Narses rubbed his face with a hand. “I am sworn to tell nothing but the truth, king of Rajputana. Even to such as Great Lady Sati. As you know.”
Sanga nodded deeply. The gesture reminded Narses of a man placing his neck on a headsman’s block. “Give me illusion, then,” he whispered, “if you cannot give me the truth.”
Abruptly, Narses rose. “I can do neither, Rana Sanga. I know nothing of philosophy. Nothing of onions or the knives needed to cut them. Send for your servant, please, to show me the way out of these chambers.”
Sanga’s head was still bent. “Please,” he whispered. “I feel as if I am dying.”
“Nothing,” insisted Narses. “Nothing which cannot bear the scrutiny of the world’s greatest ferret for the truth. Great Lady Sati, Rana Sanga.”
“Please.” The whisper could barely be heard.
Narses turned his head to the door, scowling. “Where is that servant? I can assure you, king of Rajputana, that I would not tolerate such slackness in my own. My problem, as a matter of fact, is the exact opposite. I am plagued with servants who are given to excess. Especially sentimentality. One of them, in particular. I shall have very harsh words to say to him, I can assure you, when next I see the fellow.”
And with those words, Narses left the chamber. He found his way through Sanga’s quarters easily enough. Indeed, it might be said he passed through them like an old antelope, fleeing a tiger.
* * *
Behind, in the chamber, Sanga slowly raised his head. Had there been anyone to see, they would have said the dark eyes were glowing. With growing relief—and fury—more than ebbing fear. As if a tiger, thinking himself caught in a cage, had discovered the trapper had been so careless as to leave it unlocked.
A state of affairs which, as all men know, does not bode well for the trapper.
Chapter 40
THE PUNJAB
Autumn, 533 a.d.
Despite the protests of his officers and bodyguards, Belisarius insisted on remaining in one of the bastions when the Malwa launched their mass assault on his fortifications. His plans for the coming siege were based very heavily on his assessment of the effectiveness of the mitrailleuse, and this would be the first time the weapons had ever been tested under combat conditions. He wanted to see them in action himself.
Blocking out of his mind the noise of mortar and artillery fire, as well as the sharper sounds of Felix’s sharpshooters picking off Malwa grenadiers, Belisarius concentrated all his attention on watching the mitrailleuse crew working the weapon in the retired flank he was crouched within.
The mitrailleuse—the “Montigny mitrailleuse,” to give the device its proper name—was the simplest possible form of machine gun except for the “organ gun” originally designed by Leonardo da Vinci. Like the organ gun, the mitrailleuse used fixed instead of rotating barrels. But, unlike its more primitive ancestor, the breech-loading mitrailleuse could be fired in sequence instead of in a single volley, and fire many more rounds in any given period of time.
Belisarius watched as the gun crew inserted another plate into the breech and slammed it into place with a locking lever. The plate held thirty-seven papier-mâché cartridges, which slid into the corresponding thirty-seven barrels of the weapon. A moment later, turning a crank, one of the men began triggering off the rounds while another—using the crude device of a wooden block to protect his hands from the hot jacket—tapped the barrel to traverse the Malwa soldiery piled up in the ditch below the curtain wall.
Belisarius had wanted a more advanced type of machine gun, preferably something based on the Gatling gun design which Aide had shown him and which he had detailed for John of Rhodes. But all the experiments of John’s artificers with rotating barrels—much less belt-designed weapons like the Maxim gun—had foundered on a single problem.
Roman technology was good enough to make the weapons. Not many, perhaps, but enough. The problem was the ammunition. Rotating barrel and belt-fed designs all depended on uniform and sturdy brass cartridges. John’s artificers could make such cartridges, but not in sufficient quantity. As had proven so often the case, designs which could be transformed into material reality in small numbers simply couldn’t be done on a mass production scale.