by Eric Flint
She snorted quietly. When the nobleman, whoever he was, eventually crept back into his palace, he would be surprised to discover it had not been ransacked and vandalized. The discovery would not dispose him any more favorably to the imperial authority, of course. But the calm certitude behind that little act of self-discipline might help strengthen his resolve to keep his head down.
Good enough.
Finally, a small thing, but—
She turned to her maid, and examined the girl. Under that scrutiny, the maid lowered her head timidly.
Egyptian. Not twenty years of age. From the Fayum, I'm willing to bet. Her Greek is good, but that accent is unmistakable.
"What is your name?" she asked.
"Koutina," said the maid.
"You are Monophysite?"
Koutina raised her eyes, startled. Antonina did not miss the fear hidden there.
She waved her hand reassuringly. "It means nothing to me, Koutina. I simply—" Want to know your loyal-ties. An Egyptian Monophysite from the Fayum. Yes.
She switched from Greek to the girl's native tongue. Antonina's own Coptic was still fluent, even if her long residence in Constantinople had given it a bit of an accent.
"I'll be leaving here today, Koutina. My regular maid will not recover from her illness soon. In fact, I will be sending her back to Constantinople to be with her family. So I will need a new maid. Would you like the job?"
Koutina was still staring at her uncertainly. The question about her religious loyalties had obviously unsettled the girl. Paul's persecution had been savage.
"I would prefer a Monophysite, Koutina." She smiled, patting the heavy cuirass. "I'm not wearing this grotesque thing for protection from heretics, you know."
Koutina began to return the smile. "You are very famous," she said softly. "I was frightened when you came." Her eyes flitted to the blade buckled to Antonina's waist. "We all heard about the Cleaver, even here in Alexandria."
"It has never been used against any but traitors."
"I know," said Koutina, nodding. "Still—"
Suddenly, all hesitation fled. "I would be delighted." She was beaming now. "It would be so exciting! You are going to fight the Malwa, everyone says so. Can I come there too?"
It was Antonina's turn to be startled. She had only intended to keep the girl in her service during her stay in Alexandria. But now, seeing the eagerness in Koutina's face, she began to reconsider. The young Egyptian was obviously not worried about the risks involved. Boredom, not danger, was the girl's lifelong enemy.
It was an enemy which Antonina herself well remembered, from her own girlhood. The grinding, relentless, tedious labor of a woman born into Egypt's poor masses. Koutina had probably left the Fayum seeking a better life in Alexandria—only to find that she had exchanged the toil of a peasant for the drudgery of a domestic servant.
She could not refuse that eager face. True, the girl might find her death, in Antonina's company. But she would not be—bored.
And besides, I need servants whose loyalty I can absolutely trust. Dubazes is not enough. I am certain the Malwa have infiltrated spies into my expedition. I must be certain they don't penetrate my own household.
Koutina, from the Fayum. Yes. I know that breed. The Malwa will have nothing to offer her except money, and I—
She laughed. Belisarius had not turned over all of the fortune he garnered in India to finance Shakuntala's rebellion. Nor had he given more than half of his war booty to his cataphracts.
And I am richer than any Malwa spymaster.
She grinned. "Done, Koutina. I will pay you well, too. Much better than your former employer."
Koutina's expression was an odd mixture of emotions. Pleasure at the thought of a sudden increases in wages; anger at the thought of her former employer. The man had been a cheapskate, obviously. And had combined that miserliness, Antonina was quite certain, with frequent solicitations. Koutina was pretty as well as young.
Smiling: "And I won't be rattling your door latch, either, late at night, trying to get into your room."
"That bastard!" hissed Koutina.
It was time to go. Time to crush a military rebellion. But Antonina had long since learned to savor all her victories—small ones, as well as large. So she took the moment to exchange a warm look with her new servant. Binding loyalty with her eyes, far more than her purse.
The maid broke the moment.
"You must go, you must go!" Koutina began bustling Antonina out of the room, fussing over the scabbard which held the cleaver. "Ambrose must be brought to heel!"
