Eon’s own costume, to Antonina’s eye, was a bit odd at first, until she realized she was seeing the usual Axumite combination of splendor and practicality. On the one hand, his tunic was made of simple, undyed linen. A Roman emperor—any Roman nobleman, for that matter, above the level of an equestrian—would have worn silk. But the utilitarian cloth was positively festooned with pearls and beads of red coral, and the threads which held the garment together were inlaid with gold.
His tiara, unlike the grandiose crowns of Roman or Persian emperors, was nothing more than a silver band studded with carnelian. The simplicity of the design, Antonina suspected, was to emphasize the importance of the four-streamered headdress which the tiara held in place. That was called a phakhiolin, by Ethiopians, and it was the traditional symbol of Axum’s King of Kings.
She thought there was a subtle message in that headgear. Eon had already announced, the day before, that the capital of Axum was being moved to Adulis. The Arab notables gathered in the palace had reacted to the announcement with undisguised satisfaction. The decision to move the capital, those shrewd men knew, was the surest sign that their new ruler intended to weld them into his empire. The center of Axum, from now on, would be the Red Sea rather than the highlands—a center which was shared by Arabia along with Africa.
Today, gently, Eon was reminding them of something else. He still had the highlands, after all, and the breed of disciplined spearmen forged in those mountains. Their symbol, still, rode on the top of the negusa nagast’s head.
His staff of office carried the same message. The shaft of the great spear was sheathed in gold, as was the Christian cross surmounting it. Sheathed in gold, and decorated with pearls. But the blade itself—the great, savage, leaf of destruction—was plain steel, and razor sharp.
The slow-moving chariot finally reached the center of the square. The mahouts brought the elephants to a halt, and Eon dismounted. In a few quick strides, he took his place next to his bride, and the wedding ceremony began.
* * *
The first part of the ceremony, and by far the longest, consisted of Rukaiya’s conversion to Christianity. That went on for two hours. Long before it was over, Antonina, sweltering in her robes, was cursing every priest who ever lived.
In fairness, she admitted, the fault lay not principally with the priests. True, they were their usual long-winded selves, the more so when they basked in the warmth of such a gigantic crowd’s attention. But most of the problem came from the sheer number of conversions.
Rukaiya was not converting alone. Everyone had known, of course, that the new Queen of Ethiopia would have to become a Christian (if she was not one already, as many Arabs were). Her own father, the day after Rukaiya’s selection was publicly declared, had made his own announcement. He—and all his family—would convert also.
That had been a week ago. By the day of the wedding, well over half of the Beni Hashim had made the same decision, and a goodly portion of the other clans of the Quraysh as well. There were hundreds of people in the square—well over a thousand, by Antonina’s guess—who were undergoing the rite alongside their new queen.
For all her sweltering discomfort, Antonina did not begrudge them that ceremony. True, she suspected that most of the converts were driven by less-than-spiritual motives. Canny merchants, seeing an angle. But not all of them. And not even, she thought, any of them—not completely, at least.
Arabia was a land where religion seethed, under the surface. Most Arabs of the time were still pagans, despite the great success which Jewish and Christian missionaries had found there. But even Arabia’s pagans, she knew, had a sense that there was a supreme god ruling the many deities of their pantheons. They called that god Allah.
As the conversion ceremony wound its way onward, Antonina’s mind began to drift. She recalled a conversation she had had with Belisarius, before he left for Persia.
Her husband had told her of a religion which would rise out of Arabia, in what had been the future of humanity. Islam, it would be called, submission to the one god named Allah. The religion would be brought by a new prophet not more than a century in the future. A man named Muhammad—