Belisarius II-Storm at Noontide

by Eric Flint

The fact remained that he was badly outnumbered, and the ground was open enough that the Malwa could bring all their forces to bear. Not easily; not quickly—but surely, for all that.

  Belisarius shook his head a little, reminding himself that he was not trying to win this battle. He just needed to put up enough of a fight so that his retreat to the south, when the time came, would not seem too puzzling to his opponents. Belisarius could afford the tactical setback involved in giving up this battlefield, as long as his troops weren't badly mauled. He could not afford the strategic defeat which would be certain, if Damodara or Sanga—or Narses, if the canny eunuch was with them—ever figured out what Belisarius was planning for, months from now.

  Maurice verbalized Belisarius' own thoughts.

  "It's going to be a bit touch-and-go," growled the chiliarch. "More than a bit, if your little surprise doesn't work as well as you think it will. Which it probably won't," he added sourly. "Nothing ever works the way it's supposed to, on a battlefield."

  Belisarius started to respond, but fell silent. The Ye-tai were almost close enough—

  Time. Belisarius gave the hand signal, and the small group of cornicenes just a few yards away immediately began blowing on their horns.

  The peal of the cornicens immediately brought thousands of Greek cataphracts and Syrian archers to their feet, standing hip-high in their trenches with bows already nocked. A volley of arrows swept down the slope.

  Like a scythe, came the simile to Belisarius' mind, but he knew it was inappropriate. Plunging fire was difficult. He was not surprised to see many of the arrows sail right over the approaching mass of Ye-tai. And it was often ineffective even when it struck, against experienced troops.

  The Ye-tai were veterans, and had been expecting the volley. As soon as they saw the cataphracts rearing up, the Ye-tai crouched and sheltered behind their shields. The shouted orders of their officers were quite unnecessary. Because of the angle, they presented smaller targets to begin with, and each Ye-tai was experienced enough to keep his shield properly slanted.

  Those were good shields, as good as Roman ones. Laminated wood reinforced with iron—nothing like the flimsy wicker shields with which the Malwa Empire armed its common soldiers. Most of the Roman arrows which hit their targets glanced off harmlessly.

  The Ye-tai immediately resumed their charge, bellowing their battle cries. Another volley; another shielded crouch; another upward surge. They lost men, of course—plenty of them—but not enough. Not for those warriors. Ye-tai had many vices; cowardice was not one of them.

  "Not a chance," grunted Maurice. There was no amazement in those words. Not even a trace of surprise. Maurice sounded like a man remarking that there was no way a sand castle was going to hold back the tide.

  The chiliarch glanced at Belisarius. "You'd better see to your gunmen. We're going to need them."

  Belisarius was already turning. As he began giving the new signal, he heard Maurice mutter: "Oh, marvelous. The Rajputs are already starting their charge. God, I hate competent enemies." A few seconds later, hissing: "Shit. I can't believe it!"

  Belisarius had been watching the musketeers climbing up the slope. Hearing the alarm in Maurice's voice, he immediately turned around.

  Seeing the speed with which the Rajput cavalry was charging up that side of the saddle, Belisarius understood Maurice's shock. Belisarius himself had never seen cavalry move that quickly in mountainous terrain.

  Silently, he cursed himself for an idiot. He had forgotten—it might be better to say, never understood in the first place. Belisarius was accustomed to Roman and Persian heavy cavalry, whose gear and tactics had been shaped by centuries of war on the flat plains of Mesopotamia. But the Rajputs were not heavy cavalry—not, at least, by Roman and Persian standards—and they were unfazed by rough terrain.

  Rajputana is a land of hills, chimed in Aide. The Rajput military tradition was forged in expeditions against Pathan mountaineers, and battles fought against Marathas in the volcanic badlands of the Great Country.

  "Like a bunch of damned mountain goats," growled Maurice. He cocked his head. "You do realize, young man, that your fancy battle plan just flew south for the winter." For all the grimness of the words, there was a trace of satisfaction in the voice. Maurice was one of those natural-born pessimists who took a strange pleasure in seeing the world live down to their expectations.

