Shards of Empire

by Susan Shwartz

  “Now stand aside.”

  Romanus lurched forward to face his former subordinate. “I never gave you orders such as this,” he said. “And the one order I most needed you to obey, you betrayed."

  Ducas drew himself up. Romanus swept a glance about the assembled soldiers. One or two men groaned. Several fell on their knees, their hands raised.

  “What if they do refuse to obey you?” he asked his enemy. “Will you wield the iron yourself?”

  Chalcedon sank to his knees. “I beg you, send again to the Emperor. What is a small wait, compared with a man's sight?”

  The Domestikos gestured. His secretary left his side, knelt before the bishops, and presented a letter.

  “My instructions come from the Autocrator,” Andronicus Ducas repeated.

  The bishops averted their faces.

  “Harden your heart,” Leo told his uncle. If Andronicus had not ordered him silenced or killed yet, there had to be words Leo could use to reach him. “Go ahead and try. You hate this as much as we do. Command, and see if they obey. Where is your precious army then?”

  Again, Andronicus shook his head. “These young men,” he said again. “I do not need to command then. Others have obeyed my commands already.”

  He turned and faced the gates of the camp. A file leader and his leader of ten headed the party that pushed toward him. Several of their sixteen men had weapons drawn, more to ward off attack than to protect the prisoners whom their fellows, two to each prisoner, brought before their commander and threw down before him.

  They were civilians and, as their garments indicated, of some prosperity. One was a woman, young insofar as one could tell beneath her veils. But it was not their civilian status, or their fear, or the way they had been dragged into the camp, or even the presence of a young, modestly veiled woman in their midst that drew gasps of outrage from the bishops. It was that all of them were Jews.

  “One of these Jews will blind the false monk,” Andronicus declared. “We shall have them draw lots. The female is exempt, of course, from that, but not from punishment, should they fail at their task.”

  “At least,” Leo pleaded, “summon a surgeon. Even one from town. Let him, even blinded, have a chance to fulfill his vows and serve God as a monk.”

  To think, earlier that day, he had planned to seek out a Jewish physician.

  “My orders do not speak of surgeons.”

  Leo could taste blood, fire, and iron in the air around Andronicus Ducas. It was not his orders, then, but a desire to humiliate, to crush the life and pride from Romanus—and the last vestiges of resistance from his supporters.

  Romanus laid a hand on his shoulder. “Let be, Leo. Save yourself. One last order. Try to obey it, son.”

  Tears blinded Leo, and he bowed his head. A soldier went among the Jews, holding out his helmet. In it were shards of pottery. The man who chose the one bearing a mark would be the one forced to blind the Emperor.

  “Why should I not bear the same risk as the others?” the woman asked. Her cultured Greek bore a faint accent that might have been enchanting were it not so angry. A shaft of light showed her more clearly to the soldiers. She had pulled her veil from her face. She was indeed young, her skin the color of amber, her eyes dark, long, and filled with intelligence and anger. Beneath the veil, which was picked out with gold threads, her hair was dark, richly curling, and gleaming with highlights almost the color of wine.

  “Girl, you would faint before you could do what is required,” the dekarch said. “We are soldiers and even we do not willingly watch such a deed, let alone do it.”

  “No,” retorted the woman. “You steal us from our lives and work to do it for you. I but seek to reduce my kinsmen's risk.”

  “Asherah, peace,” called one of the older men, who tried to rise to his feet and go to her.

  “The lady...” The Emperor's hand gave Leo a slight shove.

  Leo knew what Romanus wanted. Lead the maiden hence: do not permit her to see me abused.

  Leo steadied him, transferring the bulk of his weight to Attaleiates, then went to stand before the woman Asherah. “Let me take her out of here,” he offered the Jewish men. “Surely, you would not wish her to watch...”

  A tiny tremor shook the ground. Asherah swayed slightly, and Leo put out a hand to touch her arm.

  “I thank you, sir.” She spoke for herself. No downcast gaze for her; and her voice, once free of anger, was husky and sweet.

  She followed Leo's gaze. Romanus looked about the camp as ... in Leo's dream, Alyattes had stared about him, cherishing the last sights he would ever see. The former Emperor looked at the assembled soldiers and Jews before his glance lighted on Asherah.

