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Framed
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Chapter 13
THE EASTERN
MEDITERRANEAN
Summer, 531 A.D.
The expedition which set sail from Rhodes toward the end of summer was an impressive armada.
Antonina had brought a sizable fleet with her from Constantinople, to begin with. She had enough transport ships to carry her grenadiers, the five hundred bucellari under Ashot's command, and the infantrymen from the Army of Syria who would embark later at Seleuceia. The transports, all of them merchant sailing vessels, were escorted by two dromons, the oared warships favored by the Roman navy.
She had even requisitioned three of the great grain ships. The merchant combines which financed those ships had complained bitterly, despite Anto-nina's generous compensation, but the Empress Theodora had cowed them into submission. Quite easily. A simple frown, a purse of the lips, a glance at the Grand Justiciar. The merchants had suddenly discovered their compensation was quite ample, thank you.
The huge grain haulers slowed her fleet considerably, but Antonina had had no choice. At a great ceremony in the Forum of Constantine, five days before her departure from Constantinople, Michael of Macedonia had presented her with the Knights Hospitaler who had volunteered for the Egyptian expedition. Antonina had been expecting the monks from the new religious order—but not three thousand of them, proudly drawn up in their simple white tunics, marked by the distinctive red cross.
What she had conceived of, initially, as a lean military expedition, had grown by leaps and bounds. No sooner had she obtained the grain ships for the Knights Hospitaler than a small horde of officials and bureaucrats showed up at the docks. These were staffs—the typically bloated staffs—for the newly-appointed civil and canonical authorities of Egypt, clerks, and scribes, in the main, to serve the new Praetorian Prefect of Egypt and the Patriarch of Alexandria. Each and every one of whom, naturally, luxuriated in the grandiose titles with which those mundane occupations were invariably annointed by Roman official custom: tabularii, scrinarii, cornicula-rii, commentarienses, magister libellorum, magister studiorum, speculatores, beneficiarii . . .
And so on and so forth.
They, too, wailed like lost sheep when presented with their crude shipboard accommodations—tents, for the most part, pitched on the decks of the small sailing ships which Antonina hastily rounded up, naturally over the wails of their owners. But they, too, like the disgruntled grain traders, reconciled themselves to their fate. Theodora's frown had almost magical capabilities, when it came to quelling indignant merchants and bureaucrats.
Then, the very day before departure, Michael had shown up to inform her, quite casually—insufferable saint! damnable prophet!—that many more Knights Hospitaler would be waiting in Seleuceia and Tyre and possibly other ports along the Levant, eager to join the crusade in Egypt.
Three more grain ships were seized—one of them overhauled by her dromons as it tried to flee the Golden Horn—emptied hurriedly of their cargoes and pressed into imperial service. Again, Theodora put her frown to work.
Finally, departure came. For a few days, Antonina luxuriated in the relative quiet of a sea voyage, until her arrival at Rhodes placed new demands upon her. John had been forewarned, by courier, of the imperial plan to transfer his armaments complex to Egypt. But, with his stubborn, mulish nature, he had made only half-hearted and lackadaisical efforts to organize the transfer. So, once again, the task had fallen on Antonina. She scrambled about, requisitioning ships on Rhodes itself—and then, coming up short, sending Ashot with the dromons to commandeer some of the vessels at Seleuceia—until the expedition was finally ready to sail.
But, in the end, sail it did. With the newest addition to the fleet proudly in the fore—John's new warship.
John took immense pride in the craft. It was the first warship in the history of the world, he announced, which was designed exclusively for gunpowder tactics. Menander demurred, at first, on hearing that claim, pointing out that the Malwa had already developed rocket ships. But John had convinced the young cataphract otherwise. The Malwa rocket ships, he pointed out, were a bastard breed. Clumsy merchant ships, at bottom, with a few portable rocket troughs added on. Jury-rigged artillery platforms, nothing more.
Menander, after seeing the ship for himself, had quickly changed his mind. Indeed, this was something new in the world.
John's pride and joy was not completely new, of course. In the press of time, the Rhodian had not been able to build a ship from scratch. So he had started with the existing hull of an epaktrokeles—a larger version of the Roman Empire's courier vessels. He had then added gunwales and strengthened the ship's deck with bulwarks, so that the recoil of the cannons would not cave in the planking.
In the end, he had a swift sailing craft armed with ten cast-bronze guns, arranged five on a side. The cannons were short-barreled, with five-inch bores which had been scraped and polished to near-uniform size. For solid shot, which they could fire with reasonable accuracy up to three hundred yards, John had selected marble cannon balls. The balls had been smoothed and polished to fit the bores properly. For cannister, the cannons were provided with lead drop-shot.
"What did you decide to call her?" asked Menander.
"The Theodora."
"Good choice," said Menander, nodding his head vigorously.
John grinned. "I am mulish, stubborn, contrary, pig-headed and irascible, Menander. I am not stupid."
Had her fleet consisted purely of warships, Antonina could have made the voyage to Alexandria in less than a week; with favorable winds, three or four days.
The winds, in fact, were favorable. Antonina learned, from John and Ashot, that the winds in the eastern Mediterranean were almost always favorable for southward travel during the summer months. Eight days out of ten, they could count on a steady breeze from the northwest.
The slow grain ships, of course, set the pace for the armada. But even those ships, with favorable winds, could have made the passage in a week.
Yet, she estimated the voyage would take at least a month, probably two. The reason was not nautical, but political and military.
The immediate goal of her expedition was to stabilize the Empire's hold over Egypt and Alexandria. But Irene and Cassian had counseled—and Theodora had agreed—that Antonina should kill two birds with one stone. Or, to use a more apt metaphor, should intimidate the cubs on her way to bearding the lion.
The religious turmoil had not spread—yet—to the Levant. But the same forces which were undermining the Empire in Egypt were equally at work in Syria and Palestine, and, in the person of Patriarch Ephraim, had an authoritative figure around which to coalesce.
So Theodora had instructed her, as she sailed along the eastern shore of the Mediterranean, to "show the standard."
Antonina had been quite taken by that expression. When she mentioned it to Belisarius, her husband had smiled crookedly and said:
"Catchy, isn't it? She got it from me, you know. From Aide, I should say—although the proper expression is `show the flag.' "
Antonina frowned, puzzled.
"What's a `flag'?"
After Belisarius explained, Antonina shook her head.
"Some of what they do in the future is just plain stupid. Why would anyone in their right mind replace a perfectly good imperial gold standard with a raggedy piece of cloth?"
"Oh, I don't know. As a soldier, I have to say I approve. A flag's light. You try hauling around a great heavy gold standard in a battle someday. In Syria, in the summertime."