Joachim smiled proudly. “'But wisdom, where shall it be found?', is it? It is the custom of ladies of Baghdad and Alexandria to study, if they have the aptitude and desire. My child has both. But, sir, I am forgetting honesty. Let me return your property to you.”
From the folds of his heavy robe, he produced a tiny, gleaming blade. “This fell from your hand on the road. It is very old, I judge, and very curious. Were I you, I would take great care of it. It might be of some value beyond its age.” Carefully, he tested his finger on the shining thing, then handed it to Leo.
“It was a gift from a prophetess. I shall keep it forever now.”
“There is a great deal of that stone here,” Asherah ventured. “Wherever the mountains smoke. Father, do you recall if Plinius mentions it?”
Joachim shook his head. “My memory is not what it was for Latin. But the black stone holds an edge and carves well. Show our guests the black figure.”
Asherah rose and went to one of the columns that served as display stands. Carefully, using both hands, she picked up the figure Leo had noticed before, of a goddess with child, hugely swollen, but with tiny head and feet, and brought it to him. With equal care he took it to examine, trying hard not to flush at the idea of holding a figure of a naked woman in the presence of his host's daughter. He watched his fingers glide sensually over the curves of the figure's breasts and belly and the incised triangle beneath them. This time he did flush.
The light struck the statue, and it seemed as if it glowed from within. Or at his touch.
And he didn't know whether he was more relieved or more embarrassed when Asherah laughed softly. “It affects everyone so. I tell my father that he retains this ancient idol because it has charmed him.”
“It was a gift,” said Joachim. “From your holy man Meletios. You ride to see him, I have heard. He is wise and good. Oh—what do we talk about? Egypt, of course. I spent some years in Thebes before my daughter was born.
“To answer more of your question, daughter, they used this stone in Egypt during surgeries, opening even the skull. I think there is some story about Moses and the black glass, too—that as an infant, he was tested to see if he had special powers. Pharaoh had him shown glowing coals and the black glass. A babe would choose the coals, but a wise soul in a baby's form would know to pick the stone. Naturally, being Moses, he would know which was the more precious—but an angel whispered to him, and he reached for the coals and carried them to his lips. Which was why, ever after, he was halt and thick of speech, and Aaron the Priest spoke for him.”
Asherah laughed and shook her head. “Father, surely, Moses saw onyx, not obsidian.”
Joachim imitated her head-shake. “Does it matter? We are dealing in symbol here, not in fact. Never have daughters, sir. They feel free to argue with you, far more than sons. Did you not feel as if your sisters took unfair advantage?”
Leo found himself laughing, more at ease than he had been for months. “I had no sisters, sir. But I knew no lady among my kin who was not a better general, in terms of the ordering of her life and the lives of those around her, than many in the field.”
Leo handed the statue back to Asherah.
“It is very beautiful. Sir, do you discuss such stories with Father Meletios, or such statues?”
Joachim smiled at him. “Mostly, we argue. He is a civilized man, despite the wilderness he chooses to inhabit. Do you not find him so?”
“He is a hard taskmaster,” Leo admitted. He found Joachim easy to talk to, much like his own father, only as adult man to adult man, not father and son. “He tells me I am not cut out for life as a hermit or as a priest, but that I may build my own refuge and try to pray for a vocation. If all goes well, I shall have no daughters.”
“And you will have missed out on one of life's greatest blessings,” said Joachim.
Asherah set the statue back on its pedestal with a tiny clash of stone against stone.
“No doubt, you have found him to be a sane and practical man as mystics often are. Ah, Asherah, come back to us. My daughter does not approve of the valley. She is angry for the sake of the women who were cast out. Child, at times, I think I should have named you Deborah, not Asherah.”
“She was a wise woman.” The laughter was back in Asherah's voice.
“And led her men in battle—no, she told Barak to fight, and so he did. But you, you would be a Deborah who led her own soldiers, perhaps both men and women?”
