Fortune's stroke

Chapter 8

Axum

Spring, 532 A.D.

Eon's regimental ceremony did not take place until days after the bombing of the Ta'akha Maryam. Initially, the prince had insisted on doing it at once. But calmer voices-older ones, at least-prevailed.

Foremost among those voices had been that of Wahsi, the commander of the regiment itself.

"There is no time now, King of Kings," he insisted.

"I am not the negusa nagast!" roared Eon. "I cannot be-not until I am accepted into the Dakuen sarwe!"

The prince-king, now; his father and brother's corpses had already been found-rose from his labors. Eon had worked through the night, along with his soldiers and most of Axum's populace, clearing away the rubble and debris. It was now mid-morning of the next day, and there was still much work to be done. The royal quarters themselves had been excavated, but the Malwa explosives had shattered well over a third of the great complex. Hundreds of corpses had been found, and as many survivors. The rescue workers could hear the faint moans of a few victims who were still alive, buried beneath the stones.

Wahsi placed a gentle hand on Eon's shoulder. "The Dakuen can wait, King."

The Dakuen commander gestured with his head, indicating the knot of soldiers standing just a few feet behind him. Those men were all of the officers of the regiment, other than the ones who were with Ezana in India. "None of us are concerned about the matter."

Hearing Wahsi's words, the regimental officers growled their agreement. Several of them glanced at the figure of Ousanas. The dawazz was just a few yards away, oblivious to the exchange. He was too busy pulling away stones.

Not even Eon failed to miss the obvious approval in those glances.

"There is no need," repeated Wahsi softly. Then, very softly, in words only Eon could hear: "No need, Eon. There is no question of the regiment's approval of Ousanas, and you."

Wahsi chuckled but, again, so softly that only Eon could hear. "They will have harsh words to say, of course, about the hunter's ridiculous philosophies, and will relish every detail of your childhood follies. But that is just tradition." He cast a glance at the distant figure of Antonina, who was directing her own soldiers in the rescue operation. All of the Roman troops had survived the explosion, and they had immediately pitched into the work. "They are especially looking forward to hearing about all the times Ousanas was forced to slap you silly, until you finally learned not to ogle the wife of Belisarius."

Eon managed a smile. It wasn't much of a smile, but Wahsi was still relieved to see it. For just a fleeting instant, Eon's was the face of a young man again. For hours, since the bodies of Zaia and Tarabai had been found, his face had been that of an old man broken with grief. Zaia had been his concubine since Eon was thirteen years old. If the passion had faded, some, from their relationship, he had still loved her deeply. And he had been almost besotted with Tarabai, since he met her in India.

"You lost everyone yesterday, Eon," said Wahsi gently. "Your women and your only child, along with your father and brother. No man in the world-prince or peasant, it matters not-can think clearly at such a time, or deal with anything beyond his grief. So let us simply concentrate on the work before us. There will be time, soon enough, for the ceremony."

He stepped back a pace, and raised his voice slightly.

"For the moment, you are the negusa nagast. That is the opinion of the Dakuen sarwe, as well as the Lazen and the Hadefan."

Wahsi gestured toward two of the officers in the cluster. They were named Aphilas and Saizana and were, respectively, the commanders of the Lazen and the Hadefan sarwe. The Lazen had been the regiment of Kaleb; the Hadefan, that of Wa'zeb. Along with the Dakuen, they constituted the current royal regiments of the Ethiopian army.

"That is correct, King," said Aphilas. Saizana nodded, adding: "And we have spoken to all of the other sarawit. The soldiers are of one mind on this matter. All of them."

Then, almost in a snarl: "We will have our vengeance on Malwa. And you are the King of Kings who will lead us to it."

Eon wiped his face with a hand, smearing dirt and rock dust. It was a weary, weary gesture. "How is Garmat?" he asked. "Will he survive?"

Wahsi broke into a smile of his own. And not a thin one, either.

"Be serious, King! If twenty great stones falling on that old Arab brigand couldn't kill him outright, do you really think he would die of lingering wounds?"

One of the officers-an older man, well into his fifties-laughed. "I remember when we were chasing that bandit through the desert, years ago. Never could catch him, no matter how many ambushes we laid."

Another officer, also middle-aged, grinned. "Personally, I think he's malingering. Lazy half-breed! Just doesn't want to haul stones."

A little laugh swept the small crowd. Even Eon joined in the humor, for a moment.

