Shards of Empire Read online

  “Will you aid us, old mother?” Leo asked gently.

  She looked up, and he knew her then: the woman by whose hut he had found the tiny stone knife.

  She smiled, those surprising teeth glinting in the torchlight.

  He began to raise her as he might have aided a lady of his own kind in Constantinople, but she refused to move. Her hand clasped his: he felt the twists of its joints, its calluses, and its strength. “Have you still got the knife, young hero? Do you keep it safe?”

  He nodded.

  “Nah, there, nah ... I will not say it is not so bad. You are a man, not a suckling, and so you know it is hard. A moment longer ... there.”

  How he got there, he never knew. But he was kneeling at the woman's feet, his head down, almost buried in her lap, and those capable hands had cast his helm aside, had smoothed his matted hair, cupped his skull, and pressed over his closed eyes. Bless me, mother. The words faltered behind his lips.

  His own mother had pecked him on both cheeks and prayed aloud. Anna Dalassena had secluded herself in mourning, and had had no blessing for him. Warmth from the gnarled fingers eased him, relaxing for a moment against her knees, in an aura of herbs and soil.

  “Better so? Look up. Do you think we will not weather this storm? You ride out from the city with your power. But we remain, as we always have. Now, bring me to this great lord of men.”

  As if she were the Empress herself, Leo raised the farmwife to her feet. She shook out her skirts and nodded briskly at him; and he brought her through a press of crack troops and weary officers, to stand before the Emperor. Bobbing awkward obeisance to Romanus, she straightened and then knelt, sturdy as blocks of stone cut a thousand years ago from Dokeia's foundations.

  Matter-of-factly, she began to unpack her herbs. Aristocratic nostrils, heedless of the stinks of wine, of blood, of mud, and sweat, wrinkled at their fragrances; but for the first time in a very long time, the tightness in Leo's skull eased.

  Without being told, Leo fetched a bowl of warm water.

  “Turning surgeon yourself, Ducas?” Romanus asked. “Get yourself looked to. I want you able to ride.” He flinched, then eased under the old woman's ministrations. As his officers had foreseen, he paid no more attention to her than to any of his body servants.

  “Ride, sir? Where?”

  “My birth country Cappadocia,” the Emperor said, over the old woman's head. “We'll cut across the mountains and pass the Gates into Cilicia. They'll be waiting for us there, the men still loyal to me—Khatchadour and Alyattes.”

  The old woman shook her head, as if over the injuries she tended. She had washed the worst of his scratches and, from one of her bundles, had extracted a grayish strip of cloth to serve as a bandage.

  A pause. Shadows danced in the brazier, leaping as more fuel was added. The air grew thick. Leo could imagine the shrugs as eyes met eyes in secret signals. Some trick of the air let him hear the whispers.

  "We all know who is piping the tune in Constantinople. Psellus for the aristocrats; Caesar John for the army. He sent his younger son out to make his name: now he'll call him back..."

  "You think he'll send Andronicus? He's served under the Emperor in the South, he knows the land..."

  Muttered oaths.

  "The chance to fight that one would overmaster our master's good sense, wouldn't it? If he has any left."

  "Quiet!"

  If Romanus’ officers turned their coats and turned on their Emperor, Leo's Ducas connections might prove valuable. Still, he had turned on his uncle Andronicus. In either case, he remained what he had always been—profoundly suspect. He walked to the table and poured a cup of wine, then another. He brought the cup to Romanus and gave the other to the woman tending him. That caused some murmuring. She grinned and contrived to spill some of the dark-red wine upon the stone floor.

  “What do you see?” Romanus’ voice was a harsh whisper.

  “Most Exalted?” A thread of fear underlay the country accent, thickened, Leo suspected, for the Emperor's benefit.

  “Tell me what you see in the wine.”

  Let a priest hear the Emperor, and there would be, quite literally, hell to pay.

  “This is a matter for women,” the old one said, avoiding the glare that Romanus used to frighten his officers. “A game to awe the children or to ease the mind of a woman who bears a child.” Her small, wicked smile implied that the Emperor was neither.

  “So they say. Amuse me, then. Humor your Emperor.”

