Shards of Empire

by Susan Shwartz

  “Revered ladies, if you would condescend to explain...”

  Xenia let out a sharp bark of laughter that echoed painfully. “We know where this path leads to, or at least one place, and you do not. That galls you, does it? It galls all men when women have secrets. Especially women like us. Strong backs and bowed heads, you see in us; bowed and empty heads. But we remember, young sir, we remember and we wait. And ultimately, we come into our own. Do we not, stranger and sister?”

  Asherah held out a hand and touched the older woman's sleeve.

  “I am sorry,” Leo said. He was not answered, nor did he expect to be. In this moment, he knew himself to be necessary, but not central to whatever mystery they shared. It was clear they shared something; but, as the nuns obviously were asking each other, why Asherah?

  The nuns gathered, their heads bent close together. Then they fell to their knees. Xenia bent forward and kissed the wall as if she kissed an icon. A second sister wept. “I can die happy now,” she whispered.

  “Wait, we may come to the innermost shrine,” Sister Phryne cautioned.

  “No one has seen it for generations!”

  “Hush!” Their eyes flickered toward Leo like smoke and fire. They returned to their prayers. Leo could make out most of the words. They sounded like prayers to the Mother of God, but not wholly.

  “Can you understand?” he asked his wife. “What do you hear?”

  “Heresy,” she said. “By any standards but theirs. God pardon me for saying so, but they act as if we have found the Ark of the Covenant.”

  “May we see what lies within?” Xenia asked. Her voice was subdued and humble, as if she were on pilgrimage and begged entry to a shrine.

  Leo sighed. Once again, he would provide the strong back. He reached for the tools he and Asherah had left behind. The women bowed their heads, as if he performed not labor, but a necessary part of some rite.

  Once again, Leo swung at the ancient wall.

  Dust shrouded them all, making the eldest women cough. Fragments broke free of the roughly assembled wall. Then, as it had before, the wall gave way.

  Rising from their knees more rapidly than ladies of their age might be expected to do, the nuns thrust past Leo into the dark corridor. One ventured down it, into the room in which Leo had dared to tell Asherah of his desires, and she had met them. Leo did not like the idea of outsiders entering that room. Surely, some of the sweetness from the first time he embraced his wife must linger there. Heat prickled beneath his tunic lest they sense that. Asherah took his hand.

  The woman emerged quickly from that blessed little room. She smiled at Leo, then turned and kissed Asherah's cheek before she headed further down the corridor.

  “Do you know what this place is?” Leo demanded. He had brought them here for his reasons—the defense of this trap of an underground city—but they were exclaiming, laughing, and weeping in joy for their own.

  “You have found the way within,” Phryne said. “For years we have sought it, and now it is found. Praise...” Again, the word Asherah had told him was purest heresy, even in its grammar. “God,” its root meant; and yet its ending was feminine.

  “You know the stories,” Sister Xenia reminded Leo. “Doubtless you heard how all the cities are joined by roads dug underground. Well, you have happened on such a road. It joins city to city in a vast wheel; and at its hub lies great power and treasure.”

  At this point, Leo's hands might overflow with gold, but he would want no more than to wash them clean. It was a shrine he had found, but unlike anything he had ever believed in.

  Again, Xenia laughed, hawk-shrill. “Do not worry about this, young strategos. We can guide your people to safety. Only see you come quickly; we would not have invaders penetrate the way within.”

  A voice, changed almost past reckoning by how it echoed down the corridor, made them all shiver.

  “He will not fail us, sisters.”

  The voice belonged to Asherah.

  Like the song of Damascus steel tested by a swordsman, magic thrummed at the threshold of Asherah's awareness, bringing her up out of a deep sleep. She sat up, away from the warmth of her sleeping husband. He was a distraction even when he slept, and he had been asleep when she came to bed.

  They had ridden home from the underground ways. Joachim, who had heard of the attempt on Leo's life, had met them at the gates, flung his arms about Leo in relief, and led him away to the waiting physician. She and her father were both skilled: that Joachim had thought to summon the best physician he knew here was a sign of his fear for the man who had won a piece of his heart too.

