Belisarius I Thunder at Dawn

by David Drake

  Belisarius heard noises behind him. Turning, he saw two of his cataphracts coming down the hill at a fast trot. As fast a "trot," at least, as could be managed by men wearing: full suits of scale-mail armor—including chest cuirasses—covering their upper bodies, right arms, and their abdomens down to mid-thigh; open-faced iron helmets with side-flanges, of the German spangenhelm style favored by most of the Thracians; small round shields buckled to their upper left arms, leaving the left hand free to wield a bow; heavy quilted Persian-style cavalry trousers; and, of course, a full panoply of weapons. The weapons included a long lance, a powerful compound bow, a quiver of arrows, long Persian-style cavalry swords, daggers, and the special personal weapons of the individuals: in the case of one, a mace; in the case of the other, a spatha.

  Belisarius recognized the approaching cataphracts, recognized their purpose, and began to frown fiercely. But when the two cataphracts neared, his words of hot reproach were cut off before he could utter them.

  "Don't bother, General," said Valentinian.

  "No use at all," agreed Anastasius.

  "Direct orders from Maurice."

  "Very direct."

  "You're just the general."

  "Maurice is the Maurice."

  Belisarius grimaced. There was no point in trying to send Valentinian and Anastasius away. They wouldn't obey his order, and he could hardly enforce it on them personally, since—

  He eyed the two men.

  Since I don't think there are two tougher soldiers in the whole Roman army, that's why.

  So he tried reason.

  "I don't need bodyguards."

  "Hell you don't," came Valentinian's sharp, nasal reply.

  "Was ever a man needed a bodyguard, it's you," added Anastasius. As ever, the giant's voice sounded like rumbling thunder. Professional church bassos had been known to turn green with envy, hearing that voice.

  Menander was already bringing up the two cataphracts' horses. Anastasius' mount was the largest charger anyone had ever seen. Anastasius was devoted to the beast, as much out of genuine affection as simple self-preservation. No smaller horse could have borne his weight, in full armor, in the fury of a battlefield. Especially encumbered as the horse was with its own armor: scale mail covering the top of its head and its neck down to the withers, with additional sheets of mail protecting its chest and its front shoulders.

  Anastasius more or less tossed Valentinian onto his horse. Then he mounted his own, with Menander's help. By the time he was aboard, the young cataphract looked completely exhausted by the effort of hoisting him.

  Belisarius rode off, heading toward the center of the Roman lines. Behind him, he heard his two companions expressing their thoughts on the day.

  "Look at it this way, Valentinian: it beats fighting on foot."

  "It certainly does not."

  "You hate to walk, even, much less—"

  "So what? Not so bad, butchering a bunch of Medes trying to scramble their horses up that godawful hill. Instead—"

  "Maybe he'll—"

  "You know damn well he won't. When has he ever?"

  Heavy sigh, like a small rockslide.

  Again, Valentinian: "Huh? When has he ever? Name one time! Just one!"

  Heavy sigh.

  Mutter, mutter, mutter.

  "What was that last, Valentinian?" asked Belisarius mildly. "I didn't quite make it out."

  Silence.

  Anastasius: "Sounded like 'fuck bold commanders, anyway.' "

  Hiss.

  Anastasius: "But maybe not. Maybe the bad-tempered skinny cutthroat said: 'Fuck old commoners, anyway.' Stupid thing to say, under the circumstances, of course. Especially since he's a commoner himself. But maybe that's what he said. He's bad-tempered about everything, you know."

  Hiss.

  Belisarius never turned his head. Just smiled. Crookedly, at first, then broadly.

  Well, maybe Maurice is right. God help the Mede who tries to get in my way, that's for sure.

  Once he reached the fortified camp at the center of the Roman lines, Belisarius dismounted and entered through the small western gate. Valentinian and Anastasius chose to remain outside. It was too much trouble to dismount and remount, and there was no way to ride a horse into that camp.

  The camp was nothing special, in itself. It had been hastily erected in one day, and consisted of nothing much more than a ditch backed up by an earthen wall. Normally, such a wall would have been corduroyed, but there were precious few logs to be found in that region. To some degree, the soldiers had been able to reinforce the wall with field stones. Where possible, they had placed the customary cervi—branches projecting sideways from the wall—but there were few suitable branches to be found in that barren Syrian terrain. Some of the more far-sighted and enterprising units had brought sharpened stakes with them to serve the purpose, but the wall remained a rather feeble obstacle. A pitiful wall, actually, by the traditional standards of Roman field fortifications.

  But Belisarius was not unhappy with the wall. Not, not in the slightest. Quite the contrary. He wanted the Persian scouts to report to Firuz that the Roman fortification at the center of their lines was a ramshackle travesty.

  The real oddity about the camp was not the camp itself but its population density—and the peculiar position of its inhabitants. Some Roman infantrymen were standing on guard behind the wall, as one might expect. The great majority, however, were lying down behind the wall and in the shallow trenches which had been dug inside the camp. The camp held at least four times as many soldiers as it would appear to hold, looking at it from the Persian side.

