Byzantium's Crown

by Susan Shwartz

  "Go on ahead," Marric ordered his soldiers. "Lie, and lie fast: the lady has lost a stirrup, broken her reins."

  Nut, hover over us with your veils; Isis, protect us; Horus, spread your wings to cover us. Marric heard Stephana's invocation and joined his will to hers. He knew how this drained her. Now strength flowed from him too, but he barely heeded it. As long as they could maintain this level of concentration, Stephana could convince Thutmosis of what she wished. Confidently Marric rode out into the light.

  The young Alexandrian stared narrowly at them. With his enhanced clarity of perception, Marric touched Thutmosis' thoughts.

  A general . . . soldiers . . . two squalid magicians . . . Marric smiled as he caught Thutmosis' mental pictures: Marric himself scarred down brow and cheek, Stephana and Nicephorus wizened and unkempt. Silent laughter inside his head meant Stephana shared his amusement.

  The Alexandrian looked far older than he had the time he rode beside Marric's ox cart. Then he had been eager, cock sure. Now perplexity lurked within his shadowed eyes. So imperial service hadn't been what he had dreamt? He had come here, all high hopes and polished armor, to find his new regiment a welter of plots and to learn that the city of his ardent imaginings festered under Irene's rule. Marric had heard beggars too tried of life to be careful call her the "Red Empress." What a disillusionment for the lad, Marric thought.

  In his own way Thutmosis had been kind to Mor. And he had not taken Stephana to his bed. On impulse, Marric bent toward him. "Would you hear our mission, Captain?"

  Nicephorus' indrawn breath showed that he thought Marric had gone too far. But Marric remembered what Taran had said about his power—assuming he could use it—to stir men's minds and hearts.

  "For the good of the empire, Captain, would you share our mission?"

  Thutmosis kindled briefly. Then he sighed and sagged back into his role as watch officer like a much older man. "Should I be questioned, I can merely say, 'By my orders, I allowed a party to pass beyond the walls.' If I know more, I disclose more. Sir, I best share your mission by knowing nothing." He drew closer to Marric. "But if it is for the empire's weal, the gods ride with you."

  A scream from above drew their eyes. A great hawk flew overhead. Marric's face heated. The glamour that disguised him and his friends faded as the hawk called.

  Thutmosis gazed at him, then up at the hawk. Was he remembering an Alexandrian market and a slave named Mor, or the portraits of Imperial Prince Marric displayed in the city—assuming Irene had not ordered them tom down. Then the officer was on his knees.

  "You," he gasped.

  A shout brought Marric's head up. All they needed now was a crowd. He spoke rapidly.

  "Let us through quickly, Captain. They can call it a trick of the light. You know better. Now!"

  "Open the gate!" Thutmosis shouted.

  Marric signaled, and they pounded outside, across the bridge, and out into the barren land that protected Byzantium from the camps of the Huns.

  The city walls were a narrow line far to their rear when Marric signaled a halt. Standing dark against the horizon ahead of them was a party of Huns, mounted on their fast steppe ponies. The dekarch and his men drew in beside him.

  To most Byzantine soldiers, Huns were two-legged brutes who, mounted on four-legged brutes, became like centaurs, but lacked their wisdom. The dekarch probably believed the stories about how Huns ate their meat raw, never bathed, and totally lacked culture or humor. Marric had guested in their felt tents. He liked Huns far more than he liked many courtiers.

  "What now, lord?" the dekarch asked.

  "They see us. So we wait." Marric's tone was curt as he assumed the manner that would impress the khagans of the hordes. He must seem khagan of khagans, not a supplicant. Riding out here lightly armed, accompanied only by a young seeress, a scholar, and just enough of an escort to make him look respectable displayed the arrogance that Uldin of the Kutrigur or Ellac of the Golden Horde would respect.

  He rode forward a few steps. "Stay behind me," he told the soldiers. Nicephorus and Stephana moved up so that the three of them rode knee-to-knee.

  Now the Huns rode toward them. Theft blue-dyed horsetail standards fluttered. With a whoop that carried across the plain, they raced toward Marric in a display of horsemanship that brought grunts of astonishment from his calvary escort.

