“What else could he have done?” she repeated. “If he had refused to execute them, he would have given the lie to our carefully crafted image of a man contemplating treason. All that careful work—your work too, Eon, pretending to be a vicious brute with no thought for anything beyond gratifying your lusts—gone for nothing. Months of work—a year’s work, now. And for what?”
Her voice was filled with cold, imperial scorn.
“For what? Mercy? Do you think Skandagupta would have permitted the survival of Ranapur’s potentate and his family? Nonsense! They would simply have been taken away and tortured to death. As it was, they died as quickly as possible. Painlessly, from what you described.”
The Empress bestowed a quick, approving glance on Valentinian. The cataphract was standing to one side of the little command circle, along with Anastasius and Menander. They had been offered stools, but had politely refused them. Belisarius’ bucellarii had their own ingrained customs, drilled into them by their leader Maurice. Casual they might be, in the company of their lord, and ready enough to offer their opinions. But they did not sit, in the presence of their general, when matters of state were being discussed.
Eon shrugged his shoulders, irritably.
“I know that, Shakuntala!” he snapped. “I am not a—” He bit off the hot words, took a quick breath, calmed himself. But when he turned and faced the Empress, his eyes were still hot.
“We Axumites are not as quick to decree executions as you Indians,” he growled, “but neither are we bleating lambs.”
The two young people exchanged glares, matching royal will to royal will. Belisarius found it very difficult, now, not to smile. Especially when it became obvious the contest was going to be protracted.
He eyed Garmat surreptitiously, and saw that the adviser was waging his own struggle against visible amusement. For a moment, his glance met that of Ousanas. The dawazz, his face invisible to the young royals seated in front of him, grinned hugely.
Eon and Shakuntala had shared the closest of all company, during the weeks since Belisarius and his allies had rescued the Satavahana heir. The very closest.
Belisarius had devised the entire plan. After Raghunath Rao had butchered her mahamimamsa guards in Venandakatra’s palace, he had hidden Shakuntala away in a closet in the guest quarters before drawing off pursuit into a chase across India’s forests and mountains. The Ethiopians, arriving at the palace with the Romans not two days later, had taken possession of the guest quarters and smuggled Shakuntala into their entourage. She had been disguised as one of Eon’s many concubines, and had spent all her time since in his howdah and his pavilion. At night, always, she slept nestled in Eon’s arms—lest some Malwa spy manage, against all odds, to peek into the Prince’s pavilion.
Belisarius had wondered, idly, whether that close proximity would transform itself into passion. The two people were young, healthy—immensely vigorous, in fact, both of them—and each, in their own way, extremely attractive. It was a situation which, at first glance, seemed to have only one likely outcome.
Reality, he knew from Ousanas and Garmat, had been more complex. There was no question that Eon and Shakuntala felt a genuine—indeed, quite intense—mutual attraction. On the other hand, each had a well developed (if somewhat different) sense of their royal honor. Shakuntala, though she restrained herself from expressing it, obviously detested her position of dependence; Eon, for his part, was even more rigid in refusing to do anything which he thought might take advantage of that dependence.
Then, too, they each had loyalties to others. Before he met Shakuntala, Eon had already developed an attachment to Tarabai, one of the Maratha women whom the Ethiopians had met in Bharakuccha. Until Shakuntala’s arrival, it had been Tarabai who spent every night nestled in his arms—and not, unlike Shakuntala, in a platonic manner. Since then, though Shakuntala had often indicated her willingness to look the other way, Eon and Tarabai had remained chaste. Eon, from a sense of royal propriety; Tarabai, from the inevitable timidity of a low-caste woman in the presence of her own Empress.
Eon was thus caught in an exquisite trap: a young and healthy man, surrounded by beautiful women almost every hour of the day and night, living the life of a monk. To say that he was frustrated was to put it mildly.