“Merciful God defend us!” he muttered, when he was only halfway through.
“Yes,” said the Emperor. “Yes. If only he would.”
“What it was,” said Antipater to Justina that evening in his small but pleasantly situated apartments on the Palatine Hill, “was a dispatch from the Byzantine admiral in Sicilia to the commander of a second Greek fleet that seems to be moored off the western coast of Sardinia, although we didn’t know until now that any such fleet was there. The message instructs the commander of the Sardinian naval force to proceed on a northerly route past Corsica toward the mainland and capture our two ports on the Ligurian coast. Antipolis and Nicaea, their names are.” He had no business telling her anything of this. Not only was he revealing military secrets, an act that in theory was punishable by death, but she was a Greek, to boot. A daughter of the famed Botaniates family, no less, which had supplied illustrious generals to the Byzantine Emperors for three hundred years. It was fully probable that some of the Greek legions that were marching toward Roma at this very moment were under the command of distant cousins of hers.
But he could withhold nothing from her. He loved her. He trusted her. Justina would never betray him, Greek though she was. A Botaniates, even, although from a secondary and impoverished branch of the family. But just as his own people had given up their allegiance to Byzantium to seek better opportunities in the Western Empire, so had hers. The only difference was that his family had Romanized itself three and a half centuries back and hers had crossed over when she was a little girl. She still felt more comfortable speaking in Greek than in Latin. Yet to her the Byzantines were “the Greeks” and the Romans were “us.” That was sufficient for him.
“I was in Nicaea once,” she said. “A beautiful little place, mountains behind it, lovely villas all along the coast. The climate is very mild. The mountains shelter it from the north winds that come down out of the middle of Europa. You see palm trees everywhere, and there are plants in bloom all winter long, red, yellow, purple, white. Flowers of every color.”
“It isn’t as a winter resort that the Basileus wants it,” Antipater said. They had just finished dinner: grilled breast of pheasant, baked asparagus, a decent bottle of the smooth sweet golden-hued wine of Rhodes. Even here in wartime fine Greek wines were still available in Roma, if only to the fortunate members of the Imperial elite, though with the eastern ports suffering from the Byzantine blockade the stocks were unlikely to last much longer.
“Here. Look at this, Justina.”
He snatched up a tablet and quickly sketched a rough map: the long peninsula of Italia with Sicilia at its tip, the coastline of Liguria curving away along the mainland to the west with the two big islands of Corsica and Sardinia in the sea to the south of it, and that of Dalmatia to the east. With emphatic little dots of his stylus he marked in Antipolis and Nicaea on the coast just to the left of the place where Italia began its southward thrust out of the heart of Europa toward the African shore.
Justina rose and walked around to his side of the table so that she could stand behind him and peer over his shoulder. The fragrance of her perfume drifted toward him, that maddeningly wonderful Arabian myrrh of hers that also could no longer be bought in Roma because of the Greek blockade, and his heart began to pound. He had never known anyone quite like this little Greek. She was a light-boned, delicately built woman: tiny, actually, but with sudden and surprisingly voluptuous curves at hip and bosom. They had been lovers for the past eighteen months and even now, Antipater was convinced, she had not yet exhausted her entire repertoire of passionate tricks.
“All right,” he said, compelling himself rigorously to focus on the matter at hand. He gestured toward the lower part of his map. “The Greeks have already come across from Africa, just a short hop, and established a beachhead in Sicilia. It would be child’s play for them to cross the strait at Messana and start marching up the peninsula toward the capital. The Emperor expects that some such move is imminent, and he’s stationed half the home legions down here in the south, in Calabria, to keep them from getting any closer to us than the vicinity of Neapolis, let alone all the way up to Roma. Now, over here in the northeast”—Antipater indicated the upper right corner of the peninsula, where Italia bordered on the provinces of Pannonia and Dalmatia, which now were fully under Byzantine control—“we have the other half of the home army, guarding the border out back of Venetia against the inevitable push from that direction. The rest of our northern frontier, the territories bordering on Gallia and Belgica, is secure at this time and we aren’t anticipating any Greek attempt to break through from that direction. But now, consider this—”
He tapped the stylus against the western shores of Sardinia and Corsica.
“Somehow,” he said, “Andronicus seems to have managed to get a fleet up the far side of these two islands, where we haven’t expected them to go sniffing around at all. Possibly they marched westward along the African shore and secretly built a bunch of ships somewhere on the Mauritanian coast. However they did it, they’re there, apparently, and now they’re in a position to outflank us on the west. They sail up past Corsica and seize the Ligurian seacoast, and then they use Nicaea and Antipolis as bases to send an army down the peninsula through Genua and Pisae and Viterbo and right on into Roma, and there’s not a thing we can do about it. Not with half our army tied up on the northeast frontier to keep them from moving against us out of Dalmatia and the other half waiting south of Neapolis for an invasion from Sicilia. There isn’t any third half to defend the city from a fast attack on our unguarded side.”
“Can’t the frontier legions be pulled down out of central Gallia to defend the Ligurian ports?” Justina asked.
“Not quickly enough to head off a Greek landing there. And in any case if we yanked troops out of Gallia, the Greeks could simply move their forces westward from Dalmatia, break into Gallia Transalpina themselves, and come down out of the mountains at us the way Hannibal did fifteen hundred years ago.” Antipater shook his head. “No, we’re boxed in. They’ve got us on three sides at once, and that’s one too many.”
“But the message to the Sardinian commander was intercepted before it got to him,” Justina pointed out. “He doesn’t know that he’s supposed to bring his ships north.”
“Do you think they sent only one such message?”
“What if they did, and it was never intended to reach the Sardinian commander in the first place? I mean, what if it was a hoax?”
He stared. “A hoax, did you say?”
“Suppose that in fact there’s no Greek fleet at all anchored west of Sardinia. But Andronicus wants us to think that there is, and therefore he had this fake message sent out for us to intercept, so that we’d get flustered and move troops toward Liguria to meet the nonexistent invasion force there. Which would open up a hole on one of the other fronts that his forces could stroll right through.”
What a bizarre notion! For a moment Antipater was taken aback by the thought that Justina could come up with anything so far-fetched. Far-fetched ideas were supposed to be his specialty, not hers. But then he felt a surge of delight and admiration at the fertility of her imagination.
He grinned at her in an access of overflowing love. “Oh, Justina! You really are a Greek, aren’t you?”
A quick flash of surprise and puzzlement sparkled in the shining black depths of her eyes.
“What?”
“Subtle, I mean. Inscrutable. Dark and devious of thought. The mind that could hatch an idea like that—”