He stood back, pushing her with him. Let it settle. They both breathed shallowly as the dust eddied into the cave, obscuring the figures that had led Asherah to this spot. When it subsided, and they had not fallen choking to the ground, Leo reached into his tunic and pulled out something dark and shining.
“I have my sword,” he told her. “But you...”
“I have a dagger,” she said.
“Use this instead,” he asked. His eyes lit. Asherah had seen that look on men about to take a mad risk for the joy of it, and in that moment, she felt it in herself.
She took the weapon. It was the small, obsidian blade that he had used as a final weapon the night he had been attacked. Had he given it her for luck? They all grew superstitious in this haunted land. She smiled and lifted it to him in salute.
Lifting one of the torches from its improvised holder, he kindled the other and handed it to her. Raising the other torch, Leo bent down and thrust it into the darkness beyond the broken rock.
It flared brightly. Undoubtedly, the unknown, ancient engineers had equipped their creation with air shafts, like those the cave cities boasted.
“I must see!” Asherah's hands tightened on torch and dagger. They pulled her forward like iron to lodestone.
She was so much smaller than Leo she could duck beneath his arm and find herself within. Too quick for him to stop, she suited action to her thought.
Panting a little, she stood within a passageway, wider than any in the underground cities, except for their vast, main caverns. And it was more finely carved, the walls more truly vertical and smooth, the corners carved more finely. In the torchlight, paintings flickered on the walls: women again, but in no manner of garb she had ever seen; women with cats and serpents; men in triple-crowned headdresses, marching down the long corridor until it turned sharply, hiding what might lie ahead from sight.
With a quick oath, Leo scrambled through to stand beside her. He was taller by far than she, but, nevertheless, his head did not touch the ceiling; and five men his size could have marched abreast.
“Get back outside!” he whispered harshly. The command echoed down the passageway, idle, useless. He might as well, in the golden days before the library at Alexandria burned, permit her to stand before it, but forbid her to enter. Her breathing came rapidly. She could hear her heart pounding, a drumbeat that, in another instant, would set her to dancing forward.
Her hand shook, but she raised her torch and played it on the walls. Reddish light danced off the figures in their endless procession down the painted walls. Asherah thought she could see their eyes light with awareness: after all these centuries, to hear a voice again.
But who knew what they spoke among themselves once this corridor was sealed off and the builders withdrew, abandoning them to their unthinkable privacy?
“I have seen men and women like these carved into the side of a cliff,” Leo said. “Storm gods.”
“And I have seen idols thrice the height of a man carved into rock,” Asherah murmured.
“In tombs?”
She shook her head, already, in her thoughts, starting down the corridor, around the bend that might lead to ... to what?
Leo stood at her side, his breathing rasping even more deeply than hers. She would have been afraid without him here. He will leave you. He is not for you. But in this moment, he was here; and this adventure and this knowledge were adventure and knowledge shared. This much, at least, I have.
“Best not to go too far,” he said, prudent far too late. He realized it and flashed a conspirator's grin at her.
She handed him back the obsidian dagger.
“Keep it.”
She shook her head. “There's no danger here. Not now.”
Exasperation flared in Leo's eyes, to be replaced by a wary respect. “If I asked how you knew...”
“You would truly believe I had gone mad. Unless, of course, you chose to believe me. You really might try that some time.” She had strained every sense, including that strangeness within her that had told her so often whether danger lay ahead. Danger always did, these days; but for now, they were safe. No enemies would stalk them down this long, strange corridor; no enmity hovered in the still air.
Leo sheathed his sword. Asherah blinked away unexpected, unwelcome tears and decided she had seen a wonder. He wanted to know. For once, knowledge—or curiosity—had cast out fear. In that regard, Byzantine and Jew were very much akin; but that knowledge was unwelcome.
