He turned to Maurice. “Pass the word. Make sure everyone understands it. Brand it into their foreheads if you have to—or I will brand it into their corpses. Any Roman soldier who commits any crime in this valley will be summarily executed. Any crime, Maurice, be it so much as pilfering a goat.”
The general’s brown eyes were glaring hot, something which was almost as rare as a solar eclipse. Maurice turned his own head and gazed at the three couriers who accompanied him at all times.
“You heard the general,” he said curtly. “Do it. Now. Use as many men as you need to pass the word.”
His eyes fell on Leo. Antonina had insisted that Belisarius add Leo to his personal bodyguard, retaining only Matthew for herself. The ugliest and most savage-looking of Belisarius’ small squad of bodyguards—and they were all enormous, savage-looking men—was standing well within earshot.
“You heard?” Leo nodded heavily.
“You understand?” Leo nodded heavily.
Maurice glanced at Belisarius. The general smiled crookedly. “I shouldn’t imagine I’ll need Leo for a bit,” he murmured.
Maurice turned back to Leo. “Would you like a break from your normal duties?”
Leo nodded heavily.
For a moment, Maurice hesitated. Outside of battle, where his strength and trained reflexes were quite sufficient, Leo was so dull-witted he was often mistaken for a deafmute.
“You sure you understand what—”
Leo interrupted. “Not hard to understand. Do what the general says or I will hit you.”
Leo hefted the huge mace which was his favored weapon. True, the thing was simply-made; no fancy bull-headed carving here. But perhaps not even the Rustam of Aryan legend could have hefted it so lightly.
“Hit you very hard. Two, three, maybe ten times. General burns his name into what’s left. Not much.”
Everyone standing on the deck of the ship who was close enough to hear burst into laughter. Even Abbu laughed heartily, despite the fact that maintaining discipline over his own scouts during the days to come would tax him greatly. For the most part those scouts were bedouin, who considered pillaging a conquered village an act as natural as eating. Nothing outrageous, of course, unless the village had done something to aggravate them. But—goats?
Before Leo and the couriers had even begun lowering themselves over the rail into the galley tied up alongside, Belisarius was issuing new orders. For one of the few times in his life, Belisarius’ normally relaxed and calm demeanor had vanished. He was pacing back and forth on the deck like a tiger in a cage.
“This breaks it wide open!” he exclaimed. He slapped both hands together like a gunshot. Once, twice, thrice. Then, come to a decision, he abruptly halted his pacing and spun around to face his officers.
“Separate the army, Maurice. I want the sharpshooters and the engineers in the galleys. As many field guns as you can manage also, along with their crews, as long as you leave room for Felix’s musketeers to defend the counter-siege. The galleys can get there faster than the sailing ships, with this damn erratic wind.”
Belisarius now turned to Ashot, the Armenian cataphract whom Belisarius considered the best independent commander among his subordinates, save Maurice himself. “You’re in charge of pinning the Malwa at Sukkur, from the south. You’ll have to hold them, Ashot. It won’t be easy. You’ll be heavily outnumbered. But unless I miss my guess, the Malwa are still fumbling at the new situation. They’ll be so preoccupied with trying to storm into Sukkur that if they’re building lines of circumvallation at all they’ll be doing so only fitfully. Probably haven’t even started yet.”
Ashot nodded, immediately grasping the implication of the general’s words. “Lines of circumvallation” meant the fortifications which a besieging army built to protect itself from other armies while, using their “lines of countervallation,” they tried to reduce the fortress or city. The terms came from a future history, but did not confuse him in the least. Over the past year, as they prepared for this campaign, Belisarius had spent countless hours training his top subordinates in the complex methods of siege warfare he expected to witness in the Indus. Aide had taught Belisarius those methods, from the experience of future wars. The Roman general had no doubt at all that Link had done as much for its own Malwa subordinates.