Shards of Empire

by Susan Shwartz

  “Who rules, then, sir?”

  “Messenger said that they almost stabbed each other to the hearts with their pens: should Michael and his brother rule with their mother or without her? Hell of a world when the most experienced ruler in Constantinople is a middle-aged woman, isn't it, Leo?”

  Eudocia was tried, experienced. Romanus might be right to have placed his trust in her. And perhaps, just perhaps, she loved him. Leo thought his mother loved his father. Otherwise, wouldn't she have herself tonsured and retire to a convent? She had never even threatened that, not even when she had been angriest that his father had not accepted an official post.

  “The decision came through—from that precious Psellus. What is it with the man? You'd have thought the old Basileus was his ... never mind that; but he seems under a spell himself. So Psellus wrote and Psellus skulked in corners, and the logothetes crept out of their holes. With the upshot being this: Michael and Eudocia rule jointly.”

  “For you, sir, that is good news, isn't it?”

  If my wife's loyalty holds. But, of course, no man and especially no emperor could say that.

  Romanus leapt up and began again to pace. Outside, Leo could hear soldiers splashing toward them and the Varangians acknowledging them. “I think staffs outside, sir.”

  “Let them come in.”

  “We're moving out of here to the fortress at Dokeia. At dawn,” the Emperor told them. He took another turn across the room. Then, as if imposing composure upon himself, he sat down.

  “Now you can hear the bad news. Right after Eudocia was vested with co-rule, by design of Psellus, who hoped I was dead...”

  The officers grumbled. One started to spit, then reconsidered.

  “Can you imagine the effect when my letter arrived?” Romanus paused and grinned. “Psellus must have pissed himself.

  “But you know Psellus, never at a loss for long. Straightaway, he hatched up the idea that I should be outlawed. That's my copy of the order.”

  God help us, he doesn't know. Leo could hardly blurt out his suspicions. He forced himself to shrug. “He's a clerk, sir. A brilliant one, but still a clerk. If the Basilissa holds firm, my cousin Michael will give in. He is an obedient son. And he always yields to the last speaker. All she has to do is keep him away from Psellus.”

  Romanus shook his head. “How I'd love to get my fingers around Psellus’ scrawny throat! I'd squeeze the eloquence from it soon enough.

  “We're going to have to fight to take the City,” he added. “So I'll need an army. Right now, I need a good man willing to track down the Sultan in his camp. I think I'll send Scylitzes. Alp Arslan will listen to him. Holy Mother of God, I never thought I'd be grateful to a goddamned Turk.”

  “I thought you liked Alp Arslan, sir.”

  “Well enough; but he is still a Turk!"

  The messengers continued to be Job's messengers. Once again, Romanus paced, today's bad news crumpled in his strong hand.

  “Eudocia,” Romanus said, “has recalled Caesar John from exile in Bithynia. I would have expected her to hold out longer. If she'd bothered to think about it, she might have secured the Varangians. But John was the one who won them over. Here: read for yourself.”

  “She thought you were dead, sir.” Leo looked up. “And she needed a strong arm.”

  He knew Varangians, had heard them beat shields with axes. He could imagine his mother if the likes of them had stormed her house; and Eudocia was not nearly as fierce.

  “Her Majesty must have been terrified,” he murmured.

  Romanus turned, lowered his eyes. “I promised to keep her safe. I promised. And I was not there. But still...” he sighed, “when did an Empress of Byzantium ever run?”

  The Empress Theodora, a woman of no birth at all, had declared the purple to be the finest of winding sheets, had held firm, and had helped saved the Empire for her husband Justinian the Law-Giver. It diminished the Empress to imagine Eudocia, a veteran of a lifetime of palace schemes, cowering, her face covered by her veils, her hiding place in a deep crypt illuminated, perhaps, by one flickering torch because she didn't know which she feared worse: darkness or the Varangians.

  “She's finished now,” Romanus said.

  Leo nodded.

  “You're missing the best part,” Romanus told him. His voice strained over the words as if each cut him as he uttered it. “Read what happened to Psellus. Can you see him scampering after my wife, probably stumbling over his robes, nigh on to wetting them, muttering prayers and gasping for breath? It's almost worth losing an Empire for.”