Half-abstracted by the lure of the opened passageway, Leo propped his torch in an ancient bronze torch holder that had not been removed when the builders withdrew. He kindled a fresh one from it. The third fire bloomed in the corridor, catching glints off the rock surfaces left unpainted.
Down the passageway, boring straight through the living stone. Down to where the passage curved and seemed to start downward; but forward, always forward.
“Look at how much finer the work is here than even toward the end of the tunnel.” He gestured with his chin. “And down there a ways, do you see those openings? I wonder if they lead to rooms or other passageways.”
How long had they been down in the lowest depths of the underground, and how long had they delved? Here in the firelight, time aboveground seemed like an illusion: there was only firetime and shadowtime now that the unimaginable silence had been breached. The figures watched them from painted eyes. Many were no taller than Asherah herself: dark-haired, dark-eyed beneath their pointed crowns; sturdy in their archaic armor or draped gowns.
“I have seen women like this painted in the valley,” Leo said. “Did your father tell you about them?”
“On icons?” Asherah felt her voice rise skeptically. “They hardly look Christian.”
Well, if it came to that, they hardly looked like Jews either, not that there should be graven images in any Jewish shrine. She thought of the underground ways in Rome in which Christians had hidden, in which they had worshipped, and which they had made bright with symbols of their faith: men praying, shepherds, vines, cups. Catacombs, those Roman hallows had been called.
From whom had the builders of Malagobia and Enegobi and all of the other caves felt they had to hide? Or was all of this a maze in service of some nameless god? Next time, Asherah thought, I shall bring a clew of thread. She would not think of the Labyrinth of Crete or what Minotaur might lie at its heart—or the betrayal of Ariadne, the traitor who had revealed its secrets to save the life of the prince she loved, who abandoned her not long afterward.
These figures marching down the walls in solemn procession looked far more fierce—dark of hair, dark of eye, intent of purpose. None wore any garb that Asherah saw men and women wear today, and her wanderings had taken her very far. But some: she imagined that the men with staring eyes and fiercely curled beards could have borne names like Nebuchadnezzar or Nimrod; some looked Armenian; some tall and fair; and some, for whom she had no standard to refer to, looked far, far older.
One woman's figure stood facing forward, as if it would confront her. Asherah went up to it and looked into its ancient face. Save for its immobility, its darkened skin, it could have been her own.
“Don't go far,” Leo warned her. Asherah shook her head, preoccupied.
She stared into the painted face. The torches burned brightly: the air was good. The builders had built for comfort, she decided, as well as convenience. She wondered at the roughness of the caves beyond the broken wall. What catastrophe had made them begin work, then leave it in so crude a state?
She found herself smiling as she stared at the image. Greetings, Sister.
It seemed to smile at her as if seeing her, knowing her better than she knew herself. Her heartbeat and breathing were settling, deepening. One day, she promised herself. Soon. Soon, she would take the passage to wherever it might lead.
She glanced up at her torch: time still remained before she must return, but not as much as she could long for. Air stirred within, and she fancied she could hear music
, a faint piping that drew her onward.
Her heartbeat grew louder. Abruptly, her clothes clung to her, too heavy, though it had been chilly in the caves earlier that day. She put up a hand to touch not her face, but the goddess’ as if she wiped a bead of sweat from it. Her fingers came away dusty. She brushed them down the painted figure. More dust, which she had taken for pigment, fell away: the figure beneath was fair, totally bare, and ripely female, like the graven image her father insisted on keeping in their house. Her own body, if she forced herself to strict honesty, curved thus, not like the tall, more spiritual forms that the Christians painted in caves and icons, or picked out with shimmering tiles.
One must favor the spirit over the flesh, said the theologues of Byzantium. Oh yes. They said, they always said so very many things: especially if they could speak in a tone of utter command to women. But in the depths of the night, when the blood heated, and the pipes played, it was not the spirit alone that drew men's hearts. Not the promise of spring, but full, rich summer such as this. Even after all these years. They had known it in Canaan. And they had feared it. Why else would the priests thunder so loudly? They must have felt it themselves.
