Shards of Empire

by Susan Shwartz

  Leo squinted at the mountain. Sometimes, his eyes ached so badly from the glare that he wondered how he could open them at all. At least he still had his eyes—if you think that way, you will go mad.

  His thoughts rushed ahead into the land toward which he and his companion rode where he might seek the shelter of the holy caves. The men who dwelt there were blessed, safe beneath the ground, not ice-encased like the stylites atop their pillars or, like the monks of Athos, lashed by storm and wave ... though, very likely, storms rushed like tides over the great plain across which they rode.

  These were not, he thought, Psellus’ magics: those had to do with the lamp, the book, the city Leo had fled. You have your will, mage. Leave me in peace, he had implored silently once, and more than once. He thought that in that much, if nothing else, he had succeeded. But other torments succeeded to their place.

  The air as the sun soared toward zenith was warm, moist on Leo's tired eyes. He let his horse slow to a walk. Behind him, Nordbriht reined in his heavier mount. They stopped, and Leo's horse swung his head down to crop at the sparse greenery.

  “Do you want to stop?” Nordbriht's voice at his shoulder, deferential, giving away nothing.

  “You woke me last night. Again. I am an unlucky companion, always to dream in the night and rise screeching. I owe...”

  “As I recall, between us there is also the matter of a lake, a huntsman, and a man who hurled himself across my path. So let us have no talk of who owes what.”

  Nordbriht's beard and braid were streaked now with silver, and his eyes, even in daylight, preserved a reddish glint as if embers still lay buried far within. Had it aged him to see the Hunt, to set his will against that of its fell master?

  He remembered Leo commanding him not to throw himself into the salt water: Leo remembered a wolf that had walked like a man, hurling himself between Leo and the alien damnation that had made itself a habitation now in this land.

  Had the Northerners, when they came to New Rome, brought their people's oldest curses with them? For that matter, what had his own people, who had ridden back and forth across Asia since Alexander's time, brought—and before them, what monsters stalked these plains?

  “You screamed once about some woman. I was certain that the crones were at their weaving, and it was your entrails they used to thread their loom.”

  Leo shuddered. “I've had that dream. Perhaps I should have gone to Mount Athos,” he mused. “They allow no women there, not even female goats.”

  Nordbriht grinned, exposing strong, yellowed teeth. “Then is it like tales of Jornsborg, but they are all pagan there. Two things they forbid on the island—women and fear. Yet how should that be, turning away the shieldmaids who come to bear heroes away across their saddles after they die in ... at least, that was the old error,” he finished up.

  Did they ban women for greater holiness or lest they distract men from the more important business of war—or because they feared them? If asked, Leo would have weighed in on the side of fear.

  The plain stretched between Mount Argaeus and themselves unrolled before them like a vast tapestry of greens and tans. Woven, as Nordbriht said ...

  Leo kneed his horse. “Let us ride,” he said.

  If Nordbriht pressed him, he would attribute his heaviness of spirit to the sun-dazzle in an overcast sky and the growing heaviness of the air. Clouds were gathering; the sky was growing dark. Lightning darted about the peaks far to the south. Leo counted three separate storms, separated by clear air. Within each storm, lightning glittered fitfully inside the piles of clouds that made each storm look like a warrior, marching across the plain.

  “That could reach us,” Nordbriht said. He glanced around: no shelter of rock or bush offered within a quick ride, and the horses were tiring.

  “We should find a town soon,” Leo decided.

  Nordbriht's nostrils flared. He pointed at a coil of smoke rising in the sky, and unslung his axe. They rode toward the smoke, and Leo's shoulders under the mail felt as if someone used them as a target.

  Not long later, he rose in his saddle to survey a cluster of houses. While smoke could mean a baking day when all a village's ovens would be in use, he had long ago learned to choose caution over hope. Even his horse seemed to pick its steps on the road. Nordbriht muttered to himself. It sounded like a growl. Leo's horse shied at a shadow and what even Leo, with his weaker, human nostrils, could smell now. An old man lay across the road, feathered with arrows.

