The Dance of Time

The barges across the river were making a nice conflagration, too. And—wonder of wonders—the wind was blowing the smoke away from the river. Menander had worried that if the smoke blew the other way he might find himself blinded.

"It's a miracle, lads," he said cheerfully to the other men in the turret. "The one and only time in my life I've seen a military operation work exactly according to plan."

The engine coughed. The Justinian lurched.

Coughed again. Coughed again.

Silence. The Justinian glided gently downriver with the current, its engine dead.

"Idiot!" Menander hissed at himself. "You had to go and say it!"

Sighing, he studied the riverbank for a moment. "Can you keep her steady in midriver?"

"Yes, sir," replied the pilot.

"All right, then." He leaned over the speaking tube again. "Relax, boys. All that happens until the engineers get the engines running again is just that we have more time to aim. Let 'em have it."

* * *

The fighting that afternoon at the front lines was brutal, but the casualties never got bad enough for Maurice to start worrying. And the Malwa never tried any sallies at all.

* * *

Samudra was too pre-occupied to order any. All his attention was concentrated on the desperate effort to get reinforcements to the Indus in time to keep the Romans and Persians from crossing. It was bad enough that he'd lost the forts on the opposite bank. It wouldn't take the enemy long to turn the guns around and built new berms to shelter them. The Persians and Romans were already working like bees to get it done. As it was, he'd henceforth be pressed on his western flank as well as the southern front. But let them get a toehold on his side of the river...

Samudra managed to stave off that disaster. But it took two days to do so.

It wasn't until the morning of the third day that he remembered the Kushans at Margalla Pass. By which time it was too late to do anything.

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Framed

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Chapter 32

Near Mayapur, on the Ganges

"It's them, Great King," said the Pathan scout, pointing to the east. "Must be. No general—not even a Malwa—would be leading a large army from a chaundoli."

"How close are they to the Ganges?"

"For us, Great King, a day's march. For them, two. By mid-afternoon on the day after tomorrow, they will have reached Mayapur. They will need to wait until the next day to ford the river. The Ganges is still quick-moving, just coming out of the Silawik hills and the rapids. They would be foolish—very foolish—to cross it after sundown."

"Unless they were forced to..." Kungas mused. "Do you know if there's high ground nearby?"

"Yes, Great King. I have been to the shrines at Mayapur, to see the Footstep of God."

Kungas was not surprised. The Pathans were not Hindus, but like tribesmen in many places they were as likely to adopt the gods of other people as their own. Mayapur—also known as Gangadwara—was an ancient religious site, which had drawn pilgrims for centuries. It was said that Vishnu had left his footprint there, at the exact spot where the holy Ganges left the mountains.

The Pathan's hands moved surely in the air, sketching the topography. "Here, below, is the Ganges. Here—not far—there is a ridge. Very steep. There is a temple on the crest. I have been to it."

"Is the river within mortar range of the ridge?"

"Yes. The big mortars, anyway. And the flatland by the river is wide enough to hold the whole Malwa army, while they wait to cross." The Pathan grinned fiercely. "They will be relaxed and happy, now that they are finally out of the hills and entering the plain. You will slaughter them like lambs, Great King."

As he studied the distant hills, Kungas pondered the man's use of the title Great King. That was no title that Kungas himself had adopted or decreed, and this scout was not the first Pathan whom Kungas had heard use the expression. From what he could tell, in fact, it seemed to have become—or was becoming, at least—the generally accepted term for him among the tribesmen.

Great King.

There were subtleties in that phrase, if you knew—as Kungas did—the ways of thought of the mountain folk. People from lands accustomed to kings and emperors would think nothing of it. "Great" was simply one of many adjectives routinely attached to such rulers. A rather modest one, in fact, compared to the "divine" appellation of Indian tradition. Even the relatively egalitarian Axumites, when they indulged themselves in formal oratory, plastered such labels as "He Who Brought The Dawn" onto their monarchs.

Something else was involved here. Great king—where the Kushans themselves simply called him "king." The title added a certain necessary distance, for the Pathans. Kungas was not their king. Not the authority to whom they directly answered, who were their own clan leaders. But they would acknowledge that he was the overlord of the region, and would serve him in that capacity.

Good enough, certainly for the moment.