The Tide of Victory

Belisarius glanced quickly around the table. Judging from their stiff expressions, he thought Maurice and Sittas and Gregory were fighting the same battle he was—to keep from laughing outright at the scout chief's reluctance to have anything to do with the cursed new-fangled device. The detested, despised—map.

Maps were toys for children! At best. Real men—father teaching son, generation after generation!—relied on their own eyes to see; their memory to recall; the verbal acuity of a poetic race to describe and explain!

Too bad he doesn't mutter, except in his own mind,

mused Aide. I'm sure he could give even Valentinian an education in the art.

Belisarius' lips tightened still further. If so much as a single chuckle emerged . . .

"Here," rasped Abbu, pointing with a finger at a bend in the Chenab. The mark on the map was recent. So recent the ink had barely dried. Which was not surprising, since Belisarius had just drawn that stretch of the Chenab himself, following Abbu's stiff directions.

"A bit far to the north," rumbled Sittas. Now that real business was being conducted, the big general was no longer having any trouble containing his amusement. His heavy brows were lowered over half-closed eyes, and his lips were pursed as if he'd just eaten a lemon.

Abbu flashed him a dark glance. "Here!" he repeated. "The ships at Uch are big. Both of them. The whole army could be transferred across the river in a single day. And there are good landings at three places on the opposite bank."

He leaned over the map again, his earlier reluctance now lost in the eagerness of a prospective triumph.

"Here. Here. Here." Each word was accompanied by a jab of the finger at a different place on the map, indicating a spot on the opposite bank of the Chenab. "I would use the second landing. Almost no risk there of grounding the ships."

For a moment, Abbu hesitated, reluctant again. But the reluctance, this time, stemmed from simple tradition rather than outrage at newfangled ways. Like any master scout, Abbu hated to allow any imprecision into his description of terrain.

But . . . Abbu was the best scout Belisarius had ever had because the man was scrupulously honest as well as infernally capable. "I can't be certain. We did not cross the river ourselves, because there is no ford. But the river looks to run deep at that second landing, with no hidden sandbars. Not even a beach. So the fishing village built a small pier over the water. Too small for these ships, of course, but the simple fact it is there at all means that we could unload the big ships without running aground."

Sittas was still scowling. "Too far to the north," he grumbled again. "Both the town and the landing across the river. A good twenty or thirty miles past the fork of the Chenab and the Indus. Hell of a gamble." He straightened up and looked at Belisarius. "Maybe we should stick to the original plan. Seize this side of the Indus and set up our lines right at the fork itself."

Belisarius did not reply immediately. He understood Sittas' reluctance, but . . .

What a coup if we could pull it off!

You'd have no line of retreat at all, said Aide.

"No line of retreat," echoed Maurice. The chiliarch had no way of hearing Aide's voice, of course, but the situation was so obvious that Belisarius was not surprised their thoughts had run in tandem. "If it goes sour, we'll be trapped in the triangle, bottled up by the Malwa. The Chenab to our right and the Indus to our left."

Sittas shook his head. "I can't say I'm much concerned about that. Once we make the thrust into the Punjab—wherever we strike, and wherever we set up our fieldworks—`lines of retreat' are pretty much a delusion anyway."

He gestured toward the army camped just outside the tent, unseen behind its leather walls. "You know as well as I do, Maurice, that we'll have no way to retreat across the country we just passed through. Even if we could break contact with the Malwa after the fighting starts. Which isn't too likely, given how badly we'll be outnumbered."

"We've already foraged the area clean," said Belisarius, agreeing with Sittas. "As it was, the thing was tight. If the peasants hadn't been panicked by reports of Malwa massacres in the Sind and fled, we might not have had enough to get this far."