He leaned forward, planting elbows on knees. “But I know that breed. I can almost guarantee that they’ll spend two or three days quarreling and bickering before they decide what to do.” He chuckled. “That’s the whole point of this exercise. That’s why we landed north of Sana, instead of right at the coast with Eon and his sarawit.”
Antonina nodded. The tactics of this campaign had been primarily worked out by Ashot and Wahsi. Antonina and Eon, of course, had approved the plan. But neither had felt themselves qualified to develop it in the first place.
And if they had, she knew, they wouldn’t have thought to come up with this plan. Ashot and Wahsi, veterans of campaigns and not just battles, had immediately seen the weakness in the traitor Abreha’s strategic position. His problem was political, more than purely military.
Abreha was holding Yemen with only two rebel regiments from the Ethiopian army. Those two regiments, the Metin and the Falha, were forted up in the provincial capital of Sana. The third regiment stationed in Arabia, the Halen at Marib, was still maintaining neutrality in the civil war.
The bulk of Abreha’s forces, therefore—well over three-fourths of them—consisted of Arab irregulars. Warriors from the various bedouin tribes in southern Arabia, under the shaky command of an unstable cluster of war chiefs. As individuals, the Arab nomads were ferocious fighters. But their discipline was almost nonexistent, and their concept of war was essentially that of brigands and pirates. They had flocked to Abreha’s banner, not because they cared which faction of Axum ruled southern Arabia, but because they saw a chance for loot.
So, Antonina was offering them a juicy plum—her small army of Romans, detached and isolated from the main body of Ethiopian sarwen who had landed on the coast near Sana. Rome was the land of wealth, in that part of the world. What few gold coins the Arabs possessed were solidii minted in Constantinople. The streets of the fabled city, capital of the Roman Empire, were reputed among those tribesmen to be paved with gold. (There were a few skeptics in their midst, of course, who thought the tales unlikely. Silver, certainly, but not gold.)
Now, this day, ready to be plucked, was a force of rich Romans not more than two thousand strong. Less than that, really, in the eyes of the bedouin. At least five hundred of those Romans were women.
And that, of course, was another inducement to attack. The tribesmen would capture concubines along with treasure. Roman women, to boot, who were reputed to be the most beautiful women in the world. (Again, of course, there were skeptics. But they were all women themselves, driven by spite and jealousy.)
It was a cunning plan. Even if Abreha tried to restrain them, his Arab irregulars would ignore his orders. But Ashot and Wahsi thought that Abreha, in all likelihood, would not object. From a purely military standpoint, attacking the Romans would seem to be a good move. By approaching Sana from the north, in a separate column, the Romans were isolated from the Axumite army under Eon. Abreha would see the chance to defeat his enemy in detail.
A cunning plan—and risky. There were at least five thousand bedouin under Abreha’s banner. They would outnumber the Roman forces by a factor of almost three to one.
Antonina’s eyes drifted to a corner of the tent. There, resting on a small table, was her own handcannon. Much as she detested the thing, the sight of the weapon helped to restore her confidence.
The handcannon was smaller than the heavy smoothbores carried by her Cohort, and much more finely crafted. John of Rhodes had made it for her personally. It was the prototype of a line of weapons he planned to develop for cavalrymen. He called it a pistol.
“An over-and-under double-barreled caplock, to be precise,” he’d told her, when he handed her the weapon a week before her departure from Alexandria. “It’s the first gun made using the new percussion caps. Beautiful piece, isn’t it?”
Antonina, handling the device, had privately thought the term “beautiful” was absurd. To her, the grotesque-looking weapon was ugly, awkward—and God-awful heavy. Her small hand could barely hold the grip.