Like Blessed Maria, Asherah was a Jew. They were sisters, Leo thought audaciously. How should he not pray for her? He might even pray for the men who had stood with her, forgive Menachem for the torment he had never wanted to perform and think with admiration of the wealthy merchant who stood amidst soldiers and demanded water.
Yes. He would indeed offer up those prayers along with the other, more dutiful sentiments about the health of the Emperor that he was expected to express. No doubt the men who surrounded him would be praying correctly—or would they? In the years since he had ridden from Constantinople in his uncle Andronicus’ train, the world—his world—had become so full of doubt.
Light, incense, and music wreathed him about. He could sense the worship in this place as yet another presence: in this moment, the City seemed purged of its intrigue and devoted totally to adoration. In this moment, then, he could love his enemy and forgive him. The light dazzled in his eyes. In a passion of worship, Leo bent his head to pray for the enemies of his people who had treated him as a friend. As for the kin who had treated him like an enemy—
Pain spiked through his temples. He pressed his hands to them, then slid them quickly down his face to wipe off unexpected tears. Yet it was no shame for a man to weep at prayer. Perhaps it was the light: he had stared at it too long. Only eagles, or angels, may look thus directly into the light. He would try again.
This time, the pain forced a groan from him. He sank to his knees, rocking back and forth. Arms came around him, supported him. After a time, his trembling subsided. The sweat stopped trickling down his ribs under his heavy ceremonial robes.
He drew a shuddering breath and raised his head to nod thanks at his father, who had sustained him. But it was not his father who smiled as their eyes met. No: his father had withdrawn as if he had been commanded. He will not abandon me! A surge of pride in the scholarly, subdued man brought Leo's head up and steadied him. He could even smile apologetically and shake his head—cautiously—as kindly men nearby urged him to lean his head against the column in the northwest of the nave where, it was said, Justinian had miraculously been healed of a headache. He would be fine, his smile said. It would even allow him to remove himself courteously from Michael Psellus’ concerned grasp without looking as if he flinched away from a poisonous snake.
Why wasn't Psellus in his own place? For that matter, why was he not with the Imperials themselves? Because, judging from the smile on Psellus’ face, Leo sensed that it was Psellus who had cast him down—and showed every indication that he would do so again.
Leo was younger than Psellus, and stronger, with a soldier's training. He had never thought of that before. How odd to remember it now.
Clearly, a breath later, it occurred to Psellus, too. He slipped away.
Once again, Leo composed himself to pray. His hands were cold, and a rainbow haze danced before his eyes. First, he would pray never to be struck by that sort of pain again. The incense prickled in his nostrils like some wraith out of an almost-forgotten time.
Leo buried his head in his joined hands. Kyrie eleison. Christe eleison. The mighty chant washed over him, a deep-voiced wave that swelled into the highest reaches of the dome before receding into silence.
Why, the holy music had drawn the pain from him!
In a passion of gratitude, Leo raised his face toward the apse, shimmering with gold. Suddenly, as if heaven twisted itself into earthly ken, the air seemed to twist and sparkle. It filled.
There, looming before Leo, enthroned on sunlight, the dust of the earth, and the fumes of incense, sat Christ Pantocrator, He Who ruled all that was on earth and in heaven: dark hair; pale face, melancholy at the world's guilt and the joint burden of his Incarnation and role as Judge; and his eyes—dark, all-seeing, all-knowing, compassionate, but capable of the ruthless choice between sheep and goats.
He held out his hand to Leo. Leave father and mother and follow Me.
Yes, he breathed. Oh yes! Leo started forward. He blinked back tears lest they blur for even an instant the miracle floating before him. He did not want to lose sight of that majestic face, of the wise, compassionate eyes.
Oh God, his eyes were burning out!
The stink of burning overpowered the fragrance of the incense. Once again, he saw his Emperor, weighted by shields and strong men's arms, saw the glowing iron, and heard the scream that marked the beginning of his death.
