Byzantium's Crown

by Susan Shwartz

  "Alexa summoned me."

  "She could have escaped alone, Marric. No. My love, you seek the throne not because it belongs to you, but because you belong to it. You are still a slave, Marric, slave to the empire, What will you do?"

  Anger at being taunted, even in Stephana's familiar, beloved voice, flared briefly, then died away. "I will thank the gods for such bondage." As they rode, he thought about it. "My allies among the Kutrigur once offered the chance to ride the borders. I refused, but until now never knew why. And I'd have liked to travel to World's End."

  The sun blazed one last time as it sank, and the pools they rode past were reddened, as bloody as the day itself had been. The horse's hooves made sucking sounds in the mud.

  "I'd best lead him," Marric said. He started to dismount. Stephana kept her arms about his waist, holding him for a moment longer.

  "I am sorry if the truth angered you," she said. "But if you accept that you belong to the empire, then you must understand—"

  "What I understand fight now is that these lands are totally impassable after dark. Unless, of course, you have cat's eyes as well as the powers of prophecy." He kissed her lightly to end the conversation. Her lips tasted of salt.

  "Marric, you cannot return to Byzantium without some idea of what you face. Promise me you'll let me scry for you tonight. Promise."

  It would be the most intimate involvement he had ever had with magic. Yet she had asked it of him, she who asked nothing. What was the worst that she could say? Reluctantly Marric nodded. Taking the horse's reins, he walked forward.

  The horse's head bumped Marric's shoulder, and he froze at a sudden noise. He recognized it now. It was the sound of harness, the squelch and clatter of horses picking their way through the swamp. He heard a suppressed oath but couldn't make out the words to know whether they were Greek, Egyptian, or Arabic. He drew his sword and set his back against the horse.

  "Get down and hide," he hissed at Stephana, who refused to move.

  Closer and closer the noises came. Then they passed, as if whatever force lay out there regrouped for an attack. A troop against one tired man. Let Stephana hide, and he would send the horse out to distract them. If he had time, he would join her.

  The troop rode back their way.

  "Get down!" Damn it, had terror paralyzed her? She had been brave enough facing down Sutekh. He reached up to assist her, but she pushed his hand away.

  "Watch the mist," Stephana said, and gestured. From her parted lips came a trilling sound. Shadows thickened on the ground. The evening mist rose and encircled Marric, wreathing about curved blades and the metal of warriors' trapping. He saw the Berber's eyes, fierce, bright, and filled with blood lust as they rode straight at him.

  "No," he whispered. He shut his eyes against what would be his own death if he could not fight it. This was illusion, illusion cast by Stephana, and therefore beneficent. It would not harm him.

  He opened his eyes, saw her nod approval gravely. She moved her hands and glanced about as a general might survey the site of a battle. The mist thickened still further. Now it rose as a wall between them and the Berbers who trespassed into the druid's realm.

  Clashes of swords against shields and armor, screams of battle and of death agonies, the snapping of wood, and the confused shrill whinnies of panicking horses ripped the night. What were they fighting?

  "The mist shows them enemies drawn from within themselves. Stand firm; this cannot last much longer."

  How could Marric ever have thought her frail? As an adept she held powers that left him shuddering. And yet, if he possessed them, if he dared draw them into his hand like a sword or scepter, what might he not do?

  Echoes of the fight, intensified by the dank, standing water, rose, then died away. Someone staggered near them. There was a whimpered plea, a splash, and a slithering sound. The voices of the swamp dwellers rose again. Marric dashed chill sweat from his face and turned to look at Stephana.

  "Don't move yet," she ordered softly. Ahead of Marric the mist still rose from the hummocks he skirted with such care. "There is a glamour over the house. Taran and—" She paused, her head lifting as if she sniffed the air. "Nicephorus, I think, set the wards. They cannot maintain them while helping us. So we will go to them."

  She slid from the saddle and came up beside Marric. "This fog is not of my doing," she said. "I will guide you through it. Taran calls this druidechta, druid's fog. But I can pierce it." She grasped his arm.

