Antonina drew her cleaver and held it over her head.
“Nothing! Nothing!” she cried, and began marching up the steps.
Her whole army surged after her. But, before she had gone halfway up the staircase, Maurice was holding her back.
“You stay in the rear.”
Antonina obeyed. Her army swept around her. After they had all gone by, she and Maurice followed.
By the time they passed through the Gate of Death, some of the grenadiers were already launching their first grenades. Antonina could hear the explosions, as well as the battle cry of her own soldiers.
“NOTHING! NOTHING!”
She and Maurice entered the Hippodrome. They were standing on a broad, flat platform. Below them, the wide stone tiers of the Hippodrome—which served as seats and stairway combined—sloped down to the racetrack below.
The three hundred cataphracts were spreading out, filing down the first ten tiers, setting a perimeter. All of them had drawn their bows. In the center, just below her, the grenadiers and their wives had taken their own compact formation. Some of the grenadiers were slinging grenades, but most of them were still occupied in setting up their grenade baskets.
Antonina stared at the enemy, massed on the other side of the Hippodrome. After a quick glance, she ignored the huge mob of faction thugs. Her attention was drawn to the wooden bulwarks positioned on the far curve of the racetrack. She could see the kshatriya muscling around some wooden troughs. She did not recognize the odd wooden devices, but she had no difficulty recognizing the nature of the tubes which the kshatriya were placing in them.
“Rockets,” she muttered. She turned to Maurice, standing next to her.
“Tell the army to spread out further. I don’t want to give those rockets a concentrated target.”
Maurice winced. “That’ll make it harder to defend against a mass charge.”
Antonina shook her head.
“If all forty thousand of those thugs charge us at once, they’ll overwhelm us regardless of how compact we are. But I know that crowd, Maurice. I grew up with them. Forty thousand Hippodrome thugs can swamp less than a thousand soldiers—but not without suffering heavy casualties. Especially in the front ranks.”
She pointing toward the mob.
“I guarantee you, Maurice, they know it as well as we do. And every single one of that crowd, right this very moment, is making the same vow.”
She laughed, harshly. “ ‘Victory!’ is just their official battle cry. The real one—the private, silent one—is: you first! Anybody but me!”
Maurice chuckled. Then, nodded.
“I do believe you’re right.” A moment later, the hecatontarch was bellowing orders. The cataphracts immediately began spreading out further. Within a minute, they had established a perimeter which encompassed the entire southwestern arc of the Hippodrome. The grenadiers spread out to fill that guarded space. Soon, the grenadiers were scattered into separate small squads, instead of packed into a tight formation.
Not a moment too soon. The Malwa fired their first rockets at the Romans. One of the rockets plowed into the dirt track below them, sending up a cloud of dust. Another soared completely out of the Hippodrome. But the next slammed into a nearby tier.
For all the impressive sound and fury of the explosion, the heavy stone suffered no worse than scorching. And, because the space was vacated, there were no casualties beyond a few grenadiers injured by flying wooden splinters. Minor wounds, no worse.
The grenadiers roared their fury. For the first time since entering the Hippodrome, the grenadiers launched a full volley.
Hundreds of grenades, their fuses sputtering, flew across the Hippodrome. The volley was not concentrated on any particular target. Each grenadier had simply decided to smite the foe. Any foe.
The volley erupted throughout the huge mob of faction thugs. A few landed in the vicinity of the wooden bulwarks sheltering the kshatriya. The Malwa soldiers, accustomed to gunpowder weapons, took shelter long before the grenades arrived. Few of them were even injured.
The mob—
A man of the future, had he been watching, would have called that volley a gigantic shotgun blast.
A sawed-off shotgun, at short range.
“Beautiful!” shouted Maurice, raising his fist in triumph. Below, the cataphracts and the grenadiers added their own cries of elation.