Gregory shrugged. "Since Abbu and his scouts aren't much use in the siege warfare we're starting, the general put them to work guarding the Malwa prisoners."
Sittas choked humor, spitting pieces of chowpatti across the table. "Ha! Not much chance of any prisoner rebellion, then. Not with bedouin watching them!"
For all the cruel truth which lurked beneath those words, Belisarius couldn't help but smile. Abbu and his Arabs had made as clear as possible to the Malwa under their guard that the penalty for rebellion-even insubordination-would be swift and sure. As much as anything, Abbu had explained to their officers, because bedouin hated to do any work beyond fighting and trading.
Far easier to behead a man than to do his work for him, after all. A point which the old man had demonstrated by beheading, on the spot, the one Malwa officer who had raised a protest.
Thereafter, the Malwa prisoners had set to work with a will-and none more so than the officers who commanded them. Abbu had also explained that he was a firm believer in the chain of command. Far easier to behead a single officer, after all, than twenty men in his charge. A point which the old man had demonstrated by beheading, the next day, the Malwa officer whose unit had done a pitiful day's work.
Under other circumstances, Belisarius might have restrained Abbu's ferocious methods. But siege warfare was the grimmest and cruelest sort of war, and now that he had put the arch stone of his entire daring campaign into place, he would take no chances of seeing it slip. So long as Belisarius could hold the area within the fork of the Indus and the Chenab-the "Iron Triangle," as his men were beginning to call it-the Malwa would have no choice but to retreat from the Sind entirely. Belisarius would be in the best possible position to launch another war of maneuver once his forces recuperated and were refitted. He would have bypassed the Sukkur bottleneck entirely and opened the Punjab for the next campaign. The Punjab, the "land of five rivers," where all the advantages of terrain would lie with him and not his enemy. And he would have saved untold Roman lives in the process-even Malwa lives, when all was said and done.
If he could hold the Iron Triangle long enough to relieve the pressure on Khusrau and Ashot at Sukkur and allow a reliable supply route to become established on the Indus, using Menander's little fleet of steam-powered warships to clear the way.
One challenge to him having been beaten off, another immediately came to fore. One of the telegraphs in a corner of the large bunker began chattering. Seconds later, as he leaned over the telegraph operator's shoulder and read the message the man was jotting down, Belisarius began issuing new orders.
"The Malwa are trying to land troops in that little neck of land at the very tip of the Triangle," he announced. "Eight boats, carrying thousands of men."
Then, straightening and turning around: "We'll use the Thracians for this, Maurice. Give the Greeks a rest. See to it."
Maurice snatched his helmet from a peg and hustled toward the bunker's entrance, shouting over his shoulder at Sittas: "You Greeks won't get all the glory this day! Ha! Watch how Thracians do it, you sorry excuses for cataphracts! You'll be crying in your wine before nightfall, watch and see if. " The rest trailed off as the chiliarch passed through the entrance into the covered trench beyond.
Sittas smirked. "Poor bastard. I guess he doesn't know yet that the wine's all gone. My Greeks finished the last of it yesterday. Come nightfall, when they're wanting to celebrate, his precious Thracians will be drinking that homemade beer the Malwa civilians-I mean, Punjabi civilians-are starting to brew up." He stuck out his tongue. "I tried some. Horrible stuff."
Belisarius gave no more than one ear to Sittas' cheerful rambling. Most of his attention was concentrated on the map, gauging the other forces he could bring to bear if Maurice ran into difficulty. His principal reserve, with the Thracians thrown into action, were the two thousand cataphracts which Cyril had under his command. Those "old Greeks" hadn't participated in Sittas' charge. Belisarius trusted their discipline far more than he did those of Sittas' men, and so he had put them in charge of the small city which was being erected in the very center of the Iron Triangle. A city, not so much in the sense of construction-its "edifices" were the most primitive huts and tents imaginable-but in population. Over twenty-five thousand Punjabi civilians were huddled there, along with Cyril's men and half of Abbu's Arabs. Already, Belisarius' combat engineers were working frantically to design and oversee the construction of a crude sanitation system to forestall-hopefully-the danger of epidemic which siege warfare always entailed.
That worry led to another. Supplies. They were starting to get low again. Not so much in terms of food as gunpowder. Even with the Malwa gunpowder which Sittas' men would have captured in their sally this day.
Belisarius' train of thought was cut short by another burst of chatter from the telegraph. This time, he charged out of the bunker himself as soon as he read enough of the message to understand the drift. After Sittas read it, the big Greek nobleman came fast on his heels.
* * *
"No glory for you today!" Sittas cheerfully informed Maurice, as soon as he trotted his horse alongside the Thracian's. "Just as well, really. You would have been so disappointed by the libation cup."
Maurice, perhaps oddly, didn't seem discomfited in the least. "I don't think the local beer is really all that bad," he said. "I've tried it already. No worse than the stuff a Thracian villager grows up with, after all." The chiliarch stroked his gray beard complacently. "We Thracians are a lot tougher than you pampered Constantinople Greeks, you know. What's more to the point, we're also a lot smarter."
He pointed to the three Malwa ships drifting down the Indus, wreathed in flame and smoke. Five others could be seen frantically trying to reach the opposite bank. "Let Eusebius and his artisans do all the work, what we say. Charging into battle on a horse-all that damned armor and equipment-is too much like farm labor. Hot, sweaty, nasty business, when you get right down to it."
"That last one's not going to make it," opined Gregory. The artillery commander was perched on his own horse on Maurice's left, opposite Sittas. "Anyone want to make it a wager?"
Sittas was known to be an inveterate gambler. But, after a moment's pause while he gauged the situation, the Greek nobleman shook his head firmly. "I don't know enough about these newfangled gadgets to figure out the odds. But since Eusebius is a Greek artisan-best in the world! — I don't think I'll take the bet. He'll catch it, you watch."
Five minutes later, Eusebius did catch the trailing ship. Another spout of hellfire gushed from the Victrix, and yet another Malwa would-be landing craft became a scene of hysterical fear and frenzy, as hundreds of Malwa soldiers stripped off their armor and plunged into the river.
Those who could swim started making their way toward the west bank of the Indus. The others-perhaps half of them-floundered helplessly in the water. Most of them would drown. Those who survived did so only because they were close enough to the lines which the Victrix's sailors tossed from the stern to be towed ashore into Roman captivity.
"Reminds me of fishing," mused Maurice. "A good catch, that. Maybe we'll be able to get enough latrines dug to stave off an epidemic after all."
Belisarius took no part in that exchange. He had ridden his horse directly to the pier which his combat engineers had started erecting from the first day the Iron Triangle was seized. Even the pier itself was still unfinished, much less the massive armored "sheds" which Belisarius had ordered built to provide shelter from enemy fire for the Roman warships once they arrived. But enough of it was in place to allow Menander and his barges to start offloading.