Kemal bent forward and scooped up the dead man. His head lolled against the Seljuk's battered armor. No one protested that it was the Turk who bore their comrade home.
“Quick!”
They flung themselves back toward the slit in the rocks, the last man disappearing just as the first of the Turkish reinforcements stuck his head into the cave and shouted in rage.
“Wedge it!” Leo gasped.
Frantically, they heaped up rocks, trying to bar the way within. But there was precious little hope of that: once the Turks found any evidence that such a way existed, Leo knew that they would batter through the rock until they found it. They could only hurry and trust in ...
The land shuddered as two men laid Petros out with what hasty decorum they could muster. Theodoulos gabbled prayers.
Georgios flourished the torch he had used to dispatch an enemy. Fire brightened the narrow passageway as he led his comrades down. Leo followed, shoving Kemal ahead of him.
What difference did it make now if the earth caved in? Turks gnawed at their backs.
They ran. Someone flung his arm about Theodoulos when he flattened himself against the rock, determined not to hold the others back, forcing him along at a stumbling run quicker than he could have managed on his own.
“Damn you, Turk!” Leo heard him gasp. Kemal managed to spare enough breath to laugh.
Down they ran, stumbling and picking themselves up, and praying that no one snapped a leg as they fled. Back down to the bend in the tunnel, further down and to the straight track they had traveled for so long, and along it, then even further into the tunnels that Leo had noticed angling off at a gentle descent. Down, and always downward. When they could go no further, they flung themselves panting upon the trembling stone.
Here the rock was reddish, warmer. How far had they descended? Leo rested his cheek against the rough stone. Was that really water he could hear dripping? They said that thirst produced hallucinations before you died. He had not realized he was so very thirsty. There was so much he had not realized. The warm stone seemed to rock him. The torchlight swirled about him.
And then the world went dark.
The trickle of water woke Leo. He was lying, face down, upon warm rock. Once again, he had the sense of having abandoned himself that he had felt on Prote, when he stretched out like a faithful hound on the stone floor before his Emperor's tomb, and an Empress had ordered him back to the world.
An Empress: so many women in his life who had the power to command him. He remembered what he had thought about the rocks. There was power in this land, power in the earth below it. And that power was female.
He swallowed. If he judged by how dry his throat was, half of the rockfalls he had lived through seemed to have lodged in his throat.
“Here.” Kemal handed him water in a helmet—had he dipped it in the stream or pool or trickle they could hear? Best not think of how clean it might or might not be. Leo sipped, then drank avidly. He passed the helmet back to Kemal. The man was covered in grit: not just the dust that anyone inevitably collected down in these ways, but greyish powder and even a few shining wisps that adhered to his armor.
Leo gestured at him. “What happened?”
“I didn't see it. Ismail swore he saw smoke rising from that cone-shaped mountain. Snow's melting on it, they say.”
Would Mount Argaeus erupt like Etna, then? In Joachim's house, Leo had heard merchants speak of such things. Snow melted on such mountains’ peaks, and they spat molten rock and hot ash, while the land beneath them rumbled and shifted.
Tilting his helm, Kemal finished the water. He looked down, then away, then in any direction but Leo's. Courage, however, was one thing he had never lacked. “Why'd you bring me back with you?” he finally asked.
“You saw what I had to do with Father Meletios. How can I fault you for following my example?” Leo said. “You're ours, Kemal. Or the land's, I don't know which. You've proved that.”
Kemal leaned back on his heels, almost satisfied.
“This whole warren of caves may collapse on our heads,” Leo reminded him. “So don't think I've done you any favors.”
It became his turn to pause.
“You want to tell me what happened? What Petros said before he died?”
Kemal grimaced, no, then went on. “A raiding party picked me up in the valley. Some of your men may have heard it. I played the fool, and they gave me a pretty rough time of it. Then they gave me a horse and took me along, partly to do the hard work, partly because they liked laughing at me. They ... we ... happened on Ioannes and Petros as they were coming back. They must have got through, sent a message down into the caves, or something. Anyhow, they had gotten themselves horses. Fast ones.
