“I am sorry now to hurt you,” Asherah kept her tone soft. “But I tell you now, I will not give him up.”
“They rejected me,” Leo put in. “You—from the moment that I saw the two of you in Cotyaeum, you behaved with such strength and dignity. I tried to seek you out in the City. They told me to go away. And when I came here and found you, which was luck I never dreamed of having, you treated me with more honor than my own family.”
Leo flushed, but drew himself upright. He let Asherah's hand fall. “Sir, one thing more. You treated me as a son in your house. I would not have you think I betrayed your trust.”
Asherah's cheeks went crimson, and her mouth dry. To think he made that confession before a Turk!
What made it worse was the entire truth: if Leo had not betrayed Joachim's trust, it was not for lack of opportunity. Or desire.
Joachim nodded solemn acknowledgment to Leo. Then he sighed. “I had thought that you might stay with me in my old age, Asherah.” Let all of them live to see it, that was all she asked.
“We both will,” Leo said. “If you consent. And if not, I promise Asherah will always be safe and cherished.”
Joachim pulled the hand he held forward and took Leo's with the other. Sighing, he joined them. It was not the ritual of go-betweens and contracts, of family rejoicings. There would have been a contract. There would have been gifts. For the daughter of a merchant prince, those gifts would have been lavish if, say, she had joined with the son of another wealthy family, rather than a Christian outcast from an imperial family. And, when and if the time came when such things were possible, Joachim would not even be able to give his child the wedding that, no doubt, he had promised her mother he would provide. God only knew who could be found willing to wed them.
After all, canon law forbade marriage between Christian and Jew. Forbade it very loudly and very strictly. Which told you just how often it was disobeyed.
I do not care, Asherah thought, and knew it for the truth. She let her father see her face so he would know it too.
The tightness around his mouth eased somewhat. Joachim almost smiled.
“Be as a son in this house,” he told Leo. Asherah suppressed a sigh of sheer relief. “Be my son.”
Leo knelt. How strange, to see him kneel that way to her father: it must be a Christian thing. They were so very different. It would be a hard road to travel. Well, she had traveled harder ones.
And this way led to life.
Joachim pulled his hand free of Asherah's and laid it on Leo's head, blessing him. “Get up, get up,” Joachim told him. “We have work to do.”
So, it had happened. In the midst of war, she gave herself away to a stranger who drew her as no one ever had. It was not what she had hoped for. It was more than she had ever hoped to have, and more than anyone had ever thought she would have.
Leo rose. For the first time since Asherah had seen him, he looked young and glad. The gladness faded on the instant as the welter of tasks and cares he faced came flooding back; but she had seen the joy in his face, akin to hers, and that too was more than she had ever dreamed anyone would feel for her.
“Are you content now?” her father asked her.
“Thank you, father,” she whispered. “Thank you.” She bent to kiss his hand (he tugged it away, mortified), and that too was a gesture new to her. It was over. Whatever curse had dogged her, it was gone, and she had won. She had won even if they died in the next minute. But let them live.
“Don't be abject, child. You should not have doubted me. That is not how I raised you. Your promised husband will have a surprise coming, if he expects a puppet, not a wife.”
Leo's surprised laughter made the room ring.
“You take a first wife, lion's cub?” asked Kemal with a sly smile, finally daring to speak.
“Not just a wife,” Leo said. “A queen.”
“Ah,” said Kemal, “I wish you many strong sons.” His bloodshot eyes evaluated her as if she were one of the sturdy Turkish ponies, and he nodded approvingly.
Joachim nodded. He parted the curtains of the anteroom, then pushed past them, a little blindly. They had loosed their handclasp as the curtains parted, but the servants turned to stare at them. One or two of the injured men managed to smile at their commander and their benefactors.
Tzipporah, ripping cloth for bandages, looked up. She always could read her Asherah's face and eyes like a child's first letters. Her face glowed like sunrise. This was like a ballad to her; it was beyond any of her dreams. She sobbed once, and Asherah braced herself for the inevitable smothering embrace; but Tzipporah knew her duty. She finished her bandages, and now she bent to wind them about a bloody arm.
