Shards of Empire
Page 21
He looked about, then lowered his voice impressively. “I have heard that if you descend far enough into the caves, you find a great smooth road that links them one to another: a great highway beneath the earth. And men say, even, that if you go on that highway, you will find a city richer than...”
“You say too much, don't you, Paulos?” Casually, the young noble who had sneered at them earlier that day sauntered over to the shabby man, plucked his cup from his hand, and spilled it on the floor. “You talk far too much to a traitor and an enemy of our land.”
Leo levered himself to his feet. The bench screeched on the tiled floor, tottered, badly balanced as it was, then toppled.
“You have a name, no doubt?” he asked, turning the elegance of his City accent like a Syrian blade upon the newcomer. “And...” He let his voice rise in doubt. “...a father?”
“We know you, Ducas. Go home to your palace. Unless you're afraid they'll burn your eyes out too?”
Leo's eyes filled with flame, his mouth with bile. The stink of burning flesh in his nostrils and of the fever and maggots thereafter. At the end, it had been hard to see his Emperor in the husk he had tried, and failed, to keep clean. If he had tried harder ... If he did not try to restrain himself, he was going to kill someone.
Why try? He might be blind with rage, but his hand could still feel its way to his knife.
Nordbriht leaned forward across Leo, Varangian in all but the red tunic and the axe. One of his large, scarred hands slammed down right in front of Leo, waking him from his own fever-trance. He wasn't just defending an imperial scion from attack—but from himself.
“In the North,” his voice was a low, almost feral rumble, if perfectly polite for the moment, “we have many stories of how easy it is for men to boast when they drink—especially when they drink too much. Our stories are sad because they tell how dire it is when a man speaks too rashly of what he does not understand or cannot do. That is wise, do you not think?”
The noble rose.
“I asked, and nicely, too, ‘Do you not think this is wise?'”
Paulos grabbed the young noble's hand before it could drop to his belt and the too-new dagger exhibited there. Think, man!
“And yet,” Nordbriht said, always in that pleasant, purring voice, “fools call us barbarians. You do know what fools are.”
Disgusted, Leo threw down silver for the meal that burned like coals in his belly. He left the tavern, Nordbriht padding after him.
Laughter rose at his back. Leo did not think that it was aimed at him.
“You have made an enemy,” Nordbriht warned him.
Leo made himself shrug.
“Yes, a boy and a rash one, but shamed enough to become even more rash.” The big man laughed at the night sky.
Leo glanced upward. The moon was almost full.
Asherah's torch guttered and drew black streaks on the rock of the tunnel. She was small, but she had to hunch almost double as she climbed back toward the light. Her back protested, but she ignored it: she had not made the long ride from town to yield to discomfort. Resolutely, she entered the underground city that people here called Malagobia. A hard place to live, indeed: but she sought not comfort but knowledge.
Now, Asherah ran her fingers along the rock, counting: like countless generations of passersby, she felt for marks in the rock other than the scars of the tools that had hollowed it out.
The opening on her left led past an air shaft, one of many. Yes, she had counted the steps and turns correctly. Here, wind from the upper air whistled and whispered. Behind her came a choke, quickly suppressed. In the first days of Asherah's exploration of the underground, her poor maid had listened to the same stories that she had. But where Asherah had been enthralled just with the idea of the subterranean cities, let alone the possibility that a great road might connect them all and lead to one queen city, her maid feared being trapped alone in the dark while random breezes seemed to whisper her name like evil spirits approaching from behind.
Here, in the very shaft that brought them life-giving air, there was also danger. She must guard her torch. Light might be seen from the surface. Or if a stray gust put it out, Asherah thought she knew the passage well enough that she and her maid would not wander in the dark until her father's servants came, or they went mad before they died of hunger, or the underground city filled as villagers fled down into the dark that they feared as much as the Turks.
No one knew better than her father's heir and confidante just how likely that was. Caravans had been attacked. For now, her own family's camels and horses, and the treasure that they could carry from city to city, here into the West, had halted behind walls; and it lay in the hands of the Almighty whether they would be safe or not.
Never mind the camels and the silks, the spices and the treasure: if the Turks struck here in force and these later Romans struck back, she and Joachim, her father, together with the other Jews in the Empire and throughout Persia, would be lucky not to be ground between them. The villagers and those who dwelled on outlying farms might view the merchant lords askance, but they shared the same fears, the same problems—and they might not have willing access to the underground cities if war came. At least, not yet. All Asherah's charities in the town and fields might not suffice to correct how the villagers thought of the Jews—though that was not why she had performed them.
No one minded now when she visited Malagobia or Enegobi, provided that she was discreet; provided, too, that they did not know how assiduously she hunted. So far, however, what had she found? Dry stone, scarred by tools and fire. A few broken tools. A chip or three of pottery, such as she might find in any abandoned house. Once, she had found a tiny idol; but better were to be found in many places roundabouts—including (as she had heard) the valleys where the monks lived and prayed within the rocky spires. Such trove as she had found dangled from a bag at her girdle. Such symbols as she had seen etched or scrawled upon the carved-out walls were recorded in her memory.