  The old woman bent to gaze into her cup.

  “No,” said the Emperor. “Take mine. Look into it and see.”

  Leo wanted to avert his eyes. Was he in truth to play David to Romanus’ Saul? Saul had tried to murder David, after all.

  The air prickled as power seemed to gather and concentrate in the body of the woman who knelt before a fearful Emperor.

  They were fleeing, riding until their horses dropped, remounting, and riding, riding until exhaustion and fear forced them to sleep where they fell. A Gate, darker than the wine, loomed before them; but they left it unguarded; and, as they slept, their enemy came upon them, and they must flee again ...

  “A poor omen,” Romanus mused. “Try again...”

  “Great lord, I beg you,” the old woman began. The suppliant's whine was a pose: there was no begging in this one—except perhaps for Romanus to turn aside from this desire to see his future.

  “Again!”

  She squared her shoulders. He had commanded her: he would see what there was to see. God might have mercy on his soul: she would have none. She bent over the Emperor's cup and breathed upon the wine.

  Fumes rose from the cup. When they cleared, more fumes remained within, captured in the cup. No, Leo thought, not fumes: that was smoke, the smoke of a brazier in which the coals were burning down, and in it, tent stakes, glowing red hot.

  Romanus’ hand, holding the cup, shook, then steadied.

  Soldiers led out a man whose mouth was pinched with the pain of old wounds and a dreadful, present fear. His eyes started in his head, as he scanned the faces—Roman, Norman, Armenian—of his enemies first, as if seeking the mercy he would not find.

  “Alyattes,” breathed the Emperor. “Has this happened or is it yet to be?”

  Unable to look at the brazier or, any longer, at the world that would so soon turn dark for him, Alyattes shut his eyes. They forced him down, to his knees, then onto his back, and pinned him. A man with wrapped hands extracted the irons from the fire. Alyattes screamed, and from his seared-out eyes, steam rose. The wine stank of cautery ...

  The wine splashed up, destroying the hideous image within. Romanus dashed the cup to the floor. Its contents, steaming ever so slightly, spurted over his muddy crimson boots.

  Romanus covered his face with his hands. “Get that old witch out of here, Leo,” he whispered.

  “Guard yourself, young lord,” the woman said as Leo escorted her outside.

  A tired surgeon searched his cuts and pointed him toward the nearest priest. Thus it was that he fell asleep in a state of grace, but he did not sleep in peace.

  He lay out under the skies. An icy rain poured down. Lightning stalked the earth, bounded from point to point, spiking and fragmenting wherever it touched. And then They came. Male and female they were, taller than mortal men, wearing kilts and high diadems surmounted with horns. Their eyes were grey, and their mouths turned up in the mirthless smiles of ancient statues. Slowly, they advanced, as if in ceremony—yet wind rushed by them. The leader raised his hand. The lightning flew to it, like a well-schooled bird, and he hurled it across a landlocked sea to strike the cone of a mountain far away. The ground trembled like a woman in labor, groaned, and shuddered ...

  Leo woke. Outside, the rain poured down, accompanied by rolling thunder.

  As armies from the City pushed Romanus south, he claimed to have good hopes of recruiting an army in his native soil. For now, however, the Emperor's luck seemed to have turned. Did Constant
ine exult that a second army from Constantinople had arrived to augment his forces? It was his turn for chagrin as soldiers and a general in whom he had placed his hopes deserted.

  Letters from Byzantium reached Romanus. Reached him, and enraged him.

  “They offer me co-rule, then amnesty—for what? In the same breath, they demand that I abdicate, or moderate what I seek? How can a man be only moderately a Basileus?” Romanus shouted.

  At Khatchadour's suggestion, they withdrew into Cilicia, shutting the Gates most firmly shut against Andronicus Ducas. They descended from winter into early spring. Southward they marched, into Adana.

  Someone was weeping in the early dawn, deep, heartfelt sobs that brought Leo out of a dream of deep passages and flickering shadows. The camp should be stirring. Nothing. Even the cookfires had sunk into gray ash. Leo found the watchmen seated and staring out toward the mountains, their eyes vacant.

