“Fuck you!” she screamed. She sprang forward and jammed the muzzle against the Arab’s chest. The fury of her charge was so great that the small woman actually forced the man back two paces. Driving him with the handcannon by rage of body, while her mind—as cold as a kitchen icebox—went through the trained sequence.
The bedouin raised the sword. Finger on front trigger. Cock the right-side hammer.
She pulled the trigger. Again, the recoil hammered her aside.
Antonina was oblivious to the pain. Still shrieking obscenities, she spun back and swung the heavy barrel at the Arab’s head.
The gun swept through thin air. The momentum of the frenzied swing spun Antonina clear around. She stumbled, off balance, and fell on her butt. The heavy cuirass drove her down.
She stared at her opponent. The man was lying on his back, just a few feet away. She had swung at nothing, she realized. The second shot had ruptured the Arab’s heart, and probably his spine with it. He had fallen even before she spun around.
Finally, pain registered. Her hands hurt. Her arms hurt. Her shoulders hurt. Her ass hurt. Even her breasts hurt, where the brass armor had impacted them in her fall.
“Ow,” she muttered. A moment later, Koutina was at her side, kneeling, clutching her. The clutch, unfortunately—the desperate squeeze of a terrified kitten—was right across her breasts, pressing the armor further into the poor bruised things.
“Ow.” Almost desperate herself, she tried to pry Koutina loose. Or, at least, to shift the girl’s anaconda grip a little lower down.
Ashot loomed above her. Antonina stared up at him.
“Well, the battle’s won,” announced the cataphract. “Total victory. We won’t see those Arabs again. Neither will Abreha.”
Ashot did not seem ecstatic at the news. To the contrary. His expression was grim and condemnatory.
“I told you so,” he snarled, glaring at the body of the dead Arab.
Two more cataphracts came up behind Ashot. They seemed to loom over the stubby Armenian as much as he loomed over Antonina. Huge men.
Antonina recognized them. They were named Matthew and Leo. They were the two cataphracts whom Ashot had proposed as her bodyguards, when the expedition left Alexandria.
Antonina had spurned the proposal. She had not been able to explain why, at the time, even to herself. Or had not wanted to, at least. She knew that her husband had bodyguards. Valentinian and Anastasius, as a matter of fact, who were universally considered the best fighters in the Thracian bucellarii. But for Antonina—
No. It had not been necessary, she felt. Unlike Belisarius, who led his men in combat, Antonina had no intention of actually fighting. And there was a stubborn, mulish part of her which had resented the idea.
What am I, a little girl who needs chaperones?
* * *
“Does that offer still stand?” she croaked.
Ashot snorted. He gave Matthew and Leo a wave of the hand. “You’ve got a new job, lads.”
” ‘Bout time,” she heard Matthew mutter.
Leo said nothing. He almost never did. He just reached down his bear-paw-sized hand and lifted Antonina to her feet.
Antonina stared up at him. Leo was the ugliest, scariest-looking, most brutish man she—or anyone else—had ever seen. His fellow cataphracts called him “the Ogre.” When they weren’t calling him “the Ox,” that is, on account of his extremely limited intellect.
But they never called him either name to his face.
Such a handsome man, thought Antonina. I can’t think of better company.
Antonina’s maid was still clutching her. Leo had lifted both of the women, with one hand. Koutina’s grip shifted again.
“Ow,” hissed Antonina. But she didn’t pry the girl off. She just patted her hand reassuringly, while she took her own comfort staring at an ogre.
Her ogre.
Chapter 17
KAUSAMBI
Summer, 532 a.d.
“You are disturbed, Nanda Lal,” said Great Lady Sati. The young Malwa noblewoman leaned back in her plush, well-upholstered chair. Her ring-heavy fingers stroked the armrests, but her austerely beautiful face was completely still. “Something is troubling you.”
The Malwa emperor started, hearing those words. Skandagupta rolled his fat little body side to side on his ornate throne, shifting his eyes from Lady Sati to Nanda Lal. As always when the Malwa Empire’s highest council met, the room was unoccupied except for those three people and the special guards. The guards, recruited exclusively from the distant land of the Khmers, were all devotees of Link’s cult. Seven of them were giant eunuchs, kneeling in a row against a far wall of the chamber. Their immense bodies were naked from the waist up. Each held a bare tulwar in his hands. The remaining two guards were assassins. Those, garbed in black shirts and pantaloons, stood on either side of the chamber’s entrance.