Asherah pulled free of Leo. “For the same reason that you are here. I was guided. You remember, how when we first discovered the way below, something called out to us? Well, when I stayed in the caverns, I had no peace from it. The Sisters understood; they've heard the same call. My husband, you are not the only person who has a land and people to defend.”
She glanced down, and Leo's eyes followed hers: if she were with child, it did not yet show. “Nor are you the only defender of this land to act on dreams. And faith.”
“How did they let you go?”
It was a pity that she had been separated from Nordbriht, who would have slung her over his shoulder to keep her out of danger, if he had had to.
“I would have slipped away,” Asherah admitted. “I thought of it. No one knows those ways as well as I, except perhaps Xenia. I am so much smaller than she, however, that I was certain I could elude her. But she came to me, said I was the one chosen, and that if the call came...”
“The call?”
Asherah gave him an exasperated look, then softened it by taking his hand. “If you hadn't felt it, you wouldn't be here either. God only knows why I should feel it—maybe what I've always studied.”
Asherah, surrounded by bright lights and prayers; Asherah's eyes widening at the sight of the Woman in the caves; Asherah lying in his arms as music piped inside his head and blood and memories of long-ago rites fared their blood.
“You saw those pictures painted on the walls,” she said. “Pagan, all of them. Pagan dreams I said I had, and I was right. It was something reaching out to us.
“She's here with us, you know. And God forgive me, I can't see her as the blasphemy I know I should.
“At any rate, Xenia said I was chosen. So I gathered a few supplies, as much as I thought I could take without depriving the others ... and then I thought again.
“And I went to my father and to Sister Xenia, and I told them honestly, that I had had a vision and must act upon it.”
“And they let you go?” Leo cried. "They let you go!"
Asherah shrugged. “For my own soul's sake, they had to. And possibly for my sanity. Nordbriht?” Despite himself, Leo smiled, knowing how his wife must have calculated her chances of eluding her guardian. “The vision gave me no rest. So...” She swallowed hard and blinked away tears. “...my father gave me his blessing and his own knives...”
“She dropped them. Theo, see to them.” Theodoulos limped out into the darkness beyond the charmed circle of torchlight.
“And I left. Oh God, it was hard,” she sighed into Leo's shoulder. “I left. And when I was safely out of reach, I prayed, and I was answered and guided. I don't know how long I wandered, but then I heard footsteps, and I heard voices. I doused my light and cast my wardings ... and there you were!”
She reached up and kissed him very lightly on the side of the jaw.
“Lady, lady, the battle...” Georgios practically danced in an agony of suspense. He had not even paid heed how casually she had spoken of visions or wardings that, in a time long lost and better so, might have put her life and the lives of all her kin in jeopardy.
Leo eyed him, then silently counted off the others. “Asherah, can you find Sister Xenia and the other women again? I want you to take Theo and Kemal to them. And, Kemal, Theo, I want you to protect my wife with your very souls.”
“No!” Their instant protest overpowered the earth tremor that rumbled through the caves.
“I won't be sent away again,” Asherah declared.
“My place is with you,” Kemal told him.
Saddest of all, Theodoulos just looked. “Protect my wife” was a kindly lie to save his pride, and he knew it. She had foiled stronger protectors already. But if Theo fought, Leo feared his first battle would be his last.
“Leo,” Asherah spoke quickly, “he has to have something. Take us with you. Theo, you had better keep the knives.”
“Not you...” She was too precious to risk.
Not you either!
Another quake, much stronger than the rhythmic tremors to which he had almost become inured, hurled him off balance. He staggered forward, just as the ceiling cracked and a chunk of rock dropped where he had been standing, followed by a shower of smaller stones. Flinging out his arms, he tried to protect Asherah and Theodoulos with his own body, while Kemal tried to push all of them into a safer place.
Safer? Now there was a joke.
When the dust subsided, and they could almost see and breathe easily again, Leo gazed hopelessly at the mass of stone separating him from his force ... from the rest of his force.
