Belisarius I Thunder at Dawn

by David Drake

  That terror, too, proved baseless. For all their fearsome appearance, the soldiers did not behave improperly. Indeed, they were rather polite.

  So, after the soldiers finished their meal and lay down on their pallets, the innkeeper beat his daughter and the two servant girls. They had obviously been rude to the soldiers, or they would have been importuned.

  The final terror, which kept the entire household awake through the night, was for the next morning. When the nobleman and his party left, he might not give the innkeeper as large a bonus as the innkeeper was expecting. The terror grew as the long hours passed. The innkeeper's expectations waxed by the hour, as he stayed awake himself through the night, in avid consideration of his pending fortune. By the break of dawn, the innkeeper had convinced himself that he was on the verge of receiving a preposterous bonus. When the actual bonus which materialized was far beneath that absurd expectation, his family and his servants knew that he would be savage.

  Yet, that terror also vanished. The bonus which the innkeeper received—to everyone's astonishment, even his own—was, by their standards, enormous.

  And so, in the end, the sojourn of the unknown nobleman proved to be a blessing for that household. The innkeeper's greed, of course, would soon enough add to their misery. Neither his wife, nor his children, nor his servants doubted that in the least. The innkeeper would expect a similar bonus from the occasional noble customer in the future. And, when that bonus did not appear, would brutalize his household.

  But that was a problem for the future. Neither his wife, nor his children, nor his servants were given to worrying about the future. The present was more than dark enough. And, thankfully, they would enjoy a rare respite from the ever-present fear in their lives. The innkeeper, awash in his sudden wealth, indulged himself in a drunken stupor for the next three days.

  Every night, as she watched him soddenly sleeping, his wife thought of poisoning him. It was her principal entertainment in life. Over the years, she had determined eighteen different toxins she could use. At least five of those would leave no trace of suspicion.

  But, as always, the amusement paled after a time. There was no point in poisoning him. She would be required—by law, now—to immolate herself on his funeral pyre. Her children and her servants would fare little better. The innkeeper had long ago sunk into hopeless debt to the local potentates. Upon his death, that debt would come due, immediately and in its entirety. By law, now, all lower-caste households were responsible for the debts of the family head, upon his death. They would not be able to pay those debts. The inn would be seized. The servants would be sold into slavery. The children, being twice-born rather than untouchable, could not be made slaves due to debt. They would simply starve, or be forced to turn themselves to unthinkable occupations.

  By the end of the innkeeper's binge, three days later, his wife hardly remembered the nobleman who had given her that brief respite from fear. Her mind had wandered much farther back in time, to the days of her youth. Better days, she remembered—or, at least, thought she did. Though not as good as the days of her mother, and her grandmother, judging from the tales she half-remembered from her childhood. The days when suttee was only expected from rich widows—noblewomen desirous to prove their piety, and with no need to be concerned over the material welfare of their children.

  The old days, the Gupta days. The days when customs, harsh as they might be, were only customs. The days when even those harsh customs, in practice, were often meliorated by kinder—or, at least, laxer—potentates. The days when even a stern potentate might shrink from the condemnation of a Buddhist monk, or a sadhu.

  The days before the Malwa came. With Malwa law, and Malwa rigor. And the Mahaveda priests to sanctify the pure, and the mahamimamsa to punish the polluted.

  Fourteen royal couriers raced south across northern India. Unlike the three couriers headed west, all of these couriers were filled with the urgency of their mission. Royal couriers, in their own way, were one of the pampered elite of Malwa India. All of them were of kshatriya birth—low-caste kshatriya, true, but kshatriya nonetheless. And while their rank was modest, in the official aristocratic scale, they enjoyed an unusual degree of intimacy with the very highest men of India. Many of those couriers, more than once, had taken their messages from the very hand of the God-on-Earth himself.

  An arrogant lot, thus, in their own way. Royal Malwa couriers believed themselves to be the fastest men in the world. As they pounded their way south, every one of those fourteen men was certain that the vast hordes of the Malwa army had no chance of catching the foreign devils. The couriers—and they alone—were all that stood between the wicked outlanders and their successful escape.

  Fast as the Romans and Ethiopians were, with their remounts and their fine steeds, they were not as fast as Malwa couriers. The horses which the couriers rode were even better, and the couriers enjoyed one great advantage—they were under no compulsion to keep their horses alive. Many more horses awaited them in relay stations along every main road. And so all of them, more than once, ran their horses to death as they raced from station to station along their route.

  The couriers were filled with the confidence that they could reach the ports before the fleeing enemy, and alert the garrisons. The Malwa army could flounder, and the Rajputs and Ye-tai thrash about in aimless pursuit, but the couriers would save the day.

  So they thought, and they were not wrong in thinking so. But the couriers, like so many others throughout India in those weeks of frenzy, were too confident. Too full of themselves; too incautious; too heedless of all that could go wrong, in this polluted world.

