Nordbriht could be heard to sigh.
“It is no more than the Didache recommended for the early Church,” the priest reproved him. Leo hastened to nod.
Distraction came with a swish of skirts as a black-clad woman removed dishes, tended lamps, and brought more wine. Nordbriht muttered thanks and wiped his chin, shining with grease. The woman smiled, pleased by the amount he had eaten, and offered more.
“I wish to retire from the world,” Leo said. “There is much trade here. While I rejoice in your town's fortune in having it, I should wish to withdraw...”
“Still so austere?” The priest eyed him with gentle irony. “Your sins are so great as that? You have not yet told me your story, but I judge that you have been a son, a good one, and a soldier. Surely, you...” He was a mannerly man, if ironic, and he broke off as Leo flinched.
“Peristrema, then,” said Father Demetrios. “It is some distance from here, and your horse should rest before you go there. Tomorrow, you shall bide here"—and tell me what you have left unsaid, came his thoughts, so strongly that Leo could sense them—"and I shall give you a letter to Father Meletios, a saintly man. His servant will be here that day. He is both eyes and hands to the blessed man, and he can guide you.”
The footsteps behind them ceased as if the priest's housekeeper remained to listen.
“I know, Xenia,” said the priest. “You could guide our guest just as well as the young lad. My son, Father Meletios came to us from Egypt, where the rule separating monks from the world are even more strict than here. Who would have thought it? Years ago, monks and nuns both lived out in the caves in the gorge. But the holy father expelled the nuns that the monks might live the purer of thought for their absence.”
“Hard on the nuns, wasn't it?” came Nordbriht's rumble. “If it was the women's land to start with...”
Now even Leo could sense the tension in the tall woman standing behind them. Had she been one of the banished nuns? Would that order of exile account for the dark-clad women he had seen, with their blend of humility and impatience? Surely there had been holy women in the deserts of Egypt: there had, Leo remembered, but some had been a temptation and a snare to the men who lived withdrawn from them.
It is not as if it were their fault. He looked up at the tall woman removing the dishes from the table. Serving him, expressionless, in silence. Serving Nordbriht a second time. He had, after all, expressed regret for the women and their plight.
Father Demetrios blessed the room, then looked over his shoulder.
“Thank you, Si ... Xenia,” said the priest. Dismissed, she had little choice but to withdraw. Leo heard reluctance in her firm footsteps. He was not surprised. There was a mystery here, old stories, old guilts—and as a penitent, a hewer of wood and drawer of water, he would not be asked to bear a part in them.
Leo thanked his host, bowed his head for a blessing, and found himself led to a small, windowless room, whitewashed and chill. It held a chest and a narrow bed, heavy with blankets woven from the local wool. Tomorrow, he would rest, if he could rest; and the day after, he would ride out to this place and give himself away. Give himself—he corrected his thought—back to God. There would be prayer. There would be hard work. And at the end of the day, and of all his days, there would be rest.
And that would very much be that. Resolved, he blew out the ancient lamp that had been left for him. The darkness was absolute. He had a moment's fear—of Psellus in Hagia Sophia, his eyes of Christ in Majesty burnt out in his presence, the evil dreams sent to torment in Byzantium that had all but cost him his life. He yawned. Perhaps—please God, no writ ran here, not Psellus’ nor any other sorcerer's.
The blankets were as comforting as his earliest memories, and sleep came quickly. There were no dreams.
Should he take his sword or not? Leo asked himself as he prepared to leave the room Father Demetrios had made over to him. He heard Nordbriht's rapid stride and quickly picked up his weapons: he did not want to hear what the Northerner would say if he left weapons behind, nor did he wish to be guarded.
He had tried to quarrel over that the day before.
“If you do not ride armed, I must guard you,” Nordbriht had said. “Even if you ride armed, I shall watch your back.”
He had no response for that. How had he and his ever considered the Northerners to be barbaroi or lacking in wit? This one easily got the better of him. So, Nordbriht had companioned him when they had ridden out to view the monastic community that Leo had always assumed he would join before Father Demetrios suggested this site in the valley upon him as being more remote.