  They rode with their bows unstrung. But remembering archery he had seen in Cherson, Marric knew that in seconds, if the Huns chose, his friends, his soldiers, and he might resemble archery targets. He breathed deeply and prayed Stephana would not detect his fear.

  Now the Huns were so close that Marric could see the gold on their ponies' harnesses. They rode in a circle about Marric's companions.

  "Don't draw!" Marric ordered.

  Closer and closer circled the Huns. Now their arrows were hocked, ready to fire. Then a rider whose armor gleamed as richly as his horse trappings broke from the ring. He whooped and pounded toward Marric, a spear pointed at his heart. Nicephorus gasped, and Stephana muffled a cry.

  Have I miscalculated? Marric would die too quickly to regret it if he had.

  The Hun reined his pony aside so sharply that it screamed and reared.

  "Ha!" the man bellowed. "Fighting hawk!"

  Uldin!" Marric caught the khagan of the Kutrigur around the shoulders in a kinsman's embrace.

  They lounged on sheepskins in Uldin's tent, trying to ignore the Huns' characteristic odor of horses, sweat, and soured milk. Marric sat between the khagans while his soldiers and Nicephorus ate and drank among the warriors of note. Since Stephana was Marric's seer, she sat at Marric's side, waiting for her services to be needed.

  In the smoky lamp light the Huns' flat faces gleamed and their narrow eyes glittered. Marric tried to read them. He saw no anger, at least none directed at him. But he sensed an alertness.

  They waited for some sign.

  Then he must provide them with one.

  When the food trays had been removed, he rubbed his hands politely on his arms to clean them, and leaned forward.

  "So, khagans," he asked ironically, "what brings you from the steppes? Surely not since the days of Atli have so many ventured forth."

  A snort of laughter greeted his words.

  "We missed our brother the hawk and came to seek him in his nest. Yours is a soft nest, brother, and rich. You should share it."

  Despite Ellac's implied threat, Marric chuckled. "The hawk does not rest safely in that nest."

  "That we already know," said Uldin. "She whom your father took as lesser wife—"

  The banter of only moments before was gone. Marric remembered Stephana's vision of how Ellac and Uldin agreed to ride against Byzantium.

  "I was . . . sent away—"

  "You should not have allowed that," Ellac answered. "The witch queen, in your absence, sent armies against the hordes. Women, children, horses—all slaughtered and our tents burnt."

  They were calling Irene Khazaroctona in the City: Irene, Killer of Huns. She had brought their vengeance down upon her own head.

  "Do you wish vengeance?" Marric asked the khagans. "I do. Shall we have an alliance, as we had in the north?"

  "We would examine your home, prince of the hawk," said a dark-robed shaman as he entered.

  "We would examine it very closely; perhaps even dwell in it."

  "My city is not for your plunder!"

  "Not true," said the shaman. Extending skinny arms, he gestured at the Byzantines. "It has been revealed to me that the city shall fall."

  Chapter Eighteen

  Marric forced himself to drink from a skin of mare's milk. Its sourness and the shaman's words made him want to gag. He laid the skin aside calmly, though, and asked, "What of our alliance, men of the steppes?"

  "We made alliance with you. Not with this woman who murders our families and herds."

  "I made our treaty for the city," Marric said.

  "It sent you away."

  "Irene sent me away."


  "Does she not speak for the city now?" Ellac asked craftily. More than Uldin, he coveted the gold, the silks, all the wealth he could loot from Byzantium, and Marric knew it. But even more than he wanted treasure, Ellac wanted to break the myth of the imperial city's invulnerability.

  "She is a usurper!" Marric's dekarch cried. The Huns glared at him.

  "There is an order to things as we reckon them in the city." Marric chose his words with care. "The gods rule through chosen leaders. My father was one such. But if Irene serves aught beside her own ambition, it is the Dark."

  "If we took the city," Uldin said, "we could stop her. Then you could rule."

  Marric imagined the screams of dying citizens and horses, children impaled on lances, arrows feathering the markets, and rising over all the ruin, fire, as the Huns looted. They rode their ponies up the steps of the very temples themselves and into the palace. There they sat Marric down as their puppet on his father's throne, awash on a tide of his people's blood.

  "No!" He would not live to see his home such a waste, nor pretend he ruled thereafter.

  "Do you doubt the shaman?" Ellac's voice was silken.

