Agathius immediately nodded. So did Belisarius. All three men had reached the same assessment, just from the sound of the battle. For all the evident fury with which the Malwa were pressing the attack, their efforts would be futile. There had been not a trace of the unmistakable sounds of defenders losing heart. Not one cry of despair, not one desperate shriek—only a steady roar of Roman battle cries and shouts of confident triumph.
The assault would break, recoil; the Malwa stagger away, trailing small rivers of blood.
Belisarius turned away from the villa and quickly scanned the area.
“You’re ready.” It was a statement, not a question. Agathius and Bouzes didn’t even bother to speak their affirmation.
The general sighed.
“Nothing for it, then.” He looked back at the villa, wincing.
“Back into the vise, for me.” He began walking toward the buildings, saying, over his shoulder: “I’ll have the message relayed. Watch for it. Fire off the rockets at once.”
To his relief, the crowd had thinned out a bit—in the rear buildings, at least. All of the soldiers who could had forced themselves into the buildings directly facing the Malwa, fired with determination to help beat off the attack. It only took Belisarius a couple of minutes to thread his way back to the central gardens.
There, however, he was stopped cold. Cursed himself for a fool.
He had forgotten that he had given orders, the day before, to use the gardens as a field hospital. The grounds were completely impassable, now. The casualties were not particularly severe, given the situation. But wounded men, along with their attendants, take up more space than men standing.
As he scrutinized the scene, a part of Belisarius was grimly pleased with what he saw. Outside of the terrible losses suffered by a routed army being pursued, there was no kind of battle which produced casualties as quickly as a close assault on fieldworks. Most of those casualties, of course, would be inflicted on the attackers. But the defenders would take their share also.
Yet, what he now saw in the gardens were light casualties, given the circumstances. And—even better—a much higher proportion of men wounded rather than killed, compared to the usual.
The screens worked, by God!
He had thought they would. Malwa grenades, like Roman ones, were ignited by hand-lit fuses. It was almost inevitable that the man lighting that fuse would cut it a bit too long, from fear of having the bomb blow up in his hand. The Malwa would have concentrated their grenades on the many doors and portals which lined the villa’s walls and buildings. With the screens in place—put up almost instantly, without warning—the Malwa grenades would have bounced off and exploded too far away to do any concussive damage. True, shrapnel would pierce the leather—would eventually shred the screens entirely. But the screens had served to blunt the fury of the first assault, and almost all the Roman casualties had been the relatively minor wounds caused by leather-deflected shrapnel.
Pleased as he was, however, Belisarius did not spend much time examining the scene. He was too preoccupied with the unexpected problem of getting himself to a position where he could assess the next Malwa attack—the attack he was certain would be spearheaded by the Kushans. Timing would be all important, then, and he could not possibly order Maurice’s attack when he had no idea what was happening.
For a moment, he considered working his way to the front by circumnavigating the interconnected buildings which made up the compound. But he dismissed the idea almost immediately. Every one of those buildings would be so jampacked with soldiers as to make forward progress all but impossible.
He had just about come to the grotesque but inescapable conclusion that he was going to have to make his way through the gardens by walking on the bodies of wounded men, when he heard his name called.
“General Belisarius! General Belisarius! Over here!”
He looked across the gardens. Standing in a doorway on the opposite side was the same infantryman he had spoken with earlier. Felix—Felix Chalcenterus.
“You won’t be able to get across, sir!” shouted the Syrian soldier. “The chiliarch sent me back here to watch for you! Wait a minute! Just a minute!”