She must forget his kindness in Cotyaeum, the slender, distinguished height of him, even in the rough clothes he wore these days, or how gently he spoke to her in her father's house. She must regard him as just another of her father's friends, another exile washed up on the same shore. She always promised herself that, when he called, she would withdraw to her own rooms and the company of her maids. She had never kept her word yet.
At least her maids had not commented. She could bear anything but that—except her fear that they were too kind to tease her.
She caught up torches from storage and started downward. At the first bend, from a niche carved into a ruddy column, she lifted the hammer and some iron tools she thought she could use as scrapers that she had left there against the need she hoped to have. It would be better to have help, but any of her father's men would tell him, even if they obeyed her; and her women were out of the question.
Again, the faces of Leo and his guard came to mind. She had seen them in the caves—Leo more frequently than Nordbriht. They marked places for ambushes by the doors that separated parts of the city from each other. They measured storage bins to see if spears could be propped upright within them, and set the strongest men to dig traps in the cave floors, trying to disguise the airshafts lest their enemies roll stones over their mouths and snuff out the refugees’ lives with their air supply. He spoke of sea fire, stored in ceramic jars, if it could be begged from a garrison in time and set alight as a weapon of last resort before the survivors withdrew below. He had even written to Byzantium, jeopardizing the fragile quiet he had won here.
He had more important things to do than quest with her, for treasure or for wisdom.
How cleverly she had distracted her women with errands—and necessary ones at that—in the town. Today, she had vowed, she would descend as far as she might. She had achieved the ninth level the last time, and only Tzipporah's fear had restrained her from squeezing herself into a passageway narrower than she had ever dared before.
Focilis descensus ... no, this was not time for Vergil, and, in any case, it had been years since she could decipher the language of the Western Empire with much facility. Easy is the descent to hell: she remembered that much. Strait as this stair was, she would have to pray it led to somewhere else.
Now her robes swept the sides of the narrow passageway that led down into the lower levels. Dampness rose from the walls, and through the air shaft that she passed, she heard the rush of wind, the rumble of thunder that found response in the tremors of the earth. Rain was lashing down, she discovered by putting a hand out into the shaft. But it vanished quickly. The land would reap no benefit from this storm or the ones to come.
Behind her, the tumult of children fleeing from lightning and rain subsided.
Around this bend. Down this flight of stairs. Careful of the hollows in their centers.
A gust of wind from the airshaft jeopardized her torch. From here, she must take the greatest pains not to let it be extinguished, or to walk longer than it would take her to return using her second torch. Otherwise, Tzipporah's worst fears would come true, and she could easily wander in the dark until she lost the power to tell up from down, left from right, and collapsed, perhaps only a wall or a bend in a wall from help, or so mad she could not discern friend from phantom.
That made life harder in this haunted land. Even friends labored under the burden of old spirits.
Downward. And still down. She must be below the level of the church; in fact, she had not thought the ways ran this deep. Here, the rock was damp and chill. She fancied that she could hear the water in the deep wells. When she thrust her torch in at openings, she saw rooms that bore no evidence of having been used even for the roughest storage. And yet, they seemed smaller, rougher, older than the levels up above.
Don't think of that, she warned herself. Don't think of the weight of rock and earth above you, the distance between you and the open air. The thought of all that mass could bring one gasping to her knees in panic, which could kill more cruelly than any dagger.
But she must think of it. Something, she told herself, did not make sense. She stopped to work it out. These chambers were disused. Well enough. These chambers seemed older than the ones above. No. Try again. How could these chambers be older than the upper rooms, seeing as men would have to cut their way down this far into the rock before they could excavate them?
Asherah shuddered. Her hands chilled, and she drew a deep, quivering breath. There was only one way the rooms down here could be older than the levels now being prepared against attack: if this cave warren had been cut starting from below.
That meant that the diggers had had to break through from somewhere else.
Setting down her tools, she shut her eyes and pressed her forehead against the stone, willing vision to come. It had come so much more easily when she was a child and did not want it. Now that the fate of all she cared for might hang upon the powers she had feared were madness for so long ... the stone gritted against her brow, chill and rough.
Ahhh, there it was. Even as men worked the stone high above, passing the shards and grit and pebbles back into the light, hand over hand, others scraped far below them in the darkness, taking away the detritus through a longer tunnel, hollowing out rooms, building a foundation for a new city, then pulling back. Perhaps last of all, a clever mason patched the wall, blocking this new city from the roadway under the earth until the right time came.
Say it never did. Say the secret was lost. And when workers broke through to these lowest levels, they found only unused rooms. What they could not explain, they feared and thus drew back from.
What if Asherah could find the entry to that road?
She could try.
She lifted her brow from the rock wall and dashed her hand across it. Odd: she had not thought that the rock was wet enough or soft enough—her stomach twisted with fear at the thought of the upper levels caving in upon her, crushing her into a bloody smudge.