  Leo blessed himself, and Nordbriht fumbled after the amulet he no longer wore. They took the long way around the village. They would report its death at the next—if that one still lived.

  Not daring to light a fire that night, they ate but meagerly and lay out beneath their cloaks. Rain beat down upon them. Flames lashed through Leo's dreams, then were quenched by rain and sweetened, after the rain, by the gentle face that appeared in Leo's thoughts, its eyes meeting his with joy.

  Rainstorms marched across the horizon like patrols guarding the land they sought to reach. Between them swept thin veils of cloud: the day had been dark and cool, easy to ride in. And then, late in the day, the storms faded. Only high fresh winds remained. They left the land smelling clean, green, with a faint hint of salt and the sky scoured clear of the clouds that had veiled it all day.

  Heavy, slanting sunbeams accompanied them into a realm that was not so much desert as a wilderness of stone: ruddy in part, with striations of tan, copper, even pale green glinting in the rock. The rain had laid the dust in the road and was drying in gleaming pools. It wound along, a well-beaten track, then edged beside a cliff.

  Leo reined in.

  “God the Savior, will you look at that?”

  Over countless years, since this land had risen from the seabed, wind and rain had carved the soft stone until a field of tiny volcanoes and chimneys reared up below them. The sun painted them copper and bronze, with a hint of green where stunted pines fought up through the grit, all that was left by cones scoured into the ground. Trees and cones and spires cast dusky shadows on the shining ground. Glints flashed upward as the sun picked out the glassy black of stone hurled from Mount Argaeus untold years ago.

  “Miniature mountains,” Leo marveled.

  “You can see where people have carved into some of them.” He pointed. “Can you imagine the work?”

  Nordbriht dismounted and scooped up two chunks of stone, a black fragment like a dagger and a lump of tufa. He discarded the black rock and showed Leo the softer, lighter stone. “Both of these rocks come from fire. When you pass them through the fire, it hardens. And if not...” His strong hands clenched, crushing it into a trickle of powder and grit.

  Leo laid a hand to the pouch in which he had hidden the ancient rock he had been given long ago. Hard enough to hold an edge or work stone, it was. Or to serve as a weapon.

  He pointed with his chin at Mount Argaeus. “But one day, the earth shakes again, and all this...”

  Did the Northerners always look into darkness and ruin? It might account for why Leo found this man so congenial. What would he do among the monks?

  No wonder monks had come then to such a place, to serve God in a wilderness fully as desolate and stranger than the deserts of Egypt or the mountain fastness of Athos. All of them looked as if they bore God's curse, not a blessing; yet, out of them had come sanctity. He removed his helmet, and the growing wind flicked at his damp hair. The wind wound about the cones and spires that stretched out as far as the eye could see into the haze before the true mountains began. A crooning seemed to rise from the pipes, as if the wind and rock conspired to become a huge instrument.

  “Do you suppose,” he asked Nordbriht, “that when we reach Hagios Prokopios they will house us in a cave?”

  “As long as they have food for us, I do not care. You are not a monk yet to fast; and God is not so foolish that He will call me to become one.”

  By the time they rode into Hagios Prokopios, purple shadows slanted from the spires and
chimneys that overhung the well-worn track. The music of wind playing on spire and chimney murmured at the farthest frontiers of Leo's awareness like the words to a song that tease an old man's awareness just as he falls asleep.

  With an explosion of pale wings, a flock of pigeons erupted from windows carved into a cliff. Nordbriht followed them with appreciative, covetous eyes.

  “Usually, they're asleep by now,” he observed. “Someone must be cursing.” He paused. “I wouldn't mind bringing down a few of them. They make good eating.” He paused, then added regretfully, “But they belong to someone. I guess I'm not that hungry yet.”

  Leo sniffed. And their dung goes to the fields, to enrich them. He could well believe it: whatever fields men tilled here would need all the help they could get. Where there was so much more stone than trees, it made sense to carve pigeon-houses into the hills—but people's homes, too?

