As well they should be.

"I don't care if those sorry bastards up north are getting hammered by the Kushans!" General Samudra shouted at the mahaveda priest. Angrily, he pointed a finger to the west. "I've got Persians hammering on me right here! They just destroyed our ironclads on the Indus!"

The priest's face was stiff. He was one of several such whom Great Lady Sati had left behind to keep an eye on the military leadership. Without, however, giving them the authority to actually over-ride any military decisions made by Samudra.

From the priests' point of view, that was unfortunate. From Samudra's point of view, it was a blessing. What priests knew about warfare could be inscribed on the world's smallest tablet.

"Absolutely not!" he continued, lowering his voice a little but speaking every bit as firmly. "I've already sent couriers with orders to the expedition I sent in relief to turn back. We need them here."

The priest wasn't going to give up that easily. "The Kushans are out of the Margalla Pass, now!"

"So what?" sneered Samudra. "Fifteen thousand Kushans-twenty at most, and don't believe that nonsense about fifty thousand-can't do anything to threaten us here. Sixty-maybe seventy-thousand Romans and Persians can. "

"They can threaten Great Lady Sati!"

For a moment, that caused Samudra to pause. But only for a moment, before the sneer was back.

"Don't meddle in affairs that you know nothing about, priest. If you think the Kushans are going to leave their kingdom unprotected while they hare off trying to intercept the Great Lady-"

He shook his head, the way a man does upon hearing an absurd theory or proposition. "Ridiculous. Besides, by now she'll have reached the headwaters of the Sutlej. That's a hundred miles from the Margalla Pass. It would take an army of twenty thousand men-assuming they have that many to begin with-a week and a half to cover the distance."

He cleared his throat sententiously. "Had you any experience in these matters, you would understand that a large army cannot travel faster than ten miles a day."

He hoped the words didn't ring as false to the priest as they did to him, the moment he said them. That ten mile a day average was…

An average. No more, no less. It did not apply to every army. Samudra had had Kushan forces under his command, in times past, and knew that a well-trained and well-led Kushan army could march two or three times faster than that-even while fighting small battles and skirmishes along the way.

Still…

"By the time they got to the headwaters of the Sutlej-assuming they were foolish enough to make the attempt in the first place-Great Lady Sati's forces will have already reached the headwaters of the Ganges. It's conceivable, I suppose, that the Kushans might be mad enough to venture so far into the northern Punjab, but no enemy force-not that size!-will be lunatic enough to enter the Ganges plain. The garrison at Mathura alone has forty thousand men!"

The priest stared at him from under lowered brows. Clearly enough, he was not persuaded by Samudra's arguments. But, just as clearly, he did not have the military knowledge to pick apart the logic. So, after a moment, he turned and walked away stiffly.

Samudra, however, did have the knowledge. And, now that he thought upon the matter more fully, be was becoming more uneasy by the minute.

The northern Punjab had not been ravaged much by the war, and it was the most fertile portion of the Punjab because it got more rain during the monsoon season than the rest of the province. If the Kushans were willing to abandon their logistics train and cut across the area relying on forage, they could cover possibly thirty miles a day. Twenty, for a surety.

The terrain was good, too. Excellent, from the standpoint of a marching army. From Peshawar ran the ancient trade route known as the Uttar Path or North Way, which crossed into the Ganges plain and ran all the way to the Bay of Bengal on the other side of the sub-continent. That was the same route that Great Lady Sati herself planned to take in her return to Kausambi, once she reached it by following the Sutlej.

By now, Samudra was staring to the north, not really seeing anything except in his mind. A fast-moving Kushan army, unrestrained by a logistics train, marching down the Uttar Path from the Margalla hills with no army in their way any longer…

They could intercept Great Lady Sati.

Possibly. It depended on how fast her own march had been. But Samudra knew full well that with the size of the army she'd taken with her, mostly infantry and with elephant-borne chaundoli, she wouldn't be moving all that quickly.

He opened his mouth, about to issue orders-that army coming back would curse him, for sending them north yet again, but better the curses of soldiers-far better-than A horrific chain of explosions shattered his purpose.

Gaping, Samudra spun around, now facing south by southwest.

"What happened?" The chain of explosions was continuing. As loud as it was, it seemed strangely muffled. Samudra detected what might be…

Fountains, in the distance?

One of his aides coughed. "General, I think the Romans are blowing up their mine field in the river."

"That's ridiculous! Our ironclads-"

He broke off so suddenly the last word ended in a choke.

"They're only blowing the mine field in the Indus," the same officer continued, his tone apologetic. "Not the one in the Chenab."

The Malwa had no ironclads left in the Indus. The Persians had destroyed them. There was nothing to stop the Roman warships from sallying up the river, firing at troops who had no way to shoot back except small arms and light cannon. Great Lady Sati had dismantled the heavy batteries that had once been positioned along the east bank of the Indus, once the ironclads came into service, in order to move them across the river as a shield against a possible Roman flank attack.

They could be turned around to face the river, but that would take at least a full day-and Samudra was quite sure the Romans or Persians or both would be attacking those forts again as soon as the Roman ironclad got up there and started firing on them.

Perhaps the heavy batteries at Multan could be brought down…

His earlier intentions completely forgotten, Samudra began issuing a blizzard of new orders.

"Let's hope this works," Menander muttered to himself, as the Justinian steamed at full speed up the river. "If the engine breaks down…"

He eyed the engine house warily. The damn gadget was more reliable than it had been when the former emperor after whom the ironclad had been named designed it, but it was still very far from being what anyone in his right mind would call "dependable."

Not for the first time, Meander contemplated ruefully the odd twists of fate that had wound up putting him in charge of the Roman army's brown-water naval forces, instead of becoming a simple cataphract liked he'd planned to be.

When he said as much to his second-in-command, the newly-promoted former Puckle gunner, Leo Constantes laughed.

" Today? Be glad you're not a cataphract-or you'd be taking part in the crazy charge Sittas is leading."

Menander winced. "Point."

Sittas himself was downright gleeful. He'd been frustrated for months, ever since the battle on the north lines of the Iron Triangle had settled down into a siege. There was really no place for heavy cavalry in such a fight, except to stay in reserve in the unlikely event of a Malwa breakthrough. Now, finally-!