“Lady shouldn't be here,” Nordbriht protested. Asherah took a cup and filled it with the last of the water.
“You try telling her.”
“Give him the cup,” Asherah said. Nordbriht would be ravenous. By now, the kitchen fires would be lit.
Nordbriht tried to speak. His voice husked over. He drank and tried again. “Turks. Turks swarming all over. They attacked the valley, and they'll be coming here. Not Seljuks. Turkmen. I tried to ... night came, and I ... I Changed.” He grinned, showing huge teeth within the mats of his golden beard. “God, what a hunt. Turks don't fight at night, but they're vengeful as Hela herself. I outran them as if the Wild Hunt breathed down my neck.”
Perhaps it had.
It was a miracle Nordbriht was still alive. Asherah glanced down at his feet. He had run them raw, but already, the soles were healing. Apparently, wounds sustained by the man-wolf in one guise healed quickly in the other.
A growl emerged from Nordbriht's belly, not his throat. He flushed practically down to his belly and gestured protest at her presence to Leo.
“Asherah, wake the house,” Leo told her. This time, he didn't even try to apologize for commanding her. “Nordbriht's right. We have to move. Get one of the men...”
“Ioannes stayed the night...”
“I couldn't ask for a better messenger. Tell him to get the men assembled. Then, you tell your father and the women who are supposed to hide to get ready.”
Leo had turned his back to open Nordbriht's storage chest and hurl whatever garments came first to hand at him. “Send Kemal to me. I suppose he's slept across our threshold again.”
For a man who had fled any breath of Imperial power, now, its trappings ensnared him. Asherah stood, waiting for the word that would release her to the errands that would shatter her life.
“I'm going to want him to ride with me. Nordbriht, you're for the caves with my lady.”
The Varangian bellowed protest. Already, he was sounding stronger. He hated the caves, Leo knew that. And what if the change came upon him while they were immured underground? Leo would know to fear that, too. Still, if he knew all that and still ordered Nordbriht below ...
“If Kemal isn't with me, he's meat. And you can't ride with us, not in the shape you're in. We'll have to ride fast, without remounts; and your weight will overstrain the horses. You need to rest up, and I need you with my lady and her father in case the Turks break through or some damned fool among the villagers decides that they can hold out longer if they don't have to share with Jews. Besides, you might—who knows?—even be guarding my heir...”
Asherah froze. That had to be a ploy to make Nordbriht go along with Leo's plans—didn't it? It was much too early for her to know, let alone for any man to sense. And what a time for it! Even now, it was only a hope, just the earliest possible moment to hope, well before she had even thought of sharing it with him. She reached deep within her for body-sense, which had strengthened over the past months—ever since whatever powers lingered beneath the earth had roused her and sent her eagerly into Leo's arms.
“This isn't...” she blurted.
“Asherah, get to it!”
Asherah started out the door. So her husband thought he could command her like that, did he?
Just this once, he could. She ran to rouse her household and prepare it, once again, to fly for its life.
The third time the spare cloak Asherah was trying to roll neatly dropped from her chilled fingers, she tried to take herself, not her packing, in hand.
Outside her room, she could hear women calling to each other, checking off lists of supplies, the sounds of packing: orderly preparations for flight. In the kitchens, she knew, jars were being loaded and carried out. From across the courtyard, where the guards slept and kept their stores, came shouts and clatters as men armed and assembled. The same swift, orderly tumult would be racing through the stables. By now, Joachim must have packed his most secret records and his most treasured books.
Why did she alone fumble at her work? God knows, she had practice enough in fleeing. Just look, she scolded herself, how wealthy they were. They had time to get their property out. They had allies. They even had a place to run to—and a way out.
What more could she possibly want?
Tears overflowed her eyes and spotted the cloak she still held.
She knew what else she wanted. Time to live. Time to live here in a place she had made her own: her own home, rather than a rest stop for the caravans or a fortress where she lived on sufferance and the blade's edge. She wanted the land. She wanted her friends. She wanted long, serene days.
