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Sadly, he gazed down on the Armenian's corpse. Ashot's expression was peaceful, with just a trace of surprise showing in his still-open eyes.
He'd been one of the best officers Belisarius had ever had serve under him. So good, and so reliable, that he'd assigned him to serve as Antonina's commander on her expedition to Egypt. Except for Maurice, Belisarius wouldn't have trusted anyone else with his wife's safety.
"Shall we bring him back?" asked Ashot's replacement, a Thracian cataphract named Stylian.
"No. We've got another forced march ahead of us, and who knows what after that? We'll bury him here, although I'll probably have him disinterred and his body taken home after the war."
Belisarius looked around. The landscape was typical of the area between the Ganges and the Yamuna. A grassy plain, basically, with fields surrounding the villages and dotted with groves and woods. They hadn't burned here, since Belisarius had seen no reason to.
His eyes were immediately drawn to a grove of sal trees perhaps a quarter of a mile away. The trees were considered holy by many Hindus and Buddhists. The legend had it that the famous Lumbini tract where the Buddha meditated and acquired salvation had been in a grove of sal trees.
"We'll bury him over there," he said. "It seems a good resting place, and it'll be easy to find the grave later."
While Stylian handled that matter, Belisarius organized his cataphracts to help Jaimal and Udai Singh and the old kings round up the Rajputs. That would take the rest of the day, under the best of circumstances. Belisarius could only hope that Link wouldn't be able to move far in the time it took him to get back to the Ganges.
Link had managed to move its army exactly seven miles down the Ganges. What was worse, the foraging parties it had sent out had returned with very little. The constant harassment of the Kushans, even on the south side of the Ganges, made the foragers exceedingly cautious. Kushans were not a cavalry nation in the same sense as Persians and Rajputs, but they seemed to be mostly mounted and just as proficient in the saddle as they were in all forms of warfare.
Link had only three thousand cavalry. Fewer than that, now, after a number of clashes with Kushan dragoons. It could not even stop the Kushans from continuing the scorched earth campaign that Belisarius had begun.
The situation would have been infuriating, if Link had been capable of fury. The burning done by Belisarius' and Kungas' armies prevented Link from marching quickly, foraging as it went. And the Kushan harassment, despite the fact that the Malwa outnumbered them at least two-to-one, made their progress slower still. Link could destroy any Kushan attempt to charge its solid infantry, true enough. But Kungas was far too ca
And where was Belisarius? Link had no information at all. All the telegraph lines had been cut, and the Kushans ambushed any scouts it sent out. Link was operating as blindly as any commander in human history, except that it had an encyclopedic a knowledge of the terrain. But that meant almost nothing, when it had no idea where the main enemy force was to be found in it.
The probability was that Belisarius had left to meet a garrison coming north from one of the large cities. Mathura, most likely.
It was always possible that such a garrison would defeat the Roman general. But Link estimated that probability as being very low. Not more than 10%, at best. Assuming the far more likely probability that Belisarius would triumph in that battle as he had in almost all others, he and his army would be back at the Ganges within a few days.
By which time, Link and its forces would not have moved more than ten or fifteen miles. Probably ten. Kushan harassment was becoming more intense, seemingly by the hour.
"What shall we do, Great Lady?"
"Continue down the Ganges," Link replied. What else could it say?
When Khusrau and his army reached Chandan, on the Chenab river, the emperor was so taken by the beauty of the town and its setting that he ordered his soldiers not to burn it. He did, however, give them permission to loot the homes and public buildings.
That took little time. Most of the population had fled already, taking their most valuable possessions with them. After his army had crossed the Jhelum and entered the land between that river and the Chenab, the Persians considered themselves in enemy territory. By the terms of the agreement Khusrau had made with the Romans and the new Malwa emperor, after the war this would become Malwa territory. So, they were destroying everything, driving the population south toward Multan, where they'd join a horde of refugees already overburdening the Malwa garrison there.
In an sense, they'd been in enemy territory also, west of the Jhelum, but those lands were destined to become part of the Persian empire, by the provisions of the agreement. So, Khusrau had kept his soldiers under tight discipline, and had refrained from any destruction except where enemy forces put up resistance.
There hadn't been much of that. Apparently, the Malwa commander of the main army in the Punjab had been withdrawing all his detachments in the north in order to reinforce the Malwa lines facing the Romans. Lord Samudra, as he was named, was adopting a completely defensive posture while the Persians and the Kushans invaded the northern Punjab with impunity. For all practical purposes, the Malwa empire's largest and most powerful army had become paralyzed on its western border, while Damodara and Belisarius and Kungas and Khusrau himself drove lances into its unprotected guts.
Khusrau thought Samudra was an idiot. Knew him to be an idiot, rather, since the Persian emperor was well aware that Maurice had no more than fifty thousand Roman troops in the Iron Triangle. Sixty thousand, perhaps, counting the various auxiliary units that were assigned to maintaining the critical supply lines from the Sind. But even including those soldiers, Maurice was still outnumbered well over two-to-one. Probably closer to three-to-one.
With fifty thousand men behind those formidable Roman defensive works, of course, Maurice could hold his own against Samudra. But only on the defensive-and the same was true the other way. Samudra could have easily taken over half his army north to put a stop to Khusrau's expedition and, possibly, even cut off the Kushan army. Depending on where Kungas had taken it, of course. Khusrau suspected the Kushans were already into the Gangetic Plain. If they were able to join forces with Belisarius…
But while the Malwa commander in the Punjab seemed capable enough, when it came to routine matters, Samudra obviously had not an ounce of initiative and daring. The Malwa regime was not one that fostered independent thinking on the part of its commanders.
Hard to blame them, really. The one great exception to that rule was probably even now battering at the gates of Kausambi.
Damodara was not battering at the gates, as it happened. But he was bringing the siege guns into position to do so.
"Yes, yes, Ajatasutra, I know we hope to enter the city through… ah, what would you call it? 'Treachery' seems inappropriate."
"Guile and stratagem, Your Majesty," Ajatasutra supplied.
Damodara smiled. "Splendid terms. On my side, anyway."
The new emperor glanced at Narses. The Roman spymaster was perched on the mule he favored, studying the fortifications on the western walls of Kausambi.