Finding Garmat had been the only brightness in a long, dark night. The adviser had apparently been standing some distance away from the throne, when the bombs went off. The Malwa saboteurs, of course, had set the main charges in the walls near the throne itself. When the explosion took place, King Kaleb and all of the people in his immediate vicinity-including his oldest son and heir, Wa'zeb-had been pulverized by the great blast. The rest of the people in the throne room, except for Garmat and a servant, had been crushed by the falling roof and walls. But, by a freak of fortune, some of the Ta'akha Maryam's great stones, in their collapse, had formed a sort of shelter for Garmat and the servant. The servant, in fact, had been almost unharmed, other than being frightened half out of her wits. Garmat's injuries had been severe-several broken bones, along with innumerable bruises and lacerations-but his life had been spared.

The news of Garmat's survival, as it spread, brought cheer to everyone-especially to the sarwen. Partly, that was due to fondness for the man himself. King Kaleb's rule had been good, so far as the people of Axum were concerned. Much of that they ascribed to the sage, and usually gentle, advice of Garmat.

But, mostly, the news brought cheer to the soldiers laboring in the wreckage because it stirred flame in their fierce hearts. The sarwen had not forgotten that Garmat was the same wily half-Arab bandit who had eluded the Ethiopian army for years-until, finally, he had accepted their offer to become Kaleb's own dawazz, when Eon's father was still a boy. After Kaleb succeeded to the throne, Garmat had been his chief adviser for years, until Kaleb assigned him to serve Eon in the same post.

Gentle, the man Garmat had often been, in his advice to Ethiopian royalty. But always shrewd, always cunning, and-when he felt it necessary-as savage and pitiless as the Arabian desert which had shaped him. More than one Axumite soldier, hearing the news that Garmat still lived, silently repeated Antonina's own thought.

Bad move, Malwa. Bad news, you bastards. You'd have done better to toy with a scorpion, after tweaking its tail.

Ten days after the explosion, the regimental ceremony was finally held. The fact that the Ta'akha Maryam was a ruin did not impede the proceedings. By tradition, the ceremony was never held in the royal compound. It was always held on the training fields where, Ethiopians never forgot, the real power of Axum was created. The army's training fields were located about half a mile west by northwest of the royal compound, at the base of one of the two great hills which overlooked the capital. This hill, which formed the eastern boundary of Axum, was called the Mai Qoho. The one on the north, the Bieta Giyorghis.

Standing to one side, in the group of witnesses who were not members of the regiments, Antonina surveyed the scene. She was impressed, more than anything, by the open-almost barren-nature of the grounds. Other than the row of open-air thrones on the north end of the field, butted against the slope of the Mai Qoho, the training grounds were completely bare except for a handful of wooden spear targets.

That was the Axumite way of looking at things, she realized. When she first arrived in Ethiopia, Antonina had not noticed the absence of fortifications until the officers of her army began pointing it out to her. They had been quite impressed. None of Axum's towns-not even the capital city of Axum itself, nor the great seaport of Adulis-were surrounded by walls. Not one of the many villages through which they passed, on their long trek upcountry, had so much as a small fortress to protect it.

The ancient Athenians had placed their faith in the wooden walls of their ships. The Axumites, in the spears of their regiments.

That was not from lack of ability. Axumites were quite capable of massive stonework. The Ta'akha Maryam and, especially, the glorious cathedral of Maryam Tsion, were testimony to the skill and craftsmanship of Ethiopian masons. But those edifices were for pomp, display, ceremony, and worship. They had nothing to do with power.

Power came from the regiments. They, and they alone.

She brought her eyes back to the thrones at the north end of the field. Those, too, she thought, testified to the same approach.

The structures were identical, and quite small-nothing like Kaleb's great throne in the Ta'akha Maryam had been. Each throne rested on a granite slab not more than eight feet square. A smaller slab atop the first provided the base for the throne itself, which was a solid but simple wooden chair. Four slender stone columns, rising from each corner of the upper slab, supported a canopy which sheltered the occupant from the sun. A gold cross-very finely made; Axumite metalsmiths were as skilled as their masons-surmounted the entire structure, but the canopy itself was made of nothing fancier than woven grass.

Those thrones were for the commanders of the Axumite sarawit, the regiments into which their army was organized. It was typical of Axumite notions of rule that those commanders, taken as a collective group, were called "nagast"-kings.

None of them, as individuals, enjoyed that title. Unlike the vassal states of the Ethiopian Empire, whose rulers retained their royal trappings (so long, of course, as they acknowledged the suzerainty of the King of Kings), the regimental commanders derived their authority entirely from the army itself. But, in the real world, the attitude of the regiments was considered far more important than the vagaries of sub-kings.

