Shards of Empire

by Susan Shwartz

  A broken heart could do that to you. Leo's hair had started to grey practically overnight when Romanus was blinded. By that indication, it should be the color of snow now.

  If he did not cut it and, this time, withdraw from the world for good, to contemplate his losses.

  Joachim turned toward Leo. His face lit. He would have run to meet him if Leo had not run to him first. Joachim caught him in a hard embrace, a father's embrace, as if in holding Leo, he could embrace the daughter who was lost.

  “I tried, I tried...”

  Apologies and laments tried to gabble themselves out of Leo's throat, burdening the poor old man, who now had only an unworthy son-in-law to love him. He had lost his wife and sons in days gone by. And now, he had lost a daughter worthy to compare with the mothers in Israel or the greatest ladies of Byzantium. Leo forced himself not to increase Joachim's grief by burdening him with his own heartbreak.

  Deliberately, then, Joachim released him. He backed off one step, then looked up into Leo's face.

  What will you do now?

  He could hide forever in a monastery, he knew that. Leaving Joachim without an heir, and, worse than that, alone.

  The distance between them grew intolerable.

  “Let me be your son, not merely your son-in-law,” Leo offered. “Adopt me. I will become a Jew, and one day...”

  He would convert, undergo whatever rituals it was they whispered about and inflicted on boy babies on the eighth day, if that was what it took. However fearsome they might be. More fearsome by far was the sacrifice that, ultimately, he must make if his offer were to bear fruit: ultimately, he would have to marry and produce grandchildren to comfort Joachim and ease his final years. Would any other woman have him? And could he bear to take any other wife?

  “You have living parents, my son. It is a sorrow to lose a child. I would not have them endure what I do. But stay with me. Stay, as long as you wish.”

  Joachim reached up to put an arm around Leo, who allowed himself, for just this short time, to relax into the luxury. They stood, watching the sun set. Banners flared behind it, crimson and the purple of Empire: no, the purple of the gem that had flashed in the goddess’ belly and had cost both men far more than any gem was worth.

  “I should wash,” said Joachim. “Sundown brings the Sabbath. Asherah always used to...”

  “I know. I know.”

  An aftershock distracted Leo from that unwelcome knowledge. After the quakes he had endured, he balanced easily.

  “They will want to sleep out-of-doors,” Joachim said. “I confess, I may find it hard to sleep inside after this.”

  It was astonishing: the old man kept his voice from trembling. But Leo saw how his hands shook.

  And could Leo ever go back to the rooms he had shared with Asherah? The ache of something missing began to grow in him: a sense of the land, would he call it? He had been sealed to it by blood and loss, and now by a triumph that was so dearly bought that he might well have called it a defeat—save that Asherah would never have understood how he could scorn her sacrifice. The ache of loss, filtering up from the land through the soles of his boots, should have been stronger, he thought. Like the really bad wounds: you didn't feel the agony till afterward.

  He could wait for it, lifelong. He wouldn't have that chance.

  “I may join you. I have the need to pray.” Leo forced a smile. It came out sharp-edged, and the men who were watching him too closely flinched when they saw it. They would be clustering around him soon enough for orders and for comfort, and their families with them.

  “You men! Careful how you dig. You don't know what sort of landslide you could set off, and we've already lost too many!

  “They're idiots!” he hissed at Joachim. “Let a few of them try to retrieve...” He flinched from the idea of what they might need to exhume from the caves. “...and we'll have bigger idiots trying to dig for treasure until they bring the whole place down about us once again.”

  Or lure yet another blood tide of invaders.

  They had won time. They had not won the war forever; only for their own time, if they were lucky and very watchful. God grant it.

  Grumbling, Leo broke away from Joachim and started down toward the laboring men. The sisters were ahead of him, pausing to tell each worker of his kin, occasionally helping shift a rock or steady a man who stumbled. Every muscle in Leo's body had begun to ache. His father-in-law followed, somewhat more cautiously.