Kemal, half-forgotten, stumped after his captor. Tzipporah, finished with one patient, bore down on him with threats in her eyes of what would happen to him if he did not instantly rest. The strain in Joachim's face lifted somewhat.
“Your people do not drink wine,” Joachim told the gulam, “do they? You are a guest in my house, you and these others, and I would not insult you or your ways.”
Her father's eyes met hers, amused. Dietary laws, too, were forbidden: theirs, most assuredly; and those of Islam, assuming the Christians knew of their existence. With, of course and always, the exception of her Leo. You are becoming maudlin, Asherah, she told herself in imitation of her father's earlier reproof.
“Sometimes we forget. But I would drink to my friend—and, of course, to ease the pain.”
“See our guests have wine and food, will you?” Joachim asked Leo. “My steward will take your orders while my daughter tends the people you have brought her. My child, I think our life from now will be ... extremely interesting.”
Joachim clapped his hands for the steward, then turned to leave.
“Where are you going?” Asherah managed to ask.
“It has occurred to me that the last time we were accused of passing by upon the other side, the Samaritans got all the glory, and we got all the blame. Rather than risk that again, I shall go tend my friend Meletios. You and your ... Leo may stand as my guides, you know. Times like this force us all to become braver than we have been. Perhaps I can even partly redeem the ill that our kinsman Menachem wreaked upon my new son's"—yes, decidedly, he savored the word—"Emperor.”
At least, the townspeople had agreed to meet not in the church, but in one of the largest of the storehouses behind the market. Those farmers and herders who heard the summons in time crowded in. Some, like the well-off widows who kept their half-grown sons close at their sides, were accustomed to the town. Others, like the herders, seemed to fear the crowd, though doubtless, they feared the Turks more.
Asherah, seated to one side on a bale of carpets, tugged discreetly at her veils. The meeting was not a victory, of course, though her presence was.
“You may attend,” her father told her. "If you can be quiet.” He had shrugged at Leo, who would just have to get used to the independence of a daughter whom he had raised as his heir. From what Leo had said of his own kinswomen, he would have little trouble. Asherah sighed. There were secrets about Leo, stories from his childhood, that only his mother could tell her, but they would probably never meet.
Back to reality, she cautioned herself.
In a crowd this mixed, the mood could turn ugly in the twinkling of an eye. The Christian house of prayer was hardly a place where armed men, bloodied men, angry men could meet and shout. So their priest would forbid assembling there. At least, that prohibition removed one danger—if a slight one—from her and her father. They could be present, yet need not fear some hothead deciding to take offense at the presence of Jews in his holy place. Privately, Asherah did not think that God would be so inhospitable—anybody's God, including the one she worshipped—as to begrudge them room. But the market was a space common to all.
It was not an opinion she voiced, and it was not one asked of her. For that matter, her presence had not been requested and probably was not wanted. She was here, she
realized, as nurse and prop to her father: as much a servant to the men who reeked of fear, anger, and excitement, as the black-robed women, exiled from their shrine, were servants of the sere old holy man—and as little.
Not even the priest had frowned when Joachim remained by his old friend's side, quick to sense his need for quiet or for a restorative Joachim kept to hand. “Brought from Egypt,” he had explained. Everyone knew the fame of Egyptian surgeons and drugs. They even knew that the Emperor himself kept a Jew as a physician.
They knew her from her work in the underground villages as a generous lady and a willing worker, if a stranger and a Jew; but they knew nothing of her other skills. Somewhat against her father's will and Leo's, here she was, an attendant to Kemal, who was such a man as she might have been shielded from on the caravan routes from Baghdad. He had to be here, a trophy and, perhaps, a source of information; and he had winked at her again and hinted that his well-being relied upon her skill.
Shadows clustered at the back and by the walls—the black-robed women. They whispered among themselves, one or two smiling behind veils as Theodoulos limped past, his head up, side by side with young Ioannes.