“Petros hit Ioannes's horse across the rump with his sword, and it took off, leaving him to fight it out with the lot of us. Give Ioannes credit: he tried to turn and come back, but he's not that good a rider.”
“Petros looked to Ioannes. Local nobility,” Leo murmured.
“Probably, he thought he knew less, so if it came to that, better him than the boy.”
Leo bowed his head and murmured a prayer for the man's soul. He would lie forever in the caves that he had feared—finally beyond all fear.
“From what they let me hear—you can imagine how little they trusted me...”
“It's a problem you have,” Leo interrupted.
Kemal grinned and went on, “Some of the Turkmen have your cave city under guard. Siege, you'd call it.”
“Have they got provisions to last out a siege?” Leo demanded. They might not. But if they could bring in reinforcements and a supply train, it wouldn't matter. In that case, they'd be starving in the caves. The best thing would be to evacuate them ... but to where this time? He could hear Joachim's voice and Asherah's, saying that, sooner or later, there was no place to hide and you had to take a stand.
Kemal gestured to recapture Leo's attention. “Now, if it were me—and remember, I know how your mind works—I'd have had riders coming up from behind and people come pouring out of the caves. Come to think of it, that's what you planned, wasn't it?”
“Purely by mistake,” Leo murmured. “I meant to keep it quiet, but I couldn't let Petros be burnt. I couldn't.”
Kemal nodded, grave for once. After all, he had captured Romanus and set this entire caravan of the damned into motion.
They had been trained, the people who had withdrawn into the underground city. They had even turned their retreat into something that could be used as a weapon. If need arose, as it seemed it might, they would withdraw further, past the wall that Asherah had discovered and into the innermost ways that led down, always down. Asherah and the redoubtable Sister Xenia would lead. A Jew and a heretic nun leading an exodus of farm wives. Christe eleison. It made almost as much sense as a Byzantine patrician who trusted his life to a Turkish turncoat.
Leo raised his head and met the Seljuk's dark eyes.
“You think we have a chance?”
The ground beneath them shook. Leo suppressed the impulse to grab hold of anything for safety. If the land buried them, it buried them; if it spat them up into the open air, it was a miracle. They had no chance to choose.
“We?”
“You're ours now,” Leo said. “You've killed for us, bled for us. If you want to be one of us, you've paid for it.”
“If these quakes keep up, I'll leave my bones here, that's for certain,” Kemal said. “What is written, is written.”
“This isn't written,” Theodoulos interrupted. “It isn't.”
Byzantine and Turk rounded on him simultaneously.
“How do you know?"
“I know,” Theo persisted. “I saw."
“You had the falling sickness,” Leo practically accused him. “Like Caesar. Did you have a vision while your mind wandered?”
Your old men will dream dreams. Your young men will see visions. Or however the saying went. It wasn't as if Leo hadn't collapsed into a few proph
etic fits himself.
“Look at this place,” said Theodoulos. “See how the rock glows in the torchlight. It welcomes us.”
“Like a serpent lures its prey,” Kemal muttered.
Almost predictably, came another tremor.
“We've been feeling about five of those in every torch,” Georgios said. “They're getting more frequent. You know, I honestly think I'd rather be killed in an honest fight with the Turks, if you'll excuse me saying so, Kemal, than be swallowed by my own land.”
Leo found his men watching him. “Do we go and get them out, sir? There might be time to save at least a few.”
We would see them before the end. We would have that.
It was a terrible thing when temptation and need ran in harness. Leo nodded. “We'll go there and help as best we can. Assuming we can make it. Theo, I take it we'll have to climb, won't we?”
Theodoulos shut his eyes. His fingers moved as if he scrawled the grid Leo remembered in midair. Finally, he nodded.
“You said this place welcomed us!” Georgios shouted. Theodoulos cried out shrilly, then toppled as his weak leg failed to maintain its balance.
