Byzantium's Crown

by Susan Shwartz

  "You subordinate your entire being to the powers of which you become a part. But that is only the beginning.

  "Prince . . . my son, you do not wish these powers for yourself. But it is for yourself you must wish. Without that desire, they will consume you."

  "If you could save your child from starving by working in the sewers, wouldn't you do it?" Marric asked. "Can I let the empire die because I will not give it what it needs? It is father and child to me: so if it requires me to take initiation, then, yes, I do ask it for myself!"

  Marric rose from the mat and started to pace. Five steps up, five steps back across the cell. He suspected that the priest might have stopped him with a glance, but he did not. Instead he watched Marric, making the prince aware of himself as a physical being: tall, tanned, muscular, enjoying even this tiny release from iron self-control. He was healthy and welcomed what his health brought him, even to the slight sweat that had broken out on his brow and upper lip.

  "Yes," said the priest. "Look at yourself. The initiation you seek will take you out of body."

  "One night I lay dying," Marric interrupted. "My friends could not bring me back. My spirit rose . . . there were pillars, and I saw the gods; my father, my mother."

  "But you chose to return to your flesh."

  "How could I leave my work here undone?"

  "Prince, prince, I am not accusing you. But never seek to deny how much you love living or the world you live in. It is your greatest genius."

  The textures of fine cloth, of Stephana's soft skin, or of sun and dust on a drill field, the test and play of weapons, the savor of dark, red wine—Marric smiled. His senses served him well.

  "Do you understand now, my son? You have traveled out of your body. You have used powers latent within you, set your feet on the way. This is well done. All of these things are lesser initiations that will prepare you for the great one you claim to seek."

  "I do indeed seek it."

  "Are you ready to survive it?" the priest asked. "Tell me, how long did it take you to decide to come here?"

  Marric lowered his head, feeling a humiliation as keen as the time he had stood, naked and feverish, in the slave market.

  "The empire dies," he whispered. "If I were initiate, I might heal it." He hid his face from the cruel wisdom of the high priest. Where the city had shone would be a ruin. Barbarians would graze their herds among the tumbled stones of palaces. The empire's treasures would be stolen, to gleam unloved in squalid huts, one paste earring perhaps, cherished while great statues crumbled. If the empire died, Marric might as well die too. He could not restrain his tears.

  The priest let him grieve silently for a time before embracing him with a father's touch. The gentleness in his hands surprised Marric. He was tempted simply to yield to it, to accept the priest's counsel and comfort.

  "You will be ready one day," the priest spoke in his ear. "But not yet. You have power enough to rule right now."

  What power? The power that watched a soldier slay himself, that skulked in passageways, plotted, and talked, talked, talked while all around the Middle Sea, enemies converged?

  "Right now, your desire for life is your greatest power. Trust to it," said the priest.

  Marric freed himself from the man's clasp. Dull heat began to burn within him: when he let himself identify it, he would call it relief and shame. "Why am I not fit?" he asked.

  "Very well, my prince. I will show you."

  The high priest touched one of the stone blocks the height of a man, that made up the cell walls. It slid aside, revealing a staircase. His face graver, more deeply lined than usual, the priest beckoned Marric forward. "This all but violates an oath I swore long before your birth," he said. "But I accept the consequences. One day you will be one of us. Then you will understand the risk I am taking. I only hope I hasten the day by showing you why I must refuse you now."

  The high priest led Marric through a maze of stairways and connecting rooms. Some of the rooms were bare of anything but wall paintings. Other cells held acolytes seated on thin pallets, so deep in meditative trance that their high priest's passing did not cause them even to stir. Marric saw more and more of these as they walked further down the labyrinth of corridors. They must have left the Temple of Osiris, must be walking underneath the forum itself, he thought.

  What awaited him? Even the priest seemed ill at ease. He had spoken of breaking faith. Matters must stand very ill with the empire if its high priest felt drawn to such actions.

