Shards of Empire

by Susan Shwartz

  “I'm sorry I woke you. But this time, it wasn't a dream,” he admitted. “I think one of the guards threw a rock at a cat. Or some other beast.”

  Asherah's body shifted in his hold as she turned toward the covered window. Moonlight filtered in through the silks.

  “We had best hope it was only a cat. The moon is still full.”

  Leo shuddered. With the full moon came Nordbriht's change from man into beast. This time, he knew, the former Varangian had taken himself off. Scouting, he told people. Leo and Asherah knew better. When Nordbriht ran on four legs, he hunted.

  “Beasts kill no more than they need,” Asherah reminded him.

  “Natural creatures.” What if, instead of raiding some poor man's flocks, Nordbriht stalked the man himself, or malignant instinct drove him to attack a war band of Turks?

  Asherah sighed. They would have to pray that Nordbriht returned when the moon waned. “Did you sense him?” she asked.

  Leo shook his head, his lips brushing her skin, turning touch into kiss.

  “Did you?”

  “I dreamed of the moon. Pagan dreams I should not have had, you would say. Still, I first had them when we first loved each other.”

  “Then you have had these dreams for years,” Leo said. His arms tightened around her as he remembered.

  The night of their marriage, he had been escorted to her rooms—their rooms now—by men who left him there, hardly knowing whether to congratulate a groom or regret that their master's daughter married a Christian. He had found the woman made so suddenly his wife waiting for him. He assumed she had been put to bed earlier by her women, but she had risen from the flower-strewn bed and stood alone, wrapped in a gleaming robe. Her hair had flowed bewitchingly over shoulders whose bare smoothness he remembered kissing, and her eyes were huge.

  She was as much out of her depth as he, he realized. More so, being virgin. But she had looked up at him, finding the courage somewhere to trust him again. As he had in the underground ways, he reached out and took her shoulders in his hands, leaned forward, and brushed her mouth with his own.

  “Now,” he said, his voice breaking, “we finish what we began...” Her lips opened, and she pressed against him. It had been three weeks since their wedding night, which had transfigured his life.

  Now, Asherah, who seemed to know his thoughts even better than she knew his body, ruffled his hair. “Since we first ... since our wedding night. I dreamt shining women smiled at me and welcomed me. We could guess what that means, yes, love?”

  Leo sighed and relaxed against her. Oh yes.

  Her breast was soft, fragrant with attar of roses or some other, female scent he was sure belonged to Asherah alone. She was so small, but her body was surprisingly lush, and her response to his touch ... Leo smiled to himself. So self-controlled a woman, and yet, in his arms, so quick to abandon herself and her habitual modesty.

  That first night, how she had flushed and looked away as he pushed back from her shoulders the silk robe that was all her women had allowed her to wear while awaiting him. She had shivered when he looked frankly at her, but when he touched her—just as she had in the caves below, she had blossomed into desire and welcome.

  Between husband and wife, her people taught, this was no sin, but a joy. Heterodox in many of her people's ways, Asherah professed orthodoxy in this. If all the faith of the Jews were thus, he would be their most ardent convert and wonder why there weren't more.

  He really had stumbled into one of the ballads in which the Ducas lord married a princess of another people: a blend of romance, terror, and outrageous luxury. ("We put out a robe for you,” Asherah had whispered on their wedding night. It had lain on the bed, a brocaded thing of Persian splendor, almost purple. “They told me, ‘don't let him wear it long.’”)

  In the morning, Leo would shut the door on this secret, perfumed refuge, leaving it for the waking world of watches, scouts, raids, and preparations for a war they all knew they dared not fight and could not win.

  The men who had escorted Meletios back to his hermitage had returned, those few who survived. The exhausted old priest had protected them on the trip back to his home: returning to Hagios Prokopios, they had stopped to try to defend a village, scarcely more than a tumble of houses—a tumble now fire-blackened—against raiders. No soldiers could be spared to search for the missing villagers.