The next tremor, which hurled them all onto the cave floor, was the worst yet.
The rock lurched and shuddered for at least an eternity, jerking the projections that they clung to all but from their grasp. The tremors buffeted them, sent them rolling from side to side, caroming into one another. Beneath the crash, the rumble, and the clatter of rockfalls some distance way, the very bedrock seemed to groan in its own anguish. A wide crack gaped not five feet from Theodoulos, opened further, and then grew no wider.
God help us! and Allah! were choked off by the dust. For a while, they lay coughing, their arms raised over their heads to protect them.
Inexplicably, they had been spared. God only knew what else had fallen; for all they knew, the entire region might have sunk as if swallowed up for its wickedness. They were not in an age of miracles, it was too much to expect the earth to engulf invaders, as it had swallowed up Abiram and Dathan during the Exodus. Someone whimpered, then choked it off.
There was silence in the cave as the last grumbles and clatters of rockfall subsided for the moment, except for Theodoulos, who never ceased whispering prayers, and Kemal, who was probably cursing his luck. He didn't know how good his luck was, then. Hadn't he survived? How many of the Turkmen could say that?
Probably, Leo thought, too many. He would have been glad to fall asleep where he lay, but now a new urgency was on him. What had become of the refugees in the underground city? He staggered up. “We have to go now,” he choked.
If any of the men had hesitated, he knew, he would have drawn his sword and whipped them with the flat of it until they obeyed. Though they looked as if they had lived through Armageddon (and would no doubt look worse before that battle actually ensued), they staggered up, one leaning mistrustfully against the wall. Kemal and Georgios bent to raise Theodoulos.
Groping for handholds, staggering as if on the deck of a ship pitching in a storm, Leo led the way toward the upward paths. Or up as far as they could go. Boulders blocked the tunnel leading to the upward passageways.
He should have expected that!
The same red tide that had thrust him, screaming, out to avenge Petros flooded his eyes, and he attacked the stone, trying to pitch huge boulders aside. The dust sifted out from the broken rock, seeping into his lungs. He hacked and spat as he tossed debris out of his way.
“You said this place welcomed us,” he reproached Theodoulos.
“It does,” Theo said. He sat up gingerly and rubbed his weak leg. “But...”
Leo turned away, snorting in disgust. A few more boulders, or whatever you called this ... this stuff, no better than cheese, and they would be able to move upward toward the passageways that might, if Theo's grid and his map were at all accurate, lead them where they wanted to be. That is, if the path was clear beyond this obstruction. Damn it, why did he have to lift all the rocks himself?
Sweat stung in his eyes and mixed with the rock dust that had filtered through his clothing. He felt encased in a sort of bubble of fear, fury, and pain. And he must stink like a sewer. Christ, this was worse than battle.
Somehow, he would make it all come out right. Somehow.
Again, the ground shuddered. They had been lucky so far, if you could call this luck. Another shower of pebbles spattered down from up above, followed by the crash of what had to be a large chunk of rock. Even if they cleared a path through to the upper tunnel, it might be even less safe than where they were.
Wind sounded in the tunnel, still partially blocked by the earlier rockfalls. Leo could practically see it, so heavily it was loaded with dust and grit. Just as he opened his mouth to shout for the men to help him, the gust struck, catching him in the face.
He fell to his knees and bent over, coughing, almost retching from the dust he had swallowed and scrubbing frantically at his eyes. Lights exploded behind them, like glowing metal approaching his eyes. He would have screamed if he had enough breath left.
Instead, he doubled over, twisting away from the hands that sought to steady him or move him to a safer place. There was no safer place. Not his eyes. Dear God, not his eyes.
After a time (and another tremor), the racking spasms of coughing subsided. Leo raised himself on trembling hands and leaned against the fallen rock. A faint dank odor lingered in the air, the remnants of that gust of wind that had almost smothered him. He rested his aching head against the stone.
