Better the air than Leo's skull.
Talk to the man. Stop him. A Varangian who had left his service. A Varangian who was drunk and toying with his axe.
They didn't ask for much, did they?
And why? Because camp rumor, an effortless source of truth as well as entertainment, pegged Leo as what he was ... almost: a son, however disgraced, of the Imperial Ducas line and therefore the likeliest person here to control a former Varangian guardsman who looked as if he were running mad.
Had the moon maddened him? Easy enough to see tricks and figures in the light, on the flat ground, in this old, haunted land.
At a distance, Leo stopped. Holding his hands out at his sides, he waited for the man to pause in his whirling, stalking assault on moonlight and shadows. The axe whistled and cut a few more glistening spirals and circles in the air. Then, the former guardsman stopped and raised it to inspect the edge. Finishing his task, he looked up and saw Leo.
He grinned. The moonlight flashed off his teeth.
“So they found someone they could talk into sending out after me, did they? Do you really think you can take me, or are you drunk too?”
Keeping his hands at his sides, Leo accomplished a shrug and several steps forward. The Northerner's eyes widened, but he shrugged and tossed the axe from hand to hand again.
“Captain says you're scaring the merchants.”
The Northerner snorted. “I'm scaring him too. He hired me. If the merchants get scared enough, they'll cut his pay.”
He cocked his head slightly. “Why don't I scare you?”
“I don't scare easily these days.”
The big man nodded and lowered his axe. “You went East last year, too.”
“I was with His Majesty when he died.”
The former Varangian muttered something guttural in one of those barbarous northern tongues. “It should have been me, Greek. Me and the rest of the hearth companions.
“But this time, I was lucky.” He snorted. “At least, I didn't have to see my ring-giver die. Not this time. Bad enough to see him betrayed.”
Leo let out a deep breath. Keep him talking. “You think he was betrayed?”
“Man, we all saw it. Saw the reserves turn around and just ride off, with about an ocean of Turks riding at us; and us circling around the Emperor. It's my wyrd, my fate. Let me give my pledge to a lord, and the man dies.”
He sighed. “The priest calls that kind of thinking wanhope. Says it's a sin. It's not a sin to say what's true.”
“I had a choice,” said Leo. “I could stay with my...” What was that word the Northerner had used? Best not mangle it. “...Emperor, or betray my kin.”
“You had kin with the reserves?”
“My uncle led the retreat.”
“Mother's brother?”
Leo managed not to flinch.
“I called him uncle. Actually, the relationship was a little more tricky.”
This was the tricky point, if the guardsman decided that Leo's kinship with the traitor meant some kind of blood feud.
The ex-Varangian breathed out explosively. “Then I saw you, riding up to the Emperor like the berserkrgang was on you.” He grinned again, that unholy flash of teeth in his beard. “No wonder you came out to talk to me!”
“I'm on watch.” Leo shrugged. Where was he getting this composure? The answer came, unwelcome. From Andronicus.
“You're not part of the regular guard the captain hired.” A flat statement.
Leo gestured at his gear. “I may not be part of the Emperor's army any more, but what kind of fighting man would I be if I let this fat flock wander around without trying to herd them?”
“One of those eunuchs they have in the palace. Or a merchant yourself!” His companion laughed fit to make the salt water shimmering to their left ripple, as if it, too, paid attention. “Can you see any difference?”
Leo shrugged again. “Eunuchs have more gold, maybe. More courage, too. After all, emperors come and emperors go; but the eunuchs abide.”
The Northman laughed, and Leo joined him, surprised at himself. He set aside his axe and looked about—for more to drink, perhaps. Which was precisely what he did not need.
“Still, if you can't sleep, why not stand watch with me?” Leo sought for a distraction. “I'd be glad of the company.”
God credit it to him for a kindly lie.
By the time they circled the camp once, the moon was rising to its height. The fires were dying. The air grew cold. Somewhere a cat yowled. Leo blessed himself. The Northman reached for something at his throat and shivered.