  "The people you see have studied for years to control their minds and bodies. For the past seven days they have subsisted only on herbs and water to prepare their bodies to undergo initiation. Try it and fail, as your spirit burns itself out. Then you must start over again in your next life, at a much lower level." The priest's voice sounded very sad. "Marric, your mind and spirit are very strong, but they are strong in this world alone."

  "I can see lights," Marric whispered. "Over that man's head, and that woman's. Hers is green."

  "One day she will be a powerful priestess of Isis," said the priest. "Green magic, the power that burgeons, fails, and is reborn. What will your power be, Marric? When you know, you will come back to us. Then we will not turn you away."

  Again the high priest touched the wall, and the great blocks of dressed stone slid aside. They entered a tiny chamber. No torches illumined it. Light shone from the stone itself, not the phosphorescence of decay but a white light that Marric somehow knew was the blending of all colors. The only thing that did not glow was the sarcophagus of basalt and porphyry that occupied most of the room.

  "Look into it," said the high priest. "Lie in it, if you wish. Imagine yourself lying in it, every fiber of your body straining toward your ordeal. The lid lowers over your face, shutting out sound, light, air.

  "Do you wish to live, Prince? Your body convulses and gasps for breath, then escapes from its shackles."

  Marric would not refuse the challenge. He swung a leg over the sarcophagus, lay down, and shut his eyes. He heard the priest's voice soften, dimming as if it came from a greater and greater distance. His hands went to his throat; he was choking.

  And then he felt himself freed, floating . . .

  "Once you have left your body and begun to wander the planes of light," droned the faraway voice, "you will encounter tests, dangers . . . "

  Visions of slavery, of death, of grief drawn from Marric's confronted him. These are not real. These are in my past, not my future. Get away.

  Amazingly, the visions did.

  I can take this! Marric felt a surge of exultation. He pressed onward eagerly toward the unimaginable frontiers that surely lay ahead. The voice was soon left far behind, whispering its warnings.

  Merciful Isis, what was that?

  A circle of blackness with red lights glistening wetly within materialized. It was immensely powerful, it was moving his way, and it was ravenous. The red lights extruded into sharp claws that shot out beams of fire. Even in his spirit form, they burned him. He felt pain, rage, panic—where to escape, nowhere, flee anywhere at all from the thing that now bore such a face—

  "Come you back!" The high priest clapped his hands together sharply.

  Sweating heavily, Marric reeled from the immense sarcophagus. He steadied himself against its side, then recoiled from it in loathing. "How could anyone enter that thing, knowing—"

  "They do not know. But now you do. So you pay the price of your own rashness."

  The priest grasped Marric's shoulders, sustaining him. Marric forced himself to look into the older man's eyes. Their minds were still lightly joined and Marric flinched under the impact of sorrow he had not imagined. Guard him, His Majesty ordered. I obey. He has the right to try. I shall give him every chance, including what I might not give my own flesh, my son, my son . . . He had to try too, but when they brought him forth, the heart died within me too. You, prince, you will succeed where my son failed. I will see to it.

  His son? Marric hadn't kn
own the high priest had ever had one. What makes him think I can succeed where a priest's son fails?

  "You didn't see it?" Marric was still shuddering. "Black, horrible, crouching . . . it would have devoured me." Wherever it was, it was a place Marric knew he had no courage to go back to.

  "You saw the watcher at the gate. Initiates see it, master it, and return. Some do not return; we have our failures. When you are ready, prince, you too will pass the watcher unharmed. But not now."

  The priest supported Marric as if he were a man old or enfeebled by illness back to the main part of the temple. The stone slabs closed quietly behind them and hid the perilous sarcophagus. So that was initiation! Courage wasn't enough to survive it. He only hoped he would not pollute the sanctity of the temple by vomiting like a boy after his first battle.

  With his sickness and shame mingled envy. Nicephorus had passed this test. So had Stephana, his love, whom he could never, never marry because her blood was not fit to ally with his. That was the finest joke of all. He was the one who was not fit.

  Stephana: if she could pass the watcher, she was worth a dozen such as he. How would she bear to look at him, even to touch him, lie with him in love now that he had demonstrated how unworthy he was?

