"No. I could probably find her a suitable Roman husband-suitable fromher standpoint-but that wouldn't solve the political problem. Rome is now simply too strong, Ousanas. A Roman husband during Rukaiya's regency would make everyone fear-Arabs and Ethiopians alike-that Axum was becoming a Roman satrapy. In reality, if not in name."

"True." He gave her a sly little look. "Perhaps you should poisonyour husband, Antonina. It's his fault, you know. If Belisarius hadn't spent the past five years proving to everyone that Roman military power is supreme... even against the Malwaempire, the world's greatest..."

Antonina smiled back, sweetly. "Can't, I'm afraid. I'm here and he's in the Punjab. Damnation. One of the reasons I'd like to settle the succession problem is so that I can get back to him-at which point, I assure you, poisoning the fellow will be the last thought on my mind. I'm finding that my own urges haven't subsided any, even at my advanced and decrepit age."

Finally, she turned and looked out the window. "So. We need an impressive husband. Impressive to Rukaiya as much as her subjects, so she isn't tempted to stray and no one thinks otherwise. But-but!

-one who has no pre-existing ties that will make anyone worry about undue influences. And whose loyalties to Axum are unquestioned."

Far to the south, the snow-capped peaks of the Simien Mountains shone brightly, but the flanks were still dark. The sun hadn't risen high enough yet to bathe them in light.

Dark, massive, majestic beneath their crowns-and quite indifferent to any of those words. What did mountains care about attempts to depict them-much less the petty political frets and worries of humans?

They simplywere. And, being so, dwarfed any dynasty.

She understood her decision, then. It came to her, all at once, and in all its splendor.

"It's soobvious ," she said happily. "I can't believe it took me this long to figure it out."

"Perhaps you will be so kind as to make clear this 'obvious' decision to me, at some point?" Ousanas said grumpily.

Antonina bestowed the sweet smile on the mountains. "Oh, yes. You can be sure of it, when the time comes."

Peshawar, in the Hindu Kush Kungas launched the final assault just before dawn. By sunrise, his Kushan soldiers had demonstrated to the Pathan clansmen that they were just as adept at fighting in the rocks as the rebels-and far more disciplined.

Not to mention numerous. Kungas had calculated-correctly, it was now clear-that the Malwa were too pre-occupied with Belisarius in the southern Punjab at the moment to launch any serious attack on the new Kushan kingdom he was forging in the mountains to the northwest. So, he'd left a skeleton force guarding the passes while he took most of his army to suppress this first attempt by any Pathan tribesmen to rebel against his rule.

First-and hopefully last. For all his ruthlessness, when need be, Kungas took no pleasure in killing.

"Suppress" was a euphemism.

By late morning, the clansmen were routed and the Kushans had broken into their walled town nestled in the rocks of the mountains. Then, began the massacre Kungas had ordered. No member of that Pathan clan would be allowed to survive. Not women, not children, not oldsters. All animals in the town were to be slaughtered also. Then, the town itself completely destroyed. Not simply gutted by fire, but blown up.

Razed from existence. Kungas had enough gunpowder to afford that, now that the supply lines through Persia had been stabilized.

While his Kushans finished that business, Pathans from other clans allied to Kungas chased down and butchered the Pathan warriors who tried to flee into the shelter of the mountains.

There weren't many of those. Pathans could be as stupid as any humans alive, but they never lacked courage. All but a handful of the defeated clansmen died in the town, desperately trying to defend their kinfolk.

By mid-afternoon, it was done. The entire clan had ceased to exist.

Throughout, Kungas remained at his position high on a nearby mountain-a spur of the same range, really-watching.

Throughout, there was no expression on his face. None at all. To the Pathan chieftains who stood there with him, the leaders of the allied clans, it did not even seem like a face at all. Just an unmoving, iron mask.

Those old men had been told that, in his palace in Peshawar, the new king of the mountains was known to show an expression, now and then. Not often, and usually only in the presence of his Greek wife.

That was possible, they thought, although they had their doubts. It was hard to imagine that inhuman mask of a face ever showing an emotion.

Still...

Maybe. The woman was known to be a sorceress, after all.

What the clan chieftainsknew, however, was that with a king like this and his witch of a queen, rebellion was insane.

Any form of open resistance. The destroyed clan hadn't even rebelled. They'd simply thought to use the old and well-tested method of intimidating a new would-be ruler of the mountains by assassinating one of his officials.

The official had, indeed, been assassinated.

In return, Kungas had now proved that he was, indeed, the king of the mountains. The arithmetic of the equation was clear even to those illiterate clan leaders.

Clans assassinated officials.

Kings-real ones-assassinated clans.

So be it. The old men, no strangers to brutality themselves, chose to look on the bright side. The new king did not meddle with them much, after all, as long as they obeyed him. And trade was picking up a lot. Even the clans in the far mountains were getting richer.

When Kungas returned to Peshawar, he was in a very foul mood.