  “My place is with my husband!” Asherah had protested. She would have thought that those words, so much like those she had heard other women say and have respected, would have won her her way; but her women had taken her in tyrannous charge, crying out at the dust and grit that coated her and the terror she must surely have felt. By the time she had submitted to a bath, to clean clothes, to calming their fears, and to the solace of dinner with her father, the physician had given Leo a potion and put him to bed.

  “He will do better sleeping than talking,” the physician admonished her in a way that she might have resented had she not been so distressed, “and just you remember he's not in shape for anything else.”

  She would do better at his side than anywhere else, she retorted, and if her husband had been drugged, it was not as if she could tempt him to any exertion. Clad only in her unbound hair, as Leo loved to see her, she slid into their bed, letting herself rest against him as she always did. He eased against her, and she put her arms about him.

  “Did you see?” he muttered, still more than half asleep. “Threw his arms ‘round me ... s'if I were son, his own son...”

  “He loves you, Leo. I love you. Now hush and go back to sleep.” She kissed him softly, then waited till he subsided back into the healing sleep promised by the physician's drugs.

  Rising from their bed, she wrapped herself in an absurd lavishness of Ch'in silk it had delighted her father to give her. The casual way in which she wore it had astonished Leo. Both of them had so much, still, to learn about each other. In this moment, though, Leo was hers.

  She seated herself beside their bed and looked into his face. Beneath the curling hair that was turning too swiftly grey, his face looked younger: its true age, were he not constantly burdened. Asleep, his face lost the tautness she had noticed about him from the first, when she had looked up through her veil and her tears of rage and terror and seen him. Leo had come to her side, taking yet another risk to protect her. In return, she had been able to give him what, at that moment, he desired most: a last moment in which the man he served could be his Emperor, not a mutilated lump of flesh that would shortly die.

  He had saved her life and her father's and their friends'. She and her father had returned the favor that first night in Cappadocia. That left them even: but since then, they had knit their lives together. Something there was in the young officer, almost the icon of an alien Empire, that called out to her. It was akin to the life she had lived—keeping on going, trying to build something that would last, starting over and over again. At the very least, she sensed in him the willingness to try again to seek peace, to change from soldier to aspiring priest, and then, finally, to become her husband.

  She wished that could have been the end of the story: a newly married couple, the wife about her duties (even if Asherah's extended somewhat anomalously to the care of a trading empire rather than the mere management of a house), the husband learning his father-in-law's work, and, in time, a child or, better yet, children whom everyone could approve. She had part of it, and more than had ever been prophesied for her: she was as absurdly wrapped up in Leo, in the sight and the touch and the care of him, as the most smugly normal woman who had ever been held up to her as an example. And to think she had always considered herself, had been encouraged to consider herself, lacking in that regard ...

  Still, the thrum of magic quivere
d at the edge of her senses. Asherah rose from her leather chair and went to the window. The moon was still full, bathing the walled yard, but its glow was subsiding.

  A thick wall protected her home. From outside it came a despairing howl. Yes, it's high, she thought. We built it that way on purpose, to keep things like you out!

  It subsided into a whimper. Silence. Asherah's hands had clenched into small fists. When, deliberately, she opened them, the palms were wet. Walls had proved inadequate before. Which would be quicker, she wondered, snatching up the sword Leo kept by their bed to go herself, or waking him?

  Now, she heard scratching against the wall, as if some robber sought to gain purchase on it. Her smile was cruel. Let him try to pause at the top of the wall, just let him. It would be a matter of moments to bring the household to full wakefulness, but sounding that alarm brought back such terrible memories that she hesitated.

  Again, she heard scrabbling at the wall, higher up, a yowl of almost bestial anguish. Something dropped into the courtyard. Oh God, was the killing about to happen again? Her tears were hot, but the sweat that touched the silk she had tossed about herself was cold with horror.

  Not if she could stop it.

