But Gregory was no longer there. The artillery commander had sent his horse trotting behind the guns. Gregory was up in his own stirrups, bellowing like a bull.
“Down, you sorry bastards! Lower the elevation! I want grazing shots, damn you!”
The artillerymen were working feverishly. In each gun crew, two men were levering up the barrels while the gun captain sighted by eye. On his command, a fourth man slid the quoin further up between the barrel and the transom, lowering the elevation of the gun and shortening the trajectory of the fire. That done, they raced to reload the weapons. Again, with the cast iron balls of simple round shot.
Belisarius hesitated, then lowered himself down to his saddle. He still wasn’t sure Gregory was right, but . . .
Good officers need the confidence of their superiors. Best way for a general to ruin an army is to meddle.
While the guns were reloading, the Greek cataphracts who were now massing on the southwestern slope began firing their own volleys of arrows into the packed mass of Malwa troops in the riverbed. As Belisarius had insisted—he wanted to keep his own casualties to a minimum—Sittas and Cyril were keeping the armored horse archers at a distance. But, even across two hundred yards, cataphract arrows struck with enough force to punch through the light armor worn by Malwa infantrymen.
Belisarius could see a knot of Malwa begin to form up and dress their ranks. Somewhere in that shrieking and struggling pile of soldiers, apparently, some officers were still functioning and maintaining order. Good ones, too, from the evidence—within the few minutes it took for the Roman guns to reload, they managed to put together a semblance of a mass of pikemen, flanked by musketeers. Within a minute or so, Belisarius estimated, they would begin a charge.
He glanced at his own artillerymen. They were getting ready to fire again, waiting for Gregory to give the order. Belisarius moved his eyes back to the enemy. He wanted to study the effect of this next volley. “Grazing shots,” Gregory had demanded. Belisarius understood what he meant, but he was uncertain how effective they’d be.
“Fire!” The cannons belched smoke and fury. Then—
“Sweet Mary,” whispered Belisarius.
Gregory got his wish. Almost all of the cannonballs struck the ground anywhere from twenty to fifty yards in front of the Malwa soldiery. Three-pound cast-iron balls came screaming in at a low trajectory, hit the ground, and caromed back up into the enemy at knee to shoulder level. Where the first volley had plunged into the middle and rear of the Malwa soldiery, killing and maiming a relative few, this volley cut into them from front to back.
Far worse than the balls themselves, however, was the effect of the ricochets. The ground which those cannonballs struck was loose rock and shale. The impact sent stones and pieces of stone flying everywhere. For all practical purposes, solid shot had struck with the impact and effect of explosive shells. For each Malwa torn by the balls, four or five others were shredded by stones.
Most of those ricochet wounds, of course, were not as severe as those caused by the cannonballs themselves. But they were severe enough to kill many soldiers outright, cripple as many more, and wound almost anyone not sheltered from the blow.
That single volley also put paid to the charge the Malwa were trying to organize. Whether by accident or design, the worst effects of the cannon fire were felt by the semi-organized men in the middle.
The riverbed was a shrieking, blood-soaked little valley now. The cataphracts continued their own missile fire while the guns reloaded again.
“Fire!”
Another round of perfect grazing shots. Belisarius was beginning to sicken a little. Through his telescope, he could see Malwa soldiers trying to stand up, slip and slide on bloody intestines and every other form of shredded human tissue, fall, stagger to their feet again . . .
He lowered the telescope and waved at Sittas. But then, seeing that the big Greek general was preoccupied with keeping his men from moving too close and therefore hadn’t seen his wave, Belisarius turned in his saddle and shouted at the cornicenes. For a moment, the buglers just stared at him.