And she wanted Leo at her side for all of them.
Their wealth of allies and protection only gave them more to lose. God spare them this time, those whom He could.
Asherah hated to run, hated to cower in a maze beneath the earth. She obeyed—just; and only because she knew and agreed with the reasons for sending her to ground. She was not a fighter, at least not with bow or sword, no more than her father was. His chosen battlefields were wisdom and trade; reluctantly, he had conceded that he must be safeguarded for his memories, at least, if not his pride. And Asherah was his heir.
Over and over again, she could give herself good advice. But Leo was riding off. She would see him for the last time, armed among other armed men. It was bad enough that armed men of the Empire had always attacked her and hers before; but now she loved one of them. He would ride off against fighters whose deadly skill she knew almost as well as he.
Against that, her “wealth” was worthless. She rubbed the marks of her tears from her spare cloak and duly stowed it in its proper place.
Known footsteps raced down the inner corridor. Quickly, Asherah busied herself with other tasks. Leo must not see her cry. He ran into the room and wrapped his arms about her, turning her so she could rest her head against his shoulder. The boiled leather of his cuirass—probably, they were loading his mail upon his horse right now—felt hard against her cheek.
They should leave this place. Every instant was precious. Just one moment more, Asherah pleaded with herself. I will be careful. Unselfish. But just let me hold him one moment more.
More than a moment had passed by the time Leo's words finally worked through the panicked roaring in her ears. “Even now, you had hoped I would command defenses in the caves? Asherah, you should have known better. Surely, you did. They want me as their leader, and I must ride with them. We'll let you know when it's safe to emerge. Or we'll fight through to you. I promise.”
“Don't!” She turned her face against his leather-clad shoulder. His arms tightened around her.
“Asherah, listen to me. I am coming back to you. I have never wanted to live more in my life.”
You may not have the choice. She forced that fear back down into the inmost recesses of her mind, where she kept her panic. Let it rattle around in there all by its dreadful self. It had just lost a companion fear, that all her love and caring had not been enough to pull Leo back from his old yearnings for that cruel Christian God Who might grant him escape from the world into faith or death.
And that was more wealth to fear the loss of. Leo tipped her face up and kissed her eyes, then her mouth. His lips tasted salty from her tears.
“Asherah, why didn't you tell me before?”
“It is still too early to know. Truly it is.”
He rocked her, close against him. “If anything ... I want you to put yourself in your father's care, and Nordbriht's.”
She had to stop him from talking about that, even if she never heard another word from his lips. She trembled as the familiar dark breath swept over her and possessed her voice. “I want this to be over. I want you to live. I want our child to know his father.”
“His?” Leo smiled down at her. She shook her head at him.
“Or hers. If there is a child.”
A shout from the courtyard. “Ho, Leo! Leo Ducas!”
“We have to go,” she whispered.
Deftly, Leo helped her pack the last things she could take. In his way, he had had as much practice fleeing as she.
“I'll come back,” he told her. “I know where my heart is.”
She had arguments she wanted to blurt out. She did not want to hear about honor. Leo was not a Frank. He was not a Varangian, sworn to follow his lord into death. She wanted to teach him a different kind of honor, the kind that had kept her people alive all these thousands of years. You found it in staying true, in manifesting God's will by keeping His people alive.
One last time, he embraced her, holding her up after his kiss weakened her knees. When she could stand again, he released her.
“Now, Asherah.”
She let him go out first. They cheered him, the men who served her father, the men riding in at the gate of what had always been “the Jews’ house” before, his own oddly matched servants, the Northerner and the Turk, even her women, their voices rising high and shrill like the cries of women from the desert tribes.
Asherah followed Leo down into the courtyard and out where the horses were waiting.
She stood unveiled as she had before the Emperor. The fire was burning; danger prickled in the air; and honor lay in keeping her back straight and her face composed. She, Joachim's witchy daughter, had actually won herself this tiny interval of love and tenderness and passion. If it were all she was to have, she would devote the rest of her life—which might not be that much longer—to reliving this part of it, its radiant core.
