Shards of Empire

by Susan Shwartz

  “I must take a former Emperor in charge and return you to Constantinople.”

  “Then I am under arrest?”

  Andronicus inclined his head, a formal, gentlemanly gesture that, nevertheless, brought the guards forward in case Romanus harbored unmonastic thoughts of snapping his stiff neck for him.

  “My life was guaranteed,” he reminded his captor.

  “Have I said otherwise?”

  Romanus rose to his full height and straightened his shoulders. Unlike the robes of the bishops, his black was drab, bedraggled in token of humility.

  “When do we leave?” he asked.

  “At dawn.”

  The former Emperor and his enemy locked glances. Andronicus looked away. “I have my orders from Michael.”

  “Michael” was likelier to be Psellus than that fool whom Caesar John had lifted onto the throne the way a boy is lifted onto his first pony.

  “Leo.” Just a breath of sound from Romanus, but it stopped him before he could ask why Andronicus had not kissed Romanus’ cheek before betraying him. Even that whisper drew the general's attention. Holding his uncle's gaze, Leo tipped over his goblet in repudiation. The last of his wine dripped off the table.

  Andronicus’ guards marched to Romanus’ sides. He smiled.

  “I am a humble monk now, remember? I must humbly offer this up.”

  “I think I can sneak you back to Adana,” Attaleiates whispered quickly in Leo's ear. “From there, we can figure out a way ... if you come now!”

  If Attaleiates helped Leo escape, it could end his career. And, unlike Romanus, Attaleiates’ life had not been promised him. The senior officer had given Leo a gift too precious to be accepted. Another of Andronicus’ servants came to stand at Leo's shoulder. Oh, they were being very gracious, very familial. The errant nephew would be retrieved from his misadventures, nobly forgiven—no doubt, with the entire army (it always was a sentimental beast) beaming approval on Andronicus Ducas.

  Leo turned his shoulder on the servant. “I remain with my Emperor's other officers,” he told the man.

  Let them see how the Ducas “prodigal” had returned to his husks.

  In the grayness before dawn, guards brought them outside. Horses awaited them. Standing among them, swaybacked, as if abashed in such noble company, was a mule. To this, the guards led Romanus. They seized him and bound his hands before hoisting him into the mule's shabby saddle. One of them mounted and took the wretched creature's reins.

  “I will say this for you,” Romanus told Andronicus Ducas. “You—or your masters—do not miss a single detail.”

  Ducas thinned his lips. Almost, in the torchlight, it was as if he flushed. “I regret this.”

  “Do you? What have you left me now?”

  The other man smiled, finally. “Your life, as we pledged to do. The opportunity, as a monk, to amend it and purify your immortal soul. Weighted against that, what are the vanities of your former rank and of this world?”

  “Enough,” said Romanus, “to make you jeopardize your own soul.” He tried to lift his hand in the gesture a man sparring with another uses to acknowledge defeat, but his bonds did not permit it.

  Andronicus turned in his saddle. Even as he oversaw the last details of departure, he nodded slightly at Leo. Ride with me. Was this, like the mule, another subtle vengeance on his enemy?

  “Someone must stay with him,” Leo said. “And he was ever kind to me.”

  “This one?” he took the reins from a groom and raised his brows. At the general's nod, he swung up into the saddle. He edged up as close behind Romanus as his guards allowed.

  The Emperor's head was up, his eyes as distant as if he sat in the throne room he might never see again except as a prisoner, cast onto his belly before his successor. The mule shambled along in the dust of the cavalry.

  Rumor outmarched the army. Along the roads and in villages and markets, villages where Romanus had been hailed as godlike, farmers, merchants, and cautious minor nobles ventured out to see an Emperor in bonds.

  At first Romanus had tried to ignore the staring, whispering crowds, the occasional jeer, the casual humiliations of imprisonment: of having to wait, for example, until it occurred to a guard that even a deposed Emperor might need to relieve himself. But that last downpour had accomplished what Andronicus and petty indignities could not. He had retched by the side of the highway. And he rode now with his head down, unsteady in what passed for a saddle on his mule.