“If you're not a merchant, and not a monk, and not an officer any more—and you can't very well return home, not if you walked out on your uncle's side...” The words burst out of him, but he managed to break off before he actually asked the question.
“My dreams are bad,” Leo said. “I'm headed to Hagios Prokopios and the brothers. Maybe Peristrema. I hear it's quiet there.”
“So you'll become a monk? Waste of a fighting man.”
“Don't know yet.” Leo clipped off the words, just as he had heard fighting men like Attaleiates and Scylitzes do. The less said the better, especially if—and it was true—his dreams were bad.
“What about you?” A question for a question; and the Northman had asked first.
“Me, young Greek? You should keep your distance, you with your purple, bloody name—oh yes, I know who you are. I was in England with Hardrada—he was a guardsman here, an officer, once, did you know that? Well, he died; and I had cousins in the North on the other side. Good family, much as you all believe we're all bastard pirates. They'd spit on me now, if any of them stayed alive. Stay with us, they said; and so I did, and I took service again with my cousins. Then Harold died too, killed by the Bastard's archers ... God, I hate archers! They say he and his people were some kin of ours, way back. So, after losing two kings in one year, like as not, I came east.”
“You said your first king, Hardrada, was that his name? was a guardsman?”
“Senior officer, no less. That's what gave me the idea. You see how well it turned out, too.”
They walked further, again in silence. As they turned, Leo and the Northerner spoke at once. “Have you got a name you use now?”
They laughed, somewhat uneasily.
“Leo,” he said. “Just Leo.”
A nod. The moon cast a silver track on the water and made the Northerner look as though he wore a mask. “You can call me Nordbriht. Hardrada fought under that name in Miklagard. I don't think he'd grudge it me.”
“Nordbriht.” It wasn't that hard a sound in the mouth. “So now what, Nordbriht?”
“Now?” Nordbriht paused, considering it. “I may turn wraecca. You would say wanderer. Or maybe outcast. I have outlived three ring-givers.
“And you, Leo?”
“I seek to mend my soul. Hew wood, draw water for the brothers. Turn priest, if God speaks to me.”
“Ah. So you will be a penitent. We have kings who turned to God. The Saxons have more. Which is why they lost their kingdom.”
“So have we.”
Nordbriht shrugged. “There is no place under heaven for a man accursed as I. My skies are dark.” He cast an eye up at the stars and the rising moon.
Something yowled. The big man's eyes shifted, and he drew a shuddering breath.
“There is always mercy,” Leo said.
“A lonely man often longs for mercy, his Maker's mildness, while his mood is dark and he must journey, striving with oars...”
“...the wine-dark sea?” Leo was as astonished as Nordbriht to hear himself interrupt.
Nordbriht shook his head. “Not wine-dark. Silver ... grey in the North, where the gannets stoop. Is your ‘wine-dark’ from a Greek song about the sea, then?”
“I will never see the sea again,” Leo murmured.
“Our songs speak of it as cold with frost, the path of exiles. My path. It is great sin to say so, the priest in Miklagard
says. He calls it despair—ugh!”
A cat yowled, joined now by others and by the deep-voiced bay of a hound.
The big man whirled, his axe coming up, his free hand rising to the amulet at his throat.
Leo unsheathed his sword. “You think it's Turks?” he asked.
The Northerner was sweating. “No. Not Turks. Worse than Turks. Seithr, ill magic, you would say. Greek, go away. Get away while you can.”
“Damn it, man,” Leo said. He dared lay a hand on Nordbriht's shoulder. The man's flesh, even through his harness, damp now with his sweat, burned. Nordbriht stopped in his tracks and slumped to the ground.
So he had finally passed out. There was a sheltered place a little further on, nearer the water. It could not be drunk, but it might suffice to bathe a fevered man's face.
Leo draped Nordbriht's arm over his shoulders, levered him up, and started toward what little safety he could see. The bigger man tried to push away. “Easy. We'll get you settled and then I'll think of what's best to be done,” Leo tried to soothe him.
