Byzantium's Crown

by Susan Shwartz

  "You cannot," Stephana said. She stood close to him, her hands enfolded in his against his chest. "But ask me anything else. Please. I am cherished. And I don't want to be safe if it means leaving you!" Her voice rose. Then she calmed herself and went on. "You trust my visions now, don't you? Trust them one more time, my heart. I have seen you enthroned, and I know—I know—that my presence has helped place you there."

  "The thing is fated," Nicephorus broke in softly.

  Who asked you? Marric all but turned on his friend.

  "If I thought I could, I would leave you among allies too," he told Nicephorus. "You protect your own family by staying away from them."

  "As you well know, the priests guard them for me better than I can. And my wife is a woman of sense, like Stephana. You do not suggest I skulk here because I am a man. And I would not consent to." Nicephorus walked over to Marric. "Let me call you Mor right now, my friend. You must permit your friends to choose to follow you. Taran warned you: you have the gift of drawing hearts and minds. Accept it, Mor. What must be, will be."

  Finally the tears coursing down Stephana's face persuaded Marric. He brushed them away with a tender hand. "Isis protect you, Stephana, if you will not yield to me on this."

  "Ask me something else," she said again, beginning to smile. "Anything except this."

  "I am answered," Marric told Audun. "Bearmaster, I thank you, not least of all for your understanding and friendship. I only regret I have no gifts to bestow in return for yours—except for my friendship. You possess that already."

  "Send me word as you can," said Audun. "We are allies under law."

  Marric embraced the older man and met a strength almost as great as that of his bear. For one precious moment he was a boy again, impulsively flinging his arms around his father. Even for so brief a time, it felt good to be a child again. But even such a short return to boyhood was too long an indulgence for a would-be emperor.

  Marric broke away. Without looking back he walked toward the horses. The necklace of gold coins clinked against his harness, and he raised a hand to touch it. In the coins lingered some of the incredible vitality of their last wearer.

  What was Audun? he wondered. He had rescued Alexa, recognized Stephana immediately for what she was—and then, those bears . . . Marric decided he was too tired to search for answers. He had a long ride back.

  They reached Byzantium at dusk. Drizzle had begun to fall, and the sky had turned somber, foggy, heavy with a smell of rotting shellfish. The gates, closed behind them, seemed to shut them away from the freedom of the plains. The whole city seemed to be one great snare. Marric felt as heavily burdened as Mor the slave. The necklace he wore might as well read "Property of Empire."

  In the safe house a welcome had been prepared. Fires scented with delicate incenses burned in finely chased braziers. The polycandela reflected their torches. No one besides servants awaited them. It was just as well. Marric knew that he and his friends were too near exhaustion to do more than rest. Daphne set out wine and food. When Marric thanked her, she flushed and fled.

  Typical Daphne behavior, Marric thought. She was really at ease only around Stephana and, to a degree, around Nicephorus. A message awaited him, reporting on his young son's recovery from a broken collarbone. His relief cut Marric off further from the cozy world of children, small ailments, and shy servants. He wanted only to sleep. Then Merikare, muffled in a cloak, was admitted by the guards. He brought Marric word that several of the prefects of the city wanted to meet with him.

  Stephana withdrew. The prefects and priests came and left. Marric and Nicephorus coughed over dusty records in poor light until Marric took pity on his friend's jaw-stretching yawns and ordered him to go and sleep. Sighing heavily, Marric drew out old maps and his grandfather's Strategikon. No more wine for tonight, he decided. He sorted through his welter of documents once again, found the ones he wanted, and rubbed his temples where a headache was beginning. He had a night's work to do.

  Chapter Twenty

  Wearing the plain wool garments of merchants (with army swords concealed beneath their cloaks), Marric and two of the house guards strode from the Mangana at sunset. As quickly as they might, without attracting attention, they turned from the main streets to the safer back ways.

