Destiny's shield

Chapter 9

Rhodes

Summer, 531 A.D.

"Get down, you idiot!"

Antonina ducked behind the barricade. Just in time. There was a sharp, nasty-sounding, explosive crack. An instant later, an object went whizzing overhead somewhere in her vicinity.

John's head popped up behind his own barricade. When Antonina gingerly looked up, she found the naval officer's blue eyes glaring at her fiercely.

"How many times do I have to tell you?" he demanded. "This stuff is dangerous!"

The other observers of the test, five Roman officers, were beginning to rise from behind the heavy wooden barricades which surrounded, on three sides, the cannon which had been tested.

The late, lamented cannon. Lying on its side, off the heavy wooden cradle, with one of the wrought iron bars which made up its barrel missing. Seeing that gaping, scorched split running down the entire length of the barrel, Antonina winced. The missing iron bar was the object which had whizzed past-and it could have easily taken off her head.

John stumped out from behind his barricade.

"That's it! That's it!" he cried. He transferred his glare to the little cluster of Roman officers and pointed a imperious finger at Antonina. "This woman is henceforth banned for all time from the testing area!" he pronounced. "You are encharged with enforcing that order!"

Hermogenes cleared his throat. "Can't do that, John. Antonina's in command, you know. Of you and me both. Direct imperial mandate. If you want to inform the Empress Theodora that you're over-riding her authority, you go right ahead and do it. Not me."

"'Druther piss on a dragon, myself," muttered one of the other officers, the young Syrian named Euphronius who served as Antonina's chief executive officer for the Theodoran Cohort.

The regular infantry officer standing next to him, who served Hermogenes in the same capacity, nodded sagely.

"So would I," agreed Callixtos. "A big, angry, wide-awake, hungry dragon-"

"— guarding its hoard," concluded another officer. This man, Ashot, was the commander of the Thracian bucellarii whom Belisarius had assigned to accompany his wife to Egypt.

The last of the officers said nothing. His name was Menander, and he was new to his post. A hecatontarch, he was now-theoretically, the commander of a hundred men. A lad of twenty, who had never before commanded anyone. But Menander's title was a mere formality. His real position was that of Antonina's "special adviser."

Menander was the third of the three cataphracts who had accompanied Belisarius in his expedition to India. The other two, Valentinian and Anastasius, had remained with the general as his personal bodyguards. Menander, who had little of their frightening expertise in slaughter, had been assigned a different task. Belisarius thought Menander had gained an excellent grasp of gunpowder weapons and tactics during the course of their adventures in India, and so he had presented him to his wife with praise so fulsome the fair-skinned youth turned beet-red.

So, unsure of himself, Menander said nothing. But, quite sure of his loyalties, he squared his shoulders and stepped to Antonina's side.

John, seeing the united opposition of the entire military command of the expedition, threw up his hands in despair.

"I'm not responsible then!" The blue-eyed glare focussed again on Antonina. "You are doomed, woman. Doomed, I say! Destined for an early grave!"

John began stumping about, arms akimbo. "Dismembered," he predicted. "Disemboweled," he forecast. "Decapitated."

With a serene air of augury: "Shredded into a bloody, corpuscular mass of mutilated and mangled flesh."

Antonina, from long experience, waited until John had stumped about for a minute or so before she spoke.

"Exactly what happened, John?" she asked.

As always, once his irascibility was properly exercised, the naval officer's quick mind moved back to the forefront.

John gave the splintered cannon a cursory glance. "Same thing that usually happens with these damned wrought-iron cannons," he growled. "If there's any flaw at all in the welding, one of the staves will burst."

He stepped over to the cannon and squatted next to it.

"Come here," he commanded. "I'll show you the problem."

Antonina came around the barricade and stooped next to him. A moment later, the five officers were also gathered around.

John pointed to one of the iron bars which ran down the length of the barrel. The barrel was made up of twelve such bars-eleven, now, on this ruptured one. The bars were an inch square in cross-section and about three feet long. The corners of each bar joined its mates on the inside of the barrel, forming a dodecagonal tube about three inches in diameter. On the outside diameter of the barrel, the gaps between the bars had been filled up with weld.