  One courier's incaution manifested itself in the most direct way possible. Thundering around a bend in the road, his forward vision obscured by the lush forest which loomed on either side, the courier suddenly learned that he was indeed faster than the foreign enemy. He had overtaken them.

  The courier had already plunged into the midst of the foreigners before he made that unhappy discovery. A quick-thinking man, the courier did not make the mistake of trying to turn around. Instead, he took advantage of his speed and simply pounded right through them, guiding his horse expertly through the little crowd.

  He made it, too. In truth, the royal courier was one of the very finest horsemen in the world.

  But no horseman is fine enough to outrun a cataphract arrow. Not, at least, one fired by the bow of that cataphract named Valentinian.

  The foreigners dragged his body into the woods, and then piled insult onto injury. They added his wonderful steed to their stock of remounts.

  A second courier, and a third, and then a fourth, also discovered the caprices of fate.

  Dramatically, in the case of the second courier. The monsoon downpours had washed out portions of many of the roads throughout India. The route this courier took happened to be one of the lesser roads, and thus suffered more than its share of climatic degradations. The courier, however, was unfazed by these obstacles. He was an experienced courier, and an excellent rider. He had leapt over many washed-out portions of road in his career, and did so again. And again and again and again, with all the skill and self-confidence of his station in life. What he failed to consider, unfortunately, was that his horse did not share the same skill and experience—not, at least, when it was half-dead from exhaustion. So, leaping yet another stream, the horse stumbled and spilled the courier.

  Well-trained, the horse waited for its rider to remount. A very well-trained horse, that one. It did not begin to forage for two hours, after its equine mind finally concluded that the courier seemed bound and determined to remain lying in the stream. Face down, oddly enough, in two feet of water.

  The third courier's mishap took a less dramatic form. He, too, driving an exhausted mount across a broken stretch of road, caused his horse to stumble and fall. Unlike the other courier, this one did not have the bad luck to strike his head against a boulder in a stream. He landed in a bush, and merely broke his leg. A simple fr
acture, nothing worse. But he was not discovered for two days, and by the time the small party of woodcutters conveyed him to the nearest Malwa post it was much too late for it to do any good.

  The fourth courier encountered his unfortunate destiny in its most common and plebeian manifestation. He got sick. He had been feeling poorly even before he left Kausambi, and after a week of relentless travel he was in a delirium. A man can drive a horse to death, but not without great cost to himself. That courier was a stubborn man, and a brave one, and he was determined to fulfill his duty. But willpower alone is not enough. On the evening of the seventh day he reached a relay station and collapsed from his horse. The soldiers staffing the station carried him into the barracks and did their best—with the aid of a local herb doctor—to tend to his illness.

  Their best, given the medical knowledge of the time, was not good enough. The courier was a brave and stubborn man, and so he lived for four more days. But he never recovered consciousness before dying, and the soldiers were afraid to even touch the courier's message case, much less break the Malwa seal and open the royal instrument. It would have done no good, anyway, since all of them were illiterate.

  It was not until two days later, upon the arrival of the first unit of regular troops slogging in pursuit of the escapees, that an officer inspected the message. A high-caste officer, a Malwa as it happened, who was arrogant enough to break the royal seal. Immediately upon reading the message, the officer issued two commands. His first order despatched his best rider to Bharakuccha with the—now much too belated—message. His second order flogged the guards of the relay station. Fifty lashes each, with a split bamboo cane, for gross dereliction of duty.

  Still, ten couriers remained. By the end of the second week after the Romans and Ethiopians began their flight south, all ten of these couriers had bypassed the foreigners and were now forging ahead of them. Slowly, to be sure. The foreigners were indeed moving very rapidly, and were steadily outdistancing the great mass of their pursuers. Even the couriers were only able to gain a few miles on them each day. (On average. All of the couriers were taking different roads, and none of those roads was the same as that taken by the foreigners.)

  A few miles a day is not much, but it would be enough. The couriers would arrive at the Gulf of Khambat with more than ample time to spread the alarm. Four of them were destined for Bharakuccha itself. By the time the outlanders arrived at the coast, Bharakuccha and the smaller ports would be sealed off. The foreign escapees would be trapped inside India, with the enormous manpower of the Malwa army available to bring them down.

  That had been the Malwa plan from the beginning of the chase. The Emperor and his high officials had hoped, of course, that the army would catch the fugitives before they reached the coast. But they knew the odds were against that, and so they had immediately sent out the couriers.

  It was an excellent plan, taking advantage of the excellent Malwa courier corps. A plan adopted by men who were as intelligent as they were arrogant. And, like many such plans, collapsed of its own arrogance.

  Haughty men, swollen with their own self-importance, have a tendency to forget about the enemy.

