Weapons to beat a slave who had failed in his duty. Beat him to death, easily enough, if he had failed badly.
Antonina, staring at those cruel implements, had no trouble with giggles. Not any longer. She knew the clubs were not ornaments. It had happened, over the past two centuries, that a regiment had beaten a dawazz savagely—fatally, on two occasions—because they judged that he had failed in his duty to educate his prince.
She tore her eyes away, and looked at Eon. The sight of the young royal’s upright and square-shouldered stance reassured her. The calmness in his face, even more so.
Not today. Not that prince.
* * *
A minute later, the ceremony itself got underway.
Five minutes later, Antonina was fighting giggles again.
Ten minutes later, she stopped trying altogether, and joined in the general hilarity. She spent most of the day, in fact, laughing along with everyone else.
Antonina had forgotten. There was a serious core—deadly serious—at the heart of that ceremony. But Axumites, when all was said and done, did not hold solemnity in any great esteem. The best armor against self-aggrandizement and pomposity, after all, is always humor.
By and large, the ceremony proceeded chronologically. Eon’s prepubescent follies were dismissed quickly enough. Everyone wanted to get to the next stage.
Antonina learned, then, the reason for the other women standing in her group. All of them, it seemed—except for three old crones whose testimony had to do with Eon’s pranks in the royal kitchen—had been seduced by the young prince at one time or another.
It was quite a crowd. Antonina was rather impressed.
But she was more impressed, much more, by what followed. Most of the women were—or had been—servants in the royal compound, while Eon was in his teens. The kind of women, in every land, who were the natural prey of young male nobles feeling the first urges of budding sexuality.
But they were not there, it developed, to press any grievances against the prince. They simply recounted—either volunteering the information, or responding to one of the many questions shouted out by soldiers in the ranks—the ways in which Eon had finagled his way into their beds. Their statements were frank, open, usually jocular—and often at the expense of Eon himself. It became clear soon enough that, especially in his earlier years, the prince’s skill at working his way into their beds had not been matched by any great skill once he got there.
Several of the tales were downright hilarious. Antonina was especially entertained by the account of a plump, older woman who had once been a cook in the royal compound. The woman—she must have been a good twenty years older than Eon—recounted in lavish detail her patient, frustrated attempts to instruct a headstrong fifteen-year-old prince in the basic principles of female anatomy. Not with any great success, it seemed, until she discovered the secret: slap the fool boy on his head!
That produced a gale of laughter, sweeping across the entire training field. The soldiers guarding Ousanas grinned at him with approval.
Unfortunately, Antonina could not follow all of the woman’s tale. Her own knowledge of Ge’ez, the Axumite language, was still very poor. Menander, one of the cataphracts who had accompanied Belisarius on his trip to India, was serving as her translator. He had become good friends with Wahsi and Ezana during that long journey, and was quite fluent in the language.
Alas, Menander was also young, and he still bore the imprint of his conservative village upbringing. So, whenever the story got especially juicy, he fumbled and stumbled and—Antonina had no doubt—was guilty of excessive abridgement.
“And what was that about?” Antonina demanded, once the roaring laughter had subsided a bit.
Menander fumbled and stumbled. Abridged.
“Ah,” said Antonina, nodding her head wisely. “Yes, of course. It is difficult to teach a thick-headed male how to use his tongue for something more useful than boasting.”
But, for all its salacious humor, there was still a deadly serious purpose to the business. As she listened to the questions which the soldiers asked of the women, Antonina understood that they were probing for something quite important.
The soldiers were not concerned—not in the least—with Eon’s amatory habits. Young lads, of any rank in society, are always randy. A prince, because of his prestigious position and the self-confidence which that position gives him, will be much more successful than most teenage boys in the art of seduction. That much was inevitable, natural, and no concern of the soldiers. Rather the contrary, in fact—no one wanted a shy, self-effacing king in charge of a country, especially one who might have difficulty perpetuating the royal line.