“You agreed, boy?” he demanded. Seeing the young officer’s eager nod, Maurice snorted.
“Damn fool.” But the words glowed with inner fire. Maurice, too, had once been seventeen years old. He stepped over and placed a hand on Calopodius’ shoulder. Then, squeezing it:
“It’s a ‘forlorn hope,’ you know. But every man should do it at least once in a lifetime, I imagine. And—if by some odd chance, you survive—you’ll have the bragging rights for the rest of your life.”
Calopodius grinned. “Who knows? Maybe even my aunt will stop calling me ‘that worthless brat.’ ”
Belisarius chuckled. Maurice leered. “That might not be the blessing you imagine. She might start pestering you instead of the stable boys.”
Calopodius winced, but rallied quickly. “Not a problem!” he proclaimed. “I received excellent marks in both rhetoric and grammar. I’m sure I could fend off the ploys of an incestuous seductress.”
But a certain look of alarm remained on his face; and it was that, in the end, which reconciled Belisarius to the grim reality of his scheme. There was something strangely satisfying in the sight of a seventeen-year-old boy being more worried about the prospect of a distant social awkwardness than the far more immediate prospect of his own death.
You’re a peculiar form of life, observed Aide. I sometimes wonder if the term “intelligence” isn’t the ultimate oxymoron.
Belisarius added his own firm shoulder-squeeze to Maurice’s, and strode away to begin the preparations for the march. As he began issuing new orders, part of his mind examined Aide’s quip. And concluded that, as was so often true, humor was but the shell of reason.
True enough. An intelligent animal understands the certainty of his own eventual death. So it stands to reason his thought processes will be a bit—what’s the word?
Weird, came the prompt reply.
* * *
Two days later, Belisarius and his army moved out of their fieldworks on the banks of the Indus near Rohri. They left behind, stationed on the island in the new fieldworks which had been hastily erected, three field guns and their crews and a thousand of Sittas’ cataphracts. Also left behind, in Rohri itself, were all of the wounded. Many of those men would die from their injuries in the next few days and weeks. But most of them—perhaps six or seven hundred men—were healthy enough to provide Calopodius with the troops he needed to maintain the pretense that Rohri was still occupied by Belisarius’ entire army.
They pulled out shortly after midnight, using the moonlight to find their way. Belisarius knew that his soldiers would have to move slowly in order not to make enough noise to alert the Malwa positioned across the river that a large troop movement was underway. And he wanted—needed—to be completely out of sight by the break of dawn.
Under the best of circumstances, of course, heavy cavalry and field artillery make noise when they move. And doing so at night hardly constituted “the best of circumstances.” Still, Belisarius thought he could manage it. The cavalry moved out first, with Gregory’s field artillery stationed on the banks of the Indus near Rohri adding their own fire to that of Calopodius’ guns on the island. At Belisarius’ command, the guns were firing staggered shots rather than volleys. The continuous sound of the cannons, he thought, should serve to disguise the noise made by the cavalry as they left the river.
Then, as the night wore on, Gregory would start pulling his guns away from the river. Taking them out one at a time, following the now-departed cavalry, leaving the rest to continue firing until those leaving were all gone. As if Belisarius was slowly realizing that an artillery barrage at night was really a poor way to bombard an unseen and distant enemy entrenched within fieldworks. By the end, only Calopodius’ three guns would remain, firing until a courier crossing to the island on one of the few small boats left behind would tell Calopodius that his commander had succeeded in the first step of his great maneuver.
That barrage, of course, would cost Belisarius still more of his precious gunpowder. But he had managed to save all of the special ammunition used by the mitrailleuse and the mortars, and most of the sharpshooters’ cartridges. And he was sure he would have enough gunpowder to keep the field guns in operation against whatever enemy he encountered on the march to the Chenab. Whether there would be enough ammunition left thereafter, to fend off the inevitable Malwa counterattack once he set up his fortifications at the fork of the Chenab . . .