  As they rounded a corner, a noblewoman's litter swung toward them. Just in time, Marric remembered to give place to it on the crowded side street and not to look at its occupant. Noting that the woman was guarded, he pulled up his hood. There had been far too many hired swords about recently. Nervous at the presence of enemies outside the city and of rumors within it, Irene had tightened security until—as the market gossip pungently remarked—cataphracts outnumbered catamites in the brothels.

  Market gossip was also buzzing about the Dionysia to be held early in the spring.

  In the crowded market Nicephorus intercepted Marric and his escort. He had been watching the children who raced among the stalls and, Marric suspected, wishing he could see his own children. Marric had offered to have them brought to join him in the safe house—as safe as anyplace in the city could be for him—but Nico had refused. A pity, his wife Ariadne would have been company for Stephana. Recently Marric had become concerned for her safety, given the increased security and a new outbreak of robberies and stabbings in the city. Perhaps Stephana had threatened the overseer with a lance. Marric privately believed that she never could have killed him. She rarely even wore a dagger.

  Men loitering in the streets nodded as they passed: more temple guards. As they entered the safe house, Marric flung off his cape and looked around. Usually Stephana was waiting for him. But he saw only the two guards he had told to protect her.

  They rose and faced him uneasily.

  "Your lady is upstairs," one said.

  "What's wrong?"

  "No lord, she is not ill," said the second. "This is what happened: at noon, she told us that she wished to go to the Temple of Isis to meditate. Preferably accompanied only by her maid."

  Marric's face gave no sign of the relief he felt. But the Temple of Isis was too near the palace for him to like her going there at all, let alone without protection: he himself rarely went to the Temple of Osiris across from it.

  "It's a nest of court ladies," Marric said. "To be sure, Stephana is a priestess and has every right to he there, but they've never seen her before. With that hair of hers, she is too easily recognized. Anyone might track her here. You did well."

  "I told her that you would say that, my prince," said the second guard. "She asked if we kept the birds from singing or deprived the hungry of food. She said she was about that desperate to be allowed out."

  "We offered to send for a priest or priestess, but she turned on us. 'You morons,' she said quietly, but so you could tell how angry she was, 'don't you see that that would bring the disclosure you fear too? I'm no one, nothing; no one will even notice me.' And she walked past us and started for the door."

  Marric could imagine the scene: Stephana anxious at being deprived of her freedom, stalking past the guards, Daphne skittering in her indubitably regal wake.

  "I stopped her, Prince. I am very sorry, but I took the lady by the wrist and turned her around." The man looked down and flushed uncomfortably. In addition to Marric's reaction, which the man probably dreaded, he was also remembering what Stephana had said. The slave block made slaves masters of invective, if not of themselves.

  "After the lady . . . finished her say, she ran up to her rooms. And there she's stayed."

  Marric clapped the man on the shoulder. He could not let him worry because he had had to deny anything to the woman whom they knew Marric cherished.

  He strode through the garden and up the stairs. If only Stephana could understand that the restrictions on her were not permanent. Certainly, Byzantine women moved as they wished in the city. But Stephana, despite her harsh schooling as a slave and the victim of many men, was innocent of this city and must be protected for the good of all of them. O
nce he ruled, she would have whatever she wished: anything, to help her forget what her life had been until they escaped Alexandria.

  Her door was shut. He knocked on it.

  "Go away," Stephana called. "Spare me your company. My lord set you as my guards, not my jailers."

  "I'm not the guards," Marric said. He pushed the carved door open. Stephana lay face down on their bed, the very picture, he thought with an incongruous twinge of tender mirth, of a spoiled favorite sulking in the women's quarters of the palace.

  So long a slave, Stephana must fear any restriction on her movements as a return to bondage. He might think of her as a priestess and as his wife in all but name, but how did she think of herself? As his captive?

  Perhaps he had been wrong to keep her pent in so closely. The Goddess' service was as necessary to Stephana as song to the nightingale that fluttered outside, or food to a starving child.

  The perfumes that Daphne had opened to soothe her mistress were cloying in the air. Marric flung open the violet hangings to let the night breeze in. Emboldened by her mistress' tears, Daphne began a reproach that turned into a squeak.