  "Be careful," he couldn't help warning her. Yet he was the one grateful to fling an arm about her shoulders as they walked. Adrift in this magic-spawned fog, Marric feared that had he been left to himself, he would have lost his way and strayed into a deadly bog before morning. But Stephana moved as surely as if she were guided.

  She is, he thought. She is a priestess. And yet she had been willing to kill for him, had saved them both in the swamp, yet had suffered life as a slave. It was a paradox Marric could not resolve.

  Suddenly the mists parted. Wrapped in shadow stood a tiny cabin. Outside it, sitting in concentration that amounted to trance, were Taran and Nicephorus.

  "I think," Stephana murmured, "that if you had tried, you might have seen through the glamour yourself. After all . . . "

  You are the prince. "Being a prince is more than leading armies," his father had always said. Though he felt disloyal in thinking it, perhaps being a prince was more than his father knew. He seemed to be heir to ancient magic as well as to his empire.

  "The next time I shall try," Marric promised despite the dryness in his mouth.

  But I am no priest! He had said it so often it had to be true, didn't it? Another paradox.

  But the paradoxes made him confront the druid with a smile on his face. Taran rose, approached, and with complete, ceremonial deliberation made the deep bow due Marric as emperor.

  Mor, rebellious and brutalized, shrank back. Then the pain of the last months faded, and Mor was encompassed by Marric. He was the prince again. Graciousness revived in him, and he inclined his head, acknowledging Taran's homage. He felt almost dizzy from the immense change his months of slavery and the transition into freedom had wrought in his thinking.

  He looked at Stephana too with these new eyes. She would not be, could not be empress or even consort. But there would be a place, an honored place very close to him, for the woman who had healed him after he had renounced his life. Stephana would never be hailed as Isis, Mother of Empire, but she was his heart, and she had given the empire new life.

  Slave-seeress, scholar, druid, and fugitive prince against Irene and the wounded strength of the throne. Had there ever been a less likely conspiracy?

  "Did you kill your enemy?" Taran asked. Now that Marric was himself again, Sutekh's death no longer seemed of overmastering importance. He had simply been a savage man whom the prince had killed in the same way that a farmer destroys the cur who has bitten his wife.

  "My enemy sits on my father's throne."

  Taran smiled. "Come within. I can give you safe rest."

  Why were they all willing to help him? From the first moment of his slavery, Nicephorus had been ally and friend. Stephana had given herself to him. And now Taran risked his precarious security to help a foreign prince.

  Your line has the power to bind hearts, Stephana had said. Marric's heart filled with love and grief for the risks his friends accepted for his sake. He drew Stephana close and extended a hand to Taran.

  "I have not been the prince, or even the man you would have me be," he said hoarsely. "But thank you." They followed Taran inside. "I did not seek this," Marric said. "It simply happened."

  "As do all things when you place your feet on the Way. Had you forced your way onto the throne, you might . . . you would have ruled well, but never would you have been more than a warrior king: ambitious, dealing the justice of a lion to its pride. Well enough. But from having been nothing, you have earned the chance to become much more."

  In this very swamp, Marric
recalled, Isis and Horus had fled from Set and been sheltered.

  "I am not an initiate priest," Marric told him. "Nor likely to be one."

  "So you always say," Taran replied. "But now, when you have just escaped, is no time to talk of such matters. Be seated."

  Several stools ringed a low table. Marric sank onto one, aware for the first time of how weary he was. Nicephorus waited until he was seated, then sat too. Leaving the last stool for the druid, Stephana drew a mat forward and sat at Marric's feet, leaning back against his legs. She reached up to take his hand and cradle it against her cheek. The caress reassured him in this humble place that seemed to hint at mysteries too high for anything but temple dwellers.

  "The last time I saw you," Taran said, "you had been fighting too. In any case, you were wounded. You must take better care."

  "Be assured," said Marric, "I take no unnecessary risks now." Never again would he fight as he had in the provinces, when he had ridden the steppes, or as he had when he fought the pirates or the Gepid, strictly for relief from thought and purpose. What was the matter with him? Everything Taran said seemed to prick his conscience. He tightened his clasp on Stephana's hand.