  “It is well,” he said, “that the last lady I see is so fair.”

  Asherah inclined her head.

  A wail went up from her kinsmen. One held up a shard with a black cross marked upon it.

  “How,” her whisper to Leo was almost a hiss, “dare you use the symbol of your faith for such a purpose?”

  “Jesus wept, lady,” Leo said. “I beg you, let me take you away.”

  Her hand toyed with her veil. Clearly, she wished to cover herself modestly and be conveyed safely away from soldiers who might turn upon her and her kinsmen. But she looked again at the Emperor, his face grey with illness and the mortal fear that had struck him in these last moments, and she straightened her shoulders.

  “If he gains comfort from any sight of me,” she said, “he shall have it.”

  “Take her from here,” begged the man holding the marked shard.

  “I do not think that they will harm me,” she told him.

  “Asherah, Joachim's daughter, this is no sight for a daughter of Israel!”

  “Menachem, your task is no task for a son of Israel! Shall I do less than the women of Judaea when the Romans stormed their fortress?” she demanded.

  “Lady,” Leo ventured. “Maid, how can you say they will not harm you? They prepare to force your kinsman to blind an emperor!”

  “You are here,” she said. “And they...” She gestured with her chin at the bishops.

  Again, Leo attempted to lead her away, though he hated the idea of using main force upon a woman.

  “Let be,” commanded Andronicus Ducas. “She is surety for the rest.”

  He turned back toward Romanus.

  “Take him,” he ordered.

  The file leader pointed. Two of his men, clearly wishing themselves fighting the Turk or anywhere but here, hesitantly approached Romanus and grasped his arms.

  “I can walk,” he gasped, pulling free of them and Attaleiates. But his long sickness had weakened him. His knees gave out, and he would have fallen unless the soldiers caught and held him until he could steady himself.

  “Go on,” the Domestikos commanded. “And bring her. Perhaps her presence will give him more strength than he showed at Manzikert.”

  And so the Emperor of the Romans fought his last battle: not to falter as he walked on his own to the place where he would face torture; not to humiliate himself by one last, futile appeal to the priests who had shown themselves to be mere men, and cowards at that, rather than servants of God; and to bear what he must now bear.

  With almost appalled carefulness, they bore him down onto his knees. His eyes closed, then fluttered open as if unwilling to lose the last scraps of painless light that he would see. His lips moved. Kyrie eleison. Christe eleison.

  At his side, Asherah whispered husky syllables in a language Leo could not understand. Her perfume wreathed them both, incongruous amid the stinks of sickness and betrayal.

  When Romanus fell silent, they forced him onto his back, then tied him, hands and feet.

  “The Jew doesn't know what he's doing,” said the file leader. “Better secure him.”

  At his gesture, soldiers piled shields upon Romanus’ stomach and chest.

  “Now, Jew,” said the dekarch. He wrapped a cloth about the tent stake and seized Menachem's hand. He
flinched from the iron as if from something unclean.

  “Your brothers’ lives are forfeit,” said the dekarch. “And hers. Now, do it!”

  Menachem grasped the iron. The tip of it was barely red.

  “Lady,” Leo implored her. “Look away.”

  Asherah was whispering those strange prayers again, her hand light and steady upon his arm. To his astonishment, he drew strength from the touch. Even when Romanus screamed, he did not flinch.

  “Oh God, it's a botch!” the file leader spat his disgust.

  Leo could have hated all Jews in that moment for the clumsiness of one man—were it not for the woman standing at his side, as courageous as any soldier.

  “Try again.”

  Menachem sobbed. His second blows went awry. Blood sizzled on the iron. The smoke of burning flesh reeked in the air.

  The youngest of the soldiers staggered aside, to vomit in a ditch. The priests’ prayers rose. Menachem begged in at least three languages, to be let go. One of the soldiers drew his sword and held it near the throat of the oldest Jew, obviously a well-to-do merchant.

  Asherah gasped and clasped Leo's arm hard. Her father Joachim, perhaps? Leo would return her to him if this horror ever ended.