  Belisarius had already reached the same conclusion. The weakest part of his tactical plan had been its reliance on close timing. The Rajputs had just kicked over the hourglass. Shattered it to pieces, in fact. Sanga's forces would strike the Roman left long before Belisarius had expected them to.

  "Get over there quick, Maurice," he commanded. "Work with Cyril to get the Greeks reoriented. They'll have to hold off Sanga now, as long as they can. Forget about any countercharge against the Ye-tai." He pointed to the large force of Thracian cataphracts positioned halfway down the back slope, as a reserve. "And send a dispatch rider to the bucellarii, telling them to move left. We're going to need them."

  "What about the Mamelukes?" asked Maurice. He looked southwest, to where the Kushans were holding the fords at the river half a mile below. "Do you want them up here, with you?"

  Belisarius shook his head. "Not unless I'm desperate. I can't risk having any of them captured. Even a dead Kushan body could give the game away."

  Maurice gave a skeptical glance at the musketeers who were nearing the crest.

  "Do you really you think you can hold—" he started to say, but broke off. A second later, the chiliarch was scuttling down the trench, toward the Roman left. For all Maurice's frequent sarcasms on the subject of Belisarius' "fancy damned battle plans," the Thracian veteran was not given to arguing with him in the midst of actual combat. A general's willingness to command—instantly and surely—was more important in a battle than whether the command itself was wise. Maurice had seen battles won, more than once, simply because the commander had stood his ground and given clear and definite orders. Any orders, just so long as the troops felt that a steady hand was in control.

  Belisarius peered over the parapet. The Ye-tai were very close, now. Their battle cries filled the air, thick with confidence, heavy with impending triumph. They had been bloodied by the Roman archery, but not badly enough. Several thousand would still reach the crest, where outnumbered and lightly armed Syrian infantry would be no match for them.

  He rose, half-standing, and looked over the other parapet. The musketeers and the pikemen were almost at the crest, just a few yards down the slope. They had stopped, actually, to make a final dress of their lines. Belisarius saw Mark of Edessa watching him, calmly waiting for the general's order.

  Here goes, thought Belisarius.

  He gave the signal. Again, the cornicens blew. As he turned back to face the enemy, Belisarius saw small figures on nearby hilltops frantically waving banners. The Pathan scouts had caught sight of the new Roman unit surging forward, and were signaling Damodara.

  Too late.

  Belisarius took a deep breath, and gave a small prayer for the soul of a man he had never met, and never would. A general of a future that would never be. A man he didn't much care for, as a human being, but who had been one of history's greatest generals.

  May your soul rest in peace, wherever it is, Iron Duke. I hope this works as well for me as it did for you at Busaco.

  Aide's words, when they came, surprised Belisarius. He had been half-expecting some muttered reproaches. Something to the effect that Wellington's men could fire three volleys a minute; or that Wellington had the massive fortifications of the Lines of Torres Vedras to fall back on; or even—Aide had a bit of the pedant in him—that the title "Iron Duke" was an anachronism, in this context. The nickname was political, not military. It had been given to Prime Minister Wellington by English commoners, years after the fall of Napoleon, when he responded to a mob breaking his windows by installing iron shutters on his mansion in London.

  But all that came, ins
tead, was reassurance.

  It will. The reverse-slope tactic was Wellington's signature. It worked at Salamanca, too. And even against Napoleon at Waterloo.

  Belisarius was grateful for that quiet voice of confidence. He needed it. This battle was shaping up to be the worst fight of his life, rather than the simple cut-and-run he had anticipated. Once again, he had underestimated the Rajputs.

  The musketeers reached the crest of the pass, and leveled their handcannons at the Ye-tai storming forward. Belisarius rose to join in his world's first use of a musket volley in battle, but not before giving himself a small curse.

  Don't ever do that again, you jackass. Just because you've got brains, and a friend who can show you the future, don't ever forget that other men have brains too. And damned good ones, with the will to match.

  The muskets roared, all across the line. Instantly, the crest of the pass was shrouded in gunsmoke. It was impossible to see more than a few feet through those acrid billows. Impatiently, while his musketeers went through the practiced drill with their clumsy muzzle loaders, Belisarius waited for the smoke to clear.