Only three of the thrones were occupied, this day. Even that was unusual. According to tradition, one man alone should be sitting on a throne today-the commander of the Dakuen sarwe. Even the king himself, though he was not present, was required to vacate his throne in the royal compound until his son's regiment had passed its judgement.

But Wahsi had bent the custom, today. With the murder of Kaleb and Wa'zeb, the Lazen and the Hadefan sarawit had lost their own royalty. Wahsi had offered, and they had accepted, to share the prince. For the first time in Axumite history, a man would ascend the throne with the approval-and the name-of three regiments.

The ceremony was beginning. Eon was taking his own place, standing alone to one side. At the very front, before the assembled regiments themselves, Ousanas was being brought forward.

Antonina struggled mightily against a giggle. The dawazz was positively festooned with chains and manacles. The servile devices looked about as appropriate on him as ribbons on a lion.

And probably, she thought, eyeing Ousanas' tall and heavily muscled figure, just about as effective, if he decides he's tired of the rigmarole. Belisarius had told her once, after returning from India, that Ousanas was probably the strongest man he had ever met in his life. Even stronger, he suspected, than the giant Anastasius.

But Antonina's humor faded quickly enough. The chains and manacles might seem absurd, but there was nothing absurd-looking about the squad of soldiers who surrounded Ousanas. There were eight of them, and all were holding weapons in their hands. These were not the usual stabbing spears and heavy, cleaverlike swords with which Axumites went into battle, however. The soldiers were holding clubs, inlaid with iron studs.

Weapons to beat a slave who had failed in his duty. Beat him to death, easily enough, if he had failed badly.

Antonina, staring at those cruel implements, had no trouble with giggles. Not any longer. She knew the clubs were not ornaments. It had happened, over the past two centuries, that a regiment had beaten a dawazz savagely-fatally, on two occasions-because they judged that he had failed in his duty to educate his prince.

She tore her eyes away, and looked at Eon. The sight of the young royal's upright and square-shouldered stance reassured her. The calmness in his face, even more so.

Not today. Not that prince.

A minute later, the ceremony itself got underway.

Five minutes later, Antonina was fighting giggles again.

Ten minutes later, she stopped trying altogether, and joined in the general hilarity. She spent most of the day, in fact, laughing along with everyone else.

Antonina had forgotten. There was a serious core-deadly serious-at the heart of that ceremony. But Axumites, when all was said and done, did not hold solemnity in any great esteem. The best armor against self-aggrandizement and pomposity, after all, is always humor.

By and large, the ceremony proceeded chronologically. Eon's prepubescent follies were dismissed quickly enough. Everyone wanted to get to the next stage.

Antonina learned, then, the reason for the other women standing in her group. All of them, it seemed-except for three old crones whose testimony had to do with Eon's pranks in the royal kitchen-had been seduced by the young prince at one time or another.

It was quite a crowd. Antonina was rather impressed.

But she was more impressed, much more, by what followed. Most of the women were-or had been-servants in the royal compound, while Eon was in his teens. The kind of women, in every land, who were the natural prey of young male nobles feeling the first urges of budding sexuality.

But they were not there, it developed, to press any grievances against the prince. They simply recounted-either volunteering the information, or responding to one of the many questions shouted out by soldiers in the ranks-the ways in which Eon had finagled his way into their beds. Their statements were frank, open, usually jocular-and often at the expense of Eon himself. It became clear soon enough that, especially in his earlier years, the prince's skill at working his way into their beds had not been matched by any great skill once he got there.

Several of the tales were downright hilarious. Antonina was especially entertained by the account of a plump, older woman who had once been a cook in the royal compound. The woman-she must have been a good twenty years older than Eon-recounted in lavish detail her patient, frustrated attempts to instruct a headstrong fifteen-year-old prince in the basic principles of female anatomy. Not with any great success, it seemed, until she discovered the secret: slap the fool boy on his head!

That produced a gale of laughter, sweeping across the entire training field. The soldiers guarding Ousanas grinned at him with approval.

Unfortunately, Antonina could not follow all of the woman's tale. Her own knowledge of Ge'ez, the Axumite language, was still very poor. Menander, one of the cataphracts who had accompanied Belisarius on his trip to India, was serving as her translator. He had become good friends with Wahsi and Ezana during that long journey, and was quite fluent in the language.

Alas, Menander was also young, and he still bore the imprint of his conservative village upbringing. So, whenever the story got especially juicy, he fumbled and stumbled and-Antonina had no doubt-was guilty of excessive abridgement.

"And what was that about?" Antonina demanded, once the roaring laughter had subsided a bit.

Menander fumbled and stumbled. Abridged.