  "Right here. No, lie down," the priest ordered. "Don't try to talk yet." He was assisted to lie on the mats in the priest's austere chamber. A soft wool blanket was spread over him. "The trembling will stop in a moment." He heard sandals pad into the doorway, a murmur of thanks, and then the same sandals walking away. At least the priest had not admitted anyone to look upon him in his shame, And to think he hoped to rule as adept and as emperor!

  "Drink this," ordered the high priest. "We give it to adepts to prepare them for the great workings. It will restore you."

  Whatever vile potion he was handed, he didn't want, but the priest made him swallow it. Bitterness poured down Marric's throat. He coughed, then rose up on one elbow.

  "It seems I cannot even bear an initiate's diet," he said wryly. The potion sent heat through his body, battling the chill of terror that had not left him since he panicked before the watcher.

  "I will let you rest for now." The priest's gentle, inexorable hands compelled Marric to lie down again. How had he ever thought the old man weak? Gods, Marric was as tired as if he'd fought all day. The priest laid one of his cool hands on Marric's brow for a moment. Then the light in the cell dimmed, and he was alone.

  The cordial he had drunk bereft him of his senses.

  Marric awoke without the languorous awareness of moving from sleep to consciousness that he usually enjoyed. His mind was clearer than he had ever known it.

  So initiation—the way of the priest—was not his way. He had been right when he feared to reach for those powers. Though Marric blessed the high priest's kindness in saying that he was unready, the troth was he was simply unworthy. Marric smiled cynically. He might be a flawed instrument, but he was all the weapon the priest had to turn against Irene.

  He lay motionless, staring at the ceiling. If he could not unite with the powers beyond the horizon and use them, what could he do?

  Besides initiate priests, other people dealt with the gods. Healers tended those sick or in labor, embalmers prepared the dead for their last journey, and then there were the actors, whose masks symbolized that they enacted divine roles.

  Could we but get at that one's mask, Nicephorus had wished the day before in the hippodrome. Yes. Let Marric don that mask, assume that actor's role as the god who descends to mankind during the play. It would answer well. In fact, there were lines that could be added to the god's speech so that the people who watched knew that their true ruler lived, aye, and stood before them.

  As the high priest entered the room again, Marric sprang to his feet. Ignoring a brief dizziness, he stalked past him down the corridor. At this very moment the actors would be rehearsing.

  Marric might not have gained the powers he sought, but he was still a fine strategist. So Irene had revived the Dionysia as a way of reaffirming the old ties binding the empire to the gods? Two could play that game: Marric knew how easily Ion, the last play scheduled for tomorrow's festivities, could be manipulated into serving as a way of announcing himself to the city.

  Attempting to push defeat, anger, and shame to the back of his mind, Marric strode toward the Hippodrome. He would persuade the actors to fall in with his plans. He had to.

  The scheme was dangerous. All the better. He would show the Osiris priest that there were other ways he could cope besides long study and entrance, alive, into the tomb.

  Then Marric shivered despite the hot sun. Certainly the Hippodrome had made men emperors before. But it had also served as their death place.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  "Too many things could go wrong if my lord plays Apollo tonight," Stephana repeated.

  "But I tell you, we cannot afford to wait?" Caius Marcellinus stood up so fast that his chair fell crashing onto the floor behind him. "It's well enough for you both, lady, that the man who detained you at the Hippodrome was loyal to me. But can't you understand? The prince was seen! That puts all of us at risk!"

  Stephana's face was very white. Her hands, which had been clasped tightly in her lap, came up to her throat, then dropped. She didn't take her eyes from Marric.

  "Look you," Marcellinus said. "The actors are willing. Nicephorus has altered the speech, and there isn't a false word in it!" Stephana looked at him briefly, then dropped her eyes. Marcellinus had always treated her with the grave courtesy he could accord a woman of his own rank, at first for his prince's sake, and then for her own.

  "Is it Prince Marric's safety that troubles you, lady?" he asked in a much gentler voice. "The ropes are sound. And I will have guards stationed throughout the Hippodrome."

