The Dance of Time

Against demoralized troops already half-ready to surrender or flee, the charge might have worked. It wouldn't work here. The morale of the Malwa army had suffered a great deal, to be sure, from their defeats over the past two years. But they were still the largest and most powerful army in the world, and their soldiers knew it.

They knew something else, too. They knew that trying to surrender to—or flee from—an assault like the Persians had launched, was impossible anyway. If they broke, they'd just get butchered.

It didn't help any, of course, that the Persians were shouting the battle cry of Charax! as they charged. Whether because their emperor had ordered it or because of their own fury, Menander didn't know. But he knew—and so did the Malwa soldiers manning the fortresses—that the Persians might as well have been using the battle cry of No Quarter.

"Let's go, lad," said Maurice quietly. "We made an appearance as observers, since Khusrau invited us. But now that the diplomacy's done, staying any longer is just pointless. This isn't really a battle, in the first place. It's just an emperor ridding himself of troublesome noblemen."

He turned his horse and began trotting away. Menander followed.

"You think?" asked Menander.

"You've met Khusrau. Did he strike you as being as dumb as an ox?"

Menander couldn't help but smile, a little. "No. Not in the least."

"Right." Maurice jerked a thumb over his shoulder. "Not even an ox would be dumb enough to think that charge might succeed."

* * *

Maurice was slandering the Persian emperor, actually. It was true that breaking the power of the sahrdaran and vurzurgan families was part

of the reason Khusrau had ordered the charge. But it wasn't the only reason. It wasn't even the most important reason.

There would be no way to eliminate the great families simply through one battle, after all. Not all of their men had come to India, even leaving aside the Suren, and not all of them would die before the walls of the Malwa.

Not even most of them, in fact. Khusrau was no stranger to war, and knew perfectly well that no battle results in casualties worse than perhaps one-quarter of the men engaged, unless they get trapped, and many of those would recover from their wounds. It was amazing, really, how many men survived what, from a distance, looked like a sheer bloodbath.

There was no chance of a trap here, nor of enemy pursuit once the Persians cavalrymen finally retreated. Many sahrdaran and vurzurgan would die this day, to be sure. But most of them wouldn't. He'd bleed the great families, but he wouldn't do more than weaken them some.

So, the emperor hadn't even stayed to watch, once he ordered the assault. Quietly, almost surreptitiously—and far enough from the Malwa lines not to be observed—he'd slipped away from his camp with two thousand of his best imperial cavalry.

Light cavalry. Over half of them Arabs, in fact.

He'd be gone for several days. Khusrau didn't believe in cavalry charges against heavy fortifications any more than Maurice did. But since he came from a nation that had always been a cavalry power, he'd given much thought to the proper uses of cavalry in the new era of gunpowder.

Assaults against fortresses were pointless. Raids against a specific target, were not.

* * *

Two days later, he was vindicated.

"You see?" he demanded.

Next to him, also sitting on a horse carefully screened from the river by high reeds, the chief of the emperor's personal cavalry smiled.

"You were right, Your Majesty. As always."

"Ha! Coming from you!"

Almost gloating, the emperor's eyes went back to the target of the raid. One of the two ironclads had its engines steaming, but it was still tied to the dock like the other. From the casual manner of the sailors and soldiers moving about on the docks, Khusrau thought the engines were running simply as part of routine care. What the Roman naval expert Menander called "maintenance." Khusrau didn't know much about the newfangled warships, but he knew they needed a lot of it. The things were cantankerous.

"No point in trying to capture them," he said, regretfully.

The Persians had no one who could operate the things. Even the Roman experts would need time to figure out the different mechanisms—and time was not going to be available. Khusrau was quite sure his two thousand cavalrymen could break through the small garrison protecting the Malwa naval base and burn the ships before reinforcements could arrive. But it would have to be done very quickly, if they were to survive themselves. They'd had to cross a ford to get to this side of the Indus, far upstream from the battlefield—upstream from the naval base, in fact—and they'd have to cross the same ford to make their escape.

With his superb light cavalry, the emperor thought they could do it. But not if they dawdled, trying to make complex foreign equipment work.