"That was a filthy business," he told his wife Irene. Scowling openly, now, in the privacy of their quarters in the palace. "It's your fault. If you hadn't stirred up those idiot clansmen letting their young women claim to be Sarmatians and join your idiot so-called 'queen's guard,' it wouldn't have happened."

The accusation was grossly unfair, and on many counts, but Irene kept silent. Until Kungas' mood lightened, there was no point arguing with him.

Yes, it was true that Irene's subtle undermining of Pathan patriarchalism irritated the clan chiefs. So what?Everything irritated those barbaric old men. They were to "conservative thinking" what an ocean was to "wet and salty." They practically defined the term.

And, again, so what? Irene and Kungas-with Belisarius, in times past, while they'd still been with him in Persia-had discussed the matter thoroughly. No one had ever ruled these mountains, in the sense that "ruled" meant in the civilized lowlands. Just as no one had ever "ruled" the great steppes to the north into which she and Kungas planned to expand their kingdom.

But if a king couldn't rule the mountains and the steppes, he coulddominate them. Dominate them as thoroughly and as completely as, in a future era in another universe, the Mongol khans would dominate them.

There was one key difference, though, and Kungas understood it as well as she did. The new Kushan realm in central Asia would use the same methods as the Mongols, true enough. Methods which, in the end, amounted to the simple principle:oppose us and we will slaughter all of you, down to the babes and dogs.

But it did not have the same goal. In the future of that different universe, Genghis Khan and his successors had had no other purpose than simply to enjoy the largesse of their rule which came with the annual tribute. Kungas and Irene, on the other hand, intended to forge a real nation here in central Asia, over time. And that could not be done simply by dominating the ancient clans. The domination was itself but a means to an end-and the end was to undermine them completely, in the only way the human race had ever found it possible to do so.

"Civilization," in a word. Create a center of attraction in the new cities and towns, with their expanding wealth and trade and education and culture and opportunities for individuals from anywhere. And then just let the old clan chiefs rot away, while their clans slowly dissolved around them. Irene's "Sarmatian women's guard" that Kungas had just denounced was only one of a hundred methods that she and Kungas were using for that purpose.

It was not even the one that irritated the clan chiefs the most. That honor probably belonged to the new Buddhist monasteries that Kungas was starting to set up all over. In the end, for all their savage attitudes toward women, the old clan chiefs didn't really care what women did-as long as they did it outside their tightly-controlled villages.

Why should they? From their viewpoint, beyond the sexual pleasure they provided, women were simply domestic animals and beasts of burden. No different, really, from their other livestock. As long as they had enough women to keep breeding clansmen, who cared what wild women did somewhere else?

Boys, on the other hand,mattered. And now-curse him!-the new king was seducing boys away from their proper and traditional allegiances to babble mystical nonsense in monasteries. Even teaching them to read,as if any Pathan tribesman ever needed such an effeminate skill.

The process would take decades, of course, even generations. But it would work, as surely as the sunrise-provided that Kungas established from the beginning that however much the clan chiefs hated him they did not dare to oppose him openly. Or try any violent tactic against him, whatsoever.

Which he had just done. More efficiently, ruthlessly, pitilessly, and savagely than any of the clan chiefs had ever imagined he would. Just as, in a different universe, the Mongols had obliterated the cult of the Hashasin which had given the world the term "assassin" to begin with-by demonstrating that they were perfectly willing to transform the definition of the word by an order of magnitude.

Yet...

Irene knew her husband very well, by now. Kungas enjoyed her intelligence and her sense of humor, but this was no time for rational argument, much less jests.

She fell back on an emotional appeal that was even more powerful than horror and disgust and anger.

"There's this, if it helps. The dynasty is secured."

She looked down, stroking the silk raiment covering her belly. She was still, to all appearances, as slender as ever. "Well. Most likely. I might have a miscarriage."

His eyes were drawn to her waist, and she could sense Kungas' mood shifting. So, smiling gently, she ventured a little joke.

"Of course, you'll make that good, soon enough."

For a moment, Kungas tried to maintain his ferocious mood. "Typical! Salacious Greek women.

Seductresses, every one of you. If you weren't so beautiful..."

In point of fact, Irene wasn't beautiful at all. Attractive, perhaps, but no more than that. Her thick and luxurious chestnut hair was not even much of an asset, any longer, tied back as she now had it in a pony tail. And she'd found, to her disgruntlement, that becoming a queen hadn't made her big nose any smaller or made her narrow, close-eyed face any fuller. Even with the pony tail, she still looked like exactly what she was-an intellectual, not a courtesan.

Happily, none of that mattered to Kungas. Her little joke wasn't really even that. By the end of the evening, most likely-tomorrow night, at the latest-Kungas would demonstrate that there wasn't any danger that the new dynasty would die out from lack of vigor.

Kungas sighed. "It really was a hateful business, Irene. Damn those old men! I would have preferred..."

He let the thought trail away. Then, gave her something in the way of an apologetic shrug.

In point of fact, it had been Irene who suggested that he restrict himself to simply executing all of the clan chiefs-and Kungas who had declined the suggestion.