“Too late...” Moaning, as if so small a motion was against his will, Nordbriht turned his face to the moon. His moan turned into a howl of pain. He sank to his knees, taking Leo down with him. The Varangian's hand twisted the chain of the amulet he wore. Abruptly, it—massy silver, at that—snapped, and he flung it from him in a long glistening arc. It splashed into the water, disrupting the track cast by the full moon, high in the sky.
Leo's eyes followed the path of Nordbriht's amulet, where it splashed into the salt lake. The ripples were spreading out, subsiding. As he tried to steady the man against his shoulder, Nordbriht's hand closed on his arm.
As if lacking what scanty protection it afforded, Nordbriht drew in upon himself like a babe in the womb. He shuddered violently, then twitched and mewled.
And Leo saw the night as if through Nordbriht's eyes. Darkness grew as familiar as day, though more terrible. The stars pulsed and beckoned like torches on a battlefield. Among them, shining horses soared. He could see the long hair of their riders and hear their silvery, lost laughter.
“Women...” he breathed. Goddesses in the sky ... He thought of Artemis of the Silver Bow, shooting swift death from the sky. He had no hand free with which to bless himself. God have mercy.
“Not women,” Nordbriht whispered. “Battle-maidens. I told you ... run now ... ”
“If I did not run at Manzikert, I won't run now.”
“Fool!” Nordbriht cried. His voice caught. “You damned fool!”
His voice rose in a howl, first of pain, then of pure longing. And down the track cast by the full moon upon the water, their hooves as insubstantial as their road, came dark horses with flaming eyes.
“Nordbriht,” Leo shook the sick man, “who are those riders?”
The horses tossed their heads, their manes turbulent as stormclouds, lashing across the sky. And then their riders came into focus. Some wore the armor of cataphracts, riding the company of Turks. Some looked much like the man he tried to restrain.
But others ... more men ventured out onto the moonlit track, some riding, some walking; all warriors, but all different. Some wore tunics, some trousers and furs. Some carried the iron and bronze and flint of the earliest people who tilled the soil here. Some scarcely walked like men at all.
Leo had reached that last moment where sense and reality look at each other one last time before the mind snaps and the madman begins to rave. He would not go alone; he had a companion, pale as death, with a grinning mouth.
The water beckoned as the water in the Cistern had beckoned that winter. He was mad, he could hurl himself into the water and drown; and none would call it suicide.
“The hunt ... my old home's Wild Hunt ... it followed me. See it and ride with it forever...” Again, that unearthly howl.
"What hunt?” Leo demanded.
“The Master ... the Master comes!”
Nordbriht pulled away from Leo and ran toward the shore. As he ran, he tugged off his clothes and crouched lower and lower, as if avoiding a blow. His run became a shamble almost as bestial as those last almost-men in the hunt's trail, those who bore arms of flint and sharp-edged black stone.
“Wait for me-e-e-e!"
At his wail, a rider paused and turned in his saddle. Upon his head was a crown. It was not of thorns, which might have meant that the pale rider on his dark horse had some mercy about him, but it gleamed darkly, and it shifted. At one point, it seemed to be three crowns, one resting atop the next. Thunder pealed overhead. The man shifted form. Now, his crown seemed to be the antlers of an ancient stag, so vast Leo wondered how the man could bear them.
He ran after Nordbriht at the shore, straight into the path of the dark crowned rider ...
... and met his eyes. They flamed, then burnt out with a hiss such as Leo remembered from when Romanus was blinded. Clean bone shone in their sockets; the demon on the horse was sightless, yet he still faced Leo down, laughed, and spurred his ghostly horse ...
“Away!”
Nordbriht's shoulder took Leo in the belly, and he went sprawling at the Northerner's feet. He looked up at the man, dazed, his throat exposed, his arms and legs sprawled out, helpless on the earth. Nordbriht's face had coarsened, distorted. Now it seemed covered with hair. His brow was flat, his jaw drawn out into the muzzle of a beast: not a man at all, but a wolf who howled and ran forward on two legs.
Into thy hands, Leo thought. How could he fight that?