  "I must return to Alexandria," Marric told the druid after they had all washed and eaten. Mellow light and cinnamon-scented incense rose from braziers placed in the comers of the hut. They were of beautifully wrought metal and looked like gifts from the Osiris temple.

  "Indeed you must. But how? I will find out. While you rest, I shall ask."

  There were no horses here, save for the ones Marric and Nicephorus had ridden. Taran kept no servant and would not in any case have risked one by sending him forth into treacherous swamps prowled by soldiers and defeated Berbers. And though there were doves and other birds, some with splinted wings, hanging in cages from the rafters, he had no carrier birds.

  "Curious, prince?" Taran's face gleamed in the lamp light and the moonlight that shone through the hut's one window. "While the rest of you sleep, I too shall appear to rest. But I shall be traveling out of body to Imhotep, my friend, and we shall confer. A way will be found."

  "Stephana told me that I must look ahead to see—"

  "What you face? Aye, that you must." He rose from his stool and went to a battered chest. Kneeling before it, he opened it and lifted from it an object swathed in clean linen. Carefully he removed the wrappings from a silver bowl, thin and blackened with age.

  This he placed on the table before Stephana. She rose, sat on Taran's stool, and drew the bowl toward her. Nicephorus filled a ewer with clean water and placed it, along with a phial of oil, within her reach.

  Stephana poured water into the bowl. Then she moved it so that the moonlight shining through the window lay mirrored in the water. Unlike its blackened outer surface, the bowl's interior gleamed silver. It shone even more brightly as the moonlight pooled in the gently rippling water. For a moment Stephana sat with her slender hands cupping the bowl. Light flowed from it around her hands and up her arms, caught and tangled in her flowing hair, and touched her face with an austere serenity that made each man present catch his breath.

  Was this the same woman who had trembled at his touch? She seemed more priestess or goddess than woman now.

  Stephana breathed on the water, then delicately worked the stopper from the phial and let a few drops of oil fall into the bright water. The shrill cry of a creature in mortal terror and the triumphant shriek of a nighthawk stooping on its prey rent the air, but no one moved.

  "The hawk strikes," Stephana whispered. "Yes. We shall see the hawk tonight . . . and whatever else the Goddess wills us to see." She raised her face from the bowl to the moonlight. Now it seemed a palpable thing, a path of silver connecting the hut with the realm of the Goddess.

  As she extended both hands over the water, the light grew so intense that her hands gleamed pink where it touched them. "Hail, O great Mother, who art called Lady of Earth, Water, and Sky. Nourish us by field and river. Enlighten us by the radiance of Thy face. We, Thy children, praise Thee, and we invoke Thee by the power with which Thou endowest me. If it be Thy will, grant us sight!"

  "So may it be!" Nicephorus and Taran responded. To his shock, Marric realized he had joined in.

  The moonlight that turned Stephana into a breathing representation of the goddess died away. Only her hands still shone. She parted them. Now the water's glow faded into evanescent haze. She bent to stare into the bowl. The oil swirled in the water, if the substance in the bowl could still be called water. Now shapes coiled and smoked in its depths, faded out, and reformed.

  "Prince, what would you seek?" She was a priestess addressing a royal supplicant now.

  "My future," said Marric. "I go to regain the throne of my fathers and my mothers from her who has stolen it and sucks the life and health from the empire I was born to serve. Show me what I must know."

  "Give me your hands."

  Marric placed his hands over Stephana's.

  "Watch, Prince."

  As Marric sat, scarcely daring to breathe, the golden oil in the still water swirled:

  Ships—high-prowed and clinker-built, sailing down the rivers, across the Euxine toward Byzantium, beaching to unload warriors with a grudge against Empire.

  Irene, haughty in draped chlamys of a purple so bright that it was almost crimson, bringing jeweled fists up in anger: "When we fired the tents, did we not teach the barbarians our power? Perhaps they need a sharper lesson." Flame lances from her fingers and ignites the map. "Well, the Tagmata will give them one." About her stir men with braided hair, sworn to her by oaths of service, but linked to the Aescir with ties of blood.

