Shards of Empire

by Susan Shwartz

  Leo must only obey. He had profited from obedience before. Twice, he had ridden between the reserves and the Emperor himself—the last time when Romanus rejected Alp Arslan's request for a truce. The Seljuks had even been made to prostrate themselves. Granted, the Autocrator had been more arrogant than prudent in the manner of his rejection. Still, he was Emperor of the Romans, while Alp Arslan, this mountain lion, as his name ran, from the steppes of Asia was—what?

  Overmatched by a greater force, for one thing, and with the wit to know it. But a lion, even outnumbered, still possessed fangs and claws. Who would have thought that the half-bestial Seljuks could fight so long and so craftily? Maybe it had been that Persian minister standing at Alp Arslan's back. Persians, as any Roman knew, were treacherous as well as fierce.

  What was that wave of riders breaking from the Byzantine line? A shout, jeer and cheer mingled, went up from Romans and Turks alike. The half-wild Uz mercenaries broke from the battle lines and trotted over to join their distant kin. Barbarians and not of the Faith, of course: not to be trusted.

  Andronicus Ducas’ gloved hand gripped his saddle for only a moment. Romanus hasn't paid them for months, boy, he muttered. Then his Caesar-mask fell back in place.

  Leo swallowed hard, his mouth dry. He longed for light or water. Don't think of the Golden Horn. Don't think of the river, or of Lake Van, or of the black walls and leafy gardens of Manzikert.

  The world narrowed to the uplands on which the Emperor fought. With their twisty, dried-up riverbeds, their rocky outcroppings, and their hollow shadows, they were hell-made for ambushes. The hot wind blew up in the hills, drawing a cry like unearthly battle horns from the caves and deep recessed crags there. The sky was darkening. Leo raised an eyebrow. He knew what the authorities would say: the Emperor should not have been in the forefront. The battle should not be lasting this long.

  “Prepare yourself, boy,” muttered Andronicus Ducas. “I shall have use for you soon.”

  I am not “boy,” Leo thought, swallowing his anger with a lifetime's practice. He could hear his mother's urgent whisper: He kept you with him? He spoke to you about the campaign and made use of you? Good, good. When can you expect promotion?

  The armies of Rome paid their troops well—when they paid at all—and paid their officers in pounds of gold. But it was not the gold that Leo's family craved, but influence. You set hand to a weak tool, he thought. But it was unthinkable to turn in their hands and gash them.

  Mists were drifting down now from the bare, rock-strewn hills. It was getting difficult to see as the sun sank lower. It cast long beams over the waiting soldiers, turning his uncle's boots red as if he had waded in blood—which Heaven avert—or traded his own footgear for that of the Basileus and Autocrator. Heaven avert that too, whatever Andronicus and his father, the banished Caesar John, thought.

  If the Autocrator were going to summon the reserves, it was time and past time to do so. Even an officer as green as Leo could see that. But it was no part of his duty to urge his uncle forward. Look at how his cousin waited, motionless, as obedient to command as any Spartan. The thought of them and how they fell, obedient to command—another bad omen, which Heaven avert. Still, if the reserves were to be of help, they must be summoned soon.

  God, he was thirsty.

  “Nephew.” Now came the summons he had been preparing for all this long campaign. Andronicus barely troubled to raise his voice. “Go, ask the Autocrator how we may serve him.” The strategos pleased himself with his irony. It was his nature: iron and irony forged together.

  The order came as almost as blessed a relief as the water Leo craved.

  His uncle sent him, not cousin Nicholas for all his experience, he exulted. Then he set himself to reach the Autocrator with a whole skin and a live horse.

  Leo dodged over bodies and through the lines until he reached the Emperor, flanked by dour Varangians. Even now, Romanus looked like a fine figure of a fighting man. He wore the dress of a common soldier—except for the crimson boots of the Basileus. Tired as he must be, he sat his horse as if the day—and he—were fresh. Basil Bulgar-Slayer must have looked like such a one.

  Did he regret not accepting Alp Arslan's terms? Had the Seljuk submitted, the Emperor might thereby have secured the turbulent eastern boundary of the Empire—then withdrawn, however, and awaited future onslaughts with diminished troops and funds. But he had not; and now it was growing late.

