Much later that night, sleepless, the stablekeeper arose from his bed. He moved softly to the small window and opened the shutter. Just a bit—there was no glass in that modest frame to keep out the weather.
He stood there, for a time, staring to the east. There was nothing to see, beyond the blackness of the night and the glimmering of the rain.
When he returned to his bed, he fell asleep quickly, easily. Resolution often has that effect.
Chapter 15
After an hour, Belisarius finally found what he was looking for.
It had been a thoroughly frustrating hour. On the one hand, he had found plenty of lone soldiers. But all of them had been common Malwa troops, shirking their duty by hiding in alleys and out-of-the-way nooks and crannies of the city. None of these men had been big enough for their uniforms to fit him. Nor, for that matter, did he think he could pass himself off as an Indian from the Gangetic plain.
Ye-tai was what he wanted. The Ye-tai, in the west, were often called White Huns. The word “white,” actually, was misleading. The Ye-tai were not “white” in the sense that Goths or Franks were. The complexion of Ye-tai was not really much different than that of any other Asian steppe-dwellers. But their facial features were much closer to the western norm than were those of Huns proper, or, for that matter, Kushans. And, since Belisarius himself was dark-complected for a Thracian—as dark as an Armenian—he thought he could pass himself off as Ye-tai well enough. Especially since he could speak the language fluently.
Ye-tai tended to be big, too. He was quite sure he could find one whose size matched his own.
Ye-tai he found aplenty. Big Ye-tai, as well. But the Ye-tai always traveled in squads, and they tended to be much more alert than common troops.
Fortunately for him, the alertness of the Ye-tai was directed inward rather than outward—toward the common soldiers they were rounding up and driving into the streets. Scouring the streets and alleys was beneath the dignity of Ye-tai. That was dog work, for common troops. Their job was to whip the dogs.
At first, as he watched the massive search operation which began unfolding in the capital, Belisarius was concerned that he would be spotted before he could make his escape from Kausambi. But, soon enough, his fears ebbed. After a half an hour, in fact—a half hour spent darting from one alley to another, heading west by a circuitous route—Belisarius decided that the whole situation was almost comical.
The explosion of the armory had roused every soldier in the Malwa capital, of every type and variety. And since there were a huge number of troops stationed in Kausambi, the streets of the city were soon thronged with a mass of soldiers. But the soldiers were utterly confused, and largely leaderless. Leaderless, not from lack of officers, but because the officers themselves had little notion what, exactly, they were supposed to do. But they didn’t want to seem to be doing nothing—especially under the hard eyes of Ye-tai—so the officers sent their men scurrying about aimlessly. Soon enough, the masses of troops charging and counter-charging about the city had become so hopelessly intermingled that any semblance of disciplined formation vanished.
Watching the scene, Belisarius realized that he was witnessing one of the military weaknesses of the Malwa Empire. The Malwa, because of their social and political structure, had no real elite shock troops. The Malwa kshatriya, who had a monopoly of the gunpowder weapons, functioned more as privileged artillery units than elite soldiers. The Ye-tai, for all their martial prowess, were not really an elite corps either. Their position in the Malwa army was essentially that of security battalions overseeing the common troops, rather than a spearhead. And the Rajputs, or Kushans—who could easily have served the Malwa as elite troops—were too distrusted.
The end result was that the Malwa had no body of soldiers equivalent to his own Thracian bucellarii. And for the task of hunting down a foreign fugitive in the streets of a great city like Kausambi—especially at night, in pouring rain—a relatively small body of disciplined, seasoned men would have done much better than the hordes of common troops whom the Malwa had sent floundering into action.