  Warriors shifted position. Marric's guard exchanged wary looks.

  "How can I doubt his visions?" Marric asked. "But I would ask my own seeress to confirm their truth." He rested a hand on Stephana's shoulder. She looked over the men without fear.

  "I need a bowl," she said. "And fresh water."

  The things were brought. The shaman gestured, and singers raised their voices. He was preparing himself for yryq, the rites of divination. From a belt pouch he poured the scapular bones he would use to foretell. They had been polished from many years of use. Light flashed off their yellowed surfaces, and Marric glanced quickly away. He had seen this rite once before. That time he had sat through it, watching the way men watch jugglers during a lull in the feast.

  Now he couldn't take his eyes off the bones. They glistened with a power he could feel, and wanted to avoid. Somehow Stephana's visions seemed gentler and more natural. She touched his hand, even as she leaned forward to study the shaman's actions.

  "He is kam-quam," Uldin said to her. "Touched by the gods. Will you truly set your power against his?"

  "I will witness," she said. "And then I will call upon the Goddess for a vision of my own—and he will witness that."

  The shaman raised his face up to the light. Flawed by cataracts as his eyes were, he could barely see this world. But that did not hinder his sight in the one he sought to enter. In a harsh, eerie voice he began to chant. Stephana stiffened, her hand closing upon Marric's.

  He descends into his vision. She bespoke him silently.

  I must see this.

  A hint of fear. Stephana needn't remind him that the other world was perilous for him. But he would trust her with his soul.

  He felt darkness and a sense of great cold. Then he was traveling in the form of a mote of light. At terrible speed he raced over a landscape that the shaman's sight revealed to him: a steppe barren of all life, covered with deep snow. They were heading north. There, in the fabled lands, shining lights drifted between ground and sky. The beasts themselves were fierce, few, and very strange. Ahead of the lights that were Marric and Stephana gleamed the track of the shaman.

  Now mountains reared up in the dream landscape. Their path suddenly lay between awesome ranges of tremendous height and stillness. With a suddenness that almost snapped Marric free of Stephana's protection into disaster—steady, beloved!—the shaman descended, dropped into a crevasse, and swooped down for a landing in shadowed snow.

  There stood a structure all of ice. A reddish bird was trapped in its heart. As they watched, a horse and a great white bear approached and battered the ice palace. It broke into a glistening maze. The scarlet bird shrieked and beat at the other animals with beak, wings, and pinions. A blow crumpled it. The bird lay dead on the frozen ground. Blood seeped from its broken body and stained the whiteness of the snow.

  Do you see? That was the shaman's voice.

  Then they found themselves fleeing after him, struggling as their energy waned to fly back over the mountains of the other world and to reclaim the bodies they had abandoned.

  * * *

  Marric opened his eyes. Well, I always longed to see World's End, was his first, wry thought. He glanced over at Stephana, who looked pale, but smiled at him.

  As the shaman's apprentices struggled to revive him, the man shuddered. Slowly he rose and looked at the scapular bones. Cast at the height of his vision trance, they lay in the same pattern that the ice shards had formed.

  "Behold," the shaman said. "Your walls lie riven!"

  "Are you convinced?" asked Ellac.

  Marric glanced at Stephana again for direction. She leaned forward to look at the. bones, then at the shaman.

  "One thing more," said the shaman. "On my journey within, I had company."

  "The seeress from the city?" Uldin asked.

  "Not only her. But the hawk himself," the shaman whispered, pointing a finger almost as withered as his prophetic tools at Marric, "the hawk journeyed with us between the mountains and saw the city of ice shatter. Let him speak."

  "I saw a white bear and a horse," Marric said. "Indeed they struck walls made of ice, and the walls broke. And the red bird died." He paused. "But the bird was not a hawk, and certainly not the great hawk that I have seen, that greeted me before the walls of the city today." It was impossible, thought Marric, that the hawk could ever die.

  "Is the city prince Tängr—a half-god—that he sees with a shaman's sight?"

  "The prince is a warrior," said Uldin.

  "A khagan."

  "And a great one," Uldin said. "Were he of our blood, he would be fit to call khagan of khagans."

  "But he is a man of the city!" Ellac shouted.