  "Out!" Marric jerked his chin at her. After he heard her sandals clattering down the corridor, he shut the door and sat down beside his lover. Gently he raised her. He turned her face up and stroked her hair back from it.

  Saying none of the things he wanted to, Marric simply held her until he felt her grief and anger abate. Her head dropped onto his shoulder. He supported her with one arm while he reached for wine and a goblet.

  "I needed to speak to the Goddess," she whispered. "In her own home. To see her image beyond the curtains of the tenenos, the inmost shrine. And I needed just to get free, only for a little space, Marric, but they would not let me." Her hands rubbed her throat as if they felt the collar he had broken from her neck.

  "Be still," he told her. "Drink this. All of it. No, now the rest." She shook her head. But as she tasted the wine, the thirst her long weeping had brought on made her take the cup from him and drain it.

  "Now, another one," he urged her.

  She laughed shakily. "You know I cannot. Adepts are terrible drinkers, Marric: no endurance at all."

  "Don't endure for now. Give in," he whispered. Eyes meeting his, she drank, then settled back in his arms.

  When he held her thus, there was no real need of words. But as the night deepened, Marric spoke for a long time, aware only that Stephana was watching him, and had not refused to listen to him.

  "If you hate being held captive here, remember that it is only for a short time that you must take care. No later than spring, I promise you. By then . . . "

  Perhaps Stephana feared removal to the palace where she might become one of many women there without family or protection. "Do you worry what the future will bring you, my heart?" he asked. "Even after I have promised you that you will never have to fear again?"

  He felt her shake her head "no" against his shoulder and held her even more tightly. "Listen to what I plan for you."

  He heard a muffled "no need," but continued anyhow.

  "You shall have your own place, your own wealth, to go or to stay with me as you choose. Please, Stephana, stay with me. Do you know, you will be a great lady, my wife in all but the title? When we have children, as I hope we will, I shall acknowledge them. And their future will be as bright as any mother could hope. You are important, love. What if Alexa gives me no son or daughter, and you do? A child of ours might wear the crown. Does that mean nothing to you?"

  "Don't talk of it!" she begged in a soft wail. "We cannot think that far." Terror quavered in her voice.

  "Ill luck from aiming too high?" Marric asked. "Where is my brave love? I will have Merikare or Theophilus pray to avert it, I promise you. And when this is over, we will go to a place in the country that will be your own." He wanted to make her smile again.

  "Would it please you," he suggested, "if I went to the priests and asked for initiation? You have long wished that."

  The words, spoken on impulse, resonated in the silent room, stirring the shadows, and turned Marric's thoughts back on himself. He had long rejected the idea, telling Imhotep that he was not prepared, or that he was emperor, not magician—anything to avoid the burden he knew he feared and did not want. It, not the crown, would represent the ultimate symbol of his enslavement to his empire.

  Then he remembered what Audun had said. "One land, one lord." An adept-emperor would strengthen the mystic bond between ruler and realm. In that case, did he really have the right to refuse the burden of magic? Stephana's powers wore on her. Still, they had kept her sane in slavery. How would what was so great a part of her life possibly harm him? And if he wished to hold her, he could not prove less worthy than she.

  Let his land or his love require initiation of him and he would submit. Somehow he would find the strength to keep himself clean of the lust for power that had brought Alexa to grief and corrupted Irene. Somehow.

  Stephana pulled herself upright, hands on his shoulders. She touched his cheek as he stared into the dusk, returning his attention to her.

  "Seek initiation only if it is what you must have," she whispered. "Not to please me, but only out of your own need."

  "How else?" he asked, and put away his doubts.

  Stephana's lips moved up his throat to his mouth, robbing him simultaneously of speech and thought. He eased her down on the silken covers of the bed, caught up by the dizzying speed with which her passion rushed to meet his and to sweep them both out beyond their senses into a place where the stars, the roses, and the nightingale's song held them embraced as if they floated peacefully in a primordial, light-filled sea.