  Romanus’ eyes were bright, too bright; his face was flushed, sweaty; and he was mumbling. Leo edged his mount nearer.

  “They compass me about ... they compass me about ... out of the depths I cry...”

  He stood in his stirrups, hoping to locate Attaleiates. The senior officer had taken one look at Romanus this morning, cursed under his breath, then jerked his horse's head around and set off to fetch a surgeon. Neither he nor any surgeon had returned, however.

  Now, the older man rode up beside him. “They won't come,” he said.

  Leo spat.

  “Softly,” Attaleiates warned. “Someone said something about hemlock—I promised I wouldn't say who.”

  Fear gripped at Leo's bowels. Romanus's sickness, his too-bright eyes, his fever could all stem from despair or being drenched once too often by the rainstorms of late spring. But when a noble, publicly disgraced and under arrest, sickened this conveniently, that other possibility always lingered in people's thoughts. He himself had expected to be struck down before now.

  The sky clouded again.

  “Oh no,” he whispered.

  The raindrops were fat and heavy, making the ride a silent misery. As the rain lashed down, seeping through armor and garments, steaming with his body's heat, Leo allowed himself to weep.

  At the next halt in a town before Iconium, the Emperor's keepers discovered he had fouled himself. By the side of the road, Leo performed the offices of a bodyservant. The Emperor, white-lipped with shame, permitted it.

  The sun emerged, casting long beams onto the road, more cracked and scarred now than in the millennium since the Romans built it atop a path that had no doubt run along this way longer far than that.

  A child emerged to stand by the side of the road. Leo would willingly have boxed his ears and packed him off away from Romanus.

  “Is he sick, master?” asked the boy. To his credit, the child took pains to whisper.

  Leo waved off the guard who looked ready to administer the blows that he had himself had thought of striking. He shook his head.

  “I will fetch my mother, or grandmother,” the child offered. Leo saw him running from the road across a field and into a house that could be said to be tumbling down as much as it was standing near a gently mounded hill far larger than the Hippodrome. From it emerged a woman, her head covered. A child clung to her skirts, and she had her arm around it, as if to console it for the presence of the army so close, so dangerously close to home. With her other arm, she restrained the boy who had spoken with Leo.

  From his gestures and the shrillness of his voice, he knew that the child was pleading the case of the sick man by the road. “But he'll die if you don't go to him!”

  Was there ever a time when Leo had thought his mother all-powerful? There must have been, or he would not have dreaded her judgment all the years of his youth.

  The boy's mother shook her head vigorously, and began to drag her protesting son inside, when a much older woman pushed the sagging door aside. She was massive, sturdy. Still, there was nothing ponderous, nothing feeble about her. She shouted at the younger woman, who released her son's hand. Nodding approval, she handed the boy the bundle that she held, spoke quickly, urgently to him, and pushed him back toward the road.

  Gasping for breath, the child tumbled to a stop. Despite the warmth of the day, he was shaking with fever. Leo had wrapped a blanket stolen from a pack animal about him. He looked down at the sick man, then at Leo. “My grandmother says that these, steeped in water, will help the poor
sick man. Is he your father?”

  To their horror, Romanus began to weep. Greatly daring even now, Leo laid a hand on his brow. It was fever-hot. “I told my mother and my grandmother that you were a good son. My grandmother says hot water, tell him hot water, and come back home.”

  “My thanks to you and her,” said Leo. “You are a brave, good boy.”

  “I shall be a soldier when I am grown,” the child declared.

  "No!" So Romanus had retained some shreds of rationality. The child recoiled, his eyes open with terror.

  “Be a farmer, a priest, be anything you like. But not a soldier.” Romanus panted for breath.

  “Go quickly,” Leo said. He attempted to give the child a coin.

  “My grandam says we do it for the blessing, not the coin.”

  As the child ran off, Leo rose to his feet, turned in the direction of his decrepit home, and bowed in deep respect.

  “Can he ride? He'd better,” said a trooper.

  Leo sniffed at the cloth bundle the child had given him. At tonight's stop, he would boil the herbs and give them to Romanus. A pity he could not do so now. It was pointless to ask. Romanus had been granted his life. He would be given no more.