How have I failed this time?
Like Asherah, this time at least, Leo did not look away. Flame consumed those vast eyes, hollowed them until visions erupted in the waste space of their ruined sockets. Horses thundered across a plain, some as well-known and substantial as the cavalry officer Leo might have seen on the Mese the day before, others faint, with arms and garb such as he had never seen except in waking dreams. When the dust of their passing had subsided, mingling with the ash of the burning, rock towers loomed. Wind lashed them, wailing like damned souls, and the rocks split under its pressure, showing a path that must surely lead down into oblivion at the center of the world.
Throbbing battered his temples, like the beating of a gigantic heart. A heart in peril. In a moment, Leo knew it, the pain would start, and this time it would devour him. Psellus would not even leave him the sanctity of prayer.
With a strangled cry, he rushed from the sanctuary of Hagia Sophia, plunging out as if he were one of the rebel angels cast from heaven.
A wind blew in across the sea. A pall of grey clouds hid the sun. Soon the sun would go down, and the ghosts of all the men and women who died outside Hagia Sophia and the Palace would throng the streets, whispering and drawing him with them. And one of them, a tall man with scarred eyesockets, would beckon him; and he would have to go. His mother would be furious. What was that, weighed against the damnation he felt waiting for him?
He knew now that there was no escape, no safety for him under heaven. But, like a wounded animal, Leo also knew what he must do: go to ground; hide in enveloping darkness until he could once again bear the light of day.
The streets narrowed as he fled Hagia Sophia. Not toward the Senate, no. That was Psellus’ domain. If Leo had failed in the church, he would certainly fail there. Not in the Great Palace. But toward the Arch and to the refuge Leo knew was there.
The Cistern. Centuries ago, Justinian had built not only Hagia Sophia to bring nourishment to men's souls, but his cistern, to tap the sweet water that helped protect Byzantium from those who thought to sit outside its gates and wait until it died of thirst.
His eyes widened, accustoming themselves to the ancient blackness of the cistern's low vaults, hollowed out here below the streets of New Rome. Torches blazed at intervals, their flames reflected in the water. As he approached, ripples shivered across its surface. He seized a torch from the iron fastened to the wall. How very strange. The bracket was iron, not bronze, set into meticulous Roman stonework rather than the living rock of a cave.
The cistern's keepers maintained small boats for testing the water's depths or checking the integrity of the piers that supported its vaults. Leo cast off and rowed himself deeper inside. His boat left a wake of ripples; his torch left a wake of light and smoke, a tiny comet reflected in the water.
Gradually, the pain in his chest subsided, and he breathed more easily. He ceased to row, resting now, borne upon the water until it ceased to rock. The dampness soothed the ache in his eyes. He felt like a child who had cried himself out and might now rest in the safety of nightfall.
Here, no time passed, save as his torch flickered and burnt down to a ruddy flame and deeper embers. If only he could drift here forever, watching the patterns of light and water.
He would allow himself to be lulled by the silence, broken only by the occasional plink of a drop falling from the vaults or the whisper of water against the sides of his boat.
Now he drifted toward one of the piers that upheld the vault. It was sturdy, even squat. Leo put out an oar to prevent his boat from scraping up against it. He leaned ov
er the side of the boat. He had not known how much older he had begun to look—his whole life wasted, before he was even thirty. His own face, pale, sorrowful, with hollowed eyes, reflected in the water, captured his attention again. His weathering was gone, his cheeks hollowed, and his eyes as remote as the figures depicted in shimmering tiles on a church's walls. To his surprise, his hair and close-clipped beard were faintly silvered.
Perhaps that was the flickering of his torch. Soon it would burn down to embers, then to darkness. The torch flared up into brilliant light, as if the fire had burned into a pocket of sap within the wood.
And a trick of that light exposed what lay beneath the water.
The cistern was old, but stonework even older still had been melded into its foundations. One such stone had been mortared into the base of the nearest pier—but surely not by chance.