Then the man-wolf who had been a guardsman howled again and swerved—between Leo and the wild hunt, luring the others away—
Hooves thundered overhead. Leo heard howling, then lamentation; and then nothing at all.
Someone was slapping his face gently, while another man held a flask of thin, sour wine to his lips. Merchants’ babble in the background assaulted his ears.
A vision, a swoon, and a rescue: this happened entirely too often to him.
Nevertheless, Leo sucked gratefully at the flask, grunted thanks, then pushed away.
“What happened?” he demanded, thrusting aside hands and the usual, useless counsel to rest or lie back or not to worry. “And where is...”
“We found you lying here on the shore. And...”
The shore was empty. Even the moon-track was gone. Only the axe lay upon the ground.
“I'm all right,” Leo insisted.
“The big barbarian...”
“Nordbriht? I spoke to him. Then, he went to walk by himself and think. Leaving his axe.” For the other man's soul's sake and whatever might be salvaged to him of a future, best not tell what Leo had seen. Best not tell for his own good, lest Leo find himself shut up in those monasteries he feared, where the brothers were skilled in the care of the hopelessly mad.
“We will get you back to camp—”
“No!” Leo almost shouted it. He pushed himself upright. “I have a watch to keep,” he snarled as fiercely as any man-wolf. “Leave me.”
And, in the end, he watched out the night. Leo spent that watch praying for the man, or beast, who had him in his power, but who chose to thrust him from the path of that dark king, and then ran away himself, rather than endanger a fellow man.
At dawn, Leo saw the hoofprints of a great riding, and the remnants of the host—coins of awkward shapes and sizes, cast-off spearheads, broken beer jars. Sprawled amid them lay Nordbriht, his scarred body half-covered only by a cloak whose very patterns seemed to shout immense age. Around him lay Nordbriht's own clothes. And, of course, his axe.
Cautiously, Leo approached Nordbriht. Carefully, he gathered up his clothes and weapons. Carefully, he brought them to the man as he lay face down by the lake. And, most carefully of all, he dared tentatively to shake his shoulder.
Nordbriht's eyes flickered open. They were blue like lapis or the sky overhead. And filled with loathing.
“I didn't ... no, you live. Once again ... I tell you I will not live to suffer this again!”
He struggled
to his feet and headed at an unsteady run toward the lake, clearly determined to hurl himself in.
Leo's shoulder hit him in his midsection and brought him down.
“It's salt!" he shouted, blurting out the first words that came to mind. “You won't sink, fool! You can't even drown yourself.”
Nordbriht stopped and turned to look at him, pivoting so rapidly that he overbalanced and fell. To Leo's astonishment, the Northerner burst out laughing, a deep-throated bay that sounded somewhat like his howls of the night before, but that, strangely enough, did not frighten Leo.
Thank you, God, Leo thought.
“Now what?” Nordbriht demanded.
“Now?” said Leo. “Now, I have saved your life, and you are bound to me. I am Leo ... Leo Ducas, and I go to Cappadocia to be healed. You, who have left an Emperor, will you join me and seek healing and your soul's salvation?”
Nordbriht rose.
“I kill the men I swear to. I told you that.”
“I don't want a guard. A friend at my back, maybe.”
The guardsman paused, considering it. As the sun struck him, he seemed to realize, finally, that he was naked. Slowly, he stalked over to the pile of clothes and arms, dressed himself as best he could, and rummaged through the wrack left upon the shore. Then, he took up his axe and knelt before Leo, lowering his head until he lay hunched over on his belly, in the prostration that he would accord a reigning Emperor.
“I will swear to you,” Nordbriht said. “Pray I do not betray you too.”
About noon, the wind went breathless. Ahead, the cone of Mount Argaeus, touched with snow, emerged from the clouds like a mother's breast. Odd thought, wasn't it, Leo, for a man who was about to vow celibacy?
But it was better to think of it as a breast than how it had appeared to him last night, rumbling and gouting fire and exploding rock. Had there been a face amidst that fire, a woman's face, all bright eyes and feral teeth and ancient rage? He had seen it before. He feared he would see it again and again until the holy monks took it and all other evil visions from him.
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