He caught sight of Syrian and Arab units charging forward, ready to provide covering fire for the cataphracts. He waved them off. There was no need. The Malwa were pursuing, true. But it was not a furious, frenzied charge led by eager warriors. It was a sodden, leaden, sullen movement, driven forward by screaming Ye-tai.
The Malwa cavalrymen had had enough of Romans, for the moment.
Belisarius turned back, satisfied, and glanced at the sun. It was not yet noontime. He thought the Malwa commanders would not be able to drive their army back into battle for at least two hours. Possibly three.
Plenty of time. He had taken no pleasure in the killing. He never had, in any battle he had ever fought. But he did take satisfaction in a job well done, and he intended to do the same again. In two hours. Possibly three.
Plenty of time, for a craftsman at his trade.
Chapter 19
Two and a half hours later, the enemy began taking positions for the assault on the villa. The Malwa forces lined up on the open ground east of the royal compound, at a distance of half a mile. The front lines were composed of cavalry regulars, backed by Ye-tai. The rocket wagons, guarded by the Kushans, were brought to a halt fifty yards behind the front ranks. The kshatriya, overseen by Mahaveda priests, removed the tarpaulins covering the wagons and began unloading rockets and firing troughs. Within a few minutes, they had the artillery devices set up. There were eighteen of the rocket troughs, erected in a single line, spaced thirty feet apart.
From a room on the second floor of the villa, Belisarius studied the Malwa formation with his telescope. Standing just behind him were the top officers of the Syrian and Constantinople troops forted up in the imperial compound—Bouzes and Coutzes, Agathius and Cyril. They were listening intently as Belisarius passed on his assessment of the situation.
The general began by examining the rockets, but spent little time on that problem. Once the first two or three had been erected, he was satisfied that he understood them perfectly. The rockets were the same type he had seen—at much closer range—during the sea battle he had fought against pirates while traveling to India on a Malwa embassy ship. In that battle, the rockets had wreaked havoc on the Arab ships. But, he told his officers, he did not think they would have that effect here.
“Most of the damage done by the rockets in the pirate battle,” he explained, lowering the telescope for a moment, “was incendiary. The pirate galleys, like all wooden boats, were bonfires waiting to happen.”
Seeing the puzzlement on the faces of Bouzes and Coutzes, the two Constantinople officers chuckled.
“Farm boys!” snorted Cyril. “You think ’cause a boat’s floating on water that she won’t burn? Shit. The planks are made of the driest wood anyone can find, and what’s worse—”
“—they’re caulked with pitch,” concluded Agathius. Like his fellow Greek, the chiliarch was smirking—that particular, unmistakable, insufferable smirk which seafarers the world over bestow upon landlubbers.
“Not to mention the cordage and the sails,” added Cyril.
Bouzes and Coutzes, Thracian leaders of a Syrian army, took no offense at the Greeks’ sarcasm. On some other day, they might. But not on the day when those same Greeks had given the enemy such a thorough pounding. They simply grinned, shrugged at their ignorance, and studied the interior of the villa with new and enlightened eyes.
“A different matter altogether, isn’t it?” commented Belisarius.
Under the fancy trappings and elaborate decorations, the royal compound was about as fireproof as a granite tor. The walls were made of kiln-fired brick, and the sloping roof was covered with tiles. Neither would burn—those bricks and tiles had been made in ovens—and he was quite sure the thick walls could withstand the explosive power of the rockets’ relatively small warheads.
True, the roof tiles would probably shatter under a direct hit by a rocket. Belisarius did not think there would be many such hits, if any. He knew from experience that the Malwa rockets were not only erratic in their trajectories, but erratic in their destruction as well. They had no contact fuses. They simply exploded whenever the burning fuel reached the warhead. In order to shatter the roof, a rocket would have to hit directly—not at a glancing angle—and explode at just the right time.