  Swiftly, Asherah flung a sheepskin over her silk robe and drew Leo's sword from its hiding place beneath the pillows. Drawing a deep breath and strength that felt as if it rose from the center of the earth, she invoked the powers that would ward her, just as she had the night she had insisted that she and Joachim intervene against Leo's assassins—his first assassins.

  Leaving the refuge of her bedroom, she ventured outside, down the stairs, into the courtyard. For Leo. For her father. For the people who loved her. She would be Deborah. She would be Jael. She only hoped she would be alive when dawn came.

  The moon had almost set, and the sky was beginning to pale with the approach of dawn. She heard no more scrabbling or attacks on the walls. Instead, she heard something whine, something exhausted and in pain. Whatever it was, it lay by the wall in shadow.

  The thing was big, Asherah saw. She took a firmer grip on the sword, praying that she could get in one lucky blow or scream even once, just in case the thing had strength enough left to pounce. Light pooled on the sword and upon her trembling hand: she was warded, protected. Her hand ceased to shake.

  Small, darker shadows pooled beneath the hulk. As she approached, the light warding her revealed what lay beneath the wall: huge, thin, covered with fur, and that fur matted and, in places, torn, exposing the bleeding flesh beneath. It looked like nothing so much as the body of some great wolf that had escaped a particularly vicious hunt.

  She thought she could put a name to it. Or, to be more precise, to him.

  Nordbriht.

  Don't go near him, Leo would warn her. Leo was asleep. Perhaps Nordbriht was too wounded, too exhausted to be deadly, she hoped.

  Fool! That's when they're the most likely to attack!

  She knew that. She also remembered the other time she had seen Nordbriht with his curse upon him, and he had slunk over to her, his belly brushing the ground, and laid his massive fanged head at her feet.

  And she had another reason to intervene. Leo prized his guardsman, and she knew he had grieved, thinking him lost.

  Soon, it would be dawn. When Nordbriht changed from wolf to man, assuming he did not die as his injured body wrenched itself from one substance to another, he would be naked, and the morning was chill. She flung the sheepskin she had worn about her shoulders over him. Now what? If she tried to drag him back to her room where Leo could tend him, wounded as he was, in pain, and in this form, he would have every reason to wake and to savage her.

  Asherah glanced up at the sky. There was time until dawn, considerable time for her to be out here clad only in a silk robe that was lavish, concealing in its way, but hardly warm enough. That was no reason to leave poor Nordbriht alone. She sighed and edged herself down a safe distance along the wall where she would be hidden by the wolf's shadow.

  Shutting her eyes for a moment, she drew up strength from the earth. It seemed to warm about her bare feet. For now, the earth had ceased the tremors that had been so constant that most people simply ignored them. It was harder to ignore them in the underground cities: but that was what prayer was for. The nuns had made an art of it. They showed no fear at all, and they seemed to think she should be as fearless as they. Why they felt this kinship with her, she could not imagine.

  Do not fear. Again, she found herself sustained by the earth beneath her, as if she rested against it, listening to its heartbeat. Her heartbeat: the earth was her mother. It cradled her, taught her rhythms of which she had begun to have increased awareness and even a few forlorn hopes.

  I had pagan dreams, she had told Leo the night before.

  Half-bedazzled now by waking dreams, Asherah waited for dawn.

  As the first sunglow touched the wolf in the courtyard, its battered body writhed and spasmed. Nordbriht cried out in the throes of change. His hindquarters lengthened; his forepaws turned into the huge hands that wielded his heavy axe as if it were little more than a toy; and silvery fur melted away from his body, except for glints on arms, legs, and chest where the sheepskin did not cover him, and the tangled masses of his fair hair and beard.

  When the change was complete and he lay silent, face against the earth, Asherah dared rise and approach.

  “Forgive me,” she whispered.

  Setting down Leo's sword and seizing Nordbriht by the ankles, she tried to drag him to her room.