A thread of something heavy, dark, and sweet, such as might be carried at great expense and peril from the lands of incense, wafted through the air. I am dreaming, she told herself. The painted goddess smiled without parting her lips.
Asherah put her hand to her own brow and started forward, her torch flickering bravely. There would be time to see what was in at least one of the side-passages, if she hurried. She suspected from the footsteps behind her that Leo was already exploring too. She wanted to call out, tell him to wait for her or at the least tell her what he saw. Something choked her speech, and she could not move for the heat that spread throughout her body. All she could manage was his name; and even that came out half stifled.
“Asherah.” Leo had come up close behind her. He set the torch in the nearest holder, illuminating the shameless figure on the wall.
Again, the painted goddess smiled that knowing smile. Again, his heartbeat and the warmth of his body, the smell of his sweat, the dryness of the dust that dulled his hair mingled with the incense.
The music and the incense joined with her pulse, intensified into a thrum within her.
“Asherah.” No “lady” now; unease trembled in his voice, but not more than his hands shook as he clasped her shoulders as if to shake her free from some strange dream. Instead, the dream wrapped itself about them both more firmly, drawing them down into it.
Yes. The figures marched down the corridor, to some ritual in which she must participate—but not alone. Here was her match, if their courage and desire held.
Greatly daring, Asherah smoothed the dust off his hair and looked up into Leo's eyes, black and wide in this hidden place. Within them, she saw herself. That strangeness in her that she knew had driven away the sons of merchant princes and made even scholars and physicians recoil waked now and shone in her, full force.
He saw her as she was. He saw all that she was. But his eyes held her reflection, but no fear. His hands slid over her shoulders, drawing her close against him. Again, he breathed her name, making it sound like a sigh of longing and need from a man waking in the depth of night and turning to his beloved.
The beat of her heart and the illusion of music and incense in her mind heightened. As his arms closed about her, she let herself yield. It was that or dance down the passageway to what unimaginable ending she might reach before her light guttered out and sanity and life followed it into the dark. She would take, she determined, this much to remember even on the edge of the storms that her father said thundered on the horizons.
Don't think of your father, she ordered herself. Not now. He likes Leo, something in her mind protested.
Don't think, the command came again, this time backed by the scents and in the air, or in her mind, her own mental voice reinforced, as it seemed, by a darker, richer music that seemed so familiar now that it had been awakened in her thoughts. And in her body.
Don't think. Not now.
The air was hot. Her clothes were heavy. Leo's touch and the throbbing in her temples and her body made her head spin and weakened her knees. Before she shut her eyes, she saw the face upon the wall. Its gaze seemed to intensify, the eyes to enlarge. And to approve.
For a moment, Asherah rested against him. Leo's hands stroked her body, caressing it the way she had watched him touching that statue the other night. His hands on her sides, sliding to her hips, were increasingly insistent as he bent to kiss her. His lips were thirsty as they sought to part hers. As her mouth opened under his, she flung her arms about his neck, making herself vulnerable to the seeking hands that moved up to cup her breasts, his thumbs rubbing over and around her nipples until she gasped with pleasure.
Laughter bubbled from Leo's throat into her mouth. He slid his hands away from her breasts, laughing again when she murmured with growing delight, flicking her tongue with his own. Were these refinements that Christian nobles learned in Byzantium as they learned the trade of arms? Or was it simply that he knew more than an unmarried woman—or even that the compulsions here that had driven them into each other's arms were teaching him, minute by minute, how to excite her?
He slid his hands down until he could push her hips against him. She tried to recoil, a last instinct toward modesty, from the urgency she felt in him; but his hands forestalled her long enough for her own body to take fire from his. A slow, aching pulse burned deep within her where she had always known she must not touch nor permit anyone else but perhaps a midwife someday, to do so. Her thighs opened before she willed it. Leo worked one hand around to press her mound. The sweet, unfamiliar ache heightened. Comfort me with apples, for I am sick of love.