  Under his helm, the Emperor's eyes narrowed. He would signal a retreat—Leo would have wagered any patrimony he might ever have on that. Not a rout, of course: even stripped of the Uzes, even with the casualties it had taken, the army could withdraw to its camp, regroup, then return the next day to crush the Seljuks for once and for all. If his strokes were sure enough, Romanus could win back Vaspurakan and ride home to winter securely in Constantinople and groom one of his own two sons for the purple.

  Romanus signaled Leo forward. In this moment, the Emperor saw him not as the kin of his enemy, but as a tool to accomplish a task he badly needed done.

  “Tell the strategos to bring his troops forward,” he ordered. How Andronicus would glare to hear his dignities handled thus baldly.

  The Varangians closed in to guard the Emperor. Not their emperor, perhaps, but they would be loyal to their oaths. Their faces were sweaty. Their axes shone. And Leo wondered, not for the first time, if it were really true that some of the Northerners actually did turn into bears and wolves in the madness of battle.

  A wave of Seljuks rode forward. Those little ponies that wouldn't have lasted a moment against a charge from cataphracts on level ground. One of the biggest, his harness brown with dried blood, barked an order. The men raised shields against a deadly, whistling storm of arrows, then braced for a second volley.

  Retreat did not necessarily mean defeat, any more than a feint with a blade meant that your next strike might not draw blood.

  The camp was unprotected. Every man who had not deserted—yet—was in the field, without provisions, and probably exhausted. It was already growing dark, and the Roman armies had found no core of resistance to overwhelm. Help must come swiftly if it were to be help at all and retreat were not to become rout.

  “Ride!” Leo waved away offers of companion guards he could see his Emperor needed. Hunched beneath his shield, he rode back toward the reserves, and his uncle, masked in dust, his helm, and his hatreds.

  He heard horns on the wind: the retreat already? Andronicus was an experienced strategos, he could anticipate his Emperor's will and need. Faster, Leo. Perhaps you can snatch a remount before you ride into battle. Fear and hope churned in his belly.

  His uncle broke from his immobility. Whatever else today meant, it was victory for the Ducas. This was, Leo knew, the moment he had awaited, when the Emperor of the Romans must acknowledge that his enemy had saved the day. He even rode a space away from the carefully arrayed battle lines, as if honoring his nephew's return.

  Then, even as Leo saluted, his uncle's face changed. His mouth went grim, and his eyes widened in horror.

  Andronicus lunged forward in his saddle. He had his hands on Leo's shoulders, he was shaking him as if he had announced the coming of the Beast of the Apocalypse, and he was screaming, “Tell me it isn't so! He's dead, you say? You say the Emperor is dead?”

  The sun struck Andronicus's helm, leaving half his face in ruddy shadow. Nevertheless, on it, Leo saw a small, quick smile of victory.

  Leo reeled. He might have fallen himself had it not been for Andronicus Ducas’ hands, which held him upright even as they shook him till his brains rattled.

  Had the sunlight boiled Andronicus's brains under his helm? Or had Leo mistaken the smile he saw?

  Again, the strategos was shouting. “You say, you saw him fall?”

  “Sir ... uncle, no!” Leo cried. “The Autocrator is well, unwounded, but he says...”

  It was too late to tell his uncle what the Autocrator had said. They both knew it. Andronicus had always kn
own it.

  It wasn't whispers he heard now in the ranks, but dismayed shouts. The Emperor was dead. Leo flung a desperate glance over his shoulder. He could not see the labarum. Perhaps it already had been furled for retreat. In this sign, you will conquer? Not today.

  Rage: the armies were still unpaid. With the Emperor dead, who knew whenever they might expect their coin? Still, they'd be expected to soldier on until the Turks built pillars out of their poor, bleeding skulls.

  Demands: let them retreat the way the Normans and others had done—they had some use for their skulls, which were still firmly attached to their necks!—while they still could.

  In a moment, there would be mutiny and panic. And the general's officers did nothing to quell it.

  How many of them had already been bought?

  Andronicus turned his horse to face his troops. He was a patrician, a general, the son of a Caesar of the Romans. Like the Emperor, Andronicus had arrived at the kairos, the critical moment when he must do something or lose all.