  Leo hardly knew which was stranger, that his army knowledge, sufficient in his past life only to make him the butt of his uncle's humor and his cat's-paw at Manzikert, had proved so valuable here that an entire town relied upon him and the veterans here nodded respect at him when they passed, or that he had won a lady about whom songs might well have been written. Perhaps the ballad into which he had stumbled was the Song of Songs.

  Behold, thou art fair, my love.

  Strangest of all, he thought, was how quickly Asherah had become his wife, their hands joined by the old hermit; and how the core of his life had been changed so greatly that he sometimes forgot he should be afraid unto despair. He had despaired, he had been afraid for so long before he came to this blessed, deadly place which he must save if he hoped to save his wife.

  There still seemed something almost illicit about their union, from the suddenness with which Meletios had joined their hands, to Father Demetrios’ dismay, to the haste with which Joachim found and coerced one of the Jews’ own priests ... in a moment, Leo would remember what they were called. No doubt the man, who bore the look of one badly worsted in a bargain, would recover from whatever persuasions Joachim had inflicted. There was even something illicit about the joy he took in it, though he was prepared to admit that that was his stupidity.

  Leo had expected strangeness in their wedding, but found it oddly simple. The strangeness came later, and would no doubt last for years, as he threaded his way through the customs of an older people than his, one that had, against more cautious judgment, accepted him. He learned to rest in the peace of this household's Sabbath, during which these people prayed in the very tongues that Christ learned at his Mother's knee or in which he had preached at the Mount of Olives, bringing holiness almost close enough for him to touch. He grew able to accept Asherah's regular withdrawals into cleansing meditation. The other members of the household learned to glance aside if Leo bowed his head at the sound of bells or felt the need to visit the church in Hagios Prokopios.

  The slight adjustments eased his way into the household. Its care, its loyalty, and its warmth washed over him and warmed him. Oh, his wife's people would have taken in any man Asherah married, but he thought the sly sideways smiles, the gifts—a fine knife, an ivory, a length of fur—pressed into his hands despite his protests, the insistence that he must eat, he must get his rest, were meant for Leo himself, not just the man Asherah had so inexplicably married. And some scar in Leo's heart that he had scarcely known was there healed when Joachim had welcomed him as a son.

  “He probably is praying she's not with child already,” Leo heard Tzipporah telling a friend with what Leo considered appalling relish. (Leo shut his eyes. That first night, he had slipped his wife's robe from her shoulders and run his hand over her flat belly. Asherah had clung to him until he picked her up and laid her on their bed, so soft, but not as soft as she, welcoming him. So slender she was, except for where her breasts and hips curved outward. A moment more, but if Asherah did not wake ... he was on fire for her.)

  “Maybe he's hoping that she is. The old man probably never thought he'd have a grandson,” her friend had replied, equally gleeful.

  He knew that Asherah's maid had always favored him. He was a soldier, a Ducas son, and therefore something out of a ballad, or out of her most farfetched dreams of a prince for the girl she had helped raise. He had rescued her nurseling from a barrenness that could only reproach her, no matter what else she had achieved. And, his adoration of Asherah, the way he struggled not to look at her or touch her until Tzipporah beamed and announced that she knew they would far, far rather be al
one and bustled out made her beam with pride. She would be glad of a child to care for.

  When she finally heard Tzipporah's frank comments, Asherah covered her face with her hands; when Leo pulled them away, he saw her cheeks were stained with tears of laughter.

  Was that why Joachim had hastened the match? Hopes for a grandson, an heir to bulwark the family against the coming storm, part of his resolve that life must go on, and his family with it?

  “You don't mind?" he breathed, appalled, to his wife and his father-in-law one evening when Asherah had made them both laugh by telling them women's gossip she had no doubt been meant to overhear.

  Joachim shrugged. “My people can count the moons as well as anyone else. Otherwise, they would not have thrived as they do. In time, they will know their stories are untrue.” Leo thought his father-in-law looked somewhat wistful.

