"The prospect of being hanged. " mused Aide. No, I think not, especially if you maintain discipline among your own soldiers and do not allow the civilians to be abused. Beyond being forced into hard labor, at least. They will know full well that if the Malwa overrun you, they will be butchered along with the Roman troops. The Malwa will consider them "rebels," and they showed at Ranapur the penalty for rebellion.
* * *
Three days later, Maurice came across with the last of the Roman forces. By then, Belisarius had an approximate count.
"Better than twenty thousand civilians, for sure," were the first words he spoke when Maurice entered the command tent Belisarius had erected near the village of Sitpur. "Probably at least twenty-five. Maybe even thirty thousand."
Maurice grunted satisfaction. He removed his helmet and hung it on a peg attached to a nearby pole supporting the small pavilion. The helmets of Gregory and Felix and Mark of Edessa were already hanging there.
That grunt of satisfaction was the last sign of approval issued by the chiliarch. Before he had even reached the table where a new map had been spread, showing the first sketched outlines of the terrain, he was already accentuating the negative.
"You're too far north, still. If you think you can hold this much land with so few troops, you're out of your mind. What is it to the Indus from here? It must be a good ten miles!"
Gregory and Felix and Mark of Edessa burst into outright laughter. Belisarius satisfied himself with a crooked smile.
"Oh, do be quiet. I have no intention of building my principal lines up here, Maurice. I intended to erect them-have started to already, in fact-ten miles southwest of here." He pointed to a place on the map where lines indicating heavy fortifications had been drawn. "That far down into the tip of the triangle, the distance from the Chenab to the Indus is no more than six miles. And I'm building the outer line of fortifications here, a few miles north of that."
"We're just setting up field camps here," added Gregory. "Nothing fancy. Enough for large cataphract units to sally out and keep the first Malwa contingents held off for another few days. We have got to keep Sitpur in our hands as long as possible."
"Why?" demanded Maurice.
Belisarius' three other top commanders grinned. "Would you believe-talk about luck! — that Sitpur is the bakery center for the whole area?"
Maurice exhaled so forcefully it was almost as if he were spitting air. His hard gray eyes fell on Belisarius, and grew harder still.
"You don't deserve it, you really don't. This is almost as bad as the silly Iliad, where every time that reckless Achilles gets himself into a jam Athena swoops in and saves him."
Belisarius winced, acknowledging the hit. Then, shrugged. "I'll admit I assumed the local bread would be made by village women. Like trying to collect pebbles on a beach, that would have been. But I was prepared to do it."
"Instead," interrupted Mark, "we've had the villagers rounding up everything else-mostly lentils, and lots of them-while we keep the bakers in Sitpur working night and day. The biggest problem we're having right now is finding enough carts to haul the bread off to the south."
By this time, even Maurice was beginning to share in the excitement. Although he did make a last rally, attempting to salvage some portion of sane pessimism. But the effort was. feeble.
"I suppose the so-called 'bread' is that flat round stuff. Tastes awful."
"It's called chowpatti," chuckled Felix, "and I think it tastes pretty good, myself."
Maurice did not argue the point. Culinary preference, after all, was a small issue in the scope of things. Food was food, especially in a siege. Before it was all over-assuming things went well-Maurice fully expected that at least half of the Roman horses would have been eaten.
"Lentils too, eh?" he murmured, stroking his beard and staring down at the map. "And we'll be able to get fish from the rivers."
That last thought seemed to relieve him. Not because it suggested that the Roman army would be able to stave off starvation, even in a long siege, but because it brought a new problem to the fore.
"We'll have enough fishing boats for that," he growled, "but don't think the Malwa don't have plenty of boats of their own. And no little fishing vessels, either. They have enough large river craft in the Punjab, from what I can see, to start ferrying their own troops across to the triangle before we'll have the fortifications finished."
He turned and pointed back in the direction of Uch. "The whole area is starting to crawl with Malwa troops. With a lot heavier artillery than anything we have. As we were pulling out of Uch, the Malwa were starting to set up twenty-four pounders around the town. Real siege guns, those, not like these little popguns we've got."
The chiliarch was comfortably back in his favorite groove. He began stroking his beard with great vigor and satisfaction. "They must have thirty thousand men within a week's march. Three times that, within a month. And once they start transferring troops from the Ganges valley, we'll be looking at two hundred thousand." A bit lamely: "Soon enough."
"Maurice," said Belisarius patiently, "nobody can move that many troops that far very quickly. It took us months to get our army from Mesopotamia to the Indus, and we could use the sea. The Malwa cannot possibly move any large number of soldiers through Rajputana. The area is too arid. That means they'll have to march any reinforcements from the Ganges to the headwaters of the Jamuna, and then cross over to the headwaters of the Sutlej. It'll take them until well into next year, and you know it as well as I do."
He jerked his head backward, pointing to the north. "Until then, the Malwa will have to rely on whatever forces they already have in the Punjab. Which is a massive army in its own right, of course, but I'll willing to bet-I am betting-that by now they're scattered all over the place. Half of them are probably in or around Sukkur, hammering themselves into a pulp against Khusrau and Ashot."
Maurice did not argue the point, but he was not mollified either. "Fine. But they can still bring three or four times as many men to bear as we've got. Sure, with good fortifications across the neck of the triangle, we can mangle them before they break through. But there are enough boats in these rivers to enable them to land troops downstream."
With his finger, he traced on the map the Indus and Chenab rivers as they converged south of their own location. "Almost anywhere along here. So we have to leave enough of a striking force, centrally positioned, to stop any landing before it gets established." Gloomily: "We can manage it for a while, sure. We've still got twelve thousand cataphracts, and we can use half of them for a quick reaction force against any amphibious attack. But. "
Gregory finished the thought for him. "But sooner or later, they'll establish a beachhead. And when they do, the whole thing will start unraveling."
"So let's make sure it happens later than sooner," said Belisarius firmly. "Because sooner or later, Menander and Eusebius are going to get here also. There's been no indication at all that the Malwa have any real warships on these rivers. Once the Justinian and the Victrix arrive, we should be able to control the banks of the triangle well enough."
* * *
At the moment, neither Menander nor Eusebius quite shared the general's confidence. First, because they still had to run the fortress which the Malwa had built on the Indus below the Chenab fork. Secondly, because they had found themselves laden with a far greater cargo than they had expected. Instead of towing one barge behind the Justinian, the gunship was towing three and the fireship yet another. One of the three extra barges was loaded with all six of the twenty-four pounders which Ashot had possessed; the second with the artillerymen and engineers needed to set them up and keep them in operation; and the third with the powder and shot to get them in operation through pitched battles.