Rukaiya was beaming happily, now. Just like a bride.
Garmat didnot beam happily, when he first saw Rukaiya.
"She's too skinny," he complained. Standing in his place of honor on the lower steps of the palace entrance, he turned his head and hissed in her ear: "What were youthinking, Antonina?"
Antonina's humor was a bit frayed, because of the heat. Standing under the bare sun of southern Arabia, wearing the heavy robes of imperial formality, was not enjoyable. So, for an instant, the decorum of a Roman official was replaced by the response of a girl raised on the rough streets of Alexandria.
"Piss on you, old fart," she hissed back. Then, remembering her duty, Antonina relented.
"I checked the family history, Garmat. All the women are slender, but none of them have had problems with it. Rukaiya's mother-"
There followed a little history lesson. Not so little, rather. Antonina had expected the issue to arise, so she had supplemented Rukaiya's own account with a more thorough investigation. Happily, the girl had not been sugar-coating the truth. For as many generations as clan memory went-which, typical of Arab tribesmen, was along way backonly two women in that line had died in childbirth. That was better than average, for the day.
Her history lesson concluded, with all the solemnity of a Roman official, the Alexandria street urchin returned.
"So piss on you from a dizzy height, old fart."
"Well said," came Ousanas' whisper. The former dawazz-he still had no official title-was standing right behind them, on a higher step.
Antonina cocked her head a quarter turn. "You're not worried?" she whispered over her shoulder. Sourly: "I expected every man within fifty miles to be crabbing at me about it."
Ousanas' gleaming grin made a brief appearance. "Such nonsense. It comes from too much exposure to civilization and its decadent ways. My own folk, proper barbarians, never fret over the matter. Women drop babies in the fields, just like elands and lions."
Garmat, still tight-faced, began to mutter again. He was giving his own lecture, now, on natural history. Explaining, to a birdbrained Roman woman and an ignorant Bantu savage, the difference between passing a large human skull through a narrow pelvic passage and the effortless ease with which mindless animals He fell silent, stiffening with formal rigidity. The King of Kings was finally entering the square before the palace, where his bride and her party were waiting.
It was quite an entrance. Antonina, even after her years of exposure to Roman imperial pomp, was impressed. Axumites, as a rule, were not given to formality. But, when occasion demanded, they threw themselves into it with the wild abandonment of a people shaped by Africa's splendor.
Eon was preceded by dancers, leaping and capering to the rhythm of great drums. The dancers were garbed in leopard skins and cloaks of ostrich feathers. The drummers were clothed less flamboyantly. They wore shammas, the multilayered togas which were the usual costume worn by Ethiopians in the highlands. But these shammas were for ceremonial occasions. The linen was richly dyed, and adorned with ivory and tortoiseshell studs.
Behind the dancers and drummers came Eon's ceremonial guard. This body consisted of the officers of his regiment, and was much larger than normal. Eon had been adopted by three regiments, not the customary one, and all of them were present. Wahsi, Aphilas and Saizana, as commanders of the Dakuen, Lazen and the Hadefan sarawit, led the procession.
Here, Axum's more typical practicality made its reappearance. True, the soldiers were wearing ostrich-plume headdresses which were far larger and more elaborate than anything they would have worn in battle. But the weapons and light armor were the same practical and utilitarian implements with which the Ethiopian army went to the field of slaughter.
The soldiers were there, not so much to protect their king from assassins, as to remind the huge crowd packing the square of a simple truth.Axum rules by the spear, when all is said and done. Do not forget it.
Studying the crowd, however, Antonina could detect no signs of resentment in the sea of mostly Arab faces. The people of the desert, for all their love of poetry, were not given to flights of fancy when it came to politics. That rulers willrule, was a given. That being so, best to have a strong rule, and a firm one. That makes possiblepossible-a fair rule as well.
