His enthusiasm rolled all the eager questions right under. “Bouzes and Coutzes are pressing them, too! They got to Sukkur a day after the Malwa started their retreat and just kept going, with the whole army. We’ve got over seventy thousand men coming through the gorge, not one of them so much as scratched by enemy action, and with nothing in their way except that single miserable damn fortress along the river.”
His lip curled. “If the Malwa even try to hold that fortress, Coutzes swears his infantry will storm it in two hours. I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s right. Those men of his haven’t done anything for weeks except march. By now, they’re spoiling for a fight.”
The pent-up enthusiasm burst like a dam. Within a minute, the officers atop Justinian’s Palace were babbling a hundred new plans. Most of them, initially, involved the ins-and-outs of logistics. Keep one of the screw-powered warships on station at the Triangle at all times, using the other to tow more barges—no risk from that stinking miserable fortress once Coutzes gets his hands on it!—alternate them, of course, so all the sailors can share in the glory of hammering those wretched Malwa so-called riverboats—don’t want anyone to get sulky because his mates are starting to call him a barge-handler—
From there, soon enough, the officers started babbling about maneuvers and campaigns. Race up the Sutlej—nonsense, that’s exactly where Link will build their heaviest forts!—better to sweep around using the Indus—hook up with Kungas in the Hindu Kush, you know he’s gotten to the Khyber by now!
Long before it was over, Belisarius was gone. There would be time enough for plans, now; more than enough time, before the next campaign. It’s over. We won. But today, in this new dawn, he first had a debt which needed paying. As best he could.
* * *
Calopodius, as Belisarius had known he would be, was still at his post in the command bunker. The news of the Photius’ arrival—and all that it signified—was already racing through the Roman forces in the Iron Triangle. The advance of the news was like a tidal bore, a surge of celebration growing as it went. When it reached the soldiers guarding the outer walls, Belisarius knew, they would react by taunting the Malwa mercilessly. To his deep satisfaction, he also knew that nowhere would the celebration be more riotous and unrestrained than among the Punjabi civilians living in the city which they had come to call, in their own tongue, a word which meant “the Anvil.”
But Calopodius was taking no part in the celebration. He was sitting at the same desk where he sat every day, doing his duty, dictating orders and messages to the clerk who served as his principal secretary.
Hearing his arrival—Calopodius was already developing the uncanny ear of the blind—the Greek officer raised his head. Oddly enough, there seemed to be a trace of embarrassment in his face. He whispered something hurriedly to the secretary and the man put down the pen he had been scribbling with.
Belisarius studied the young man for a moment. It was hard to read Calopodius’ expression. Partly because the youth had always possessed more than his years’ worth of calm self-assurance, but mostly because of the horrible damage done to the face itself. Calopodius had removed the bandages several days earlier. With the quiet defiance which Belisarius knew was his nature, the young man would present those horribly scarred and empty eye sockets to the world, along with the mutilated brow which had not been enough to shield them.
The general, again, as he had so many times since Calopodius returned, felt a wave of grief and guilt wash over him.
It’s not your fault, insisted Aide.
Of course it is, replied Belisarius. It was I—no other man—who sent that boy into harm’s way. Told him to hold a position which was key to my campaign plans, knowing full well that for such a boy that order was as good as if a god had given it. I might as well have asked him to fall on his sword, knowing he would.
Other boys will live because of it. Thousands of them in this very place—Punjabi boys as well as Roman ones.