The Tide of Victory

All hesitation gone, Vasudeva became as energetic and decisive as ever. "It will be done, King! We will take the high ground—clear the Malwa from every outlying hillfort with grenade and sword—bring up the mortars and artillery . . . and then! Place half the army further down the pass to stymie any Malwa relief column. It'll be a siege, with us holding them in a grip of iron."

Kungas smiled, in a manner of speaking. "I give them two weeks. Maybe three. And they can't even try to retreat back to the Vale of Peshawar, once we've blocked their route. We outnumber them three to one. We'd cut them to pieces on open ground, and they know it. They'll have no choice but to surrender."

He planted his hands on his hips and surveyed the mountains surrounding the Khyber Pass with approval. "After which—using them to do the scut work—we can fortify this pass the way it should

be done. And we'll have plenty of time to do it, with the Malwa preoccupied with Belisarius in the plains. Before Malwa can counterattack, the Hindu Kush will be secure. The Pathans will bow to our rule—and why not, since it will be lighter than Malwa's—and next year . . ."

But he was speaking to himself, now. Vasudeva, being no more prone than his king to worry about formality, was already hurrying away to send the Kushan army back into motion.

Kungas remained in the ruins of the stupa for the rest of that day, and all the days which followed. He thought it was fitting that the founder of the new Kushan kingdom should make his headquarters in a holy place desecrated by those who had destroyed the old one. By the morning of the third day, Kushan shock troops had taken the outlying hillforts in two solid days of savage hand-to-hand combat, using both their traditional swords and spears as well as the Roman grenades for which all Kushan soldiers had developed a great affection. The Malwa troops were good—much better than usual—but they were not Rajputs. Nor did they have more than a few hundred Ye-tai to stiffen them.

So began, on the morning of the fourth day, the bombardment of the Malwa fortress which was the key to control of the Khyber pass. The Kushan troops were able to place many mortars within a thousand yards of the fortress. The devices were crude, true. They had been patterned after what Belisarius called a "coehorn mortar," nothing more complicated than a brass tube mounted at a fixed forty-five-degree angle on a base. The only way to adjust the weapon's range was by adjusting the powder charge. But the four-inch shells they fired, with a fuse ignited by the powder, could still wreak havoc within the fortress even if they could not shatter the walls.

And, two days later, once the Kushans had wrestled the field guns into the hillforts they had taken, the mortar fire was augmented by solid shot. Which, in the days which followed, began slowly pulverizing the inner fortifications and—more slowly still—crumbling the outer. Fieldstone being returned to fieldstone, with blood and flesh lubricating the way.

And each morning, as he arose, Kungas completed the thought. Speaking aloud, to the mountains which would shelter a kingdom being reborn.

"Next year—Peshawar

!"

* * *

The oldest and most prestigious of the Pathan chiefs stroked his beard, frowning fiercely. Part of the frown was due to his ruminations. Most of it was because, being the grand patriarch of a patriarchal folk, he did not approve of the woman sitting on the chair across from him. Outrageous, really, for this self-proclaimed new king to have left his wife in charge of his capital!

Still—

Different folk, different customs. So long as the Kushans did not meddle with his own—which the scandalous woman had assured him they would not—the chief did not much care, in the end, what silly and effeminate customs the dwellers of the towns maintained.

Too, there was this: effeminate they might be, in some ways, but there was no doubt at all that the Kushans were not to be taken lightly on the battlefield. And the fact that—judging from reports which Pathan scouts had brought from the siege in the Khyber Pass—they seemed as much at home fighting in the mountains as in the plains, was added reason for caution.

As a rule, the Pathans did not much fear the armies of civilization. Plains armies. Dangerous enough on flat ground, but ill-prepared to challenge the Pathans in their own mountains. But the chief had not lived to such an age, nor risen to such prominence, by being an arrogant fool. Civilized kingdoms, with their wealth and rich soils, could field much larger armies than the Pathans. And whenever those armies proved capable of adapting to mountain warfare . . .

It had happened once before, after all. The old chief barely managed to repress a shudder, remembering the savage punitive expeditions of the Rajputs.