An instant later, Belisarius joined him. The general took a moment to make sure his footing was good. The wall—almost a battlement—was at least a yard wide, but there was nothing to stop someone who overbalanced from plunging to their death on the stone rubble sixty feet below.
Khusrau smiled.
“Does altitude bother you?” he asked. The question was polite, not scornful.
The Roman general shook his head. “Not par-ticularly. Still, I wouldn’t want to dance up here.”
“Lucky man! I myself am petrified by heights. Anything above the level of horseback.”
Belisarius glanced at the Persian Emperor. In truth, Khusrau’s face seemed a bit pinched, as if he were controlling himself by sheer force of will.
He was impressed, again, by the Emperor’s self-discipline. Since his arrival in Babylon three days before, Belisarius had been struck by the way Khusrau kept his obviously exuberant and dynamic personality under a tight rein. That same self-control was being manifested now, in the Persian ruler’s ability to remain standing on a perch which would have sent most men to their knees seeking safety.
For ten minutes or so, the two men said nothing. They simply stood side by side, studying the battle being waged below them.
Belisarius’ attention was immediately drawn by the roar of siege guns. A cloud of gunsmoke, well over a mile distant, indicated the presence of a battery of the huge cannons. After the wind blew the cloud away, he could spot the actual guns themselves. Eight of them, sheltered behind a berm. He recognized the pattern from his previous experience at the siege of Ranapur. His eyes ranged north and south, quickly spotting two more batteries. Another roar, another cloud of gunsmoke, and one of those batteries was also hidden from view.
Belisarius shifted his gaze to the walls of the besieged city. His eyes widened.
The defenses of Babylon were gigantic. The outer ring was so massive that it was impossible, almost, to think of it as anything other than a low ridge. The fortifications were not particularly tall—perhaps twenty feet, no more—but they spanned perhaps forty yards in thickness.
Studying it more closely, Belisarius saw that the outer defenses were actually a triple wall—or, at least, had been so once. The inner wall, some twenty feet wide, was constructed of sun-dried mud brick. Squat towers spaced at regular intervals projected another twenty feet above the wall itself, topped with sheltered platforms for Persian soldiers manning scorpions and other artillery engines. A rubble-strewn space fifty feet wide separated this inner wall from the middle wall. The middle wall was a bit thicker than the inner wall, with no towers. Unlike the inner wall, this wall was made of harder and more durable oven-baked brick.
That same type of brick was used in the third, outermost wall. No space separated this outermost wall from the midwall. The third wall, originally ten feet in thickness, served both as a bulwark for the midwall as well as the escarpment for the huge moat beyond it.
There was not much left of that third wall, however. Over the centuries, peasants had plucked away the good bricks for their own use. Today, the moat which lapped at the crumbled edge of the wall seemed more like a natural river than a man-made artifact. The size of the moat, of course, was partly responsible for producing that impression—Belisarius estimated that it was at least a hundred yards wide.
Belisarius watched a cannonball slam into the outer wall. A little avalanche of broken bricks slid into the moat, leaving a ripple in their wake. Other than that, the siege gun seemed to have made no impact whatsoever.
“At that rate,” he mused, “they’ll fill the moat with rubble and cannonballs before they ever finish breaking down the wall.”
Khusrau snorted.
“We were terrified—myself also, I will admit it—when they first began firing with those incredible machines. ‘Siege guns,’ as you call them. But after a few days—then weeks, and now months—we have little fear of them. It’s ironic, actually. Most of my advisers urged me to make a stand at Ctesiphon, taking advantage of its tall, stone walls. But I think if I had done so—”