Fortune's stroke

"Which could have done what we just did," grumbled Maurice. "A commanding general's got no business doing this kind of work."

Quite right, came Aide's vigorous thought.

"Quite right," came the echo from Valentinian, Anastasius and Vasudeva.

Seeing the four men glaring at him in the moonlight, and sensing the crystalline glare coming from within his own mind, Belisarius sighed.

It's going to be a long night. And a longer day tomorrow-if I'm lucky, and Coutzes is on the job. If not Sigh.

Days! Days of this! Slogging through the mountains is bad enough, without having every footstep dogged by reproaches and "I-told-you-so' s."

"I told you so," came the inevitable words from Maurice.

Chapter 3

"I told you so," murmured Rana Sanga. The Rajput king strode over to the well and peered down into the shaft.

Pratap, the commander of the cavalry troop, suppressed a sigh of relief. Sanga, on occasion, possessed an absolutely ferocious temper. But his words of reproach had been more philosophical than condemnatory.

He joined the king at the well.

"You followed?" asked Sanga.

Pratap hesitated, then squared his shoulders. "I sent several men to investigate. But-it's pitch-black down there, and we had no good torches. Nothing that would have lasted more than a few minutes. By the time we finally cleared away the rubble and figured out what had happened, the Romans had at least an hour's head start. It didn't seem to me-"

Sanga waved him down. "You don't have to justify yourself, Pratap. As it happens, I agree with you. You almost certainly wouldn't have caught up with them and, even if you had-"

He straightened, finished with his examination of the well. In truth, there wasn't much to see. Just a stone-lined hole descending into darkness.

"From your description of the giant Roman, I'm sure that was one of Belisarius' two personal bodyguards. I've forgotten his name. But the other one is called Valentinian, and-"

From the corner of his eye, he saw Udai wince. Udai was one of his chief lieutenants. Like Sanga himself, Udai had been present at the Malwa emperor's pavilion after the capture of Ranapur. The emperor, testing Belisarius' pretense at treason, had ordered him to execute Ranapur's lord and his family. The Roman general had not hesitated, ordering Valentinian to do the work.

For a moment, remembering, Sanga almost winced himself. Valentinian had drawn his sword and decapitated six people in less time than it would have taken most soldiers to gather their wits. Sanga was himself accounted one of India's greatest swordsmen. Valentinian was one of the few men he had ever encountered-thevery few men-who he thought might be his equal. To meet such a man downthere "Just as well," he stated firmly. "In the qanat, with no way to surround them, the advantage would have been all theirs." He turned away from the well, and began picking his way across the mound of rubble.

"The ambush failed, that's all. It happens-especially against an opponent as quick and shrewd as Belisarius."

Seeing Ajatasutra standing before him, at the edge of the stone pile which had once been a farmhouse, Sanga stopped and drew himself up.

"I will not have my men criticized." The Rajput's statement was flat, hard, unyielding. His brows lowered over glaring eyes.

Ajatasutra smiled, and spread his hands in a placating gesture. "I didn't say a word." The assassin chuckled dryly. "As it happens, I agree with you. The only thing that surprises me is that you came as close as you did. I didn't really think this scheme of yours was more than a half-baked fancy. Generals, in my experience, don't conduct their own advance reconnaissance."

"I do," rasped Sanga.

"So you do," mused Ajatasutra. The assassin eyed the Rajput king. His lips twisted humorously. "You were right, and Narses was wrong," he stated. "You assessed Belisarius better than he did."

Again, Ajatasutra spread his hands. "I will simply report the facts, Sanga, that's all. The ambush was well laid, and almost succeeded. But it failed, as ambushes often do. There is no fault or failure imputed."

Sanga nodded. For a moment, he studied the man standing before him. Despite himself, and his normal fierce dislike for Malwa spies, Sanga found it impossible not to be impressed by Ajatasutra. Ajatasutra was one of the Malwa Empire's most accomplished assassins. A year earlier, he had been second in command of the mission to Rome which had engineered the attempted insurrection against the Roman Empire. Narses had been the Malwa's principal co-conspirator in that plot. The insurrection-the Nika revolt, as the Romans called it-had failed, in the end, due to Belisarius. But it had been a very close thing, and the Malwa Empire had not blamed Ajatasutra or Narses for its failure. The two men had warned Balban, the head of the Malwa mission, that Belisarius and his wife, Antonina, were playing a duplicitous game. That, at least, had been their claim-and the evidence seemed to support them.