Stand back, he had told Asherah, in what felt like another life, before he broke open the seal to the deeper ways within the rock. The air might be bad. Perhaps the air was bad here, too, and it would madden him or cast him into sleep.
But the air was so soothing now, and the rock had turned warm, as warm as in the tunnel below. Almost, as Theo had said, welcoming. He let himself absorb whatever comfort the warmth might give him before he moved on. Then he noticed how the dust itself had changed. No longer did it hold that faint musty odor, a combination of crypts and a kind of wasteland. Now, it seemed tinged with cinnamon. No, not cinnamon, incense.
He remembered that scent. He and Asherah had broken through the wall separating her current refuge from the deeper passageways when they had first noticed it. Once again, Leo's heart pounded with excitement and fear. It had intoxicated him, had given him the courage to go over and embrace Asherah. Since then, her response had transformed his life. They had both had the sense that some power had swept them up in its embrace, that some power wanted them as much as they realized they wanted each other.
Whatever it was, it was a power that could not be forced, no more than Asherah herself. Perhaps, it could be coaxed. Perhaps it could be persuaded. Leo raised his head and looked into the darkness of the half-blocked passageway. His eyes were still blurred and sore. A soft wind blew, easing them. The incense scent intensified, wafting out toward him, and the darkness was transformed from enemy into a type of comfort.
Not here. This way, instead; as if the woman he loved took his hand and showed him how she wanted him to touch her.
Leo shook his head. Dreaming dreams and seeing visions, indeed! This was hardly the time for the type of vision he stopped himself from having. But the voice that had teased at his awareness spoke again. This way. Down this road.
He turned his back on the rockfall and all his labor there.
“You were right, Theo. We can't go that way. It won't let us.”
“It? Won't let?” If he didn't say something quickly, he might have a panic on his hands; and the idea of a band of armed, panicked men running about beneath the earth was not one he liked—or one that he thought that this power would approve, any more than any great lady would approve of mice scurrying about her skirts.
“The sun will not strike thee by day, nor the moon by night,” Theodoulos recited a line from the reassuring old psalm.
“He will keep Thy soul,” Georgios joined in.
Or something will, Leo thought.
“You know, Father Meletios said I was sealed to these stones,” he told his men. Cold comfort to him, however reassuring they seemed to find it. “You know there's something odd about them, something odd...”
To his astonishment he saw Georgios nod. “It's the land,” he said. “Petros—God rest his soul, he was a better Christian than I, and he didn't hold with whatever it was. Said it was heathenish and smashed any of the long-ago things he would find when he was plowing. The rest of us, though...”
“Wouldn't have thought you'd feel it. Being from the City and half-royal, you might say.”
Who better than a king to sense the power in the land?
He was not a king. He was only Ducas, and dishonored of his line. But that sense of the land, that response to power, maybe even the ability to focus it through his own senses, were all strong in him. They had almost led to his destruction, as men who would do anything to retain their grasp on the throne sought to take him out of a game he had never wanted to play.
They had cast him out, and here was where he had come to land. Precisely where he could listen and respond. Leo found himself smiling through the blood and dust that caked his face. Sometimes, the powers were sly. The fates, you might call them. The pit in his stomach hollowed as he recalled that, to the pagans, the fates were female.
Kemal trudged back down the corridor. “If I can't wash, I can't pray. I could wash in the dust, I suppose.” He spat. “Allah will have to take my intention for the deed.”
He prostrated himself and prayed. The others looked away. One or two muttered what might have passed for holy words and blessed themselves. Leo bowed his head. “Into Thy hands,” he began; but into whose hands was he commending them? They had come to a place where even prayer was of less use than blind faith.
At the brink of a rotten death, Romanus had trusted. Could Leo do any less?
“Let's go,” he said simply. “This time, we let ourselves be guided.”
He was sealed to this place. Let it and the power within it guide him. He had no other choice. The torch guttered, but the scent of the incense flared up more strongly.
Shards of Empire Page 42