“Not much longer now.” Asherah hoped her maid found the sound of her voice encouraging. She would never say it, but she found the sound of actual, sunlit cheerfulness an intrusion here.
What if they hear you?
Be quiet, she told herself. There is no they.
None that she had found. Yet.
Tzipporah, as she often pointed out, was older than she. The damp made her knees ache. It was cruel to bring her here, let alone to descend level upon level armed with no more than a torch and the knife Asherah had been taught to use; but her maid and her father were united on this: Asherah must not explore the deep ways of the city-caves alone. Perhaps, no certainly, a manservant would have been better for the task of companion, but Asherah had bent custom and braved comment as much as even the sole heiress of a wealthy merchant might dare. Even if the merchant heiress was a Jew.
It was not the Christians who would comment that Asherah, daughter of Joachim, wandered about companioned by a man. They knew so little of her people, and condemned all of it, that they would not know how great a violation of custom it would be for her to spend time alone with a man, especially in the dark caves outside the town. If she could gratify custom and her curiosity both, how much the better for her.
Her conscience smote her at her maid's attempt at a brave reply. The shadows danced as Tzipporah's torch wobbled. God send that the damp had soaked into their clothes so they would not go up like tinder if a torch brushed them. Her heavy garments were a sad nuisance; but man's clothing was forbidden.
Asherah stopped so quickly that Tzipporah almost walked into her. She shut her eyes. No, it was the wind, not a voice at all. She sighed, echoing the sound. At times this trip, she almost thought she had found it. Whatever “it” was: some prickle of power, some trace of it, even a rock curiously carved or a shard of pottery, or scrap of metal—something that could not be traced to the villagers who now maintained these cave warrens as storages and refuge in times of raid.
Almost.
That was how she survived, she and the people she loved, some of the time. The darkness brought back memories, memories of fear, of power prickling behind her eyes, of voices in her brain calling her name, demanding that she pay attention! Or, like a tardy schoolboy, she would face the whip. The lashes of that power in her mind were not a punishment she would choose.
Around this curve. Bend down. Put out your hand—just so! yes, and support yourself against the pillar that some kindly artisan had carved here, no doubt for just this purpose. What was that she felt incised into the rock? A butterfly? A figure of a woman, such as the monks vied in smashing? Or was it only a slip of the chisel? She ran her fingers along the grooves. No ... letters, a maker's mark. One D ... U ... K ...
Behind her Tzipporah murmured in dismayed impatience.
Asherah moved on, her garments sweeping against the narrow passageway. Had the mark been important, she would have sensed it as fire behind her eyes, or a pressure so demanding it would force her to her knees until she gave voice to it.
The time they had fled Baghdad, for example: as a child, she had waked screaming in the night, just enough time for servants to snatch up arms and defend them, winning the precious hours they had used to retreat. Or the time a cousin bought a house she did not like. It had burned, and it was only through the mercy of God that no lives were lost. But who listened to a child, unless she screamed?
More people, Asherah realized, than listened to an unwed maid; and it would be many years until she grew old enough—God grant she lived through them in health—that she would be listened to for her wisdom. And yet, wisdom of a sort there already was, honed by study. And her senses grew keener as her body ripened. At first, her women blamed her moods on her new womanhood.
She had wept when her mother had left their house with her brother to show her kin her baby son, and wept harder, for no reason, they all said, all one night. For months, Asherah had dreams of bones covered by drifting sand, or raiders sweeping down. For months, they waited for a letter from her mother's people, then for some word from the outposts along the caravan routes, then for any scrap of news or rumor at all from the net of spies her father cast into the sand. Like water poured onto the desert, her father's gold, like her mother's and brother's blood, had been spilled out into the sand; and no one would see any of them again.
In comforting a child who seemed likely to run mad with grief, Joachim had become aware that his turbulent daughter's dreams were more than a child's mourning. He had not become rich, not survived by ignoring what was put before him—in this case, the history of his daughter's outbursts and what followed them. Another man might see her as a witch, a danger to him and to the safety of the people. Joachim saw the promise in his daughter's painful gifts!
How much Asherah loved her father, not least because he called her curse a gift! But he too had sought out truth as eagerly as trade all his life. Finding his daughter of even more interest as a mind than an agent of family bargaining, he had kept her by his side: a good daughter, a loyal girl, and his dearest ally.
If he had given her life, she had repaid him several times. On the road from Samarkand once, the sight of a pool of water had sent her retching to her knees. That sight had cost her father a prospective son-in-law, as frightened by the way her fears had been accepted as he was revolted by her loss of control. Joachim accounted the continued health of their pack animals and, of course, of themselves as rather more important. Aided by substantial gifts to his family, her father found it easy to convince the youth (who wanted to be convinced far more than his family had ever wanted her for a daughter-in-law) that fear and fever had made him see what he had not. Now, her father's drovers looked to her as much as to her father. Well enough, since she was now his sole heir. Better still, now that she was known among the great trading families to be sufficiently odd that she might better, for all her youth, her virtues, her wealth, and the Law itself, she might do better to remain thus.