She smeared her fingers across her forehead once again and examined them in the torchlight. Not mud, not grit; but paint smeared her hand. Backing away from the wall, she played the torch over it, careful not to stain the pictures with soot. There were figures, crudely daubed, of men bearing spears and picks, of women wearing intricate headdresses towering high above them, and, at their ankles, cats and a long, long painted serpent leading ... leading to a space bare of goddesses or workers or even snakes. The stone here looked rougher, too. So far below the earth, it would not be exposed to weather, would not wear down into smoothness as it did on the surface.
Again, terror and excitement rushed through her, like a river overflowing its banks and sweeping toward the fields. Was it unbroken rock there on that wall, or had it been cobbled together from behind it?
She wedged her torch into a crevice in the rock. Awkwardly, she lifted her pick and scraped it across the wall. The noise set her teeth on edge; its echo made her glance around. Had she been heard? She paused, listening for footsteps, and heard nothing except her heartbeat and her rapid breathing.
What was on the pick? No, no paint at all. She pressed in toward the rock face, holding up the torch to examine the whole blank area. Yes, at some point, the paint stopped.
Experimentally, Asherah tapped the pick against the wall, then elsewhere further down the corridor. The sounds echoed, then died. She heard no difference, and her heart sank with disappointment.
Strike harder, fool. The thought possessed her with the power of the strongest dreams from her childhood.
She traded pick for hammer and swung it against the wall: here, the solid crash of hammer against stone (and the serpent's head); here, against a soldier's shield, too; but here, in the empty space, the crash was hollow, as if here, she struck not solid stone, but a thin wall.
Joy made her tremble; fear made her ice cold. She had found the way within. What might lie behind the wall? The long road? Treasure? Nothing at all?
Whatever lay behind it was
unknown; and knowledge was the treasure that she sought.
Her trembling ceased. She braced her hands upon the hammer and swung with all her strength. The impact knocked her halfway around. Try again, Asherah. Brace your feet and try again. Again, she swung. A small piece of rock flaked from the vacant wall. She attacked the stone before her in a frenzy.
When Asherah finally had to pause, coughing from the damp and the rock dust that her flurry of blows had stirred, she saw how little progress she had made, and her heart sank. This was not how workers did it. Workers picked one spot and struck at it repeatedly. A trickle of dust. A scattering of pebbles. A chunk of rock segmented from the wall and burst into powder. She bent to examine it: this had been assembled from broken stone.
She spared a glance at the torch. It had scarcely burned halfway down, and the spare was yet untouched. She had time, assuming her strength held out.
If only Nordbriht were here, with his immense strength ... not Nordbriht, who might change into a beast; and this time, he might not crouch with his head at her feet.
Again, she struck, a measured set of blows, and paused, head down until her breathing steadied.
Then she heard the pad, pad, pad of footsteps coming up behind her. She whirled, grasping the hammer as she had seen fighters grasp an axe and held it between her and whatever might approach.
Lady,” Leo Ducas said, holding aloft a torch. “Lady Asherah. What are you doing here?”
Startled past bearing, Asherah screamed and tried to swing the hammer. He darted forward and pulled it from her grip. The torchlight flickered. She tried to dash past him, but he caught and held her. She twisted, trying to bring up her hands, or reach the knife she carried, or fight free.
“I am sorry,” he said, “Asherah, Asherah, do you not know me? Forgive me for frightening you. Steady there. Steady. I know you can control yourself.”
He let the hammer fall. It rolled near where his torch had fallen. Leo looked down, pushing her away from the dying flame. She shuddered again: if her clothing had caught fire, she might truly have reason to be afraid.
“You have nothing to fear. Not while I'm here.”
He spoke to her so gently, as if to a madwoman or to a child. But then, he always spoke thus, not like the nobles she had seen, or her own clever people, who expressed love in other ways.
She sighed deeply and let her head drop onto his shoulder. Just for a moment, let her feel shielded. She would not indulge herself for any longer; but she would allow herself just that much.
“Leo,” she murmured. “How foolish I have been.”
“How foolish have you been?” he demanded. “I saw your women in the market, without you. When I spoke to Tzipporah, she told me you had come here. Alone. Don't you know...”
Let a man, any man, catch a woman in an adventure of her own, and he took it upon himself to lecture her as if he were her father. Just as well: otherwise she might imagine this one to be a paragon when he was only a man.
“I know the story Nordbriht told, about the woman whom a comrade in the Guard tried to ... to attack. She killed him, and his former brothers ceded her his property and threw his body out. He does not think I am helpless.”
Leo laughed. “Where Nordbriht grew up, the women were six feet tall and had shoulders almost as wide as his. Which, you will forgive me if I point out, you have not. So it is foolish for you to wield hammer and pick when you have a friend who will do it for you. Remember, I am much in practice from carving out my own hermitage.”
Asherah looked away, appalled to find herself sulking.
“Come now, is it that you do not want to share what you have found? You told me you were looking for the underground ways, remember? I could say, ‘Tell me and I will not tell your father that you slipped your tether and came down here alone to hack at the stone like a child playing stonemason,’ but I will not. Asherah, we are friends. What do you think you're doing?”