"No," he'd said. "That won't be enough. However stupid and vicious, no clan chief is a coward. They'll accept their own deaths, readily enough, as stubborn as they are. The only thing that will really terrify them is the extinction of their entire clan. So I have no choice but to demonstrate that I'm quite willing to do so. Maybe if I do it once, right now, I'll never have to do it again."

He'd been right, and Irene had known it. She'd only advanced her suggestion because she knew how much Kungas detested the alternative. As hard a man as he was, and as hard a life as he'd led, not even Kungas could butcher babies to punish octogenarians without shrieking somewhere in his iron-masked soul.

Finally, she could sense the mood breaking. The surest sign came when Kungas made his own jest.

"And who's the father, by the way?"

Irene's eyes narrowed. "Don't be stupid. As often as you mount me, when would I have the time to cuckold you? Even assuming I wasn't too exhausted, you insensate brute."

Kungas was still scowling. In his own way, he could teach stubbornness to clan chiefs.

"Not that," he said curtly, waving the notion aside with an economical little gesture. "I don't doubt my cock's the only one that gets into you. But it's just a conduit. Spiritually speaking. Who's thereal father?

Have we moved up to gods, yet? Will I discover as an old man that the children I thought mine were actually sired by Zeus and who knows how many randy members of the Hindu pantheon?"

"What a heathen notion!" Irene exclaimed. "You should be ashamed of yourself!"

"I'm not a Christian," he pointed out.

"You're not really a Buddhist, either, even if you insist on the trappings. So what? It's still a barbarous notion."

She drew herself up with as much dignity as she could manage. That was... hard, given that she was almost laughing.

"And it's all nonsense, anyway. Of course, you're thefather. The ancestry gets interesting, though."

His first smile came, finally. "More interesting than Alexander the Great? Whom-to my immense surprise-you have explained was one of my forefathers. Odd, really, given that he passed through this area long before we Kushans got here."

"My scholars assure me it is true, nonetheless. But now, they tell me, it seems that in addition-"

"Please! Don't tell me I'm descended from Ashoka also!"

Irenehad considered Ashoka, in fact, and quite seriously. But, in the end, she'd decided that claiming India's most famous and revered emperor as one of her husband's forefathers would probably cause too many political problems. India's ever-suspicious rulers would assume that meant the Kushans had designs on India also.

Which, they didn't. To meddle in India's affairs-even the Punjab, much less the great and populous Gangetic plain-would be pure folly. As long as she and Kungas controlled the Khyber Pass and the Hindu Kush, they could expand to the north without stirring up animosities with either the Indians or the Persians. Animosities, at least, that would be severe enough to lead to war. Soon enough, of course, Persians and Indians-and Romans and Chinese too, for that matter-would be complaining bitterly about Kushan control of the trade routes through central Asia.

But those quarrels could be negotiated. Irene was an excellent negotiator-even without the advantage of having a husband who could terrify Pathan clan chiefs.

"Nonsense," she said firmly. "You're no relation to Ashoka at all, so far as my scholars can determine.

Just as well, really, since we have no ambitions toward India. However-what a happy coincidence, given the centrality of Buddhism to our plans-would you believe that-"

Kungas choked. Irene pressed on.

"It's true!" she insisted. "Not the Buddhahimself, of course. After he became the Buddha, that is. He was quite the ascetic sage, you know. Butbefore that-when he was still just plain Siddhartha Gautama and was married to Yashodhara. It turns out that their son Rahula-"

Kungas burst into laughter, and Irene knew that she'd saved his soul again. That was always her greatest fear, that a soul which had shelled itself in iron for so long would eventually become iron itself.

The mask, the world could afford. Even needed. But if the soul beneath the mask ever became iron, in fact, she dreaded the consequences. In the new universe they were helping to shape, the name "Kungas"

would someday become a term like "Tamerlane" had been in another. A name that signified nothing but savagery.

No fear of that, so long as she could make Kungas laugh that way. No fear at all.

The Iron Triangle As always, the sound of Luke's footsteps awakened Calopodius. This time, though, as he emerged from sleep, he sensed that other men were shuffling their feet in the background.

He was puzzled, a bit. Few visitors came to the bunker where he and Luke had set up their quarters.

Calopodius suspected that was because men felt uncomfortable in the presence of a blind man, especially one as young as himself. It was certainly not due to lack of space. The general had provided him with a very roomy bunker, connected by a short tunnel to the great command bunker buried near the small city which had emerged over the past months toward the southern tip of the Iron Triangle. The Roman army called that city "the Anvil," taking the name from the Punjabi civilians who made up most of its inhabitants.

"Who's there, Luke?" he asked.

His aide-de-camp barked a laugh. "A bunch of boys seeking fame and glory, lad. The general sent them."

The shuffling feet came nearer. "Begging your pardon, sir, but we were wondering-as he says, the general sent us to talk to you-" The man, whoever he was, lapsed into an awkward silence.