  Stephana touched the hand of the Huns' shaman. She freed her hair from its scarf, then turned to the bowl and pitcher of gem-encrusted gold that the shaman's apprentices had brought her.

  She held up a hand for silence and waited until everyone's attention was fixed upon her. The fire crackled once. Men jumped, but Stephana remained as serene as she had been when the beggars clutched at her stirrups.

  "The bird died," she said. "At the blows of stallion and bear, the ice walls shattered. Your shaman saw truth. Shall I complete his vision?"

  She raised her eyes to Marric's, a look more intimate and more reassuring than a caress, then poured water into the bowl. She cupped her hands over it. Her lips moved soundlessly in an invocation of the powers she served.

  Shadows began to move in the water. Marric leaned over the bowl, trying to give Stephana his strength.

  "The bird . . . dead. Blood in the snow, far too much blood, but look, above it! The hawk. The hawk flies free and perches on the greatest tower of the city," she whispered. Another shadow formed: a woman in a fair room, twisting in pain from the dagger in her breast. Marric leaned closer. Did Stephana foresee Irene's assassination?

  The sorceress breathed on the water and broke the vision.

  "So much is true: the bird's death means victory," she said. "But the bird is Irene—red, not golden: certainly not the hawk of my lord's house. Dying, she stabs with her beak and wounds the city, as we have all seen. Then it turns for healing to its new ruler and his allies—but without conquest.

  "Seize the city as you now plan, lord of the steppe, and can you truly promise you will not destroy what you hope to rule?"

  A muttering came from the Huns. Stephana fell silent. Ellac himself poured her a cup of water. When Marric moved a saddle into place behind her back, she leaned against it gratefully.

  "I cannot rule the city as a puppet." Marric took over Stephana's line of reasoning. "Stallion and bear aid the hawk; they do not destroy. The empire needs its rightful lord or . . . you have seen what Irene has become. Her ambition has destroyed her, and her evil reaches out to touch the whole world. Once you gave me clan-right. Give me he
lp now, or at least, give me leave to depart unharmed."

  Deliberately exploiting the length of limb that made him tower over the Huns, Marric rose.

  "Uldin, when we raced our ponies to Cherson, neither losing to the other, you called me brother. There are no losers or victors between us. As brother to the clans, I shall deliver the stallion's blow to the bird the shaman saw die. Will that content you?"

  The torches guttered while the khagans thought.

  "Let him go, great lords," cackled the shaman. "Let him bear your burden for you."

  Uldin nodded, then leaned over to speak to Ellac. The other khagan still scowled, unconvinced. "Let him shed his own men's blood, not ours. Why should we care?" At that Ellac nodded assent, too.

  Uldin clapped his hands, ushering in a procession of slaves bearing gifts. Apparently he had waited to present them until after it was decided that and his people were guests, not captives.

  Marric received a spear with a blue horsetail dangling from it, the insignia of the hordes, and a gold-hilted blade. Stephana received bracelets of heavy gold. Nicephorus received a jade statue that had come from the Lands of Gold. Each of the soldiers took up daggers with finely chased hilts.

  Marric saluted the khagans and began farewell courtesies.

  "Where now, lord?" asked the dekarch.

  "To the bearmaster."

  He reached out to pull Stephana to her feet. She brushed free of his hand and stood poised, listening to some inner voice. Her face was very pale, and her eyes gleamed the mad blue that dances at a flame's core.

  "Say you so, Prince?" The voice was not her own. "You will have your trip for nothing." Robust laughter burst from her, and she rushed in a tangle of skirts, cloak, and glistening hair out into the camp. The shaman chuckled and whispered to the khagans.

  All the men followed Stephana outside. Stephana walked down the long aisle that divided the Huns' tents. Her earlier, febrile energy was gone, but she raised arms in greeting to a party of twelve riders whose horses' bridles and, bits gleamed with silver.

  Riding in the van was a man Marric had not seen for years. By now, he thought, Audun Bearmaster must be vastly old. The last year of his father's life when Audun had come to court, his hair had been gray and gold. Now the beard that swept his byrnie, the braided long hair that shone in the light was the white of northern snows: fit match for the bears that he alone of the Aescir nobles could master. He glistened with jewelry—belt pouch, bracelets, a torque, and, hanging far down his chest, a magnificent braided rope of heavy gold.