“Come here!” he hollered, holding up the telescope. “There’s a new development I think you should consider.”
Belisarius hurried over. As he made his way across the fifty-foot-wide expanse, he quickly scanned the entire area. From the roof, he could see all of southern Charax as well as the great delta which extended southward to the Persian Gulf itself, perhaps ten miles away. Charax had been built on the east bank of the largest tributary which formed the Tigris-Euphrates delta, on a spit extending south and west of the Mesopotamian mainland. The tributary could hardly be called a river. It was so broad that it was almost a small gulf in its own right. For all practical purposes, Charax was a port city which was surrounded by water from the west all the way around to its east-by-southeast quadrant.
His eyes scanned right, then left. He could see nothing that would cause Maurice such apparent concern. There were masses of Malwa troops on both banks of the tributary, but they had been there since the first few days of the siege. The Malwa had tried to position siege guns on those banks, where they could have fired into the harbor area, but had given up the effort after a week. The ground, as the reeds which covered the banks indicated, was much too soggy. The troops were there simply to keep the Romans from escaping while the main forces of the Malwa tried to hammer their way into the city from the north. They also kept the galleys patrolling the delta supplied with provisions.
He turned his eyes to the fore, looking for the galleys. Again, he could see nothing amiss. There had been upwards of twenty galleys stationed in Charax, when Belisarius broke into the city. Half of them had been on patrol, and all but three of the ones moored to the docks had managed to get free before Roman troops could seize them.
Since then, the Malwa had used the galleys to maintain a blockade. Belisarius’ obvious escape route was to sail out on the cargo ships he had captured. But there was no way to get those ungainly vessels through a line of war galleys. The huge Malwa cargo ships might have been able to withstand ramming—some of them, at least—but the galleys were armed with rockets as well as rams. At close range, with no room to maneuver, rocket volleys would turn unarmored cargo ships into floating funeral pyres.
As it was, Belisarius’ soldiers had been hard-pressed to extinguish the small conflagrations started on the moored ships by long-range rocket fire. Link was making no pretense of saving the cargo ships to evacuate the Malwa troops. Even though the vast majority of the rockets never came close to the docks, the galleys as well as the troops stationed on the banks had kept up a steady barrage since the beginning of the siege. Belisarius didn’t want to think about the disciplinary measures which Link must be taking, to keep its troops driving forward into what, by now, even the dimwits among them must have realized was a suicide mission.
I’m sure that Link has promised the Ye-tai commanders that Malwa would save the Ye-tai, if the barbarians kept the regular troops under control.
Belisarius agreed with Aide’s assessment. But, as he advanced toward Maurice, Belisarius could still see nothing in the delta to cause any concern. Outside of three galleys moored to a makeshift pier on the east bank, taking on supplies, the rest were on patrol. As usual, the Malwa kept five galleys close to the harbor, with the remainder spread out between one and two miles away.
When he came up to Maurice, the gray-haired chiliarch was studying the galleys themselves. His expression seemed one of grim satisfaction.
“They haven’t seen it yet,” he said. “Our elevation’s better.”
He handed Belisarius the telescope. Grim satisfaction was replaced by—
Before he even got the telescope up, in a motion so quick he almost gave himself a black eye, Belisarius knew. He only heard Maurice’s next words dimly, through the rushing blood in his ears.
“Yeah, I thought you’d want to see it, lad. It’s not often, after all, that a man gets to watch Venus rise from the waves.”