Ahmet laughed and squeezed her close. She turned, smiling up at him.

“Thou conquerest, Empress, thou conquerest.”

She wrinkled her pert nose at him but lay back again, weary.

“You are making fun of me,” she said. “I shall have your head cut off for it.”

Ahmet made as to shudder, then said: “And who would sing you to sleep, then, Princess of the Sand?”

“No one.” Her voice was sad. “I would be alone again.”

They sat in silence for a long time, watching the stars wheel overhead. The moon began to set at last. The night was passing. A colder wind began to blow off of the desert.

“Do not take it amiss, lady, but why have you favored me so? I am neither the handsomest of men nor rich. My birth is poor and my vocation obscure. The favor you show me must plague you in this volatile mix of trjjjes and chieftains you have assembled. Aretas, for one, rarely looks at me with less than venom in his eyes.”

Zenobia laughed, and her small hand snaked out of the blankets to pinch his nose. “What a man you are! You are the most insecure of creatures. All these things are points in your favor, silly man. No one, even the dour Aretas, considers you more than a summer dalliance for me-the mysterious Egyptian priest, caught in the toils of a cunning woman. They say, when they speak of it around their camp-fires, that I curry the favor of the old gods to consort with you. The Princes and lords sniff and make catty comments about my low taste in men. None of them consider you the least impediment to their plans for me.”

Ahmet frowned. “How can you exist amid such a state?”

“I was born to it,” she answered calmly, “it has always been so for me. The sole daughter of the house of Septimus Palmyrene is either a prize above all others or the victor who takes the prize herself. My earliest memory is of two of my aunts fighting over their position in my mother’s funeral procession. So it has been, so it shall be. I favor you because you have a good heart and know little of me. In you there is some hope that I can be solely myself-not the Queen, not the schemer, not the pivot that the fate of

Empires turn upon-but Zenobia, the woman. The failed poet. The scholar.“

Ahmet nodded, thinking that he understood.

“There is only one thing that I ask of you, Ahmet. It grates on me to do so, but I see no alternative.” She shifted around to face him and her face was grave. “Soon there will be battle and I will lead my men into the thick of it. When that day comes, if you could be at my side to protect me, I would count it a great favor.”

“Protect you? I am no warrior!” He stared back at her, puzzled^

She gave him a sad half smile. “Yes you are, my friend. The most precious kind. Persia will come against us with more than their fighting men; they will come with sorcery and dreadful summonings. That is wnat I need desperately from you, to hold back whatever dark arts they bring to bear upon me.”

“But,” he said, “I thought that Aretas…”

Zenobia shook her head and placed a finger on his lips. “If I were to fall in the battle, Aretas would command. He and his sorcerers are to protect the army as a whole and I believe that they will, but the Persians are not fools, they know whom they face. I will be the focus of all the might they can array against me. Please, stand by my side.”

The pleading look in her face was too much for what resolve remained to him.

“Of course,” he said, “I will stand by you.”

The lost student was forgotten.

Four days after Zenobia’s army had occupied Denaba, Ahmet and Mohammed were sitting in the quarters in the prin-cipia that they had taken for themselves, playing a game that the priest had been given as a gift by one of the Indian officers. Mohammed advanced one of his horsemen along the right-hand side of the board. Ahmet frowned; the Arab played very aggressively, and Ahmet was still trying to divine the patterns of movement the pieces made among the red and black squares of the board. He moved an elephant to the right, to close off the lane of attack that the horseman represented.

Mohammed was surveying the board when there was a sharp rapping sound at the door. Both men turned and one of the Tanukh scouts, still dusty from the road, fell to his knees and bent his head to the concrete tiles of the room. “Blessings and greetings!” the man barked, “I bring tidings from the north. The Persian army has been sighted crossing the Orontes at Arethusa.”

Mohammed stood up, forgetting the game. “How many men? Is the Boar with them? Do they have any elephants?” The scout settled back on his heels. His face was flushed with the effort of his ride. “The relay rider said that there were sixty thousands of the Persians, under the banner of the great Princes Shahin and Rhazates. He saw no elephants.”

“Excellent. Well done, Abu Kabir. See to your horse and tell no one else of what you have told me.”

The Tanukh, flushed with pleasure that his captain remembered him, bowed again and left. Mohammed turned to Ahmet, who was still surveying the board with a puzzled look on his face.

“Arethusa is ninety miles north of here, my friend. The Queen’s battle is very close. Shahin could be upon us with six days, less if he hurries.”

Ahmet nodded, then shook his head in disgust. His position on the board was untenable. He stood and gathered his bag and staff. “You’ll inform the Queen?”

Mohammed nodded; he was almost hopping from one foot to another in excitement.

“Good,” Ahmet said. “You should send some of your riders out on the road to Palmyra and see if they can find

Vorodes and his army. She will not want to give battle until we are reinforced.“

The Arab paused at the door and looked sharply at his friend, who was buckling his belt around his waist. “So, you’re a general now?”

Ahmet smiled, a brief thing, and shook his. head in negation. “No, you’ve that gift. I have heard something of her thought. I go to see to the state of the hospital. You must see the Queen at once.”

NEAR THE HIPPODROME, CONSTANTINOPLE

Your friend seems to have collected his last secret, Persian.“ Gaius Julius’ voice was droll.

Abdmachus cursed, muttering under his breath, and scratched his thinning hair. The narrow street, crowded by insulae of flats on one side and warehouses on the other, suddenly widened. On the northern side there was a wide gap in the buildings. Smoke-blackened pillars of brick and mortar rose out of a great tumbled heap of masonry and charred wood. In the ruins of the house, local children were picking through the rubble for salvage. The overcast sky and the thin gray smoke that lay over the city heightened the sense of destruction.

“His library will have been buried or destroyed in the fire,” Maxian said, his voice level. He held Krista close to his body, his arms crossed over her chest. Her hands curled around his forearms. He was wearing a broad leather hat that kept the drizzle off both of them. She was wearing a dark-green cloak over a russet tunic and laced-up boots. He had adopted a dark gray and black for himself, something that matched his mood.

“Perhaps not, Lord Prince,” Abdmachus said in a low voice. “It will have been in the basement and well pro tected, both by stone and wood and by unseen forces.“

“True.” The Prince felt grim and determined. He had spent a long time thinking, during the swift voyage from Ostia to the Eastern capital, and had come to some conclusions about his adversary and the strength he would need to overthrow it. Any concerns about the propriety of looting the cellars of a dead antiquarian were of little interest to him. “There are no guards set to keep scavengers off, so any family that might have inherited it must be absent, uncaring, or nonexistent. Gaius?”