It was lively tale. The more so because the empress made no attempt, as she normally did in imperial audience, to restrain her own lively sense of humor. And if the tale bordered on salaciousness—Shakuntala depicted in lavish detail the episode where Eon kept her out of sight from Malwa soldiers searching his quarters by tossing the princess into his bed and pretending to mount her—himself, if not she, stark naked—none of the assembled notables reacted with anything but laughter. For all their obsession with ritual purity, Indians were not prudes. Anyone had but to walk a short distance from the palace to see a temple whose exterior carvings depicted—in even greater detail than the empress’ story—copulations which were real and not simulated.
“I thought, once,” she concluded, “that a day might come when I would marry Eon. For the sake of advancing Andhra’s cause, of course. But the thought itself was not unpleasing to me.”
Her little hand reached out and squeezed the large hand of her husband. Unusually, for such an affair, Shakuntala had insisted that Rao stand by her side throughout the audience.
“Destiny decreed otherwise, and I am glad of it. But there will always remain a part of me which is still that young princess, sheltered from harm by the noblest prince in the world. And so, I think, it is fitting that Andhra should give Axum the dowry which would have come in a different turn of the wheel. I would not be here—none of us would be here—except for Eon bisi Dakuen.”
She rose and stepped down from the throne, then presented it to Saizana, the commander of the Hadefan regiment, whom Ousanas had appointed the Axumite viceroy of the new territory.
* * *
Watching the feverish work of the Axumites and the Marathas they had hired atop Malabar Hill, Antonina began to laugh softly. Not satisfied with simply rebuilding those portions of the Malwa fortress which they had destroyed in the assault, the Ethiopians were dismantling it still further. Antonina had heard, from Ousanas himself, the plans which the Ethiopians had developed for the new great fortress they would build. A fortress within whose fastnesses the body of Eon was buried, and which they intended to serve as his monument.
“I was just remembering,” she said, in response to Ousanas’ quizzical expression, “the time Eon took me on a tour of the royal ruins at Axum. So sarcastic, you were, on the subject of royal aggrandizement congealed in stone.”
She pointed to the fortress under construction. “And now—look! By the time you’re finished, that thing will make any monument in Axum seem like a child’s pile of pebbles.”
Ousanas grinned. “Not the same thing at all, Antonina!” He clucked his tongue. “Women. Never practical. That thing is not a monument of any kind. True, it will be gigantic and grandiose and—between us, in private—rather grotesque. But it is really a fortress, Antonina. Living proof of Axum’s real power, not”—here, he waved his hand in a regal gesture of dismissal—”some silly curio recalling a long-dead and half-forgotten petty monarch.”
Antonina stared at him, her eyebrows arched in a skeptical curve.
“It is true! We Ethiopians are a practical folk, as all men know. Very economical. We saw no reason to waste all that space, and so why not use a small corner of it to serve double duty as a modest grave? Rather than require some poor grave digger to do unneeded and additional work?”
A very arched curve, those eyebrows made. “I have seen a sketch of that ‘modest grave,’ Ousanas. Saizana showed it to me, bragging fiercely all the while. He told me, furthermore, that the design originally came from none other than you. Some dawazz you turned out to be!”
Ousanas’ grin never wavered, never flinched. “True, true. Actually, I got it from Belisarius. Long ago, during one of those evenings when he was passing along Aide’s secrets of the future to me. I’ve forgotten how we got onto the subject. But we starting talking about great conquerors of the future that would have been and Aide wound up describing a monument which rather caught my fancy. Mainly because it was perhaps the most garish and tasteless one imaginable. And what better, I ask you, for a nation to remind all skeptics that what it did once it might still do again, if it is crossed?”