“I like that! I like that!” he cried. “Fire in the hole!”
The cry was taken up by others. Within three minutes, the entire army was chanting the words. Even the Kushans, in their newly-learned and broken Greek.
“FIRE IN THE HOLE! FIRE IN THE HOLE!”
The fuse reached its destination.
There was fire in the hole.
Chapter 27
The demolition had been well-planned. So much was immediately obvious. Guided by Aide, Belisarius and Basil had emplaced the charges in the optimum locations to do the job.
Across most of its width, the lower bank of the dam blew sidewise, clearing an instant path for the pent-up energy of the Euphrates. The great river, now released, literally burst into the new channel opened for it. Raging like a bull, the torrent charged down the long-dry Nehar Malka, scouring it deeper and wider as it went.
But Belisarius was unable to appreciate the sight. As so often happens in life, practice subverted theory. The charges had been perfectly placed, true. And then, doubled beyond Aide’s instructions; and then, doubled again.
Aide had complained, of course. Had warned, cautioned, chastened, chastised; been driven, in fact, into its own crystalline version of a gibbering fit.
To no avail. With the simple logic of men whose familiarity with gunpowder was still primitive, Belisarius and Basil had both insisted that more was vastly preferable than enough. Better to make sure the job was done, after all, than to risk a feeble half-result through cringing niggardliness.
Applied to the task of splitting a log with an axe, such logic simply results in unnecessary exertion. Applied to the task of demolishing a dam with gunpowder, however—
I told you so, groused Aide, as Belisarius watched the top layers of the dam sailing into the sky. Hundreds upon hundreds of rocks and boulders—tons and tons of stony projectiles—soaring every which way.
Not all of those missiles, of course, were heading for the tower where Belisarius stood. It just seemed that way.
Baresmanas and Kurush scrambled down the ladder first. The Roman general was halfway down—
Stupid humans.
—when the first rocks began pelting into the tower. By the time he was three-fourths down—
Protoplasmic idiots.
—covered, now, with wood splinters—
Glorified monkeys.
—the tower collapsed completely.
That probably saved his life, as well as those of Baresmanas and Kurush—and Basil, who had also instinctively sought shelter beneath the tower. The half-shattered platform hammered Belisarius and the other three men into the ground, battering them almost senseless. Thereafter, however, it acted as a sort of huge shield, sheltering them—in a manner of speaking—from the hail of rocks which would otherwise have turned two Roman officers and two Persian noblemen into so much undifferentiated pulp.
At the time, Belisarius found little comfort in the fact. The platform lying on him did not deflect the blows, in the manner of a true shield, so much as it simply spread the shock across his entire body. He was not pulped, therefore. Amazingly, none of his bones were even broken. But he did undergo a version of being pounded into flatcake, except that flatcakes do not suffer the added indignity of being lectured throughout the experience.
Crazy fucking Thracian.
Whoever made you a general, anyway?
It’s amazing you even made it out of the womb, as stupid as you are. I’m surprised you didn’t insist on finding your own way out. God forbid you should listen to your mother.
Crazy fucking Thracian.
Whoever—
And so on, and so forth.
It took his soldiers an hour to dig Belisarius and the others out, after the rocks stopped falling. The digging itself, actually, took only a few minutes. The delay was caused by the fact that his men had fled a full half mile away after the barrage started.
His first, semiconscious, croaking words:
“Did it work? I couldn’t see.”
His ensuing croaks, after being assured of full success in the project:
“Next time. Smaller charges.”
“Much smaller,” croaked Basil.
“Crazy fucking Romans,” croaked Baresmanas.
“Whoever put him in charge?” croaked Kurush.
Others, also, failed to heed warnings. When Merena arrived at Ctesiphon to warn the governor of the oncoming tidal wave, the man responded with derision. Partly, that was due to his personality. Arrogant by nature, his recent naming to the post of shahrab of the Persian Empire’s capital city had swelled his head even further. In the main, however, his attitude was determined by politics. The shahrab of Ctesiphon—Shiroe was his name—was allied with Ormazd’s faction. The appearance before him of an officer of Emperor Khusrau’s most ferociously-loyal follower, Baresmanas, seemed to him a perfect opportunity to score a political point. So, Shiroe responded to Merena’s warning with jocular remarks on lunacy, embellished with denunciations of Romans and those Persians besotted with them, and concluding with a not-so-veiled thrust on the subject of miscegenation.