Only once since her mother's death had her foresight, refined now by study and prayer and practice, failed even in part. Menachem, she thought, had been pressed into service to torture an Emperor who had already lost his diadem and must lose his sight. She had failed to warn them when the soldiers came. One young soldier had taken pity on them—she remembered his cleanliness and strength beside her as he fought for courage in her presence. No harm had come to her or any of the Jews herded into the camp—except that Menachem had left them and gone to Alexandria where, please God, he too would learn to heal.
She had feared her powers were failing but, “Who else was there to comfort the Emperor?” her father had comforted her—when he too had stopped shaking. It was a good deed, a great deed; but it was a deed she could have done without. Its immensity, and its power to have destroyed her and hers, terrified her. So, she had been well pleased to attend her father here, to this Imperial backwater that had been the birthplace of the Emperor she had watched be destroyed.
True help, she raged to Joachim, would have been to free him. Since she had had her women's growth, he had introduced her to some ancient scrolls, some from Alexandria and some, older yet, from Babylon. They had awakened her to ideas that desperation might have made her try. She had feared for her father, the other men, and for herself. She had even feared for the young officer, who had offered her protection although, white and anguished himself at his Emperor's fate, she thought he needed it even more than she. His determination and loyalty—like his Emperor's courage—deserved better recompense. And so she had drawn upon her power ...
... and felt her father's voice inside her thoughts, forbidding her as surely as if an Archangel barred her path with a flaming sword.
And then the iron had struck, bungling the hateful task, once, twice, a third time; and the time for intervention was far past. Menachem had collapsed, and what she could do by compassion and courage must be done.
But she had taken the subject up with Joachim later on, as they hastened into the South. With luck the Ducas Emperor now in power would not know them from any one of a number of clans of wealthy Jews. Even his own surgeon would help conceal them. If true danger came, they could be gone in an instant, bound for the caravan routes that were marked more surely by the names of merchant families that were kin to them than by the shifting roads across the sand.
“And what then, daughter?” he had asked. “Let them see what you know and they do not? No quicker way to the torturers ourselves!”
“He might have been grateful!” she had railed.
For the first time in her adult life, her father had laughed at her. “Grateful to us? What is the measure of a king's gratitude to the Children of Israel? A quick death, perhaps, if we are fortunate. No, we truly exist to serve God and to save a remnant of us alive that we may continue to serve Him until, finally, at the end of time, we establish our Kingdom. That is why we are alive, and not washed away like sand upon the shore. Like the others.”
The others ... up the rocky stairs Asherah trudged, one stair to every vanished empire. The Egyptians. The Babylonians. The Philistines. The Greeks. The Romans. This latest empire of Christians who called themselves Roman. Was it too about to be swept onto the shoals of time where empires that had been cast down went to be forgotten—by everyone but her?
It was hard to watch and wait. But, for Asherah, it would have been harder not to know at all.
One last stair there. She ducked to avoid the bulge in the rock that the carvers had not smoothed when this tunnel was burrowed out of the naked stone. Almost free. Now the passage evened out, went from tunnel to sloping chimney within instants. She began to see light up ahead. The s
hadows plucked at her clothing as if seeking to draw her back into their midst: come; we will give you all you ask. She pressed on, calling on strength that prayer and constant walking had allowed her to sustain. Hard enough it was to negotiate the twists and turns, to learn the stairs and ramps of the underground ways without the constant need to listen with all her senses, not just for water, but for whatever man or beast might lie in wait. Or even for the whispers that the knowledge that she sought was here. Use these places the villagers did, and must; but they feared them.
Past the millstones and the heavy doors that could be drawn to bar the way within. Up uneven stairs, rough-hewn once, smoothed now by the passage of centuries of feet. Asherah urged her maidservant up the last steps toward the light.
She raised her head, smoothing her veil over hair that she knew was sadly tumbled. The sky was darkening from gray to indigo, a few last banners lingering at the horizon in a futile contest with the rising moon.
And then she smiled. Along with the servingmen, her father was waiting for her. And smiling. Guilt twinged deep within her. He was too old to ride out this far. But he smiled as one sure that he had given a joyous surprise. She would not have to travel home by night accompanied by a tired maid, sullen guards, and questions such as “did she run mad this time?” mouthed behind her back. Sometimes, those unspoken accusations weighed on her more than any other burden she might bear.
“Are you content, daughter?” Joachim asked her with an answering smile.
“I shall be content,” she said, “when I find the entrance to this roadway to the center of all caves the Christians talk about when they think we don't hear them.”
Joachim laughed.
“And what did you glean today?” he asked. “We should call you Ruth. Surely, no corn is as alien as what you seek.”
He gestured at one manservant to take the bag tied to her belt, at another who must help Tzipporah mount—which she did with precisely enough moaned complaints to let Asherah know she had exceeded her bounds. How long the road would be to their home. But Tzipporah, like Asherah, had traveled the caravan routes to the East: she could ride in her sleep, if she must.