisarius couldn’t help but smile. Justinian might insist that he’d given up his wicked old imperial ways of looking at the world, but it never took much to stir the beast up again.

    “That’s as may be,” he said, a bit brusquely. “It’s certainly a good deal for us, at least in the short run—and, better yet, might go a long way to mollifying Theodora. In the long run... hard to say. We’d be completely dependent on maintaining trade routes through either Persian or Indian territory, don’t forget. We wouldn’t even have a common border with the Kushans.”

    Justinian started to say something, but Belisarius drove over him. “Enough of that, however. We still have a war to win.”

    He turned to Calopodius. “Draft another message telling Damodara we agree. And add the following—”

    —bz-bzzz-bz-bz-bzzz-bzzz-bz-bz-bzzz—

    “I purely detest that sound,” snarled Narses. “My ears are too old to be inflicted with it.”

    But he made no move to leave. Didn’t so much as twitch a muscle.

    The message finished, the operator handed it to Damodara. Again, the new Malwa emperor tilted it so both Narses and Rana Sanga could read the contents.

    By the time they finished the message, all three pairs of eyes were very wide.

    “God damn him,” said Narses tonelessly. “No man should be that smart. Not even me.”

    Damodara shook his head, just slightly. “He planned for this, and months ago. There are no wells in the Thar—so he had them dug in advance.”

    “Months?” Sanga’s headshake was a more vigorous affair. “I think not, Emperor. I think he has been planning this for years.”

    His gaze grew unfocussed, as he pulled on his beard. “All along, I think... If you consider everything, from the beginning. He never planned to defeat the Malwa Empire by outright conquest. Never once. Instead, he pried it apart. Worked at all the weaknesses until it erupted. Forged alliances with Axum and Persia—the latter, an ancient Roman enemy—not so much to hammer us but so that he could support and supply a Maratha rebellion. Which he fostered himself. And then...”

    “We did beat him at the Pass,” pointed out Damodara.

    Sanga left off the beard-pulling, and grimaced.

    Damodara chuckled, quite humorlessly. “Yes, I know. A tactical victory only. You could even argue it was a strategic defeat. Still, as an army we were never defeated by him. Not even badly battered, really.”

    “Well, of course not,” said Narses, in the same toneless voice. “He planned that, too. All through that campaign—if you recall it again, from this angle—he was careful to keep our casualties to a minimum. His army’s, as well, of course. We thought at the time that was simply because he needed it intact to take Charax. But, as usual, there was a second string to the bow. He wanted your army intact also. So that, some day, you could do what you’re doing now.”

    His old eyes were pure slits, now, glaring at the message. “That bastard! I should have had him assassinated when I could.”

    Sanga’s lips twisted. “And when was that, exactly?”

    “I could have done it when he was still six years old,” replied Narses gloomily. “Of course, he was nobody then, so it never occurred to me. Just another scion of minor Thracian nobility, with pig shit on his bare feet.”

    “Enough!” snapped Damodara. “I, for one, am glad he’s here.” He held the message up, inclining it toward Sanga. “What’s the answer? Can we get someone to Ajmer in time to meet him? Someone the Rajputs there will listen to—but it can’t be you, Sanga. We’ve got our own forced march to make, with a great siege at the end.”

    The Rajput king went back to beard-pulling. “A fortnight... That’s the problem. I’ll send Jaimal and Udai, with fifty men. Neither of them are kings, but they’re both well-known and much respected. Also known to be among my closest lieutenants. The Rajputs will listen to them.”

    A smile came, distorted by a sharp yank on the beard. “Ha! After these years, Belisarius is something of a legend among the Rajputs also—and we are a people who adore our legends. The truth, Emperor? If Jaimal and Udai are there to vouch for him, most Rajput warriors will flock to his banner. Especially the young ones.”

    “No problem with the oath?”

    “No, not really. The old men will quibble and complain and quarrel, of course. But who cares? It won’t be old men that Belisarius leads toward the headwaters of the Ganges, to meet a monster on the field of battle. Young men, they’ll be. With no love for Skandagupta, an interpretation of the oath that’s good enough—since it was good enough for me—and a commander out of legend.”

    He lowered his hand. “Yes, it’ll work. If Jaimal and Udai can reach Ajmer in time.”

    He looked around. “I need to summon them. Also need a map. One moment.”

    He went to the door, opened it, and barked the orders.

    Damodara leaned over the radio operator’s shoulder. “How much longer can we transmit?”

    “Hard to say, Your Majesty. The best time, at this distance, is around sunrise and sunset. But, especially once the sun is down, the window—that’s what we call it—can stay open for hours. All night, sometimes.”

    “We’ll just have to hope for the best. If necessary, we can send the final message in the morning. For now, send the following. Exactly as I give it you, understand? Great Lady Sati will be receiving it also, and she mustn’t be able to understand what it means.”

    The operator’s nod was nervous, but not the terrified gesture it had been hours earlier. As time had passed, the man had come to conclude that while the new self-proclaimed emperor was a scary man—the tall Rajput and the evil-looking old eunuch, even worse—he was not as scary as Nanda Lal had been.

    Not even close. The truth was that the radio operator had no more love for the old dynasty than anybody. Certainly not for their stinking priests and torturers.

    The buzzing was brief.

    “Here’s all there is, General,” Calopodius said apologetically. “I thought there’d be more. And what there is doesn’t make much sense.”

    Belisarius looked at the message.

    He needed a moment himself, to decipher it. “Very clever. Sanga must have found that peddler, after all.”

    “What peddler?” demanded Justinian. “And what kind of peddler has an emerald to begin with?”

    “A very happy peddler—although I imagine his joy vanished once Sanga caught him.”