  "We will have no better opportunity," said another man. "All the people we must influence will be there. And the mob: we give them a show, the appearance of risk, and they'll adore it. But there will really be no risk at all."

  Stephana rose from her chair and folded her slender arms about herself, as if chilled by something other than the breeze from the courtyard.

  "I am worried for my lord's safety," she said, almost in an undertone. "But not that way." She was silent for a long time. Finally she burst out, "You see this as a calculated act, an act of desperation. I say simply that I fear acts of desperation. You tell me, 'You are a woman, and so your fear is understandable . . . for you.' But I have fought, and I have lived . . . very hard. And I tell you, I fear what consequences this show of yours may create."

  She took Marric's hands. "Irene is desperate. Look what desperation has done to her—forced her into madness and mad pride. The way she had the Varangians arrested and butchered proves that. Now, this travesty of a festival . . . Marric, can't you see? Assume the mask of the god, put words into his mouth, and you share Irene's hubris. Have you forgotten everything you have learned? This time your penalty may be harsher."

  "It's the ends and the means again," Nicephorus spoke up. "If you assume the god's mask, you become the god. That will mean a price to pay."

  "Then I will pay it!"

  Stephana drew her hands from Marric's. "I fear that you will."

  Marric began to pace. Up and down the carpet and the stone floor he walked restlessly. He had seized on this plan as something he could do, a useful action that could salve his inadequacy. Stephana might be able to wait for Isis to descend and crown him: he could not.

  "The choice is mine," said Marric. "I will go through with tonight's spectacle."

  "I will stay here," Stephana said suddenly. "Not because I refuse to watch, but because you must not be distracted."

  "I think that is wise," said Marcellinus.

  Marric was surprised by his own ambivalence. Yes, he wanted Stephana there to witness his triumph. But he also wanted her safe. Her misgivings unsettled him; he had never gone against her judgment before.

  "I understand," Stephana said. "Marric,
I do understand. You feel that the time turns against you, that Irene will either attack and win, or be deposed, but that it must be now. But"—She made a gesture of rejection, of shutting herself off from the discussion—"I am only what I am: a former bondsmaid with a faint gift for interpreting the Goddess' will. If you say that I do not understand statecraft and strategy, you are quite right. But in that case, why ask my advice at all?"

  She left the room quickly. Marric watched her as she walked through the garden, her head held a trifle too high.

  "Do you wish to alter plans, my prince?" asked Marcellinus.

  Marric shook his head. "Caius, I will need you in the Hippodrome. Nicephorus, you too. Be certain that you have a weapon ready for me too. I have no wish to precede Irene to the horizon."

  Marcellinus and his men saluted. Nicephorus contrived his own disappearance. Marric went to find Stephana. He discovered her searching through chests of clothing with such determination that he knew that she was still far from calm.

  "At least," she said, trying to laugh, "I shall see you dressed as an emperor tonight. I have long wished to."

  "Sit down, Stephana," Marric said. Slowly he knelt before her and cupped her shoulders in his hands. "You," he said. "My very dearest. Why were you not my kinswoman? You should have been empress, far worthier to rule than I." The day's humiliation bowed his head. He was glad to lay it in her lap. Stephana's hand stroked his hair, traced over his ears and began to ease the tension from the knotted muscles of neck and shoulders. Marric sighed.

  "So the temple refused to receive you," she said finally.

  "The priest took me down to see the sarcophagus. I suddenly . . . I was falling, falling out of my body. I panicked." He pressed his face against her legs, glad she could not see his face. He could feel her reach out to soothe him, the touch of the priestess as well as the lover. He shook his head. Unfit, unworthy.

  Stephana slid cool fingers inside the neck of his tunic.

  "You saw the watcher, did you, and feared it? How not? Marric, would you set a boy still unable to lift a shield in the forefront of a cavalry charge? I tell you, in facing such creatures as the watcher, you are just such a boy, and not the prince or the general. There is no need for this shame." She tugged Marric's hair and he raised his face.