“You will think I am possessed,” she burst out with her secret fear, which was far worse than simple terror.
“No more than some people I left behind thought I was. And I gave them considerably more reason to believe I should be locked up. You know, lady, you and I share an uncomfortable passion for the depths. In Constantinople, there was this cistern...” Leo gave a bark of laughter that hurt Asherah to hear. “I saw a Gorgon in its depths and fell in, terrified of what was simply an old piece of stone, mortared in upside-down. A boy pulled me out.
“I'm babbling. That's a sign of insanity too, they say. Some day, we must compare the evidence against us and determine which of us has the greater claim to madness. But for now, tell me what you've found.”
“The rock.” She pointed. “It sounds hollow when I strike there. The rest of the wall is painted. But that place isn't. I think they sealed it behind them when they left.”
“'They'?”
“Whoever built the road between the cities, the road everyone whispers about but no one has ever found. Look about you, Leo. The rooms down here are older than the ones above. You can see it from the stone. They built from both ends.”
“From both ends?”
Asherah hissed with frustration. He was a Byzantine. Next to the Jews and the Syrians and Persians and the Phoenicians, they were as clever as any people in the world. Why was he so slow-witted?
“Yes. The caves down here are older. So logic demands they had to tunnel through from somewhere.”
If her madness didn't drive this man away, a parade of logic surely would!
He nodded. So she had convinced him. She attempted to conceal her surprise. Then, he stooped and picked up her tools. Asherah tried to soothe her cheeks with her freezing hands, then raked them through her tumbled hair. Her veil hung wildly askew.
He tapped the wall, just as she had done. “Hollow, indeed. I have broken enough stone to know. When was the last time you dug out your own hermitage, lady?”
This time, his laughter made her warm again, almost relaxed. It was painful when he picked away at himself and his memories, as if hacking at rock that could bleed. She had learned very young that people flinched at such remembrances, and had always taken pains never to inflict her own upon the unwary. Leo, though: she could hardly call him unwary, or unpracticed in strangeness. They were alike in that, and it marked what friendship they had built, even from the moment he had struggled to her side.
More strangeness still: here they stood on the edge of amazement, in a land awaiting attack, and he could smile at her as if they sat at dinner. He is gracious, your father's friend and yours. Do not expect more than he will give. Or you will weep when he goes away.
Leo rekindled his torch from the one she had wedged into the rock. “You seem to have made some progress. I suppose Nordbriht could make a faster job of this, but Nordbriht hates the depths. He calls these caves pure barrow, probably complete with monsters from the frozen North.”
Their eyes met, confirming what they knew as truth: Nordbriht had a right to know and fear such creatures, tainted as he was.
“So, I have even more practice than he at breaking rocks. Now, if you will step back, while I put my back into this...”
He swung with practiced skill. The wall did not so much flake away as disintegrate. The stone might have had centuries to set, or longer, but it was soft, fractured; and Leo was determined.
Asherah backed up, hands over her ears as he battered at the wall. Finally, he paused to draw a deep breath. Despite the chill, sweat showed dark on his clothing, pressing it against his body. Setting down the hammer, he rubbed his hands over his arms.
“Another blow or two and we'll break through,” he told her. “Do you still want to?”
In the torchlight, she could see his eyes, kindling with the curiosity of the Byzantine and something more, something akin to her own passion for knowledge. Knowledge meant survival. Knowledge meant power. And the passion for knowledge was more powerful than the lust for gold or for ... protected by the shadows, she flushed deep
ly.
Asherah drew a deep breath to steady herself. “We can always block the passage afterward.” She offered tribute to a practicality she did not feel.
Leo's grin showed he did not feel it either. He raised the hammer, then set it down.
“The air could be bad in there,” he said. “So I want you to get behind me. Well behind me.”
He pointed with his chin up the twisted passageway. She measured the distance as if she planned to bargain for it in a bazaar. She would not be able to escape upward and fetch help in time if he were overcome.
Asherah shook her head. “If you fall, I shall cover my face with my veil and drag you out,” she told him.
Why did I say that? she wailed to herself. Watch him choose retreat before embarrassment. And watch him call it prudence. Like all the others.
“I am certain I should not allow...”
She stamped her foot, stung by his tone into a display of temper that would surely dash all of Tzipporah's simple-minded hopes—not that the presumptuous thing had any right to them. “I found this cave. And if you had not come, I would have broken down the wall. It would have taken me a long time, but I would have done it. Now, are you going to finish what we started or...”
Leo drew a deep breath and swung.
Crack! The rock crumbled before them. For an instant, Asherah disgusted herself by throwing up her arms, as if they could protect her foolish skull from any chunks of rock that might shake loose from the ceiling. Both of them coughed, hunching over in the puffs of rock dust that rose despite the dampness this far below the earth, from the wall. And from the hole that Leo had battered.
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