“I release you from your oath. You do not owe me any service,” he had told Nordbriht when the man's presence looming before him or guarding his back had caused the monks to view them both with suspicion. “I am no prince to require a man with a great axe to guard me.”
Nordbriht had merely raised his brows, a gesture he had, worse luck, learned from his years in Constantinople. Leo was Ducas; a Ducas was Emperor; therefore, Leo was of an Imperial family and, by Nordbriht's reckoning, a prince.
“Remember: when I take vows, I will surrender even my name.”
The road twisted through a desert frozen in stone, but as much a refuge as the pitiless sun and sand in Egypt. Rain spat down briefly, and the wind blew, piping eerily through the chimneys carved by centuries of wind and water. The road dropped off.
Abruptly, they found themselves in a weird geometry of cones, chimneys, and spires. Nearby loomed a cliff, striated like the rest of the rock: perhaps, ages ago, this had been level ground, perhaps even a seabed. Leo thought of waters rushing back in to fill it, shuddered, and shut his eyes in brief prayer. Surely, people contemplating such a cataclysm must have thought it the end of the world. But it had not been: and perhaps what he had lived through was not the Last Days either.
When he opened his eyes, the winds had dispelled some of the clouds, and the sun, even though it had reached its zenith, was not as oppressive as he had remembered, sheltered as he was by the sand-colored cliff. Studding it, much worn away, were doors and windows such as one might see in some back-country basilica, all wrought of the living rock of the hills. The face of one cliff had fallen away and lay in rubble at the foot of a huge hill.
Peering within, Leo saw the remains of chapels and corridors. He could see figures within the ruined chapel, striding down toward the altar, wrought of one block of stone, behind which generations of humble workers had hollowed out an apse and painted it. More figures, their paint rapidly faded now with exposure to the air and rain, stood arrayed upon those walls. Among them were images of robed women, whose faces were scored and scratched out. As Leo watched, a monk walked by the ruined church. Something on the ground caught the man's attention. He picked it up, then hurled it at the wall with an exclamation of loathing.
Leo tensed, and Nordbriht was instantly at his side.
“Potsherds,” the big man said. “I saw them in the town. They have old marks on them, like butterflies. The holy men say, though, that they are women's bodies—which shows you how little such men know of real women—and so they break them.”
“Soon I shall be one of them.”
Nordbriht shrugged. Leo, his gesture suggested, would not be such a fool as to be shocked by pottery.
“Do you not understand me?” Leo demanded. “You may wish for—what did you call it—a ring-giver. I am not he.”
“You drew me back from the Hunt,” Nordbriht said simply.
A file of monks in dusty robes wound along the path among the rocks.
“They've seen us,” Leo pointed out to Nordbriht.
Three monks left the line and approached them, offering hospitality. Slightly behind them was a shorter figure, not quite out of boyhood. He moved hastily, trying to catch up despite a bad limp. As he reached Leo and Nordbriht, his knee twisted beneath him. With the uncanny silent speed Leo had first seen under a full moon, Nordbriht leapt out to steady him.
“I
would not have fallen,” the boy said. “It is my duty to greet pilgrims. I am quite fit.”
“No doubt, young sir,” Nordbriht said and stepped back. He released the boy, who bowed to Leo with far more formality.
“The stranger did not know that, Theodoulos,” said the elder of the monks. “After all, you have had such a long ride that anyone might falter when he dismounted. You owe him your thanks.”
Leo restrained a faintly malicious smile. The boy's face, ruddy and somewhat round, despite the thinness of all of the monastics, flushed. He looked even younger: black-haired, black-eyed. Then, he regained his composure, and his features settled into a mask that should have been absurdly dignified on a lad so young. He greeted them with the manners of a prince and an accent that somehow escaped all rusticity.
In vain, Nordbriht shook his head and would have edged behind Leo. The monks insisted on greeting them both and inviting them both to join them at their meal. Leo ignored the Varangian's silent plea to be dismissed.
