"Enough, Maurice." The chiliarch clamped shut his jaws.
Scratched the chin.
The general thought; gauged; calculated; assessed.
The man decided.
His crooked smile came. He said, very firmly:
"Let the Kushans cross. All of them."
To the scout:
"Tell Abbu to send up the rocket when the Ye-tai are almost across. And tell that old maniac to make sure he's clear first. Do you understand? I want him clear!"
The Arab grinned. "He will be clear, general. By a hair, of course. But he will be clear."
An instant later, the man was gone.
Belisarius turned back to Maurice. The grizzled veteran was glaring at him.
"Look at it this way," Belisarius said pleasantly. "I've just given you what you treasure most. Something else to be morose about."
Glaring furiously. To one side, Valentinian muttered: "Oh, great. Just what we needed. Eight thousand Kushans to deal with."
Belisarius ignored both the glare and the mutter. He began to scratch his chin, but stopped. He had made his decision, and would stick with it.
It was a bad decision, perhaps. It might even, in the end, prove to be disastrous. But he thought of men who liked to gamble, when they had nothing to gamble with except humor. And he remembered, most of all, a man with an iron face. A hard man who had, in two lives and two futures, made the same soft decision. A decision which, Belisarius knew, that man would always make, in every life and every future.
He relaxed, then. Confident, not in his decision, but in his soul.
"Let them pass," he murmured. "Let them pass."
He cocked his head, slightly. "Basil's ready?"
"Be serious," growled Maurice.
Belisarius smiled. A minute later, he cocked his head again. "Everyone's clear?" he asked.
"Be serious," growled Maurice.
"Everybody except us," hissed Valentinian. "We're the only ones left. The last Syrians cleared off five minutes ago."
"Let's be off, then," said Belisarius cheerfully.
As he and his three cataphracts walked their horses off the dam—moving carefully, in the dark—Belisarius began softly reciting verses.
The men with him did not recognize the poem. There was no way they could have. Aide had just given it to him, from the future. That future which Belisarius would shield, from men who thought themselves gods.
Those masterful images because complete
Grew in pure mind but out of what began?
I must lie down where all the ladders start
In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.
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Contents
Framed
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Contents
Chapter 38
The moment the signal rocket exploded, Link knew.
Its four top officers, standing nearby on the platform of the command tower overlooking the river, were simply puzzled. The rocket, after bursting, continued to burn like a flare as it sailed down onto the mass of soldiers struggling their way across the bed of the Euphrates. Ye-tai, in the main, swearing softly as they tried to guide their horses in the darkness through a morass of streamlets and mucky sinkholes. But there were at least five thousand Malwa regulars, also, including a train of rocket-carts and the kshatriya to man them.
The flare burned. The officers stared, and puzzled.
But Link knew at once. Understood how completely it had been outwitted, although it did not—then or ever—understand how Belisarius had done it.
But the being from the future was not given to cursing or useless self-reproach. It recognized only necessity. It did not even wait for the first thundering sound of the explosions to give the order to its assassins.
Across the entire length of the dam blocking the Euphrates, the charges erupted. Almost in slow motion, the boulder-laden ships which formed the base of the dam heaved up. The sound of the eruption was huge, but muffled. And there was almost no flash given off. The charges, for all their immensity, had been deeply buried. Even Link, with its superhuman vision, could barely see the disaster, in the faint light still thrown off by the signal flare.
The officers saw nothing. Then, or ever. The first assassin's knife plunged into the back of the first officer, severing his spinal cord. A split second later, the other three died with him. Still staring at the rocket. Still puzzled.
Link had failed, but its failure would remain hidden. Its reputation was essential to the Malwa cause, and the cause of the new gods who had created Malwa. The officers would take the blame.
The mass of soldiers in the bed of the Euphrates—perhaps fourteen thousand, in all—froze at the sound. Turned, stared into the darkness. Puzzled. The night was dark, and the dam was a mile away. They, too, could see nothing. But the noise was ominous.
Then the first breeze came, and the smartest of the trapped soldiers understood. Shrieking, cursing—even sabring the slower-witted men who barred their way—they made a desperate attempt to scramble their horses out of the riverbed.
The rest—
The wall of water which smote the Malwa army came like a mace, wielded by a god. Untold tons of hurtling water, carrying great boulders as if they were chips of wood. Smashing in the sides of the old riverbed, gouging channels as it came, ripping new stones to join the old.
By the time the torrent struck, all of the doomed men in that riverbed understood. The sound was no longer a distant thunder. It was a howling banshee. Shiva's shriek. Kali's scream of triumph.
All of them, now, were fighting to get out. Their horses, panicked as much by the terror in their riders' voices as the thunder coming from the north, were scuttling through the mud, skittering past the reeds, falling into sinkholes, trampling each other under.
But it was hopeless. Some of the Malwa soldiers—less than a thousand—were far enough from the riverbed's center to reach the banks. Others, caught by the edges of the tidal wave, were able to save their lives by clinging to reeds, or boulders, or ropes thrown by their comrades ashore.
A few—a very, very small few—even survived the flood. A gigantic, turbulent mass of water such as the one which hammered its way down the riverbed is an odd thing. Fickle, at times. Weird, in its workings.
The Euphrates, restored to its rightful place, raged and raged and raged. But, here and there, it took pity. One soldier, to his everlasting amazement, found himself carried—gently, gently—to the riverbank. Another, too terrified to be amazed, was simply tossed ashore.
And one Malwa soldier, hours later and fifty miles downriver, waded out of the reeds. The Euphrates had nestled him in a bizarre and permanent little eddy—like a chick cupped in a man's hand—and carried him through the night. A simple man, he was—simple-minded, his unkind former comrades had often called him—but no fool. It was noted, thereafter, that the previously profane fellow had become deeply religious. Particularly devoted, it seemed, to river gods.
But for the overwhelming majority of the Ye-tai and Malwa regulars caught in Belisarius' trap, death came almost instantly. They did not even drown, most of them. They were simply battered to death.
Twelve thousand, one hundred and forty-three men. Dead within a minute. Another nine hundred and six, crippled and badly wounded. Most of those would die within a week.
Ten thousand and eighty-nine horses, dead. Two thousand, two hundred and seventy-eight camels, dead. Thirty-four rocket carts, pulverized. Almost half of the expedition's gunpowder weapons, destroyed.
It was the worst military disaster in Malwa's history.
And Link knew it. The superbeing was already examining its options, before the wall of water had taken a single life. Throughout the horror which followed, the creature named Great Lady Holi sat motionless upon its throne. Utterly indifferent to the carnage—those dying men and animals were simply facts—it went about its business.