The huge face carved into it had been mortared in upside down, so its pitiless blank eyes met Leo's as he stared into the water. The serpents that were its hair shimmered as if newly freed from the stone that confined them. Darkness formed in the pit of the Gorgon's eyes, as marble lids rose.
Too late! Now he would stay here forever, a stone man, his face twisted into a mask of terror. He wailed like a frightened child and flinched away. His boat rocked from side to side. His torch, falling from its holder, hissing into extinction. Leo clutched at the oars. Too far, too awkwardly—he could not recover, the boat was overbalanced, overturning ...
The water closed over Leo's head. For an instant he saw its surface smooth and go taut above him. Then he collided with the pier, an ungainly kiss of the Gorgon's face.
A violent light exploded in Leo's face. His ears roared—was that the cooling tide of his own blood, or someone shouting at him? Something tugged at his shoulders, his arms, even his hair—he was being captured again. He tried to fight the indignity, but his limbs moved so feebly! He could neither fight nor escape; but must submit to being drawn back into the world of whirling lights and loud voices from which the Gorgon had drawn him.
His captor dragged him through the surface of the water into icy air. The roaring subsided: the shouting rose in pitch.
“He's half ice!” the voice that had dinned in his ears now shouted.
“Get him out of that robe or he'll catch his death!”
“If he hasn't already...”
“He can't!” The voice almost cracked. “He just can't!”
So the voice belonged to a younger man than he had thought. How very interesting that would be, if he were only not so tired. The blackness beckoned, only slightly out of reach. So warm ...
Hands pounded his back and shoulders.
“Leo, Leo! In the name of God, wake up!”
That was Alexius shouting at him. And hitting him. Why was he hitting him? Leo had thought they were friends.
He opened his mouth to protest. No words came. Instead, he gagged, then hacked up what felt like half the contents of the Cistern. He lay gasping on the bottom of the boat as oars propelled it vigorously across the water. It crashed against the walls so hard that Leo's ribs protested.
The boy dragged Leo out of the boat. He lay face down upon the wet stone, dripping, gasping, and shuddering.
“The way he's shaking, if he hits his face, he'll break his teeth. Wrap him up in this.”
The coarse blanket that dropped upon him almost smothered him from nose to sodden shoes, but it felt warmer than any furs from the Rus trade routes.
“It's those clothes. We've got to get them off him.”
“And carry him naked through the Mese. In the winter. People will be certain he's disgraced or run mad...”
“I don't call screaming in the middle of Hagia Sophia, then bolting out with the Emperor present particularly sane, do you? Maybe he's got a devil in him.” Leo knew without seeing that the pause meant that the speaker had blessed himself.
“Leo's got to be all right!” Alexius protested to the other, older man. There was some family resemblance; but Comnenus was a large family. No shame to Leo if he didn't recognize the man, though there would be if he forgot to thank him—if he lived. And he had garnered shame enough as it was. Again, he coughed and choked and spat as he was hoisted from the icy stones onto the older man's shoulder.
“He doesn't live far from here.”
“We can thank God for that.” Head down, he was carried along. Wind lashed him even through the blanket. Curious: this upside-down view of the streets he knew so well. How the people bobbed! No, he realized: he was doing the bobbing, jolting with each step the man took as well as shuddering from the cold.
The walk expanded into an eternity, made worse as his limbs, half frozen by the water, regained sensation in a barrage of tinglings and burnings. He bit his lip to distract himself with a more bearable pain. Romanus had not moaned.
Carried as he was, he recognized the scars left on the old wood of the door to his house before he could make out the house himself. The door slammed open, and the warmth radiating out from the house to envelop him brought hot tears to his eyes.
His mother stood amidst the house servants, so pale that Leo wondered if she had gazed upon a Gorgon of her own and turned to marble. She would have had to have a heart of stone to make the devil's bargain he now suspected. But would a woman with a heart of stone weep and wring her hands?
