As they walked down the gangplank from their ship to the dock at Barbaricum, where a crowd waited to greet them, Ousanas gave Antonina a sly little smile. "Brace yourself. I realize it's a shock for you, not being the most famous woman in the area."
Antonina sniffed. "It's a relief, frankly. Give them someone else to gossip about."
Ousanas shook his head. "The other woman in question being a saint and the model of virtue, your own notoriety will simply stand out in contrast. The gossip will be fiercer than ever. Especially—"
He swelled out his chest. A chest which needed no swelling to begin with, as muscular as it so obviously was under the flashy but sparse Axumite regalia. "—arriving, as you do, in the company of such a magnificent male."
Throughout, he'd kept a solemn expression on his face. As they neared the pack of notables on the dock, the expression became positively lugubrious. He tilted his head toward her, murmuring: "Within a day, tales will be sweeping the city of the orgy you held on the ship, from the moment it left Adulis."
"Ridiculous." She lifted her head slightly, to augment her dignified bearing. "That same reputation will shield me. Everyone knows that if I'd been holding an orgy, you wouldn't be able to walk off this ship in the first place. 'Magnificent male.' Ha. Weaklings, all of you."
They were almost at the docks. The front line of the crowd consisted of Roman officials, Persian noblemen and Axumite troop leaders. Quite an august body, really. So Antonina's next words were spoken almost in a whisper.
"I grant you, if we had any stallions or bulls on the ship, I'd be in trouble. But we didn't bring any."
It was all she could do not to stick out her tongue at him. Getting the best of Ousanas in that sort of repartee was something of an accomplishment.
The ceremonies that followed were the usual tedious business. Fortunately, Antonina was spared the worst of it, thanks to Photius and Tahmina. Their own transfer from the ship to the dock had been no simple matter of walking down a gangplank. The Roman officials and Persian grandees had vied with each other to see who could produce the most absurdly elaborate palanquins for the purpose.
"I was scared the gangplank would collapse under the weight," Photius confided to her later. "Tahmina—did you see the idiotic thing they carried her off in?—was downright petrified."
The most interesting part of the day, perhaps ironically, was the tour of the new hospital. The one the Wife had established.
It wasn't hers, really. Anna Saronites might have been wealthy enough—her husband Calopodius, at any rate—to commission the building of a brand-new hospital. But she simply hadn't been in Barbaricum long enough, before she began her voyage up the Indus.
But, from what Antonina could determine, that didn't seem to matter. The young Roman noblewoman had struck the existing hospital like the monsoon. Leaving plenty of wreckage in her wake, as the monsoon does. But—also like the monsoon—leaving a greener land behind. One with life, where there had been death.
"I'm impressed," Ousanas admitted. For once, not joking at all. "I wouldn't have thought even the Emperor of Iran and all his executioners could have swept aside this much stupidity and carelessness. In that short a time, anyway."
Antonina eyed a nearby member of the Wife's Service, standing solemnly in the doorway to the next ward. Despite the purple uniform, he bore approximately the same resemblance to a "nurse" as a tavern bouncer bears to an "usher."
"She knew the trick," Antonina murmured. "I'm a little flattered, actually."
Ousanas cocked his head.
"Don't you see? She patterned the Service after the Hospitalers. That's what it takes, for something like this. People will simply evade the rulings of officials. Much harder to evade the strictures of a militant mass order."
"You're quite right," came a voice from behind. Turning her head, Antonina saw the chief of the Service in Barbaricum. Psoes, his name was. She hadn't realized he was following them closely enough to have overheard.
"You're quite right," he repeated. "She told me she got the idea from reading Irene Macrembolitissa's account of your exploits in Alexandria."
Antonina chuckled. "Irene's fables, you mean. She was long gone from Alexandria and on her way to India before all that happened. That account she wrote was entirely after the fact, and based on hearsay."
"Your hearsay, to make it worse," Ousanas grunted. "Told to her in one of your scandalous drinking bouts."
He surveyed the ward again, before they passed on to the next. This one was devoted to men recovering from amputations of the lower extremities, where the one they'd passed through earlier was given over to men who'd suffered more severe trauma. The harshly practical mind of the Wife was evident even in the hospital's new design. Triage, everywhere. Partly to keep diseased men from infecting men who were simply injured. Mostly, because the Wife accepted that some men would die, but saw no reason that other men should die unnecessarily.
In times past, hospitals simply heaped men wherever they happened to have a space, with no more forethought than a wind driving leaves against a fence. In such haphazard piles, a man suffering a simple amputation might die from neglect, simply because he was in a ward most of whose occupants were dying anyway.
Agathius came limping up. He'd lagged behind to reassure one of the soldiers from his own personal experience that while wooden legs were certainly a nuisance, they didn't seriously interfere with copulation. Once they were removed, anyway.
"Horrible," he muttered. "Thank God Sudaba remained in the palace and didn't see this."
Antonina lifted an eyebrow. "She never struck me as being particularly squeamish."
"She's not." Agathius glowered around the room. "That's what I'm worried about. She's already hard enough to control. Once she meets this cursed 'Wife' . . ."