“Take it as a sign,” Asherah murmured.
He looked beyond her. One or two of his men blessed themselves. Clearly, they had already interpreted this latest rockfall as a warning.
“You are sealed to this land. Chosen, Xenia told me, just as I am. It will not release you. Let the others go...”
Leo stretched out his hand to Georgios. “As you see...”
“You are not just a soldier anymore,” the farmer said. “I shall pray for you as I fight, because you have chosen the harder part.”
Or it has chosen me.
Leo let his hand drop. “Go, then, if you think you can help. All of you. And the Lord of Battles be with you.”
“With all of us, sir.”
They bent to divide the torches.
“Take them all,” Asherah said softly. Her voice sounded distant, hollow, and Georgios gasped, recognizing the tones of impending prophecy. “We will not be needing them where we go.”
They would have saluted him before they left. Leo tried to fling out his hand, to clasp their arms, but too much stone divided them. With no other choice before him, he stiffened to the salute himself until the curve in the tunnel hid them from sight.
He sighed deeply and turned back toward his wife.
“Now where do we go, Asherah?”
Shocks trembled underfoot every few moments now. Drafts seemed to pant from the tunnel. Leo had the sense, too, of intense concentration: perhaps not upon them, but upon some task that required them.
He cast one longing glance back at the way his men had gone. It seemed so much simpler, so much safer, simply to draw sword, scream Nobiscum! and charge, to live or die as God willed.
If he had wanted simplicity, he should have been born into a different family and definitely married into a different one altogether. He had duty. And now he had prophecy and necessity.
“This way,” whispered Asherah, and touched his arm. Theodoulos followed without comment and, Leo thought, without surprise. Kemal came last, muttering prayers.
Their way wound down and down from the crossroads beneath the earth, where the slightest whisper echoed forever. They had entered a maze. They wound through it, Asherah leading surely, though Leo would have put his hand on burning iron—don't think of that!—and sworn she had never seen this place before.
Except in her dreams, of course, or in the prophecies that had come to haunt them both, sleeping and waking, devouring their lives and seeking now to eat their souls.
No! Leo thought.
Asherah beckoned them onward. He was guardian of these ways, or so Meletios’ blood had sealed him. That did not reassure him.
The tiny quakes seemed to come almost without let now, and gusts of air rustled by like troops of ghosts, or some bellows from the mouth of hell.
“Hurry, oh do!” she pleaded with them. “The sisters told me that when the earth shakes...” To Leo's horror, when she turned to urge them on, her eyes were huge with tears.
The tunnel widened into a more perfect arch than any Leo had seen down here. Guarding it on either side were huge stone lions such as the ancient dwellers in this land had once carved. They were incised with what could have been vandals’ blows, but with what Leo suspected were words of power in a language long vanished beneath the earth with those who spoke it. Asherah reached out and touched the glyphs, then beckoned them onward.
Theodou
los’ torch sputtered and went out. Asherah's voice hummed softly. Moments later, a soft golden light bathed her as if she had been transformed into some icon herself. She led the way down the deep, smooth passageway. Here the walls glistened not with mosaics, but with glazed bricks of gold and turquoise. On them ramped or stalked bulls, lions, and the immense twisting coils of a kind of dragon.
“It is,” Asherah whispered, “the sirrush. They say Nebuchadnezzar and Nimrod hunted such creatures. But then...”
Any absurd scholarly observations she might have made were interrupted by a sharper tremor than before.
“Quickly!” Asherah's voice was urgent though she did not dare to raise it.
Leo bent close to her. “Did they tell you what you run toward?” he asked.
Asherah shook her head. “The secret at the center of all this maze. I don't know which is worse, what they told me or that I believe them, or will when I see. But I must see!”