“Father, I am certain that the time may come when we will all have to fight. That is why the people fill the caves, why...”
“My daughter studies history. And since coming here, she has become convinced that the history of this land can be read in its very rocks. The very presence of the black stone indicates that once, Mount Argaeus did not just loom on the horizon; it, or others like it, belched fire and molten rock.”
“Is that why you go to the caves, lady?” Leo was glad of the excuse to speak directly to her again. “Or do you, too, search for the road they say connects all the cities below the earth and the great treasure in their midst?”
“Ah, the caves have you in their spell, too!” Asherah said. “I should explore them in your presence; you would grow tired less rapidly than Tzipporah.”
Her waiting woman straightened, flushed, and proclaimed her willingness to clamber in the dark for as long as her mistress desired. Asherah, Leo knew, was being outrageous; women of good family in Constantinople would not have gone on such expeditions unaccompanied except by a man who was no kin to them. In fact, such women would probably have seen no secular advantage in such expeditions at all. Clearly, however, Asherah did.
“You seek treasure, lady?” Leo asked again. “What would you find? The jewels of Helen or of some unknown queen?”
“Wisdom,” Asherah declared, “is the treasure I seek. But it would be good to see, to know whether those roads exist and where they meet. And treasure...” She shrugged. “A little treasure would not come amiss. Too much, and there is enmity. But a little...” She looked at her father and laughed. “I am a merchant's daughter, sir. Would you expect me to protest I have no eye for value?”
“Not if you created the beauty in this room,” Leo told her.
“You see,” said Joachim. “You must have daughters. My child is my great consolation.”
“I did not create the beauty here. I found it. This is an old land, a haunted land, with many shards from old cultures tossed up on its fields. Perhaps that is why I find it beautiful. But still, I thank you.”
“You do not fear the old things, lady? In the town, they break them.”
Asherah shook her head. “How shall I fear them? They are old, but so are my people. I feel at home among them. Your people, however ... only a thousand years, an eruption of Turks; and you fear world's end. We have seen many such, survived many such deathbeds, perhaps, of Empires...”
“Asherah,” Joachim cautioned, and the woman fell silent.
“'Strength and dignity are her clothing, and she laugheth at the time to come,'” Leo quoted softly.
Asherah's silks fell about her like water as she rose from her cushions. Color more angry than modest stained her face, and her eyes were bright and enormous. “I must go speak with the servants. Forgive me.” She swept from the room.
Leo looked about it, as if for clues to her sudden anger.
“Forgive me, if I offended.”
Joachim held out his hands, a baffled, conciliatory gesture.
“It is not from you that my mistress should hear such words.” Tzipporah rustled to her feet more slowly than the younger woman had. “Those are words with which a husband praises his wife.” She left the room, her back too straight.
“I may have erred,” said Joachim. “My daughter is not just my daughter, but my only son as well. We value such women, but their lives are not as easy as their more sheltered sisters'. Do the ladies of your City find it so?”
Leo thought of the Empress, mock-demure despite how
Psellus praised her. Of the redoubtable Anna Dalassena, who, he was fairly certain, had never pretended to anything in her life. Of his mother, ambitious in the world, but fiercely contrite. The Empress Eudocia, resolved to spend her life in prayer. They would have things to say to one another, he thought. And to this woman, this stranger in a strange land, who might be the strangest and most accomplished of all of them.
I have dreamed horrors, Leo thought, and always, then, it was your face that brought me rest from them. What are you, lady? Aside from forbidden to me, by the salvation I seek, by your people, and by mine?
Perhaps it would not be that great a tragedy if Father Meletios were right about Leo and his vocation.
“I should beg her forgiveness,” Leo said. “I meant no harm.”
“I hope you will come again to do so, and to speak with me. You are a civilized man, Leo Ducas, and civilized men are rare at times like these.”
Leo bowed amidst his cushions, a grace he had learned from his time among the Turks. Would they indeed overrun this land he hoped to make his home? He hoped not.
“With your permission, I shall indeed come again to apologize, at least.”