As Asherah felt her knees give way, Leo swung her up and carried her into the darkness of the room from which she had called him. The light from the torch above the goddess-image was enough for her to see it: a carved table, much like she had seen in the upper reaches of the cities; an alcove.
Leo set her down carefully as if upon a bed, bare of the sheepskins that, in the city they had left behind, she might have expected. He edged himself in beside her, kissed her again, then pressed her back against the stone until his body covered hers. Again, he kissed her, and she closed her eyes.
He would flee her, as they always had. At least, this one desired her for now, and she wanted him. For once, she thought, she would risk taking what she wanted. She was a woman grown with a woman's craft. If that failed her, as, clearly, her good sense had, there were herbs and discreet midwives. There was even exile, which would be better than knowing that this man too had not just feared her, but repented of her.
But for once, she would know what it was to be desired, rather than respected like one of the icons these Christians knelt to. Leo plucked free her veil and kissed her again, twisting fingers in her hair. Wanting him made her ache as if an ember smoldered inside her, just where her thighs met. Slowly, she let her legs part. Her body moved beneath Leo's, seeking a way to yield herself without seeming too eager. Perhaps she could even imagine just for a little while that she was beloved.
When the kiss ended, she found herself clasping him, arms and legs. The pulse that had first aroused her drummed now in the hot air. The incense she fancied she had smelled earlier seemed mixed now with musk. Leo's mouth pressed against her neck. His face was wet as he murmured her name, first against the hollow in her throat, then upon her breasts, already half-bared from his caresses. For a moment, he relaxed as if, for the first time in years, he could permit himself that much ease. He trusted her as much as he wanted her! The shock held her motionless long enough to feel how utterly his body trusted, resting on hers.
Whispering to him, Asherah ran her hands down his spine, then up his back again. He lifted his face from between her breasts to look into her eyes.
Asking her consent? She would give him anything. He had only to take it—and
her. Again, his hands moved over her, holding her heartbeat in his hand. She had raised her knees, but she was still guarded by the heavy fabrics of her garments. As he began to coax them away from her, she remembered how intimately his fingers had traced the shadowed delta so lovingly carved between the thighs of the statue he had held. She had flushed at the sensuality of that touch: he had reddened to find her watching his fingers. This time, he would be touching her, rather than lifeless stone; and she would open for him and be joyful. He wasn't a priest. He wouldn't ever be a priest. And for now, he was hers.
Asherah closed her eyes and let desire wash away fear of the unknown. With desire came vision. The goddess she had seen: she saw her, bathed and oiled by priestesses, led to recline in such a place, softened by pillows, waiting for her consort.
Now Leo rested his hand upon her inner thigh and traced it delicately. Upward. Yes; further upward. This was no dream. It was no dream that she should dare be dreaming. Leo's breath hissed between his teeth. A moment more, and he would touch the fire within her. She should cry out. No one would hear her if she cried. She should call this abomination, flee it, repent of it. It had been abomination so long ago in Canaan when the priestesses called out to the men of the Twelve Tribes, and the men from the stranger-tribes with their dark eyes reached out their hands to the daughters of Israel.
She would do nothing of the kind. It was no stranger whose touch made her tremble and gasp now: it was Leo, not an enemy, an outsider. So righteous the old fathers were: so stern. They too had known this. But they had been afraid, where there was no need for fear.
In her vision, the woman lying on the altar wore her face and nothing else. And the man who came to her, dropping his robes, was Leo. She watched him, in her dreams, her eyes flicking to the mysteries at the center of his body. He was ready to take her and bring them both to the fulfillment that was counted here as worship. He lay beside her, then over her; and her knees came up to clasp his legs. She felt the heat throb in her core, the opening of her body, the tracing of the folds within it, and then a triumphant cry and union.
Shards of Empire Page 26