  As Leo started to shake the nearest man awake, his gaze fell on what should have had the guard up and sounding the alarm. Unimpeded by any watchers or any traps, their enemy's army had passed the Gate by night and, like water seeping past the level in the hull where a ship can safely float, massed in formation beneath the hills.

  Once again, Andronicus had proved too much for Romanus. Perhaps because Leo came of the blood he did, the bemusement that worked on the others did not seep into his consciousness and paralyze his will.

  Leo shouted and shook the man awake. At the next guard post, a man stirred, spat out a prayer or a blasphemy at the sight of Andronicus’ army, and sounded the alarm. Now the camp boiled as if one of the Emperor's zookeepers had thrown a chunk of meat into a cage of starving animals.

  There would be no time, now, for Khatchadour to make good on his promises of more aid from Antioch, no time for Alp Arslan's reinforcements to arrive.

  Men with the stolid, weathered faces of small farmers or tenants from Cappadocia stood with weapons shaking in their hands, their weathered, stolid faces unusually pallid. Soldiers with the clever, volatile features of city-dwellers or the intensity of Armenians, distant kin, perhaps to the governor of Antioch, tightened their harness.

  The Emperor knelt before a priest, then prostrated himself before the signs of holiness. When he rose, he forced a smile onto his face as if it too could shield him. He wore his parade armor.

  Had he some notion of challenging Andronicus hand to hand?

  Even now, the last of the City's troops moved into formation. As the dawn haze faded, the last mists withdrew from the minds of the men around him, allowing them, in a final cruelty, to know how desperate their plight was.

  In that moment came the cry, Nobiscum! And the forces of Byzantium rushed upon the Emperor's host like a bird of prey upon a helpless fowl.

  A lull in the fighting allowed Leo to blink the dust from his eyes. Someone thundered by him on a lathered horse: Khatchadour. The governor's eyes were wilder than those of his mount, flaming as if he had seen the Furies and they had made him mad. Screaming oaths in Greek and Armenian, he and a few of his men charged. Then he disappeared from sight in a cloud of dust and a welter of soldiers.

  “Ducas! Andronicus Ducas!” Leo could hear Romanus screaming his adversary's name.

  Clean, safe, mounted on a fresh horse, and positioned where his troops could see him, Andronicus did not so much disdain the challenge as ignore it out of existence. He sat his horse while blood flowed over the flat land, aloof and terrible as image of Empire.

  The surviving Varangians massed around Romanus and forced him away. Some men tossed their shields and weapons away to run the faster. Leo's horse screamed and fell. He kicked free of the stirrups and, for a miracle, landed on his feet. Then it was run, run in harness, run until he thought his heart would burst. At dawn, Adana's earth had been yellow-brown. Now it had been churned into a hideous red muck on which flies were already beginning to land.

  The routed army reached the city, spreading panic in their wake. Shouting, they rushed past its guards, into the city, up into its acropolis. In that temporary safety, they cast themselves down, gasping, bleeding, retching over ancient, austere stone while the sky, which had seen such sights before, remained pitilessly bright.

  Again, messengers brought the death of hope. Khatchadour, it was said, had been battered so disastrously outside Adana that he had taken refuge in the underbrush. Andronicus had received him as much as a host as a captor. Spies whispered of a great gem that he had presented to Andronicus—and that he had reserved, he said publicly, for the Empress. He could scarcely mean Eudocia.

  With the loss of Khatchadour, Adana's suppliers grew restive, the soldiers more so. Andronicus tightened his nets around the city on the plain.

  “Do you hear rustling?”

  Leo started.

  “Easy, easy...” To his surprise, Attaleiates grinned at him. Leo had not seen the older man for some time: trusted, responsible, he had been as often away from the Emperor's forces as riding with them.

  “Rustling? As in men preparing to turn their coats upon their shoulders?”

  Attaleiates leaned closer to Leo. “He knows we can't go on this way.”

  Leo shrugged.

  The man he had counted a friend shrugged back. “We all want to survive through this, if we can. If only to write histories and bore our grandsons.”

  Attaleiates gestured at the next group of men awaiting their chance at the Emperor—priests, surrounded by soldiers.