Joachim inclined his own upper body with even more ceremony than Leo. He rose. Perforce, Leo and Nordbriht rose too.
“It grows light outside. I shall have you shown to rooms where you can rest until dawn or however long you require. I have morning prayers, but I shall be here to say farewell to you.”
The hot wind plucked at Asherah's clothing as she watched the file of women and children carrying provisions into Malagobia, the more remote of the two major cave cities. Other refugees, she knew, prepared to move into Enegobi.
If she ruled here, she would have ordered those children loaded onto her father's camels, would have slung them up into the carpeted saddles herself rather than see them serve as beasts of burden. All their willing labor now: and for what? To retreat into a fastness their parents only hoped would withstand attack, and attack by a race known to be swift, thorough, and merciless.
The villagers had found more than just the bodies of the ... she dared not call them assassins; words like that, slipping unwarily from the tongue, betrayed as subtly as human traitors. No: the nobles whose bodies they had found lying in the road had been young men, cruelly ambushed by raiding Turks, cut off in their prime, and all of the other truisms that she, outside the Christian community, need not repeat with the women of their families, who had little enough to say to her outside details of trade.
Matters had not stopped there. The villages had suffered other raids as well. Alp Arslan was dead. Fierce as he was, he had been at least honorable, as Leo had told her and her father. Now his successors made him seem a paragon of peace and restraint. The earth itself had trembled, and the cap of Mount Argaeus seemed whitened with a smoke plume rather than its perpetual snow. The churches, needless to say, were crammed.
More than one storm loomed over Cappadocia these days.
She shut her eyes against the sunlight and the ugly visions that tormented her: men and women dying in a misty land, the unity of God the last words on their lips before the screaming started; men drawing lots and slaying their families, then slaying each other, before the last man slew himself. Why hide when you could flee, saving what brands you might from the burning, to live and thrive another day? Honor lay in survival of the people. Survival of the children. And extolling the unity of the name of God.
Open your eyes again, Asherah. What do you see?
A brazen sky, with flat, sullen clouds moving in too fast.
The hot wind lashed at her as if she stood in the deep desert far to the east. To her left, like a fist of clouds, a storm center hammered the horizon. It would strike here before long. When you faced such storms in the desert, you wrapped yourself and your camels in felts and huddled down to wait before moving on, always moving on.
Here, it would be safer to flee indoors than to try to outrun the storm. Safer yet, to seek the refuge of the underground in this land. Here, the earth was its own protection. Having herself fled so often, she felt this rootedness, this faith in the old, rich land, as a seduction.
How tempting to say “here I am and here I remain.” It was an attraction that should not be for the likes of her. Long ago, her people had lost their land. But they remembered it always, dreaming of the day—even if it came at the end of time—when they might be restored to it and, this time, please God, hold it forever.
“For we were strangers in the land of Egypt.” They were strangers everywhere their feet touched, Asherah thought with the sorrow and anger the words always brought: useful for their talents and their wealth; valued, sometimes, for their knowledge; but never trusted, never permitted to remain.
Perhaps these people, these stolid, sturdy people, who dug themselves into the land itself, had the right of it: scurry into sanctuary, abide, let the waves of Empire wash over them; and, when the waters subsided, emerge again to till the soil, lead the flocks to what greenery remained in the summer, raise the children, and show them how to survive the next assault. Ararat lay far to the east, Asherah recalled. It made sense that from this land, the world would be rebuilt.
Safety argued that it was time and past time to leave here. They had received packets of letters sent from up and down the caravan routes urging them to move on; yet she and her father had not done so. Not this time; and she had not forced herself to speculate why.
“My father judges it safe,” she told a woman with two children clinging to her shabby skirts. “I remain here.”
“But when there is danger, you will be gone?” A flash of resentment: dangerous as sparks to dry leaves if that rumor spread.
“I am my father's daughter and must obey him.” A woman's obedience was almost always a safe thing to invoke: everyone paid it lip service before going about her business. “But I do not always give in without a word—do you?”