  The Caesar must be enjoying every moment of this, Leo thought. News that the army guarded no less than a former Emperor, now in chains and very probably poisoned, spread across the countryside more efficiently than if relays of messengers had borne news from the capital. Men and a few women watched crossings or at the edge of their fields as the army passed: frequently, at the sight of Romanus, swaying on his mule, they knelt. And it was a rare evening when the boldest boy in a village did not dash to the army's camp, at least trying to bring gifts to the “poor sick man.”

  “Not their Emp ... Emp'ror,” whispered Romanus as Leo bathed his face or attempted to spoon some herbal brew into him.

  No, he had been an Emperor for soldiers. But the countryfolk made their own stubborn, silent judgments: he had lost all, and now he was suffering.

  When a surgeon finally summoned up courage to appear, he stared at the former Emperor, blanched, and hastened away.

  The roads wound past outcroppings of rock carved with figures of dragons and old pagans, hollowed out, in places, into caves. The sun waxed as the year neared midsummer. The fields became more richly green, the brilliant poppies marking them like splotches of blood.

  And then, one evening, the army marched into Cotyaeum beneath rounded white hills and twisted pines.

  Leo let himself sag with relief. For at least a day or two, he could get Romanus off that wretched mule, safely inside perhaps, cleaned, and even onto a decent bed. Leo himself might have the luxury of a bath and at least a dry place to sleep. Romanus, tossing his head back and forward, saw Leo smile and smiled himself, as easily pleased by comfort to come as a sick child.

  “I don't want to think how many horses they've killed going back and forth from the City,” Attaleiates told Leo a day or so later.

  Leo had lost track of time. He rarely left the Emperor's side. If a monk had not offered to help him, he might have had no rest at all.

  “How is he?” Attaleiates asked.

  “He was lucid this morning. I asked him if he wanted me to fetch someone from town. Trade's good here, and a lot of Jews have settled here. You can usually count on them to have a real physician, maybe someone trained in Egypt.”

  “That would be one in the bishops’ eyes, wouldn't it? You'll lose your monkish assistant.” Attaleiates’ bark of laughter held no mirth at all.

  Leo shrugged. “What, a monk not aid a brother monk? Rest assured, I shall complain. But I think it's a good idea. Every time an Emperor gets a stomach gripe in Constantinople, they send a summons to Pera or the Chalkoprateia and haul out the physicians there. Why not?”

  Because we're no longer dealing with an Emperor. Neither he nor Attaleiates would say that.

  Hoofbeats. He saw his friend raise an eyebrow and knew that he had tensed, listening for any word he could hear. Another messenger had arrived.

  Just the idea of a physician such as Romanus had had in Constantinople might reassure him. The Empire's laws restraining Jews were strict: they could not intermarry, own Christian slaves, build synagogues, or plead cases against Christians in their own courts. Jews faced the occasional riot and constant abuse from the lower orders—not to mention times of unusually strict laws. Still, they managed to prosper, and their medical training was famous.

  “I should go in and check on the Emp—check on his condition,” Leo said. “And you?”

  “The usual,” Attaleiates said. “Waiting upon my betters. If nothing happens, perhaps I can steal some time to write ... Leo, they're coming out of the Domestikos’ quarters. God help us, he's got on his Caesar mask!”

  Andronicus did not look as much imperial and remote as he did resolved, a man who had come to a decision he would see through to its bitterest consequences.

  At his orders, soldiers dashed to the left and to the right, even, in some cases, outside the camp. But his orders, spoken quietly enough, produced a buzz of comment and complaint.

  Attaleiates signed himself, then grasped Leo's shoulder. “My God, look what they're setting up,” he whispered.

  Leo had seen such a sight only in a vision: stakes, ropes, a brazier, and in it, heating, iron tent stakes. A growl rose from his throat.

  “Hold hard, Leo!” His friend's voice reached him from a distance. “I'll try to hold them off, while you—no, the monk may be too slow—you run and get those bishops. By Christ the Pantocrator, they promised him safe conduct!”

  Leo ran. The high wind that seemed to drive him forward brought him snatches of rumor.