  Psellus had fled to the crypt, cowering with Eudocia. And there, among the very bones of imperium, the Varangians had found him. Barbaroi though they were, they were not stupid. Barbaroi that they were, they could still sniff out a magus, and they knew what to do with one who wished them ill.

  “The writer here says that Michael—now the Emperor Michael—sent the guards looking for him ... he always looked at the people he admired like a dog pleading for scraps, sir.” Leo found himself laughing. It hurt.

  Romanus joined in the laughter. “Eudocia is gone, gone with John; and meanwhile, Psellus hasn't figured out a flowery enough way to say, ‘Forgive me; I miscalculated; now I will be your lickspittle'—oh God, and he hears the Varangians shouting and lumbering down into the crypt and tries to scratch his way into the stone itself! I swear, if he could have moved the stones, he'd have clambered into a tomb!”

  “So the Varangians find him and bring him to Michael...”

  “And instead of chopping Psellus's head off, your idiot cousin—my wife's mindless excuse for a son—all but places the diadem upon it.

  “They've sent Eudocia to an island convent. She won't find it easy to escape from there.” Romanus shrugged. “So I am no longer Emperor by marriage. Must I make myself Emperor by conquest?”

  The older man's eyes blazed; his breath came faster; and then he subsided. Not enough fire remained.

  Leo handed the closely written leaves back to the Emperor, who laid them gently aside.

  “Leo,” the Emperor asked, “would you go home?”

  “As your emissary, sir? They would hardly welcome me, or believe me. Still, if you command...”

  “No, it is not my will. You are useful here,” Romanus said. “Not to keep my eyes on you; you think I can't tell the difference? But I would see you safe.

  “Leo ... if I come back into my own, it might be that two Caesars would bear the name Leo. You, and my son.”

  Become a piece in another man's game—to keep him and his dream of power alive a lifetime longer, a generation, a decade, even a day. He shook his head—the buzzing subsided to its prior level of disturbance—and flung out a hand.

  Romanus smiled at what must appear to him to be admirable humility. I will not play this game.

  “You have proved yourself a thousandfold.”

  The bridge before the fortress of Dokeia was a mongrel structure of wood and slapdash stone atop sturdy Roman columns sunk deeply into the swift Halys. This was the road of conquerors who had left their seed behind: not just Greeks, but the Romans before them; a few fair children, the far, far descendants of Macedonians on their way to Persia; and others, black-haired, black-eyed, the stamp of the most ancient times upon their features.

  Capitals, their acanthus leaves battered yet still showing fragments of their original grace, upheld hovels that would not last a fraction of the old stonework's years.

  Eyes upon Leo's back made him turn to look into the eyes of a woman, wrapped in black, perhaps a farmwife—or widow, the great woman of her family. Her daughters-in-law in subjection and hard at work, she had taken a few moments to hobble out from her house and watch the armed men pass. And, no doubt, to make certain that they stole nothing, from the scrawniest fowl to her most restless, army-mad grandson.

  Light glinted on the road. Leo stooped, curious. A gem, perhaps, dropped by some mercenary or some refugee? He swung down to retrieve it: a blade flaked from bla
ck stone, shining in the buttery afternoon light. The old woman set up a clamor.

  “Yours?” Leo asked. “Since it's on your land? Take it!”

  He would have tossed it to her; but she reached his side and grasped the hand that held the tiny blade as if she would claim them both. The serrations of its flaked edge cut his palm.

  “Found another sweetheart, Ducas?”

  The old woman's head rose.

  “You? You are Ducas?”

  He spared her a nod.

  Old as she was, she was still hale: one of the black-eyed round-faced people, the oldest dwellers in these parts. They were very black indeed, those eyes, and they drew him in.

  “You're the one,” she said. “You'll do.”

  "What will I do?” he whispered. Despite the heat of the sun, he had trembled at her touch, her words.

  “Keep the knife, young prince,” she told him.

  “Ducas, how long do we have to wait for you to finish courting?”