  Lights glowed up ahead, removed at some space from the side of the road from just such homes. He could smell bread baking and roast lamb. Despite his resolve to eat as sparely as the monks he had come to live among, the temptation to dismount, to go into one of those dwellings, and claim hospitality by the fire made him feel empty inside.

  “We should disarm,” he told Nordbriht.

  Eyes on the pigeons, the Northerner snorted. “Two men are not a pack of bandits. Or invading Turks. If the people here have sense, they know that men who ride alone must protect themselves. Besides, the sooner we are lodged, the sooner we are fed.”

  Nevertheless, at Leo's raised eyebrow, he slung his helm and axe. The braids on his shoulders hardly looked familiar and reassuring, but at least he did not appear ready to charge.

  Hagios Prokopios was a mingling of homes and churches, built of battered, re-used wood or carved into overhangs of rock. Beneath each cliff, piles of stone and grit lay tumbled, the result of decades of wind and storm, eating at the friable stone.

  Lights glowed within the cliffs. There might be comfort in living thus, within the rock, perhaps within hearing of water running perpetually beneath the surface. It would be like a child, really too grown to be nursed like an infant, retreating to his mother's lap.

  If he had had a home like this rather than a shabby mansion in Constantinople, perhaps he would not be a stranger, not in a strange land, but in his own home. Well, he would be going to God's home now. Once settled, perhaps some kindly superior would permit him to write to Her Imperial Majesty to tell her that, after all, Leo Ducas had chosen to join her in holiness. He hoped that his Emperor's widow would not judge him harshly.

  Though the sun was going down and all about, stalls were shutting, talk still filled the streets. Leo and Nordbriht let their tired horses pause, dusty hoofs crunching on a road that was stone, grit, and something that looked like ground-up potsherds.

  From one enclosed, unusually wide stall dug into the stone hillside, he heard merchants chaffer in several tongues. Cups and coins clinked seductively. In the mellow light of new-kindled lamps, gleamed the deep, colored geometries of fringed rugs strewn over the dusty floor. A merchant laughed and clapped his hands. Two younger men unrolled an even more vivid carpet, a veritable mosaic wrought of wool and dye. From near that stall came the groan of tall beasts, swaying down to rest.

  Camels! Leo had seen them during the campaign East, sturdy, vile-tempered, stinking of dung and the grasses they munched and spat whenever strangers came in range. By lamplight or torches, men unloaded their packs. The men's voices were impatient: it was growing dark; they were tired; and they wanted the reassurances of a roof, a fire, hot food, and the laughter of companions.

  Where there was trade, there was need for guards, even if Leo doubted Nordbriht would want ever to journey east again. But something must be done for him after Leo entered his long-fought-for sanctuary. Could Nordbriht earn a future here?

  Leo stared down the dusty road. Women walked alone or in groups, their dark, narrow garments sweeping after them. They moved swiftly, but without the guilty, hunched scuttle of wives or servants out far too long and answerable to authority the instant they returned. The wind blew, and he turned his head at some poignant memory of a sweet scent, some glimpse, out of the corner of his eye, of a veil the colors of sunset floating in the air behind a figure whose movements were almost a dance.

  Incense wafted out from a church, overpowering whatever he thought he had smelled. From the weathered, low building came the clamor of a wooden semantron and bells, summoning the pious to worship. Many of these, he noticed, were the tall, severe women he had noticed earlier.

  Kyrie eleison.

  Here, in the dead emperor's native earth, Leo could finally pray for Romanus’ soul. Here, God would surely hear him, and the blessed Bearer of God would intervene. And no time like the present to begin in the work of piety that would last him, if all went well, the rest of his life.

  “We stop here,” he murmured.

  Nordbriht shrugged, resigned. They dismounted before the church. Like many of the buildings here, it was half wood and masonry, and half cave. Incense clung to the air inside, darkening the stone and all but obscuring the paintings and lines from Scripture daubed on the rough walls. They blinked until their eyes adjusted to the darkness and stopped prickling from the onslaught of the incense in the cool air.

  Leo turned his attention to the apse. There, above the altar, was not the figure of the Pantocrator he might have expected, but a depiction of a woman, standing, her hands upraised in supplication. She had not the sweetness that Leo had always associated with the Bearer of God, but a kind of ferocious concentration more like his mother than any icon had a right to be.

