The Tide of Victory

"Better than being butchered," retorted Khusrau. "As for the rest . . ." He shrugged. "I can keep the dehgans from committing any real atrocities. The first few days will be rough, of course. No way to keep such soldiers from pilfering what little treasure there might be and pestering the local women."

" `Pestering'!" snorted Antonina.

Again, Khusrau shrugged. "And so a number of Indian peasants find themselves with bastards soon thereafter. Not even many of those, truth to tell, because my dehgans will be looking for concubines anyway. So they will formalize the relationships, more often than not, and see to the well-being of their new offspring."

"The peasant men won't like that much," pointed out Belisarius. He cut off Khusrau's rebuttal with his own. "But that's neither here nor there. They've doubtless been suffering worse under the Malwa as it is. They'll adjust, soon enough. Especially since Indian peasants are even less inclined than most of the world's peasantry to care two figs who happens to rule their area. As long as their new masters don't tax them dry—you will extend your new tax system to the Indus, yes?—"

Khusrau nodded. "I'll do more than that. I'll use the Indus as the testing ground. Along with much else." The emperor began pacing about slowly. "I'm sure, by now, you have deduced my plans for transforming Aryan society. I've had enough of these damned squabbling noblemen. As much as possible, I intend to duplicate Rome's more efficient and intelligent system. Advancement by merit, not birth, with the new aristocracy tied with ropes to the imperial dynasty."

Belisarius said nothing. He had not, in fact, "deduced" any such thing. He had not needed to. Aide, with his encyclopedic knowledge of human history, had long since acquainted the Roman general with the sweeping changes which Khusrau the Just—as future history would have called him—would make in Persian culture and society. Replacing a feudal system with an imperial one, and instituting a tax system so efficient and fairly spread that even the later Moslem conquerors would adopt it for their own.

"The Indus will be the perfect place to plant that shoot," mused Khusrau. "My army will be made up almost entirely of modest dehgans from the impoverished eastern borderlands. Not rich and haughty grandees from Mesopotamia. They'll be willing enough, in exchange for land and wealth, to accept new terms of imperial service."

He clenched his fist. "And with them to back me, I can deal with any fractious Mesopotamian sahrdaran as roughly as I need to." He quirked a smile. "Who knows? Perhaps, upon my eventual death, my designated successor can take the throne without having to wage the usual civil war."

Belisarius leaned over the map, planting both his hands, and studied the terrain depicted there. "All right," he said softly. "I can see where the land campaign has a good chance for success. A very good chance, actually, since the one thing not even the superhuman mind of Link will be expecting is to see twenty thousand Persian heavy cavalry come charging into the Indus valley out of the Kacchi Desert."

Chuckling: "The whole idea's insane, after all. And if there's one thing that damned monster is not, it's given to illogical planning."

It will never understand the power of such myths as Rustam, came Aide's soft thought. I would never have understood either, had I not spent so many years now living in your mind. And your heart.

True, said Belisarius in reply. In the end, Link and the "new gods" who sent it here will fail, as much as anything, because they tried to shape humanity's future without ever understanding its soul.

He straightened from the table. "But that still leaves the naval problem," he said forcefully. "The fact is that none of this can possibly succeed without a total mobilization of the entire fleet for the logistical effort. That, and—of course—the actual assault on Barbaricum."