In the center of the room, with the priests, the headmen, surviving local nobles who were not now out raising troops, and Father Meletios, lying on a pallet, stood Leo.
He was another reason that she sat here so securely in the presence of former and—who knew?—perhaps future enemies. She could not take her eyes off him. Just this once, thank God for veils. He caught sight of her and smiled, ever so slightly.
Leo had snatched a few minutes to bathe and dress himself in the clothing of a man of the great city. He looked like what he had been born to be: Ducas, knowledgeable in the Empire's ways, poised near its apex, and as confident as if he expected reinforcements to march in down the road.
Nordbriht, reclaimed from her father, stood behind him. He had rebraided his hair, and he too had changed, into a crimson tunic—so that was where the rest of the red brocade had gone! Asherah thought with an inward crow of glee. Although he lacked his axe, he and the message he conveyed were unmistakable: he was a Varangian who guarded a prince. He glared across the room at the only men who had been permitted to enter it armed. They watched Kemal, Leo's captive and, in a strange way, his friend. How strange that Kemal had insisted on being present. He had, he said, somewhat to tell the Greeks.
Ioannes, in clean, dark garments, stood nearby, forcing himself into the manhood that war had thrust upon him. His father would be proud. Asherah murmured a few words under her breath. The man was dead; he could not object to her prayers, and his son needed all the help prayer could afford him.
“What news from the City?” One of the Christian merchants from Hagios Prokopios was first to shout. “Will they send us troops to protect us?”
“Who's he?” Asherah heard the whispers start. “Ducas. A young one. Served with our Emperor before ... you know. He brought us the good father to speak to us. Let him speak!”
Leo stepped forward, drawing the attention of the room about him like a garment an actor might wear. “I think,” he said, “we should ask Father Demetrios to conduct this meeting. And allow others to speak who have lived among you longer.”
He gestured, ever so slightly, at Father Meletios where he lay. Joachim nodded at him: Good. So the old man was strong enough to speak.
The town's priest, his black robes brushed, glowed visibly. “Perhaps the holy man would bless us, then speak to us.”
Beneath her veils, Asherah bit her lip. Moments like these meant risk for her. She knew what to do: Hunch down, bow your head, do not draw attention to yourself.
Leo knelt by the old man's side, helping to support him. Now that was a relief, and clever of Leo: at least, her father would not be seen propping up a Christian priest. Despite Asherah's apprehensions, she was struck by the cultivation of the hermit's Greek and the sere beauty of his voice. She had seen glass plucked from the desert—thin, graceful shapes glazed by sun and sand until they shimmered with rainbows. Out of the waste, a treasure.
Joachim respected him. Leo revered him. Even the black-robed former nuns, angry as they still were after all these years at their exile from the valley, bowed their heads. One wept at the sight of him, so wasted and laid low.
Sighs gusted across the room, then subsided. Asherah tested the quality of the silence: tension, not contemplation.
“Are the armies coming?” This time, it was a noble who threw that demand at Leo.
He rose. “This is why my Emperor fought in the East and why your sons went with him. I do not speak of my kin. I left them to come here.”
“So we're cut off?”
“No!”
“Have you sent a messenger to ask?” One of the women asked that.
Speak quickly, Leo, Asherah thought, or these people will get out of hand. Already, some of the younger men had stiffened their backs, were drifting oh-so-casually toward the corner where Leo's most trusted soldiers guarded the gulam.
“They won't come,” Leo said. “This emperor wields a pen better than a sword. His clerks control him...”
This Emperor Michael was a coward and a fool, Asherah had long since decided. Leo had said very little of him, but she had pieced it together with accounts brought from Constantinople by other merchants. A coward and a fool, dominated by unscrupulous kinsmen and by the scholar who had all but driven Leo into madness and suicide. No wonder he sounded as if he were being strangled.
“They would not come in time, my daughter,” Meletios’ voice cut in as shrewdly as if he had not spent decades praying in the wilderness.