The glower came to Antonina. "I'm blaming you, mostly. You and that damned Macrembolitissa. Hadn't been for your example—hers, even worse!—none of this would be happening."
"Men's lives are being saved," Ousanas pointed out mildly.
The glower never wavered. "Who cares? All men die sooner or later anyway. But in the good old days, whatever years we had given to us, we didn't have to spend half of them arguing with the women. It's your fault, Antonina."
That evening, over dinner at the palace that had been turned over to them for the duration of their short sojourn in Barbaricum, Antonina recounted the day's activities to those who had remained behind.
Sudaba wasn't interested in the official ceremonies. As a girl whose father was merely a dehgan, she might have been. As a young woman who'd now been married to the top Roman official in Mesopotamia for almost two years and had attended more official ceremonies than she could remember, she wasn't in the least.
What she was interested in hearing about—at length—was the hospital.
"I can't wait to meet this woman," she said.
Antonina smiled at Agathius. "Oh, stop glaring at the roast. It's already overcooked as it is."
"Your fault, I say it again."
It was odd, really, the comfort the stable-keeper took from the presence of the giant Roman soldier. Under any other circumstances, the man—Anastasius, his name—would have terrified him. The stable-keeper was Bengali. Despite the years he'd lived in Kausambi, he'd never really gotten accustomed to the size of western barbarians. The Ye-tai were bad enough. But no Ye-tai the stable-keeper had ever seen was as big and powerful-looking as this Roman.
Anastasius still did frighten the stable-keeper. But since he was so much less terrifying than his companion, the stable-keeper was almost relieved to have him around. He liked to imagine that the giant one would restrain the other—Valentinian, he was called, with another of those bizarre western names—in the all-too-likely event that the man reverted to the predator nature he so obviously possessed.
"Stop bullying the poor man, Valentinian," the giant rumbled.
"I'm not bullying him. I'm simply pointing out the facts of life."
The stable-keeper avoided both their gazes. Squatting on the floor of one of his stables and staring at the ground, he whimpered: "Why did I ever agree to this?"
"Why?" The one named Valentinian leaned over and casually spit on the ground. He was standing, not squatting, and leaning against a nearby stall. "Four reasons. First, you were stupid enough to catch the eye of somebody powerful—today, if not then—when he came through here some years ago, and impressed him with your competence and sterling character. Fucking idiot. You're what—almost fifty years old? And you still haven't learned that no good deed shall go unpunished?"
The stable-keeper whimpered again. "I didn't know who he was."
"Stupider still, then. The second reason is that this stable is about the right distance. Close enough that we could dig to it, far enough away that nobody will connect it to the palace once we blow the tunnel. It's even more or less in the right direction—away from the river."
He spat again. "Just bad luck, that. The next two reasons were your own fault, though. To begin with, you were greedy enough to accept our money."
The whimper that came out now was considerably louder. "You didn't explain exactly what you were doing," he protested.
"You didn't ask either, did you? Like I said, too greedy."
The weasel-faced Roman fell silent, his eyes idly wandering about the gloom of the stable.
The stable-keeper was hoping he wouldn't continue with the explanation.
But, of course, he did.
"The fourth and final reason is that if you don't do what we tell you to do, I'll kill you. Then I'll kill every member of your family after raping your wife and daughters and nieces. Your mother's too old and your sister has bad breath. I'll save the baby for last. He looks pretty tender and I'm sick of lamb."
The giant rolled his eyes. "Oh, for the love of God, Valentinian!"
He squatted down next to the stable-keeper and placed a huge hand on his skinny shoulder. Then, gave him a friendly and reassuring smile.
"He's lying," he assured the stable-keeper. "Valentinian won't rape the women before he kills them. And all he'll do to the baby is just cut his throat."
The stable-keeper believed him. Most insane of all was that he did find that a relief.
"How is that last reason my fault?" he whined.
Valentinian gave him that horrible weasel smile. "You weren't born big enough and tough enough and mean enough to fight back against the likes of me, and not rich enough to hire a small army to do it for you. Maybe in your next life, you won't be so careless."
Valentinian and Anastasius spent several hours in the tunnel, on the way back, checking and inspecting everything.
More precisely, Anastasius pretended to check the timbers and shoring, while Valentinian gave the Bihari miners and their remaining Ye-tai guards that level and dark-eyed stare that could intimidate a demon. Neither Valentinian nor Anastasius were miners, after all, so they really had no good idea what to look for. True, they had considerable experience at siege work—as both defenders and attackers—but neither of them had ever been used as sappers. That was specialty work, and not something that cataphracts generally got involved in.
"Ignore him," Anastasius assured the miners. "He just likes to stay in practice."
In a half-crouch due to the low ceiling, Anastasius planted his hands on his knees and smiled at the chief of the miners. "It looks good to me. But we don't want it to be too good. There are three doglegs we might need to use, and all three of them have to collapse if we set off the charges. Collapse for dozens of yards, too. Won't do us any good just to cave in a few feet. The Malwa can dig, too."
