Thereafter, Belisarius gave the Malwa no further opportunities for such sallies. To his delight, Mark of Edessa was finally able to give his sharpshooters their first test in battle. Whenever it seemed another group of officers was beginning to bring cohesion back to some portion of the Malwa army bleeding to death in the riverbed, Belisarius would give the order and concentrated fire from the sharpshooters would cut them down. Mark’s men, shooting weapons which were modeled after the Sharps rifle, were still indifferent marksmen by the standards of the nineteenth-century America which would produce those guns. But they were good enough, for this purpose.
By the time Belisarius broke off the engagement, the enemy forces had suffered casualties in excess of fifty percent. Far more than was needed to break almost any army in history. The more so because the casualty rate was even higher among officers, and higher still among those who were brave and capable. For all practical purposes, a Malwa army had been erased from the face of the earth.
Even Maurice pronounced himself satisfied with the result. Of course, Maurice being Maurice, he immediately moved on to another problem. Maurice fondled worries the way another man might fondle a wife.
“None of this’ll mean shit, you understand, if the Ethiopians can’t give us supremacy at sea.” The comfort with which he settled back into morose pessimism was almost palpable. “Something will go wrong, mark my words.”
* * *
“I can’t see a damned thing,” complained Antonina, peering through the relatively narrow gap between the foredeck’s roof and the bulwarks which shield the cannons in the bow.
“You’re not supposed to,” retorted Ousanas, standing just behind her. “The sun is down. Only an idiot would make an attack like this in broad daylight on a clear day.”
Scowling, Antonina kept peering. She wasn’t sure what annoyed her the most—the total darkness, or the endless hammering of rain on the roof.
“What if we go aground?” she muttered. Then, hearing Ousanas’ heavy sigh, she restrained herself.
“Sorry, sorry,” she grumbled sarcastically. “I forget that Ethiopian seamen all sprang full-blown from the brow of Neptune. Can see in the dark, smell a lee shore—”
“They can, as a matter of fact,” said Ousanas. “Smell the shore, at least.”
“Easiest thing in the world,” chimed in Eon. The negusa nagast of Axum was standing right next to Ousanas, leaning on one of the four cannons in the bow. In the covered foredeck of the large Ethiopian flagship, there was far more room than there had been in the relatively tiny bow shield of the Victrix.
“People call it the ‘smell of the sea,’ ” he added. “But it’s actually the smell of the seacoast. Rotting vegetation, all that. The open sea barely smells at all.” He gestured toward the lookout, perched on the very bow of the ship. “That’s what he’s doing, you know, along with using the lead. Sniffing.”
“How can anyone smell anything in this wretched downpour?” Antonina studied the lookout. The man’s position was well forward of the roof which sheltered the foredeck. She thought he looked like a drowned rat.
At that very moment, the lookout turned his head and whistled. Then whistled again, and twice again.
Antonina knew enough of the Axumite signals to interpret the whistles. Land is near. Still no bottom.
For a moment, she was flooded with relief. But only for a moment.
“We’re probably somewhere on the Malabar coast,” she said gloomily. “Six hundred miles—or more!—from Chowpatty.”
Suddenly she squealed and began dancing around. Eon was tickling her!
“Stop that!” she gasped, desperately spinning around to bring her sensitive ribs away from his fingers.
Eon was laughing outright. Ousanas, along with the half dozen Axumite officers positioned in the foredeck, was grinning widely.
“Only if you stop making like Cassandra!” boomed Eon. Who, at the moment, looked more like a very large boy than the Ethiopian King of Kings. A scamp and a rascal—royal regalia and vestments be damned. The phakhiolin, as Ethiopians called their version of an imperial tiara, was half-askew on Eon’s head.
With a last laugh, Eon stopped the tickling. “Will you relax, woman? Ethiopian sailors have been running the Malwa blockade of Suppara for almost two years now. Every ship in this fleet has half a dozen of those sailors aboard as pilots. They know the entire Maratha coastline like the back of their hand—good weather or bad, rain or shine, day or night.”