  “Harder, Jew.”

  As blind as Romanus now from tears and terror, Menachem struck, then struck again. The former Emperor screamed and spasmed, all but scattering the shields that weighted him down before he fainted.

  Menachem fell to the earth himself, keening helplessly.

  The old man stepped away from the sword and went to him, raising him, then holding his head as he retched himself dry.

  “Will someone bring him water?” he asked. His eyes blazed, revealing his resemblance to his daughter. “Water,” he repeated. “I can pay you gold for it.”

  A monk kneeling behind the bishop flushed and fetched a cup of water. He handed it to the file leader—even now, he would not willingly touch a Jew—who brought it to Asherah.

  She took it and stepped away from Leo to give it to Menachem. Her arm went around him, and she crooned to him and dried his face with a corner of her veil, heedless of how she ruined its rich fabric.

  Leo turned away from the sight, from the sound of the old man's voice, “Daughter, Asherah, in the name of God, let us go now before they change their minds; he knows you're grateful,” to Romanus, who lay unmoving beneath the eyes of the guards, the shields that had been used to pin him scattered about.

  “Pick those up!” Leo ordered and knelt at his emperor's side. He had no idea of how to tend a blinding, but Romanus must be tended, unless there was more mercy in the world than Leo had seen recently and the man had died from shock and agony. He turned him over, trying not to gag at what he saw, attempting to bandage the ruined face until a surgeon finally arrived.

  By the time he was free to look around, Asherah, her father, and their kin were long gone. Safely, he hoped. Her discarded veil lay upon the fouled ground.

  Had Fortune been kind, Romanus would not have survived the night. The iron had been scarcely hot enough to sear the bleeding sockets closed. So the surgeons muttered, prayed, and applied poultices and bandages, which Leo already knew would have to be soaked away. He forced himself to watch: unless Andronicus ordered him away, the task would fall to him.

  Outside the tent in which the blinded man moaned and writhed, restrained lest he tear at his bandages, Leo heard the orderly tumult of breaking camp. At dawn, guards approached, leading the weary mule that had carried Romanus from Cotyaeum. One of Andronicus’ officers stood waiting, armed and inexorable.

  “The Emp—how can you even think of making him travel?” Leo demanded. “The Emperor is barely conscious.”

  It was provocation to refer to the blinded man as Emperor, and Leo took a risky satisfaction in doing so.

  “Then he won't know what's happening to him, now, will he?” asked the officer. “We but take the good monk to his monastery on Prote. He can offer up his pain there.”

  “Man, that's days away in the summer dust! Do you want to kill him?” Leo started forward.

  “Quiet! Let the surgeons handle this.” Attaleiates strode forward and caught Leo's shoulder, pressed it hard. If Leo's immunity had a limit, Attaleiates had no desire to find it out.

  Leo snorted his contempt for surgeons who had abandoned a sick man to suffer all the way from Adana to Cotyaeum when he should not have had to travel at all.

  “Quiet, I said,” the older officer repeated. “You have already pushed the Domestikos harder than anyone I have ever seen and lived to tell of it. But even blood kin can push a man too far. Make trouble now, and who knows? He might start with the tongue...”

  “They mean to kill him. They guaranteed his life, and now ... even the bishops are foresworn.”

  “Leo, that's close to heresy!” Attaleiates whispered, honestly appalled.

  “The Holy Fathers do not lie,” said Andronicus’ man. “They serve the Empire as he failed to do. The strong do as they will. The weak ... well, at any rate, I've got a horse for you, so he'll have at least you to care for him along the road. Do you want to risk losing him that?”

  Leo turned slightly aside. Inside the tent, he heard one surgeon, braver than all the others and more competent than most, losing the same argument he had just lost about rest and quiet and time to heal.

  Well, he had expected that. But then the surgeon lost a second argument, this one a plea for, at the very least, a covered cart to convey Romanus to the monastery he had built on the isle of Prote, within sight of Constantinople. Surprisingly enough, however, the surgeon won permission for himself and a monk to accompany the dying man.

  Romanus had been Emperor and friend. Now he was “the dying man"—soon to be less than that, assuming God mercifully took him to Himself.