  Leo had been his uncle's cat's-paw: the cousin too inexperienced, too foolish, to count as a player in this game of family treachery. The toothless, angry face of the old woman Leo had rescued flickered across his consciousness, then altered into the polished elegance of his mother's visage. Sweet Bearer of God, had she known she sent him to betrayal? Not her too!

  This was double treachery: family as well as politics. Why had the family turned on him? Had Leo not been humble enough, malleable enough, apt enough? Had he not swallowed every snub, obedient to his family's commands?

  No, Leo told himself, the treachery was now threefold, a damnable, veritable Trinity of betrayal upon the body of the man who had been made Emperor with prayers and chrism in the Church of the Holy Wisdom itself. What Andronicus did was not only betrayal but blasphemy, and now it grew worse. So far from advancing to let the Emperor's body be recovered and borne home in dignity—assuming he was dead, which Leo doubted—Andronicus was actually ordering his army to retire from the field.

  The Emperor needed the reserves; the Turks were advancing, yelping in joy and shooting as they rode; and Andronicus Ducas snatched away the troops that might mean victory, or at least life, for Romans who had fought all day.

  The reserves’ horns wailed like the last trump of the damned before the gates of hell clang shut at the end of time.

  The Armenian troops slipped away into the twilight. They would slink into the shadowy hills where they knew every cave, avoiding the Byzantines whom they hated almost as much as they hated the Seljuks who watched—oh God, there must be ten thousand of the deadly mounted archers watching from the heights.

  A dark mass of troops broke from the Autocrator's depleted forces. The Cappadocians deserted, men, perhaps, from Romanus's own estates turning on a lord they had followed lifelong. Another betrayal. What was it that had snapped their loyalty? One tax or one troop levy too many—too late to ask that now. None of them would ever see their homes again.

  Leo glared at his uncle. He had always feared Andronicus: feared his well, he may not make much of a warrior, but I do my best with what I have to work with to his mother as much as her elegant disappointment. To think, he had spent all those years fearing a traitor!

  He had feared two traitors. Now he remembered where he had seen Andronicus's secretive, smug look before—on Psellus. Did the scholar play such a deep game that he used generals and Emperors as pieces on his board? Leo was, of course, no scholar, but he had ears: had heard Psellus murmur to himself. Declensions, he had thought when he was a boy; when he was a very young man, he had thought it was sermons. And the glazed eyes of his chosen students—was that boredom (to think that Psellus was reputed to be such a spellbinding orator!), or was it ...

  No time to wonder now. Leo realized he was fighting for not just his life, but his immortal soul.

  “Are you a lovesick girl or a monk contemplating the True Cross?” His uncle's contempt had always compelled his obedience. Andronicus seized the bridle of Leo's horse and sawed its head around. “Move!”

  “The Emperor...” Leo protested. “He needs our help.”

  Like the half-wit his family clearly thought him, Leo gestured toward the uplands. The army dwindled like a plague-ridden city, and the Seljuks began to descend to snatch this treasure of an unexpected victory that Andronicus had just tossed into their bloody hands.

  “The Emperor is dead, boy. Did you take a blow on your head when he fell?”

  Andronicus leaned forward, his dark eyes spearing at Leo's will. Obey. Submit. After all, he had always done so before. He followed the orders of his uncle, who was also his strategos, he could say. It would be easy enough.

  And what an opportunity for the family, if men of the Ducas line brought home the army even after the Emperor died. Even Leo would earn praise: a young man of unimpeachable honor, who brought back word of the Emperor's death, yet had to be compelled to retreat. Even his mother might be content with the reward from such a reputation.

  But it would be a lie.

  “You can't...” Leo gasped.

  “Can't what, boy?” His new enemy whirled on him like a maddened wolf. He might die in the next moment, before ever he drew sword today against the Turks. Or he might be taken in charge by his uncle and forced to play another role: madman and coward, the family disgrace, to be blamed and locked away in some filthy island monastery or hermit's cave where his lungs or his mind would soon rot.

  In either case, Psellus would glide through the corridors of power, even into the palace, sleek and satisfied. Things were as he would have them; and he would keep them that way.