  There was a good breeze coming through the pass. The clouds of gunsmoke were swept away within seconds. And Belisarius, seeing the havoc wreaked by a thousand .80-caliber smoothbores firing at close range, felt himself relax. Just a bit. The Ye-tai army was like a bull, half-stunned by a hammer blow between the eyes.

  He raised his eyes, staring across the mounded heaps of Ye-tai corpses to his opponent's distant pavilion. Belisarius had just sent his own message—to himself, as well as Damodara. Reminding them both that if Belisarius had no monopoly on intelligence, neither did he have a monopoly on overconfidence.

  And don't underestimate me again, Lord of Malwa, he thought. Better yet—do underestimate me again.

  The Ye-tai, stubborn and courageous, were pushing forward. They clambered up and over the corpses and hideously shattered bodies of their wounded comrades, roaring with rage and hefting their swords. The Ye-tai were no longer trying to maintain formation. They were just a mob of enraged berserks, burning to reach their tormentors. The bull was half-stunned, but it was still a bull.

  The second line of musketeers stepped forward and fired. While the smoke cleared, the third line took their place. Behind, the first line had already finished reloading and was preparing for a second volley.

  It was true that Belisarius' musketeers, with their awkward matchlocks, could not match Wellington's three volleys a minute. The guns themselves were not much better than sixteenth-century arquebusses. John of Rhodes, working with sixth-century technology, couldn't possibly match the precision of nineteenth-century gunmaking. But Belisarius had all of Aide's encyclopedic knowledge to draw upon, so he had been able to leap over centuries of military experimentation in other ways. It was within the capacity of the Roman Empire to manufacture the prepared cartridges which Gustavus Adolphus had introduced. The muzzle loaders themselves were clumsy things, but there was nothing clumsy about the way they were being used.

  His musketeers couldn't manage more than one volley a minute, but Belisarius could rely on that rate. And, as the smoke cleared, and he saw the carnage which the second volley had created, Belisarius knew that would be enough.

  Wellington's reverse-slope tactic depended as much on the shock of surprise as it did on rates of fire, said Aide.

  Belisarius nodded. An enemy storming forward in expectation of furious victory had its spirits shattered, along with its bodies, when it was struck down by a hail of bullets. Not even warriors like the Ye-tai could withstand such a blow.

  No more than Napoleon's Imperial Guard at Waterloo.

  The third line stepped forward, their weapons ready. There was no need for plunging fire, now. The vanguard elements of the Ye-tai had reached the crest and were not more than ten yards from the trenches. Felix Chalcenterus, the executive officer, was in charge of fire control. He called out the orders, in sure sequence.

  Level! The guns came up like so many blunt lances.

  There was no command to aim. Belisarius' musketeers, like Wellington's, were simply trained to fire in the general direction of the enemy. The weapons were so inaccurate, beyond fifty yards, that marksmanship was pointless.

  Fire! The handcannons erupted. Another cloud of smoke obscured everything.

  Obscured sight, that is, not sound. Belisarius could hear the bullets slamming into the struggling mass of Ye-tai. The sounds had a metallic edge, where bullets impacted armor, but he knew the armor was irrelevant. At that range, the murderous lead pellets punched through the finest plate armor as if it were mere cloth. The muzzle velocity of a matchlock arquebus was extremely high—supersonic, more often than not. The high-velocity rifles which would replace them in the future would do no more than double that, even after centuries of arms development and refinement. An arquebus' round shot lost its muzzle velocity very quickly, of course—far sooner than the spinning bullets of rifles. But at this range, the heavy-caliber arquebusses were probably even more effective than rifles.

  The shrieks of wounded Ye-tai began to fill the pass, like the wail of a giant banshee. The Ye-tai were tough—as tough as any soldiers Belisarius had ever seen. But no soldiers are that tough.

  The bull was on its knees, now. Bellowing, still, but dying for all that.

  Their bloody work done, the third line retired. Even with the breeze, the pass was still half-obscured with smoke. But Belisarius could hear Felix commanding the first line back to the front. Chalcenterus' voice still had the timbre of his youth, but the voice itself was relaxed and confident.