  Soft hair pulling free from under his head, a warm body moving apart from his own brought Marric back from deep sleep to instant, silent watchfulness. Keeping his eyelids all but closed, he saw Stephana, seated at the foot of the bed, shake her hair back and wrap a loose gown interwoven with threads of silver about her. She knotted it and gazed down at him, her face unreadable. Marric feigned the rhythmic breathing of sleep. She stood and walked over to the window, the white silk of her robe drifting about her.

  The moon had risen, its white light cool, but Stephana did not shiver as she stood in the pillared embrasure that overlooked the garden. She extended her arms, and even the nightingale fell silent, drowsing under an unheard spell. Stephana bowed her head and stood praying for a long while. The soft silk of her robe slipped out of the loose knot and onto the floor, leaving her naked to the night air and the chill caress of the moonlight.

  It tangled in her hair the way he had watched it so many times and turned the long lovely lines of her back and legs to silver.

  He heard her whisper, so faint that it teased his understanding. "Let me keep free. For his sake, though, I could wish . . . Mother, watch over him." Marric's eyes were dazzled, and he blamed it on the moon's brightness.

  "But I have so little courage!" Her voice broke on the last word, and she hid her face in her hands, away from the all-seeing eye of the moon. Even this gesture acquired an exquisite, hieratic significance: if Stephana could not go to pray in the Goddess' shrine, here she prayed with all her heart. The light seemed to grow about her, enveloping her in brightness.

  Such a moment was too private even for a lover's eyes. Marric willed himself to sleep again, and to dream of silver light.

  "Marric?"

  The low, sweet voice calling his name awoke him. As he heard it call him a second time, he propped himself on his elbows and raised his face.

  The lamps had gone out. The woman who called his name was tall and slim, light gleaming from the curves of her breasts and sides as she stood beside him. That was all the figure had in common with the woman Marric had watched praying. This woman was taller than Stephana. She carried herself with such grace that an emperor's pride seemed but the louting of a slave before his master in comparison.

  Godlike, Marric breathed to himself. Then he saw the crown that the figure
wore—a gleaming disk set between silver horns. It was the Goddess herself. Isis stood before Marric, and her white light soothed his heart.

  "Marric?"

  "Here I am," he breathed. What title could he give one so high?

  "Brother, husband, son: in some way you are all of these to Me, triply dear. But the time for you to intrude upon the women's mysteries is not yet, beloved. Leave My daughter to her freedom. She loves you dearly. Being part of Myself, how should she not? But before she is yours, she is her own—and Mine. You are both in My hands, sheltered under My wings against your enemies. Remember that, and let My daughter go her own way."

  The Goddess form bent over Marric. He smelled the fragrance of Her breath, the perfume—an ecstatic, ineffable blend of roses and myrrh that might make a dying man rise from his bed and walk again, restored to health and unimpaired youth. Almost fainting from the scent, Marric fell back. As Her face bent toward his, he watched Her eyes, fascinated. At one moment Isis seemed to look down at him with his mother's calm gaze; at the next, he thought She had Alexa's vivid, dark eyes. But at the instant Her lips touched his, Marric closed his eyes on a vision of Stephana's blue ones suddenly deepening, becoming the Goddess' all-seeing stare that engulfed whole stars, the world itself, and Marric's awareness.

  The rising sun restored Marric to his senses. There was a sweet scent lingering in the room, more than he could ascribe to the flowers arranged within it. Stephana lay in his arms, her head on his shoulder. Her breasts were warm against his side, and one of her hands rested lightly against his heart. The dawn light made her hair look more silvery than ever before. Her face wore a look of transcendent peace.

  The white robe lay pooled on the floor where it had fallen from her the night before.

  It was no dream, Marric thought with a prickle of awe. The Goddess Herself stood before me.

  He even had proof. The night before, the hangings that drifted between the room's window pillars had been delicately tinted violet gauze banded with darker taffeta strips. Now the bands gleamed silver, and the hanging themselves were pure white.