  “They could be bringing him guarantees of safety,” he muttered.

  Leo himself had written letters from the Emperor to the bishops of Coloneia, Heracleia, and Chalcedon.

  “I've my own news from the Domestikos’ camp,” he said. “Truly, Andronicus does not want a massacre. You mark my words, Leo. We will have a treaty before long.”

  “And him?”

  Attaleiates made a cutting gesture. “He won't be the first to turn to a life of prayer. He can always try again in a few years. Psellus did.”

  The Emperor rose.

  The officers and priests fell back. He was still Basileus, still isaposteles, God's vicegerent on earth.

  For a long moment, Romanus stood, staring at his hands as if surprised that, even now, they could not pull victory out of thin air. Then, he began to laugh.

  “My beautiful, costly whore of an army. I can no longer feed you. Adana can no longer, it seems, feed you. And thus...”

  He held up his empty hands and shrugged. Then the Emperor of the Romans seated himself on plain stone as if upon the Lion Throne in Byzantium.

  “Bring the Domestikos’ messengers before Us. We shall hear their terms.”

  Black-clad men led the way to Andronicus Ducas’ camp. One upheld a large cross. The bishops of Coloneia, Heracleia, and Chalcedon marched behind it. One held a letter, the seals on it of the Basileus plainly visible. There was no doubt now who was meant when that term was used: Michael in Constantinople.

  Clad in black, his hair shorn as befit a monk, Romanus followed the bishops toward the victor's camp.

  Andronicus Ducas stood waiting. His armor glittered; his head was high; and his face gleamed with satisfaction. Hand outstretched, Andronicus strode forward to clasp his former master's hand, to bring him as an honored guest into camp, and to invite him and ... for the first time, his fine flow of speech hesitated. He wrung Romanus’ hand again and invited him to a feast in his tent.

  “So noble, it makes me sick,” Attaleiates muttered rashly.

  Leo kept his face carefully impassive. The bishops’ guarantees had secured his life—perhaps. He was giddy with the odors wreathing up from the silver dishes generously arrayed upon a long table.

  “Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies.” Romanus showed teeth in a feral smile.

  “You have no enemies here today,” Andronicus Ducas declared. There was no mention, of course, of anointing his guest's head with oil: that was for coronation, not deposition. He strode to the table, chose two goblets, and
filled them to overflowing. Handing one to Romanus, he sipped from the other. Servants approached and began to pour wine for all those present.

  Attaleiates grasped Leo's arm. “Get it over with,” he recommended, but Leo needed no urging.

  Let him see me as a proper officer. Leo stiffened to attention.

  His uncle's eyes bored into Leo's as if he were a captured spy.

  “Your mother asked me to tell you she and your father are well,” he said.

  “Sir, I could not have a more noble messenger,” Leo replied. His eyes dazzled, and he covered the momentary lapse of control by sipping his wine. If some poison had been added, he could not taste it. He turned away to see Romanus watching them. The former Emperor shook his head.

  “I beggared myself to provide you with a future,” said Romanus. “I'd take it, if I were you.”

  “Why?” Leo asked his uncle.

  “Let us say we do not cast men of honor from our family as quickly as you believe. Come, it is not quite a fatted calf that we have here on the table, but will you sit and eat something? Your mother would be distressed to see you so thin.”

  Romanus was eating as appreciatively if he might never again have a meal this lavish. Leo seated himself. It was good to eat his fill. As they took the initial edge off their hunger, Leo found himself able to look about. The Emperor—he could not think of him as ... as what? Brother Romanus? Or would they give him some name untainted by imperial dignities? Yet another messenger left Andronicus Ducas. This time, he leaned back from the table. It was not, Leo realized, the gesture of a man replete and expansive after a feast, but the movement of someone settling down to a tricky piece of business

  Air currents seemed to hiss and whisper in the great tent, stirred by the press of many bodies. When had all the guards entered?

  Andronicus rose.

  “I have,” he began, “a most difficult duty to perform.”

  Romanus smiled without mirth “Difficult? I renounced an empire and cut my hair. What is your difficulty, weighed against that?”