  Again, an aftershock, stronger, this time, and followed this time by a sustained rockfall, some of it clattering into a tunnel that must still be partially clear. A child's thin cry wailed up, then subsided. Used to it, are you? Leo thought.

  They would have to put up barricades. Tomorrow.

  A beam from the crimson sun struck light from the toppled rock. The light flared and shifted. It paused, then moved again as if it climbed out toward the freedom of the air. It grew as it moved, as a torch's flame strengthens when it is taken out of foul air into an open cavern. And when it had put the scattered rock behind it, it stopped. Again, the sunset haloed it until those who watched had to look away.

  But the light was fading fast. Leo turned back to see what had emerged from the rock.

  A cloud of butterflies like those that had flown out of the caverns and helped panic an invading army swirled upward from the ground and circled the source of light, then withdrew.

  “Leo?” The barriers Leo had put up so hastily to protect him against his loss crumbled at the sound of that beloved, not-to-be-believed voice. Please God, this was real, and not madness, come to claim him irrevocably.

  Asherah stood there, watching him. Smiling for him alone.

  She was swathed in fabrics so stiff with gold thread that they had not rotted away in all the years they must have been stored in the caves. Butterflies, but creatures wrought of gold and jewels, clung to her hair, distinguishable from the living creatures only by the fact that they did not fly away with the others. And in her arms, swaddled in glinting fabric, she held a child.

  Sister Xenia sank to her knees at the apparition. The faces of the woman and child were so bright she had to avert her eyes. If they were not careful, Leo thought, they could have a religious panic as well as the aftermath of war and earthquake to deal with—assuming bandits, the remnants of this wave of Turkmen, and treasure hunters were not more than enough to fill one day. Oh God, that was his wife down there. Not crushed beneath the rock, but alive and smiling at him.

  He didn't care how many tremors might occur. Half-blind, he raced down and drew Asherah into his arms, carefully, for the sake of the infant she held.

  She put up her face to be kissed. Her tears wet his lips—or was it he who wept?

  “What happened?” he demanded, sweeping his arm about her and urging her upward toward her father. “Come, come quickly. I thought your father would have died for grief at losing you. I thought that I ... oh, God, Asherah, I saw the rest of my life stretching out without you, and I didn't want it.”

  She smiled. Her tears ran down her cheeks and fell onto the infant's face. It turned and looked at Leo. Immense eyes opened, violet and unfathomable, the color of the gem he remembered from the cave.

  “Her child?” Leo stammered. “Yours?”

  “Our daughter,” Asherah told him, serenely confident that he would welcome the child. He held out a trembling finger to the baby who took it and smiled. Not for the first time that day, Leo's heart turned over from sheer adoration.

  Then he reached out to catch and steady Joachim. Of course, he could not wait for his daughter to climb up the slope to him. He would have to try to run down; and naturally, he tripped and pitched forward, practically into Leo's arms, blind with tears of joy.

  Leo had his family in his arms, then, all but Theodoulos, who had spotted his friend Ioannes with his arm in a sling. He bore himself with a flourish that would have done credit to a youth in one of the Tagmata regiments. At some point, Leo would have to deal with that, too.
Then, Joachim, trying to hold his daughter as close as he could, jostled the baby Asherah had brought from beneath the earth. The child squirmed and set up a wail that made the people digging out of the rubble or trying to figure out how and what they would eat, and where they would sleep tonight pause and smile.

  “Asherah.” Joachim brushed his daughter's hair away from her forehead. His fingers glanced over one of the butterflies gleaming in the dark curls, then over the cloth of gold she wore. “What is this?”

  She smiled. “I will explain it all. First, this is my daughter. Mine and Leo's.”

  Joachim raised his eyebrows.

  “I rescued her from beneath the earth.”

  “She must have people, child. You cannot simply claim a child, a Christian child at that. Why...”

  “Leo can,” Asherah pointed out, impeccably logical. “But ... Father, you know those statues. Those and the dishes with the women symbols on them, the ones that the monks tell people to break? For that matter, you've seen the icons they have in the churches, the ones with the women's faces scratched out?”

