The Rajput king placed his large and powerful hand atop the documents. "It is not there, Narses. Nanda Lal and his men could not have possibly overlooked it, in the course of such a thorough report. The knife was a small and simple one, to be sure, but not that small-and very sturdy. The blade would have survived the fire, at the very least. The thing was made by a Rajput peasant as a gift to my wife on her wedding. She adored it, despite its simplicity. Refused, time after time, to allow me to replace it with a finer one." He took a deep breath, as if controlling grief. "She always said that knife-that knife alone-enabled her to laugh at onions."
Seeing the stiffness of Narses' posture-the old eunuch looked, for all the water, as if he were carved from stone-Sanga emitted a dry chuckle. "Oh, to be sure, Nanda Lal himself would never have noticed the absence of onions or the knife. How could he or his spies know anything of that? The thing was just a private joke between my wife and me. To everyone else, even our own servants, it was just one of many knives in the kitchen."
"Undoubtedly, he failed to notice its absence." Narses' words were not so much husked, as croaked. "Undoubtedly." As a frog might pray for deliverance.
"Undoubtedly," said Sanga firmly. "Nor did I see any reason to raise the matter with him, of course. What would such a great spymaster and dynast as Nanda Lal know about onions, and the knives used to cut them?"
"Nothing," croaked Narses.
"Indeed." And now, for the first time, the severe control left Rana Sanga's face. His eyes, staring at Narses, were like dark pools of sheer agony, begging for relief.
Narses rubbed his face with a hand. "I am sworn to tell nothing but the truth, king of Rajputana. Even to such as Great Lady Sati. As you know."
Sanga nodded deeply. The gesture reminded Narses of a man placing his neck on a headsman's block. "Give me illusion, then," he whispered, "if you cannot give me the truth."
Abruptly, Narses rose. "I can do neither, Rana Sanga. I know nothing of philosophy. Nothing of onions or the knives needed to cut them. Send for your servant, please, to show me the way out of these chambers."
Sanga's head was still bent. "Please," he whispered. "I feel as if I am dying."
"Nothing," insisted Narses. "Nothing which cannot bear the scrutiny of the world's greatest ferret for the truth. Great Lady Sati, Rana Sanga."
"Please." The whisper could barely be heard.
Narses turned his head to the door, scowling. "Where is that servant? I can assure you, king of Rajputana, that I would not tolerate such slackness in my own. My problem, as a matter of fact, is the exact opposite. I am plagued with servants who are given to excess. Especially sentimentality. One of them, in particular. I shall have very harsh words to say to him, I can assure you, when next I see the fellow."
And with those words, Narses left the chamber. He found his way through Sanga's quarters easily enough. Indeed, it might be said he passed through them like an old antelope, fleeing a tiger.
Behind, in the chamber, Sanga slowly raised his head. Had there been anyone to see, they would have said the dark eyes were glowing. With growing relief-and fury-more than ebbing fear. As if a tiger, thinking himself caught in a cage, had discovered the trapper had been so careless as to leave it unlocked.
A state of affairs which, as all men know, does not bode well for the trapper.
Chapter 40
The Punjab
Autumn, 533 A.D.
Despite the protests of his officers and bodyguards, Belisarius insisted on remaining in one of the bastions when the Malwa launched their mass assault on his fortifications. His plans for the coming siege were based very heavily on his assessment of the effectiveness of the mitrailleuse, and this would be the first time the weapons had ever been tested under combat conditions. He wanted to see them in action himself.
Blocking out of his mind the noise of mortar and artillery fire, as well as the sharper sounds of Felix's sharpshooters picking off Malwa grenadiers, Belisarius concentrated all his attention on watching the mitrailleuse crew working the weapon in the retired flank he was crouched within.
The mitrailleuse-the "Montigny mitrailleuse," to give the device its proper name-was the simplest possible form of machine gun except for the "organ gun" originally designed by Leonardo da Vinci. Like the organ gun, the mitrailleuse used fixed instead of rotating barrels. But, unlike its more primitive ancestor, the breech-loading mitrailleuse could be fired in sequence instead of in a single volley, and fire many more rounds in any given period of time.
Belisarius watched as the gun crew inserted another plate into the breech and slammed it into place with a locking lever. The plate held thirty-seven papier-mache cartridges, which slid into the corresponding thirty-seven barrels of the weapon. A moment later, turning a crank, one of the men began triggering off the rounds while another-using the crude device of a wooden block to protect his hands from the hot jacket-tapped the barrel to traverse the Malwa soldiery piled up in the ditch below the curtain wall.
Belisarius had wanted a more advanced type of machine gun, preferably something based on the Gatling gun design which Aide had shown him and which he had detailed for John of Rhodes. But all the experiments of John's artificers with rotating barrels-much less belt-designed weapons like the Maxim gun-had foundered on a single problem.
Roman technology was good enough to make the weapons. Not many, perhaps, but enough. The problem was the ammunition. Rotating barrel and belt-fed designs all depended on uniform and sturdy brass cartridges. John's artificers could make such cartridges, but not in sufficient quantity. As had proven so often the case, designs which could be transformed into material reality in small numbers simply couldn't be done on a mass production scale.
The sixth-century Roman technical base was just too narrow. They lacked the tools to make the tools to make the tools, just as they lacked the artisans who could have used them properly even if they existed. That was a reality which could not be overcome in a few years, regardless of Aide's encyclopedic knowledge.
Since there was no point in having a "machine gun" which ran out of ammunition within minutes on a battlefield, Belisarius had opted for the Montigny design. The small number of brass cartridges which could be produced would be reserved for the special use of the Puckle guns mounted on river boats. The mitrailleuse, because it used a plate where all thirty-seven cartridges were fixed in position, did not require drawn brass for the cartridges. Rome did have plenty of cheap labor, especially in teeming Alexandria. The simple plate-and-papier-mache units could be mass produced easily enough, providing the mitrailleuse with the large quantities of ammunition which were necessary for major field battles.
It was a somewhat cumbersome weapon, but, as he watched it in operation, Belisarius was satisfied that it would serve the purpose. The two mitrailleuse which were raking the Malwa along the curtain wall-one firing from each opposed retired flank of two adjacent bastions-were wreaking havoc in the closely packed and unprotected troops. Combined with the grenades being lobbed by soldiers on the curtain wall, and the grapeshot being fired by field guns positioned in the sharply raked angle of the bastions themselves, the water in the ditch where hundreds of Malwa soldiers were already lying dead or wounded had become a moat of blood.