  Fearing the last time he had looked into the eyes of such a holy image, he dared to meet Hers. No flames lashed over the fixed intensity of her gaze, reminding him of the old crime and the gates of hell; but he had the sense, when finally he lowered his eyes, that he had done so by her permission rather than his own will. About the image's feet, sibyl-fashion, coiled a serpent. Like the women Leo had seen in the road, she was robed in black, unrelieved by the mosaic gold and gems that she would have worn in Byzantium.

  Those women who were her image were here too, prostrating themselves before the altar until they looked like black boulders scattered within the church. Leo remembered Empress Eudocia, praying before her husband's monument. Had Cappadocia lost so many of its sons that this many pious widows were left to mourn them?

  He sank to his knees in a rustle of mail, a creak of leather. Behind him, he heard Nordbriht sigh at yet another postponement of his dinner, then struggle downward, a fierce guardian even in prayer. Listening to the chant, Leo stretched out in the darkness humbly on his belly, letting the waves of holiness wash over him.

  Except for the voice of the priest, the chanting was borne on women's voices, powerful, even edged as the prayers rose as high as the crudely carved ceiling of the cave church would permit. What were these women doing out in the world? Surely, they would sing in their own communities, not here ...

  He deafened himself to the questions that threatened to storm his mind. It felt good, so good to be here in the grasp of a kindly mother, here beneath the stone where lights and shadows flickered the way nightlights had when he was a child. He yawned as he prayed, and tears came to his eyes.

  The clamor of bells and semantrons broke his reverie, and he levered himself up in time to see a file of tall, black-robed women stride out. Behind him, he heard Nordbriht's stomach growl, reminding him of his own hunger. He regained his feet and went to seek the priest to beg a night's hospitality.

  Above his black robe, the priest had a gray beard, bright eyes, a hooked nose and dark brows: a strong face that reassured Leo with its familiarity. He named himself as Father Demetrios, raised eyebrows at Leo's names, but blessed him in any case. He even achieved a nod and smile of greeting for Nordbriht.

  “A night's lodging?” He made hasty, dismissive gestures with his hands as Leo reached for his purse (though Leo rather thought a
donation to the church would not come amiss). “It is I who should thank you. It is more blessed to give than to receive; and too often it is I who have not had the opportunity to give. Come this way, sirs, come this way. You have horses, servants, perhaps? My house is not large, but...”

  No, the priest's house, once they entered an arbor, then a reception chamber painted white, and then a dining room hollowed from the rock and imperfectly sanded smooth, was not large. But it was clean and, like his church, it gave the sense of shelter.

  One of the black-clad women brought out bread and olives, a sharp, strong wine, and a salver of fish, which Father Demetrios served his guests with his own hands. Gladly, the priest would have loaded their plates and stinted himself, but Leo's frown forestalled him.

  “A miracle!” said Father Demetrios. “The loaves and fishes have been multiplied and produced a feast. We are far inland for fish, unlike you of New Rome. We do keep a few trout in pools; but for the most part, it is mostly lamb here and goat.”

  “I no longer eat meat,” Leo told him and knew that Nordbriht had again sighed.

  “And have you yet taken vows and been commanded to that penance?” asked Demetrios. “No? You are my guest and shall, of course, do as pleases you. But speaking as a priest, my son, I shall tell you that it is better by far that you eat what is set before you rather than make yourself singular.”

  His eyes twinkled, and when the meat indeed came round—freshly roasted and served with warm bread, Leo helped himself. The food tasted better than any meal since his first dinner in his father's house when he was first home. Nordbriht attacked the lamb like a wolf, if a mannerly one.

  “Tomorrow,” said the priest, “you shall rest if you choose or—” he held up his hand “—ride out to Peristrema. It is too far to reach in a single day.”

  Leo felt the man's eyes upon him.

  “We do not dwell apart from the monks here, my son. The Holy Basil set our Rule: morning and evening services, in accordance with general church usage, plus other prayers five times a day.”