Long enough.
“Are the men—?”
“Mounted up, and ready,” came Maurice’s immediate reply. “They’re just waiting for the order.”
Belisarius took a deep breath, filling his lungs.
“Now,” he said. Quickly, while the clean air of the mountains buoyed him up and stiffened his resolve. Soon enough, he would be gasping and sweating in damp, smoky darkness. One of thousands of men, stumbling through a tunnel eight feet wide, their steps barely illuminated by a few torches.
The Roman camp, within minutes, was a beehive of activity. Long files of mounted soldiers started down the valley, headed for another small valley two days’ ride away. That valley was also a beehive of activity. Kurush and his miners had been preparing the deception for weeks, now.
Belisarius waited until the very end, before he mounted up and followed. It was odd, he realized, how much he was going to miss the mountains. Odd, when he thought of the many times he had cursed them. But the Zagros had been good to him, when all was said and done. And he was going to miss the clean air.
He drove out all regrets. Aide helped.
Think of the sea breeze. Think of gulls, soaring through blue skies. Think of—
The hell with all that! came Belisarius’ cheerful retort. All I want to think about is Venus rising from the waves.
And that was the thought that held him, through the miserable days ahead. His wife, coming to meet him from across the sea.
Dearest love.
At a place called Charax. A place where Belisarius would lance a dragon’s belly; and show the new gods that they too, for all their dreams of perfection, still needed intestines.
Charax. Belisarius would burn that name into eternity.
But the name meant nothing to him. It was just the place where his Venus would rise from the waves. A name which was only important because a man could remember embracing his wife there, like so many men, over so many years, at so many places, had embraced their wives after a long separation. Nothing more.
So is eternity made, said Aide gently. Out of that simple clay, and no other.
Chapter 24
MAJARASHTRA
Summer, 532 a.d.
Irene whispered a few words into her agent’s ear. The man nodded, bowed, and left the room. Irene closed the door behind him.
Kungas had ignored the interchange. Bent over the reading table in Irene’s outer chamber, carefully writing out the assignment she had given him, Kungas had seemed utterly oblivious to the spy’s arrival or his whispered conversation with Irene. But, the moment the spy was gone, Kungas raised his head and cocked an eye toward her.
Seeing the expression on her face, he turned away from the table completely.
“Is something wrong?” he asked.
Irene stared at him, blank-faced. Kungas rose from the chair. A faint frown of worry creased his brow.
“What is wrong?” he demanded.
Irene shook her head. “Nothing,” she replied. “Nothing is wrong.”
With the air of a woman preoccupied by something, she drifted toward the window. Kungas remained in place, following only with his eyes.
Once at the window, Irene placed her hands on the sill. She leaned into the gentle breeze coming from the ocean, closing her eyes. Her thick, lustrous, chestnut hair billowed gently in the wind.
Behind her, unseen, Kungas’ hands moved. Coming up, cupping, as if to stroke and caress. But the movement was short-lived. In seconds, his hands were back at his side.
Irene turned away from the window. “I need your advice,” she said softly.
Kungas nodded. The gesture, as always, was economical. But his eyes were alert.
For a moment, as her mind veered aside into the hot place in her heart, Irene reveled in her own words. I need your advice. Simple words. But words which, except for Belisarius and occasionally Justinian, she had never spoken to a man. Men, as a rule, did not give advice to women. They condescended, or they instructed, or they babbled vaingloriously, or they tried to seduce. They rarely simply advised.
She could not remember, any longer, how many times she had said the words to Kungas. And how many times, in the weeks since the battle where they destroyed the guns, he had simply advised.