Out into the corridor, bustling her mistress along. Fussing, now, with the straps that held the cuirass. "He probably won't fight you, anyway. His soldiers will be blinded by the sun, shining off your brass boobs. You must be a giantess, they're so huge! They'll be terrified and run away!"
The stern-faced officers who awaited her in the entryway to the palace were startled, then. Startled—and mightily heartened. Appearing before them was the leader of their grim and perilous mission—a woman, and small at that—howling with laughter. As gay a laughter as they had ever heard. At any time, much less on the morning of a battle.
They took courage from the thought. Stern faces grew sterner still.
And Antonina kept laughing, and laughing, all the way out to her horse waiting in the courtyard. She wasn't sure what amused her most—the thought of her brass breasts, which made her laugh, or the way her laughter so obviously boosted the morale of her men.
Either way, either way. Doesn't matter. Out of small victories come great ones.
As her army marched through the streets of Alexandria, heading toward the suburb of Nicopolis where the Roman garrison had been stationed since the early days of imperial rule, Antonina took the opportunity to assess the city's mood. The streets were lined with people, watching the procession. Most of them were Egyptians and poor Greeks. Both were cheering—the Egyptians with loud enthusiasm, the Greeks with more restraint.
Word had already spread through the city that Theodosius had been installed as the new Patriarch. That news had been greeted by the Egyptian Mono-physites with wild acclaim. Theodosius was one of their own. True, he was an adherent of the Severan school, whose moderate and compromising attitude toward the official Church was out of step with the more dogmatic tradition of Egyptian Monophysitism. But the Egyptian residents of Alexandria did not look on these things the same way as the fanatic Mono-physite monks of the desert. They had had enough of street brawls, and persecution. Doctrinal fine points be damned. The Empress Theodora was one of them, and she had placed another in the Church of St. Michael.
Good enough—more than good enough!—to declare a holiday.
The Greek residents who watched Antonina pass—and cheered her on—took less pleasure in the news. Many of Alexandria's Greek population, of course, had adopted Monophysitism themselves. All of the religious leaders of that dogma were Greek, in fact, even if they found their popular base in the Coptic masses of Egypt. But most Greeks, even poor ones, had remained true to orthodoxy.
Still, they were not nobles. Tailors, bakers, linen-makers, glassblowers, sailors, papyrus workers—almost all the Mediterranean world's paper was made in Alexandria—shopkeepers, merchants, domestic servants, fishermen, grain handlers: the list was well nigh endless. Some were prosperous, some merely scraped by; but none were rich. And all of them, even here in Alexandria, had come to accept the general opinion of the Roman Empire's great masses with regard to the imperial power.
That opinion had crystallized, in Constantinople itself, with the defeat of the Nika insurrection. From there, carried by the sailors and merchants who weaved Roman society into a single cloth, the opinion had spread to every corner of the Empire. From the Danube to Elephantine, from Cyrene to Tre-bizond, the great millions of Rome's citizens had heard, discussed, quarreled, decided.
The dynasty which ruled the Empire was their dynasty.
It never occurred to them, of course,
to think of the dynasty as a "people's dynasty." Emperors were emperors; common folk were common folk. The one ruled the other. Law of nature.
But they did think of it as theirs. Not because the dynasty came from their own ranks—which it did, and they knew it, and took pleasure in the knowing—so much as they were satisfied that the dynasty understood them; and based its power on their support; and kept at least one eye open on behalf of their needs and interests.
Common folk were common folk, emperors were emperors, and never the twain shall meet. That still leaves the difference between a good emperor and a bad one—a difference which common folk measure with a very different stick than nobility.
The taxes had been lowered, and made more equitable. The haughtiest nobles and the most corrupt bureaucrats had been humbled, always a popular thing, among those over whom the elite lords it—even executed. Wildly popular, that. Stability had been restored, and with it the conditions which those people needed to feed their families.
And, finally, there was Belisarius.