  “Ever since I was a child, people have gossiped about Joachim's witchy daughter,” Asherah said. “This would be news to relish. They enjoyed considering us less than orthodox and point that out every time they can. Frankly, I think they like being shocked by us. By that logic, my dearest, you are simply more grist for their mills. Probably, they will think my father arranged our wedding to win some relief from taxes. Or for politics. With me married to a Christian...”

  “They don't know how bad my position is in the City.” Leo had written his parents about his marriage. Communications were bad now: he didn't know if he should expect a response from them or dread it.

  Asherah smiled up at him, her shining eyes removing any possible doubt about why she was glad her wedding was quick, rather than elaborate.

  From the first time Leo had entered their house, Joachim had treated him well. From anyone else, Leo would have said that he had been encouraged to think of himself as kin. Now that he had married into Joachim's household, Leo saw a side of the merchant, of all of them, that he had not imagined: zest, humor, color, and a ferocious love of life such as he had not imagined. It made his wish to die after Manzikert seem like a child's tantrum.

  Why hadn't he known this before? The answer was simple. Before, they had restrained themselves before their Christian friend. Fond of him as they might be, but he had been an outsider. Now he was loved; now Leo knew what a rich life lay beneath the sober, even apologetic visages of the Jews he had seen.

  What were the others like? What was life like, say, in the Jewish quarter of the City, or along the trade routes? Would they still send him away if he went to them in the Bazaar and introduced himself as Joachim's son-in-law?

  God grant he lived long enough to learn.

  He would gladly have spent all his waking hours finding out, best yet, with Asherah, whose touch as well as her voice continued to enthrall him. But she had duties of her own and, unfortunately for him, life was tense enough here that Leo dared not dally in Joachim's house, much less in the rooms he shared with his wife.

  Home—where was Nordbriht? If he did not return within a couple of days, Leo would have to seek him out. Nordbriht had quarters somewhere in the house, too; and it was a noisier place now that he ran tame there, or as tame as Nordbriht could ever run. From the gleeful complaints of the gossip he overheard, Leo suspected that Nordbriht, vastly untidy and happy to eat even the immense quantities of food offered him, was a popular—please God, not too popular—addition to the household, at least when the moon was not full. It was only Nordbriht's presence that convinced the other men in Hagios Prokopios to allow Leo to keep his Turkish prisoner with him.

  Leo learned to respond to jokes about “the bridegroom” with a foolish smile, an abstracted look, or even a yawn that brought more jokes down upon his head. Curiously enough, it united him to the town more than anything else he could have done. Marriage gave him roots here. Marriage to Asherah—she laughed when he told her he thought every man in the Empire must envy him.

  Evenings, though: on trying days, the house was infested by guests, some local, some strangers to him, but connected to Joachim by blood kinship and years of trade or scholarship. On better days, he could look forward to a waiting bath, followed by dinner and talk with Asherah and her father.

  Time alone with his wife came later. Sometimes, all Leo wished to do was sleep. Not often, though. Quickly, Asherah adapted to his ways, and he to hers. She tolerated, but was never quite at ease with his need for steel close at hand, while he still blinked in some confusion at servants who considered themselves distant cousins, to say the least, entitled to comment on every possible decision and event, until Asherah, sometimes laughing, sometimes absurdly enraged, drove them away and closed the door.

  Meanwhile, his thirst to learn the languages the others moved in and out of as effortlessly as they might walk from one room into the next, to learn what he might of Joachim's holdings in order to protect them as well as this land that had become his home won their approval. For these people, scholarship was not alms or bribe, doled out by a politician with an eye to the future. It was a birthright. Even more than that: it was a commandment.

  He had met and come to love a woman whose restraint and dignity had won his respect. Beneath her quiet face, veiled too often in public for his liking, he had found the richness of the Orient. Her bed might have delighted a princess in Babylon or Susa. And as for Asherah herself ...

  She stirred now in her sleep, and he held her even closer. His touch roused her in more ways than one. Delicately, her fingers smoothed his hair, traced his ear, stroked his neck in a way that soothed him now, but that he knew would become a major distraction in a few moments more. He had only to reach up and kiss her, and she would respond ardently to anything either of them might desire of the other.

