The Dance of Time

Kujulo was frowning slightly, looking at the Pathan. "Are you sure—"

Kungas waved his hand. "If a Pathan scout says it's Great Lady Sati, it's Great Lady Sati."

The man looked very pleased. Kungas' following question, however, had him frowning also.

"How large is her army?"

The Pathan's hands moved again, but no longer surely, as if groping a little. "Hard to say, Great King. Very large army. Many hundreds of hundreds."

Kungas left off further questioning. The Pathan was not only illiterate, but had a concept of arithmetic that faded away somewhere into the distance after the number "one hundred." Even that number was a borrowed Greek term. And, although the man was an experienced warrior, he was the veteran of mountain fights. Feuds between clans, clashes with expeditions from the lowlands—none of them involving forces on the scale of battles between civilized nations. Any estimate he gave of the size of Sati's army would be meaningless.

He nodded, dismissing the scout, and turned to Kujulo. "We'll need some of our own soldiers to do a reasonably accurate count. Send off a party guided by the scout."

"And in the meantime? Continue the march?"

"No. As hard as we've pressed them the past few days, the men need a rest." He glanced at the sky, gauging the sun. "I'll want a long march tomorrow, though, and it'll be a hard one, followed by a night march after a few hours rest. I want to be at that ridge before Sati can cross the river."

Kujulo started to move off. Kungas called him back.

"One other thing. By now, the bitch will be suspicious because we've cut the telegraph lines. Take three thousand men and march immediately. Stay to the south. She'll send back a scouting expedition. Three thousand should be enough to drive them off—but make sure you draw their attention to the south."

Kujulo nodded. "While you march by night and slip past them to the north."

"Yes. If it works, we'll come onto the ridge opposite the river. They won't know we're there until they start crossing."

Kujulo's grin was every bit as savage as the Pathan's. "A big army—tens of thousands of soldiers—in the middle of a river crossing. Like catching an enemy while he's shitting. Good thing you made us wait to get more ammunition for the mortars, before we left Margalla Pass."

"We only lost a day, thanks to Irene's efficiency, and I knew we'd make it up in the march."

"True. Best quartermaster I ever saw, she is. Stupid Pathans. If they had any brains, they'd know it was just plain and simple 'king'—but with a very great queen."

He hurried off, then, leaving Kungas behind to ponder the question of whether or not he'd just seen his royal self deeply insulted.

Being an eminently sane and rational man who'd begun life as a simple soldier, it took him no more than a second to dismiss the silly notion. But he knew his grandson—great-grandson, for sure—would think otherwise. There were perils to claiming Alexander and Siddhartha Gautama as the ancestors of a dynasty. It tended to produce a steep and rapid decline in the intelligence of the dynasty's succeeding generations.

But that was a problem for a later decade. In the coming few days, Kungas would be quite satisfied if he could tear the flanks of the army escorting Malwa's overlord to what he thought was its final battle.

He probably couldn't manage to destroy the monster itself, unfortunately. But if Kungas was right, Belisarius was waiting to pounce on the creature somewhere down the Ganges. He'd kill the monster, if it was already bleeding.

* * *

"Another splendid speech," said Jaimal approvingly.

Next to him, Udai Singh nodded. "I knew—I remembered—that your Hindi was excellent. But I didn't know you were an orator, as well."

Belisarius glanced at the men riding beside him. Over the days of hard marches since they'd left Ajmer, a subtle change had come in the way Jaimal acted toward the Roman general. Udai Singh, also.

In the beginning, they'd both been stiffly proper. Their new emperor and Rana Sanga had ordered them to place the Rajputs under Belisarius' command, and they had done so dutifully and energetically. But it had been clear enough that some hostility lurked beneath the polite surface.

Belisarius had wondered about that. He'd found it surprising. True, they'd been enemies until very recently. But the clashes between Belisarius' army and Damodara's had been gallant affairs, certainly by the standards of the Malwa war. He hadn't though there'd be any real grudges left, now that they were allied. There'd certainly been no indication of personal animosity from either Damodara himself or Rana Sanga, when Belisarius met them for a parlay in the midst of their campaign in Persia.