John pointed to the broken welds which had once held the missing bar in place. "That's where they always rupture," he said. "And they do it about a third of the time."

He scowled, more thoughtfully than angrily. "I wouldn't even mind if the things were predictable. Then I could just test each one of them, and discard the failures. Won't work. I've seen one of these things blow up after it had fired successfully at least twenty times."

Hesitantly, Euphronius spoke up. "I notice you don't have the same hoops welded around the barrel that you have on the handcannons. Wouldn't that strengthen the barrel, if you added them?"

Antonina watched John struggle with his temper. The struggle was very brief, however. When the naval officer spoke his voice was mild, and his tone simply that of patient explanation. It was one of the many things she liked about the Rhodian. For all of John's legendary irritability, Antonina had long ago realized that John was one of those rare hot-tempered people who is rude to superiors yet, as a rule, courteous to social inferiors.

"Yes, it would, Euphronius," he said. "But here's the problem. The handcannons are small, and reasonably light-even with the addition of a few reinforcing hoops. Furthermore, the powder charge isn't really all that big. But to accomplish the same purpose with these three-inchers, I'd have to surround the barrel with hoops down its entire length. That adds a lot of weight-"

He hesitated, calculating.

"Right now, these things weigh about one hundred and fifty pounds. If you add the hoops-as I said, we'd have to run the hoops all the way down the length, not just occasional reinforcement like the handcannons-you'd wind up with a barrel weighing another fifty pounds or so. Say two hundred pounds-and that's just the weight of the barrel. Doesn't include the cradle."

"That's not so bad," commented Ashot. "Especially if you use it on a warship."

"Yes and no," replied John. "It's true that the weight wouldn't matter on a ship. The problem is with the integrity of the iron."

He glanced at Antonina.

"One of the things Belisarius told me-and I've verified it with my own tests-is that these welded wrought-iron cannons have to be properly maintained. The damned things have to be cleaned in boiling water after each period of use, or else the powder residues build up and start corroding the metal." He grimaced. So did Ashot.

Hermogenes, staring back and forth at the two men, frowned with puzzlement. "I don't see the problem," he said. "Sure, that'd be a real nuisance for a land army, having to boil water and wash out the cannons. Especially in the desert. But on a ship-"

John's eyes bugged out. Before the naval officer could give vent to his outrage, Ashot intervened.

"Don't forget, John. He's never served at sea."

John clenched his jaws. "Obviously not," he growled.

Ashot, smiling, said to Hermogenes, "The one thing you do not want to do on a ship is build a big fire in order to boil a huge kettle of water. Believe me, Hermogenes, you don't. There's nothing in the world that'll burn like a ship. All that oil-soaked wood-pitch-rigging-"

"Damned ships are like so much kindling, just waiting to go up," concurred John. "Besides, what water would you use? Sea-water? That'd corrode the barrels even faster!"

Antonina straightened. "That's it, then. We'll go with cast bronze guns for the warships. And the field artillery. We'll restrict the wrought-iron weapons for the infantry's handguns."

"They'll still blow up, now and then," warned John.

Euphronius smiled, with surprising good cheer. "Yes, John, they will. I've seen it happen-had it happen to me, once-and it's a bit scary. But my grenadiers can handle it. The one nice thing about these wrought-iron guns, when they do go, is that they blow sideways, not back. Startling as hell, but it's not really that dangerous."

"Except to the man standing next to you," muttered Callixtos.

"Not really. Don't forget-the handcannons have those hoop reinforcements. So far, every time one of the guns has blown-which, by the way, doesn't happen all that often-the hoops have kept the staves from flying off like so many spears. What you get is ruptured pieces. Those can hurt you, sure-even kill you, maybe-but the odds aren't bad." Euphronius shrugged. "That's life. We're farmers and shepherds, Callixtos. Farming's dangerous too, believe it or not. Especially dealing with livestock. My cousin was crippled just last year, when-"

He broke off, waving aside the incident. All who watched the Syrian peasant-turned-grenadier were struck by the calm fatalism of the gesture.