Controlling herself, she led the way to Leo's room, helped strip him, rub him dry, and wrap him in every warm covering she could find in the house.
Tenderly, she wiped away the tears as they dripped down his face. He was not ashamed of weeping before her and his rescuers: he was beyond shame now, beyond sorrow. Children wept when they were born; and he felt, in truth, reborn into a kind of puzzlement.
And then he felt himself washed beyond consciousness as well. Relief eased the tremor from his limbs, leaving only the wonderful unfamiliar warmth and the stillness of a long-lost safety.
Leo woke to the drone of a priest's voice. The holy words droned in his ears, and Leo listened idly. Miracles. Demons were being cast into the Gadarene swine, which was a good place for them—if they couldn't be cast into Psellus. No ... Psellus was a demon, or maybe he had one of his own.
How pleasant it was to lie here, no longer shivering. He was delightfully warm, and his head did not ache as if demons were squeezing it in a heated vise. His throat hurt, but he remembered hacking up water when Alexius hauled him out of the cistern.
Warmth radiated from the floor as well as from the coverings in which he was wrapped. If only the priest would not drone on that way, or if he would at least read some more cheerful text.
His mother edged into the room with a steaming bowl. She would have fed him, but he turned his head away. It was too much trouble to talk. Better by far to drift away on tides of his own thoughts. Through lidded eyes, he saw her stricken look. That troubled him. Dimly, he remembered he had some reason—what was it—for this sense of estrangement he felt. He had seen her weep. What did she have to weep about?
Sorrow and anger flickered at the edges of his consciousness, but a yawn blotted them out. The priest's voice, his mother's footsteps, the creaks of the old house in the wind blown from Asia all faded. Leo felt himself sinking back into sleep, wrapping it about him the way blankets and robes had been heaped around him after he was pulled from the cold water beneath the streets of Constantinople.
Shadows stirred beyond the shelter of his eyelids. They melded, then split. Two shadows: slight ones. Not soldiers then, nor officials. Perhaps not even priests.
“This is the man you pulled from the cistern?” The voice was a child's.
“This is the man who stayed by your father until God took him to Himself.” That was Alexius’ voice, correcting the boy with him so subtly that he might not know himself to have been corrected.
Leo opened his eyes. His smile, much to his surprise, was unforced.
“How did you get in here?” he asked. Idiot, he reproved himself. At least, thank him.
; Alexius smiled, an oddly adult expression for someone his age. It made them all conspirators.
“I am a dutiful son. I accompanied my mother, who is here consoling yours. We slipped away. I have two brothers named Leo. I wanted them to meet each other.”
So, this was the elder of Romanus’ two sons, the one who shared his name! Leo inclined his head, though the boy was no Caesar and might not even be allowed to survive to adulthood. Fevers, after all, were so common in the young.
Again, Leo raised an eyebrow, glancing at the dead man's elder son. Child he might be: he was perilous company in these times.
Alexius broke into a grin far more spontaneous than most of the expressions noblemen of Byzantium dared to wear, even in the privacy of a sick friend's bedchamber.
“You know my mother,” he said.
And so Leo did. Anna Dalassena would despise the very thought of scorning a child—especially one who had lost both parents—in the hope of currying favor at court. She would hold her head high and insist on doing precisely as she wished, even if she risked exile again. Leo could well believe she considered herself justified—as she so often was. He wished ... oh how he wished ...
The boy, young Leo, drew himself up, catching his attention. “Sir, I want to thank...”
Leo shook his head. “No need. I am only sorry for your loss. Our loss.”
He met the boy's eyes. They were filling, but they reminded him so much of his father's before they weighted him down with shields and forced the hot iron into the hands of a stranger.
“Leo?”
He and the boy turned to look at Alexius, who quirked an eyebrow at him. Quickly, Leo adjusted the expression on his face: best not to let the boy see the shadow he knew was there.
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