As she marched through the streets, Antonina was struck by how often her husband's name made up the cheer coming from the throats of the Greek residents. The Egyptians, too, chanted his name. But they were as likely to call out her own or the Empress Theodora's.
Among the Greeks, one name only:
Belisarius! Belisarius! Belisarius!
She took no personal umbrage in that chant. If nothing else, it was obvious that the cheer was the Greeks' way of approving her, as well. She was Belisarius' wife, and if the Greek upper crust had often sneered at the general for marrying such a disreputable woman, it was clear as day that the Greek commoners lining the streets of Alexandria were not sneering at him in the least.
The Greeks had found their own way to support the dynasty, she realized. Belisarius might be a Thracian himself, and might have married an Egyptian, and put his half-Egyptian, half-who-knows-what bastard stepson on the throne, but he was still a Greek. In the way which mattered most to that proudest of Rome's many proud nations.
Whipped the Persians, didn't he? Just like he'll whip these Malwa dogs. Whoever they are.
Hermogenes leaned over to her, whispering: "The word of Anatha's already spread."
Antonina nodded. She had just gotten the word herself, the day before. The semaphore network was still half-finished, but enough of it had been completed to bring the news to Antioch—and from there, by a swift keles courier ship, to Alexandria.
There had been nothing personal, addressed to her, in the report. But she had recognized her husband's turn of phrase in the wording of it. And had seen his shrewd mind at work, in the way he emphasized the decisive role of Greek cataphracts in winning the great victory over Malwa.
That word, too, had obviously spread. She could read it in the way Greek shopkeepers grinned, as they cheered her army onward, and the way Greek sailors hoisted their drinking cups in salute to the passing soldiers.
Thank you, husband. Your great victory has given me a multitude of small ones.
The fortress at Nicopolis where the Army of Egypt lay waiting was one of the Roman Empire's mightiest. Not surprising. The garrison was critical to the Empire's rule. Egyptian grain fed the Roman world—Constantinople depended upon it almost entirely—and the grain was shipped through Alex-andria's port. Since Augustus, every Roman Emperor had seen to it that Egypt was secure. For centuries, now, the fort at Nicopolis had been strengthened, expanded, modified, built up, and strengthened yet again.
"We'll never take it by storm," stated Ashot. "Not with the forces we've got. Even grenades'd be like pebbles, against those walls."
He looked up at the battlements, where a mass of soldiers could be seen standing guard.
"Be pure suicide for sappers, trying to set charges."
Ashot, along with Antonina and Hermogenes and the other top officers of the expedition, was observing the fortress from three hundred yards away. Their vantage point was another of the great intersections which dotted Alexandria itself. Very similar to the one at the city's center, if not quite as large, down to the tetrastylon.
Originally, the fortress had been built outside the city's limits. But Alexandria had spread, over the centuries. Today, the city's population numbered in the hundreds of thousands. The fortress had long since been engulfed within the suburb called Nico-polis.
It was a bit jarring, actually, the way that massive stone structure—so obviously built for war—rose up out of a sea of small shops and mudbrick apartment buildings. Comical, almost. In the way that a majestic lion might seem comical, if it were surrounded by chittering mice.
Except there were no chittering mice that day. The shops were boarded up, the apartments vacant. Nicopolis' populace had fled, the moment news came that Antonina was advancing against Ambrose. All morning, a stream of people had poured out of the suburb, bearing what valuables they owned in carts or haversacks.
Antonina turned to Hermogenes. "Do you agree?"
Hermogenes nodded instantly. "Ashot's right. I know that fortress. I was stationed in it for a few months, shortly after I joined the army. You can't believe how thick those stone walls are until you see them."
He twisted in his saddle and looked back at Menander.
"Could you take it with siege guns? You're the only one of us who's observed them in action."
Seeing himself the focus of attention, the shy young cataphract tensed. But there was no faltering or hesitation in his reply.
"Yes, I could, if we had them. But John told me just yesterday that he doesn't expect to produce any for months. Even then, it'd take weeks to reduce those walls."