After giving Valentinian a quick, nervous glance, the Bihari nodded vigorously. "Not a problem! Not a problem! Look here!" He scurried over to one of the nearby wood pillars that held up the roof and began jabbing with his finger. Here, there—everywhere, it seemed.
"See how the wedges are set? The charges will blow them all loose. Without the wedges, everything will come down. We put all the doglegs deep, too. Deeper than the rest of the tunnels. With that much weight of earth above them—especially the first dogleg, near the river, with all that muddy soil—they'll come right down."
Anastasius swiveled a bit, to be able to look at Valentinian. "Looks good to me. You have a problem with anything?"
Valentinian was in a half-crouch also, although in his case he was leaning his rump against one of the pillars to support his weight rather than using hands on knees. He wasn't as tall as Anastasius, but he was still much too tall to stand upright in the low tunnel. Even the short Bihari miners had to stoop a little.
"Not really," he said, "beyond the general principle that something's bound to get fucked up." He gave the miner a little nod of the head. "It's not as if I really distrust him and his men. If it doesn't work, they're dead meat along with the rest of us."
The miner nodded his head, maybe a dozen times. "Yes! Yes! And if it works, we get our freedom and a big bonus. The lady promised. And—ah—"
He left off the rest, since it was a bit awkward. What was more to the point was that Valentinian had agreed to the lady's promise, and done so to their faces. For all that he frightened the miners—and frightened the Ye-tai even more, probably—there was an odd way in which they all trusted Valentinian. A man that murderous simply didn't need to stoop to petty treachery, when all was said and done.
Rajiv's fight with the three traitors had cemented Valentinian's reputation with those men. Especially the Ye-tai, who were experienced warriors themselves. "The Mongoose" might be a legend, inflated and overblown as legends often are. A man so deadly he could train a thirteen-year-old boy to kill three mercenaries—with jury-rigged weapons, to boot—was a living, breathing human cobra in their midst.
They were scared of Anastasius, also. But for all his size and strength and the fact they knew him to be an experienced fighter, he just didn't have the same dark aura about him. If anything, like the stable-keeper, they found his presence alongside Valentinian something of a relief.
Besides, there was hope as well as fear. Freedom and enough money to set themselves up well, for the slave miners. For the Ye-tai who had remained loyal, the chance to join an imperial bodyguard, with all its perks and privileges.
That presumed, of course, that the scheme worked. By now, all of them knew the gist of the thing, since there was no point in trying to keep any of it a secret any longer. But if it didn't work, they were all dead anyway. So why not dream?
When the two cataphracts got back to the palace late in the afternoon and reported to Lady Damodara, she expressed some doubts.
"This is all so risky. We're depending on the loyalty of a man we don't know at all, simply because of a message sent by a man who is our enemy."
Anastasius shrugged. "I've met Holkar. Know him pretty well, actually. I really don't think this is the sort of thing he'd get tricky about. If he vouches for the character of the stable-keeper, I think we can trust him. Don't forget that the life of Holkar's daughters is at stake, too."
Valentinian started to spit on the floor. Then, remembering where he was, swallowed the phlegm. "Besides, we're not trusting the stable-keeper. I'm threatening him. Big difference."
Lady Damodara shook her head disapprovingly. "You shouldn't bully him so. He does seem like a nice man, after all."
"So? When this is all over, he's still a nice man. Except he's a nice man with the favor of the new emperor instead of a dirt-poor stable-keeper with no friends worth talking about. He'll have the fanciest stable in India. His biggest problem will be keeping the help from stealing the jewels encrusting the imperial saddles and howdahs."
Lady Damodara laughed softly. "I'm not sure I've ever met anyone with quite your view of life, Valentinian. I don't know how to describe it, exactly."
"Stripped to the bone," Valentinian supplied. He jerked a thumb at his huge companion. "This one can prattle about Plato and Aristotle all he wants. My philosophy is simple. Moralize like a miser."
Still later that evening, it was Dhruva's turn to chide Valentinian.
"You're spoiling him again!"
Valentinian studied the infant in his arms. Baji was grinning at him, his hands waving about for another sweet to suck on.
"Goo!"
"I know." He was silent for a while, playing tug-of-war with Baji over his finger. "Terrific grip. I've got hopes for the kid."
"Give him to me," Dhruva insisted. "He needs to eat real food. He can't live on sweets."
After handing him over, Valentinian sighed. "I know I spoil him. Maybe it's my way of making amends."
"For what?"
He waved his hand vaguely. "I don't know. Me."
Dhruva started to feed the baby. "That's silly. You're not so bad."
Valentinian chuckled. "You're one of the few people I know who'd say that."
She shrugged with only one arm and shoulder, the other being occupied with the baby at her breast. "Most people haven't been Maratha slave whores in a Malwa brothel."
She said it almost serenely. After a while, she looked up. "I have never asked. Does that bother you?"
"No. It's like I told Lady Damodara. I'm pretty well stripped to the bone."
She nodded and looked back down at Baji. "Yes. You must have done something right in your former life."
Valentinian watched her, for a time. "I think maybe I did."