  He was dead weight. She tried again. She would never drag him across the yard, let alone up the stairs; and even if she could, it would probably hurt him at least as much as he was hurt already. All she accomplished was to trail her silks in the muck of blood and dust left by the wounded creature. Her hair fell about her, tangling almost to her knees. If she bent too far, it too would be filthy. She knotted it carelessly out of the way, muttering a phrase or two she had heard from an Aleppan muleteer.

  At any moment, lights would be kindled in the kitchens. The entire household would begin to stir. And when they found Nordbriht ... and her husband's sword ...

  “I'm not abandoning you,” Asherah whispered. “I promise I'll be back.”

  Picking up the sword, she sped across the courtyard and back up the stairs into her room.

  Leo had turned in his sleep so that the light did not brush his face. Asherah rather thought his breathing was less heavy. Good, the drug had worn off, and he would be easier to wake. If this were a ballad, she could kneel at his side, kiss him sweetly awake, and chances were, they wouldn't leave the room until noon. Besides, she had learned that waking Leo required some precautions. Let her simply bend over and kiss him when his body had gotten used to being alone in the bed, and he would probably jump up, alarmed.

  She stood at the foot of their bed.

  “Leo,” she called his name repeatedly. Shouting would wake him only to memories of battles. She would not hurt him in that way; she would not even let him suspect that she knew how those memories made him react.

  She saw the stealthy motion of hand toward sword, followed by a thrash when he couldn't find it. He fought toward full alertness.

  “I have it.” Asherah showed him the sword.

  He was up in an instant, tugging on the garments he had arranged within arm's reach. Then he had snatched the sword from her and drawn her into the circle of his other arm. His nostrils flared.

  “Blood,” he muttered. “Asherah...” Sudden, terrible fear for her, for the strange illnesses that men thought women suffered, even grief ... and had there been a child so soon that she was losing?

  She brushed her cheek against his shoulder. “Nordbriht came home, Leo. Terribly injured, at least in beast form. I couldn't bring him up here. He was too hurt, too heavy. So I threw a sheepskin over him and sat by him until dawn.”

  “He'd be better off in his own bed.” Sheathing his sword, Leo ran ahead of her down the stairs. By the time Asher
ah could assemble salves and bandages, he was kneeling by the half-naked guardsman, wishing, no doubt, to call the physician who had tended him yesterday and knowing he dared not wake the man.

  “With two of us here, we can shift him,” Leo told her. Again, she bent, tossed her hair out of the way, and clasped Nordbriht's ankles. This time, with Leo supporting the big man's shoulders, she was able to help half-carry, half-drag him across the courtyard. Leo kicked open the door, and they laid Nordbriht on the long, fleece-strewn pallet that had been all he would accept in the way of a bed.

  “Fetch water,” Leo told her. With her husband present, Asherah could move with complete propriety about a guardsman's room—though she would have tended Nordbriht alone if she had been able. If his wounds had taken cold as he lay out on the ground while she was too weak to move him ... she brought a filled bowl and pitcher and set them down by Leo's side.

  “He won't want you here,” Leo said.

  “Neither do you. But I know more about nursing than you do.”

  “I'll bathe him. He may wake and jump up and send you flying into the wall. When I'm finished, you can see to him.”

  Nordbriht moaned as Leo worked on him. The water grew foul and had to be replaced two or three times, and Leo passed her the bowls. Finally, Leo beckoned her back into the room.

  Asherah bent to the serious work of tending the injured man. Grazes and scrapes had to be salved. In several places, arrows had gashed him. Thank God for His mercy; Asherah had never yet had to draw an arrow from a wound or had to burn one with a knife. She swallowed bile: Menachem's hand shaking, the iron slipping awry, the Emperor's body bucking despite the shields and kneeling soldiers holding him down.

  “Love, if this is making you ill...”

  She shook her head to clear it and to deny her weakness.

  Nordbriht sat bolt upright and spat out words Asherah did not understand. His birth-speech, no doubt, and a demand to know what was going on. Leo grabbed him by the shoulders.

  “What did you get into, man? You've been gone for days. Asherah found you, brought you here.”