John stumped out from behind his barricade.
“That’s it! That’s it!” he cried. He transferred his glare to the little cluster of Roman officers and pointed a imperious finger at Antonina. “This woman is henceforth banned for all time from the testing area!” he pronounced. “You are encharged with enforcing that order!”
Hermogenes cleared his throat. “Can’t do that, John. Antonina’s in command, you know. Of you and me both. Direct imperial mandate. If you want to inform the Empress Theodora that you’re over-riding her authority, you go right ahead and do it. Not me.”
“‘Druther piss on a dragon, myself,” muttered one of the other officers, the young Syrian named Euphronius who served as Antonina’s chief executive officer for the Theodoran Cohort.
The regular infantry officer standing next to him, who served Hermogenes in the same capacity, nodded sagely.
“So would I,” agreed Callixtos. “A big, angry, wide-awake, hungry dragon—”
“—guarding its hoard,” concluded another officer. This man, Ashot, was the commander of the Thracian bucellarii whom Belisarius had assigned to accompany his wife to Egypt.
The last of the officers said nothing. His name was Menander, and he was new to his post. A hecatontarch, he was now—theoretically, the commander of a hundred men. A lad of twenty, who had never before commanded anyone. But Menander’s title was a mere formality. His real position was that of Antonina’s “special adviser.”
Menander was the third of the three cataphracts who had accompanied Belisarius in his expedition to India. The other two, Valentinian and Anastasius, had remained with the general as his personal bodyguards. Menander, who had little of their frightening expertise in slaughter, had been assigned a different task. Belisarius thought Menander had gained an excellent grasp of gunpowder weapons and tactics during the course of their adventures in India, and so he had presented him to his wife with praise so fulsome the fair-skinned youth turned beet-red.
So, unsure of himself, Menander said nothing. But, quite sure of his loyalties, he squared his shoulders and stepped to Antonina’s side.
John, seeing the united opposition of the entire military command of the expedition, threw up his hands in despair.
“I’m not responsible then!” The blue-eyed glare focussed again on Antonina. “You are doomed, woman. Doomed, I say! Destined for an early grave!”
John began stumping about, arms akimbo. “Dismembered,” he predicted. “Disemboweled,” he forecast. “Decapitated.”
With a serene air of augury: “Shredded into a bloody, corpuscular mass of mutilated and mangled flesh.”
Antonina, from long experience, waited until John had stumped about for a minute or so before she spoke.
“Exactly what happened, John?” she asked.
As always, once his irascibility was properly exercised, the naval officer’s quick mind moved back to the forefront.
John gave the splintered cannon a cursory glance. “Same thing that usually happens with these damned wrought-iron cannons,” he growled. “If there’s any flaw at all in the welding, one of the staves will burst.”
He stepped over to the cannon and squatted next to it.
“Come here,” he commanded. “I’ll show you the problem.”
Antonina came around the barricade and stooped next to him. A moment later, the five officers were also gathered around.
John pointed to one of the iron bars which ran down the length of the barrel. The barrel was made up of twelve such bars—eleven, now, on this ruptured one. The bars were an inch square in cross-section and about three feet long. The corners of each bar joined its mates on the inside of the barrel, forming a dodecagonal tube about three inches in diameter. On the outside diameter of the barrel, the gaps between the bars had been filled up with weld.
John pointed to the broken welds which had once held the missing bar in place. “That’s where they always rupture,” he said. “And they do it about a third of the time.”
He scowled, more thoughtfully than angrily. “I wouldn’t even mind if the things were predictable. Then I could just test each one of them, and discard the failures. Won’t work. I’ve seen one of these things blow up after it had fired successfully at least twenty times.”
Hesitantly, Euphronius spoke up. “I notice you don’t have the same hoops welded around the barrel that you have on the handcannons. Wouldn’t that strengthen the barrel, if you added them?”