  Joachim nodded. Even in the darkness, Leo could see that his eyes were glazing. Too many shocks, already. How would Joachim deal with what he was about to hear?

  “There was a reason for it all. You knew, as I did, that there was power here. I found it in the ways beneath the cities. They are joined; or they were.”

  “You found them!” Joachim said. His eyes lit, flicking over the butterflies she wore in her hair.

  “Oh, there was treasure there. This is some of it. But there was also ... you would call it a statue, only it was alive. Theophany: goddess made manifest, and a goddess, at that, about to give birth and very angry at the intrusion of invaders, wave after wave, year after year, over her land. So I helped her.”

  “You,” said Joachim to Leo. “You let her?”

  “You were the one who warned me that Asherah was no puppet of mine or anyone else's. When she offered to serve as midwife and sent me away, saying that a birthing chamber was no place for men, I went.” He chose his words carefully, trying to shield Joachim from the terror and despair he had felt in those last hideous moments before the beasts and the Wild Hunt leapt out from the birthing chamber to drive the Turkmen from their domain. “I judged I could best serve everyone by fighting.”

  “The Mother drove him away, Father. She might have killed him, only she saw we had chosen each other and spared us. I think she wanted parents for her child, too.” She held up the infant to her father.

  “My dearest,” he recoiled. “I am hardly in a position to be a Spartan father—or grandfather—to expose a child, or a man of Canaan to sacrifice a first-born. I thought I had lost you! Now, beyond hope, you return, and you say this is your daughter, yours and Leo's? She is welcome, she and those who will follow her.” He touched the infant's forehead. She opened her eyes and smiled at him. It was not the smile of a newborn, but a much older, wiser child.

  Joachim's wrinkled face seemed to ease, wax smoothing beneath the sun of his granddaughter's healing regard.

  “Would you...” Leo had never heard his father-in-law so hesitant. “...would you call her Binah?”

  “Mother's name!” Asherah nodded happily. “I was hoping you would suggest that. The right name, a name of power...”

  “Like your own, child, like your own.”

  Asherah leaned her head against Leo's shoulder, pressing in to stand as close to him as she might. Leo was not at all certain that he wanted to share her just yet with a child, much less with a newborn and with Theodoulos, who would still need attention before he entered fully into manhood. Then he recalled: Tzipporah and the other women of the household, assuming they survived, would be ecstatic at having a child to care for. He would have what he longed for: a bath, a meal, and time alone to reassure himself that Asherah would always be by his side.

  Except, of course, when she chose otherwise.

  Then the child caught him in the gaze of those remarkable violet eyes, and he was lost. No, his guardianship was not at an end.

  “Let me tell you, Leo. After a long time—” She opened her mouth, considered, closed it again, and started over. Leo had the distinct sense that she was censoring details of midwifery that she considered unfit for masculine ears. “I caught the child. Caught it as it was born, and then the world seemed to turn upside down. It exploded about me— light and sound, and the terrible, terrible shaking of the earthquakes. I heard the land crack wide open, the goddess’ guardian beasts run by; and I told myself, ‘You will never see the light of day.’

  “Then the shaking stopped. I found myself lying on my face, dressed as I am now. When I stopped shaking and could focus my eyes, I saw the statue. It had toppled, and the gem in its belly had shattered into thousands of tiny shards, each one glowing, each vanishing when I put out a hand to touch it. I leaned forward and saw Binah—” She did not so much smile as let her eyes glow at her father. “—lying there, unhurt, and swaddled. Just as you see her.

  “I picked her up, and then, oh Leo, a flight of butterflies just erupted from the cracks in the walls. They swirled around me and the baby as if they were trying to hide us. It was dark in the cave, and a great cat, like one of the statues beside the goddess, walked beside me, leading me out into the light.”

  It was a ballad that they lived in, a ballad that bled and feared and rejoiced past the ability of any one singer. One last question remained.

  “What happened to the other lion?” Perhaps it was a foolish question; but he wanted to know, if he could, and thus knot up the edges on this exceedingly complex tapestry.

