Fortune's stroke

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.