  For his country's sake, Leo must not be used. For his soul's sake, he dare not. Guide me, command me! he howled soundlessly upward. I lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my help. The hills were boiling with Turks on those disastrously sure-footed ponies, and they shot as they rode. The shadows were growing longer. And more and more men were slipping away from the Emperor—those who had not already died.

  How could God permit this?

  No help would come from the hills—just wave upon wave of enemies who probably would fall quarreling first about whether to spit the Rhomaioi or thank whatever vile gods they served. A storm of arrows whined overhead, and it was only by the mercy of the Theotokos, the blessed bearer of God, that he and his horse were not feathered.

  Or had she, too, turned away her gaze in despair after a man had invoked her to beg the Emperor's mercy and been denied?

  Tell me what to do, he prayed in desperation. Tell me.

  A shaft of light pierced through the clouds shrouding the now-deadly horizon. It brightened as if sunset were becoming dawn. Leo stared at it. Time slowed as the shaft of light changed form: a Chi superimposed on the letter Rho. Christ rules.

  Leo shut his eyes briefly in thanks. His course was clear, even if the time he could steer it would be only a few pain-filled hours.

  “Judas!” he shouted at Andronicus Ducas. “You damned Judas in purple. I'm not your 'boy'!"

  He backed his horse away from his uncle. He was no match for the elder man in battle, unless heaven defended the right. But if Andronicus did not strike him down, he knew what he would do. Like Constantine, Leo would conquer, though his kingdom would not be of this earth. He hoped that the first Christian emperor would look down from bliss and see how one Leo Ducas had not abandoned this Autocrator.

  Andronicus, his sword out, lunged at Leo. Just in time, he twisted his horse's head around. Anger and fear made him cruel to the poor beast, but probably saved their lives for a few ignoble moments more.

  He pressed with his knees and shouted. His horse stretched out to run toward the comfort of a herd—the mounts of the Emperor and his officers. He knew he would not be followed. Why would Andronicus—may Leo's tongue wither if ever he called him “uncle” again—waste more time upon a family renegade when he had an emperor to betray and an empire to win?

  Uphill he rode, past dark caves tha
t yawned like entrances to the Pit or temptations to refuge, over so many bodies that his horse no longer shied at them. The darkening land seemed to tremble.

  Retreat had turned into rout, each man seeking safety in flight as the enemy chased them. Leo rode past heaps of bodies, past dark clots of fleeing men who had been loyal soldiers of the Empire only that morning. Eyes and mouths and open wounds glistened, and winds and arrows whined in the hills. And above all other sounds rose the shouts of panicked men who knew that all Rome was lost and their lives with it.

  One of the last Cappadocians rode at him. He was screaming, screaming, froth coming from his mouth as well as his horse's as they fled in panic. Seeing Leo, the fellow—an officer once and most likely accounted brave—struck with his mace as if he expected Leo single-handedly to arrest him. The blow cost Leo his helmet and might have cost him his brains had he not swerved in time. Damn. He would need a helmet where he was going.

  Do you truly think you will live long enough to use it, fool?

  Hunched beneath his shield, Leo rode on. The salt of his sweat stung where the mace had grazed his brow. He would have retched from the blow, let alone the stinks of blood and bowels on the field, but this was no time to be any weaker than he already was.

  I'm coming! Over and over, he screamed it. Let the Turks hear. Let the others hear. One Ducas, at least, was no traitor.

  Some trick of the wind and the light showed him the standard of the Emperor of the Romans. For a moment, it blew, tatters of gold and silk as brave and as foredoomed as the stand that the Emperor and his personal guard had made. The Varangians stood like cliffs around the Emperor's horse. They might neither like nor respect Romanus, but they had given their pledge, and they would die for him. Their faces were set, and their eyes wild. One hailed Leo with a swing of his axe, then, on the downswing, cut the arm from a rider who ventured too close.

  The last shafts of light from the sunset splattered onto that axe and fragmented like light on the mosaics in Hagia Sophia where the Pantocrator sat in majesty. The Emperor ruled on earth, but there was One, Three in One, higher than he, Who watched over all and would punish treachery. After all, life was short and bitter. But judgment came quickly, and the hereafter stretched out for eternity.