He had chosen to follow: this could just be his reward. And if his head scraped on the stone doorframes as they visited the churches, or his knees jutted up as he sat with the monks in their refectory, tables and benches carved in site from what had been solid stone, he attempted to keep watch and what decorum he thought might be appropriate among these strange ascetics; he even tried, when he saw them holding back from taking food, not to eat more than the others. Theodoulos, however, was sharp-eyed and brought him more bread.
The boy's name was Theodoulos. He was no resident of that community but there on a pilgrimage to one church where the wall-paintings were all of serpents: when Leo rode out to Peristrema, the river valley where Father Meletios ruled, the boy would ride with him, home to the hermitage where he served its master.
“Are you coming? They wait for you outside.”
It was victory of a sort that Nordbriht called to Leo without insisting upon a formal title. But the former Varangian had let all of the others assemble while Leo lingered in the priest's house as if they had nothing better to do than dance attendance on a spoiled princeling. That war remained to be fought.
It would be fought by others once Leo put himself under obedience. Leo wondered how this saintly Meletios would dismiss the Varangian.
Theodoulos, no doubt concerned that his twisted leg would cramp on the long ride to the valley, had dismounted and limped over to supervise the loading of supplies on pack animals. Leo saw him in the company of several of the dark flock of tall women who served the church and were such a presence in the town.
“You must eat!” One handed him a packet that looked like honeycakes. A second smoothed his hair and tried to make his coarse robes lie more tidily on his shoulders, while a third worried that there were nowhere near enough supplies, that the roads became hot and dusty, and who knew whether they would be safe to travel later on in the year.
“Supplies are stored underground in the cities...”
“Hush!” The tallest of the women blessed herself and looked around. She and her sisters had been exiled from the valley, but seemed to feel bound to keep whatever secrets it might have.
Whose son was Theodoulos? He was his master's servant, Leo had heard the boy explain to Nordbriht who, unembarrassed, made his share of the honeycakes disappear. Perhaps the youth was the posthumous child of some soldier and one of these black-robed women, consigned to holiness as soon as people realized his leg would prevent him ever from becoming a fighting man.
Seeing Leo, Theodoulos hugged the black-robed women like a much younger boy, knelt for the priest's blessing, then mounted quickly. Leo and Nordbriht mounted with a clash of armor that drew people's attention. But Theodoulos bore not so much as a dagger.
“You're determined to come?” Leo asked Nordbriht once again.
“I can't let you and a bunch of monks ride out there by yourselves. God only knows what sort of barbarians you might meet on the way.” The big man grinned at him.
After so long in the saddle, Leo was certain that the sun's rays hitting the earth sent up clouds of dust. He shut his eyes against the glare, then flinched: even worse than the reek of beasts, of sweat, had been the stink as his emperor's eyes rotted out beneath their fouled bandages as they rode, always pushing the pace, from town to town, exhibiting the man who was no longer an emperor and scarcely even alive. The sun had beaten down upon Leo's head until he thought it would boil in its helm; but not to wear the helm meant brain fever.
Soon, he would find quiet, disturbed only by the singing of holy men, and the darkness of caves, lamplit so that the saints painted on the wall seemed to come to life. Soon.
He forced himself back to awareness. Like it or not, the others still saw him, armed, as a fighting man: he could not let Nordbriht guard this troop alone.
Gradually, the glare faded. The road swept them past what looked like a desert, frozen in time. Shepherds on the road gave way to them (the sheep showed less deference). A tree clung, twisted from the years that storms had buffeted it, to one small hill. It was hollow: Leo saw a watcher retreat within it. Later on, a boy who waved as the troop rode by appeared, as from the ground itself.
“They say this whole land is hollowed out,” Nordbriht muttered. “Cave cities all around here. Malagobia, with its deep wells, and Enegobi, which is smaller. They use them for storage and to hide in from the Turks.”
“Are these cities linked?” Leo's head came up.