  Enemies, in this case. The man they were pursuing, the general Belisarius, was something quite foreign to their experience. He, like them, also made plans. He, like them, also followed those plans. But he—quite unlike them—also knew that plans are fickle things. And, that being so, it always pays to make plans within plans, and to keep an eye out for every unexpected opportunity. Every new angle.

  Months earlier, Belisarius had seen such an opportunity. He had seized it with both hands. The Empress Shakuntala had been delivered from captivity, and Majarashtra's greatest warrior set free from that task.

  Raghunath Rao had been free for months, now. Free to set the Great Country afire.

  Months, of course, are not enough to create a great popular rebellion. Certainly not in a recently conquered land, whose people are still licking their wounds. But months are enough, for such a man as Rao, to assemble the nucleus of his future army. To gather rebellious young men—almost a thousand, by now—in the isolated hillforts which pocked the Great Country's badlands.

  Rao was not only an experienced commander, he had the natural aptitude of a guerrilla fighter. So, almost from the day he returned to Majarashtra, he had set the young men rallying to his banner to the first, simplest, and most essential task of the would-be rebel.

  Intelligence.

  Watch. Observe. Nothing moves south of the Vindhyas without our knowledge.

  The fastest of all the Malwa couriers finally made his way through the Gangetic plain, and through the Vindhya mountains which were the traditional boundary between north India and the Deccan. Bharakuccha was not far away, now.

  He did not get thirty miles before he was ambushed. Brought down by five arrows.

  Rao, as it happened, was camped not far away, in a hillfort some twenty miles distant. Within hours, the young Maratha ambushers brought him the courier's message case. Rao had no fear of the royal seal, and he was quite literate. A very fast reader, in fact.

  Immediately after reading the message, he issued his own set of rapid commands. Within minutes, the hillfort was emptied of all but Rao himself and his two chief lieutenants. All the others—all three hundred or so—were racing to spread the news.

  Malwa couriers are coming. All of them must be stopped. Kill them. Take their message cases. Rao himself commands.

  After the young warriors were gone, Rao and his lieutenants enjoyed a simple meal. Over the meal, they discussed the significance of this latest event.

  "Can we aid the Romans in some other way?" asked Maloji.

  Rao shrugged. "Perhaps. We will see when they arrive. I do not know their plans, although I suspect the Malwa are right. The Romans and the Africans will try to take ship in Bharakuccha. If so, it will be enough for us to stop the couriers." He smiled grimly. "Those men are very capable. They will manage, if we can keep the garrisons from being alerted."

  "What if the Empress is with them?" asked his other lieutenant, Ramchandra.

  Rao shook his head firmly. "She will not be."

  "How do you know?"

  Rao's smile, now, was not grim at all. Quite gay, in fact.

  "I know the mind of Belisarius, Ramchandra. That man will never do the obvious. Remember how he rescued Shakuntala! In fact—" Rao looked down at the message scroll, still in his hand. "I wonder . . ." he mused.

  He rolled up the scroll and slapped it back into the case. The motion had a finality to it.

  "We will know soon enough." His smile, now, was a veritable grin. "Expect to be surprised, comrades. When you deal with Belisarius, that is the one thing you can be sure of. The only thing."

  With a single lithe movement, Rao came to his feet. He strode to the nearest battlement and stood for a moment gazing across the Great Country. The stone wall of the hillfort rose directly from an almost perpendicular cliff over a hundred yards in height. The view was magnificent.

  His two lieutenants joined him. They were both struck by the serenity in the Panther's face.

  "We will see the Empress, soon enough," he murmured. "She will arrive, comrades—be sure of it. From the most unexpected direction, and in the most unexpected way."

  That same day—that same hour—the young officer in command of a guardpost just south of Pataliputra found himself in a quandary.

  On the one hand, the party seeking passage through his post lacked the proper documentation. This lack weighed the heavier in the officer's mind for the fact that he was of brahmin ancestry, with all the veneration which that priest/scholar class had for the written word. Brahmin ancestry was uncommon for a military officer. Such men were normally kshatriya. He had chosen that career due to his ambition. He was not Malwa, but Bihari. As a member of a subject nation, he could expect to rise higher in the military than in the more status-conscious civilian hierarchy.

  Still, he retained the instincts of a pettifo
gging bureaucrat, and the simple fact was that these people had no documents. Scandalous.

  On the other hand—

  The nobleman was obviously of very high caste. Not Malwa, no—some western nation. But no low-ranking officer is eager to offend a high-caste dignitary of the Empire, Malwa or otherwise.

  The officer could hear his men grumbling in the background. They had seen the size of the bribe offered by the nobleman, and were seething at their commander's idiotic obsession with petty rules and regulations.

  The officer hesitated, vacillated, rattled back and forth within the narrow confines of his mind.

  The nobleman's wife ended that dance of indecision.

  The officer heard her sharp yelps of command. Watched, as she clambered down from the howdah, assisted by her fierce looking soldiers. Watched her stalk over to him.