When the last Arab had vanished into the purple gloom of a barely breaking day, Belisarius turned to Maurice.
“So? Where are your predictions of catastrophe?”
Maurice grunted. “Abbu said it all. Nothing to add.”
A heavier clattering began. The first of the Roman warhorses were being brought onto the deck, and the heavily armored cataphracts were clumping around to lead them off the ship.
Maurice’s face seemed to lighten a bit. Or, perhaps, it was simply that daylight was beginning to spread. “Might not be so bad, though. Abbu always was a pessimist. We might be able to fight our way back through the mountains, after the disaster, with maybe a tenth of the army still alive.”
* * *
By the time Belisarius caught sight of Barbaricum, the city was already burning. Burning fiercely, in fact—far more than any city made primarily from mudbrick should have been.
“No way the ships’ guns caused that,” said Maurice.
Belisarius shook his head. He halted his horse atop a slight rise in the landscape—more like a little mound of dry mud than a “rise”—and cocked an ear. He couldn’t see the Roman fleet beyond the port, but he could hear the sound of its cannonade.
“Sounds good, though,” he said quietly. “I don’t think the fleet has suffered much damage.”
He listened for perhaps five minutes longer. Only once, in that time, did he hear the deeper roar of one of the Malwa siege guns positioned to protect the harbor. And even that one sounded odd. Slightly muted, as if—
“They’re using light powder loads,” said Gregory. The commander of the artillery force which was off-loading onto the delta—miles behind them, now—had accompanied Belisarius and Maurice. “Looks like you were right, General. They’re saving it for something else.”
Belisarius left off listening to the cannon fire and studied Barbaricum. Much of the city was invisible, shrouded in smoke. But, here and there, he could see portions of the mudbrick buildings which made up most of the city’s outlying areas.
Barbaricum was an unwalled city. But its residential areas were so tightly packed, one building abutting another, that at a superficial glance they appeared to form a defensive wall. The more so since, so far as he could see, there were no windows in any of the exterior walls of the buildings. That might be due to conscious planning, but Belisarius suspected it was simply a matter of cost. The population of Barbaricum, as the name itself implied, was polyglot and largely transient. The simplest and cheapest construction would be the norm.
He reached down into a saddlebag and pulled out his telescope. Then, looking for gaps in the smoke, he began studying the few alleyways which opened into the city’s interior. Still, he could see hardly anything. The alleyways were narrow and crooked, providing only short lines of sight. Needless to say, they were filled with refuse. Only one of the alleys—the one Belisarius focused his attention upon—provided a glimpse of more than a few yards into Barbaricum.
A sudden lull in the cannon fire, perhaps combined with a slight shift in the wind, allowed him for the first time to hear sounds coming from the city itself. Sounds of screaming.
“You were right,” repeated Gregory. The words were almost hissed.
Belisarius tightened his jaws. As soon as Gregory began to speak, he had caught sight through the telescope of the first signs of movement in the city. Four people, dressed in rags—two women and two children, he thought—were running down one of the alleyways. Trying to get out of the city.
As he watched, one of the women stumbled and fell. For a moment, Belisarius thought she had tripped over some of the refuse in the alley. Twisted an ankle or broken a bone, judging from the way she was writhing on the ground. Her face was distorted by a grimace. Belisarius could hear nothing, but he was quite sure she was screaming.
Then he spotted the arrow sticking out of the back of the woman’s leg. An instant later, another arrow took her in the ribs. Now he could hear her screams.
When the woman fell, one of the children had stopped and hesitated. Began to turn back, until the other woman grabbed the child and resumed the race to get out of the city.