  The woman disappeared into her low door faster than he would have thought she could move.

  I wish my mother had permitted me to ride with you against the Persians, but my brother's death was a wound in her heart, and I owe her a son's obedience. Now, however, that we have been exiled to this island, I think that she wishes she had permitted me to serve as befitted a man of conscience and a Roman.”

  You might not have survived, my friend.

  By now, Alexius was getting on toward fifteen. Man enough to ride, he had insisted. Old enough to fight. It was no small achievement for a boy to smuggle a letter out of monastic imprisonment. It was an even larger achievement that it reached Leo with the Emperor's dispatches.

  Alexius’ neatly formed, indignant writing danced before Leo's eyes: Anna Dalassena, Alexius's mother, had been accused of sedition “by a snake, Leo, that I would not have bothered to bruise as we are commanded with my heel if I had seen it slither out across a garden walk.”

  Letters had been forged to prove she had been writing to Romanus. “Your cousin, though I am shamed to reproach you with that kinship,” wrote Alexius, “thereupon called my mother, whom I know you esteem as her son, to a trial that he was too shamed to attend, perhaps because it was not of his instigation.”

  Not as discreet as you might be, lad, Leo thought. Anna Dalassena had been almost more of a mother to him than his own. Please the Bearer of God that Leo's own mother had had nothing to do with the Lady Anna's downfall.

  “Whereupon, when ushered into the presence of the court, my mother drew an icon of the Savior from within her garments. ‘Behold the Judge who will today decide between you and me. Observe Him well when you utter your sentence and try to ensure that it is not unworthy of the Judge who knows the secrets of the heart,’ she declared.

  “A woman of valor, who can find, for her worth is far above rubies: truly, I think that proverb can be applied to my mother, and I should have thought that all the world, or that piece of it that is Rome, would have agreed. But the judges were cowards and like the Sanhedrin of Caiphas, they have exiled her and her sons to Prinkipo, where we stare out over the sea and, like the scandalous old Roman poet, lament our city.

  “I have been able to send no word to my friend the other Leo, though I remember him for his own sake and for the sake of his father, whom my brother served so nobly. My mother does not know that I write you, but I am certain she would want you to know that you are included in her prayers, as you are in mine...”

  Psellus again, Leo thought. Now, he moved to destroy the powerful Comnenus family, as he would move to thwart anyone who might influence his Emperor—or place another candidate on the throne. Psellus might even have written the letters purporting to be from Anna Dalassena rather than tossing the task to some cat's-paw: capturing, then perverting, the voice of a great lady celebrated for her wisdom might have been a task he would enjoy.

  A shout brought Leo's head around. He thrust Alexius’ compromising letter into his breast and ran back along the hollowed pavement.

  “Is there not one fortress they would leave me? Not even one?” The Autocrator's voice almost cracked with fury.

  They did not need Michael Psellus to tell him that that was a rhetorical question.

  “Out!” Romanus shouted. He crumpled something in his hand, then hurled it to the stone floor. A military secretary deftly retrieved it and smoothed it, to preserve it for the interminable, inevitable records.

  Three civilians bowed with the trained grace of Byzantium, exaggerated almost to the point of contempt. The odor of the court clung to these three, and Leo thought he heard the sinuous rush of silk along the passageway as they followed the officer, at a fastidious distance, out of Romanus’ presence. Civil servants, ostensibly sent from Michael and his puppetmasters, Caesar John and the scholar Psellus.

  Leo felt their eyes slice across him like an assassin's blade. Clever eyes, hooded eyes: the eyes not even of civil servants, but of scholars. Power quivered in them like a plucked string—to a tune struck in Byzantium by a man who had vowed as a poor boy that all the world would dance to his playing.

  “Whom the gods wish to destroy, they first make mad!” Romanus exclaimed. He paced across the room even more vigorously than was his custom, as if spurred. A shadow lay on his face.

  “Get over here!”

  A table loaded with documents divided them: not enough, should Romanus run mad in truth. Leo had seen animals confined and baited past their control turn suddenly at bay and savage keeper and tormentor alike.