  Belisarius heard the cornicens blaring out a ragged tune. Very ragged, just as he had instructed. As if the men blowing those horns were half-deranged with fear. The soldiers standing visible guard began acting out their parts.

  As Belisarius watched, the infantry chiliarch of the Army of Lebanon trotted up. Hermogenes was grinning from ear to ear.

  "What do you think?" he asked.

  Belisarius smiled. "Well, they're certainly throwing themselves into their roles. Although I'm not sure it's really necessary for so many of them to be tearing at their hair. Or howling quite so loud. Or shaking their knees and gibbering."

  Hermogenes' grin never faded.

  "Better too much than too little." He turned and admired the thespian display. By now, the soldiers at the wall were racing around madly, in apparent confusion and disorder.

  "Don't overdo it, Hermogenes," said Belisarius. "The men might get a little too far into it and forget it's just an act."

  The chiliarch shook his head firmly.

  "Not a chance. They're actually quite enthusiastic about the coming battle."

  Belisarius eyed him skeptically.

  "It's true, General. Well—maybe 'enthusiastic' is putting it a little too strongly. Confident, let's say."

  Belisarius scratched his chin. "You think? I'd have thought the men would be skeptical of such a tricky little scheme."

  Hermogenes stared at the general. Then said, very seriously, "If any other general had come up with it, they probably would. But—it's Belisarius' plan. That's what makes the difference."

  Again, the skeptical eye.

  "You underestimate your reputation, general. Badly."

  Belisarius began to say that the scheme wasn't actually his. He had taken it from Julius Caesar, who had used hidden troops in a fortified camp in one of his many battles against the Gauls. But before he could utter more than two words, he fell silent. One of the sentries at the wall was shouting. A genuine alert, now, not a false act.

  Belisarius raced to the wall and peered over. Hermogenes joined him an instant later.

  The Persians were advancing.

  Belisarius studied the Mede formation intently. It was impressive, even—potentially—terrifying. As Persian armies always were.

  An old thought caused a little quirk to come to the general's lips.

  I'm always amazed at the way modern Gre
ek scholars and courtiers don't live in the real world. Their image of Persian armies is fixed a thousand years ago, in the ancient times. When a small number of disciplined and armored Greek and Macedonian hoplites could always scatter the lightly-armed Persian mobs of Xerxes and Darius. The glorious phalanx of the Hellenes against the motley hordes of despotic Asia.

  Let them see this, and gape, and tremble.

  Many modern Greeks, of course, knew the truth. But they were of a different class than the Greeks who wrote the books and the laws, and collected the taxes, and lorded it over their great estates.

  Persia had changed, over the centuries. More, even, than Rome. A class of tough, land-vested nobility had arisen. They were the real power in Persia, now, when all was said and done. True, they paid homage to the Sassanid emperors, and served them, as they had the Parthians who preceded them. But it was a conditional homage and a proud service. The conditions and the pride stemmed from one simple fact. The Persian aristocracy had invented modern heavy cavalry, and they were still better at it than any people on the face of the earth. The Roman cataphracts were, in all essential respects, simply attempts to copy the Persian noble cavalry.

  The Persians were now close enough for the details of their formation to be made out.

  Unlike Roman armies, which used infantry as the stolid center of their formations—as an anchor for the battle, even if they weren't much use in the battle itself—the Persians scorned infantry almost entirely. True, there were ten thousand foot soldiers in the advancing Mede army. But Persian infantry were a ragged, scraggly lot: modern Persian foot soldiers were probably even worse than the rabble which had been broken by the hoplites at Marathon and Issus centuries earlier. Miserable peasant levies, completely unarmored except for hide shields; armed only with javelins and light spears; consigned to the flanks; assigned the simple duties of butchering wounded enemies and serving as a buffer against charging foes. Armed cattle, basically.

  Belisarius dismissed them with a glance. The general's attention was riveted on the cavalry advancing at the center of the Persian army. His experienced eye immediately sorted order out of the mass.

  The heart of the Persian cavalry were the heavily armored noble lancers, riding huge war horses bred on the Persian plateau. Each nobleman, in turn, brought to battle a small retinue of more lightly armored horse archers. The horse archers would start the battle, and would fight closely alongside the heavy lancers. When the lancers made charges, the mounted archers would act as a screen to keep off enemy cavalry and suppress enemy archers, while the lancers shattered their foe.

  It was a ferocious, well-disciplined military machine. No Roman army had won a major battle in the open field against Persia in over a century.

  But Belisarius was filled with confidence.

  Today, I'm going to do it.

  He began to turn away from the wall. Before leaving, however, he stopped a moment and gazed at Hermogenes. The infantry chiliarch grinned.

  "Relax, General. You just take care of the cavalry. The infantry will do its job."