"Ah," said Antonina, nodding her head wisely. "Yes, of course. It is difficult to teach a thick-headed male how to use his tongue for something more useful than boasting."

But, for all its salacious humor, there was still a deadly serious purpose to the business. As she listened to the questions which the soldiers asked of the women, Antonina understood that they were probing for something quite important.

The soldiers were not concerned-not in the least-with Eon's amatory habits. Young lads, of any rank in society, are always randy. A prince, because of his prestigious position and the self-confidence which that position gives him, will be much more successful than most teenage boys in the art of seduction. That much was inevitable, natural, and no concern of the soldiers. Rather the contrary, in fact-no one wanted a shy, self-effacing king in charge of a country, especially one who might have difficulty perpetuating the royal line.

And if a particular prince proved to be particularly adept at the skill-as Eon obviously was-so much the better. A glib tongue was a useful attribute for a good monarch.

What the soldiers were concerned about were Eon's methods. Charm is one thing; bullying is another. If Eon could use his prestige as a prince to sweet-talk his way into a hundred servant girls' beds, that was a source for nothing beyond amusement. But if he used that royal position in order to threaten his way to the goal, that was regimental business. A prince who would rape his servants would not hesitate, as a king, to rape his country.

But there was no trace of that in Eon's past. The questioning of the women went on as long as it did, Antonina decided, simply because everyone was enjoying the affair. Everyone except Eon, at least, although Antonina noticed that the prince himself was not reluctant to join in the laughter, even when he was the butt of the joke.

Soon enough, it was Antonina's turn to be a witness. Wahsi led the questioning, as he had since the beginning of the ceremony.

It did not take him more than a minute to clarify the issue involving Antonina. A randy prince was fine, so long as he could keep it under control. But a prince who would jeopardize important political affairs because of his unbridled lust would make a disastrous ruler.

Here, Wahsi glowered fiercely, leaning forward in his throne.

Isn't it true that during his trip to Constantinople, the fool boy prince could not stop ogling the wife of Rome's greatest general?

Antonina was not even tempted to deny the charge. Wahsi himself, along with Ezana, had been Eon's bodyguards during that time. But she managed to toss the thing off easily enough.

Well, yes, I suppose, for the first few days. But I was not offended. It's not as if I'm unaccustomed to it, after all-

Here, she drew herself erect, swelling her chest a bit. Antonina had deliberately worn the most revealing costume she had brought with her on this expedition. The outfit was not really very provocative, in all truth-nothing like the costumes she had worn in her days as a courtesan-but it didn't need to be. With her figure, she could attract men wearing a sackcloth.

An appreciative murmur rose from the ranks of the watching soldiers.

— and Eon was perfectly courteous in his actual conduct. A most proper young prince.

So much for that.

Menander was summoned next. The questioning here had no sexual overtone, but the issue was the same. Wasn't it true, during Eon's trip, that he behaved overbearingly toward Roman soldiers? Mention was made, in particular, of an arm-wrestling match in which the arrogant prince could not resist showing off his grotesque musculature.

Menander did not handle the thing as smoothly as Antonina. But, in its own way, his stubborn and vehement-almost resentful-defense of Eon was even more effective. No one watching the young foreign soldier, stammering his admiration for the prince, could fail to be impressed with the way in which Eon had obviously won over his allies, whatever might have been his initial blunders. And, again, laughter swept the field when Menander described Ousanas' methods of correcting Eon's behavior.

The rest of the ceremony was much of a piece. Every aspect of Eon's character was probed-with humor, more often than not, but relentlessly nonetheless. The dawazz was on trial, not the prince. But the real issue was Eon's suitability to assume the throne.

By mid-afternoon, the question was settled. In truth, Antonina realized, it had never really been at issue. The soldiers in the gathered regiments had followed the tradition scrupulously, but they had long since made their own private judgements. And it was not difficult for her, watching those soldiers, to come to the conclusion that they would not only accept Eon as their monarch, but were fiercely looking forward to his rule.

Bad move, Malwa.

The ceremony ended. The shackles were removed from Ousanas. Following custom, Wahsi offered the former dawazz a choice. He could return to his homeland, laden with riches; or he could choose to stay in Axum, where the new king would doubtless find a suitable post for his talents.

Ousanas' answer brought the last roar of laughter to the field-and a roar of fury with it.

"I shall stay here," he announced. "My own folk are too practical. Here, I will have great opportunity to contemplate philosophy. Especially the dialectic, which teaches us that all things are a contradiction."

He gave Eon a stony look. "As the fool boy king will prove soon enough."

When the laughter faded, he said: "But the dialectic also teaches us that all things change. As the Malwa are about to discover-even quicker!"