  I didn't make any mistake there, at least, Belisarius consoled himself. Felix had first caught the general's eye at the battle of the villa near Anatha, the previous year. Belisarius had been impressed by the Syrian soldier's alert calmness when the Roman army was subjected to its first experience with rocket fire. He had kept an eye on the youth, and seen to his rapid promotion.

  The first line, back in position, went through the sequence. Another roar of handcannon fire. The pass was completely shrouded in smoke. Even with their clumsy weapons, the men could still keep up a rate of fire that outmatched the breeze.

  The sound of bullets slamming into the enemy had a sodden quality, now. Belisarius was thankful that he couldn't actually see the results. This was sheer slaughter. He knew that the rear elements of the Ye-tai would already be staggering back in defeat. But the barbarian soldiers trapped at the front were helpless. Immobile targets. The bull was no longer even bellowing. It was just a dying beast, dumbly waiting for another blow of the hammer.

  The second line returned, and the blow came. Belisarius heard Gregory calling out an order. His pikemen had been in position since the first line of musketeers stepped forward, ready to fend off any Ye-tai who made it through the gunfire. But they had not even been needed. Gregory had obviously come to the conclusion that they wouldn't be, and so he had called on his men to use their grenades.

  The pikemen lowered their twelve-foot spears and plucked grenades from their bandoliers. Each pikeman carried only two of the devices. More would have impeded them in performing their principal duty. But these were special grenades. The pikemen had been equipped with the new grenades which John of Rhodes had developed—the ones with impact fuses.

  The grenades had a simple "potato-masher" design. A strip of cloth was attached to the butt of the wooden handle. Like the cloth strips often attached to javelins, it would stabilize the grenade in flight and ensure that the weapon would strike in the proper orientation to set off the fuse. There was no need to fumble with a striker, or cut a fuse to proper length. Each pikeman simply yanked out the pin which armed the device, and sent it sailing down the slope.

  The grenades disappeared into the clouds of smoke which were wafting down the pass. Before they hit, Felix had ordered another round of gunfire. Not more than a second after that roaring lightning, Belisarius heard the sharp claps of the grenades exploding down the slope. The sounds harm
onized like music composed by a maniac. A homicidal maniac. Those Ye-tai at the rear, trying to retreat, were being savaged by the grenades even while their comrades at the front were being hammered into pulp by the guns.

  For an instant, Belisarius was seized by a savage urge to order a countercharge. That had been his plan from the beginning. The Ye-tai were already broken—as badly as any army could be, driven back from an assault. A rush of pikemen now would complete their destruction. The fierce army which had charged up the slope not minutes earlier would be as thoroughly beaten as any army in human history.

  Mark and Gregory were at his side now, awaiting the order. Their faces were tense and eager. They knew as well as Belisarius that they were on the verge of total victory.

  Fiercely, Belisarius restrained himself. Yes, the enemy was beaten here. But—

  Distantly, he could hear wails from another direction. To his left. Wails of pain, and the steel clash of weapons. He couldn't see anything through the wafting clouds of gunsmoke, but he knew the Rajputs were already hammering his left flank.

  All ferocity and sense of satisfaction fled. His counterstroke at the saddle had worked, just as it had worked in another future for a man named Arthur Wellesley. But battles are rarely neat and tidy affairs which go according to plan. Not against well-led enemies, at least.

  This battle could still wind up a disaster, came Aide's forceful thought.

  Belisarius had won the struggle at the center, true. But if he didn't withdraw his army quickly, and in good order—which was the most difficult maneuver of all, in the face of the enemy—Sanga and the Rajputs would roll up his flank.

  "No," he commanded, pointing toward the slope of the saddle to their left. Only the crest of the pass was still visible, due to the gunsmoke, but they could see hundreds of Rajput cavalry pouring across the terrain. Ten times that number would be hidden in the clouds below, on the lower part of the slope. Twenty times, more likely. There had been at least ten thousand Rajputs massed on the Malwa right, under Sanga's command.