Maurice exhaled so forcefully it was almost as if he were spitting air. His hard gray eyes fell on Belisarius, and grew harder still.
“You don’t deserve it, you really don’t. This is almost as bad as the silly Iliad, where every time that reckless Achilles gets himself into a jam Athena swoops in and saves him.”
Belisarius winced, acknowledging the hit. Then, shrugged. “I’ll admit I assumed the local bread would be made by village women. Like trying to collect pebbles on a beach, that would have been. But I was prepared to do it.”
“Instead,” interrupted Mark, “we’ve had the villagers rounding up everything else—mostly lentils, and lots of them—while we keep the bakers in Sitpur working night and day. The biggest problem we’re having right now is finding enough carts to haul the bread off to the south.”
By this time, even Maurice was beginning to share in the excitement. Although he did make a last rally, attempting to salvage some portion of sane pessimism. But the effort was . . . feeble.
“I suppose the so-called ‘bread’ is that flat round stuff. Tastes awful.”
“It’s called chowpatti,” chuckled Felix, “and I think it tastes pretty good, myself.”
Maurice did not argue the point. Culinary preference, after all, was a small issue in the scope of things. Food was food, especially in a siege. Before it was all over—assuming things went well—Maurice fully expected that at least half of the Roman horses would have been eaten.
“Lentils too, eh?” he murmured, stroking his beard and staring down at the map. “And we’ll be able to get fish from the rivers.”
That last thought seemed to relieve him. Not because it suggested that the Roman army would be able to stave off starvation, even in a long siege, but because it brought a new problem to the fore.
“We’ll have enough fishing boats for that,” he growled, “but don’t think the Malwa don’t have plenty of boats of their own. And no little fishing vessels, either. They have enough large river craft in the Punjab, from what I can see, to start ferrying their own troops across to the triangle before we’ll have the fortifications finished.”
He turned and pointed back in the direction of Uch. “The whole area is starting to crawl with Malwa troops. With a lot heavier artillery than anything we have. As we were pulling out of Uch, the Malwa were starting to set up twenty-four pounders around the town. Real siege guns, those, not like these little popguns we’ve got.”
The chiliarch was comfortably back in his favorite groove. He began stroking his beard with great vigor and satisfaction. “They must have thirty thousand men within a week’s march. Three times that, within a month. And once they start transferring troops from the Ganges valley, we’ll be looking at two hundred thousand.” A bit lamely: “Soon enough.”
“Maurice,” said Belisarius patiently, “nobody can move that many troops that far very quickly. It took us months to get our army from Mesopotamia to the Indus, and we could use the sea. The Malwa cannot possibly move any large number of soldiers through Rajputana. The area is too arid. That means they’ll have to march any reinforcements from the Ganges to the headwaters of the Jamuna, and then cross over to the headwaters of the Sutlej. It’ll take them until well into next year, and you know it as well as I do.”
He jerked his head backward, pointing to the north. “Until then, the Malwa will have to rely on whatever forces they already have in the Punjab. Which is a massive army in its own right, of course, but I’ll willing to bet—I am betting—that by now they’re scattered all over the place. Half of them are probably in or around Sukkur, hammering themselves into a pulp against Khusrau and Ashot.”
Maurice did not argue the point, but he was not mollified either. “Fine. But they can still bring three or four times as many men to bear as we’ve got. Sure, with good fortifications across the neck of the triangle, we can mangle them before they break through. But there are enough boats in these rivers to enable them to land troops downstream.”