"We'll manage," he repeated. The cheerful smile returned. "Though I will emphasize the importance of keeping the guns clean, to my grenadiers. Even if that means having to haul a bunch of heavy kettles around."

Now, chuckling:

"The wives'll scream bloody murder, of course, since they'll wind up doing most of the hauling."

John was still not satisfied. "Bronze is expensive," he complained. "Iron cannons are a lot cheaper."

Antonina shook her head.

"We'll just have to live with the cost. I won't subject my soldiers and sailors to that kind of gamble. Let the treasury officials wail all they want."

Grimly: "If they wail too much, I'll refer them to Theodora."

Her usual good humor returned. "Besides, John, we can make the giant fortress cannons out of wrought iron. Once we get to Alexandria. It won't matter what they weigh, since they'll never be moved once they're erected to defend the city. And there'll be no problem keeping them clean. The garrison gunners won't have anything else to do anyway. Hopefully, the guns'll never be used."

John scowled. "Are you sure about this?" he demanded.

He was not talking about the cannons, now. He was raising-again-the argument he had been having with Antonina since she arrived at Rhodes. The very first instruction Antonina had given John, almost the minute she set foot on the island, was to organize the transfer of the armaments complex he had so painstakingly built up, in its entirety, to Alexandria.

Antonina sighed.

"John, we've been over this a hundred times. Rhodes is just too isolated. The war with the Malwa will be won in the south. Egypt's the key. And besides-"

She hesitated. Like most Rhodians of her acquaintance, John had a fierce attachment to his native island. But-

"Face the truth, John. Rhodes isn't just isolated-it's too damn small."

She waved her hand toward the cluster of workshops some fifty yards away from the testing range. The workshops, like the testing area, were perched on a small bluff overlooking the sea. Behind them rose a steep and rocky ridge.

"This is a war like no other ever fought. We need to build a gigantic arms complex to fight it. That means Alexandria, John, not this little island. Alexandria's the second largest city in the Empire, after Constantinople, and it has by far the greatest concentration of manufactories, artisans, and skilled craftsmen. There's nowhere else we can put together the materials-and, most importantly, the workforce-quickly enough."

"Egypt's the richest agricultural province of the Empire, too," added Hermogenes. "So we won't have any problems keeping that workforce fed. Whereas here on Rhodes-"

He left off, gesturing at the rugged terrain surrounding them. Rhodes was famous, throughout the Mediterranean world, for the skill of its seamen and the savvy of its merchants. Both of which talents had developed, over the centuries, to compensate for the island's hardscrabble agriculture.

John stood up slowly. "All right," he sighed. Then, with a suspicious glance at Antonina:

"You sure this isn't just an elaborate scheme to justify a triumphant return to your native city?"

Antonina laughed. There was no humor in that sound. None at all. "When I left Alexandria, John, I swore I'd never set foot in that place again." For a moment, her beautiful face twisted into a harsh, cold mask. "Fuck Alexandria. All I remember is poverty, scraping, and-"

She paused, shrugged. All of the men standing around knew her history. All of them except Euph-ronius had long known.

The Syrian peasant had only learned that history three months earlier, when Antonina selected him as her executive officer and invited him and his wife to her villa for dinner. She had told them, then, over the wine after the meal. Watching carefully for their reaction. Euphronius had been shocked, a bit, but his admiration for Antonina had enabled him to overcome the moment.

His wife Mary had not been shocked at all. She, too, admired Antonina. But, unlike her husband, she understood the choices facing girls born into poverty. Mary had chosen a different path than Antonina-for a moment, her hand had caressed her husband's, remembering the tenderness of a sixteen-year-old shepherd boy-but she did not condemn the alternative. She had thought about it herself, more than once, before deciding to marry Euphronius and accept the life of a peasant's wife.

Antonina turned away. "Fuck Alexandria," she repeated.