The dawn wind scoured tears as hot as a burning iron from her eyes and cheeks. Leo mounted and rode out. As she knew he would, he turned to glance at her one last time. Asherah smiled like an antique statue. She did not expect to see him again.
One more gift Asherah had made Leo: when he rode off, glancing back for what might be the sight of her he would take into eternity, she stood unveiled and tearless. Smiling for him to see.
A silk thread stitched to his heart seemed to want to pull him back to Asherah's side, never to leave her. It tore at him, gaping wider in his heart the further he rode.
His wife faced, he knew, a quiet battle of her own. At least, Leo could ride. He could fight. Asherah must go into hiding beneath the earth; and if she were forced to fight, it would be only because his men had faltered and he had failed her.
Leaning out over his horse's neck, Leo rode as if—how had Nordbriht described it?—he felt the Wild Hunt's hot breath against his neck. Then, the thread joining him and Asherah snapped. The pain of that parting twinged once more, and shrewdly. Then, it left him free yet oddly disconsolate in the midst of his fear.
Kemal followed, careful to ride at Leo's horse's tail. Leo had no doubt at all that the gulam could outride him. But his hope of life depended on Leo's, upon guarding him; and Kemal wanted very much to live. He had always seen reasons for life beyond power and destruction. He had served in the tents of Alp Arslan. In a way, it was as well that the sultan who had befriended Leo and his Emperor had died: he could oppose a Wild Hunt of Turks with body, soul, and will. But the sultan Kemal remembered? He was a better ruler and a better man than the Ducas who kinged it in Byzantium.
The thunder of hooves rumbled out to his left: men joining them. To his right: more men. Such a force had not been seen in Cappadocia since Romanus had stripped it of its best men. They rode.
Heat and clouds shimmered at the horizon. Far off, thunder echoed in the sky above the thunder trampling the earth. It shook, as it had for months, in faint protest. Haze glowed around the sun like the diadems of the storm gods. The morning was very hot for early autumn. The horses would be lathered long before they reached the valley. God send that Turks had not choked the river with corpses. But they would do nothing to ruin the land, Kemal had said. No use ruining what they wanted to rule.
They rode out of the field of rock dunes on the outskirts of the town, and more men joined them. Not all: some must be left to reinforce the monks who prayed for their souls and the souls of every man, woman, and child in the Empire. If the monks’ prayers proved not to be enough, Leo hoped they would know to snatch up rocks, the swords that it had been most reluctantly decided to place in their hands, or, like Samson, the jawbone of an ass and give some account of themselves before Archangel Michael reviewed them in heaven.
Leo rode now to relieve another such valley. The faces of a blind man and a lame boy flickered in his mind's eye now, mercifully clouding his memories of Asherah. She was as safe now as she could be made: Father Meletios and the souls in his care had no such refuge unless Leo's troop could somehow blunt the Turkmen attack upon their valley and carry them off to safety.
Smoke rose, mixing with the autumn haze. The fields were not gold, as they usually were this time of year. They were charred, burned upon orders lest the Turkmen, raiders who lived off the lands they ravaged, thrive upon the harvest. The ash from the fields the Greeks had burnt and the ash of homes burnt by the Turks: you couldn't tell them apart. All wasted. All wasteland.
A wave of Leo's arm freed a troop from the pathetically small host: attack the attackers; defend the survivors; ride once more. To fight Turks now, they would have to fight like Turks. If Leo lived, he would ache from riding. But his shoulders would not bleed from galls left by the chainmail of the cataphract whom he had been in another life. He had not wanted to be a soldier. Convinced by his uncle's lies, he had thought meanly of his skill. Now, he still did not want to be a soldier, but he was gambling lives on the hope that where Andronicus had lied once to him, he had lied many times.
They urged the horses to settle into a gait that would eat up the miles. Here, the land was dangerously, deceptively peaceful. No one shot arrows at them from ambush or rode out to bar their way.