  “They say the Emperor wept...”

  “He always weeps and swears his milk-white innocence, but in the end...”

  “The Caesar calls the tune. He and that minister, that Psellus...”

  “Quiet, for your life. You want to wind up like him?” An infantry officer gestured toward where Attaleiates stood blocking the entrance to the Emperor's quarters.

  Outside the quarters reserved for the bishops of Coloneia, Heracleia, and Chalcedon, Leo stopped long enough to draw breath and compose himself.

  Leo pushed past the monk at the door and hurled himself to his knees before the bishops. One rose as if to defend himself. Another knelt before an icon, while the third—he of Chalcedon—made no move whatsoever.

  “Most blessed lords,” Leo gasped. “I most humbly beg your pardons, but I must beg ... entreat you ... messengers have come from the City, and the orders are to blind the Emperor.”

  He hurled himself forward, onto his face.

  The bishop of Chalcedon assisted him to his feet, a bleak compassion on his face.

  “We had our own messengers at dawn, my son. And we have been praying...”

  “Sirs, you guaranteed his life. I beg you, come ... they will not do such a thing in the presence of men of God...”

  “It is the Emperor's will,” said the bishop.

  Leo shook his head. “I beseech you...” He was on his knees again, tears and sweat hot on his face.

  Chalcedon's arm was about his shoulders. “Look at this good lad,” he said. “Kin to the Basileus, yet he begs for mercy for his enemy. Faced with such a noble example, can we, my brothers, do any less than try?”

  Leo sagged against the bishop's arm, waiting for the others to decide. The roaring in his ears subsided, to be replaced by the dangerous buzz of soldiers angered past silent obedience.

  “This is not a popular decision,” said his grace of Heracleia.

  The bishop of Coloneia smiled a thin, ironic smile and rose.

  “I will tell them you are coming.” Pulling free of the bishop's arm, Leo ran back the way he had come.

  “They're coming, the bishops are coming...” he gasped as he ran.

  Attaleiates blocked the way to the Emperor's bedside with both arms. For once, he had forgotten the discretion of a prudent man, a su
rvivor in Byzantium, and was shouting at Andronicus, “He spent his life in the service of the Romans. Even the Sultan gave him honor, treated him as a companion—and you would deprive him of light?”

  “Will you, as Christians, do less than the Turks?” To Leo's horror, his voice cracked into a sob. “I have been to beg the bishops to intercede. They are coming...” He gestured. Like a wave, crested with black, not foam, the bishops and their entourage approached Andronicus Ducas. Most of the men crowding around went to their knees.

  “What ... what is it?”

  The voice was parched, unsteady. Romanus appeared at the door, fighting to stay on his feet.

  Attaleiates flung out an arm to brace the former Emperor.

  “Sir, I have brought the bishops.” Leo pushed through to the Emperor's side.

  “The bishops, yes, but for what?” With every word, Romanus’ voice grew more resonant.

  Leo pointed. Leo felt the Emperor's shudder of revulsion in his own body.

  Romanus bowed his head as the bishops approached. “Most blessed sirs,” he raised his voice, trying to pitch it over the clamor, “I beg you to fulfill the promises you made to me.”

  “A fine monk,” Andronicus Ducas snapped. “You speak of broken promises? You broke your own vow the first time you made it.”

  The Bishop of Chalcedon held up a hand as finely shaped as old carved ivory. “Our vow, not his, is under question. We guaranteed his life.”

  “He has his life.”

  “Men die when they are blinded. We implore your mercy. We cannot believe that the Emperor, who is a merciful young man, would not forgive even his greatest enemy...”

  Andronicus Ducas shook his head. “These young men ... these young men ... His Most Sacred Majesty wept for pity. This young kinsman of mine looks likely to run mad. But older heads have ordered...”

  “Then you yourself do not like this,” Attaleiates snapped. “In the name of God, man, you are Domestikos of the Scholae; you can use your judgment.”

  “Sir, you forget yourself!” snarled Andronicus. “No, I do not like my orders. But I am a soldier, sir, as you are. And we would both do well to remember what we are—and obey when we are commanded.