The woman smiled, and they were friends again. Or friendly. Once again, Asherah set about her self-appointed work: getting those people out who wished to go. Saving brands from the burning. No, she assured one woman, if she wished to send her son to her kin, he would be brought there “out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage.” But the story of the Exodus did not reassure the woman. No, Asherah assured her, they would not seek to make a Jew of him. He would not be cut, though they did that in the capital. “We have sons of our own,” she reassured her.
Only, Asherah had no sons and was not likely to. She remembered from her lessons in Greek how long ago, there had been a princess whose name meant, quite literally, “spirit.” Beautiful, Psyche was—accomplished and wise, she was admired, but not beloved. Never beloved.
But Asherah was no princess to wait for fate or fortune. Never mind her Greek lessons, set aside now in the face of commerce and danger. Never mind the face of the man she and her father had rescued, and who had rescued her in Cotyaeum, or the way her heart had lifted when he had smiled at her—he remembers me! It was not only her maids who had heard too many stories; as a scholar, she had heard far more.
And it was past time for her to set to work. Allowing herself to be distracted by greetings, by details of stowage or a child's illness, she proceeded toward the caves.
Why is today different from all other days? she asked herself. Her heart raced; her breathing came fast. Because today, she would return to a deep, deep passage that led to a way she had glimpsed as her next-to-last torch flickered. Something about the rock had drawn her attention, and she would gladly have tested it, had she not been forced up from below by voices echoing around a corner and her maid's terror.
As if reluctant to allow her to descend, the wind tugged at her as she headed toward the rounded entrance to the city, twice a man's height, branching off into rough chambers with columns scraped clear of the living stone like immense bones.
At the entrance, two men tested the balance on the millstone, almost the color of the grain it should have ground, that
would block access below. Women wiped down the tables, also carved from the rock when the chambers were hollowed out, while their daughters fitted bedding into alcoves carved into the walls. One family; one room. It was said that thousands could live for months in these warrens. Asherah hoped she would not have to learn how.
The storage bins were filling. The water tanks were full. In a room with carved arches like blind windows, a young priest spread out cloths and bowed before the altar, carved from a block of stone, a cross incised in its front. A boy wrestled a wineskin into a room that reminded her of a refectory. The main church was far below: she would not go there, being unsure of her welcome.
Moving on, she saw her household's marks on bags and boxes. The priests and monks would eat well at the Jews’ expense, and the Jews, for safety's sake, dared not begrudge it. Perhaps, if the Turks swept through the town, her household too would be permitted to find refuge here. But refuge was not a thing that could be paid for. It had to be earned in honest liking and trust.
So far, no one had thought to blame them for the deaths of the men left by the road. Wild beasts, the rumor went. Some blamed the Turks, as Joachim had thought they would. Other fools, with more humor than taste, had looked at how they had died and suggested that the stone lions that, occasionally, one found buried in rubble had come alive and mauled them. Asherah suspected that such vile humor helped guard them from their fear of Turkish raids.
For the most part, as merchants sought to send their wares out of danger, the men in the town formed into troops of guards. Leo had broken off work on carving out his hermitage, to move into a room in the priest's house and drill the younger men. He had, of course, to attend the funeral for the dead assassins—a ceremony Asherah was devoutly grateful her faith (and theirs) forbade her to attend. She could imagine Nordbriht trying to dim that sun-bright physical splendor of his that had dazzled the women of her household.
All except her.
His name is Leo Ducas! she told herself again. He is practically a prince, or would be if he hadn't chosen the wrong side of the Christians’ last ridiculous civil war. Even so, he says he will take vows; and he is true to his word. And then, where will you be? Men befool themselves for ideas far more than for women. Or, say he gives up, and goes back home. Never mind his talk of learned ladies, they will match him up with some small-dowried second daughter who will make big eyes at him, do all his will, and give him a baby every year. And bore him senseless.
Shards of Empire Page 24