Very shyly, now: "I don't know as Antonina can afford to wait that long."
"Absolutely not," she said firmly. "The longer this drags on, the more likely it is that revolt will start brewing in other parts of Alexandria. The rest of Egypt, for that matter. Paul has plenty of supporters in every one of the province's Greek towns, all the way up to Ombos and Syene, just below the First Cataract. Antinoopolis and Oxyrhynchos are hotbeds of disloyalty. Not to mention—"
She fell silent. The top officers surrounding her knew the strategic plan which she and Belisarius had worked out, months earlier, to carry the fight to Malwa's exposed southern flank. But the more junior officers didn't. Antonina had no reason to doubt their loyalty, but there was still the risk of loose talk being picked up by Malwa spies.
So she bit her tongue and finished the thought only in her mind:
Not to mention that I don't have weeks—months!—to waste in Alexandria. I've got to get to the Red Sea, and join forces with the Axumites. By early spring of next year, at the latest.
And the next one, full of anguish: Or my husband, if he's not already, will be a dead man.
But nothing of that anguish showed, in her face. Simply calm resolution.
"No, gentlemen, we've got to win this little civil war quickly."
Ashot tugged his beard and growled. "I'm telling you, it'll be pure slaughter if we try to storm that place."
Antonina waved him down. "Relax, Ashot. I'm not crazy. I have no intention of wasting lives in a frontal attack. But I don't think it's necessary."
Hermogenes, too, was tugging his beard.
"A siege'll take months. A year, probably, unless we get siege guns. That fortress has enough provisions to last that long, easily. And they've got two wells inside the walls."
Antonina shook her head. "I wasn't thinking of a siege, either."
Seeing the confusion in the faces around her, Antonina had to restrain a sigh.
Generals.
"You're approaching the situation upside down," she stated. "This is not really a military problem. It's political."
To Ashot: "Weren't you the one who was telling me, just yesterday, that the reason Ambrose couldn't intervene while we were suppressing the mob was because he needed the day to win over his troops?"
The commander of her Thracian bucellarii nodded.
She grin
ned. "Well, he's had a day. Just how solid do you think he's made himself? With his troops?"
Frowning.
Generals.
She pointed at the fortress. "How long have those men—the soldiers, I mean—been stationed here? Hermogenes?"
The young merarch shrugged.
"Years. Most of the garrison—the troops, anyway—spend their entire term of service in Egypt. Even units that get called out for a campaign elsewhere are always rotated back here."
"That's what I thought. Now—another question. Where do those men live? Not in the fortress, I'm sure. Years of service, you said. That means wives, children, families. Outside businesses, probably. Half of those soldiers—at least half—will have married into local families. They'll have invested their pay in their father-in-laws' shops. Bought interests in grain-shipping."
"The whole bit," grumbled Ashot. "Yeah, you're right. Fucking garritroopers. Always takes weeks to shake 'em down on a campaign. Spend the first month, solid, wailing about their declining property values back home."
The light of understanding came, finally, to her officers.
Or so, at least, she thought.
"You're right, Antonina!" cried Hermogenes excitedly. "That'll work!"
He cast eager eyes about, scanning the immediate environment of the fortress. "Most of 'em probably live right here, right in Nicopolis. We'll start by burning everything to the ground. Then—"
"Find their wives and daughters," chipped in his executive officer, Callixtos. "Track 'em down wherever they are and—"
"Won't need to," countered Ashot. "Any women'll do. At this distance, the garrison won't be able to make out faces anyway. Just women being stripped naked in the street with us waving our dicks around and threatening to—"
Antonina erupted. "Stupid generals!"
Startled, her horse twitched. Antonina drew back on the reins savagely. Wisely, the horse froze.
"Cretins! Idiots! Morons—absolute morons—the whole lot! You want me to end a small civil war by starting a big one? What the fuck is wrong with you?"
They shrank from her hot eyes. Antonina turned in her saddle and transferred the glare back to Menander.