  “Don't you understand yet?” Asherah laid a hand upon his arm. The child stirred and opened its astonishing, too-wise eyes.

  “Leo, it was you!”

  Behind him, Leo could hear Joachim muttering prayers. Sensing his attention, his father-in-law smiled. “I thank God, son, not just for keeping us alive, but letting us live until now.”

  They stood, not speaking, letting the shouts and clatter of a people returning to life wash over them.

  “I'm afraid you won't have much of a Sabbath, sir,” Leo commented. The work to come would be backbreakingly hard, leaving Joachim little time for prayer and contemplation, probably for years to come.

  “I couldn't ask for better.” Joachim raised an admonishing eyebrow at Leo: don't keep people waiting.

  They stood outside the charmed circle that good fortune and a now-buried statue of an ancient goddess had cast for them, waiting on Leo's pleasure.

  Nordbriht, worn out, but oddly relaxed, came over to stand behind him, a small boy clinging to his leg. “I've been helping families locate their men.”

  It was laughter that Leo heard, then, laughter and sobs of joy, mingled with the grief for losses only now being discovered.

  Leo nodded approval at the Northerner. The wolfishness was gone from his grin—almost. “Now, just you look at them, brother—I mean, prince. They know who saved their lives. Say the word, and you could be Emperor. And I would serve you more faithfully than my kinsman Haraldr served all the Jarls of Miklagard gone by.”

  He made as if to lay his axe at Leo's feet or raise it in salute, whichever he might prefer. Leo forestalled him.

  He looked from Kemal, whose gaze darted before and behind him as if he expected imminent attack. Something must be done for him in the way of lands, perhaps, or herds. Ioannes stood among the landowners, drawn, but determined to press beyond battle-courage and achieve the endurance of his elders. Fanning out behind them, suffering occasional demands from Sister Xenia and her companions for messengers to fetch food, blankets, wine, or anything else from their lands or warehouses, were the farmers, merchants, and aristocrats who had eyed Leo askance when he had first arrived, a cloud on his name and his soul.

  “Ducas,” one of the nobles hailed him. “Well done.”

  The heat that had made that name dangerous to bear here was gone. A Ducas might have betrayed Romanus, Cappadocia's so
n. Another Ducas had helped preserve his old land. Noble to noble, was it? What did the man want?

  “We have our work cut out for us now,” Leo said, gesturing at the effort to bring order out of earthquake.

  “Whatever you decide. Whatever.”

  Leo suppressed a shiver. He had not missed the undertones in that reply. A moment longer, and they would be cheering him, riding yet another whirlwind.

  Perhaps that was what the man wanted, what they all might be led to want: for another man to rise from Cappadocia at the head of an army. A man, say, who had the backing of all people in the region; who had Imperial connections and experience with the ways, more treacherous than any underground roadway, of Byzantium; who could point to a Varangian and that very Seljuk who had taken an Emperor prisoner as a sign of the men who would follow him; and who had contacts among the richest trading caravans in the East and a wily, courageous wife. On the whole, it was easier when Leo had only had to worry about assassins.

  Him. The Basileus Leo Ducas. Leo Digenis—twice-bred; twice-born. If he had a sufficient share of his family's ambition and ruthlessness, he might even manage it. There could even be fulfillment in replacing an incompetent with a capable administrator.

  Could he withstand Psellus? He was sealed to this land with blood, not made Emperor in the Church, the bridge between Asia and Europe, the intermediary between God and Earth. Any power that he had was something other, something of the earth. Even now, he could feel it appealing to him: so many ravaged homes, torn-up fields, plundered flocks; so much in shards or ashes. The appeals made him want to set to work right now, not hasten into battle or to the nearest palace.

  There might indeed be treasure to be found here, if they spared time from rebuilding to dig for it. It might even prove useful in repairing an empire.

  But why bother, either to dig or to scheme? Such treasure could attract only more enemies and more traitors. That belonged to the world that he had left behind, the world in which he and Kemal would have been enemies, and Joachim only a resource to be exploited and despised. As for Asherah ...