Now all the years-long terror of the child who feared she was mad quivered in her voice. Leo nodded at her and stepped up the pace. They passed by the bulls and the lions and the dragons as old as Babylon without more comment. Gradually, the glazed brick gave way, to be replaced by processions of men and women—more women than men—wearing crowns like those of the storm gods who had shadowed Leo's life and dreams since Manzikert.
Was that what he heard and felt: wind and thunder underneath the earth? Again, the ground shook. As above, so below.
“They're coming closer together,” whispered Asherah again.
They hastened, Leo bracing himself against the slope of the tunnel's floor. He spared a glance for Theodoulos. To his astonishment, the boy easily kept pace. They hastened, joining the procession of ancient storm gods and goddesses toward some unimaginable rite.
After a time, the figures gave way to bare stone—the tufa that had once been spat from the molten depths of the earth, carved, and then hardened by a breath of fire. Now, carved, daubed in red here where the rock was scorched were symbols, some elaborate, some so simple and worn that Leo could barely detect them: the triangles and bars that they had told him in the town were butterflies; the figures that the most ancient pagans meant to be goddesses, horned skulls, and felines.
Even in the glow of the wards Asherah had cast, the painted symbols danced and flickered in the shadows that the wind, rushing through the tunnel, seemed to shred from off the ancient walls. All the chimerae that had besieged him, waking and sleeping, since Manzikert joined in a kind of hunt: not a waking dream, but a waking nightmare.
Pain stitched itself down his chest, lancing into his left arm. Leo forced himself to ignore it and to hurry after Asherah, whose pace had taken on a kind of urgency. Behind him, Theodoulos urged on Kemal.
The corridor made one last turn, then opened into a central cavern that might, at its widest, rival the Hippodrome. And facing him, painted in red upon the wall, was a face Leo had seen before, the woman from what seemed to be the beginning of time, with her harsh eyes and her cruel smile.
“The Gorgon,” he whispered. He had seen her face in the cistern and then collapsed. All of the hauntings leapt out as one to oppress him, and he sank gasping to the ground.
Now the creature's face was savage, scornful.
“No, Leo, no!” Asherah knelt at his side, her arms about him, her chin up as she faced that unbelievably ancient, alien woman. How could she withstand her? The creature was older by far than his Empire or her people or any civilization he had ever heard of. And, if her expression were any evidence, she despised them all, especially the people of the upper air, who had fled for refuge beneath the earth and into her realm.
He should not be ascribing power to pagan deities: that was for certain. So, even as he tried to steady his breathing, to slow the wild heartbeats that made his temples throb in sympathy—and so much like the tremors that rippled through the rock—he tried to pray.
And failed wretchedly. They were in no place where any prayers that he knew had any validity: except, perhaps, appeals to the woman whose face now confronted Leo. She had been waiting for him. She had always been waiting for him. And if he dared go on, no doubt, she would stop him and wither him as, indubitably, she had withered Father Meletios.
Meletios was a saint, or almost a saint, but he had recoiled in terror from this underground mystery, so unlike the kindly Mother of God whom he venerated. He had driven out the women, then set himself, lifelong, to guard the underground ways, lest this creature penned for so long in the darkness dare to rise again into the light. And he had even survived, after a fashion.
Not being a saint, Leo would probably not survive. And what sort of afterlife could he, married to a Jew, expect if he were slain, his soul devoured by this creature—goddess or demon?
He shut his eyes, winning a respite from the presence before him. Asherah's arms sustained him: a precious luxury he dare not allow for much longer. Once terror and this creature's gaze stopped his heart, she would need all her strength. Like the nuns, she was not just drawn here, she had some protection from what laired here—and perhaps even some sympathy, deep in blood and soul, with it.
At least, now he knew why so many of the men who ventured to seek out the deepest underground ways and the treasure that legend heaped them with never returned to the light of day. Only Theodoulos, who was a boy and crippled. And Meletios, who had been a blind man
He had been a blinded man, the thought intruded into Leo's consciousness.