The men rode quietly now, lulled by the rhythm of the beating hooves, deep in their own thoughts. Leo's musings, as always when he rode, were as haunted as the land through which he rode.
By now, everyone in Peristrema was probably dead. That was a fact Leo had to face. Why, then, was it so important that he find Father Meletios? Already, he had heard rumblings as one soldier argued that such and such a village must be protected above all else, while a friend insisted that another one (usually the debater's home) was of even greater importance or wealth.
I will have things as I will them to be! Leo had ridden close to Romanus long enough to know how quickly the former Emperor could fall into a rage when his will was crossed. Leo knew it was foolishness to draw so large a force away from the towns. It was rash; it was even a provocation to attack. But Meletios’ wisdom had saved his sanity. And, by his kindness, he had Asherah to wife earlier than he might otherwise have done—had her at all; for who knew if he would survive even the next hour? Beyond what he owed to any holy man, he owed Meletios his soul.
Not my will alone, but Thine. Leo made for the valley with the harsh high wind of prophecy blowing at his back.
In the afternoon, they reached the bend in the road and turned, riding toward the valley carved into the soft rock. The poplars rustled thirstily; and, in the sultry weather, the buzz of insects seemed to rise from the green valley floor.
They paused to send out scouts. From the valley floor, the river's siren music reached them. Leo took off his helmet, letting the air cool him for a moment. He sucked up a few grudging sips of water. He had been this thirsty before, when he had fought or when he fasted, or when he had hacked out the walls of the hermitage he would never use now, thank God.
A low call brought his head around, and he slung the bottle away.
“What's a Turk doing here?” one of the soldiers muttered and reached for his sword.
“That's no Turk. That's Kemal,” Ioannes told him.
“Well, what is he but a Turk?”
“He's our Turk. If he hadn't offered to scout the road, one of us would have had to.” Probably, Ioannes should not take that tone with an older man, but the weather was hot and the men edgy.
Leo mounted. His horse, reluctant to leave th
e coarse grass it was cropping, sidled, then reluctantly plodded forward.
He raised an eyebrow at the gulam, who served him now.
“Were there ever stables at the head of a great cliff, where stairs lead down into the valley?”
“'Were there?'” Leo echoed. The news was as bad as he had expected.
“They're gone now. Burnt to embers. They took the horses with them, of course.”
Leo shut his eyes. Horses feared flames and screamed as piteously as men if they were trapped in them. Thank God, the Turks were horsemen, whatever else they were.
“What about the monks?” Ioannes demanded. “There were men down there too!”
And his friend Theodoulos, not to mention chapels and hermitages that should not be defiled.
Kemal shook his head, his hand going out in a cutting-off motion.
“It is quiet down there now. I went belly-down on the ground and couldn't see anything move. Except,” he added in a lower voice, “the birds. You can see them from here.”
The birds looked as if they fled. But they would return, and with them—don't think of that, Leo warned himself. Some monks in the valley may yet be alive.
And I alone escaped to tell you. Leo remembered the stinks of blood and burning and bowels voiding in death. Bowing his head, he shut his eyes in prayer. Protect them, Lord. What did they ever do but praise you?
A wind blew up from the valley, ruffling Leo's hair, dank from the helmet he had taken off. He could smell smoke on the wind. A kind of dark exhilaration akin to a compulsion lay upon him. Leo turned toward the valley that he knew was filled with dead men and possible ambushers, and he knew that he was going to climb down into it.
Leo set his helmet back on his head. It might as well have been made of lead. Reaching for his shield, he saw the others copy him. Once more, they rode toward sure destruction.
Beyond the burnt-out stables, Leo stationed guards. Some of the men covered their horses and walked them until they were cool. One or two, those who lacked horror in the face of fire, picked through the rubble. Leo and Ioannes, Kemal, and several others stretched flat out on the lip of the valley, trying to see whether anyone still moved down there.
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