  Audun Bearmaster, gesturing furiously, his white bears moaning in sympathy, turns on his heel with the briefest of bows, stalking from the court back to his camp. "I could not move her because she would not permit me to speak," he tells his men.

  Opposite the city cluster felt yurts, the traveling homes of the Kutrigur hordes. Their horses, hardy and steppe-bred, smaller than the massive charges of the klibanophoroi, graze in the fields outside the walls. Within the largest tent, seated on a heap of furs are Ellac and Uldin, khagans of the hordes, and their brothers by fosterage. With them is the shaman who casts the scapular bones of divination.

  "I made my treaty with Marric, the khagan of the city's son. He is a man and a warrior. Where is he? Gone, says this little queen of weak power and less truth. Had Marric wanted to ride free, we offered him the freedom of the steppes. My faith is to the man, not to his city."

  Marric groaned. "No! You have it wrong. The city is what is important; you made peace with it! Friend, they will slaughter you; don't do this—"

  "Silence!" ordered Stephana.

  "Caravans I will permit," said Uldin, "but not an invading army. Let this feeble queen and her clumsy troopers ride at me and my sons will fill them with arrows."

  Marric saw that Stephana's face still bore that divine calm. But the contrast between moonlight and darkness, moonlight on the bowl, darkness elsewhere, was less distinct, more akin to the separation between normal light and shadow. She was tiring, yet he must know more.

  For a third time the oil swirled in the bowl:

  A tall, familiar form—himself!—grasped an enraged woman in a cloak clasped across her breasts by hands stained with red light. Alexa.

  Marric remembered how she had loosed Ctesiphon to die under their pursuers' horses and saw the whole, sickening story replayed with merciless clarity in the water:

  Alexa struggled with Irene's men, her sharp dagger dripping blood on her robes, screaming defiance as she tried to summon power even against her brother. A guard's blade slashed her side and she was falling—

  Why could Marric not weep for the blow that had ended his house?

  Even as Marric fell unconscious, men charged down from a ship onto the docks.

  Why should Stephana exhaust herself merely to show Marric his own willfulness? He should never have let her scry for him: this was too clo
se a contact with magic for his comfort. He raised a hand to break her trance, but then the water showed still another scene.

  And then came the rush of the bearmaster's men over the side of their vessel, overpowering the cataphracts who surrounded Alexa, then lifting her gently and returning to their ship.

  The bearmaster bent over a pallet on which Alexa lay. The sheet covering her rose and fell as she breathed.

  Alexa was alive! Marric exulted. He would have hidden his face in his hands save that Stephana still clasped them. Her hands had gone very cold. But the visions were not yet over.

  Alexa, wearing the dress of an Aescir noblewoman, walking on the riverbank as the bearmaster's men compelled their ship upriver over the rapids . . . Alexa, riding at Audun's side in a green land, her face peaceful . . . staring out to sea, no aura of evil about her now.

  The film of oil on the water was thinner, darker now. More and more feebly it swirled. Stephana's hands shook.

  "One last thing," Marric begged. "Let me see my sister as she is now!"

  Stephana drew a shuddering breath and bent over the bowl.

  Alexa's dark hair was brushed back into long braids bound with gold. She wore green, girdled with metal leaves, and she stood between a man and woman, no, a king and queen. Both were tall and golden haired, crowned with simple circlets. Alexa parted her lips as if to speak to Marric and—

  The vision guttered out. The oil in the water caught fire and burned for a brief instant. Then smoke rose from what was only a bowl of water stained with ashes. Light and life had fled from it. Stephana's hands jerked and the bowl turned over. She lurched sideways, and Marric came around the table to kneel at her side. He was glad to bury his face against her hair and hide his tears.

  He wanted to shout, to laugh, to weep, or to swing Stephana high into the air. Alexa was alive and safe in the Isles of the Mists. The brother and sister who ruled there would protect her against the time he could come to claim her. Alexa would reign as Isis yet!