An Oblique Approach

All else was lost. The first Persian lancer loomed in the dust, his back turned away. Belisarius raised his lance high and drove it right through the Mede's heart. The enemy fell off his horse, taking the lance with him.

Another Mede, turned half away, to his right. Belisarius drew his long cavalry sword out of its baldric and hewed the man's arm off with the same motion. Another Mede, again from the back. The sword butchered into his neck, below the rim of the helmet. Another Mede—facing him, now. The sword hammered his shield down, hammered it aside, hammered his helmet sideways. The man was driven off his mount and fell, unconscious, to the ground. In that mad press of stamping horses, he would be dead within a minute, crushed to a bloody pulp.

The entire Roman cavalry piled into the Persians, caving in the right rear of their already disorganized formation. The initial slaughter was horrendous. The charge caught the Persians completely by surprise. Many of them, in the first few seconds, fell before blows which they never even saw.

To an extent, of course, Belisarius now found himself caught by the same dilemma that had faced the Medes. The thousands of Persian cavalrymen jammed against the Roman camp in the center of the battlefield were not quite a wall. But almost. Combat became a matter of men on skittering horses hammering at each other. Lances were useless, now. It was all sword, mace, and ax work. And utterly murderous.

Yet, for all the ensuing mayhem, the outcome was certain. The Medes were trapped between an equal number of Roman heavy cavalry and thousands of Roman infantrymen. Their greatest strength—that unequaled Persian skill at hard-hitting, fast-moving cavalry warfare—was completely neutralized. As cavalrymen, the average Roman was not their equal. But this was no longer a cavalry battle. It was a pure infantry battle, in which the majority of soldiers just happened to be sitting on horses.

As always under those circumstances, more and more of the men—on both sides—soon found themselves on the ground. Without momentum, it was almost impossible to swing heavy swords and axes for any length of time without falling off a horse. The only thing keeping a soldier on his horse were the pressure of his knees and—if possible, which it usually wasn't in a battle—a hand on the pommel of his saddle. Any well-delivered blow on his armor or shield would knock a man off. And any badly delivered blow of his own was likely to drag him off by the inertia of his missed swing.

Five minutes into the fray, almost half of the cavalrymen on both sides were dismounted.

"This is going to be as bad as Lake Ticinus," grunted Anastasius. He pounded a Persian to the ground with a mace blow. Nothing fancy; Anastasius needn't bother—the giant's mace slammed the man's own shield into his helmet hard enough to crack his skull.

Belisarius grimaced. The ancient battle of Lake Ticinus was a staple of Roman army lore. Fought during the Second Punic War, it had started as a pure cavalry battle and ended as a pure infantry fight. Every single man on both sides, according to legend, had fallen off his horse before the fray was finished.

Belisarius was actually surprised that he was still mounted himself. Partly, of course, that was due to his bodyguards. In his entire career, Anastasius had only fallen off his horse once during a battle. And that didn't really count—his horse had fallen first, slipping in a patch of snow on some unnamed little battlefield in Dacia. The man was so huge and powerful—with a horse to match—that he could swap blows with anyone without budging from his saddle.

Valentinian, on the other hand, had taken to the ground as soon as the battle had become a deadlocked slugging match. Valentinian was possibly even deadlier than Anastasius, but his lethality was the product of skill, dexterity, and speed. Those traits were almost nullified in this kind of fray, as long as he was trapped on a stationary horse.

Valentinian was a veteran, however. For all his grousing about foot-soldiering, the man had instantly slid from his horse and kept fighting afoot. The result had been a gory trail of hamstrung and gutted horses, their former riders lying nearby in their own blood.

With those two protecting him—and his own great skill as a fighter—Belisarius hadn't even been hurt.

Yet—it was odd. There was something else. Belisarius hadn't noticed, at first, until a slight pause in the action enabled him to think. But the fact was that he was fighting much too well.