  Soldiers carried him from his temporary quarters. He was a big man, and now his limbs sagged. They tied him to the saddle, binding his legs and hands. Leo and the surgeon mounted up beside him.

  “Try,” Leo ordered the man who led Romanus’ mule, “to pick the cleanest road.”

  “You should have been a nursemaid, young lord,” the groom replied with a mirthless grin.

  Leo shut his eyes. The sun was pale on a cloudless horizon. The day would be hot. Most likely, all the dust of Anatolia would stick to the stained bandages that swathed Romanus’ head. If he had to support him all the way to Prote and keep off flies, he would do so, he vowed.

  By noon, Romanus’ body seemed to shed heat like wildfire. He and the surgeon had given up trying to plead for stops by the roadside. Now, they simply packed cloths between him and the saddle, as if he had reverted to infancy or fallen into the most squalid old age.

  The stink grew hideous. Now, Leo longed for Romanus to remain unconscious: no use for him to awake to this humiliation.

  He wetted the Emperor's lips—or whatever he could reach of them through the discolored folds of bandage. The bandages were hot with more than the fever Romanus had had since leaving Adana. Already, the poison in his body had reached the sockets of his eyes. The dust would filter through, and everyone knew that dust bred maggots in fresh meat. What would it do to wounds?

  Lord have mercy. Christ have mercy. God send a miracle or a quick end to the Emperor's pain.

  “I am ... a brother to owls...” Romanus’ voice was hoarse. Leo's eyes filled with tears.

  Curse God and die. Romanus would not do so, any more than Job. He would have made a monk of outstanding steadfastness.

  “Try to drink this,” Leo whispered and gestured—carefully, lest he jostle the man he supported—to the surgeon.

  “Time,” muttered Romanus. “Time to serve God ... oh my God, I am heartily sorry...” A dry sob forced itself from his throat. “No tears now ... will God understand?”

  “He must,” Leo told him. “He surely must.”

  “Praise Him.” Romanus fell silent. The mule jogged along. It placed a forehoof wrong and stumbled. The Emperor flinched.
<
br />   “Can't you lead a mule better than that?” Leo shouted at the man holding its reins.

  “Offer ... it up.”

  “No reason, sir. None at all. They take you to Prote...”

  “Ah. Built well there...” he sighed in what Leo was astonished to realize was relief. “Home.”

  Mercifully, he fell into a kind of doze. The surgeon appeared at Leo's side, driving him away until they halted for the night. To protect him from contagion, he said.

  But it was not his eyes that had been gouged out, not he who had been poisoned. But “Go,” whispered his Emperor, and Leo went.

  He was shadowed as he rode, he knew, watched as men might watch a prodigy. There goes the man who defied the Domestikos. Kinsman or not, Leo knew he flirted with disaster. They would be taking bets, he thought, on how long he could go before he too was forcibly shorn and consigned to a monastery—if he did not succumb to Romanus’ fate.

  What of it? Ever since Manzikert, he had considered his life forfeit. Now, he rode along as if balanced upon a knife's edge in the dark. He had never felt so free.

  That night, Romanus refused all food. Only the reproof, “Are you trying to kill yourself?” made him try to drink. He had bitten through his lip rather than cry out. Leo held the cup carefully, lest he subject Romanus to more suffering. He was painfully thin, dried out by fever and the poison that coursed through him.

  “Lion ... lion's cub.”

  The cracked whisper brought Leo up out of sleep. Leo rose from his pallet, his bones aching. He could hear the surgeon stirring on the other side of the man they served.

  “Raving,” said the surgeon. “The end is near. Shall I fetch the priest?”

  Leo shook his head. “He is not raving, but remembering. The Turks called me ‘lion's cub.'” The surgeon's face showed clearly what he thought of any Byzantine who jested with Turks.

  He knelt by Romanus’ side and took his hand. It was hot enough, however, to belie his words about the Emperor's fever.

  “I will get the priest.”

  Glad to escape the stinks of fever and corruption, the surgeon pushed out of the tent.

  “Leo ... they hunt lions, you know,” Romanus whispered. “Do not try...”