“You would have been defeated by now,” concluded Belisarius. “I have seen these guns in use before, and I have seen the walls of Ctesiphon. Those walls would have been brought down within two months.”
He pointed to Babylon’s outer fortifications. “Whereas this wall—this wide, soft, low wall—is actually more of a berm. Exactly the best kind of defenses against siege guns.”
Both men watched as another cannonball struck the wall—the inner wall, this time. The cannonball buried itself in the crumbly mudbrick, without so much as shaking the tower thirty yards away from the impact.
“The wall just got stronger, I think,” chuckled Khusrau.
“How many assaults have they mounted?” asked Belisarius.
“Seven. The last one was a month ago. No—almost six weeks now.”
The Persian Emperor turned and pointed to his right, toward the Euphrates.
“That one they attempted with barges, loaded with soldiers. It was a massacre. As you can see, the western walls of the city are still standing, almost as they were built by Nebuchadrezzar a thousand years ago. Stonework. Very tall. We poured burning naphtha on them, and sank many of the barges with catapults.”
He elevated his finger, still pointing to the west.
“If they could position their siege guns to the west, they could probably break down those stone walls. But I ordered the dikes and levees broken.”
Belisarius gazed toward the river. It was now late in the afternoon, and the sun’s rays were reflected off a vast spread of water. Khusrau, following a Mesopotamian military tradition which went back to the ancient Sumerians, had ordered the flooding of the low ground. Unchecked by manmade obstructions, the Euphrates had turned the entire area west of Babylon into a swamp. Impossible terrain even for an infantry assault, much less the positioning of artillery.
The area east of Babylon had been protected in the same manner. The ancient city was almost an island now, surrounded by water and marshes to the west, east and northeast. The Malwa army held the southern ground. Persian forces still retained control of the narrow causeway which led from the Ishtar Gate on Babylon’s northwest side to the northern regions of Mesopotamia. Even after all these months, the Malwa had not been able to surround and isolate the besieged city.
Khusrau looked back to the south.
“The first six assaults were made here. The Malwa suffered great losses in all of them, with no success at all except, temporarily, during the third assault. In that attack, some of their troops—those excellent ones with the strange hair style—”
“Kushans.”
“Yes. About a thousand of them got past the outer fortifications, in three different places. But—”
He shrugged. Belisarius, gazing down, could not help wincing.
“Must have been a slaughter.”
“Yes,” agreed Khusrau. The Emperor pointed at the inner fortifications, which consisted of a second ring of walls positioned about two hundred yards inside the outer ring.
“That is a double wall. The outer wall is twenty feet thick; the inner, fifteen. These fortifications were also built by Nebuchadrezzar. Very clever, he was—or his engineers and architects, at least. You can see that the two walls are separated by a space of twenty feet. The area between is a built-up road, perfect for military traffic. Then, beyond the outer wall, is a low berm. You can’t see it from here. But you can see the moat which butts up against that berm. It’s fifty yards wide.”
Belisarius shook his head. “A pure killing ground. If the enemy manages to cross the first moat and fight their way over the outer defenses, they find themselves trapped in the open—with another moat to cross, and still more fortifications to be scaled.”
“That, too, was slaughter. I had the road packed with dehgans and their retainers. It is quite solid and wide enough for horsemen. They were able to fire their bows from the saddle, sheltered by the outer wall, and rush to whatever spot looked most in danger. I don’t think we lost more than two hundred men. And that’s about how many of the Kushans finally made it back across the outer fortifications alive.”
He began to add something else, but his attention was distracted by the sight of a rocket arching up from the Malwa lines. Khusrau and Belisarius followed the rocket’s erratic trajectory, until it plunged harmlessly into the open area between Babylon’s two rings of defenses.