  “I fight a war with rumor, rather than swords,” he raged. “All rumors. Did you know I have renounced the throne, Leo, and that I shall become a monk—should they allow any monastery to accept the likes of me?”

  Leo met the Emperor's eyes. “Would you indeed receive the tonsure, Majesty?” he asked.

  “A forced vocation? To speak of such things, even as a ruse of war, is blasphemy,” Romanus said. “I have letters ... veritable epistles ... from the august bishops of Coloneia, Heracleia, and Chalcedon. Surely, they would surely tell me so if I did not know it myself.”

  Not an answer. Leo glanced down at the table again. Alp Arslan fought far to the East.

  “The boy in Constantinople leaves his wretched verses and his schoolmaster and orders—orders!—me to yield Dokeia to Constantine. Not one fortress shall be left to me, Autocrator of the Romans. This is civil war...”

  The Emperor's voice trailed off, then strengthened. “Well, if it is war they want, they should send the traitor Andronicus, not his little brother. I shall beat him like a child.”

  Kyrie eleison, Christe eleison flickered through the shadowed chambers of Leo's mind. If he were indeed mad, he might not be the only madman in this room. The Emperor turned, looking out over the sunset plain of Anatolia. His head was up, his eyes alight with eagerness and zest for battle as if, already, the sun had risen on a brighter day and he turned aside from the body of his enemy to see the sun flash off the shields of his cataphracts and the great axes of his northern guardsmen.

  Whom the gods wish to destroy ...

  Leo withdrew to stand against the wall. It would be a very long evening, and a longer night.

  Another Constantine had conquered at Dokeia. Even though this one was younger than Leo himself, the very name of Constantine was a powerful omen. What would the Emperor do now? And was he emperor of anything at all?

  The surgeons had set up operations in half-makeshift quarters. Lit by torches, they cast long shadows like demons, tormenting the most recent harvest of damned souls, who writhed and cried out under knives only slightly more merciful than the ones that had brought them to this pass. Covered bodies lay nearby; more lay outside the fortress.

  “Young Ducas?” Beneath the rasp of exhaustion, Leo heard the snap of a senior officer.

  “Sir.”

  “The Emperor's in there...” The man pointed with his chin.

  “That's no place for me, sir,” Leo ventured.

  “Ducas, if
it had been me, you'd have been long gone. But, for some reason, he likes you. If you can play David to the Autocrator's Saul, we'll all thank you...”

  “Is the Emperor badly hurt, sir?” A boy's question, asked with the disingenuous frankness that won results more often than it should.

  “He couldn't shout like that if he'd been badly wounded. But the strategos Alyattes has gone missing, and the Emperor is taking the news badly. Now get in there. I've still got work to do. Christ, who was the fool that said if he'd been defeated, he wouldn't be this tired? Another madman.”

  He strode off in the direction of the stables.

  It had been an Emperor who had said that. The full burden of the officer's words hit him. Theodore Alyattes, who had commanded the right wing of Romanus’ troops at Manzikert, was missing. If he were slain or captured, Romanus had lost his right arm.

  Surgeons had the armor half off Romanus, who was pushing them away as he tried to reach the table on which a map had been unrolled.

  “Get those surgeons into the square, treating my men ... they deserve the best...” His voice cracked. “I want as many of them ready...”

  “Damn you, then, yes, bring the crone in, if that will shut you up. All these grandmothers have some skill in herbs; how else do babies survive in these wretched towns?”

  “Get her in here,” someone gestured.

  “But...”

  “If her hearing's as bad as her breath, you think she'll understand a word we're saying? Besides, he wants it that way.” Two officers had their heads together.

  Leo saw their glances shift toward him, distrust and complicity combined. “We'll get him to keep an eye on her. That way, if anything goes wrong...”

  The crone they had spoken of squatted outside, waiting with patience akin to the rock against which she hunched with her bundles of herbs and the blessed Virgin only knew what else. Under the swathings about her head, her eyes were dark, withdrawn into shadows of her own. He put a gentle hand on her shoulder, drawing her attention back.