  Once back on his horse, Belisarius cantered over to the right wing of his army. The right was in the hands of the Army of Lebanon's cavalry commanders. Belisarius intended to take his position there at the beginning of the battle. Although the Army of Lebanon had accepted his leadership, he knew that they would quickly slip the leash if he was not there to keep a tight grip on it. The one thing that could ruin his plans was a rash, unplanned cavalry charge. Which, in his experience, cavalry was always prone to do.

  That's another thing I like about infantry. When a man has to charge on his own two legs, he tends to think it over first. Less tiring.

  Seeing him approach, the cavalry chiliarchs rode to meet him.

  "Soon, now," announced Eutyches.

  Belisarius nodded.

  "As soon as—" A blaring cornicen cut him off. Belisarius turned in his saddle just in time to see the first missiles hurled from the four scorpions and two onagers which he had positioned behind the fortified camp. Phocas had gauged the range and given the command for the artillery fire.

  Out of the corner of his eye, he saw a scowl on the face of Pharas.

  Belisarius understood the meaning of that expression. Like most modern Roman commanders, Pharas had no use for artillery in a field battle.

  But Belisarius forebore comment. He had learned, from experience, that it was a futile argument.

  They just don't understand. Sure, the damned things are a pain to haul around. Sure, they don't really inflict that many casualties. But they do two invaluable things. First, they break up the cohesion of the enemy's ranks. An alert soldier, even a heavily armored horseman, can usually dodge a great big scorpion dart or a huge stone thrown by an onager—as long as he isn't hemmed in by closely packed ranks. So, the enemy starts spreading out. Second—and most important—it's utterly infuriating to a warrior to be bombarded when he's too far away to retaliate. So he charges closer. Which is just what I want. Strategic offense; tactical defense. There's the whole secret in a nutshell.

  The two chiliarchs were already galloping toward the front line. Belisarius followed. He needed to be able to watch the progress of the battle, and had already decided he would do it from the right. The hill would have been a perfect vantage point, of course, but he would have been much too isolated from the right wing of his army. Which represented both his heaviest force and his least reliable.

  By the time he reached the front line, the Persians had already begun their charge. He saw at once that the enemy had begun the charge much too soon. Even the huge Persian horses couldn't charge any great distance before becoming exhausted.

  And so, once again, the artillery did the trick.

  Still, the Persians weren't Goths. Once Goths began a cavalry charge, they always tried to carry it through. The Medes, sophisticated and civilized for all their noble pride, were much too canny not to suspect a trap.

  So, once they got within bow range, the Persian heavy cavalry reined in and let their horses breathe. The lighter mounted archers continued forward, firing their bows.

  Pharas didn't wait for Belisarius' command. He ordered the Roman horse archers forward. The Huns galloped out onto the battleground, firing their own bows. Within moments, a swirling archery duel was underway.

  Between Persian and Hun mounted archers, the contest was unequal. The Persians, as always, fired their bows as rapidly as did the Huns—much more rapidly than Roman cataphracts or regular infantry. But the Persians were better armored, and that extra armor counted for much against the relatively weak bows being used by both sides.

  Soon enough, the Huns began falling back. The Persian horse archers did not attempt to charge in pursuit. They were no fools, and knew full well that Huns surpassed everyone in the art of turning a retreat into a sudden counterattack. So they simply satisfied themselves with a disciplined, orderly advance. Firing volley after volley as they came.

  Pharas began to grumble, but Belisarius cut him off. Quickly. As he had expected, the chiliarch had already forgotten the battle plan.

  "Splendid," announced Belisarius. "The Huns have already succeeded in fixing the entire left wing of the enemy."

  "They're advancing on us!" exclaimed Pharas.

  How did this idiot ever get made a chiliarch? I wouldn't trust him to bake bread. The first thing he'd do is throw away the recipe.

  But his words were mild.

  "Which is precisely what I want, Pharas. As long as the Persian left is advancing on our right, they aren't free to be doing something else. Such as chewing up our left, which is where the battle's going to be decided."

  Belisarius ignored the fuming chiliarch and watched the battle develop on the other side of the field. The Isaurians and Thracian cataphracts on the hill were now starting to fire their bows at the Persian cavalry spreading into the center of the battleground. Within five minutes, it was obvious to Belisarius that his earlier estimate had been accurate.

  It was th
e great advantage of cataphract archery, and one of the reasons Belisarius had stationed his Thracians atop the hill. With individual exceptions, such as Valentinian, they didn't have the rapid rate of fire that Persian or Hun horse archers did. But no archers in the world fired bows more accurately, and none with that awesome power. With the advantage of the hill's altitude, the cataphract arrows were plunging into the ranks of the Persian cavalry, wreaking havoc. Even the armor of Persian nobility couldn't withstand those arrows. And his cataphracts—especially the veterans—weren't aiming at the Persians anyway. Their targets were the horses themselves. The heavy frontal armor of the Persian chargers might have turned the arrows. But these missiles were plunging down into the great beasts' unarmored flanks. Dying and wounded horses began disrupting the serried ranks of the enemy's heavy cavalry.