    Belisarius handed the message back to Calopodius. “Years ago, when I fled India, I finally shook off Sanga and his men at Ajmer. I traded my horses for three camels and all the water and supplies I needed to cross the desert. To clinch the deal, I gave the peddler one of the emeralds that had been part of Skandagupta’s bribe and told him there’d be another one for him if he deliver a message in Bharakuccha to a Captain Jason, commanding a vessel named the Argo.”

    Maurice already knew the story, so he simply smiled. Calopodius and Justinian laughed aloud.

    “That peddler must have thought I was crazy, giving him an emerald for camels. But it did the trick. Sanga and his men followed the horse tracks—I’d nicked one of the hooves to make it distinctive—and by the time they could have run down the peddler and realized what happened, I was well into the Thar. No way to catch me then.”

    He looked at Calopodius. “How much longer before the window closes?”

    The blind young officer shrugged. “There’s really no way to predict it, General. It may never close at all.”

    “Well enough, even if it does. It’ll take me half the night anyway to get the men ready to leave. By morning, we’ll know.”

    “Get some sleep, woman,” Ousanas said gruffly. “There’s nothing you can do here on the docks, anyway. The fleet will be ready to sail at dawn, be sure of it.”

    “Ready to row, you should say.”

    “Don’t remind me!” In the dim lighting thrown off by the lanterns along the docks, Ousanas’ dark features were hard to make out. But the scowl on his face was ferocious enough to be quite evident.

    “Your husband! It’s his fault. If he was clever enough to manipulate everyone to this ridiculous state of affairs, why didn’t he time it properly? Two or three more months and we’d be in monsoon season. Sail all the way, lolling in comfort and drinking wine.”

    “He’s only mortal,” replied Antonina, smiling despite herself. Even though she wouldn’t be working an oar, she was not looking forward to the voyage to Bharakuccha any more than Ousanas was. It would be long and slow and... hot.

    “I hope the Hindus are right,” grumbled Ousanas. “For this idiot stunt, Belisarius deserves to come into his next life as a lizard. Perched on a rock in the desert in the middle of garam, so he can fry—instead of us.”

    Hands on hips, his gaze swept back and forth across the row of Axumite galleys. Even in the near-darkness, every one of them was a beehive of activity as the Ethiopian sailors and marines made ready for the voyage. What Antonina couldn’t see, she could hear.

    “They don’t seem to be complaining as much as I expected,” she said.

    “That’s because of my awesome new title. In the olden days, when I was but the modest keeper of the fly whisks, I’d have had a mutiny on my hands. Be swinging from a gibbet, by now. Disemboweled, too. My entrails dangling just inches above the water, so the Axumite marines could bet on the sharks competing for them.”

    Antonina couldn’t help but laugh. When he was in the mood, Ousanas did histrionic gloom as well as he did anything else. If he’d been alive in the days of Cassandra, probably no one would remember her at all.

    “Stop exaggerating. They’d only have beaten you to a senseless pulp and placed bets on the alley dogs.”

    Ousanas’ grin flashed in the night. A moment later, more seriously, he added: “They’re not really disgruntled at all, in truth. Yes, the voyage to Bharakuccha at this time of year will be a miserable business. We’ll be lucky if we have the sails up more than a few hours every other day. Row, row, row and sweat buckets while we do it. But...”

    He took a long, slow breath. “But there is Bharakuccha for them, at the end. The same city where Eon left us, and whose harbor they destroyed in their vengeance. This time, with its gates opening wide.”

    Antonina felt a pang of grief. She remembered that harbor very well herself. She had been sitting next to Eon when he died, reading to him from the Bible.

    “Best of all, it’ll be garrison duty. In one of the world’s largest and busiest seaports. Dens of vice and iniquity on every street. No more fighting, dying and bleeding. Let the Hindu heathens fight it out amongst themselves, from now on. For Axum, the war is over—and what remains are the pickings.”

    The grin flashed again. “Great pickings, too. There are even more merchant coffers in Bharakuccha than taverns and brothels. Just skimming the tolls—even the light ones we’ll maintain—will make Axum rich. Richer still, I should say.”

    He basked in that happy thought, for a moment. Then the scowl came back.

    “And will you get some sleep, woman? You’ll need to be wide awake and alert tomorrow morning.”

    “Whatever for? I’m not pulling an oar.” Half-righteously and half-apologetically, she added: “I’m too small. It’d be silly.”

    “Who cares about that? I remind you that it will be your responsibility—not mine!—to oversee the transfer of your emperor son and his sahrdaran wife aboard ship. Especially her. God only knows what absurd contrivance the Persians will come up with, for the purpose. But I’m sure it’ll involve elephants.”

    Antonina didn’t quite scamper from the docks. Not quite.

    “You’re certain?”

    “Yes,” replied Jaimal. Udai nodded his agreement.

    Sanga’s lieutenant traced a line on the map. “We can follow the rivers, most of the way, east of the Aravalli mountains. Basically, it’s the same route we took years ago, when we tried to catch up with Belisarius by sea. That time, it took us almost three weeks. But we had tired horses, after that long chase, where this time we’ll be starting with fresh ones. And... well...”

    Sanga smiled thinly. “Yes, I know. Last time, I wasn’t really driving the matter, since I knew it was hopeless anyway.”

    He straightened up from the map. “Well enough. Be out of the city as soon as possible. Try to make it in two weeks. But don’t be foolish!” He held up an admonishing finger. “Better to use half the day—most of it, if need be—to make sure you’ve got the best horses in Bharakuccha. You’ll make up the difference within five days.”

    The admonition was simply a symptom of Sanga’s tension, so Jaimal and Udai took it in good enough spirits. On its face, of course, it was insulting. Teach a Rajput about horses!

    The final message was also brief.

    “I’m off, then,” said Belisarius. “At first light.”