“We are blessed here. We have each other. And we have our friends. I have seen what I have seen—and what I see is a storm so great that the tree that attempts to stand tall against it will only break. And here is my counsel to you: we do not fight—yes, I know, but where is your humility? We lower our heads. We let the storm wash over us. And we wait for it to pass. Time is on our side.”
“You saw fighting in Egypt!” young Ioannes shouted. “How can you tell us not to fight? The whole Empire will fall!”
“My son, it has already cut you off. I am a shepherd, not a prince. And I say, if my flocks are safe, I have not failed, no matter...”
Meletios bent over, coughing. Joachim pressed forward, holding out his restoratives, but the old man waved him away.
We agree on one thing at least, her father had told Asherah after he returned from a visit to the valley. We both see the day when this Empire will fall. Odd, for a Christian. Must be his time in the desert, that graveyard for empires.
He seeks to save a remnant, Asherah realized. To save us. All of us. And Leo is his agent.
Still, the room was filled with young men, angry men; and the counsel of submission was never attractive to such as they.
“Esteemed and learned sir,” came a voice huskier than the priest's, but equally cultivated, “it takes great courage to retreat, sometimes more than to engage in battle. Is there, perhaps, another reason why you enjoin this on your people?”
Had her father gone mad that he spoke up in this group? Asherah pressed her hand to her heart and calculated how many steps it would take her to fight through to his side.
Meletios smiled. “I would remind my friend Reb Joachim—oh yes, we have disputed many times—that this is a very ancient land, known to both our peoples. I do not think open war is the will of God. We saw our Emperor fall—or you did, and this young man at your side. If we persevere in this course, well, as I said, this land is old. It shudders underfoot. Who knows if it would not crack asunder and swallow up evil-doers, as it did when the Israelites fled from Egypt...”
“God has sent the Turks to scourge us for our sins!” A young monk—and Father Demetrios laid an arm about his shoulder, comforting him, calming him, and forcing him back onto a convenient bench.
“Perhaps the old man is right. Perhaps we should repent and not fight,” said one woman wearing the blac
k that the nuns exiled from the valley had clung to for all these years.
If it came to that, she would have made a formidable enemy. Asherah had seen her in the fields once, wielding a scythe. The memory made her shiver.
Now, the tall old nun rose and made her way toward Father Meletios, her bony figure casting a long shadow over him. He lay looking up at her, prepared to endure whatever she might say or do.
She knelt and bowed her head. “Give me your blessing, Father,” she said. “Here at the end of all things.”
Meletios laid a hand upon her head. “At last. My daughter, blessed are the peacemakers. It eases my heart to reconcile with you.”
She looked at him. “But now what?”
“You can't fight us.” Kemal's wretched Greek rose over the quarrelling voices of his guards. “Even after my sultan died, they keep coming. Alp Arslan was a prince and a warrior, but these men are hungry! What was that in your Book about a plague of locusts? That is what we are, thousands and ten thousands of us, tribe upon tribe. Locusts with bows and swords. For the sake of my friend here, I hope you will all flee or accept us. I would not see you resist and die.”
Leo grimaced in pure frustration as the room rang with curses and howls of outrage. Kemal's tact, clearly, was as lacking as his luck. He's not taunting you! Asherah wanted to shout. Instead, she clenched her hands. It was terrible to see, terrible to know, and terrible to realize that if you spoke out you'd only make things worse—and she didn't know if she were thinking of Kemal, or of herself. Asherah watched Nordbriht push through to the back of the room and stand with the Turk's guards. He turned and gestured at Leo: you had best say something fast.
“People,” Leo shouted. “People, listen to me! This man saved my life when he might have killed me, long ago. He rode with men not his kin or they would have killed him. He does not taunt you. You heard him yourself. He would not see you die.”
The crowd exploded into shouts and quarrels. If they didn't die of their own accord, blood might flow. Leo and the priests had agreed: disarm the men at the door. Asherah was not fool enough to believe that they had gotten all the weapons. Even if, unfortunately, they had collected Nordbriht's axe.
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