“Well,” mused Anastasius, “that’s one way to arrange a meeting. I don’t remember Antonina describing him as being quite so broad-shouldered, though. You, Valentinian?”
Valentinian seemed lost in thought. He said nothing for a few seconds. Then, softly: “I don’t remember her saying he could move that quickly, either.” The words seemed filled more with interest than concern. One raptor gauging another.
“Splendid,” growled Kujulo. “You will remember that we didn’t come all this way to fight a duel on a mountainside?”
Valentinian’s narrow smile made an appearance. “No danger of that. I don’t believe he’s any more taken by dramatic public duels than I am.”
The words did not seem to bring much reassurance. The sour expression was still on Kujulo’s face when the caravan pulled up before the inn. Nor was his displeasure primarily caused by the obvious dilapidation of the establishment.
One raptor gauging another.
“Splendid,” he growled.
Chapter 13
MARV
Summer, 533 a.d.
“How are you feeling?” asked Kungas, smiling down at Irene. The expression was broader than the usual faint crack in the mask which normally did Kungas for a smile. Suspicious souls, in fact, might even take it for a . . .
“Stop grinning at me,” grumbled Irene. Painfully, she levered herself up from the pallet where she had been resting. “I ache all over, that’s how I’m feeling.”
Now sitting up, she studied Kungas’ face. Seeing that the smile showed no sign of vanishing—might even be widening, in fact!—she scowled ferociously.
“Feeling superior, are we? Enjoying the sight of the too-clever-by-half female puddled in exhaustion and fatigue? Undone by the frailty of her flesh?”
Still smiling, Kungas squatted next to her and stroked Irene’s cheek. “Such a suspicious woman! Actually, no. All things considered, you are doing extremely well. The army thinks so, too.”
He chuckled. “In fact, the bets are being settled right now. Most of the soldiers were wagering that you wouldn’t make it as far as Damghan—much less all the way to Marv. And the ones who thought you might weren’t willing to place much of a stake on it.”
Irene cocked her head and listened to the gleeful sounds coming through the walls of the small tent. She had wondered—a bit, not much; as preoccupied as she had been with her own misery—why so many people seemed full of good cheer. Kushans were addicted to gambling. Those were the sounds of a major bet being settled, at long odds and with a big payoff.
“So who’s collecting, then?” she demanded crossly.
“The camp followers, who else? The women are getting rich.”
That news lightened Irene’s mood immensely. She had discovered, in the long and arduous weeks of their trek across all of Persia, that she got along very well with the Kushan women. Much to her surprise, in fact. She had assumed from the outset, without really thinking about it, that the mostly illiterate and tough women who had become the camp followers of the none-too-literate and very tough army of Kungas would have nothing in common with her.
In many ways, of course, they didn’t. Irene was sophisticated and cosmopolitan in a way that those women never would be, any more than the soldiers to whom they were attached. But women in Kushan society enjoyed far greater freedom than Irene would have expected in a society forged in the mountains and deserts of central Asia.
Perhaps that was because of the practical needs of the Kushan dispersal after the Ye-tai conquest of their homeland, and the later policies of their Malwa overlords. But Irene liked to think it was the legacy of the Sarmatians who had once, in the days of Alexander, ruled the area that would eventually become the Kushan empire. The Scythians whom the Sarmatians displaced had kept women in a strictly subordinate position. But every Sarmatian girl, according to ancient accounts, was taught to ride a horse. And—so legend had it, at least—was expected to fight alongside the men, armed and armored, and was even forbidden to marry until she had slain an enemy in battle.
Perhaps that was all idle fancy. The Kushan women, for all their undoubted toughness, were not expected to fight except under extreme circumstances. But, for whatever reason, Irene had found that the Kushan women took a certain sly pleasure in her own ability to discomfit, time after time, the self-confident men who marched under Kungas’ banner.