But Leo had cowered here long enough. He forced himself, despite the pain that stabbed into him with every breath he took, to stand erect.
Overpowering relief swept over Asherah like a gale: I am not mad. Strong compulsions ripped at her defenses, commanding her forward. The nuns had had their traditions, their prayers, and their faith. She had her own faith, as much at odds as it was with this hidden cult, whose core was female. It was pagan, it was hostile—and it was a part of herself. She would advance into the valley of the shadow ... she heard herself reciting the Psalm. The ground did not crack, and no rock shower punished her.
She spared one glance back at her husband, the crippled boy, and the warrior who huddled beside him. Could they manage as they were? As long as Leo had even one person he thought he must protect, he would force himself to endure. She could best protect him by going forward.
With a fragment of her consciousness, she noted that she heard water rippling somewhere in the cave. Then, she was aware of nothing but a raging demand to know—curiosity in the guise of a storm wind—impelling her forward, coupled with a kind of triumph. Now, finally, she was aware that she would find answers to all of her questions. Whether she would live beyond the moment of revelation, she didn't know: but she would learn.
To her astonishment, she sensed her own curiosity met by an equal demand to know, plus a sense of relief—a relief that swiftly vanished as the earth shuddered underfoot and seemed to groan.
No: something else actually was groaning. Some one else. The sisters had not been lying. Their Mother, they told her, needed aid. But they were all pledged virgins, while she, she was a wife who might, even now, bear renewed life: she was chosen for the task they could not do.
She looked down. Before her flowed the trickle of water she had heard. She would have to cross it if she were to go any further. Abruptly, stepping across that stream assumed heroic proportions.
Go on, fool. You want to know, don't you?
Asherah had always thought she had. Now, she feared; but she still wanted to know. So, she took the step that put her, irrevocably, beyond her husband's reach. She entered the great cavern and started toward its center.
Eons ago, some great bubble rising up out of the molten rock had formed it. When the builders of the underground ways had found it, they had smoothed its walls, then left it much as it was.
Now, however, the walls were pitted once more, as if with long use. Shadows seemed to crouch like a wounded animal in the center of the room, watching her. The
menace that had brought Leo to his knees was only quiescent. Leo still swayed behind her. Theodoulos wavered at his shoulder. And Kemal sank down in awe, his forehead pressed against the rock as if he prayed, even if he had no idea here before the shadows where East might lie.
Blasphemous as the idea was, here and not in Jerusalem lay the Omphalos, the navel of the world. Blasphemous as the idea was, what crouched in a recess at the far side of the room was as far beyond blasphemy as the stars were above her head.
The shadows dissipated. A faint glow rose from the living rock, a brighter one from the triangles and circles, the woman-symbols daubed so long ago upon the walls.
Asherah had entered a birthing chamber.
Here, beneath the fire and snow of Mount Argaeus and the changing cliffs and towers of the volcanic rock, here, beneath a thousand years of Christianity and thousands more years of her own faith and those of other gods, she had found the deepest mystery of this ancient land. And, despite all the wisdom that had been taught, all the lessons dinned into easily frightened children, and, on too many occasions in all those years, enforced by fire and sword, the mystery here was one of and for women. She should have known, look at the statues. Look at the symbols on the pottery. And—perhaps the greatest proof of all—look at the prohibitions that burdened women, not least of which had expelled holy women like Xenia from their ancient home.
The valley was old, true. But the mystery itself was older. It was old when Bathsheba, wife of Uriah the Hittite, ensnared a king as she reclined, dreaming in her bath. It was older still: it had watched dances such as the temple whores of Canaan danced at harvest festivals, luring men away from the women of the tribes of Israel. And it had laughed in joy.
It was older than her own faith, her own people, though they knew it, and feared it, and ripped down its holy places when they could find them.
And here it crouched in monumental labor before her.
She was sealed to this creature by no more than their common womanhood. What promise did she have that this power would not blast her?
Shards of Empire Page 44