When he looked about for someone to answer his question, he found the monks’ attention curiously elsewhere. He pointed that out to Nordbriht.
“I heard mutters of a road underground. Thing is, no one knows if the story is true. For my part, I prefer Turks and the sun on my face. Riding underground, I would worry if every step would be the one that would set the earth shaking and bury us all. But that doesn't seem to trouble them."
This rock-strewn plain guarded as many secrets as the court. Others were welcome to seek them out.
Gradually, clouds veiled the sky, hiding Mount Argaeus as if it were shrouded in its own smoke. The clouds thickened, shielding and revealing the road they traveled. Now they had the wind at their backs, and driving rain. The clouds scudded toward the vast horizon. Once again, Leo imagined that he could see figures marching in the land, helmed men and women, gods and goddesses from before the time that civilized people had come here.
Don't see such things, don't think of such things, he warned himself. Don't fall into illusion now that you are so close to holiness. Not even Psellus’ spells or spite can reach you here.
Perhaps, in the secret safety of the valley toward which he rode, he would even consent to be exorcised.
Theodoulos’ shout—that of a boy in sight of home—recalled Leo to himself. Ahead, the earth was cleft, following the track of a river, that ran too fast to be choked with leaves from the trees that lined it—or branches from the tree trunks that it had engulfed, swollen as it was by the spring rains. Sunlight glistened on the troubled water, hundreds of feet below.
The packtrain halted. At Theodoulos’ direction, Leo followed him toward the rim of the cliff. The ground seemed to shake, or perhaps that was just the effects of a long, long ride. He stretched out on his belly in the grass and stared into the valley. Grass crowned the cliff on the other side of the river that had gnawed, century after century, into the soft rock through which it ran. On either side of the river were tumbled piles of rock. Many of them were marked by the rough-cut openings that Leo knew meant doorways. Peristrema. Perhaps his home from now on and his salvation?
Did any of those doorways lead to the underground towns of which Nordbriht had spoken?
He promised himself not to care.
In the valley, men in brown and men in black, but no women, went about their tasks beneath the long shadows of the poplars. They moved without haste or idleness, though, from time to time, a monk might pause to look about the valley or study the river, slowing now after the storm, sparkling in the sun. Carvings gave jutt
ing rocks above and beside the entrances to the caves the semblance of ancient temples.
How fortunate the monks were to live in such splendor. No wonder those formidable old women in town still mourned their loss.
Not far from where they paused, the road halted. A rough stair, carved into the rock and kept in good repair, snaked down into the valley.
Gesturing them to follow him, Theodoulos started down the stair. Very soon, his limp became more pronounced and he was sweating heavily, but he refused to rest or give place to the others. Nordbriht edged down beside him.
“Let me give you some help with that.” He gestured at the pack that Theodoulos had insisted on bearing.
“You are my guests!” he said, the first young man's pride Leo had seen in him. “The path can be tricky. I know it; you don't.”
Nordbriht lifted the young man's burden from his back. “You may be strong enough. But you are not our pack-horse.”
“Father Meletios would expect me to guide you.”
Nordbriht clapped him on the shoulder, careful not to strike too hard and push Theodoulos off balance on a turn in the stair.
“By God, we'll make a fighter of you yet.”
Theodoulos looked uncomprehending. Nordbriht laughed.
If the Turks struck this far into the land, they might all have to turn fighters here before the day was done.
It would be a pity if battle ever came this way.
Ever came this way again.
What had put that thought into Leo's head? He pulled off his helmet and let the breeze cool his face and dry his matted hair. Here in this hermitage, the breeze and the swift-rushing river seemed like luxuries all the greater for their simplicity. He found himself smiling at the surface of the river, like some fine, ever-changing brocade—sunlight striking it from above; rocks and branches pressing from beneath the surface.
Perhaps it was rockfalls from the protecting cliffs and the way that some of the temples—a strange word to use for cave churches only slightly simpler than those outside Hagios Prokopios—had fallen into disrepair that made him think that there had been battle here before.
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