  He fondled her, delighted at how quickly she, too, kindled into the fire that had dazzled him the first time he took her in his arms.

  “We might have been making love like this for years,” he whispered to her. “So knowing you are. No, don't laugh at me, or...”

  Now, he did kiss her, opening her mouth with his lips, kissing her more deeply until he felt her tremble.

  She pressed his hand where it cupped her breast. “You know I was virgin when we married,” she murmured against his lips and tongue. “But no one has ever called me reluctant to learn.”

  “Thank God for scholarship.” Now, he laughed. His body ached for her.

  “Shall I tell you how I learned to please you so quickly?”

  “My skill, perhaps, and my fine city ways? Or some magic of the East?”

  Asherah's voice began to deepen, as it did as she became eager for him. “When we lived in Susa, we had Persian friends, the wives and daughters of merchants. I would sit with the Persian ladies as they talked. I might have nothing to add, but I could at least listen.”

  Leo ran his hands over her body, feeling her arch and shift beneath them as he caressed her.

  “Did they talk about their husbands?” he asked. It was a terrible thought. “Perhaps even compare them?”

  Asherah's laughter was mischievous now. “They are very eloquent, those ladies. Very specific.”

  “And now, as a married lady yourself, and of such vast experience, would you ... ?”

  “It would be selfish of me not to share,” Asherah said. “Especially where you are of another people, so very different, as it would seem. If we lived near them, Stateira and Marsinah would weep with disappointment.”

  Leo thanked God Susa lay nowhere within a month's traveling time. Never mind those women. He bent to kiss Asherah's throat. “Do you know, you purr when I kiss you?”

  She laughed, and he felt it as vibration against his lips.

  “Do you wish to hear what I would tell my old friends, Leo? You know how Kemal calls you ‘Lion's Cub'? My husband, I would say, is no cub, but the lion himself: strong, valiant—and tireless.”

  He tightened his arms about her.

  “Tireless, indeed,” she whispered against his mouth. Now, her hips moved against his. At his touch, her thighs parted and she arched her ba
ck. Leo reveled in the surprising strength of her embrace. His head was spinning, but her words enticed him almost as much as the fragrance of her skin. Still, before passion robbed him of speech, he had to ask one more question.

  “And after you told them this, what would they say to you?”

  He pulled away from her lips, which murmured a faint protest. Sight and smell told him how ready she was.

  She smiled wickedly. “What would they tell me? To watch what the great cats do, and do it ourselves!”

  “Next time,” he promised. The heat of her body felt like home-coming after a long absence. She cried out in welcome and held him close, as she had since their first night together.

  Afterward, he watched her again. Her skin glowed in the lamplight, though it was flickering now toward extinction. He touched her belly, trailing one finger down to caress her the way, long ago, he had traced the secret curves of an ancient statue so much like Asherah herself. How had she described her dreams? “Shining women, welcoming me.”

  “Keep doing that, and neither of us will ever sleep,” she murmured. Even now, she moved her hips in the oldest dance of all, to delight him further with the sight of her pleasure. “And you will have to bear more jokes about yawning bridegrooms.”

  “What about you?”

  “Tzipporah is always following me about, telling me to lie down and rest or eat something, just in case.”

  Let there be a child, he hoped, and soon. It was more than he had ever hoped to have, more than he had ever dreamed.

  Leo chuckled and drew her closer, breathing in the fragrance of her hair. Perhaps he really had strayed into the Song of Songs. King Solomon had survived a battle or two, hadn't he?

  Asherah's breathing grew softer, sleepier as he stroked her hair. After awhile, she slept again. Holding her in his arms, Leo watched the moon set.

  The lamp guttered and went out. An earth tremor ruffled some of the hangings on the walls. Leo tried to steady his breathing, to sink his awareness into the land itself. He had, after all, been able to protect her from this one thing. His dreams had not showed him Nordbriht nor any trace of him. He could not hear him. And, more than he wanted to admit to Asherah, who wrestled with demons of her own, that troubled him.